98. 1922 (2017)
97. LOCKE (2014)
96. BAD TIMES AT THE EL ROYALE (2018)
95. HELL OR HIGH WATER (2016)
94. IT COMES AT NIGHT (2017)
93. A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT (2014)
92. THE INVITATION (2015)
91. EXTREMELY WICKED, SHOCKINGLY EVIL, AND VILE (2019)
What Zac Efron gets right is the hollowness. I have a feeling it's easy to method-act cunning, driven, angry, forlorn, or enthusiastic characters, but hollow is hard. The sense that there's nothing behind the eyes but craftiness. Deception. Planning the next move. No emotions except strategic ones. Hollowness.
Efron and director Joe Berlinger wisely avoid humanizing Ted Bundy, or rationalizing his motives, or explaining his background. It doesn't matter why he is. He just is.
Bundy confessed to murdering 30 people between 1974 and 1978. We don't see any of those murders on screen; we only see the prelude to one of them, and it's a visualization of one of Bundy's confessions. Truth be told, there's very little violence in this film at all, but it feels more violent than it is. That's because the violence is in Bundy's manipulation of the people around him, in his charm and charisma that enamor him to women, in his bland white Republican normalcy that enables him to fade into the background of suburban America.
Except for some glimpses, we see Bundy mostly through the eyes of his girlfriend Liz (Lily Collins), a single mother who is charmed by him one night at a bar and is soon inviting him into her life. Of course, Ted would never harm her: not because he feels an emotional connection to her at all, but because he would be easily caught. Once suspicion falls upon him for a murder in far-away Utah, Liz wants to defend him but soon discovers she cannot.
It doesn't end there. Soon Bundy flees to Florida, where he is suspected in several more gruesome murders. A boisterous televised trial follows, with Ted as its charming antihero. He commands the courtroom: riffing, frivolously objecting, firing his court-appointed attorney, lambasting the judge and prosecution. Efron deftly displays Bundy's hypermasculine confidence, which doubles as his weakness: his assumption that--of course--everyone will believe his plea of innocence, because he's smart enough to convince them. Even the judge (played with stoic authority by John Malkovich) admits to being impressed with Bundy's competence in representing himself. And because Berlinger puts us in the position of the charmed rather than the charmer, we're a little surprised when the guilty verdict comes.
Berlinger, a documentarian who--along with his late partner Bruce Sinofsky--delivered some of the best true-crime work that's ever been made, like Brother's Keeper and the Paradise Lost series, has dealt quite a bit with the notion of prejudice trumping evidence. The borderline-aboriginal family in Brother's Keeper finds it difficult to get a fair shake in court, as do the supposed Satan-worshiping West Memphis Three in Paradise Lost, even when the evidence seems to be in their favor. His much-maligned but underrated Blair Witch 2 spun out from the mockumentary format of the original to explore what happens when the footage doesn't seem to fit the fact.
Here Berlinger shows in disturbing detail how much of the public, including many women, took Bundy's side despite the evidence, possibly because he was handsome, affable, all the things that sociopaths learn to be in order to fool those around them. Even on death row, we see Bundy smiling, joking, still manipulating, still planning the next step. The evidence eventually won out in this case, but Berlinger seems to be saying that even in a seemingly clear-cut case such as Bundy's, it's an uphill slope.
Tuesday, December 31, 2019
Sunday, December 29, 2019
The 100 Worst Movies of the '10s, #96: RINGS (2017)
100. THE GIRL IN THE SPIDER'S WEB (2018)
99. 31 (2016)
98. THE ROOMMATE (2011)
97. WAR ON EVERYONE (2016)
96. RINGS (2017)
A lot of people complain about cancel culture. I'm more irritated with resurrection culture.
Somewhere along the line, movie studios got the idea that just because a series has lain dormant for a few years, a reboot or sequel or remake is somehow warranted. Sometimes, as with the long-awaited revival of The X-Files, it's worthwhile. Other times, as with the ill-fated fifth entry in the Pirates of the Caribbean saga, it's not. Rings, the revival of the Samara saga of the American version of The Ring (2002), is boring and ineffectual in addition to being unnecessary.
Give credit to director F. Javier Gutierrez (I know, I know--what did Javier Gutierrez ever do to me) for injecting as much atmosphere as he can. The credited writers are no flunkies, either: Akiva Goldsman has a ton of heavy hits to his name, and made a little throwaway thriller a few years ago called Stephanie that was a lot of fun; Jacob Aaron Estes has made some decent indie films, including the haunting Mean Creek; David Loucka wrote a moderate flop called Dream House that nonetheless introduced future spouses Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz, and a year later wrote a turd called The House at the End of the Street that was notable for headlining a budding star named Jennifer Lawrence--but more on that one later in the countdown.
Rings lands upon some interesting premises in its first half-hour, and then jettisons them immediately in favor of another pseudo-whodunit in which the main character tries to piece together the clues. Why? We know from six or seven previous movies between the U.S. and Japan that it doesn't matter and she gets you in the end.
The more successful movies in the series--namely the first Japanese Ringu and the American sequel The Ring Two--worked because they focused more on experience and less on plot. The premise is simple--that there's a VHS tape that kills anyone who watches it--but most of the movies in the series can't find a way to let the primal horror speak for itself. What's scary is not the quest to find out more about the origins of the tape, but the nagging notion that even a silly threat like "You will die in seven days" might be true. Kind of like how the zombies in Night of the Living Dead aren't particularly scary on their own, but the inevitability of a horde of zombies coming toward you slowly but surely chills you to the bone.
The first act gave me hope of some invention in the series. A copy of the deadly tape ends up in the hands of Gabriel (Johnny Galecki, really stretching to play a sketchy college professor), who of course spins it into an academic project and shows it to his students. This could have been an interesting premise: how much of Gabriel's research is based in legitimate curiosity, and how much is smug academic self-congratulation? And how much of it comes from his simply trying to save his own life?
But never mind that. Most of the movie follows Julia (Matilda Lutz), the girlfriend of one of Gabriel's students who has disappeared. She's living at home to take care of her sick mom, who I suppose gets conveniently better once Julia needs to trek off to the corners of the forest to investigate her boyfriend's disappearance. From here on out it's the same old lazy mystery story, following pointless strand after strand, stopping for a bit at Vincent D'Onofrio's house for some reason, and settling into a thudding non-ending.
Though Rings is really too insignificant to make a Bottom 100 list, I'm using it as my stand-in for every franchise that has been needlessly retreaded over the past 10 years. There might have been a way to make a Ring movie seem warranted in 2017, but little effort was made here.
99. 31 (2016)
98. THE ROOMMATE (2011)
97. WAR ON EVERYONE (2016)
96. RINGS (2017)
A lot of people complain about cancel culture. I'm more irritated with resurrection culture.
Somewhere along the line, movie studios got the idea that just because a series has lain dormant for a few years, a reboot or sequel or remake is somehow warranted. Sometimes, as with the long-awaited revival of The X-Files, it's worthwhile. Other times, as with the ill-fated fifth entry in the Pirates of the Caribbean saga, it's not. Rings, the revival of the Samara saga of the American version of The Ring (2002), is boring and ineffectual in addition to being unnecessary.
Give credit to director F. Javier Gutierrez (I know, I know--what did Javier Gutierrez ever do to me) for injecting as much atmosphere as he can. The credited writers are no flunkies, either: Akiva Goldsman has a ton of heavy hits to his name, and made a little throwaway thriller a few years ago called Stephanie that was a lot of fun; Jacob Aaron Estes has made some decent indie films, including the haunting Mean Creek; David Loucka wrote a moderate flop called Dream House that nonetheless introduced future spouses Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz, and a year later wrote a turd called The House at the End of the Street that was notable for headlining a budding star named Jennifer Lawrence--but more on that one later in the countdown.
Rings lands upon some interesting premises in its first half-hour, and then jettisons them immediately in favor of another pseudo-whodunit in which the main character tries to piece together the clues. Why? We know from six or seven previous movies between the U.S. and Japan that it doesn't matter and she gets you in the end.
The more successful movies in the series--namely the first Japanese Ringu and the American sequel The Ring Two--worked because they focused more on experience and less on plot. The premise is simple--that there's a VHS tape that kills anyone who watches it--but most of the movies in the series can't find a way to let the primal horror speak for itself. What's scary is not the quest to find out more about the origins of the tape, but the nagging notion that even a silly threat like "You will die in seven days" might be true. Kind of like how the zombies in Night of the Living Dead aren't particularly scary on their own, but the inevitability of a horde of zombies coming toward you slowly but surely chills you to the bone.
The first act gave me hope of some invention in the series. A copy of the deadly tape ends up in the hands of Gabriel (Johnny Galecki, really stretching to play a sketchy college professor), who of course spins it into an academic project and shows it to his students. This could have been an interesting premise: how much of Gabriel's research is based in legitimate curiosity, and how much is smug academic self-congratulation? And how much of it comes from his simply trying to save his own life?
But never mind that. Most of the movie follows Julia (Matilda Lutz), the girlfriend of one of Gabriel's students who has disappeared. She's living at home to take care of her sick mom, who I suppose gets conveniently better once Julia needs to trek off to the corners of the forest to investigate her boyfriend's disappearance. From here on out it's the same old lazy mystery story, following pointless strand after strand, stopping for a bit at Vincent D'Onofrio's house for some reason, and settling into a thudding non-ending.
Though Rings is really too insignificant to make a Bottom 100 list, I'm using it as my stand-in for every franchise that has been needlessly retreaded over the past 10 years. There might have been a way to make a Ring movie seem warranted in 2017, but little effort was made here.
The Top 100 Movies of the '10s, #99: MOCKINGBIRD (2014)
100. THE NIGHTMARE (2015)
99. MOCKINGBIRD (2014)
Bryan Bertino's 2008 surprise hit The Strangers was so expertly made (and by a first-time director who learned the craft pretty much on the fly, no less) that it was easy to forget how fairly shallow it was. Though it had moments where Bertino's talent for tension transcended the need for extraneous things like plot and character, there was really nothing left in the end but an empty scream. Some characters survived, some didn't, and so what?
Bertino has come into his own since then, with the well-received character drama/fairytale horror film The Monster in 2016, which featured a career-defining performance from Zoe Kazan. But he made a movie in between, which BlumHouse released directly to streaming without any fanfare, called Mockingbird, and it's not only one of the best horror films of the decade, but a pointed deconstruction of the found footage genre in particular.
The opening title reads "Once upon a time in 1995." Before social media, before cell phones became ubiquitous, before the world turned into a general panopticon where everyone's lives have been more or less documented at every moment. This is important to the story.
The movie is told through three separate parallel narratives, defined by titles as "The Woman," "The Family," and "The Clown." Each is sent a video camera in the mail along with a message of "Congratulations!" and instructions to record themselves. The cameras are already recording and streaming the footage. Just what they've won is unclear, but the victory is not unexpected; all parties make a vague reference to having signed up for a contest at the mall. All are excited to participate in whatever they've just won: after all, they're stars now.
Then the Woman and the Family receive a message demanding that they never stop filming themselves, with a videotape that brutally displays the consequences of disobeying. The Clown gets no threat or demand, but receives a series of increasingly ridiculous instructions which he enthusiastically follows, to the point of embarrassment and self-harm.
Mockingbird was written by Bertino from a story he created along with Sam Esmail, who since has rocketed to auteur status with the brilliant series Mr. Robot, which just wrapped up its four-season run on USA. I don't know exactly what Esmail's contribution here was, but what it shares with his other flagship work is a caution about the fragility of privacy. The characters are completely cavalier about the personal information they give away, in the name of simply performing in a proto-version of a reality TV show or social media. In signing up for the "contest," they've unwittingly signed their lives away. Anyone who's skeptical about this should recite for me any line from Apple terms and conditions.
The movie crosscuts until the three storylines inevitably meet, in an ending that seems contrived because it is. The orchestrators of the "contest" are making their own horror film with unwitting subjects, and they essentially script it without scripting it, similar to any reality TV show. (They even place record players throughout the houses they stalk to score their scenes with foreboding music.) I won't reveal who the orchestrators turn out to be, but it's worth noting that Bertino and Esmail realize that young people have mastered technology that older generations still treat as novel. Just look at the number of baby boomers taken in by Trump bluster, Q conspiracies, and online scams. In the end, "reality" can be scripted as easily as fiction can. Maybe easier.
99. MOCKINGBIRD (2014)
Bryan Bertino's 2008 surprise hit The Strangers was so expertly made (and by a first-time director who learned the craft pretty much on the fly, no less) that it was easy to forget how fairly shallow it was. Though it had moments where Bertino's talent for tension transcended the need for extraneous things like plot and character, there was really nothing left in the end but an empty scream. Some characters survived, some didn't, and so what?
Bertino has come into his own since then, with the well-received character drama/fairytale horror film The Monster in 2016, which featured a career-defining performance from Zoe Kazan. But he made a movie in between, which BlumHouse released directly to streaming without any fanfare, called Mockingbird, and it's not only one of the best horror films of the decade, but a pointed deconstruction of the found footage genre in particular.
The opening title reads "Once upon a time in 1995." Before social media, before cell phones became ubiquitous, before the world turned into a general panopticon where everyone's lives have been more or less documented at every moment. This is important to the story.
The movie is told through three separate parallel narratives, defined by titles as "The Woman," "The Family," and "The Clown." Each is sent a video camera in the mail along with a message of "Congratulations!" and instructions to record themselves. The cameras are already recording and streaming the footage. Just what they've won is unclear, but the victory is not unexpected; all parties make a vague reference to having signed up for a contest at the mall. All are excited to participate in whatever they've just won: after all, they're stars now.
Then the Woman and the Family receive a message demanding that they never stop filming themselves, with a videotape that brutally displays the consequences of disobeying. The Clown gets no threat or demand, but receives a series of increasingly ridiculous instructions which he enthusiastically follows, to the point of embarrassment and self-harm.
Mockingbird was written by Bertino from a story he created along with Sam Esmail, who since has rocketed to auteur status with the brilliant series Mr. Robot, which just wrapped up its four-season run on USA. I don't know exactly what Esmail's contribution here was, but what it shares with his other flagship work is a caution about the fragility of privacy. The characters are completely cavalier about the personal information they give away, in the name of simply performing in a proto-version of a reality TV show or social media. In signing up for the "contest," they've unwittingly signed their lives away. Anyone who's skeptical about this should recite for me any line from Apple terms and conditions.
The movie crosscuts until the three storylines inevitably meet, in an ending that seems contrived because it is. The orchestrators of the "contest" are making their own horror film with unwitting subjects, and they essentially script it without scripting it, similar to any reality TV show. (They even place record players throughout the houses they stalk to score their scenes with foreboding music.) I won't reveal who the orchestrators turn out to be, but it's worth noting that Bertino and Esmail realize that young people have mastered technology that older generations still treat as novel. Just look at the number of baby boomers taken in by Trump bluster, Q conspiracies, and online scams. In the end, "reality" can be scripted as easily as fiction can. Maybe easier.
Tuesday, July 16, 2019
VICE (2018)
There may be no way to make a movie about Dick Cheney, mainly because he's probably the most secretive politician in history, but also because to be true, he's impossible to humanize. Adam McKay, the writer and director of Vice, certainly pulls no punches in going after him. There's no ambiguity as to where Mr. McKay lies on the political spectrum, and nothing up in the air about his lingering anger toward the administration Cheney led and the heap that Cheney and his cohort left the country to clean up. The thesis of the movie, essentially, is this:
A completely valid approach, but also not a particularly challenging one. I voted against Cheney both times. I know he's a monster. Convince me he's a human being.
McKay graduated from SNL and goofy comedies like Anchorman to make The Big Short, a fascinating ensemble film which detailed the collapse of the housing market that Cheney partially oversaw. That movie, like Vice, mixed straight-faced social commentary with academic narration and acidic satire, but in taking essentially the format of a heist movie, it put human faces on its protagonists of varying moral sensibility. McKay particularly coaxed unique performances out of Christian Bale, as an eccentric math whiz, and Steve Carell, as a disgruntled stock market player who, the economy be damned, feels he's owed.
Though Bale and Carell turn up again here and give laudable performances, the humanity is missing. I suspect that McKay's collaborator on The Big Short, Charles Randolph, provided the conventional frame that gave its epic story shape, while McKay provided the acidic humor and righteous rage. Here, from a script he wrote by himself, McKay only has the acid.
He tries to apply the same explain-it-to-me-like-I'm-a-six-year-old method of The Big Short, having a working-class father named Kurt (Jesse Plemons) narrate Cheney's story from beginning to... well, near-end. We get a glimpse of Cheney's early years, a couple of his DUIs, his failure at Yale, and his being saved by the sternness of his dedicated wife Lynne (Amy Adams, wasted), who is played as more of a Lady Macbeth figure than I imagine the real Lynne Cheney is. We see his solidifying of power as he works his way from chief of staff to then-Congressman Donald Rumsfeld (Carell, hilarious) to Wyoming Congressman for 10 years, to Secretary of Defense, to Vice President.
The early scenes are a bit of a yawn, since the movie doesn't get to its red meat until the Bush years. It's then that we see the Cheney we know: scheming, gaining influence, consolidating as much power as he can in the Vice President's office, to the point where he's ordering planes to be shot down on September 11th without the President's authority. Since Cheney is all skill and no personality, there's really no point to the setup. There's no spark to his relationship with Lynne other than their collaborative scheming, which I suppose is the point.
The only moment where Mr. Cheney registers as a human being is his defense of his daughter Mary (played well by Allison Pill), who came out of the closet shortly before his run for the White House. It's Dick who defends her--against a casually apathetic George W. Bush (Sam Rockwell, grinning and empty) and against the ambitious Lynne--and his defense withers away toward the end, as he throws Mary under the bus to make way for his older daughter Liz (Lily Rabe) to run for Senate as an opponent to marriage equality. This turnaround could have sparked a real human conflict in the Cheneys, but either McKay isn't interested in it, or the Cheneys just aren't all that complicated. I think it's the latter.
Christian Bale is magnificent in his impersonation of Cheney, not only in his embodying of each mannerism but in his endowing each facet of Cheney's persona with its own purpose. He and McKay have rightly noticed that Cheney's odd way of speaking--in low tones with frequent pauses--demands that his audience listen closely and pay attention, and endows whatever he's saying with a certain gravitas. That was Cheney's game, and Bale gets it.
But how do you make a movie about someone who isn't there? McKay struggles in compiling a subject out of the elusive Cheney. The only real path he has to follow is the audacity of Cheney's ambition and the lengths he goes to in order to grabbing power. To McKay's credit, he still manages a few surprises here: the best scenes are of Cheney's days in the Ford Administration, in which he discovers disturbing loopholes in the limits on the President's power with the help of a young lawyer named Antonin Scalia (Sam Massaro), and of his early days in the W. Bush administration, in which he is constantly amassing influence, bypassing rules, and confirming his general omnipotence with the help of Rumsfeld, lawyer David Addington (Don McManus), chief of staff Scooter Libby (Justin Kirk, slimy), and deputy Sec. Def. Paul Wolfowitz (Eddie Marsan, also slimy). It's in these scenes that the movie feels authentic, and we see to the core of Cheney's opportunism and nihilism.
But McKay doesn't stick with it, probably because there's too much mud to sling. Detailing Dick Cheney's offenses would take the better part of a miniseries. Making hay out of Cheney is similar, I guess, to trying to make any scandals stick to the current occupant of the White House: there's too much. Focus too closely on one infraction and you're ignoring tons of others. Try to cover them all and you spread yourself too thin. Vice's unifying message, if there is one, is delivered in the revelation of Kurt's identity, which is clever but simplistic: at the end, the only thing to take from Cheney's life is that he has no soul, and until recently he had no heart either.
** out of ****
A completely valid approach, but also not a particularly challenging one. I voted against Cheney both times. I know he's a monster. Convince me he's a human being.
McKay graduated from SNL and goofy comedies like Anchorman to make The Big Short, a fascinating ensemble film which detailed the collapse of the housing market that Cheney partially oversaw. That movie, like Vice, mixed straight-faced social commentary with academic narration and acidic satire, but in taking essentially the format of a heist movie, it put human faces on its protagonists of varying moral sensibility. McKay particularly coaxed unique performances out of Christian Bale, as an eccentric math whiz, and Steve Carell, as a disgruntled stock market player who, the economy be damned, feels he's owed.
Though Bale and Carell turn up again here and give laudable performances, the humanity is missing. I suspect that McKay's collaborator on The Big Short, Charles Randolph, provided the conventional frame that gave its epic story shape, while McKay provided the acidic humor and righteous rage. Here, from a script he wrote by himself, McKay only has the acid.
He tries to apply the same explain-it-to-me-like-I'm-a-six-year-old method of The Big Short, having a working-class father named Kurt (Jesse Plemons) narrate Cheney's story from beginning to... well, near-end. We get a glimpse of Cheney's early years, a couple of his DUIs, his failure at Yale, and his being saved by the sternness of his dedicated wife Lynne (Amy Adams, wasted), who is played as more of a Lady Macbeth figure than I imagine the real Lynne Cheney is. We see his solidifying of power as he works his way from chief of staff to then-Congressman Donald Rumsfeld (Carell, hilarious) to Wyoming Congressman for 10 years, to Secretary of Defense, to Vice President.
The early scenes are a bit of a yawn, since the movie doesn't get to its red meat until the Bush years. It's then that we see the Cheney we know: scheming, gaining influence, consolidating as much power as he can in the Vice President's office, to the point where he's ordering planes to be shot down on September 11th without the President's authority. Since Cheney is all skill and no personality, there's really no point to the setup. There's no spark to his relationship with Lynne other than their collaborative scheming, which I suppose is the point.
The only moment where Mr. Cheney registers as a human being is his defense of his daughter Mary (played well by Allison Pill), who came out of the closet shortly before his run for the White House. It's Dick who defends her--against a casually apathetic George W. Bush (Sam Rockwell, grinning and empty) and against the ambitious Lynne--and his defense withers away toward the end, as he throws Mary under the bus to make way for his older daughter Liz (Lily Rabe) to run for Senate as an opponent to marriage equality. This turnaround could have sparked a real human conflict in the Cheneys, but either McKay isn't interested in it, or the Cheneys just aren't all that complicated. I think it's the latter.
Christian Bale is magnificent in his impersonation of Cheney, not only in his embodying of each mannerism but in his endowing each facet of Cheney's persona with its own purpose. He and McKay have rightly noticed that Cheney's odd way of speaking--in low tones with frequent pauses--demands that his audience listen closely and pay attention, and endows whatever he's saying with a certain gravitas. That was Cheney's game, and Bale gets it.
But how do you make a movie about someone who isn't there? McKay struggles in compiling a subject out of the elusive Cheney. The only real path he has to follow is the audacity of Cheney's ambition and the lengths he goes to in order to grabbing power. To McKay's credit, he still manages a few surprises here: the best scenes are of Cheney's days in the Ford Administration, in which he discovers disturbing loopholes in the limits on the President's power with the help of a young lawyer named Antonin Scalia (Sam Massaro), and of his early days in the W. Bush administration, in which he is constantly amassing influence, bypassing rules, and confirming his general omnipotence with the help of Rumsfeld, lawyer David Addington (Don McManus), chief of staff Scooter Libby (Justin Kirk, slimy), and deputy Sec. Def. Paul Wolfowitz (Eddie Marsan, also slimy). It's in these scenes that the movie feels authentic, and we see to the core of Cheney's opportunism and nihilism.
But McKay doesn't stick with it, probably because there's too much mud to sling. Detailing Dick Cheney's offenses would take the better part of a miniseries. Making hay out of Cheney is similar, I guess, to trying to make any scandals stick to the current occupant of the White House: there's too much. Focus too closely on one infraction and you're ignoring tons of others. Try to cover them all and you spread yourself too thin. Vice's unifying message, if there is one, is delivered in the revelation of Kurt's identity, which is clever but simplistic: at the end, the only thing to take from Cheney's life is that he has no soul, and until recently he had no heart either.
** out of ****
Saturday, June 15, 2019
SERENITY (2019): Serenity Now, Insanity Also Now
Serenity is that rare movie that is terrible in so many ways that it's a miracle it exists. On the level of writing, directing, acting, editing, photography, music, and probably catering, it fails spectacularly. Lots of movies are terrible, but most tend to stem from cynicism and profitability, the need to please too many people at once. Serenity surely accurately represents the vision of its director. No one meddled, no one took it out his hands in the editing room, no one supplanted his message with an audience-friendly approach. This is the gargantuan misfire of one artist, faithfully portrayed on the screen. It derails in the first act and keeps on chugging.
Its $25 million budget is slim considering its production value and cast. Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway must have taken significant pay cuts to work on this film. It's not hard to understand why. The writer and director is Steven Knight, who wrote my favorite film of the 2000s (Dirty Pretty Things) as well as another damn good thriller of the same era (Eastern Promises). He also directed an excellent chamber piece a few years ago called Locke, which took place entirely within the confines of Tom Hardy's car as he drove from Birmingham to London. That movie, no action and all dialogue, was captivating all the way through.
So it's not hard to see why Serenity's two lead actors and six (6) production companies took a risk on Knight. It didn't pay off. But boy, did it ever not pay off.
I'd say that someone along the line should have said no to Knight, but I honestly can't imagine any point at which this film was on track. Most bad movies have a good movie hidden within them somewhere. This one is like a Russian doll of badness; each layer of the plot reveals a new level of preposterousness.
Trailers set the film up as a modern sweaty noir picture. The setting, a fictional Florida Key-like island called Plymouth, recalls Key Largo. The grizzled McConaughey recalls Bogart, or at least tries to, as fisherman-for-hire Baker Dill. (Because every single element of this film has some sort of allegorical significance, I'm sure this name means something, but I can't figure out what.) He makes a living taking rich people out to catch big fish, but has fallen on hard times. There's a big tuna--he calls it Justice--that he's been angling for since he's been there, but he's never caught it: a character point that seems right out of Robert McKee's playbook for How to Give a Main Character Purpose. A literal Big Fish that he's literally trying to catch.
Then his estranged ex-wife Karen (Hathaway) shows up unexpectedly with a proposal. She's married to Frank (Jason Clarke), who's abusive to her and her son Patrick. Patrick, of course, is Dill's son. She's proposing that Dill take Frank out on a fishing expedition and that Frank not come back.
It sounds like your average noir plot, a la Double Indemnity and Body Heat: Femme Fatale comes to the Morally Compromised Hero with a murder plot, Hero is reluctant to accept but does it anyway because of his feelings for/sexual attraction to the Femme Fatale, things spin out of control. Rest assured that Knight has far less up his sleeve than that. There is a genre-bending surprise twist at the midpoint which I won't reveal, but somehow it's less surprising and less thrilling than if the movie had just continued as a regular old noir.
But then again, as a noir it would have been merely awful and not baffling. McConaughey hurls himself into the role with a ferocity that seems to combine his Lincoln commercials at their most arcane with a kind of Nicolas Cage-esque expressiveness. His performance is not good, because nothing in this movie is good, but it's appropriate to the movie's general messiness. Clarke does all that Knight asks him to do, which is to grunt and threaten and snarl, but he's not so much a villainous menace as he is merely despicable. Djimon Hounsou is blameless as Dill's first mate.
Hathaway, who's proven herself a great actor, has no idea what to do with Karen, which is all Knight's fault and not hers. She's introduced as a mysterious possible threat to Dill's relative comfort, but Knight doesn't follow through. That there are no surprises or revelations around her character is probably the movie's biggest failure. It generally has no room for women; the only other female role is a flirty neighbor played by Diane Lane, who can occasionally be seen peering out of windows knowingly, as if there is something else to know.
The ending is confounding, but no more confounding than the movie that led up to it. Knight will not let us rest until we know for sure that this movie is an Allegory with a capital A. Without revealing what happens, let me assure you that Knight finds a way to involve video games, The Troops, one of those news broadcasts where an unseen reporter narrates the ending for us, and a fishing pole on Dill's boat that attaches to the waist of its user in a way that makes the murder weapon in A Clockwork Orange look subtle. There's also a nerdy accountant-looking character (Jeremy Strong) who keeps chasing after Dill and Must Mean Something. And if we ever doubt that this is a Big Meaningful Movie and that he is a Literate Filmmaker who has Read Many Books, Knight packs it with constant allusions to any author who's ever written anything nautical-related. I spotted Shakespeare, Melville, and Hemingway. Coleridge too, I think, and not just that the movie looks like Knight wrote it while in an opium daze.
How many stars do I give this movie? It's one of the most critically misguided movies I've ever seen, but it's not boring. Nor is it a cynical crowd-pleaser, like your average Transformers movie, or Pottersville. When the ambitious project of one artist goes bananas like this movie does, it's usually worth a look. I don't know if Serenity clocks in with the greatest disasters of film history, like Cleopatra or Heaven's Gate or The Exorcist II, but it's not for lack of trying. Only a filmmaker with proven talent like Knight would have been allowed to make a movie this horrendous. I'm refusing to give it a star rating because it does not exist on a scale of good to bad. It is itself, wonderfully, awfully, itself.
Monday, March 11, 2019
BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY (2018), or: Radio Blah Blah
Bohemian Rhapsody, the long-time-coming and troubled biopic of Freddie Mercury by way of his surviving Queen members, has a view of queerness that is firmly entrenched in 1980, around the time that Al Pacino's latent homosexuality turned him into a murderer in Cruising, and Michael Caine's cross-dressing exacerbated his psychopathy in Dressed to Kill. And Bohemian Rhapsody doesn't even have the camp appeal of those two films, but manages in 2018 to be as instantly dated as either. Rated PG-13, when I suppose it just as easily could have nabbed a PG, it treats Freddie's sexuality as an afterthought and--more insidiously--a burden to his bandmates, family, and wife. It seems him primarily as an amusing eccentric, and a musical genius second.
This is, I suppose, the conundrum of any biopic of an artist. The makers of a film like this have the challenge of telling a story that at once embraces its subject's art and offers us something to complement it. I think of how disappointed I was by Ray and Walk the Line, which spoke to its subjects' musical genius with only the most perfunctory addiction/recovery story to round them out. But then I recall the Stephen Fry-headlining Wilde, which was all about Oscar Wilde's queerness with none of his wit. A good biopic, I think, needs to have both the personal and the mythical in balance, and I struggle to think of one that actually works. Freddie has the art, and I feel like he must have the other part somewhere, and that it's been obscured by people who'd rather not tell it.
What we're left with is the only story rock stars ever seem to want to tell: (1) Defiant iconoclast rises to fame with singular talent; (2) Defiant iconoclast creates masterpiece by being defiant and iconoclastic, and gets even more famous; (3) Same rock star is tarnished by excess--whether drugs, alcohol, or ego--and ruins relationships because of it; (4) Rock star redeems himself in epic fashion. It's the story that should now be retired post-Walk Hard, but here it is again. We even have Freddie's stereotypical wet-blanket of a working-class dad, who would rather he "Do good deeds" or something or other instead of being cool and hip and rocking. (The mom is quiet and demure, as if the filmmakers never agreed on a type for her.)
Freddie (Rami Malek) happens upon the small-time band Smile in a college bar and admires them. He introduces himself to Brian May (Gwilym Lee) and Roger Taylor (Ben Hardy). Their lead singer has just quit. He joins them and they form Queen.
The best part of the film surrounds the writing and recording of the title song. These are the only scenes that project any sort of uniqueness on the band; even though the plot is fairly standard, these scenes portray the band's unconventional recording techniques and fierce advocacy for "Bohemian Rhapsody" and refusal to be formulaic. There's a couple of amusing scenes between the band and a producer played cheekily by Mike Myers, who makes a clunky but heartwarming in-joke about the upcoming Wayne's World revival of the song. This feels like the most honest part of the film, probably because it represents the band's version of the story, and naturally the scenes that feature Freddie as one-of-four rather than one-of-one play better. The scene in which Brian May composes "We Will Rock You" is also a highlight, and it really shouldn't be.
It's when the movie dwells on Freddie's excess that it feels disingenuous. There's the standard plot line about the lead singer who gets too big for the band, and the band who resents his going solo. This does happen, and has been dealt with in some thoughtful ways (see Barbara Kopple's Shut Up and Sing, for example, about the Dixie Chicks and their internal troubles after Natalie Maines went political). But this plot thread exists mainly so that Freddie can try to branch out on his own and humbly come crawling back. "I hired a bunch of guys, I told them exactly what I wanted them to do," he says, "and the problem was: they did it. I need you." Sure you do, Fred.
His bisexuality is played mostly as the source of frustration for his wife, Mary Austin (Lucy Boynton), who remains his Girl Friday despite his open dalliances. His longtime boyfriend, Paul Prenter (Allen Leech), is portrayed as an invasive presence on Freddie's marriage and on the band. Freddie's attraction to and affairs with men are portrayed disturbingly chastely, as if the movie is afraid to really touch them. That PG-13 movies can feature untold amounts of violence but balk at male-male relationships is certainly partially to blame for this, but it doesn't absolve the filmmakers; even a PG-13 movie can deal with the perils of queerness in the 1980s more honestly than this. A scene in which Freddie is propositioned by a man in a public bathroom is reminiscent of Colin Firth's coming-out scene in Mamma Mia, which was so obscure and suggestive that I couldn't even be sure he was coming out.
AIDS, of course, exists mainly on the movie's sidelines, as, I suppose, it ought to; a movie about Freddie Mercury's genius should spend only as much time as is absolutely necessary on the disease that robbed us of him. (Plus, I'm not really interested in any salient statement on AIDS from filmmakers who fumble with homosexuality to begin with.) Still, its use of the epidemic is as perfunctory as anything else in the film, and fits right into the formula, right down to the scene in which Freddie coughs up blood into a hankie, a trope that should have been retired long before Oh Hello! on Broadway.
To say that Rami Malek isn't really to blame for the film's badness is not to say he's particularly good in it. Malek is a great actor and does fantastic work on Mr. Robot, but doesn't overcome the screenplay or his dental insert. He has a brilliant career ahead of him and though he won the Oscar for this film, he'll be the better the sooner he moves past it.
I know people who've found a lot to enjoy about the film, mainly in its re-creations of live performances, including the Live Aid concert that acts as the film's climax. These are all well-filmed, but there's not much to them that can't be achieved by watching actual footage of Queen performances. The most exhilarating scenes--and there is some exhilaration--already exist, and watching Malek and crew act through them is like listening to a decent cover band.
I don't consider myself an expert on Freddie Mercury's life, but I can't be alone in insisting that there must have been more to him than this. Given that the best scenes lionize the band over him, I have to assume his image is muted by their creative control. There must be both Queen and Freddie Mercury: the legendary band and the unique frontman. This is a movie, alas, about a gravedigger who meets a prince.
* 1/2 out of ****
This is, I suppose, the conundrum of any biopic of an artist. The makers of a film like this have the challenge of telling a story that at once embraces its subject's art and offers us something to complement it. I think of how disappointed I was by Ray and Walk the Line, which spoke to its subjects' musical genius with only the most perfunctory addiction/recovery story to round them out. But then I recall the Stephen Fry-headlining Wilde, which was all about Oscar Wilde's queerness with none of his wit. A good biopic, I think, needs to have both the personal and the mythical in balance, and I struggle to think of one that actually works. Freddie has the art, and I feel like he must have the other part somewhere, and that it's been obscured by people who'd rather not tell it.
What we're left with is the only story rock stars ever seem to want to tell: (1) Defiant iconoclast rises to fame with singular talent; (2) Defiant iconoclast creates masterpiece by being defiant and iconoclastic, and gets even more famous; (3) Same rock star is tarnished by excess--whether drugs, alcohol, or ego--and ruins relationships because of it; (4) Rock star redeems himself in epic fashion. It's the story that should now be retired post-Walk Hard, but here it is again. We even have Freddie's stereotypical wet-blanket of a working-class dad, who would rather he "Do good deeds" or something or other instead of being cool and hip and rocking. (The mom is quiet and demure, as if the filmmakers never agreed on a type for her.)
Freddie (Rami Malek) happens upon the small-time band Smile in a college bar and admires them. He introduces himself to Brian May (Gwilym Lee) and Roger Taylor (Ben Hardy). Their lead singer has just quit. He joins them and they form Queen.
The best part of the film surrounds the writing and recording of the title song. These are the only scenes that project any sort of uniqueness on the band; even though the plot is fairly standard, these scenes portray the band's unconventional recording techniques and fierce advocacy for "Bohemian Rhapsody" and refusal to be formulaic. There's a couple of amusing scenes between the band and a producer played cheekily by Mike Myers, who makes a clunky but heartwarming in-joke about the upcoming Wayne's World revival of the song. This feels like the most honest part of the film, probably because it represents the band's version of the story, and naturally the scenes that feature Freddie as one-of-four rather than one-of-one play better. The scene in which Brian May composes "We Will Rock You" is also a highlight, and it really shouldn't be.
It's when the movie dwells on Freddie's excess that it feels disingenuous. There's the standard plot line about the lead singer who gets too big for the band, and the band who resents his going solo. This does happen, and has been dealt with in some thoughtful ways (see Barbara Kopple's Shut Up and Sing, for example, about the Dixie Chicks and their internal troubles after Natalie Maines went political). But this plot thread exists mainly so that Freddie can try to branch out on his own and humbly come crawling back. "I hired a bunch of guys, I told them exactly what I wanted them to do," he says, "and the problem was: they did it. I need you." Sure you do, Fred.
His bisexuality is played mostly as the source of frustration for his wife, Mary Austin (Lucy Boynton), who remains his Girl Friday despite his open dalliances. His longtime boyfriend, Paul Prenter (Allen Leech), is portrayed as an invasive presence on Freddie's marriage and on the band. Freddie's attraction to and affairs with men are portrayed disturbingly chastely, as if the movie is afraid to really touch them. That PG-13 movies can feature untold amounts of violence but balk at male-male relationships is certainly partially to blame for this, but it doesn't absolve the filmmakers; even a PG-13 movie can deal with the perils of queerness in the 1980s more honestly than this. A scene in which Freddie is propositioned by a man in a public bathroom is reminiscent of Colin Firth's coming-out scene in Mamma Mia, which was so obscure and suggestive that I couldn't even be sure he was coming out.
AIDS, of course, exists mainly on the movie's sidelines, as, I suppose, it ought to; a movie about Freddie Mercury's genius should spend only as much time as is absolutely necessary on the disease that robbed us of him. (Plus, I'm not really interested in any salient statement on AIDS from filmmakers who fumble with homosexuality to begin with.) Still, its use of the epidemic is as perfunctory as anything else in the film, and fits right into the formula, right down to the scene in which Freddie coughs up blood into a hankie, a trope that should have been retired long before Oh Hello! on Broadway.
To say that Rami Malek isn't really to blame for the film's badness is not to say he's particularly good in it. Malek is a great actor and does fantastic work on Mr. Robot, but doesn't overcome the screenplay or his dental insert. He has a brilliant career ahead of him and though he won the Oscar for this film, he'll be the better the sooner he moves past it.
I know people who've found a lot to enjoy about the film, mainly in its re-creations of live performances, including the Live Aid concert that acts as the film's climax. These are all well-filmed, but there's not much to them that can't be achieved by watching actual footage of Queen performances. The most exhilarating scenes--and there is some exhilaration--already exist, and watching Malek and crew act through them is like listening to a decent cover band.
I don't consider myself an expert on Freddie Mercury's life, but I can't be alone in insisting that there must have been more to him than this. Given that the best scenes lionize the band over him, I have to assume his image is muted by their creative control. There must be both Queen and Freddie Mercury: the legendary band and the unique frontman. This is a movie, alas, about a gravedigger who meets a prince.
* 1/2 out of ****
Saturday, February 23, 2019
SUSPIRIA (2018)
Dario Argento's original 1977 film Suspiria is rightly heralded as a masterwork of terror. Its first fifteen minutes are among the scariest I've ever seen, and what follows is a prime example of why Argento, however flawed his overall resume may be, is considered a master of the horror mise en scene. It is all experience. Argento reels us into the darkness with him.
Luca Guadagnino wisely follows the same path with his 2018 film of the same name, though that doesn't mean he takes the same directions. It is a remake of the Argento film, to be sure, but it also isn't. It has the same plot, and then it doesn't. The characters have their parallels, and then they don't. It's a tribute to Argento's work, and then it stands on its own. One could watch both (and should), with either film first, and still appreciate both on their own.
Guadagnino's film is spiritually related, I think, to Werner Herzog's Nosferatu the Vampyre. Herzog's film took the well-known Nosferatu story--which began as a plagiarism of Dracula--and spun it outward to more explicitly address the complex implications, particularly about male dominance. Guadagnino spins Argento's tight 95-minute thriller into a 152-minute meditation on everything around the edges of the Argento film. While Argento ratcheted his tension up to a grisly punch, Guadagnino lets the tension sit and fester, and it never lets up.
The plot is the same, and set in the same 1977 Berlin as the original. Quiet American girl Susie Bannion (Dakota Johnson) arrives at a prestigious Berlin dance school, fleeing an oppressive fundamentalist upbringing and an abusive mother. The school is run by famed choreographer Viva Blanc (Tilda Swinton) and a strange group of women. But there is some sort of malevolent presence at the school, established when one of the students, Patricia (Chloe Grace Moretz), flees from the school, terrified, and subsequently disappears. Susie's audition catches Madame Blanc's attention, and before long she suspects that the women of the company have plans for her that go beyond dancing.
This plot is ripe for the kind of terror that Argento did best, but Guadagnino and screenwriter David Kajganich take it to an unexpected, though no less unsettling, place. They expand 1977 Berlin to include its political context, amid the German Autumn, RAF terrorist attacks, and the Baader/Meinhof trials. The setting of a dance school suggests a need for any kind of order amid chaos. The choreography is already set; all there is left to do is follow it. What was a malevolent coven in the original is a bulwark against oppression in the new version, with Blanc as a democratic dissenter against what could be a tyrannical takeover by the dance school's founder, the mysterious Helena Markos, who believes herself to be the reincarnation of Mater Suspiriorum (The Mother of Sighs), one of the three witches said to possess untold supernatural power.
Women possess all of the power in Suspiria, in subtle contrast to the male-dominated authority around them. It wasn't until the movie was over that I noticed that there are almost no men in it. They occupy perfunctory roles with only the semblance of fragile routine authority. The sad-looking man who stamps an East German passport. The two cops who factor into a very funny attempted interrogation scene. Even the Amish priest who delivers the last rites to Susie's mother, in a flashback, is emasculated by the mother's control over the room.
The only male character of note is Dr. Josef Klemperer (Lutz Ebersdorf), Patricia's psychiatrist, who investigates her disappearance. In scenes parallel to the dance school plot, Klemperer navigates a barren and broken Berlin, eventually putting himself at risk to save one girl. His reason for doing so becomes clear as the movie goes on; it connects to the Holocaust and Klemperer's feeling of responsibility for the crimes that men like him committed 30-odd years earlier. Ebersdorf's performance is a mask of tortured duty, a deeply felt embodiment even if you don't pick up on the trick he and Guadagnino have up their sleeves (which--full disclosure--I didn't, until I read some reviews).
The other two triangular anchors of the film are Johnson and Swinton, both of whom are captivating. Susie, merely an innocent protagonist in the original, is fleshed out into a taciturn yet brazen heroine here. Through brief flashbacks we see her fundamentalist upbringing, and how her sheltered childhood and stunted sexuality makes her appropriate prey for Madame Markos--or so we think. Johnson's performance strikes the right note between innocence and cunning, so that by the end we know a supernatural possession has taken place, but just who is the possessed and who is the possessor is left ambiguous. Swinton turns Madame Blanc into a politician of sorts, scheming to gain power within her coven, always keeping a knowing eye on Susie, treating her with a mix of condescension, suspicion, and admiration.
The women of the coven are an idiosyncratic, imposing, and often very funny ensemble, as Guadagnino embeds us in their routine of dinners, rituals, democratic votes; though the logic of it is sometimes confusing, their purposefulness always carries a sinister suggestion with it. I liked the varied personalities of the matrons in charge, particularly Angela Winkler as the stoic Mme. Tanner and Sylvie Testud as the frazzled Miss Griffith. Mia Goth is also impressive as Sara, the first dancer to befriend Susie, and the first to become suspicious of the matrons.
Guadagnino replaces Argento's traditional horror template of buildup and payoff with a constant thread of crescendo and decrescendo leading to a final conflagration. There are moments that hit hard--particularly one early in the film in which one of the more obstinate dancers meets an end that is particularly brutal, even by Argento standards--but the film maintains a quiet dread throughout, punctuated but not interrupted by moments of terror. Thom Yorke's dissonant score, reminiscent of Radiohead bandmate Jonny Greenwood's work on There Will Be Blood, tempers orchestral order with minimalist disorder.
Of course, Guadagnino and Kajganich do get a bit big for their britches; adapting a simple fairy-tale horror film to a very real Cold War backdrop doesn't come without its fair share of pretentiousness. The big climax, though it offers a satisfying turn in Susie's and Mme. Blanc's characters, doesn't quite manage to meld the obligatory bloodbath with the more serious setup, and Guadagnino's occasional camera trickery feels less like a necessary atmosphere and more like a cover for some narrative loopholes. He makes up for this in the epilogue, which offers a subtle statement of what the film has really been about. The last shot is sure to be debated, as it seems to jostle the film out of its previous context. I think that it, in conjunction with the one shot of Susie we see in the middle of the closing credits, reinforces the power of unity in the face of walls that separate us. If Argento's film portrays a force of darkness amid a normal world, Guadagnino's concerns a formidable, though brutal and uncompromising, force of unity amid a dark world.
*** 1/2 out of ****
Luca Guadagnino wisely follows the same path with his 2018 film of the same name, though that doesn't mean he takes the same directions. It is a remake of the Argento film, to be sure, but it also isn't. It has the same plot, and then it doesn't. The characters have their parallels, and then they don't. It's a tribute to Argento's work, and then it stands on its own. One could watch both (and should), with either film first, and still appreciate both on their own.
Guadagnino's film is spiritually related, I think, to Werner Herzog's Nosferatu the Vampyre. Herzog's film took the well-known Nosferatu story--which began as a plagiarism of Dracula--and spun it outward to more explicitly address the complex implications, particularly about male dominance. Guadagnino spins Argento's tight 95-minute thriller into a 152-minute meditation on everything around the edges of the Argento film. While Argento ratcheted his tension up to a grisly punch, Guadagnino lets the tension sit and fester, and it never lets up.
The plot is the same, and set in the same 1977 Berlin as the original. Quiet American girl Susie Bannion (Dakota Johnson) arrives at a prestigious Berlin dance school, fleeing an oppressive fundamentalist upbringing and an abusive mother. The school is run by famed choreographer Viva Blanc (Tilda Swinton) and a strange group of women. But there is some sort of malevolent presence at the school, established when one of the students, Patricia (Chloe Grace Moretz), flees from the school, terrified, and subsequently disappears. Susie's audition catches Madame Blanc's attention, and before long she suspects that the women of the company have plans for her that go beyond dancing.
This plot is ripe for the kind of terror that Argento did best, but Guadagnino and screenwriter David Kajganich take it to an unexpected, though no less unsettling, place. They expand 1977 Berlin to include its political context, amid the German Autumn, RAF terrorist attacks, and the Baader/Meinhof trials. The setting of a dance school suggests a need for any kind of order amid chaos. The choreography is already set; all there is left to do is follow it. What was a malevolent coven in the original is a bulwark against oppression in the new version, with Blanc as a democratic dissenter against what could be a tyrannical takeover by the dance school's founder, the mysterious Helena Markos, who believes herself to be the reincarnation of Mater Suspiriorum (The Mother of Sighs), one of the three witches said to possess untold supernatural power.
Women possess all of the power in Suspiria, in subtle contrast to the male-dominated authority around them. It wasn't until the movie was over that I noticed that there are almost no men in it. They occupy perfunctory roles with only the semblance of fragile routine authority. The sad-looking man who stamps an East German passport. The two cops who factor into a very funny attempted interrogation scene. Even the Amish priest who delivers the last rites to Susie's mother, in a flashback, is emasculated by the mother's control over the room.
The only male character of note is Dr. Josef Klemperer (Lutz Ebersdorf), Patricia's psychiatrist, who investigates her disappearance. In scenes parallel to the dance school plot, Klemperer navigates a barren and broken Berlin, eventually putting himself at risk to save one girl. His reason for doing so becomes clear as the movie goes on; it connects to the Holocaust and Klemperer's feeling of responsibility for the crimes that men like him committed 30-odd years earlier. Ebersdorf's performance is a mask of tortured duty, a deeply felt embodiment even if you don't pick up on the trick he and Guadagnino have up their sleeves (which--full disclosure--I didn't, until I read some reviews).
The other two triangular anchors of the film are Johnson and Swinton, both of whom are captivating. Susie, merely an innocent protagonist in the original, is fleshed out into a taciturn yet brazen heroine here. Through brief flashbacks we see her fundamentalist upbringing, and how her sheltered childhood and stunted sexuality makes her appropriate prey for Madame Markos--or so we think. Johnson's performance strikes the right note between innocence and cunning, so that by the end we know a supernatural possession has taken place, but just who is the possessed and who is the possessor is left ambiguous. Swinton turns Madame Blanc into a politician of sorts, scheming to gain power within her coven, always keeping a knowing eye on Susie, treating her with a mix of condescension, suspicion, and admiration.
The women of the coven are an idiosyncratic, imposing, and often very funny ensemble, as Guadagnino embeds us in their routine of dinners, rituals, democratic votes; though the logic of it is sometimes confusing, their purposefulness always carries a sinister suggestion with it. I liked the varied personalities of the matrons in charge, particularly Angela Winkler as the stoic Mme. Tanner and Sylvie Testud as the frazzled Miss Griffith. Mia Goth is also impressive as Sara, the first dancer to befriend Susie, and the first to become suspicious of the matrons.
Guadagnino replaces Argento's traditional horror template of buildup and payoff with a constant thread of crescendo and decrescendo leading to a final conflagration. There are moments that hit hard--particularly one early in the film in which one of the more obstinate dancers meets an end that is particularly brutal, even by Argento standards--but the film maintains a quiet dread throughout, punctuated but not interrupted by moments of terror. Thom Yorke's dissonant score, reminiscent of Radiohead bandmate Jonny Greenwood's work on There Will Be Blood, tempers orchestral order with minimalist disorder.
Of course, Guadagnino and Kajganich do get a bit big for their britches; adapting a simple fairy-tale horror film to a very real Cold War backdrop doesn't come without its fair share of pretentiousness. The big climax, though it offers a satisfying turn in Susie's and Mme. Blanc's characters, doesn't quite manage to meld the obligatory bloodbath with the more serious setup, and Guadagnino's occasional camera trickery feels less like a necessary atmosphere and more like a cover for some narrative loopholes. He makes up for this in the epilogue, which offers a subtle statement of what the film has really been about. The last shot is sure to be debated, as it seems to jostle the film out of its previous context. I think that it, in conjunction with the one shot of Susie we see in the middle of the closing credits, reinforces the power of unity in the face of walls that separate us. If Argento's film portrays a force of darkness amid a normal world, Guadagnino's concerns a formidable, though brutal and uncompromising, force of unity amid a dark world.
*** 1/2 out of ****
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