There's an action sequence in Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol that rivals much of what has been done with the genre since it began. I won't reveal much about it, except that it involves the recently constructed Burj Khalifa hotel in Dubai (now the tallest building in the world), Tom Cruise, and a pair of hi-tech climbing gloves that are of questionable working condition.
It's a masterful scene, in its setup and in its delivery, not the least because it uses the increasingly destructible Tom Cruise to its advantage. Excepting Brian De Palma's breathtakingly weird original, this is the first film in the Mission series to consider the physical weaknesses of the characters, most prominently Cruise's Ethan Hunt. Rather like Clint Eastwood in his later work, Cruise (who also produced) doesn't try to avoid the fact that he's no longer an invincible twentysomething hotshot. While the second film (by John Woo) had him dueling with motorcycles and casually scaling mountains, and the third (by J.J. Abrams) had him exploding with furious anger at the kidnapping of his fiancee, this one reminds us that he's no Superman and mines his vulnerability for quite a bit of tension. That Cruise did most of his own stunts only drives that tension further.
Ethan Hunt, just freed from a Russian prison, teams up with the computer whiz Benji (Simon Pegg) and the resourceful agent Jane (Paula Patton) to intercept the theft of Russian nuclear codes by a madman (Michael Nyqvist). As can be expected, things go wrong, and the team finds itself cut off, without any government help; the "Ghost Protocol" of the title refers to the condition under which all agents are disavowed. This leaves the team short of the time and tools they need to finish the job. Their forced improvisation in several tight spots is one of the joys of the film; while many action films are on autopilot, this one is always on its feet.
Jeremy Renner, who turns up at the midpoint as an IMF "analyst," seems to be slumming after his celebrated turn in The Hurt Locker, but has a good chemistry with the other players. He does a good job of appearing to be in over his head, but still able to save the day in a pinch. After many complex, emotionally disturbed roles, this one must be a bit of a break for Renner, and it's good to see him having fun with it.
Director Brad Bird, whose live-action debut this is, proves himself adept at building multifaceted action scenes and seeing them through. He choreographs the film with the same daring glee that he brought to The Incredibles, throwing obstacle after obstacle in the characters' way. His background in animation appears to have influenced his style greatly; there's even one bit of tactical misdirection early on that I swear must have been stolen from Wile E. Coyote.
There's also very limited use of CGI, as far as I can see. Much of the action is done the old-fashioned way: with stuntmen, stunt drivers, and clever editing.
Bird and writers Josh Appelbaum and Andre Nemec also wisely leave out the insufferable romantic sub-plot that brought down Mission: Impossible II and III. Like the first film, Ghost Protocol knows that the sexiness is in the spy intrigue, not in the romance, and that Ethan Hunt is not a romantic lead but rather Hollywood's sexiest workaholic. Though there is a sufficient emotional background, in order to give the characters depth, for the most part the kissy-kissy stuff is checked at the door.
Pegg is delightful as the kind of agent who can gain complete control of a prison's electronic locks in a few seconds, but still looks awkward firing a gun. Patton is a likable second-gun to Cruise, and has a great scene where she seduces a buffoonish Indian tycoon (the inimitable Anil Kapoor) to try to get the codes to a satellite his company owns. "Lost" alum Josh Holloway turns up as a very Sawyer-esque IMF agent. Nyqvist, of the original Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, makes for a fairly bland villain, but the movie doesn't depend on his menace particularly heavily.
Still, this is Cruise's show. Though he's supplied with a stronger-than-usual supporting cast (to boost the film's box office after several Cruise-led disappointments), he earns the movie for himself and is on his way to ditching the couch-jumping idiot persona and rediscovering the respectable Tom Cruise, who's a good and hard-working actor. Ghost Protocol is the best American action film in a long time.
*** 1/2 out of ****
Thursday, December 29, 2011
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
Who is John Galt? Tune in next time. ATLAS SHRUGGED: PART I (2011)
For obvious reasons, I've never read any work by Ayn Rand, short of a few snippets in philosophy class which were enough to give me an idea of her outlook on life. Her philosophy begins with the postulation that no human being ever acts in anything but his or her own interest. It ends with the embrace of every awful conservative laissez-faire economic policy known to man. So many prominent conservatives are avid worshipers of Rand's work that even one current Republican Presidential nominee named his son after her. You know which one.
Now along comes Atlas Shrugged: Part I, a labor of love (and not much else) from conservative businessman John Aglialoro. Mr. Aglialoro, a lover of Rand's work, inherited the project from Albert S. Ruddy, who had tried to get a film of Atlas Shrugged made for over twenty years. In the early 21st century it looked like it was going to happen, with a screenplay by James V. Hart (Contact) and Randall Wallace (Braveheart) and stars as huge as Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie... but it never took off.
Not only did it leave Aglialoro at square one, but his clock was running out. His rights to the novel were set to expire on June 15, 2010, if he did not make a movie from it. So he rushed Part I into production, began principal photography on June 13, 2010, and shot it in five weeks for $10 million. The cast are mostly no-names with their credits mainly in television. The director, Stephen Polk, quit nine days before filming was to begin, and was replaced by the actor Paul Johansson.
This is not the first time a movie was rushed into production for a rights extension. In 1994, producer Bernd Eichinger shot a $1 million Fantastic Four movie that was never intended for release, in order to keep the rights from expiring. He later produced the higher-budgeted 2005 Fantastic 4, which was a financial success. The point, I suppose, is that Aglialoro will get the chance to do the same someday, and that Atlas Shrugged: Part I is just buying him time until he can do it right.
But considering that it's essentially an abandoned child, Atlas Shrugged--and I hope my political compatriots will forgive me for this admission--is not a bad film. Like The Fantastic Four before it, it has a certain charm. It's an endearingly pedestrian film version of a gargantuan novel, like the old gang decided to open up the barn and put on "Hamlet." At a time when many big-studio, big-money films are dead on arrival, here is a movie that was essentially put to death but remains alive, with an engaging story and surprisingly decent acting.
The politics, of course, are abhorrent. The movie's premise is the ultimate straw man that is used by conservatives whenever they wish to combat the slightest regulation from the government. The year is 2016, and the U.S. economy is in the toilet. The poor are getting poorer, and the rich... are also getting poorer. One poor man on the news says, "If it's bad for rich people, think of how bad it must be for us." This is only the first of many phony connections between the welfare of the rich and the welfare of the rest of the country: if the wealthy do well, everyone else naturally will prosper, right?
Dagny Taggart (Taylor Schilling), heiress to a transcontinental rail company, is in the process of collaborating with a steel company, run by the soap-opera-good-looking Hank Rearden (Grant Bowler), to create the nation's fastest and most economical railway system. The trouble is that the pesky government keeps getting in the way; constant regulations stand in the way of innovation, as do shady backdoor dealings between a slimy Congressman (Michael Lerner) and Dagny's brother (Matthew Marsden).
So we know where the movie stands. Corporations are the heroes and the government is the bad guy, and the only thing that will allow our nation to prosper again is if government just gets out of the way and lets the corporations do their thing. With corporations contributing amply to political campaigns, and K Street still running strong, it's not easy to accept the ridiculous premise of the mighty Congress bringing down its fist on capitalism. If only Rand had lived to see the Supreme Court decision on corporate personhood. Oh, if only.
But never mind that the film is completely incongruous, and its premise is easily refuted, and its sociopolitical ideas are horrifying. With this work, Rand appears to aspire to be the John le Carre of the corporate world. Only the intrigue isn't in globetrotting espionage; it's in mergers and acquisitions. The CEO is the James Bond of the future! Does it work? Well, not always, but you can give them points for trying. At the very most, Atlas Shrugged is a brisk piece of corporate soap-opera fluff.
Schilling is tenacious as the unbeatable Ms. Taggart; she has only a small filmography thus far, but she likely has a future. Bowler is not called to be much other than a handsome block of wood, but he does that well. There's nice supporting work from Marsden and Lerner, as well as from Patrick Fischler (recognizable as the man in the diner with the dream, from Mulholland Dr.). As Dagny's personal assistant, Edi Gathegi is wasted (I read that his role is bigger in the novel).
Aglialoro has stated that although Part II is scheduled to begin shooting in early 2012, he will not continue if the first film is not financially successful. The story told by Atlas Shrugged: Part I is that of a noble rich heiress and how her innovation needs to be cultivated so the rest of us poor schlubs can survive. The story behind Atlas Shrugged: Part I is that of a rich man who, in danger of losing his decades-old project, sliced off $10 million to fund a throwaway production which in turn was given life by a bunch of working-class TV actors and a working-class TV director. And if you do not see the irony there, you are probably an Ayn Rand reader.
** out of ****
Sunday, December 18, 2011
MY SOUL TO TAKE (2010): Contents of Wes Craven's sock drawer
Strange that a director as well-established and acclaimed as Wes Craven would decide to slum it and make an unironic slasher flick, but that's what he's done here. My Soul to Take is a return to his roots, a mashup of some themes from A Nightmare on Elm Street with the dead-teenager motif pioneered by Friday the 13th. It's the kind of maddeningly creative, sloppy yet irresistible mess that used to be Craven's forte during the '80s, and it's the most underrated shocker from this director since, well, Shocker.
It has everything. The return of the long-dormant serial killer. The nightmares that blend with real life. The nerd who gets with the popular girl. And this time the killer may have passed his soul into one of the children who was born on the day he died. The "Riverton Ripper" was killed sixteen years ago to the day, coincidentally the day seven Riverton kids were born. Not so coincidentally, the kids all turn sixteen and the killings begin again. No one knows if it's a copycat, or if the Ripper isn't dead, or if it's simply the soul of the killer that's alive. Suspicion falls on Bug (Max Thieriot), a local spaz who's one of the Riverton Seven, and has been acting strange lately.
It has everything. The return of the long-dormant serial killer. The nightmares that blend with real life. The nerd who gets with the popular girl. And this time the killer may have passed his soul into one of the children who was born on the day he died. The "Riverton Ripper" was killed sixteen years ago to the day, coincidentally the day seven Riverton kids were born. Not so coincidentally, the kids all turn sixteen and the killings begin again. No one knows if it's a copycat, or if the Ripper isn't dead, or if it's simply the soul of the killer that's alive. Suspicion falls on Bug (Max Thieriot), a local spaz who's one of the Riverton Seven, and has been acting strange lately.
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
SCRE4M (2011): Y4wn.
There's a kind of sequel that's emerged over the past few years that I've come to call the Moving Back Home film. These are the movie equivalent of moving back in with your parents; after failing to make a big splash in the movie business, an actor or filmmaker returns to the series that made him or her famous. The most prominent example is the Fast and the Furious series, which reunited Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Jordana Brewster and Michelle Rodriguez for a blockbuster continuation after Hollywood was less than kind to them otherwise.
Scream 4 brings back Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson, fairly dormant in recent years. Though hardly a failure, Craven's money has manifested itself mainly in remakes of his classic films (The Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes, A Nightmare on Elm Street). His one outing as director in the past five years, My Soul to Take, was an underrated yet barely noticeable genre entry. Kevin Williamson has stuck mostly to TV, having birthed two successful series (Dawson's Creek and The Vampire Diaries). Both claimed they'd never do another Scream movie, and Williamson even declined to write the 3rd one. But here they are again.
The effect is less a grand re-invigoration of the series than a dull 15-year high school reunion. Though Williamson applies the same tongue-in-cheek approach that he did to the previous films, his work here is more mean-spirited and cynical. In the other Scream films we got the sense that he was lampooning them out of love, but here the screenplay is distant and mocking. Maybe Williamson just doesn't like horror movies these days.
He seems to take issue especially with the "torture porn" of the Saw films. The new addition to horror since the series finished, Williamson says, is that of the killer as hero. In this new leaf, the killer is likelier to take responsibility for the murders himself, and even videotape himself committing them. Not only is the killer the main character; the killer makes the movie and the rules.
Williamson and Craven aren't having that, even if their killer is. Even if it does have a few new twists, Scream 4 is a traditional guy-with-a-knife movie. The problem is that it's a bad guy-with-a-knife movie, and a lazy one to boot. The other three films took delight in hurling us through their suspenseful contraption, adhering to conventions while at the same time denying them. In Scream 4 there are few surprises and little fun to be had.
Even the returning cast members look like they would rather be anywhere else. Neve Campbell returns as Sidney Prescott, who's just come back to her hometown of Woodsboro as a bestselling author. Little does she know that the Ghostface killer has returned with her, and is offing high schoolers while taunting her all the while. Campbell looks about as thrilled to be in the movie as Sidney must be to be facing the killer again. Her attitude seems about right; the actress has never quite gotten the credit she deserves after delivering some brilliant work in movies like The Company and When Will I Be Loved.
Dewey Reilly (David Arquette) is now the local sheriff, and wife Gale (Courteney Cox) has given up her ambitious journalism career to be a housewife. Arquette, so wonderfully goofy in the previous films, is all business here with no personality. Cox is given little to do but kvetch about how bored she is living the smalltown life. As Sidney's teenaged cousin (and the movie's obvious setup for a final girl), Emma Roberts doesn't make much of an impression.
The movie does have its signs of life. The opening sequence, a staple of the series, plays a few clever point-of-view tricks and is the most fun that Craven and Williamson allow themselves to have with the premise. Without giving too much away, I'll say that it made me wish that the movie had continued in this fashion, as a sort of slasher version of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. Hayden Panettiere, as the town's resident smart-aleck hipster high schooler, is always fun to watch, and finds a likable character amid the horror cliches. Erik Knudsen and Rory Culkin are also funny as two nerdy videophiles.
To an extent, we the audience will only have fun if a movie is having fun with itself. The Scream series has always been one to mock conventions and throw us for just the right loop. This time it's just going through the motions. Though Williamson still has his sights set on the usual targets, Scream 4 is as dull and mechanistic as any high-number Saw sequel.
* 1/2 out of ****
Scream 4 brings back Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson, fairly dormant in recent years. Though hardly a failure, Craven's money has manifested itself mainly in remakes of his classic films (The Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes, A Nightmare on Elm Street). His one outing as director in the past five years, My Soul to Take, was an underrated yet barely noticeable genre entry. Kevin Williamson has stuck mostly to TV, having birthed two successful series (Dawson's Creek and The Vampire Diaries). Both claimed they'd never do another Scream movie, and Williamson even declined to write the 3rd one. But here they are again.
The effect is less a grand re-invigoration of the series than a dull 15-year high school reunion. Though Williamson applies the same tongue-in-cheek approach that he did to the previous films, his work here is more mean-spirited and cynical. In the other Scream films we got the sense that he was lampooning them out of love, but here the screenplay is distant and mocking. Maybe Williamson just doesn't like horror movies these days.
He seems to take issue especially with the "torture porn" of the Saw films. The new addition to horror since the series finished, Williamson says, is that of the killer as hero. In this new leaf, the killer is likelier to take responsibility for the murders himself, and even videotape himself committing them. Not only is the killer the main character; the killer makes the movie and the rules.
Williamson and Craven aren't having that, even if their killer is. Even if it does have a few new twists, Scream 4 is a traditional guy-with-a-knife movie. The problem is that it's a bad guy-with-a-knife movie, and a lazy one to boot. The other three films took delight in hurling us through their suspenseful contraption, adhering to conventions while at the same time denying them. In Scream 4 there are few surprises and little fun to be had.
Even the returning cast members look like they would rather be anywhere else. Neve Campbell returns as Sidney Prescott, who's just come back to her hometown of Woodsboro as a bestselling author. Little does she know that the Ghostface killer has returned with her, and is offing high schoolers while taunting her all the while. Campbell looks about as thrilled to be in the movie as Sidney must be to be facing the killer again. Her attitude seems about right; the actress has never quite gotten the credit she deserves after delivering some brilliant work in movies like The Company and When Will I Be Loved.
Dewey Reilly (David Arquette) is now the local sheriff, and wife Gale (Courteney Cox) has given up her ambitious journalism career to be a housewife. Arquette, so wonderfully goofy in the previous films, is all business here with no personality. Cox is given little to do but kvetch about how bored she is living the smalltown life. As Sidney's teenaged cousin (and the movie's obvious setup for a final girl), Emma Roberts doesn't make much of an impression.
The movie does have its signs of life. The opening sequence, a staple of the series, plays a few clever point-of-view tricks and is the most fun that Craven and Williamson allow themselves to have with the premise. Without giving too much away, I'll say that it made me wish that the movie had continued in this fashion, as a sort of slasher version of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. Hayden Panettiere, as the town's resident smart-aleck hipster high schooler, is always fun to watch, and finds a likable character amid the horror cliches. Erik Knudsen and Rory Culkin are also funny as two nerdy videophiles.
To an extent, we the audience will only have fun if a movie is having fun with itself. The Scream series has always been one to mock conventions and throw us for just the right loop. This time it's just going through the motions. Though Williamson still has his sights set on the usual targets, Scream 4 is as dull and mechanistic as any high-number Saw sequel.
* 1/2 out of ****
Sunday, December 11, 2011
THE LOVELY BONES (2010): Saoirse Ronan is Dead Alive. Peter Jackson's movie leaves a Bad Taste.
There have been many films made about the afterlife, but few have given it such little thought as Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones, adapted from Alice Sebold's bestselling novel. I haven't read the book, but I would hope that it is braver and more imaginative than Mr. Jackson's film, which is cold and unsympathetic. Its story of a murdered young girl's journey through purgatory is maddeningly simplistic: not as dumbfounding, mind you, as What Dreams May Come, but close. It looks upon its characters the way an audient at the Republican debates might react to Rick Perry's execution track record: this world doesn't matter, the next is more important, and let God do the sorting out.
I think the first wrong step was commissioning Jackson to direct the film. At first glance he would seem like the ideal choice, as his Heavenly Creatures told a similarly brutal story mixed with elements of fantasy. But that was a painfully honest picture, set in brutal reality rather than the magical world of flowers that The Lovely Bones occupies. His The Frighteners dealt passingly with the concepts of heaven and hell and the mess in between, but only so far as the ghost story needed.
Not that Jackson need be a true believer to direct a movie about heaven. Clint Eastwood, not the most devout believer, was able to pose some honest and interesting questions in his afterlife-themed film, Hereafter. Though that too was a failure, it was an intelligent and ambitious one. The Lovely Bones is only interested in the subject as far as it can manipulate the audience.
Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan, from Atonement) is a normal 14-year-old girl in an idyllic Pennsylvania suburb. She likes her family, likes taking pictures, and has a crush on a local boy who might just like her back. Then one day, she never comes home.
Susie finds herself in a purgatory-like state, somewhere between earth and the Great Beyond, where she can see what happens on earth and affect it in strange ways that are never quite made clear. Like many movie ghosts, she can't come right out and talk to her parents (Mark Wahlberg and Rachel Weisz, from better movies), but she seems to affect their moods and send messages through the ether that they can somehow receive.
The movie's earthbound sub-plot is actually quite well-played, and so much more interesting than anything it has to say about metaphysics that we wish the movie had just ditched the whole heaven thing and been a story about a family coping with losing a daughter. Wahlberg and Weisz are very good, as are Susan Sarandon as Susie's alcoholic grandmother and Rose McIver as her suspicious sister.
As the killer, Stanley Tucci easily ambles away with the film. Not content to be a stereotypical movie psycho, he takes an approach similar to The Vanishing: he plays a believable sociopath who kills simply because he can. It's in his scenes that Jackson is most comfortable, and builds suspense quite nicely in one breaking-and-entering sequence, as well as a conversation with a police officer (Michael Imperioli, also very good) that lovingly rips off Shadow of a Doubt.
Though Ronan is very good, she's stuck in the movie's more preposterous storyline. The movie ends up being a victim of its own premise; since there's no real way for Susie to affect what happens on earth in a major way, the two plots remain awkwardly separated. All that connects them is a ridiculous theme of a kind of simple divine providence in which everything happens for a reason and everything is worked out after death. (The way that the Tucci character meets his end is particularly insulting to the intelligence of any thinking person.)
I don't know if the widely praised novel is as shallow as this film or not. Perhaps it isn't, and Jackson has simply misread it. I have a feeling that the book was more about the need for an afterlife than about the actual afterlife. Imagine if the movie were told not from the point of view of the dead girl, but rather from the point of view of her younger sister, who needs to create this image of her sister in heaven in order to cope with her loss. If Jackson had realized that the more captivating story was on earth rather than in heaven, The Lovely Bones would not seem so silly, pretentious, and insulting.
** out of ****
I think the first wrong step was commissioning Jackson to direct the film. At first glance he would seem like the ideal choice, as his Heavenly Creatures told a similarly brutal story mixed with elements of fantasy. But that was a painfully honest picture, set in brutal reality rather than the magical world of flowers that The Lovely Bones occupies. His The Frighteners dealt passingly with the concepts of heaven and hell and the mess in between, but only so far as the ghost story needed.
Not that Jackson need be a true believer to direct a movie about heaven. Clint Eastwood, not the most devout believer, was able to pose some honest and interesting questions in his afterlife-themed film, Hereafter. Though that too was a failure, it was an intelligent and ambitious one. The Lovely Bones is only interested in the subject as far as it can manipulate the audience.
Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan, from Atonement) is a normal 14-year-old girl in an idyllic Pennsylvania suburb. She likes her family, likes taking pictures, and has a crush on a local boy who might just like her back. Then one day, she never comes home.
Susie finds herself in a purgatory-like state, somewhere between earth and the Great Beyond, where she can see what happens on earth and affect it in strange ways that are never quite made clear. Like many movie ghosts, she can't come right out and talk to her parents (Mark Wahlberg and Rachel Weisz, from better movies), but she seems to affect their moods and send messages through the ether that they can somehow receive.
The movie's earthbound sub-plot is actually quite well-played, and so much more interesting than anything it has to say about metaphysics that we wish the movie had just ditched the whole heaven thing and been a story about a family coping with losing a daughter. Wahlberg and Weisz are very good, as are Susan Sarandon as Susie's alcoholic grandmother and Rose McIver as her suspicious sister.
As the killer, Stanley Tucci easily ambles away with the film. Not content to be a stereotypical movie psycho, he takes an approach similar to The Vanishing: he plays a believable sociopath who kills simply because he can. It's in his scenes that Jackson is most comfortable, and builds suspense quite nicely in one breaking-and-entering sequence, as well as a conversation with a police officer (Michael Imperioli, also very good) that lovingly rips off Shadow of a Doubt.
Though Ronan is very good, she's stuck in the movie's more preposterous storyline. The movie ends up being a victim of its own premise; since there's no real way for Susie to affect what happens on earth in a major way, the two plots remain awkwardly separated. All that connects them is a ridiculous theme of a kind of simple divine providence in which everything happens for a reason and everything is worked out after death. (The way that the Tucci character meets his end is particularly insulting to the intelligence of any thinking person.)
I don't know if the widely praised novel is as shallow as this film or not. Perhaps it isn't, and Jackson has simply misread it. I have a feeling that the book was more about the need for an afterlife than about the actual afterlife. Imagine if the movie were told not from the point of view of the dead girl, but rather from the point of view of her younger sister, who needs to create this image of her sister in heaven in order to cope with her loss. If Jackson had realized that the more captivating story was on earth rather than in heaven, The Lovely Bones would not seem so silly, pretentious, and insulting.
** out of ****
Friday, November 25, 2011
OUR HUMBLEST APOLOGIES (parody!)
Recently, NBC was forced to apologize to Congresswoman Michele Bachmann after it was found that during her introduction on the network's "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon," house band The Roots played an instrumental version of a song called "Lyin' Ass Bitch." Rep. Bachmann's discovery of this sneaky insult has led other Republican candidates to more closely examine the music that accompanied their appearances on talk shows. Here are the letters of apology from the networks responsible.
To: Mitt Romney
From: Les Moonves, Chairman, CBS
Dear Gov. Romney,
Please accept our apologies for the music that was played during your entrance on "The Late Show with David Letterman." The CBS Orchestra's choice of Styx's "Mr. Roboto" was meant to kick off your fantastic interview performance with an upbeat, bouncy melody. It in no way was meant to reflect any criticism of your personality on the campaign trail. On behalf of myself, Dave, music director Paul Shaffer, and all of us at CBS, I hope you will accept our humblest apologies.
Sincerely,
Les Moonves
Thursday, November 24, 2011
TURKEY DAY: Troll 2 (1990)
This Thanksgiving, Torturously Okay is thankful for all things that have the courage to be truly awful.
There is a certain level of awfulness that a film cannot achieve simply by being bad for its entire running time. Just as it is with libel laws, actual malice must be proven. The film must have evil intentions, or at the very least a reckless disregard for human decency. Badness is not achieved simply by the absence of goodness.
That’s why I knew from moment one that the widespread claims that Troll 2 is the worst movie ever made could not have any merit. How can a movie about killer trolls possibly be as insulting as I Spit On Your Grave, or as mind-deadening as Corky Romano?
The answer: it can’t. And to be honest, the worse Troll 2 got, the more I loved it. It’s in a class with Over the Top, Prince of Space, and The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies. Here is a movie that is bad in all the conventional ways: acting, direction, writing, special effects, editing, makeup. But it’s truly great in many unconventional ways. For all the tests this movie fails, it passes this one: I left it a happier person than when I found it.
Never mind that the movie has no connection to Troll 1. It tells of a happy suburban family who takes a trip to the mysterious town of Nilbog for their vacation (get it?). Right away things don't seem right. The townspeople are sparse, and those they see are always trying to feed them odd green food. And the youngest boy, Josh (Michael Stephenson), has been receiving visits from his dead grandfather (Robert Ormsby) warning him about vicious creatures who turn people into plants and then eat them.
It's hard to express the inexplicable awesomeness of what follows. It's a given that the plot is incredibly stupid, but director "Drake Floyd" (Claudio Fragasso) attacks it gung-ho. Say what you will about Troll 2, but it is not cynical. Here is a movie with what looks to have been a very small budget and a cast of inexperienced actors, and no discernible reason for existence. But Fragasso and crew have thrown themselves in head first and made it anyway.
The acting is wretched at worst, and at best is on the level of drama club. As Joshua, Michael Stephenson ranks among the most annoying child actors of all time. As far as childish voice affectations go, nothing can match the moment where he chirps, "See??? It wasn't me this toiyme!" Still, Stephenson appears to have a sense of humor about the movie, as last year he directed Best Worst Movie, a documentary about Troll 2's recent rise in popularity.
There isn't a line uttered by Connie McFarland, as the older sister Holly, that doesn't elicit a Bad Laugh from the audience. The performance of Deborah Reed, as a nearby witch, is completely off-the-wall and zany, and just what the movie needs. And I'm sure I don't need to mention the precious "Oh my god" moment. (But here it is anyway.)
Oddly enough, the actor who fares best isn't an actor at all: George Hardy, who plays the patriarch of the family, was a dentist at the time the movie was made, and still has a practice. He's actually pretty good; he must have been cast for his fatherly appearance and demeanor, and he appears to take the role seriously and earnestly.
The special effects are, if pedestrian, completely appropriate for the movie. It just wouldn't be right if Troll 2 had state-of-the-art makeup. And to tell the truth, the effects in Troll 2 aren't that bad. I enjoyed the wonderfully sick transformation in which people turn into plants: bold green liquid chlorophyll begins to leak from their pores and branches protrude from their arms and legs, and then a gaggle of goblins appears and begins to eat their mushy insides. I live for this stuff.
The goblins themselves were obviously created on the cheap, with plastic faces that barely move, but that somehow makes them all the eerier. The heavy-synth score, no doubt inspired by Dario Argento's band Goblin (no relation), also helps to set an appropriately spooky tone.
The ending, while completely predictable, is a flat-out delight, and the closing line made me giggle in the same devilish way that Hannibal Lecter's farewell line at the end of The Silence of the Lambs did. I should also make special mention of the movie's other wonderfully nasty moment: the incredulous family is about to eat poisoned food given to them by the villagers, and Grandpa tells Josh he has 30 seconds to stop them. I won't reveal what happens, except that they do not eat the food and Josh is sent to his room.
*** out of ****
There is a certain level of awfulness that a film cannot achieve simply by being bad for its entire running time. Just as it is with libel laws, actual malice must be proven. The film must have evil intentions, or at the very least a reckless disregard for human decency. Badness is not achieved simply by the absence of goodness.
That’s why I knew from moment one that the widespread claims that Troll 2 is the worst movie ever made could not have any merit. How can a movie about killer trolls possibly be as insulting as I Spit On Your Grave, or as mind-deadening as Corky Romano?
The answer: it can’t. And to be honest, the worse Troll 2 got, the more I loved it. It’s in a class with Over the Top, Prince of Space, and The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies. Here is a movie that is bad in all the conventional ways: acting, direction, writing, special effects, editing, makeup. But it’s truly great in many unconventional ways. For all the tests this movie fails, it passes this one: I left it a happier person than when I found it.
Never mind that the movie has no connection to Troll 1. It tells of a happy suburban family who takes a trip to the mysterious town of Nilbog for their vacation (get it?). Right away things don't seem right. The townspeople are sparse, and those they see are always trying to feed them odd green food. And the youngest boy, Josh (Michael Stephenson), has been receiving visits from his dead grandfather (Robert Ormsby) warning him about vicious creatures who turn people into plants and then eat them.
It's hard to express the inexplicable awesomeness of what follows. It's a given that the plot is incredibly stupid, but director "Drake Floyd" (Claudio Fragasso) attacks it gung-ho. Say what you will about Troll 2, but it is not cynical. Here is a movie with what looks to have been a very small budget and a cast of inexperienced actors, and no discernible reason for existence. But Fragasso and crew have thrown themselves in head first and made it anyway.
The acting is wretched at worst, and at best is on the level of drama club. As Joshua, Michael Stephenson ranks among the most annoying child actors of all time. As far as childish voice affectations go, nothing can match the moment where he chirps, "See??? It wasn't me this toiyme!" Still, Stephenson appears to have a sense of humor about the movie, as last year he directed Best Worst Movie, a documentary about Troll 2's recent rise in popularity.
There isn't a line uttered by Connie McFarland, as the older sister Holly, that doesn't elicit a Bad Laugh from the audience. The performance of Deborah Reed, as a nearby witch, is completely off-the-wall and zany, and just what the movie needs. And I'm sure I don't need to mention the precious "Oh my god" moment. (But here it is anyway.)
Oddly enough, the actor who fares best isn't an actor at all: George Hardy, who plays the patriarch of the family, was a dentist at the time the movie was made, and still has a practice. He's actually pretty good; he must have been cast for his fatherly appearance and demeanor, and he appears to take the role seriously and earnestly.
The special effects are, if pedestrian, completely appropriate for the movie. It just wouldn't be right if Troll 2 had state-of-the-art makeup. And to tell the truth, the effects in Troll 2 aren't that bad. I enjoyed the wonderfully sick transformation in which people turn into plants: bold green liquid chlorophyll begins to leak from their pores and branches protrude from their arms and legs, and then a gaggle of goblins appears and begins to eat their mushy insides. I live for this stuff.
The goblins themselves were obviously created on the cheap, with plastic faces that barely move, but that somehow makes them all the eerier. The heavy-synth score, no doubt inspired by Dario Argento's band Goblin (no relation), also helps to set an appropriately spooky tone.
The ending, while completely predictable, is a flat-out delight, and the closing line made me giggle in the same devilish way that Hannibal Lecter's farewell line at the end of The Silence of the Lambs did. I should also make special mention of the movie's other wonderfully nasty moment: the incredulous family is about to eat poisoned food given to them by the villagers, and Grandpa tells Josh he has 30 seconds to stop them. I won't reveal what happens, except that they do not eat the food and Josh is sent to his room.
*** out of ****
THE TOURIST (2010): Acclaimed auteur ruins perfectly good trash
It seems odd that after his wonderful Academy Award-winning The Lives of Others, Florian Henckel von Dammersmarck would choose a fanciful caper comedy/romance as his next project. Here we have a grand thriller in the Hitchcock tradition, with two gigantic stars and fascinating locations (John Seale's cinematography does them justice), directed by the man who made the somber character-driven drama about the sympathetic East German policeman. The Lives of Others was an amazing film; The Tourist less so, but it is no less amazing that it got made in the first place.
What this movie needed was a Stanley Donen type of director, one who knows how to play the audience like a piano. That is not quite what von Dammersmarck does here; he focuses less on the adventure and more on the characters, as you would expect the director of The Lives of Others to do. Audiences might go into The Tourist expecting a romantic thriller, when what they'll get is a thrilling romance.
And so The Tourist is not quite as interesting as it might have been. We get the sense that von Dammersmarck is primarily interested exploring a facet of the film that isn't meant to be terribly deep. Though romance can be the soul of a thriller, the fun is really in the thrills, of which The Tourist has too few. On this level it is a failure, but still an amiable and uncharacteristically ambitious failure.
We meet Elise Ward (Angelina Jolie) as she casually enjoys breakfast at a Paris cafe, tailed not-so-inconspicuously by police. Turns out she has a connection to a well-known British criminal named Alexander Pearce, who's been on the lam for two years, and Scotland Yard is hoping she'll lead them to him. To throw off their scent, she befriends an average schlub named Frank (Johnny Depp) on the train to Venice and casts the suspicion onto him. Once in Venice, Frank finds himself the target of the police and, more urgently, the very rich man that Pearce most recently stole from (Steven Berkoff).
This would have been the perfect setup for a lighthearted twisty-turny caper like Charade, with Depp in the Audrey Hepburn role as the unsuspecting innocent, and Jolie in the Cary Grant role as the player with all the cards, choosing which ones to deal at which times. Though Depp received some of the worst reviews imaginable, he's actually quite good in the role. Critics lambasted him as plain and melancholic, but that's the point: he's adept at playing someone who's plain to the extreme. Depp perfectly captures the bemusement of a regular Joe who's just been invited to spend a night in Venice with a gal who looks like Angelina Jolie, and overnight has police and thugs after him. Jolie is radiant, and she was born to play roles like this.
Then von Dammersmarck reveals that the movie will mainly be about their love affair, rather than the chase. These two really do end up falling in love, and the urgency, from von Dammersmarck's point of view, comes from the threat to their love rather than to Frank's life. Though the love story is well played, it renders secondary the more interesting part of the story. He essentially uses The Lives of Others as a template, and it doesn't fit.
I am giving the movie 3 stars. Why? Because it still made me smile in spite of its failures. I enjoyed Paul Bettany as the weathered Scotland Yard agent who's at the end of his rope. It's always good to see Steven Berkoff as the villain; he still possesses the same effortless menace that he did in Beverly Hills Cop all those years ago. And then there's Rufus Sewell, in an enigmatic role as a man who keeps turning up prominently in brief shots and on the side of the screen. Sewell is probably one of the first actors I'd notice if he were on the side somewhere.
Though The Tourist is not the refreshing diversion that we sometimes get when an auteur decides to take a break and make a genre film (like Steven Soderbergh did with Ocean's Eleven), it's not a case of the independent director selling out either. Though it's a big studio, big star movie, it is purely a Florian Henckel von Dammersmarck film. The romantic comic thriller may not be his strong suit, but now we know this is how he would have made one.
*** out of ****
What this movie needed was a Stanley Donen type of director, one who knows how to play the audience like a piano. That is not quite what von Dammersmarck does here; he focuses less on the adventure and more on the characters, as you would expect the director of The Lives of Others to do. Audiences might go into The Tourist expecting a romantic thriller, when what they'll get is a thrilling romance.
And so The Tourist is not quite as interesting as it might have been. We get the sense that von Dammersmarck is primarily interested exploring a facet of the film that isn't meant to be terribly deep. Though romance can be the soul of a thriller, the fun is really in the thrills, of which The Tourist has too few. On this level it is a failure, but still an amiable and uncharacteristically ambitious failure.
We meet Elise Ward (Angelina Jolie) as she casually enjoys breakfast at a Paris cafe, tailed not-so-inconspicuously by police. Turns out she has a connection to a well-known British criminal named Alexander Pearce, who's been on the lam for two years, and Scotland Yard is hoping she'll lead them to him. To throw off their scent, she befriends an average schlub named Frank (Johnny Depp) on the train to Venice and casts the suspicion onto him. Once in Venice, Frank finds himself the target of the police and, more urgently, the very rich man that Pearce most recently stole from (Steven Berkoff).
This would have been the perfect setup for a lighthearted twisty-turny caper like Charade, with Depp in the Audrey Hepburn role as the unsuspecting innocent, and Jolie in the Cary Grant role as the player with all the cards, choosing which ones to deal at which times. Though Depp received some of the worst reviews imaginable, he's actually quite good in the role. Critics lambasted him as plain and melancholic, but that's the point: he's adept at playing someone who's plain to the extreme. Depp perfectly captures the bemusement of a regular Joe who's just been invited to spend a night in Venice with a gal who looks like Angelina Jolie, and overnight has police and thugs after him. Jolie is radiant, and she was born to play roles like this.
Then von Dammersmarck reveals that the movie will mainly be about their love affair, rather than the chase. These two really do end up falling in love, and the urgency, from von Dammersmarck's point of view, comes from the threat to their love rather than to Frank's life. Though the love story is well played, it renders secondary the more interesting part of the story. He essentially uses The Lives of Others as a template, and it doesn't fit.
I am giving the movie 3 stars. Why? Because it still made me smile in spite of its failures. I enjoyed Paul Bettany as the weathered Scotland Yard agent who's at the end of his rope. It's always good to see Steven Berkoff as the villain; he still possesses the same effortless menace that he did in Beverly Hills Cop all those years ago. And then there's Rufus Sewell, in an enigmatic role as a man who keeps turning up prominently in brief shots and on the side of the screen. Sewell is probably one of the first actors I'd notice if he were on the side somewhere.
Though The Tourist is not the refreshing diversion that we sometimes get when an auteur decides to take a break and make a genre film (like Steven Soderbergh did with Ocean's Eleven), it's not a case of the independent director selling out either. Though it's a big studio, big star movie, it is purely a Florian Henckel von Dammersmarck film. The romantic comic thriller may not be his strong suit, but now we know this is how he would have made one.
*** out of ****
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
BREAKING DAWN PART 1: One disbeliever's honest appraisal of a movie that doesn't need his approval
To say that Breaking Dawn Part 1 breaks some new ground is not to say that it’s particularly noteworthy. Still, I must regretfully admit that in the teeny-bopper bottomless pit of money that is the Twilight series, it takes some risks that the other films haven’t, and unlike its leaden predecessors, by the end it has actually gone somewhere. It’s not the best of the series (the briskly paced New Moon remains the most bearable so far), but under the guidance of director Bill Condon (Gods and Monsters, Dreamgirls), it finally moves the story and characters forward. And what’s more, it gives Kristen Stewart something to do other than be plain, and Robert Pattinson something to do other than brood.
The wedding day has finally arrived, as Bella Swan (Stewart) is preparing to walk down the aisle to her 100-some-year-old vampire husband Edward Cullen (Pattinson). He whisks her away to a Brazil honeymoon, where they finally do that thing that married people do. Bella has, of course, remained a virgin until her wedding night; the much older Edward’s sexual history is unclear, another of the many nuggets of patriarchy in the often disturbingly conservative series. But I digress.
So yes, they do the nasty. Since the Twilight vampires have superhuman strength, Bella wakes up with bruises and aches. Edward, now frightened for her safety, retreats back to chastity. Then comes the morning sickness.
Though Breaking Dawn is slowly paced and never subtle, it at least tackles some of the more interesting questions about the vampire-human relationship. That this is the most sexually frank of the previously coy series is likely attributable to Condon, who directed Kinsey and rarely shies away from the big sexual questions. The early honeymoon scenes are a believable portrait of a couple struggling with their sexual chemistry.
When Bella becomes pregnant, the movie also isn’t afraid to delve into the consequences of having a vampire baby. The scenes in which we see the toll the pregnancy takes on Bella are surprisingly honest, graphic, and disturbing, with one hilariously gross blood-drinking scene and at least one moment that is reminiscent of the ordeal Christian Bale went through in The Machinist. Though the series has been known for its embrace of socially conservative values, the movie doesn’t shy away from the prospect of abortion, either. When Bella insists upon carrying to term, it is not because of a moral conviction (or a Mississippi personhood law); rather, it is a choice of hers based on what the baby means for her and Edward’s relationship.
Ms. Stewart, in her fourth time playing this role, is finally allowed to make it her own. To date, Bella has been defined mainly through the men she is interested in (Is it Edward? Is it Jacob?). In Breaking Dawn, we see what makes her tick. Condon injects life into the role and allows Stewart to have fun with it. Now we see not just a typical, plain, uncommonly reserved girl who is the object of desire for a couple of hunks, but a fragile yet determined young lady with desires of her own.
Mr. Pattinson is also better than usual; where his performances in the previous films seemed phony and furtive, here we sense that he is a kind, attentive, caring guy who’s just trying to do the best he can for his lady. His emotions come through as true feelings rather than affectations. Billy Burke continues to be entertaining as Bella’s kindly yet ineffectual father. The underused Sarah Clarke finally gets a few nice moments for herself as Bella’s mother.
That said, though Condon tries with all his might, the movie still isn’t particularly good. No matter what talented director tries his or her hand at it (Catherine Hardwicke, Chris Weitz, and David Slade have been the casualties so far), the writing remains incredibly poor. Not-so-freely adapted from Stephenie Meyer’s book by Melissa Rosenberg, each line of dialogue hits with a whopping thud. Though Condon coaxes good, thoughtful performances out of most of the actors, they cannot hope to wrap their mouths around the words without sounding phenomenally silly. Peter Facinelli, Elizabeth Reaser, and Nikki Reed are among the talented actors left to spout this nonsense, and fail to make much of an impression. Anna Kendrick once again manages to rise above it, but the movie has far too little of her for my liking.
As the hotheaded Jacob, Lautner continues to be the cast’s weak link. Though he certainly looks good without a shirt (and has appeared in the film for all of 1.5 seconds before he violently tears it off), he doesn’t fare as well when he’s required to talk. If the more accomplished actors have trouble with the insipid dialogue, Lautner doesn’t stand a chance.
While the makeup on Stewart showing Bella’s deterioration is disturbingly convincing, the visual effects are laughably bad. The CGI wolves that Jacob and his crew transform into are about as seamless as “South Park.” One scene in which the wolves telepathically communicate—with their human voices awkwardly playing in the background, no lips moving—begs to be drug into the street, shot, stuffed, and mounted. The visual effects were supervised by John Bruno, who performed the same job on Avatar, Terminator 2, The Abyss, Poltergeist, and Heavy Metal. Those are among the most visually engrossing films ever made. I assume Breaking Dawn, which looks like a Nick Jr. cartoon, will not be listed on his resume.
** 1/2 out of ****
The wedding day has finally arrived, as Bella Swan (Stewart) is preparing to walk down the aisle to her 100-some-year-old vampire husband Edward Cullen (Pattinson). He whisks her away to a Brazil honeymoon, where they finally do that thing that married people do. Bella has, of course, remained a virgin until her wedding night; the much older Edward’s sexual history is unclear, another of the many nuggets of patriarchy in the often disturbingly conservative series. But I digress.
So yes, they do the nasty. Since the Twilight vampires have superhuman strength, Bella wakes up with bruises and aches. Edward, now frightened for her safety, retreats back to chastity. Then comes the morning sickness.
Though Breaking Dawn is slowly paced and never subtle, it at least tackles some of the more interesting questions about the vampire-human relationship. That this is the most sexually frank of the previously coy series is likely attributable to Condon, who directed Kinsey and rarely shies away from the big sexual questions. The early honeymoon scenes are a believable portrait of a couple struggling with their sexual chemistry.
When Bella becomes pregnant, the movie also isn’t afraid to delve into the consequences of having a vampire baby. The scenes in which we see the toll the pregnancy takes on Bella are surprisingly honest, graphic, and disturbing, with one hilariously gross blood-drinking scene and at least one moment that is reminiscent of the ordeal Christian Bale went through in The Machinist. Though the series has been known for its embrace of socially conservative values, the movie doesn’t shy away from the prospect of abortion, either. When Bella insists upon carrying to term, it is not because of a moral conviction (or a Mississippi personhood law); rather, it is a choice of hers based on what the baby means for her and Edward’s relationship.
Ms. Stewart, in her fourth time playing this role, is finally allowed to make it her own. To date, Bella has been defined mainly through the men she is interested in (Is it Edward? Is it Jacob?). In Breaking Dawn, we see what makes her tick. Condon injects life into the role and allows Stewart to have fun with it. Now we see not just a typical, plain, uncommonly reserved girl who is the object of desire for a couple of hunks, but a fragile yet determined young lady with desires of her own.
Mr. Pattinson is also better than usual; where his performances in the previous films seemed phony and furtive, here we sense that he is a kind, attentive, caring guy who’s just trying to do the best he can for his lady. His emotions come through as true feelings rather than affectations. Billy Burke continues to be entertaining as Bella’s kindly yet ineffectual father. The underused Sarah Clarke finally gets a few nice moments for herself as Bella’s mother.
That said, though Condon tries with all his might, the movie still isn’t particularly good. No matter what talented director tries his or her hand at it (Catherine Hardwicke, Chris Weitz, and David Slade have been the casualties so far), the writing remains incredibly poor. Not-so-freely adapted from Stephenie Meyer’s book by Melissa Rosenberg, each line of dialogue hits with a whopping thud. Though Condon coaxes good, thoughtful performances out of most of the actors, they cannot hope to wrap their mouths around the words without sounding phenomenally silly. Peter Facinelli, Elizabeth Reaser, and Nikki Reed are among the talented actors left to spout this nonsense, and fail to make much of an impression. Anna Kendrick once again manages to rise above it, but the movie has far too little of her for my liking.
As the hotheaded Jacob, Lautner continues to be the cast’s weak link. Though he certainly looks good without a shirt (and has appeared in the film for all of 1.5 seconds before he violently tears it off), he doesn’t fare as well when he’s required to talk. If the more accomplished actors have trouble with the insipid dialogue, Lautner doesn’t stand a chance.
While the makeup on Stewart showing Bella’s deterioration is disturbingly convincing, the visual effects are laughably bad. The CGI wolves that Jacob and his crew transform into are about as seamless as “South Park.” One scene in which the wolves telepathically communicate—with their human voices awkwardly playing in the background, no lips moving—begs to be drug into the street, shot, stuffed, and mounted. The visual effects were supervised by John Bruno, who performed the same job on Avatar, Terminator 2, The Abyss, Poltergeist, and Heavy Metal. Those are among the most visually engrossing films ever made. I assume Breaking Dawn, which looks like a Nick Jr. cartoon, will not be listed on his resume.
** 1/2 out of ****
Friday, November 11, 2011
TAKE SHELTER (2011): Drizzle
Take Shelter sets itself up for a nor'easter and delivers a late afternoon shower. It's like a big hurricane that by the time it reaches you has already been downgraded to a tropical storm. The movie proves to us in its gripping first half that it's too smart for the meandering second half, and it contains a tour de force performance from Michael Shannon that it does not deserve.
Much like William Friedkin's Bug (which also starred Shannon), Take Shelter is an exploration of paranoid schizophrenia from the inside out. Curtis (Shannon) is a working-class family man with a caring wife, Samantha (Jessica Chastain), and daughter, Hannah (Tova Stewart). He has a good job, enough money to get by, health insurance, and friends. People respect him. His best friend and co-worker, Dewart (Shea Whigham), looks up to him. He lives a good life.
Then the nightmares begin to come. Curtis begins to see things in the sky that others do not: signs of a big storm coming. He sees raindrops that look like motor oil. He has a dream that the family dog attacks him, and another that zombie-like people kidnap Hannah.
Curtis takes action. He chains the dog up in the backyard. He begins renovating an old storm shelter in the backyard. Others don't understand why he feels the urgent need to do this, but Curtis does.
In the movie's early scenes, Shannon and writer-director Jeff Nichols create one of the most compelling portrayals of schizophrenia yet put on screen. What sets Curtis apart from most examples of mental illness is that he knows all along that he is sick, and there is nothing he can do about it. Just as with any disease, mere knowledge that he is sick is not enough to make him well. Curtis knows that what he's doing is ridiculous, but knows he has to do it. Because he is embarrassed, he hides it from his family. He reads up on mental illnesses. He talks to his doctor, who recommends he see a psychiatrist that is far out of his budget range. He knows of schizophrenia because his mother (Kathy Baker) was committed to a mental hospital when he was 10.
His disease progresses with terrifying logic. Samantha begins to worry. The amount of money he spends renovating the storm shelter begins to inhibit Hannah's upcoming cochlear implant surgery. His visions and nightmares affect his performance at work. Curtis's biggest fear is all that he has will be taken away from him, and he begins to see his fears come to life around him.
It's a shame, then, that the movie goes stagnant after its first hour. The tension, ever so gradually ratcheting, goes loose and the movie lets us off the hook. Curtis's disease becomes repetitive rather than progressive. A climactic fight between Curtis and another character seems to come out of nowhere, and one explosion of emotion from Curtis seems phony and histrionic.
The special effects, too, begin to get in the way, notably Curtis's recurring vision of birds flying in a strange formation. The birds are obviously the creation of CGI, and are so cartoonish that they take us right out of the picture. Better to use the Orson Welles method: shoot a few birds in close-up and use montage to make it look like a whole lot. The image of the storm-filled sky is also all too obviously animated.
The ending is a letdown. Without giving away too much, I can say that the movie might have ended perfectly with Curtis throwing open the shelter doors. Rather, it tacks on a coda that is meant to be foreboding but is only confounding and silly.
Take Shelter is a film of rare sensitivity; it is a gripping portrayal of a man who is always depended upon to be strong, brought down by the weakness of his fear. I doubt any actor other than Michael Shannon could have played this role successfully, and I would not count him out for an Oscar this year. Though the movie fails him in the end, his performance alone is enough to recommend it.
** 1/2 out of ****
P.S. Shannon has become one of my favorite actors over the past few years, and I feel the need to cite two previous standout performances of his that might otherwise go unnoticed: as a disgruntled mama's boy in Werner Herzog's underseen and brilliant My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, and as a white supremacist murderer in Bob Odenkirk's spotty but still quite funny Let's Go to Prison. Both films require him to segue between buffoonishness and imposing intimidation, which he does seamlessly. He's been compared to a young Christopher Walken, and rightly so. Walken is the only other actor who might possibly pull off this exchange, from Let's Go to Prison:
Shannon: "You remind me of my daddy."
Will Arnett: "I'm sure he was a great man."
Shannon: "I killed him."
Arnett: "You didn't kill him with kindness, did you?"
Shannon: "With a hammer."
Much like William Friedkin's Bug (which also starred Shannon), Take Shelter is an exploration of paranoid schizophrenia from the inside out. Curtis (Shannon) is a working-class family man with a caring wife, Samantha (Jessica Chastain), and daughter, Hannah (Tova Stewart). He has a good job, enough money to get by, health insurance, and friends. People respect him. His best friend and co-worker, Dewart (Shea Whigham), looks up to him. He lives a good life.
Then the nightmares begin to come. Curtis begins to see things in the sky that others do not: signs of a big storm coming. He sees raindrops that look like motor oil. He has a dream that the family dog attacks him, and another that zombie-like people kidnap Hannah.
Curtis takes action. He chains the dog up in the backyard. He begins renovating an old storm shelter in the backyard. Others don't understand why he feels the urgent need to do this, but Curtis does.
In the movie's early scenes, Shannon and writer-director Jeff Nichols create one of the most compelling portrayals of schizophrenia yet put on screen. What sets Curtis apart from most examples of mental illness is that he knows all along that he is sick, and there is nothing he can do about it. Just as with any disease, mere knowledge that he is sick is not enough to make him well. Curtis knows that what he's doing is ridiculous, but knows he has to do it. Because he is embarrassed, he hides it from his family. He reads up on mental illnesses. He talks to his doctor, who recommends he see a psychiatrist that is far out of his budget range. He knows of schizophrenia because his mother (Kathy Baker) was committed to a mental hospital when he was 10.
His disease progresses with terrifying logic. Samantha begins to worry. The amount of money he spends renovating the storm shelter begins to inhibit Hannah's upcoming cochlear implant surgery. His visions and nightmares affect his performance at work. Curtis's biggest fear is all that he has will be taken away from him, and he begins to see his fears come to life around him.
It's a shame, then, that the movie goes stagnant after its first hour. The tension, ever so gradually ratcheting, goes loose and the movie lets us off the hook. Curtis's disease becomes repetitive rather than progressive. A climactic fight between Curtis and another character seems to come out of nowhere, and one explosion of emotion from Curtis seems phony and histrionic.
The special effects, too, begin to get in the way, notably Curtis's recurring vision of birds flying in a strange formation. The birds are obviously the creation of CGI, and are so cartoonish that they take us right out of the picture. Better to use the Orson Welles method: shoot a few birds in close-up and use montage to make it look like a whole lot. The image of the storm-filled sky is also all too obviously animated.
The ending is a letdown. Without giving away too much, I can say that the movie might have ended perfectly with Curtis throwing open the shelter doors. Rather, it tacks on a coda that is meant to be foreboding but is only confounding and silly.
Take Shelter is a film of rare sensitivity; it is a gripping portrayal of a man who is always depended upon to be strong, brought down by the weakness of his fear. I doubt any actor other than Michael Shannon could have played this role successfully, and I would not count him out for an Oscar this year. Though the movie fails him in the end, his performance alone is enough to recommend it.
** 1/2 out of ****
P.S. Shannon has become one of my favorite actors over the past few years, and I feel the need to cite two previous standout performances of his that might otherwise go unnoticed: as a disgruntled mama's boy in Werner Herzog's underseen and brilliant My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, and as a white supremacist murderer in Bob Odenkirk's spotty but still quite funny Let's Go to Prison. Both films require him to segue between buffoonishness and imposing intimidation, which he does seamlessly. He's been compared to a young Christopher Walken, and rightly so. Walken is the only other actor who might possibly pull off this exchange, from Let's Go to Prison:
Shannon: "You remind me of my daddy."
Will Arnett: "I'm sure he was a great man."
Shannon: "I killed him."
Arnett: "You didn't kill him with kindness, did you?"
Shannon: "With a hammer."
Saturday, October 22, 2011
PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 3 (2011)
That the Paranormal Activity series has stuck comfortably close to its formula is no surprise. Sticking to formula is generally how long-running series succeed: look at Final Destination, or Saw, or Halloween or Friday the 13th or A Nightmare on Elm Street or "Law & Order." The third entry in the wildly successful series wisely doesn't cheat on its gimmick: the entire film is presented as found footage, edited together after the fact.
The first film, directed by first-timer Oren Peli, was a brilliant shiver-inducing piece of work. It was fascinating in its simplicity; though we never believed for a second that it was authentic, each scene was unquestionably real. For part 2, director Tod Williams (The Door in the Floor) effectively guided the film through the pitfalls of its pop culture identity, and balanced the framing device of the original with a few tried-and-true horror movie formula tricks to make it an entertaining thrill ride, even if it lacked the raw power of the original.
In Paranormal Activity 3, the gimmick begins to get just a little bit tired. Peli made a huge splash by setting most of his film at night, with the characters all asleep and one stationary camera recording all the devious things that they don't see. Williams continued the trend in part 2 by opening the footage up to the whole house, with three security cameras doing the same duty.
Here, the contribution of directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman is to set the film in the 1980s, with several VHS cameras recording all that happens. It's an interesting premise, since the limits in technology prevent the characters from recording more than 6 hours at a time, viewing and editing requires a great deal more work, and tripods are clunky and can easily tip over. The directors do just enough with this idea that we wish they had done more: videotapes always seem to be in plentiful supply, even though the characters use 4 per camera per day. Though the movie features a constant "retro" timestamp at the bottom right, it still appears to have been shot on digital video in widescreen; if it had been shot on actual VHS, it might have come with an eerier found-footage atmosphere, kind of like the 16mm black-and-white camera in The Blair Witch Project.
We meet Katie and Kristi, the two sisters we got to know in the previous two films. Here, they're young children, played by Chloe Csengery and Jessica Tyler Brown. They live fairly happily with their mom Julie (Lauren Bittner) and mom's boyfriend Dennis (Chris Smith). Then Kristi begins talking with an invisible friend she calls Toby, who warns her not to tell anyone of their conversations.
The quiet nighttime scenes, so scarily foreshadowing in the first film, are perfunctory and inert here. The usual bumps in the night take place. Light fixtures sway, doors squeak shut, bedsheets ripple. Something appears to be coming from Kristi and Katie's bedroom closet. In the middle of the night Kristi gets up and talks to the closet door, which is just behind the camera and to the left. It does not say much for the intelligence of the characters in this movie that after viewing the footage each day, nobody thinks to point the camera at the damn closet.
By nature of the movie's premise, it still comes preloaded with a bit of urgency. Since it's supposedly been edited down from many hours of found footage, there is the sense that every scene has a reason for being shown, which calls the audience's attention to all parts of the screen at all times. The movie revisits the now-famous device in which the timestamp speeds up and then slows down to signify that something important is about to happen. This is a surefire way to raise tension, but the series has used it so many times that it has barely any effect anymore.
Still, the movie does deliver the shocks it promises. The directors, who previously made the documentary-style Catfish, have mastered the first-person format well enough so that we still find terror in what we don't see. They find a brilliant device in the oscillating camera, constructed by Dennis from an oscillating fan, which pans from the living room to the kitchen with the ostensible purpose of showing us what's happening in both rooms, but with the ulterior purpose of concealing what's happening in the other room at the time. This paves the way for a few wonderful scares, my favorite involving a crafty babysitter.
Also, unlike the ultimately disappointing part 2, this film spends comparatively little time on plot and, like the original, devotes most of its time to setting up the tension. Though there is a backstory about demons and witches, it is only a McGuffin and the movie mostly dismisses it in favor of suspense. It also ramps up the tension considerably toward the end, leaving us with a third act which is, if nothing groundbreaking, appropriately spooky and satisfying.
Though Paranormal Activity 3 still manages to keep the popular franchise alive, the wrinkles are beginning to show. Both sequels have been significantly less tight than the original, and have been regressing into horror movie cliche. Take, for example, the repeated use of the It's Only A device. A character hears a noise, goes to check it out, and a startling BANG! Turns out it was only the wife, or the kid, or the cat, or the dog. Since the footage in Paranormal Activity 3 was allegedly found and edited into shape by a third party, we have to assume this person was thinking, "I know there are horrible things to come, but I think I'll throw in this part where it was only the wife, just for giggles."
** 1/2 out of ****
The first film, directed by first-timer Oren Peli, was a brilliant shiver-inducing piece of work. It was fascinating in its simplicity; though we never believed for a second that it was authentic, each scene was unquestionably real. For part 2, director Tod Williams (The Door in the Floor) effectively guided the film through the pitfalls of its pop culture identity, and balanced the framing device of the original with a few tried-and-true horror movie formula tricks to make it an entertaining thrill ride, even if it lacked the raw power of the original.
In Paranormal Activity 3, the gimmick begins to get just a little bit tired. Peli made a huge splash by setting most of his film at night, with the characters all asleep and one stationary camera recording all the devious things that they don't see. Williams continued the trend in part 2 by opening the footage up to the whole house, with three security cameras doing the same duty.
Here, the contribution of directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman is to set the film in the 1980s, with several VHS cameras recording all that happens. It's an interesting premise, since the limits in technology prevent the characters from recording more than 6 hours at a time, viewing and editing requires a great deal more work, and tripods are clunky and can easily tip over. The directors do just enough with this idea that we wish they had done more: videotapes always seem to be in plentiful supply, even though the characters use 4 per camera per day. Though the movie features a constant "retro" timestamp at the bottom right, it still appears to have been shot on digital video in widescreen; if it had been shot on actual VHS, it might have come with an eerier found-footage atmosphere, kind of like the 16mm black-and-white camera in The Blair Witch Project.
We meet Katie and Kristi, the two sisters we got to know in the previous two films. Here, they're young children, played by Chloe Csengery and Jessica Tyler Brown. They live fairly happily with their mom Julie (Lauren Bittner) and mom's boyfriend Dennis (Chris Smith). Then Kristi begins talking with an invisible friend she calls Toby, who warns her not to tell anyone of their conversations.
The quiet nighttime scenes, so scarily foreshadowing in the first film, are perfunctory and inert here. The usual bumps in the night take place. Light fixtures sway, doors squeak shut, bedsheets ripple. Something appears to be coming from Kristi and Katie's bedroom closet. In the middle of the night Kristi gets up and talks to the closet door, which is just behind the camera and to the left. It does not say much for the intelligence of the characters in this movie that after viewing the footage each day, nobody thinks to point the camera at the damn closet.
By nature of the movie's premise, it still comes preloaded with a bit of urgency. Since it's supposedly been edited down from many hours of found footage, there is the sense that every scene has a reason for being shown, which calls the audience's attention to all parts of the screen at all times. The movie revisits the now-famous device in which the timestamp speeds up and then slows down to signify that something important is about to happen. This is a surefire way to raise tension, but the series has used it so many times that it has barely any effect anymore.
Still, the movie does deliver the shocks it promises. The directors, who previously made the documentary-style Catfish, have mastered the first-person format well enough so that we still find terror in what we don't see. They find a brilliant device in the oscillating camera, constructed by Dennis from an oscillating fan, which pans from the living room to the kitchen with the ostensible purpose of showing us what's happening in both rooms, but with the ulterior purpose of concealing what's happening in the other room at the time. This paves the way for a few wonderful scares, my favorite involving a crafty babysitter.
Also, unlike the ultimately disappointing part 2, this film spends comparatively little time on plot and, like the original, devotes most of its time to setting up the tension. Though there is a backstory about demons and witches, it is only a McGuffin and the movie mostly dismisses it in favor of suspense. It also ramps up the tension considerably toward the end, leaving us with a third act which is, if nothing groundbreaking, appropriately spooky and satisfying.
Though Paranormal Activity 3 still manages to keep the popular franchise alive, the wrinkles are beginning to show. Both sequels have been significantly less tight than the original, and have been regressing into horror movie cliche. Take, for example, the repeated use of the It's Only A device. A character hears a noise, goes to check it out, and a startling BANG! Turns out it was only the wife, or the kid, or the cat, or the dog. Since the footage in Paranormal Activity 3 was allegedly found and edited into shape by a third party, we have to assume this person was thinking, "I know there are horrible things to come, but I think I'll throw in this part where it was only the wife, just for giggles."
** 1/2 out of ****
Thursday, September 29, 2011
A Torturously Okay Prediction: THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE 2, why the first one was no good, and why the second one will not be any better
The first Human Centipede was a success, probably for the same reason that "2 Girls 1 Cup" could be considered a success. You make a movie that's about nothing but a guy sewing people's lips to anuses, and curious thrill-seekers will come, if only to see what it's all about. I was one of those thrill-seekers, and what it's all about turned out to be not all that much.
Now that we're on the verge of being subjected to a sequel, The Human Centipede Part 2 (Full Sequence), the British Board of Film Classification has offered what has turned out to be a de facto publicity boost to the film: they've banned it from release in the UK. An interview in last Sunday's New York Times reveals that the film's director, Tom Six, is only passively upset at the board's rejection. "My God, this is brilliant for the marketing," he says.
The Human Centipede 2 would be far from the first film to trumpet its censorship in other countries to boost ticket sales. It was 33 years ago that I Spit On Your Grave, a sadistic and artless rape-revenge dud, played the same card. Movie critics like Roger Ebert trashed it for being the cold, manipulative piece of waste that it was, and played right into its hand. It gained a cult following and even spawned a slick Hollywood remake last year.
The Human Centipede appears to be going for the same sadistic, gut-wrenching reaction, but the problem isn't that it's too sadistic, or too artless, or even too fetishistic. The problem is that it's its own Hollywood remake. Far from being a grainy, bargain-basement snuff film lite, The Human Centipede is beautifully shot, artfully created and designed, and boring. Though Ebert awarded the film zero stars, the same rating he gave to I Spit, he backhandedly praises Six's effort in making a proud midnight movie that avoids being purely an exploitation film.
The trailer for Part 2, though it occupies a different universe and a different style, looks to be just as Hollywood. The gorgeous black-and-white photography recalls an old Universal monster movie. Its new antihero--a stocky introvert played by Laurence R. Harvey--reminds us of Peter Lorre in M. This is far from a mere exploitation film; it looks as if Six is trying to elevate his crude premise into a real film.
And there's the problem. There's no room in the mouth-to-anus business for a real film. Just as the first Human Centipede spent too much time lingering on the existential pain and suffering of the six-legged creature at its center, Part 2 appears to be more a harrowing exploration into the mind of a tortured madman than a celebration of bodily invasion.
But reports do say that the film is much more disgusting than its predecessor. Though I do take issue with the notion of any film being banned by a country's government, the British Film Board is dead right in their description of the first film, which was given the OK for ages 18 and up: though "undoubtedly tasteless and disgusting, it was a relatively traditional and conventional horror film." The second, they say, is much more disgusting and may even put audiences at risk. At risk of what, I am not sure, other than flushing a hard-earned $10 down the toilet.
The idea of a film causing actual harm to a person watching it actually plays right into Six's hand as well. His sequel takes the meta route and sets itself in a world where The Human Centipede is a successful cult film, and inspires a sociopathic copycat to give the experiment a try. I had enough trouble believing that a sick Nazi doctor would be so dumb as to think an experiment like this would be worth anything. I, like the film board, was not too worried about it inspiring any copycats.
By going meta, Six takes a big risk. Audiences have not typically responded well to movies that turn mirrors on themselves and say, "Wow, aren't we great?" An audience is far more likely to take to a sequel that stays within its own universe. Look at how much money people have spent on the Saw series, or on Final Destination, or Friday the 13th.
And then look at how much money they spent on Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2. That was an uncommonly intelligent sequel which took an entirely different approach from its wildly successful original. The Blair Witch Project was a monumental hit with a revolutionary marketing strategy, and a sequel was immediately called for. But rather than continue with their found-footage, lost-in-the-woods, documentary-like motif, the filmmakers hired Joe Berlinger, the documentarian behind Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills, to make a traditional horror film set outside the realm of the original, in which Blair Witch was a cultural phenomenon and has inspired copycats to venture into the woods themselves.
Berlinger also raised questions about the idea of documentary footage itself. What happens when documented footage disagrees with real life? Does video lie? How can we ever know the truth? Interesting stuff. The movie tanked at the box office and killed the Blair Witch franchise.
It looks like Six is doing something along the same lines here. In doing so, he's giving himself far too much credit. Though The Human Centipede caused quite a stir upon its release, I can't say I've known anyone who's liked it, or even thought it sick and twisted enough to inspire a cult phenomenon. With its surprising lack of gore and artful treatment of its central creature, The Human Centipede just isn't strong enough to inspire a madman either. Of course, if the cultural and psychological subtext doesn't work, the sequel could simply fall back on the increase in blood, gore, and bodily terror. Will The Human Centipede 2 be disgusting and exploitative enough to redeem itself from his secretly highbrow intentions?
My vote would be no. Though Six appears to take glee in making audiences squirm, it looks to me like he's a closeted reputable filmmaker. He may be loath to admit it, but I think Six is probably going to make an actual good film someday. One where mouths and anuses can remain blissfully separate.
Now that we're on the verge of being subjected to a sequel, The Human Centipede Part 2 (Full Sequence), the British Board of Film Classification has offered what has turned out to be a de facto publicity boost to the film: they've banned it from release in the UK. An interview in last Sunday's New York Times reveals that the film's director, Tom Six, is only passively upset at the board's rejection. "My God, this is brilliant for the marketing," he says.
The Human Centipede 2 would be far from the first film to trumpet its censorship in other countries to boost ticket sales. It was 33 years ago that I Spit On Your Grave, a sadistic and artless rape-revenge dud, played the same card. Movie critics like Roger Ebert trashed it for being the cold, manipulative piece of waste that it was, and played right into its hand. It gained a cult following and even spawned a slick Hollywood remake last year.
The Human Centipede appears to be going for the same sadistic, gut-wrenching reaction, but the problem isn't that it's too sadistic, or too artless, or even too fetishistic. The problem is that it's its own Hollywood remake. Far from being a grainy, bargain-basement snuff film lite, The Human Centipede is beautifully shot, artfully created and designed, and boring. Though Ebert awarded the film zero stars, the same rating he gave to I Spit, he backhandedly praises Six's effort in making a proud midnight movie that avoids being purely an exploitation film.
The trailer for Part 2, though it occupies a different universe and a different style, looks to be just as Hollywood. The gorgeous black-and-white photography recalls an old Universal monster movie. Its new antihero--a stocky introvert played by Laurence R. Harvey--reminds us of Peter Lorre in M. This is far from a mere exploitation film; it looks as if Six is trying to elevate his crude premise into a real film.
And there's the problem. There's no room in the mouth-to-anus business for a real film. Just as the first Human Centipede spent too much time lingering on the existential pain and suffering of the six-legged creature at its center, Part 2 appears to be more a harrowing exploration into the mind of a tortured madman than a celebration of bodily invasion.
But reports do say that the film is much more disgusting than its predecessor. Though I do take issue with the notion of any film being banned by a country's government, the British Film Board is dead right in their description of the first film, which was given the OK for ages 18 and up: though "undoubtedly tasteless and disgusting, it was a relatively traditional and conventional horror film." The second, they say, is much more disgusting and may even put audiences at risk. At risk of what, I am not sure, other than flushing a hard-earned $10 down the toilet.
The idea of a film causing actual harm to a person watching it actually plays right into Six's hand as well. His sequel takes the meta route and sets itself in a world where The Human Centipede is a successful cult film, and inspires a sociopathic copycat to give the experiment a try. I had enough trouble believing that a sick Nazi doctor would be so dumb as to think an experiment like this would be worth anything. I, like the film board, was not too worried about it inspiring any copycats.
By going meta, Six takes a big risk. Audiences have not typically responded well to movies that turn mirrors on themselves and say, "Wow, aren't we great?" An audience is far more likely to take to a sequel that stays within its own universe. Look at how much money people have spent on the Saw series, or on Final Destination, or Friday the 13th.
And then look at how much money they spent on Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2. That was an uncommonly intelligent sequel which took an entirely different approach from its wildly successful original. The Blair Witch Project was a monumental hit with a revolutionary marketing strategy, and a sequel was immediately called for. But rather than continue with their found-footage, lost-in-the-woods, documentary-like motif, the filmmakers hired Joe Berlinger, the documentarian behind Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills, to make a traditional horror film set outside the realm of the original, in which Blair Witch was a cultural phenomenon and has inspired copycats to venture into the woods themselves.
Berlinger also raised questions about the idea of documentary footage itself. What happens when documented footage disagrees with real life? Does video lie? How can we ever know the truth? Interesting stuff. The movie tanked at the box office and killed the Blair Witch franchise.
It looks like Six is doing something along the same lines here. In doing so, he's giving himself far too much credit. Though The Human Centipede caused quite a stir upon its release, I can't say I've known anyone who's liked it, or even thought it sick and twisted enough to inspire a cult phenomenon. With its surprising lack of gore and artful treatment of its central creature, The Human Centipede just isn't strong enough to inspire a madman either. Of course, if the cultural and psychological subtext doesn't work, the sequel could simply fall back on the increase in blood, gore, and bodily terror. Will The Human Centipede 2 be disgusting and exploitative enough to redeem itself from his secretly highbrow intentions?
My vote would be no. Though Six appears to take glee in making audiences squirm, it looks to me like he's a closeted reputable filmmaker. He may be loath to admit it, but I think Six is probably going to make an actual good film someday. One where mouths and anuses can remain blissfully separate.
Shock and Yawn: THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE (FIRST SEQUENCE) (2010)
The Human Centipede suffers from what psychologists call the availability heuristic. The availability heuristic is the assumption that a certain event is likely or possible because of how easy it is to imagine. More and more movies suffer from it nowadays, especially as the increase in CGI makes more things that might be impossible in real life more likely on screen. Events are decided based on how easy the image is to put together, rather than how likely the event would be to happen. It’s easy to imagine Bruce Willis casually stepping out of a car that’s spinning out of control, like he does in RED, but not quite so plausible in real life.
It’s also easy to imagine a German scientist kidnapping tourists and sewing their lips to each other’s anuses to make one big long segmented animal. Disgusting, yes, but easy to imagine. That is the starting-off point for Tom Six’s (his real name) The Human Centipede. The trouble is that’s pretty much his ending point too.
Dr. Heiter (Dieter Laser, his real name) is quite a madman indeed. He introduces himself as Germany’s foremost surgeon for separating conjoined twins. Over the course of The Human Centipede (First Sequence), he kidnaps several people, sedates them, and when they wake up, they are joined together, one in front of the other. This explains why he was the conjoined twin guy and not a gastroenterologist.
It’s at this point that even the most sicko horror fan begins to ask what the point is. There really isn’t a whole lot of bodily terror in the film; there’s a lot more wincing and almost-vomiting to be done at the mere description of the premise than at anything that happens in the film. The scenes of the human centipede are filmed gingerly enough so that we’re sure that the actors aren’t being put through the same trials as the characters.
The grotesqueness of the premise has led some critics to compare Six to David Cronenberg. Let it be known that Cronenberg’s superiority is not limited to number of syllables. While Cronenberg dealt with bodily invasion just as gleefully, many of his films were political and social allegories that used their gore to make a point.
Six hints that he’s going to go there at times. Early in the film, one character has a chance to kill herself rather than go through such a horrible experience; this might have posed the question of at which point life becomes not worth saving. The fusing of three people together might have made an interesting allegory about loss of individuality; what happens when you, formerly a human being, are now just a cog in a larger organism and have to do your part to make it work? You don’t have to look too deep to see the parallels to Communism.
For the most part, Six is content to stick with the old Friday the 13th formula. Hapless victims get lost in the woods, are preyed upon by a maniac, try to escape to no avail, are tortured. The end. The problem with the film isn’t that Six has no boundaries and pushes the envelope too far; rather, it’s that he’s too Hollywood to do anything interesting with the film. His Human Centipede is at heart the same as any paint-by-numbers big-studio flick that takes a grabber of a premise and leaves it to die.
The production is slickly made and extremely well-shot for what it is. Six and cinematographer Goof de Koning (his real name) make Dr. Heiter’s house into a living, breathing, antibacterial nightmare with long constrictive corridors and very few windows. Six stages several very effective chase scenes all within those walls: no easy feat.
Mr. Laser, who looks like Christopher Walken with a facelift, plays Dr. Heiter as well as he can under the circumstances, though the role is really impossible to play. How to play a man so dementedly brilliant, yet so stupid that he doesn’t realize why the back end of the centipede is going to die of dysentery eventually? Why wouldn’t he realize that a human centipede is no good if the front segment is the only one that survives? Most mad scientists have a madness that speaks to their purpose.
The three segments of the centipede—Akihiro Kitamura, Ashley C. Williams, and Ashlynn Yennie, in that order—are completely believable. All Kitamura has to do as the centipede’s head is scream epithets in Japanese. Well, what would you do if you were the head of a human centipede and spoke only Japanese?
Six is not an untalented director, and I suspect he may have a future making normal films. His path will probably follow that of John Waters, who started out making trash and graduated to some truly great (if not completely untrashy) films. The Human Centipede is Six’s Pink Flamingos, and now that he’s gotten everyone’s attention he will move on to better things, like... let me check... The Human Centipede 2. So there you go.
* 1/2 out of ****
It’s also easy to imagine a German scientist kidnapping tourists and sewing their lips to each other’s anuses to make one big long segmented animal. Disgusting, yes, but easy to imagine. That is the starting-off point for Tom Six’s (his real name) The Human Centipede. The trouble is that’s pretty much his ending point too.
Dr. Heiter (Dieter Laser, his real name) is quite a madman indeed. He introduces himself as Germany’s foremost surgeon for separating conjoined twins. Over the course of The Human Centipede (First Sequence), he kidnaps several people, sedates them, and when they wake up, they are joined together, one in front of the other. This explains why he was the conjoined twin guy and not a gastroenterologist.
It’s at this point that even the most sicko horror fan begins to ask what the point is. There really isn’t a whole lot of bodily terror in the film; there’s a lot more wincing and almost-vomiting to be done at the mere description of the premise than at anything that happens in the film. The scenes of the human centipede are filmed gingerly enough so that we’re sure that the actors aren’t being put through the same trials as the characters.
The grotesqueness of the premise has led some critics to compare Six to David Cronenberg. Let it be known that Cronenberg’s superiority is not limited to number of syllables. While Cronenberg dealt with bodily invasion just as gleefully, many of his films were political and social allegories that used their gore to make a point.
Six hints that he’s going to go there at times. Early in the film, one character has a chance to kill herself rather than go through such a horrible experience; this might have posed the question of at which point life becomes not worth saving. The fusing of three people together might have made an interesting allegory about loss of individuality; what happens when you, formerly a human being, are now just a cog in a larger organism and have to do your part to make it work? You don’t have to look too deep to see the parallels to Communism.
For the most part, Six is content to stick with the old Friday the 13th formula. Hapless victims get lost in the woods, are preyed upon by a maniac, try to escape to no avail, are tortured. The end. The problem with the film isn’t that Six has no boundaries and pushes the envelope too far; rather, it’s that he’s too Hollywood to do anything interesting with the film. His Human Centipede is at heart the same as any paint-by-numbers big-studio flick that takes a grabber of a premise and leaves it to die.
The production is slickly made and extremely well-shot for what it is. Six and cinematographer Goof de Koning (his real name) make Dr. Heiter’s house into a living, breathing, antibacterial nightmare with long constrictive corridors and very few windows. Six stages several very effective chase scenes all within those walls: no easy feat.
Mr. Laser, who looks like Christopher Walken with a facelift, plays Dr. Heiter as well as he can under the circumstances, though the role is really impossible to play. How to play a man so dementedly brilliant, yet so stupid that he doesn’t realize why the back end of the centipede is going to die of dysentery eventually? Why wouldn’t he realize that a human centipede is no good if the front segment is the only one that survives? Most mad scientists have a madness that speaks to their purpose.
The three segments of the centipede—Akihiro Kitamura, Ashley C. Williams, and Ashlynn Yennie, in that order—are completely believable. All Kitamura has to do as the centipede’s head is scream epithets in Japanese. Well, what would you do if you were the head of a human centipede and spoke only Japanese?
Six is not an untalented director, and I suspect he may have a future making normal films. His path will probably follow that of John Waters, who started out making trash and graduated to some truly great (if not completely untrashy) films. The Human Centipede is Six’s Pink Flamingos, and now that he’s gotten everyone’s attention he will move on to better things, like... let me check... The Human Centipede 2. So there you go.
* 1/2 out of ****
Sunday, September 25, 2011
Helplessness Blues: Steven Soderbergh's CONTAGION (2011)
Steven Soderbergh's Contagion starts out as the kind of epic thriller that was Irwin Allen's specialty: a large-scale disaster unites a team of big movie stars who work together to fix it. It ends, however, with a sincere plea for order and patience in a world of chaos and mistrust. The movie tracks the global spread of a fatal disease, but at the outset a plague of cynicism has already taken its toll.
The world in which it takes place is eerily real. The movie chronicles a near-apocalypse that, based on how the public tends to react, I believe could happen. An outbreak of a deadly flu-like virus originating in China, or perhaps Chicago, is spreading faster than scientists can examine it. It's airborne and scoots from person to person with a mere touch. The average person touches his or her face thousands of times a day, one character explains. That's a big deal, when you consider what else that person has touched.
A vaccine might be feasible in three months, after the virus has been created in a lab, developed into an antivirus, tested on animals and then on humans. When thousands have been killed in 14 days, this is not a promising solution.
An epidemic specialist (Kate Winslet) gathers evidence about the virus. Lab scientists (Jennifer Ehle, Elliott Gould, Demetri Martin) work to create a vaccine. A WHO doctor (Marion Cotillard) investigates the disease's origin in China. A CDC official (Laurence Fishburne) tries to juggle the entire situation. A conspiracy theorist blogger (Jude Law) points fingers at the government's ties to pharmaceutical companies, and rallies his alleged 12 million readers around his skeptical vision.
The panic spreads even faster than the disease. There is no cut-and-dry way to deal with the growing disaster, as I suspect there would not be in real life. Certainly everyone would agree that the CDC does need to keep certain things secret to avoid widespread panic, but how much can be kept from the public before it starts to demand answers? How do you tell someone that there is a 1 in 4 chance he's going to die? How do you keep police on the streets when they're in danger of dropping dead? Firemen at work? Grocery stores open? How do you stop looting from happening? How do you explain to a nation of people afraid of sudden death that they need to wait 3 months for a vaccine? One government official makes the questionable suggestion, "Let's make sure nobody knows until everybody knows." Uh-huh. Law's slimy would-be journalist salts the wound, leading people onto a bogus holistic cure, which prompts riots at drugstores when supplies run low.
As he did with Traffic, his multi-plotted exploration of the drug business, Soderbergh weaves in and out of each facet of the story with ease, casting recognizable actors in each key role to help keep them straight. Also like Traffic, Contagion is a movie about good people trying to do their jobs the best they can under the circumstances, where there is no right answer and they have to settle for the least wrong. Even the smarmy blogger isn't completely wrongheaded.
The cast is stellar. Fishburne in particular returns to form after some years toiling in the depressing Matrix (and the even more depressing 21). The crooked-toothed Law is a perfect balance of rightful questioner, Glenn Beckian populist rabble-rouser, and sleazoid opportunist. The presence of should-have-been-Oscar-winner John Hawkes, though he only appears in a few short scenes, lends the film a heartbreaking humanity, so that the scenes within the government are more than mere procedure. Only the sections of the film that follow Ehle and Cotillard come up short; though they make sense within the plot, their characters seem too good to be true.
At the center of the film is Matt Damon, in one of his best performances yet. He plays Mitch, whose wife, Beth (Gwyneth Paltrow), is the first known infected. Damon surprisingly channels Gregory Peck, playing a husband and father who takes it upon himself to remain cool, collected, and reasonable while the world crumbles around him. When his daughter (Anna Jacoby-Heron) turns up uninfected, he does exactly the right thing to protect her and keeps doing the right thing, as a calming antithesis to the public's riotous reaction.
Soderbergh has said that he set up to make a realist version of an Irwin Allen movie, and that's what he's done. Contagion is a brilliant exploration of a feasible outbreak, as well as a warning to a cynical public who are quick to point blame when things go wrong, but too numb to notice how often they touch their faces.
*** 1/2 out of ****
The world in which it takes place is eerily real. The movie chronicles a near-apocalypse that, based on how the public tends to react, I believe could happen. An outbreak of a deadly flu-like virus originating in China, or perhaps Chicago, is spreading faster than scientists can examine it. It's airborne and scoots from person to person with a mere touch. The average person touches his or her face thousands of times a day, one character explains. That's a big deal, when you consider what else that person has touched.
A vaccine might be feasible in three months, after the virus has been created in a lab, developed into an antivirus, tested on animals and then on humans. When thousands have been killed in 14 days, this is not a promising solution.
An epidemic specialist (Kate Winslet) gathers evidence about the virus. Lab scientists (Jennifer Ehle, Elliott Gould, Demetri Martin) work to create a vaccine. A WHO doctor (Marion Cotillard) investigates the disease's origin in China. A CDC official (Laurence Fishburne) tries to juggle the entire situation. A conspiracy theorist blogger (Jude Law) points fingers at the government's ties to pharmaceutical companies, and rallies his alleged 12 million readers around his skeptical vision.
The panic spreads even faster than the disease. There is no cut-and-dry way to deal with the growing disaster, as I suspect there would not be in real life. Certainly everyone would agree that the CDC does need to keep certain things secret to avoid widespread panic, but how much can be kept from the public before it starts to demand answers? How do you tell someone that there is a 1 in 4 chance he's going to die? How do you keep police on the streets when they're in danger of dropping dead? Firemen at work? Grocery stores open? How do you stop looting from happening? How do you explain to a nation of people afraid of sudden death that they need to wait 3 months for a vaccine? One government official makes the questionable suggestion, "Let's make sure nobody knows until everybody knows." Uh-huh. Law's slimy would-be journalist salts the wound, leading people onto a bogus holistic cure, which prompts riots at drugstores when supplies run low.
As he did with Traffic, his multi-plotted exploration of the drug business, Soderbergh weaves in and out of each facet of the story with ease, casting recognizable actors in each key role to help keep them straight. Also like Traffic, Contagion is a movie about good people trying to do their jobs the best they can under the circumstances, where there is no right answer and they have to settle for the least wrong. Even the smarmy blogger isn't completely wrongheaded.
The cast is stellar. Fishburne in particular returns to form after some years toiling in the depressing Matrix (and the even more depressing 21). The crooked-toothed Law is a perfect balance of rightful questioner, Glenn Beckian populist rabble-rouser, and sleazoid opportunist. The presence of should-have-been-Oscar-winner John Hawkes, though he only appears in a few short scenes, lends the film a heartbreaking humanity, so that the scenes within the government are more than mere procedure. Only the sections of the film that follow Ehle and Cotillard come up short; though they make sense within the plot, their characters seem too good to be true.
At the center of the film is Matt Damon, in one of his best performances yet. He plays Mitch, whose wife, Beth (Gwyneth Paltrow), is the first known infected. Damon surprisingly channels Gregory Peck, playing a husband and father who takes it upon himself to remain cool, collected, and reasonable while the world crumbles around him. When his daughter (Anna Jacoby-Heron) turns up uninfected, he does exactly the right thing to protect her and keeps doing the right thing, as a calming antithesis to the public's riotous reaction.
Soderbergh has said that he set up to make a realist version of an Irwin Allen movie, and that's what he's done. Contagion is a brilliant exploration of a feasible outbreak, as well as a warning to a cynical public who are quick to point blame when things go wrong, but too numb to notice how often they touch their faces.
*** 1/2 out of ****
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