THIS IS THE END (2013): Hollywood is Damned, Seth Rogen is Redeemed

Seth Rogen must have had the urge to take the easy way out with This is the End, his directorial debut with his partner Evan Goldberg.  It stars most of his friends and frequent collaborators--James Franco, Jay Baruchel, Jonah Hill, Craig Robinson, Danny McBride--and pretty much everyone in the movie plays himself or herself.  It must have been in danger of becoming a giant inside joke in which the cast has a lot more fun than the audience, like, say, the original Ocean's Eleven, or James Franco's gig as Oscar host.

This is the End is not that.  In fact, it's the opposite.  It's Rogen's best film to date, in front of or behind the camera, and it's an antithesis to much of what has been so off-putting about him so far, as an actor and a writer.  On his best day, he's endearing, as in the underrated Zack & Miri Make a Porno and Take This Waltz.  On his worst, he's irritating and self-serving, as in Superbad and The Green Hornet.  A movie in which he and his friends all play themselves and improvise much of their dialogue is in danger of becoming a self-indulgent bore.

That the movie avoids self-indulgence is only one of its victories.  This is the End is a brilliant piece of work.  Though much of the dialogue has a spontaneous feel, it's not merely a party for the cast; it's a real film, put together carefully and expertly by its directors.  If the cast and directors weren't working hard, it would be a disaster; because they take it seriously, it's hilarious and oddly moving.  As far as high-concept action-comedies go, it might be the best of its type since Ghostbusters.

Though each cast member plays a slightly removed or elevated version of his or her own public persona, they're not "playing themselves." The movie rightfully does the heavy lifting with its characters rather than depend on us to know the actors' pop culture identities.  Seth Rogen is Seth, hometown Canadian boy turned Hollywood superstar: once a regular guy, Seth has now been absorbed into the L.A. lifestyle.  His childhood friend Jay (Baruchel, his co-star on "Undeclared") is visiting him for the week, but shows little interest in hanging out with Seth's L.A. friends, most prominently James Franco, who's recently built a gaudy house in which to have gaudy Gatsby-like Hollywood parties.

In the early scenes each actor perfectly sets up his or her own facade that very thinly masks a superiority complex.  In the first scene we see Seth waiting at the airport, barely tolerating greetings from fans passing by.  Franco's smarmy attitude, labyrinthine house, lavish party and garishly awful art signifies an art student at his most pretentious.  Even Jay, who's not quite the celebrity that his friends are (though one reference is made to his very good performance in Million Dollar Baby), feels a constant false superiority to those around him.

Franco's party is an impressive creation, worthy of comparison to La Dolce Vita or Blake Edwards's The Party.  It paints a large, elaborate portrait of Hollywood debauchery, and features a gargantuan cast of celebrities showcasing their worst sides.  I won't reveal who appears, though Michael Cera's performance as a coke-addled misogynist in a tracksuit--the only character purposely developed to clash with the actor's real persona--is uproariously off-putting.

Once the party begins, something happens.  I won't say exactly what it is, but it involves explosions, the reduction of Los Angeles to a burning wasteland, a monster or two, and a group of celebrities (Rogen, Franco, and Baruchel, along with Jonah Hill, Craig Robinson, and Danny McBride) holed up inside Franco's house, awaiting help.  Help doesn't arrive, but a few other things do.

The celebrities' egos immediately clash with one another, which naturally makes it increasingly difficult for them to stay in the house together.  Hill in particular creates a terrifically phony personality; his obnoxiously fake niceness gives way to reveal a nasty person underneath, and his ultimate fate is just as deserved as it is unexpected.  McBride, playing a version of himself related to his "Eastbound & Down" character, is a purposely irritating and unwelcome presence, but is the only one who wears his obnoxiousness on his sleeve.

The key to the film's success is that it takes its horror-movie situation at face value.  Like Ghostbusters, it doesn't approach its apocalyptic scenario from a right angle, but accepts it and takes it seriously, and depends on its character work for laughs.  The hellscape that its Los Angeles gradually turns into is brilliantly realized by Rogen and Goldberg along with cinematographer Brandon Trost (who also shot the year's other descent into hell, Rob Zombie's The Lords of Salem).  And the movie surprisingly avoids ironic distance and nihilism, and presents us with an earnest and heartwarming conclusion... along with a surprise cameo appearance at its sendoff which I wouldn't dream of revealing here, but which strikes the perfect final note.

**** out of ****

Have Yourself an Evil Little Christmas, Part 1: BLACK CHRISTMAS (1974)

(Warning: video contains obscene language.)



Though Halloween gets most of the attention when it comes to grisly teen murders, witchcraft, and other general supernatural happenings, Christmas doesn't lag far behind.  The difference is that it's a lot harder to make a horror film set around Christmas without seeming cynical.  Any movie featuring a serial killer in a Santa Claus suit is merely using the holiday ironically as a platform for disturbing imagery.  However, there are films that manage to avoid that pitfall.

Bob Clark's Black Christmas, which predates Halloween by four years, is the foremost example.  I'm surprised that it's not widely counted among the best horror films ever made, because it certainly is.  Though it's not the first of its type (Mario Bava's A Bay of Blood pioneered the genre), it set the trend for the American stalker/slasher film.

The setup is intricately played.  A group of sorority girls is preparing to celebrate Christmas.  Some are going home, others are staying at the house, some are clandestinely staying with boyfriends.  A phone rings.  It's an obscene caller, and it's made clear that the call is not out of the ordinary.  Gradually the call transforms from sexual to threatening, and future calls become more and more psychotic.  Then a girl goes upstairs to the attic and never returns.

It seems strange at first that Clark would go on to direct the funniest, most endearing Christmas movie of all time, A Christmas Story (not to mention Porky's, and lamentably, Rhinestone and Baby Geniuses), but the two holiday films are not worlds apart.  Both are held together not primarily by plot but by character.  Clark toys with our expectations, not through the lazy whodunit game of which-one's-the-murderer, but through subtle character development and imagery.

The police, led by Lt. Fuller (genre stalwart John Saxon), are well-meaning but of limited help.  A high school girl reported missing at the same time is both a warning and a distraction.  At a time when many college girls are disappearing to undisclosed locations with boyfriends, no one is sure what to suspect.

At the center is Jess (Olivia Hussey), one of the sorority girls, who is the victim of most of the obscene calls.  She is pregnant and unsure if she wants to keep the baby, which disturbs her boyfriend Peter (Keir Dullea) to the point where he exhibits destructive behavior just as the killing begins.  Surely suspicion falls upon Peter, who is a credible suspect.  Or is he?

Clark doesn't rely on gore.  In fact, there is barely any blood in the film. He sometimes uses non-graphic but unsettling images (e.g. a dead girl wrapped in plastic rocking back and forth in a rocking chair) to drive the horror element of the film. The rest of the time, he uses suggestion, often cutting away before anything gory happens. He knows that people are scared most by what they can’t see and what they don’t know; he carefully shows us some things and obscures others, and tactically reveals to us some things of which his characters remain unaware.

The obscene calls that punctuate the film are a masterwork of oddball terror.  It sometimes sounds like there are multiple speakers on the other end.  They soon escalate beyond mere sexual harassment and into madness.  The calls are wild and disorienting; no overt threats are made, but the voice on the other end is wild and disorienting.  No sense can be made of the killer's ramblings, but they have a definite urgency that makes them threatening.  By the end of the film a certain amount of lucidity can be deciphered, as if the calls reveal an alternate story that makes sense to the killer but no one else.

The movie works largely because, like A Christmas Story, it feels authentic.  The sorority setting is believable, and the girls who inhabit it are likable and complex.  Margot Kidder in particular is dynamic as a foulmouthed, brutally honest sister who refuses to be victimized.  Even the cops, usually a stereotype in movies like this, aren't written off but are given real personalities: Douglas McGrath is particularly memorable as Sgt. Nash, a slightly boneheaded policeman (who incidentally ends up blurting out the movie's most memorable warning, plagiarized five years later by the far inferior When a Stranger Calls).

The conclusion is sure to disappoint many, since there really isn't one.  People often look for some sort of catharsis at the end of a horror film, which Clark and his writer Roy Moore refuse to provide.  There's only the tension left hanging there; it never releases.  The final tracking shot seems to tease some kind of certainty, but there is only a final line: four words which make no superficial sense, but are as taunting and crushing as anything I've ever heard spoken in a movie.  And a ringing phone.

**** out of ****

HAVE YOURSELF AN OKAY LITTLE CHRISTMAS!

There have been joyous ones and somber ones, but I believe that 'N Sync's "Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays" is the first and only Christmas song to use the word "okay." Whether you're excited or bitter about the holidays, the term "okay" usually doesn't fit.  Kudos to 'N Sync for blanding it up '90s style!




Have a Totally Okay Holiday!

ONLY GOD FORGIVES (2013)

Only God Forgives might be Ryan Gosling's very first bad performance.  That's curious, because he plays a character not more than a few miles from his taciturn hero from Drive, which was one of his best performances.  There, he was a slowly boiling pot of silent emotion.  In Only God Forgives, which reunites him with director Nicolas Winding Refn, he's even more taciturn, but there appears to be nothing behind his blank stare.  There are myriad shots of him looking deeply, and most of the movie is bathed in a deep red hue that makes his blue eyes glow like cat's eyes.  He spends more time observing than any top-billed actor in any movie short of Mystery Science Theater 3000, I think.

Only God Forgives is the kind of turd that only an accomplished, supremely talented director could possibly have made.  Refn is trying once again to make a classy arthouse genre picture like Drive, but he forgets what made that film a superior example.  It was about an amoral person who gained a soul.  Only God Forgives is about soulless people who remain soulless.  While Drive was about characters struggling to do the right thing in situations that force them to do wrong, Only God Forgives is a purposely nihilistic exercise in pretentious film school claptrap.

Refn purposely uses the template of a western, transported to a barren Thai urban wasteland.  Drug dealer Billy (Tom Burke) kills a prostitute.  Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm), a policeman who believes literally in an-eye-for-an-eye, commands the girl's father to kill Billy in retaliation, which he does.  Julian (Gosling), Billy's brother, is commanded by his domineering mother (Kristin Scott Thomas) to take revenge on Chang.  And so the vicious circle of revenge continues...  [snore]

If Only God Forgives is not the most tedious film ever made, it's certainly the bloodiest tedious film ever made.  Limbs are chopped off, guts are cut out, and one poor character is very graphically blinded, but it's difficult to care.  Refn displays the violence unironically and without style, refusing to glorify such acts but also refusing to give them any sort of purpose.

The movie begins with a spark of life, as Burke plays the short-lived Billy as a dangerous firebrand, the type who walks into a brothel and says, "I want an underaged prostitute." He's such a vile character that when the movie kills him off, it loses all of its steam.

Ms. Scott Thomas tries to revive the proceedings, not by lending class to an otherwise hamfisted affair, but by playing her role so badly that she grabs our attention at every turn.  She saunters in at the midpoint, verbally abuses several characters, delivers a vulgar and poorly written speech about the size of her sons' penises, and generally causes a mean ruckus.  It is one of the most flamboyantly awful performances I've ever seen, worthy of comparison with, say, Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct (both 1 and 2), or Famke Janssen on "Hemlock Grove." Her character is a plot contrivance, and reeks of Refn's desperation, but well, she's not boring.

Gosling's character, meant to be the conscience of the film, just isn't there.  I think he's meant to be portrayed as a morally conflicted soul, but his constant silent staring provides little insight.  Refn has given Gosling nothing to hold on to; Julian is a cipher, and feels like a minor character in his own story.  I can understand why Gosling wanted to work with Refn again after Drive.  If the two ever work together again, I will be surprised.

* 1/2 out of ****

NO-HIT NOVEMBER, Bomb #2: IN-APP-ROPRIATE COMEDY (2013)

All through November we take a look at box-office bombs and widely maligned turkeys, to let you know if you might have missed a classic.  Or not.

 

InAPPropriate Comedy is the new "film" from writer-director Vince Offer, a.k.a. Vince Shlomi, a.k.a. the ShamWow Guy, a.k.a. the guy who punched a hooker because he claimed she tried to bite his face off. Every so often he takes the money he's made hawking kitchen junk and makes a movie. He made The Underground Comedy Movie in 1999, memorable from its prominent late night commercials and an appearance from a pre-Green Mile Michael Clarke Duncan as the "Big Black Gay Virgin."

And now comes InAPPropriate Comedy, also a Kentucky Fried Movie knockoff, also desperate to offend. It is the most unpleasant time I've ever had watching a movie.  Keep in mind that I have faithfully watched The Lonely Lady, An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn, Dr. T & the Women, Wired, Cannibal Holocaust, Cruising, Corky Romano, and even The Underground Comedy Movie.  If Offer wishes to wear this as a badge of honor, then I wish him well.

The film combines a ravenous desire to offend every race, creed, sex, and sexual orientation on the planet with a profound lack of any kind of comic awareness or timing.  "Sketches" drag on without any kind of structure or focus.  There appears to have been very little writing, as most segments seem to be improvised desperately.

It's not that the movie is offensive.  It's that it tries to offend, but only succeeds by its own badness.  While The Underground Comedy Movie chose There's Something About Mary as its model and assaulted the audience with every bodily fluid it could imagine, InAPPropriate Comedy chooses Borat as its template and creates a series of faux-real-life sketches based around racism.  Offer finds racial slurs so funny that he bases pretty much all of the sketches around them.

Most of the running time is devoted to "The Amazing Racist," played by comedian Ari Shaffir, who might want to make this movie go away as quickly as he can.  He is placed in numerous situations in which he brazenly spouts racial insults at every race he can find: he's a driving instructor who hates Asians, a priest who tries to convince Jewish people to apologize for killing Christ, a vigilante who tries to deport illegals back to Mexico.  This might make for an interesting experiment, if the "victims" of his ruse weren't clearly actors who were directed to spout Jewish slurs right back at him.  And if Offer didn't allow each segment to drone on forever without a single laugh.  But he does, and keeps coming back to the character as if we'd like to see him again.

Another recurring sketch is "Blackass," featuring a team of African-Americans doing Jackass-style stunts centered around their blackness.  These sketches reach a Stepin Fetchit level of racial insensitivity.  One has a black man who enters an abortion clinic and offers his services with a coat hanger, and that's the joke.  In another, a woman introduces her two white friends to her boyfriend, who is a big black man, and that's the joke.  I felt sorry for the African-American actors, who are forced to utter unnatural-sounding ebonics as if Offer has plainly instructed them to replace every "is" with "be."

Adrien Brody turns up, as flamboyant cop "Flirty Harry," in what must have been a James Franco-style performance art piece.  These segments at least have a rock-bottom charm, as they're made up of nothing but Brody making gay puns. ("Go ahead.  Make me gay." Yep.)

The movie is far beneath the reputation of its other celebrity guest stars, who appear perpendicularly to the film, as if Offer wanted to keep at arm's length from the movie's more torturous scenes.  Rob Schneider's appearance here is akin to Cary Grant appearing in a Rob Schneider movie.  Michelle Rodriguez also appears for no real reason.  You know your movie's in trouble when its one (1) real laugh comes from Lindsay Lohan; I chortled at her little bit of paparazzi revenge near the end.

Some comedies are offensive but funny; others are simply offensive.  InAPPropriate Comedy is neither; it's simply filthy.  It isn't even made with enough skill to be disgusting.  It is a gaping black hole of comedy, with sharp white teeth that poke at you with every labored attempt to offend that falls flat.  When it's finally over, there is no real escape, for it has reminded you of what a dark, dark place the world is.

Zero stars out of ****

NO-HIT NOVEMBER, Bomb #1: THE HOST (2013)

All through November we take a look at box-office bombs and widely maligned turkeys, to let you know if you might have missed a classic.  Or not.


The Host, based on Stephenie Meyer's first non-Twilight novel, is another young-adult romance thriller where teenagers fall desperately in love even when it puts their lives in danger.  It's not as depressing as The Hunger Games, where kids were forced to kill each other, but it's in the same ballpark.  It's thankfully missing the conservative sexual politics of the Twilight series, though it does hinge on a romance between two characters of wildly varying ages, in soul if not in body.  Twilight was about a 100-year-old vampire who fell for a 17-year-old girl; The Host is about a 1000-year-old alien of indistinct sex who simultaneously falls in love with the 18-year-old girl whose body it inhabits, and one of the girl's hunky friends as well.

The alien is called Wanderer, or Wanda for short (ugh).  It comes to earth as one of many invaders, "souls," who have taken over the planet and inhabited the bodies of human beings.  Wanderer is placed in the body of Melanie Stryder (Saoirse Ronan), a dissident who is one of few humans still alive.  But something is different about Melanie: her identity stays alive inside Wanderer, talks to her, and can sometimes control her.  Wanderer, like her namesake, becomes curious about Melanie, and helps her to find her family, who are still alive in the desert somewhere.

The setup is intriguing, and the love story just unlikely enough to be interesting.  This is a movie crying out for a director like Andrei Tarkovsky, who might have honestly explored the idea of a thousand-year-old being discovering earth for the first time.  Wanderer, who has been traveling the universe for a millennium, finally finds something on earth that she hasn't before, and Ronan is a good enough actress that she portrays this believably in early scenes.

The invading race of souls, unlike those in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, is not made up of faceless and emotionless pods, but of real, believable, advanced, evolved people who are merely colonizers.  They portray a society that knows it has advanced far beyond any others in the universe, and thinks nothing of eradicating the dominant species on earth.  But beyond that, they are smart, kind, courteous, and unfailingly honest, which leads to a funny car-theft scene that wouldn't have been out of place in The Invention of Lying.

The trouble is that the movie falls prey to Meyer's hokey writing, and it becomes gradually more interested in telling a teenage love story than an intergalactic emotional thriller.  Like in the Twilight films, we're asked to believe that an age-old wise traveler from beyond the stars just needed a little old school making out.  The kissy-kissy stuff grows more invasive, and the movie becomes less and less interesting.

The communication between the inner Melanie and the outer Wanderer also becomes silly, though there may not have been a non-silly way to portray it.  We hear an ambient voice-over of Melanie's thoughts as she talks from within Wanderer, but I wonder what it might have been like if we only saw and heard Wanderer, and if Melanie's influence on her were implied.  Melanie's dialogue from inside Wanderer leads to some of the movie's dumbest moments, as she's reduced to making snarky sarcastic remarks whenever Wanderer gets kissy-kissy with Ian (Jake Abel), one of the humans living with Melanie's family.

The writer and director is Andrew Niccol, whose first film, Gattaca, was as thoughtful and poignant as any sci-fi film since Solaris.  Like all of the talented directors who tried their hand at a Twilight movie, he gives it his all, but Meyer only takes the story skin-deep.  Wanderer is an intriguing character, but her schoolgirl crush on Ian doesn't build from anything and goes nowhere.  She's meant to have a growing fascination with human beings, but it's not represented as anything but a teenage fantasy.  The ending is a real cop-out.

Ronan does what she can, and there's an emotional farewell between Wanderer and Melanie that's well-made and genuine; though the writing is clunky, Ronan and Niccol play it right.  There's a setup here for a great sci-fi film, but the relationships in the film just aren't believable.  It is, like Twilight, a lot of dead space amid some interesting ideas.

** out of ****

30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT, Night 8: HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH (1982)

Halloween III: Season of the Witch, an unexpectedly brutal but satisfyingly outrageous film, sits perpendicular to the rest of the Halloween series. It’s the only entry not to feature the ubiquitous Michael Myers, save for a few glimpses of the original film on a TV screen. That’s because John Carpenter, who reportedly disliked the traditional sequel Halloween II, said he’d only be involved in a third film if it were a completely different story. The idea was that Carpenter and crew would make Halloween into an anthology series, with a new story centered on Halloween each sequel.

The idea didn’t last long. Halloween III premiered to general distaste, and with the fourth entry a few years later, Michael was back and stabbing away. But although it certainly isn’t in line with what a Halloween audience would expect, Halloween III is actually pretty good, and unjustly overlooked.

Still, attaching it to the Halloween franchise may have been a mistake. Though Carpenter succeeds in doing something different from the two previous films, his and writer/director Tommy Lee Wallace’s approach is extremely different. Far from the spare, stark, quiet terror of the original, Halloween III is big, loud, and downright loopy, with a plot that is brazenly ridiculous. Yet it still works, because Wallace and crew play it straight, and don’t balk even when the movie is at its most ludicrous.

An old man (Al Berry) turns up in a California town, afraid for his life, apparently being chased. He’s found catatonic, clutching a Halloween mask in his hand. When a commercial for the mask company, Silver Shamrock, comes on the hospital TV, he shouts, “They’re gonna kill us all!” This prompts his doctor, Dan Chaliss (Tom Atkins), and his daughter Ellie (Stacey Nelkin) to travel to the Silver Shamrock factory to investigate just what he means.

What they discover I will leave for you to see, but I’ll just say that I was surprised. Most horror movies don’t work when they’re this plotty, but Halloween III has the courage of its convictions. Like many of Dario Argento’s ridiculous but spellbinding films, it takes itself seriously and still manages to build true suspense. Wallace takes a cue from Carpenter and builds tension from atmosphere. The film actually works in a bit of capitalist satire as the town of Santa Mira, home to the Silver Shamrock factory, is a believably barren hamlet whose laws are determined by the only company that brings it business.

Silver Shamrock’s owner, Conal Cochran (Dan O’Herlihy, who went on to play a similar role in the Robocop series), is just the right kind of heavy: ruthless, amoral, and just silly enough to explain his diabolical plan like a Bond villain before he sends the hero to be killed (he even slow-claps at one point).

I just plain like the stonefaced goofiness of this movie. I like the mask company’s loyal army of henchmen in cheap suits. The simple, retro image of a computer-generated pumpkin, and how Wallace and Carpenter use it to build tension. The eventual emergence of snakes, bugs, and all sorts of creepy-crawlies. The involvement of Stonehenge, somehow. The ambient Carpenter synth score, which is legitimately one of the director/composer’s best.

The ending doesn’t quite work, as if Wallace and crew didn’t have a conclusion and just decided to stop, but, well, how was it supposed to end anyway? Movies like this can only be viewed on their own terms. The plot of Halloween III may be a bit out there, but if you accept it on its own logic, it works.

*** out of ****

THE ROOM (2003) and The Disaster Artist (2013)

It’s really tough for a movie to achieve greatness simply by being bad, but The Room has managed to do so, and has remained a staple of pop culture ever since it was first released in 2003, discovered by some film students and passed around on DVD and at midnight showings for ten years. It’s not merely bad, but monumentally mediocre. To paraphrase Mel Brooks, it rises below mediocrity. And it has skyrocketed its writer/director/producer/star, Tommy Wiseau, to the same kind of cult status held by Ed Wood.

See the movie once, and it’s a remarkable achievement of awfulness. But see it after reading “The Disaster Artist,” an account of the making of the film written by co-star and line producer Greg Sestero, and it becomes an odd sort of victory tale. Wiseau, whose attempts to become a Hollywood actor had all failed, decided to bankroll and direct his own movie. And he did it. It’s not an inspiring rags-to-riches story. Wiseau was no struggling artist by any means, but an entrepreneur with seemingly unlimited funds. He had enough money to buy--not rent--two cameras with which to shoot his opus. He had enough money to pay the two or three crews he needed to hire after so many threw their arms up and quit. He had enough money to build a green-screen set of a rooftop in a parking lot, rather than simply film on a rooftop.

The Room is the culmination of a fight against not the boundaries of money, but the boundaries of talent. Wiseau had no directing experience, no writing experience, and little acting experience, and it shows. But here is his movie, as he conceived it, as he wanted it.

Wiseau plays Johnny, a good American boy (with an unexplained thick European accent) with a good job, who takes good care of his fiancee Lisa (Juliette Danielle). He even pays the tuition for Denny (Phillip Haldiman), a young boy who lives in his apartment building. Little does he know that Lisa actually hates him, and is cheating on him with his best friend Mark (Sestero).

Wiseau claims to have been inspired by Tennessee Williams for his screenplay, and it sometimes does feel like a poor man’s gender-reversed Streetcar. Williams’s plays usually did identify with genuine but put-upon characters who are eventually beaten down by the society they’re thrown into; “sympathy for the fragile people,” he called it. But I think even Williams might have been a little queasy about the unfettered worship that Wiseau lavishes upon his own character. He takes great pains to show us that Johnny is such a decent, nice, honest man who’s preyed upon by his witch of a girlfriend. Blanche Dubois may not have deserved what she got, but she was never meant to be perfect.  Johnny is a veritable superhero.

Most of the film is set in one apartment, with characters entering and exiting on a whim. A few perfunctory locations--a rooftop, an alleyway, a coffee shop--are concocted, but in no scene does the setting really matter. In fact, the only location that actually contributes to the plot is a now-legendary 19-second scene set in a flower shop, which tells us all we need to know about how Johnny is portrayed.


The heart of The Room and its badness lies mostly in the writing. At the time he wrote it, Wiseau very clearly had a less-than-firm grasp on the English language, and as a result everyone in the film talks like an ESL student. Characters spout botched idioms that Wiseau likely insisted be kept as written: “Hey Denny, two’s great but three’s a crowd.” “Hey Mark, XYZ.” “Just give me five [minutes].” It must be the optimistic view of America from someone who grew up behind the Iron Curtain that leads Wiseau to make his characters sound so cool, hip, and passive: “Don’t worry about it” is probably the most spoken line in the film. That also must have led to the prominent use of footballs in the film: not the sport of football, but merely the act of throwing them around as a source of bonding among men (a scene in which Johnny and his friends don tuxedos and pass a football around is inexplicable).

The bad writing also leads to some unintentional greatness. Plot strands are introduced and then immediately dropped. Lisa’s mother (Carolyn Minnott) has one of the film’s most memorable moments when she makes a severe revelation early in the film that is never, not even once, mentioned again. One actor (Kyle Vogt) leaves the film at the midpoint and is clearly replaced by another (Greg Ellery). A scene on the roof involving a gun and a drug dealer named “Chris-R” (Dan Janjigian, who according to Sestero was the only actor having any fun on the set) comes out of nowhere and is never referenced again (though the film faithfully follows the rule that a gun introduced in the first act must be fired by the third).  In a masterstroke of lazy writing, most scenes begin with characters greeting other characters.


The acting is, well, not that bad. Wiseau for the most part hired professional actors who took the film seriously on screen, even as they knew what a turd it was. Danielle does what she can with a thankless role, and is a trooper through numerous gratuitous steamy love scenes which require her to disrobe frequently but are mainly there to show off Wiseau’s physique (for some reason). Sestero tries hard as well, though like all the other actors he struggles with Wiseau’s goofy dialogue. He is required to shout the weirdest line in the film (“Leave your stupid comments in your pocket!”) and his heroic conquering of that piece of linguistic mush is recounted in detail in the book. All things considered, he nails it.

I think my favorite player is Mike Holmes, who plays Mike, a friend of Johnny’s and Lisa’s who for some reason goes to their apartment to make out with his girlfriend (Robyn Paris). Mike is the “comic relief” character, and in his several scenes has obviously been directed to “be funny.” A scene in which he does nothing but retell what happened in his previous scene is side-splitting.

Even Wiseau isn’t a terrible actor; though he reportedly struggled quite a bit with dialogue on the set, his acting isn’t bad in any way that isn’t the fault of his writing or directing. He throws himself into the role headfirst. It’s clear he’s trying to emulate the emotional power of, say, James Dean, which explains why he pirates a famous line from Rebel Without a Cause, which has been made infamous by this film on its own.

The Room may be a legendary bad movie, but it is no failure. By all accounts, it is exactly the movie that Tommy Wiseau wanted to make. Is he troubled that no one else seems to take the film at face value like he does? If a movie is this widely enjoyed, can it still be bad?

Don’t worry about it.

30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT, Night 7: MANIAC (2012)

William Lustig's 1980 slasher Maniac is not a film that needed a remake, or to be made in the first place, for that matter.  It was one of those hack-em-up pictures that were a dime a dozen in the early '80s, in which insecure men with mommy issues carved up innocent women for our enjoyment.  All that set that one apart were the gore effects, decently done by Tom Savini, of Living Dead series fame.  I remember a ridiculous scene in which Savini played both a victim and the stand-in for the killer, and technically shot himself in the face.

This slick remake stars Elijah Wood as the killer, Frank, a mannequin shop owner who stalks and murders women by night, and adds them to his collection.  Though it's about as perfunctory as the original, director Franck Khalfoun and writers Alexandre Aja and Gregory Levasseur handle the characters with surprising sensitivity and sympathy.  The murders here are just as grisly, the victims also mostly women, but while the first film objectified women, this one is about the objectification of women.

The gimmick that this remake throws in is that the entire movie is seen from Frank's point of view.  We see each murder through his eyes as he commits it.  We rarely see him except in mirrors, and in a few carefully placed shots in which the point of view seems to drift away and observe him, as seemingly does his own mind.

This motif works because Khalfoun commits to it and never cheats.  He also never shies away from any of the graphic murder scenes; as Frank watches his own actions, we must as well.  The gore, created by "The Walking Dead's" Greg Nicotero and Howard Berger, are astonishingly real and effective.

There is an overarching story in which Frank meets and falls in love with an artist (Nora Arnezeder), whom he believes might be more than just another mannequin.  Otherwise, the film is mostly a series of vignettes in which Frank seeks to satisfy his homicidal urges.  There's a silly sub-plot about the Oedipal origin of Frank's obsession, a holdover from the original film that's unnecessary here.  It runs out of steam after a while, as the murders grow a bit repetitive.

Still, Maniac is substantially better than the kind of brutal slasher from which it draws its inspiration.  Wood is flawed and appealingly pathetic as the killer.  The women he obsesses over aren't merely knife fodder, but appear to lead lives that exist off screen.  This is a movie about a man who stalks and kills women, but its women surprisingly are not there merely to be killed.

** 1/2 out of ****

30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT, Night 6: THE SHINING (1980)

I've just rewatched The Shining for the first time in about ten years.  The first time I saw it I was a kid, and I didn't quite get it; it was my first Stanley Kubrick film, and I hadn't quite learned how to watch one yet.  I gave it another go as a teenager, after having seen and loved Kubrick's other work, and warmed to it more.  Now I've seen it a third time, and I'm ready to say it's one of the most terrifying films I've ever seen.

It's also the first time I've seen it after reading Stephen King's novel on which it's based.  King is one of the film's toughest critics, had disagreements with Kubrick while it was being made, still insists that it does not represent his own vision, and scripted his own version (a TV miniseries starring Steven Weber) in 1998.

I've now read the book, seen the miniseries, and seen the Kubrick film fresh, and I've reached the conclusion that King is wrong.  It's not that Kubrick has better ideas than King does, but the Kubrick film is a much more accurate representation of his book than the miniseries is.  Kubrick does change certain plot details of the book, but it all adds up to the same thing.  It's the story of a deeply disturbed man who is driven mad over one horrible winter, and a vast, empty hotel that brings out the worst in him.

Where Kubrick and King have differed most vocally is in the portrayal of Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson), a recovering alcoholic who's not far from falling off the wagon and into insanity.  King, I think, saw Jack as a flawed but generally good-natured man whose alcoholism and violent tendencies have made it impossible for him to be the good father he wants to be.  But what stands out about Jack is not his good intentions, but his failure and frustration.  At the beginning of the film and book we learn that Jack has had many violent outbursts, the most notable of which is an "accident" which resulted in the breaking of his four-year-old son's arm.  Well-intentioned or not, Jack is a dangerous force, and Kubrick seizes upon that as the crux of his film.

When Jack and his family move as caretakers into the haunted Overlook Hotel, a gargantuan castle abandoned for the winter months, the setting only exacerbates Jack's disease.  It's not the story of a good man being driven bad by ghosts, but a dangerous man who's given permission to act on his most destructive instincts.

It's why Nicholson is perfect for the role.  King has long criticized the casting of Nicholson, claiming that we know he's going to go berserk right at the beginning.  But his performance is much more subtle than that; his restraint in early scenes depicts someone trying extremely hard to be nice and to avoid lashing out.  As the film goes on, the hotel gradually unravels his facade and drives him to murder.

Shelley Duvall, as Jack's wife Wendy, is the picture of wifely support.  She's unwaveringly positive until she begins to realize that her husband is fading fast.  A scene in which she explains an act of domestic violence to a pediatrician is frightfully eerie: not because of the act she describes, but because of her optimistic dismissal of it.

The extrasensory ability of their son Danny (Danny Lloyd) is played obliquely by Kubrick, as it should be.  His conversations with his "imaginary" friend Tony, who warns him to stay away from the Overlook, are just strange enough to be worrying.  We have the occasional glimpse into Danny's mind: we hear a brief connection between him and Dick Hallorann (Scatman Crothers), the hotel cook, and we see bits of a horrific precognition early in the film, but for the most part we only see what an outsider sees.  This is a better translation of King's book than the one he spells out in the miniseries, in which Tony is portrayed as a benign teenage ghost rather than the unexplained, possibly malevolent force that he is in the book and Kubrick's film.

What sets the film apart is the empty space.  The running time is 146 minutes, long for a horror film, but not a moment of it is wasted.  It's allowed to occupy its setting and take its time.  Seemingly contentless scenes, like one in which Jack bounces a tennis ball off the wall in a huge lobby, set up a quietly maddening tension.  The sounds, like the echo of Danny's big wheel rolling through a part-carpeted, part-hardwood hallway, enhance the isolation.

Slowly but surely Kubrick allows the tension to build.  Jack hallucinates (maybe) a hotel bartender who gives him a drink.  He has a terrible vision in the infamous Room 237.  By the time he picks up an axe, we see how he has gotten there.  Danny telepathically contacts Dick for help, in a scene that might have been impossible to film, but Kubrick does it, in one long shot of Crothers's face that is unforgettable.

I can see why King was dissatisfied with Kubrick's film.  It doesn't bother with many of the elements of his novel.  Much of the checkered history of the hotel isn't dealt with, though a scene of roaring-twenties excess is enough to give an idea.  In the novel, King had the hotel guarded by large animal-shaped topiaries which moved, or maybe didn't; Kubrick replaces them with a labyrinthine hedge maze which is just as forbidding (in King's miniseries, the giant animals look a lot sillier than they seem when described in the book).  The cathartic, easy ending of King's novel is also absent; Kubrick opts for something more ambiguous.

Much of King's work to date has been extremely cinematic, not terribly difficult to translate to film.  But The Shining is the exception, since much of its action occurs within the characters' heads, in memories, in introspection, in conversations with ghosts who may or may not actually be there.  That's why King's more literal adaptation is less effective, while Kubrick finds a way to translate it into the language of film.  Look closely and you realize that Kubrick hasn't changed the novel much at all; he has merely converted it.  Of the two screen adaptations of the novel, Kubrick's is actually the more faithful, in essence if not literally.  King may know his own work, but Kubrick knows film better.

**** out of ****

30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT, Night 5: THE HOWLING: NEW MOON RISING (1995)

The seventh in a long, fairly stale series of werewolf films, The Howling: New Moon Rising is certainly the strangest of the bunch.  Maybe one of the strangest movies ever made.  I can't imagine how it was conceived, if it was conceived, if the end result in fact represents the director's intention.  I think it does.  It's mostly the work of one man: Clive Turner, an Aussie who wrote and produced entries 4 and 5 in the Howling series, and has produced a few other noteworthy films, like the dumb-but-fun The Lawnmower Man.

If you remember, Stephen King sued Turner and company to have his name taken off of that film, which bears no resemblance to his short story of the same name.  Similarly, a werewolf might want to sue Turner for this film, which features several peripheral references to werewolves but isn't really about them, nor is a werewolf ever visible on screen.

Turner writes, directs, produces, edits, and stars as Ted, a drifter whose motorcycle pulls into a small desert town in California.  He takes a job and befriends the townspeople, but he may have some secrets, possibly connected to a series of grisly murders that have been happening in the desert.

Earlier films in the series prided themselves on depicting bloody deaths and gory werewolf transformations in graphic, occasionally goofy detail.  This one, apparently made on the budget of an Applebee's dinner, can't afford to do so.  It instead gives us sloppy first-person attack scenes, seen through a red tint so we know it's a werewolf.  To give us an idea of what a werewolf looks like, the movie has to use archive footage from earlier films in the series.  The one time we get to see a werewolf for real, the effect is shoddy enough to make "Manos": The Hands of Fate look like Avatar.

But never mind that the film is awful.  This we know from the beginning.  Though Turner has failed at making a Howling movie, he's certainly made something.  I don't know what it is, but it's something.

In certain scenes it looks as if Turner is trying to make the Nashville of werewolf movies.  He devotes a heavy percentage of the running time to establishing the atmosphere of the setting.  We get to know the local characters, most of whom are played by actual local non-actors (it shows).  They drink, line-dance, crack silly dad-jokes, and sing country music.  A lot.

It's not long before we realize that this isn't a werewolf movie with musical interludes, but a musical with werewolf interludes.  Some of the music, dare I say, is pretty good, most of it written by the actors in the film.  There's even room for a campfire melody about the dangers of drug use (though it still extols the pleasures of beer-drinkin').  The acting is bad but the people in the film seem genuine, like ensemble players in a community production of Oklahoma!.  Werewolf or no werewolf, the town seems like a pleasant place to live.  Turner, brazenly casting himself as the movie's anchor, is no great actor himself, but he has a certain goofy charm.

The movie alternates between the drinkin' and dancin' of the town and a nearby police station, where a priest (John Huff) explains the plot of the film to a detective (John Ramsden) for what appears to be several days straight (the continuity of the film is not flawless).  It's here that Turner attempts valiantly to connect the plot of this film to that of Howlings 4 and 5: no small task, since the previous two films weren't made with any connection in mind.  The way in which he ties them together is positively labyrinthine, and it culminates in a last-minute connecting-the-dots scene that Keyser Soze would find too complex.

This movie is awful, yes.  But it is awful in a truly fascinating way.  Many directors make bad werewolf movies, but this one is a beauty.  It's as if Turner started to make a werewolf movie, hired some locals on the cheap to act in it, then was so charmed by them that he decided to make them the focus of the movie instead.  What a strange, unique occurrence The Howling: New Moon Rising is.  As bad as it is, I hadn't seen it before and I doubt I'll see anything like it again.

THIS WEEK IN CINEMASOCHISM: Movie 43 (2013)

Just why Movie 43 exists is a good question.  A middling collection of short sketches starring A-list actors might have been a novelty in the time of Kentucky Fried Movie or Amazon Women on the Moon, the obvious inspiration for this strange anthology spearheaded by Peter Farrelly.  But with the rise of Funny or Die, it's not out of the ordinary to see the biggest of names turn up in short films and sketches online.  A movie full of them is kind of like a VHS full of Blu-rays.

Because the movie is a collection of sketches from different directors with little connection and no continuity, they by nature range from the very funny to the not funny at all.  Kind of like the recent horror experiment The ABCs of Death, when it is good, it is very good.  When it is not, it's at least short.

Most of the films aim for pure grossout effect, and seeing famous actors doing decidedly grotesque things is one of the movie's redemptive joys.  Farrelly directs two sketches himself, both about blind dates gone wrong.  One of them, "The Catch," is awfully easy once the premise is revealed, but it moves briskly, gets laughs and ends early, and Kate Winslet and Hugh Jackman are good sports as the two people in question.  He also directs the wraparound sequence, in which Dennis Quaid pitches the anthology to movie producer Greg Kinnear; this segment overstays its welcome quickly, though Quaid's outfit alone is good for a laugh.

Some sketches wring themselves out before they're over.  Real-life couple Liev Schreiber and Naomi Watts are funny as parents homeschooling their son, though the sketch has limited gas in it.  A love story in which Anna Faris has a strange request for boyfriend Chris Pratt is a little too obvious, though the performances are genuine, particularly from JB Smoove as Pratt's best friend.  Griffin Dunne's sketch, about a weird grocery store romance (Kieran Culkin and Emma Stone), and Brett Ratner's, about a couple of guys (Seann William Scott and Johnny Knoxville) who catch a leprechaun (Gerard Butler), are pretty much swings-and-misses.  An overlong sketch about Batman (Jason Sudeikis) ruining Robin's (Justin Long) chances on a date is painfully labored, though it does feature a welcome appearance by John Hodgman.

The sketches that work best are the ones that have something up their sleeves other than grossouts.  Best is Elizabeth Banks's, about a young girl (Chloe Grace Moretz) on a date getting her first period, and the men around her having no idea what to do.  Steven Brill's, in which a room full of corporate executives are unable to determine why their product is injuring so many young men, is very funny, and contains some great deadpan work from Richard Gere and Aasif Mandvi.  James Gunn's is a wonderfully disgusting story about a woman (Elizabeth Banks) who's a bit upset at her boyfriend's (Josh Duhamel) relationship with his housecat.

And Rusty Cundieff, a veteran of "Chappelle's Show" and director of Tales from the Hood, a great and underseen socially conscious horror-comedy, delivers a faux sports reel about an African-American basketball team about to be the first to play against a white team, and a coach (Terrence Howard) who seems to be the only one not worried.  The sketch's one joke is a well-worn one, but it works, because of the time at which it takes place, and how the white team is portrayed, and how the inevitable punchline is executed.

** out of ****

Is it really that bad?: No.

Pain level: Beginner, though some of the longer sketches breed impatience.

30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT, Night 4 / THIS WEEK IN CINEMASOCHISM: A Nightmare on Elm Street (2011)

Fans instantly chirped at the news that Jackie Earle Haley had been cast as Freddy Krueger, that irreplaceable haunter of dreams, in the new redux of A Nightmare on Elm Street. Some, having seen Haley’s exceptional work in Little Children and Watchmen, eagerly awaited his take on the well-known villain. Others poo-poohed the casting, insisting that the only real Freddy is the original, Robert Englund.

It has been interesting seeing Englund’s performance of Freddy evolve over the many sequels: from a powerful evil presence in the first film, to a jokester in the third film, then just a joke in later efforts. Casting another actor stops Freddy in his tracks, and only works if the filmmakers have a new direction to take the character in. In this case, they do not.

Not only does the casting of Haley—who’s far too talented an actor to be involved in the first place—bring nothing to the film, but the new Nightmare is poorly written, badly acted, and amateurishly directed to boot. I remember making movies like this with my VHS camcorder when I was 12. The Be Kind Rewind guys would have made a more professional-looking film than this.

It follows the plot of the original film fairly closely. Teenagers in Springwood have been having graphic nightmares in which a man with a burnt face, a striped sweater, and knives on his fingers stalks them. Soon they begin to notice that when they’re cut in their dreams, they bleed in real life. The parents seem to have some idea of what’s going on, but stay suspiciously silent. It all ties back to Fred Krueger.

Freddy’s backstory is well-known at this point, but this movie dwells on it as if it’s a surprise. Each detail is spelled out as if the movie aspires to be an encyclopedia of movie monsters for nerds. The 2009 Friday the 13th remake was no classic, but it at least began knowingly, with a prologue that assumed we knew who Jason was and then moved on quickly.

Everything that the new Nightmare tells us about Freddy is something we know from the original film. The only new step the movie takes is to focus uncomfortably on Freddy’s pedophilia, so that we’re rewarded with several flashback scenes of Mr. Krueger asking young girls if they want to know a secret. Barf.

The casting of Jackie Earle Haley might have easily led the film in a new direction. Haley was no doubt cast because of his excellent Oscar-nominated performance in Little Children, in which he played a convicted pedophile who was sick and afflicted, and garnered our sympathy. Are we ready for a sadder, resigned Freddy Krueger, who’s a monster simply because there’s nothing else he can be? Apparently not; Haley’s take on Freddy is pretty much the same old stuff, and at times he even seems to be parroting Englund. Even Englund’s snappy jokey dialogue from the later sequels would have been welcomed here. Instead we get this:

Teenager: “You’re not real.”
Freddy: “I’m real.” 

There are other actors in the film going through the motions. One is the delightful Rooney Mara, whose work in The Social Network had already lifted her above junk like this. Connie Britton appears as one of the moms, but her performance as a standard plot-deliverer only reminds us of Ronee Blakley’s brilliant off-the-wall portrayal of the same character in the original.

So much more could have been done with this plot. With the steep takeoff of ADD drugs in recent years, something might have been done with the fact that kids actually are awake all night nowadays. There’s one scene involving a video blogger that might have been expanded upon, but is quickly dismissed. There are ways to update A Nightmare on Elm Street for the times without simply rehashing it.

What an incredible bore this movie is. There’s not one legitimate scare in it. Not one. It carbon-copies the original but sucks out everything that made it work. The characters are turned into lame teen soap stars, the plot is dumbed down to the lowest common denominator, and Freddy is made inert. One of the writers is Wesley Strick, who has written some very good thrillers over the past twenty years: Arachnophobia, Wolf, Return to Paradise, Doom, the Martin Scorsese Cape Fear. His draft for A Nightmare on Elm Street should never have left the bottom drawer.

* out of ****

Is it really that bad?: It's excruciating.

Pain level: Advanced. 

30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT, Night 3: PUPPETMASTER (1989)

I had the unfortunate experience of journeying into a Wal-Mart around 10pm on a Sunday night (all the other grocery stores were closed) and found this in a $5 discount bin.

I didn't even know that the cheapie Full Moon-produced series had half that many sequels.  And this is not even all of them, as the collection excludes 2004's Puppet Master vs. Demonic Toys and last year's Puppet Master X: Axis Rising, in which it looks like the puppets are fighting Nazis.  Or maybe they're on the Nazis' side, I dunno.  This, I thought, is not a bargain.  This is a challenge.

The first Puppetmaster, directed by Full Moon regular David Schmoeller, is a challenge indeed.  For a movie in which a bunch of puppets come alive and kill people, it's unimaginatively directed and distinctly poorly acted.  And in a movie called Puppetmaster, for the acting to be noticeably bad is no small feat.

The plot, so far as there is one: a bunch of psychics, led by Alex (Paul Le Mat, who lists American Graffiti among his credits but here proves about as effective a leading man as Arnold Stang), visit a mansion where Toulon (William Hickey), an old puppeteer (Hickey was only 62 when this film was made), killed himself 50 years earlier.  Soon his puppets come to life and attack them all.

The puppets were created by David Allen, responsible for some wonderful Harryhausen-esque stop-motion animation on films like Q: The Winged Serpent and The Howling, and they're pretty good.  I especially like the ringleader, a white-faced ghost with a wide-brimmed hat and very large knife.  There's also a lady puppet who vomits giant leeches, and a tiny-headed one whose big strong arms prove none too helpful when characters just pick him up and toss him across the room.

The puppets would make for an interesting premise, if the movie around them weren't so stiff and boring.  Schmoeller points and shoots without much care, and lets dialogue scenes drone on and on.  He even botches the final shot, which might have been clever but feels like a joke where the punchline is revealed too soon.

* 1/2 out of ****

COMING SOON: Puppet Master 2, directed by Allen himself and hopefully featuring a lot more of his creations and a lot less filibustering.

30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT, Night 2: TWIXT (2012)

Francis Ford Coppola’s Twixt is a small gem of a ghost story, an ode to the director’s roots in horror. Though he’s made some of the best films of all time, Coppola has always had an appreciation for all things spooky and creepy and crawly. He produced the Jeepers Creepers series (the third of which has been unforgivably long delayed), and his first film, Dementia 13, was a micro-budgeted shocker that hinted at what he was to become. Twixt, which he wrote and directed, has a preposterous and convoluted story that I wasn’t quite sure I’d grasped at the end, but I was surprised at how much it didn’t matter.

This is a movie about atmosphere, and Coppola creates a living, breathing setting in the small ghost town of Swan Valley. Hall Baltimore (Val Kilmer), a semi-successful horror author who’s forever lived in the shadow of Stephen King, drives into town for a book signing which attracts distressingly little attention. The exception is the sheriff, Bobby LaGrange (Bruce Dern), who’s interested in partnering with Baltimore on a book about the mysterious deaths of 13 young girls, and their connection to a group of devil-worshipers that have set up shop at the outskirts of town.

As Baltimore walks through the town at night, it begins to take a different shape from the boring, nearly abandoned town he sees during the day. He speaks with several inhabitants, some of whom may no longer be alive. It provides a pensive escape from the daytime, when he battles with his estranged wife (Joanne Whalley, Kilmer’s real-life ex-wife) over money, fends off the sheriff’s ambitious advances, and investigates the strange occurrences in the town’s history.

The story is difficult to follow. I’m not even sure that Coppola intends for us to do so. The past blends with the present, and characters seem to weave back and forth in time, and neither Baltimore nor we are quite sure what year it is. The film inhabits Baltimore’s mind as he explores the town and sees it through the filter of a ghost story. He meets a young girl (Elle Fanning) who by all accounts existed in the 19th century but appears to know who he is. And in the film’s weakest sub-plot, he carries on conversations with a dour, humorless spectre of Edgar Allan Poe (Ben Chaplin).

But never mind the plot. Look at the joy Coppola takes in visiting classic horror traditions. The heptagonal clock tower that for some reason broadcasts seven different times. The oddball clock repairman (Don Novello—yes, Don Novello) who seems to exist at all times in history. The body in the morgue with the stake driven through its heart. The small-town strangeness of Dern’s performance as the opportunistic sheriff, and his relationship with the Renfieldesque deputy, as well as the kid who hangs out at the station and plays games.

Kilmer’s strong performance is an anchor for the film’s traverses. He’s believable as the down-and-out author, and provides something to follow even when the film goes off the rails. (He also finds occasion to revisit the impressive Brando impression he showcased in The Island of Dr. Moreau.)

Twixt is overcrowded and goes overboard a little too often, but it’s also made with the subtle attention to detail that inhabited Val Lewton’s films. Most ghost stories nowadays throw in more gimmicks than they need. This one is what it is.

*** out of ****

30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT, Night 1: V/H/S/2

V/H/S/2, the followup to last year's uneven but occasionally brilliant horror anthology, is in some ways a more satisfying collection of short films than its predecessor.  It's shorter, leaner, and less self-indulgent than the previous film, and the directors are always having fun with the film's gimmick.  The premise--a collection of five found-footage films from different directors--was strained in the original, but here is kept fresh in each entry.

Each of the four films finds an interesting way to tell its first-person story. Adam Wingard’s (You're Next) is shown through a bionic eye that records a little more than it should. Gregg Hale and Eduardo Sánchez, the producer and co-director of The Blair Witch Project, use a GoPro helmet camera in a way that I’d never seen before. Jason Eisener’s (Hobo with a Shotgun) segment, a very funny Goonies-like account of a sleepover gone wrong, is told partially from the point of view of the family dog.

The best segment belongs to Timo Tjahjanto (who made the notorious "L is for Libido" segment of The ABCs of Death) and Gareth Huw Evans (The Raid: Redemption), about an Indonesian religious cult that agrees to let a camera crew into its compound for the first time. This is the most suspenseful and the looniest of the series, and the off-the-wall performance from Epy Kusnandar as the pompous cult leader is a standout.

The only weak link in the film is the wraparound story by Simon Barrett, which strains to be spooky but doesn’t leave much of an impression. Still, the opening scene, in which a peeping tom gets a surprise, is clever, and the gory punchline is good for a laugh.

*** out of ****

NOTE: It might be silly, but I really enjoy the song that plays over the end credits. 

 

The Nicolas Cage Roulette Challenge, Part 3

It’s been a while since my last entry in the N.C.R. Challenge for a reason. The first two films that came up, luckily, were the kind of goofy thrillers that Nicolas Cage is best known for: Seeking Justice and Trespass. So I was a little gobsmacked when I hit the wheel and this was what came up:

Oh.  Well then.

It took some time to get to the right place where I could watch the film, but I play by my own rules, so there's no skipping allowed.  Needless to say, it doesn't quite fit the profile for the N.C.R. Challenge.  It doesn't represent the Nicolas Cage of Face/Off and National Treasure, but a more serious Cage in a more serious film.

World Trade Center is not a particularly insightful film. It doesn’t say anything new about the attacks of September 11, 2001, nor does it intend to. It might seem odd that Oliver Stone would direct a staunchly apolitical film about one of the most politically inflammatory events in history, but it’s not out of character for him. He’s made films before that reduce a politically polarizing topic to emotional simplicity. Platoon: war is hell. Born on the Fourth of July: soldiers ought not to be punished for fighting an unjust war. He caught some flak for W, a film which didn’t back away from taking a political side but dared to portray the maligned President as a flawed human being rather than as a cartoon.

Like those films, World Trade Center is earnest from beginning to end. It’s a reverent tribute to those who, without a second thought, put themselves into danger on that Tuesday morning to rescue others. It doesn’t see the reasons for the attack or the destructive decisions that would result from it—it doesn’t even see the planes hit—rather, it only sees the men and women who were on the ground that day. They don’t have time to think about the big questions, and neither does the film.

It’s an easy route to take, but we never get the sense that Stone is merely mining the event for an emotional response. He’s respectful and honest, and his movie is genuine rather than maudlin.

It helps that the performances are measured and intricate, never rising to the histrionic levels that must have been tempting. Cage and Michael Peña, as two Port Authority police officers trapped in the rubble, are excellent anchors for the events of the film, and the scenes between them have a quiet resonance of love, loss and desperation. As the people above ground, Maria Bello, Donna Murphy, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Frank Whaley, and Viola Davis are believable faces of heartbreak, hope, and determination.

Stone admittedly does go overboard at times. A scene in which Peña has a vision of Christ is a little ridiculous. And it’s a rare movie in which Michael Shannon is the weak link, but his character of Marine Staff Sgt. Dave Karnes, a key figure in the rescue effort, is portrayed as too much of a superhero.

While World Trade Center is limited in its point of view of the attacks of 9/11, it tells a clear key side of the story that’s easy to tell, but needs to be told. It isn’t in line with the best 9/11 films that have been made: it’s not as bold as Paul Greengrass’s United 93, which was just as reverent but quietly political as well, nor is it as complex as Danny Leiner’s The Great New Wonderful, which portrayed a New York City still trembling in the aftermath. But unlike the worst (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close), it also carefully avoids sentiment and mawkishness. It boils the day down to this simplicity: when people were running out, good people ran in.

*** out of ****

Lorde = Lana Del Rey x Andy Kaufman. Just a thought.

For those without the reference point:

Andy Kaufman performs Mighty Mouse - watch more funny videos

ELYSIUM (2013): A literal gap between rich and poor

If Elysium's heavyhanded allegory won't be the ringing bell that sets off the move toward a fairer health care system in America, it's no real fault of the film itself.  Like Neill Blomkamp's debut film, District 9, the connection to the current class system is too obvious and its thesis clear too soon to be truly effective as a political comment.  But also like that previous film, it's alive, exciting, intelligent, funny, bitterly sad, and it creates a vivid, intricately realized setting.

Elysium is actually better than District 9, which had a brilliant premise and dazzling visual effects but failed to follow through with its story.  It's a superior sci-fi action film that deserves mention alongside the best.

In the near future, the gap between rich and poor has continued to widen as technology has advanced.  The rich have abandoned Earth and taken residence on Elysium, a space station orbiting not far away.  What's more, medical technology has advanced to the point where cancer can be cured with the flick of a switch, but only the rich on Elysium have access to it.  Earth, in the meantime, is overcrowded and dilapidated, and its inhabitants are still loading into emergency rooms.

When Max (Matt Damon), a lowly factory worker and ex-con, needs medical treatment badly, he calls in a favor from an underground illegal immigrant runner (Wagner Moura) to get a ticket to Elysium.  The scheme involves a heist of important data stored inside the brain of a CEO (William Fichtner, sublimely snakelike).  But his plans to cure himself may be sidetracked by his reconnection with a childhood friend (Alice Braga) and her young daughter, who has leukemia.

The role of Max doesn't particularly play well to Damon's strengths, since he's a better and subtler leading man than is required for a Mad Max/RoboCop-style martyr hero (he was similarly a little bit too good for the Bourne series).  But he knocks it out of the park anyway, lending a working-class sense of humor and a broken man's gravity to the role.  Moura is also likable as the hustler of illegals to Elysium with questionable motives.

Jodie Foster plays the sinister, power-grabbing Elysian Secretary of Defense Delacourt, modeled on the likes of Dick Cheney, in a scenery-gnashing performance that would be terrible if it were meant to be good in the first place.  The role, much like Famke Janssen's wild villainess on "Hemlock Grove," is not meant to be played well; it's meant to be played viciously and snarlingly, which Foster ably does.

The film is spirited away, however, by Sharlto Copley as Kruger, a secret officer of Elysium who's used by Delcaourt to sabotage illegal transport to the space station.  Copley, who kickstarted his career as the hero in District 9, here plays a villain so memorably ruthless and horrible, but at the same time scarily and delightfully believable as a character.  I wouldn't count him out for an Oscar.

Elysium rarely takes a breath as Max's quest follows irrefutable logic to a simultaneously victorious and unfortunate conclusion.  The movie has some holes in the plot: the McGuffin of the information stored in Fichtner's head is a little too simplistic, as is the egalitarian victory at the end which feels too easy.  But it doesn't derail a film that is a monumental and inventive piece of entertainment.

*** 1/2 out of ****

CLOUD ATLAS (2012)

Here is a strange and wonderful film: just as wonderful though not quite as strange as the novel on which it's based, but if I hadn't read it I wouldn't know any better.  Films of such a gigantic scope don't come around much; truly thoughtful movies tend to be low-key, while grandeur is saved for box-office-safe action movies.  It's the synthesis of two great artists of film who have collaborated to make something possibly greater than either one could make on his or her own.  Those artists are the Wachowskis, who hit it big with The Matrix trilogy but haven't quite gotten due credit for their superb noir picture Bound or for their underrated piece of pure cotton candy Speed Racer, and Tom Tykwer, whose Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is one of the best and saddest tragedies in recent history.

Cloud Atlas is made up of six stories, set at times ranging from 1849 to 1973 to far, far in the future after they stop counting.  They are stories of human relationships that cause people to rethink the conventions of the world they live in.  In the book, the stories run chronologically from 1 through 6 and then recede back from 5 through 1 again; the movie understandably modifies this format and weaves the stories in and out of each other.  That Tykwer and the Wachowskis, along with their editors Alexander Berner and Claus Wehlisch, are able to tell six stories concurrently without losing momentum is astounding.

They do so mostly through clever and precise casting of familiar faces in recurring appearances: Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Hugh Grant, Jim Sturgess, Ben Whishaw, James D'Arcy, Hugo Weaving, Keith David, Susan Sarandon.  Most of the actors play different characters in more than one of the stories, but they're often used as bridges between the stories to hold the movie together.  As the movie goes on, the connection and shared meaning between the stories becomes clearer.  Characters' journeys parallel each other, and each one leads to a different version of the same conclusion.

Hanks is more dynamic than he's been in years, given the opportunity to play the most varied characters of any actor in the film.  He's most commanding in the sixth story, set far in the future, as an aborigine who struggles with guilt after witnessing a horrible occurrence, but he also gets to play two of the movie's weirdest supporting characters: in 1849 as an eccentric doctor, and in 2012 as... well, you'll have to see for yourself.  Berry is also a strong presence, and the story she leads (set in 1973) could pass for a decent spy thriller (but I've just given away a small bit of the movie's game).

Broadbent is a delight, playing a particularly loathsome publisher in the 2012 story who redeems himself in an especially loony and heartwarming way.  Whishaw headlines the most complex and tragic story, of a down-and-out composer who's hired by a cantankerous, old and dying composer to help him finish his final piece.  Weaving does what he does best, playing the villain in each of the six pieces.  Grant, far removed from his usual romcom comfort zone, has a lot of fun in several villainous roles as well.  In addition to its all-star cast the movie has two great performances from lesser-known actors: Doona Bae, who plays several roles but is most memorable in the Philip K. Dick-like fifth story, as a "fabricant" who becomes self-aware; and David Gyasi, who in the film's first story plays a Pacific Island slave who's rescued by a lawyer (Sturgess).

Cloud Atlas is technically brilliantly made.  Each setting is completely realized and feels wildly different from the last.  The makeup is incredibly elaborate, which is usually a great bother; I'm a little bit fed up with movies that cake a bunch of makeup on young actors to make them look old rather than just cast an old actor, but here I didn't seem to mind.  The differing genres of each story are also handled well, from the sweeping and old-fashioned 1849 (directed by the Wachowskis) to the somber chamber piece in 1936 (Tykwer) to the gritty crime thriller of 1973 (Tykwer) to the Hitchcockian melodrama of 2012 (Tykwer) to the squeaky-clean future of 2144 (Wachowskis) to the rough jungle of the distant future (Wachowskis).

If the movie has a flaw, it is in the shaping of the book's Russian-doll format to a mosaic format, which is more conducive to a film.  Because the stories need to weave in and out of each other seamlessly, the links between them are more obvious and the resolution becomes a little bit too heavyhanded.  Though the conclusion is too pat, the movie that leads to it is wondrous.  It is a miracle that Cloud Atlas made it to the screen at all, but here it is.

**** out of ****

THIS WEEK IN DISGUSTING: The Koch Brothers: Obamacare is coming to physically penetrate you

David and Charles Koch, tied for fourth place on Forbes' Richest People in America list, are naturally no fan of President Obama, nor of his plan to make health care more affordable to more Americans, destroy the insurance industry by giving it millions of new paying customers, and bankrupt businesses by giving them a healthier workforce.

The billionaire Brothers, notable as the founders of Americans for [the] Prosperity [of the Koch Brothers], have also sunk money into an independent group called Meaningless Platitude Generation Opportunity, which has just released the most fantastically awful series of ads aimed at convincing young people to opt out of the required purchase and assistance of the Affordable Care Act, pay the fine, and continue to be uninsured.

How to convince young people to shun a program that helps them get health care, which they might not otherwise be able to afford, and instead to pay more money to continue getting nothing?



Oh!  By telling them they'll get stuff stuck up their butts.

Everyone knows that the one thing young men hate worse than paying money is another guy's fingers in their butts.  So all they need to do is opt out, pay the fine, and their buttholes will remain untouched by everything except the cancer that might have been detected.

Wait, it gets worse:



Nothing like a little rape terror to make your political point, eh.

It's not so much that the implication of the ad is completely false, although it is.  In both the ads, the respective doctors say something along the lines of "I see you're new to Obamacare" or "I see you've signed up for Obamacare," as if it were the organ donor program.  The doctor shouldn't give a hoot whether you use Obamacare or not, any more than your digestive system notices if the food you just ate was bought with food stamps.  What the Kochs are assuming is that their target audience thinks that Obamacare is a public option (which would be nice, but that's an argument for a different day), when it's actually an assistance program meant to help people buy insurance from the already existing private insurers.  If you're insured with Blue Cross, and you used Obamacare to buy into it, all that matters to your doctor is that you're insured with Blue Cross.  Obamacare doesn't enter (physically or otherwise) into the exam room whatsoever.

But never mind: these ads are, like most mainstream right-wing arguments, targeted at the ill-informed and misinformed.

What gets me is that the commercial is so incredibly vulgar and cheap.  Bereft of real ideas, the Kochs have elected to shoot for the absolute lowest common denominator for political scare tactics.  And I don't just mean that creepy perma-smile Uncle Sam mask, which doesn't make me afraid of doctor's offices but does admittedly make me a little queasy around Burger King.

WE'RE COMING FOR YOU.

It's that the Kochs are so out of arguments that they're forced to use fear of physical penetration as their cue.  As a left-winger I'm no ardent fan of Obamacare, though it's a step in the right direction and hopefully a bridge to a more socially conscious, nationally inclusive and efficient form of health care.  It's not the simplest legislation out there; certainly there was some mode of criticism the Kochs could have followed, other than "Opt out, or get raped"?  Even a critical ad that was patently misleading about the law might be worthy of debate.  This campaign is just cowardly hogwash, preying on the instinctive fears of young people.

And at the expense of two necessary and helpful procedures, no less.  The young man is, of course, petrified of the rectal exam, because... well, he's scared at the prospect of being gay, I suppose.  I'm frequently surprised at the prevalence of gay panic in pop culture even nowadays; I was recently as flummoxed by a scene in A Haunted House (likely to be a Cinemasochism entry soon) in which the brutal rape of Marlon Wayans by a ghost is played for laughs, because he doesn't want to appear gay, yuk yuk.

The Koch ads don't play it for just yuks, although I have to assume the makers had a good ol' boy laugh while conceiving it.  They not only assume a ridiculous homophobia on its audience, but also demonize and marginalize the exam itself.  The gynecological exam is also conflated with rape, with the image of the scary Uncle Sam wielding the speculum and the young lady's legs quivering with fear.  Barf.

Never mind that the right wing has yet to heed constant warnings to stay away from rape and to stay out of the OB/GYN business.  This one manages to tackle both!  The image that pops into my mind when Uncle Sam descends on the poor scared girl isn't of President Obama, but of Gov. Bob McDonnell of Virginia or Gov. Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania, or any of the Republican governors and legislators who've enacted laws that require doctors to do essentially what Uncle Sam's doing in that second video, to women who've elected to terminate pregnancy.

The ads are a logical and political mess, but it's that desperation that makes them really awful.  They're so base, condescending and just downright dirty.  I don't mean dirty in the sense that they're unfair or untrue, although they are.  But they're also just icky.  Slimy.  Gross.  Creepy.  The Kochs' and Generation Opportunity's proposal that young people ought to stay uninsured is ridiculous, but the notion that this concept would appeal to anyone--that anyone would take it seriously enough to be scared by it, or worse, that anyone would find it clever or funny--is insulting.

TWITTUR'D!

https://twitter.com/TorturouslyOkay

Torturously Okay is now on Twitter.  To be honest, we've never been much the tweeting type, but we're interested in participating the entertainment twitterverse along with personalities much more established than us.  So there might not be much original material other than links to blog stuff and entries aimed at other shows/comedians/games/etc. we like (Doug Loves Movies, Team Coco, Jimmy Fallon, etc.).  But anyway, here we are.

@TorturouslyOkay

THIS WEEK IN CINEMASOCHISM: The Devil Inside (2012)

This Week in Cinemasochism takes a look at movies that have been notoriously rejected by the mass populace, and tells you if you might perchance be missing a classic.  Or not.


The Devil Inside is a quick cheapie built for a swift box office draw: the kind of horror movie that's being made more and more often since Paranormal Activity spun a few thousand dollars into 100 million.  According to IMDb, Devil cost about a million to make and brought in $33 million on its opening weekend: modest for a major-studio movie, but more than enough.  The reception among critics and fans, however, was not as successful; it may have gone down as the most hated movie of 2012.  It scored a 6% on Rotten Tomatoes, which is not easy (The Oogieloves is listed at 27%), and appears to be generous at that.  Let me quote from the critics who "liked" it: "Exorcism horror gets the cliched shaky-camera treatment," "The less said about that ending, the better." The bad reviews aren't just unfavorable; they're downright nasty.  Peter Travers: "The Devil Inside manages not only to scrape the barrel's bottom but to drill a hole in said bottom and funnel deeper into the scum."

Ouch.  I, uh, I kinda liked it.

I really don't see what all the vitriol is about.  The Devil Inside is a competently made, well-acted, quickly paced and enjoyable thriller.  It's unambitious, but, well, so what?  Sometimes a demonic-possession movie doesn't need to be ambitious.  It's certainly more entertaining than The Conjuring, a dull would-be shocker that's been heaped with praise.  Will it fill you with dread?  No.  But if you're the kind who enjoys demonic screaming and flailing, levitating objects, crosses that burn your skin, possessed women shouting something that rhymes with "Your mother sews socks that smell," and pea soup that flows like water--all things which we hold near and dear to our hearts--then the film will not disappoint.

It begins with that old portentous signal "Based on true events," which is the second-most meaningless caption in the film.  It's followed by the most meaningless, which says that the Vatican did not in any way endorse this film.

Yes, I wrote in my review of The Conjuring that the old, old based-on-true-events trick is the kiss of death for a horror movie.  But that's only if the movie takes itself seriously, which The Devil Inside doesn't.  Though it plays itself straight, it's content to be nothing more than a romp with the devil through a series of body-bending exorcisms.

An ominous, anonymous call is placed to 911: "Three people are dead." Police arrive to find... well, I'll leave you to discover it.  Flash forward twenty or so odd years and Isabella Rossi (Fernanda Andrade) is traveling to Rome with a couple of rogue exorcists (Simon Quarterman and Evan Helmuth) and the camera crew from The Blair Witch Project at her behest.  Isabella Rossi (no relation to Ingrid Bergman) hopes to exorcise the demon that she believes has possessed her mother (Suzan Crowley).

The movie delivers far more guffaws than frights.  Was that intentional?  It doesn't matter; it does.  The first scene between Isabella and her mother is a delight, in which the mother spouts ominous warnings in several different languages and accents, and boasts a body covered in markings of upside-down crosses.  Since the crosses point in many directions, I don't know how the characters know they're upside-down.  The exorcism scenes are actually quite well done, with some excellent stunt work from contortionist Pixie Le Knot at key moments.  The performances are earnest and surprisingly good, particularly from Crowley as the possessed mum.

Director William Brent Bell works handily within the well-worn "found footage" template, and never cheats on the point of view.  The quieter scenes fail to achieve the kind of brutally honest emotion that other documentary-style horror films have, such as The Poughkeepsie Tapes and Blair Witch.  As a result some confessional (in the reality-TV sense, not the Catholic sense) scenes are extraneous, and the movie feels a little padded at barely 75 minutes followed by the slowest scrolling end credits you'll ever see.  But the film is punctuated by some truly entertaining, gory and kinetic scenes.  The ending has been much maligned, and the film doesn't so much end as it does stop, but Bell throws in a few delicious set pieces near the end.  I'm thinking in particular of one memorable baptism scene in which... well, I'll just say I didn't see it coming.

** 1/2 out of ****

Is it really that bad?: Yes.  Which is to say not at all.

Pain level: For horror fans, non-existent.  For others, moderate.