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 ****