It seems odd that after his wonderful Academy Award-winning The Lives of Others, Florian Henckel von Dammersmarck would choose a fanciful caper comedy/romance as his next project. Here we have a grand thriller in the Hitchcock tradition, with two gigantic stars and fascinating locations (John Seale's cinematography does them justice), directed by the man who made the somber character-driven drama about the sympathetic East German policeman. The Lives of Others was an amazing film; The Tourist less so, but it is no less amazing that it got made in the first place.
What this movie needed was a Stanley Donen type of director, one who knows how to play the audience like a piano. That is not quite what von Dammersmarck does here; he focuses less on the adventure and more on the characters, as you would expect the director of The Lives of Others to do. Audiences might go into The Tourist expecting a romantic thriller, when what they'll get is a thrilling romance.
And so The Tourist is not quite as interesting as it might have been. We get the sense that von Dammersmarck is primarily interested exploring a facet of the film that isn't meant to be terribly deep. Though romance can be the soul of a thriller, the fun is really in the thrills, of which The Tourist has too few. On this level it is a failure, but still an amiable and uncharacteristically ambitious failure.
We meet Elise Ward (Angelina Jolie) as she casually enjoys breakfast at a Paris cafe, tailed not-so-inconspicuously by police. Turns out she has a connection to a well-known British criminal named Alexander Pearce, who's been on the lam for two years, and Scotland Yard is hoping she'll lead them to him. To throw off their scent, she befriends an average schlub named Frank (Johnny Depp) on the train to Venice and casts the suspicion onto him. Once in Venice, Frank finds himself the target of the police and, more urgently, the very rich man that Pearce most recently stole from (Steven Berkoff).
This would have been the perfect setup for a lighthearted twisty-turny caper like Charade, with Depp in the Audrey Hepburn role as the unsuspecting innocent, and Jolie in the Cary Grant role as the player with all the cards, choosing which ones to deal at which times. Though Depp received some of the worst reviews imaginable, he's actually quite good in the role. Critics lambasted him as plain and melancholic, but that's the point: he's adept at playing someone who's plain to the extreme. Depp perfectly captures the bemusement of a regular Joe who's just been invited to spend a night in Venice with a gal who looks like Angelina Jolie, and overnight has police and thugs after him. Jolie is radiant, and she was born to play roles like this.
Then von Dammersmarck reveals that the movie will mainly be about their love affair, rather than the chase. These two really do end up falling in love, and the urgency, from von Dammersmarck's point of view, comes from the threat to their love rather than to Frank's life. Though the love story is well played, it renders secondary the more interesting part of the story. He essentially uses The Lives of Others as a template, and it doesn't fit.
I am giving the movie 3 stars. Why? Because it still made me smile in spite of its failures. I enjoyed Paul Bettany as the weathered Scotland Yard agent who's at the end of his rope. It's always good to see Steven Berkoff as the villain; he still possesses the same effortless menace that he did in Beverly Hills Cop all those years ago. And then there's Rufus Sewell, in an enigmatic role as a man who keeps turning up prominently in brief shots and on the side of the screen. Sewell is probably one of the first actors I'd notice if he were on the side somewhere.
Though The Tourist is not the refreshing diversion that we sometimes get when an auteur decides to take a break and make a genre film (like Steven Soderbergh did with Ocean's Eleven), it's not a case of the independent director selling out either. Though it's a big studio, big star movie, it is purely a Florian Henckel von Dammersmarck film. The romantic comic thriller may not be his strong suit, but now we know this is how he would have made one.
*** out of ****
Showing posts with label review. Show all posts
Showing posts with label review. Show all posts
Thursday, November 24, 2011
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
BREAKING DAWN PART 1: One disbeliever's honest appraisal of a movie that doesn't need his approval
To say that Breaking Dawn Part 1 breaks some new ground is not to say that it’s particularly noteworthy. Still, I must regretfully admit that in the teeny-bopper bottomless pit of money that is the Twilight series, it takes some risks that the other films haven’t, and unlike its leaden predecessors, by the end it has actually gone somewhere. It’s not the best of the series (the briskly paced New Moon remains the most bearable so far), but under the guidance of director Bill Condon (Gods and Monsters, Dreamgirls), it finally moves the story and characters forward. And what’s more, it gives Kristen Stewart something to do other than be plain, and Robert Pattinson something to do other than brood.
The wedding day has finally arrived, as Bella Swan (Stewart) is preparing to walk down the aisle to her 100-some-year-old vampire husband Edward Cullen (Pattinson). He whisks her away to a Brazil honeymoon, where they finally do that thing that married people do. Bella has, of course, remained a virgin until her wedding night; the much older Edward’s sexual history is unclear, another of the many nuggets of patriarchy in the often disturbingly conservative series. But I digress.
So yes, they do the nasty. Since the Twilight vampires have superhuman strength, Bella wakes up with bruises and aches. Edward, now frightened for her safety, retreats back to chastity. Then comes the morning sickness.
Though Breaking Dawn is slowly paced and never subtle, it at least tackles some of the more interesting questions about the vampire-human relationship. That this is the most sexually frank of the previously coy series is likely attributable to Condon, who directed Kinsey and rarely shies away from the big sexual questions. The early honeymoon scenes are a believable portrait of a couple struggling with their sexual chemistry.
When Bella becomes pregnant, the movie also isn’t afraid to delve into the consequences of having a vampire baby. The scenes in which we see the toll the pregnancy takes on Bella are surprisingly honest, graphic, and disturbing, with one hilariously gross blood-drinking scene and at least one moment that is reminiscent of the ordeal Christian Bale went through in The Machinist. Though the series has been known for its embrace of socially conservative values, the movie doesn’t shy away from the prospect of abortion, either. When Bella insists upon carrying to term, it is not because of a moral conviction (or a Mississippi personhood law); rather, it is a choice of hers based on what the baby means for her and Edward’s relationship.
Ms. Stewart, in her fourth time playing this role, is finally allowed to make it her own. To date, Bella has been defined mainly through the men she is interested in (Is it Edward? Is it Jacob?). In Breaking Dawn, we see what makes her tick. Condon injects life into the role and allows Stewart to have fun with it. Now we see not just a typical, plain, uncommonly reserved girl who is the object of desire for a couple of hunks, but a fragile yet determined young lady with desires of her own.
Mr. Pattinson is also better than usual; where his performances in the previous films seemed phony and furtive, here we sense that he is a kind, attentive, caring guy who’s just trying to do the best he can for his lady. His emotions come through as true feelings rather than affectations. Billy Burke continues to be entertaining as Bella’s kindly yet ineffectual father. The underused Sarah Clarke finally gets a few nice moments for herself as Bella’s mother.
That said, though Condon tries with all his might, the movie still isn’t particularly good. No matter what talented director tries his or her hand at it (Catherine Hardwicke, Chris Weitz, and David Slade have been the casualties so far), the writing remains incredibly poor. Not-so-freely adapted from Stephenie Meyer’s book by Melissa Rosenberg, each line of dialogue hits with a whopping thud. Though Condon coaxes good, thoughtful performances out of most of the actors, they cannot hope to wrap their mouths around the words without sounding phenomenally silly. Peter Facinelli, Elizabeth Reaser, and Nikki Reed are among the talented actors left to spout this nonsense, and fail to make much of an impression. Anna Kendrick once again manages to rise above it, but the movie has far too little of her for my liking.
As the hotheaded Jacob, Lautner continues to be the cast’s weak link. Though he certainly looks good without a shirt (and has appeared in the film for all of 1.5 seconds before he violently tears it off), he doesn’t fare as well when he’s required to talk. If the more accomplished actors have trouble with the insipid dialogue, Lautner doesn’t stand a chance.
While the makeup on Stewart showing Bella’s deterioration is disturbingly convincing, the visual effects are laughably bad. The CGI wolves that Jacob and his crew transform into are about as seamless as “South Park.” One scene in which the wolves telepathically communicate—with their human voices awkwardly playing in the background, no lips moving—begs to be drug into the street, shot, stuffed, and mounted. The visual effects were supervised by John Bruno, who performed the same job on Avatar, Terminator 2, The Abyss, Poltergeist, and Heavy Metal. Those are among the most visually engrossing films ever made. I assume Breaking Dawn, which looks like a Nick Jr. cartoon, will not be listed on his resume.
** 1/2 out of ****
The wedding day has finally arrived, as Bella Swan (Stewart) is preparing to walk down the aisle to her 100-some-year-old vampire husband Edward Cullen (Pattinson). He whisks her away to a Brazil honeymoon, where they finally do that thing that married people do. Bella has, of course, remained a virgin until her wedding night; the much older Edward’s sexual history is unclear, another of the many nuggets of patriarchy in the often disturbingly conservative series. But I digress.
So yes, they do the nasty. Since the Twilight vampires have superhuman strength, Bella wakes up with bruises and aches. Edward, now frightened for her safety, retreats back to chastity. Then comes the morning sickness.
Though Breaking Dawn is slowly paced and never subtle, it at least tackles some of the more interesting questions about the vampire-human relationship. That this is the most sexually frank of the previously coy series is likely attributable to Condon, who directed Kinsey and rarely shies away from the big sexual questions. The early honeymoon scenes are a believable portrait of a couple struggling with their sexual chemistry.
When Bella becomes pregnant, the movie also isn’t afraid to delve into the consequences of having a vampire baby. The scenes in which we see the toll the pregnancy takes on Bella are surprisingly honest, graphic, and disturbing, with one hilariously gross blood-drinking scene and at least one moment that is reminiscent of the ordeal Christian Bale went through in The Machinist. Though the series has been known for its embrace of socially conservative values, the movie doesn’t shy away from the prospect of abortion, either. When Bella insists upon carrying to term, it is not because of a moral conviction (or a Mississippi personhood law); rather, it is a choice of hers based on what the baby means for her and Edward’s relationship.
Ms. Stewart, in her fourth time playing this role, is finally allowed to make it her own. To date, Bella has been defined mainly through the men she is interested in (Is it Edward? Is it Jacob?). In Breaking Dawn, we see what makes her tick. Condon injects life into the role and allows Stewart to have fun with it. Now we see not just a typical, plain, uncommonly reserved girl who is the object of desire for a couple of hunks, but a fragile yet determined young lady with desires of her own.
Mr. Pattinson is also better than usual; where his performances in the previous films seemed phony and furtive, here we sense that he is a kind, attentive, caring guy who’s just trying to do the best he can for his lady. His emotions come through as true feelings rather than affectations. Billy Burke continues to be entertaining as Bella’s kindly yet ineffectual father. The underused Sarah Clarke finally gets a few nice moments for herself as Bella’s mother.
That said, though Condon tries with all his might, the movie still isn’t particularly good. No matter what talented director tries his or her hand at it (Catherine Hardwicke, Chris Weitz, and David Slade have been the casualties so far), the writing remains incredibly poor. Not-so-freely adapted from Stephenie Meyer’s book by Melissa Rosenberg, each line of dialogue hits with a whopping thud. Though Condon coaxes good, thoughtful performances out of most of the actors, they cannot hope to wrap their mouths around the words without sounding phenomenally silly. Peter Facinelli, Elizabeth Reaser, and Nikki Reed are among the talented actors left to spout this nonsense, and fail to make much of an impression. Anna Kendrick once again manages to rise above it, but the movie has far too little of her for my liking.
As the hotheaded Jacob, Lautner continues to be the cast’s weak link. Though he certainly looks good without a shirt (and has appeared in the film for all of 1.5 seconds before he violently tears it off), he doesn’t fare as well when he’s required to talk. If the more accomplished actors have trouble with the insipid dialogue, Lautner doesn’t stand a chance.
While the makeup on Stewart showing Bella’s deterioration is disturbingly convincing, the visual effects are laughably bad. The CGI wolves that Jacob and his crew transform into are about as seamless as “South Park.” One scene in which the wolves telepathically communicate—with their human voices awkwardly playing in the background, no lips moving—begs to be drug into the street, shot, stuffed, and mounted. The visual effects were supervised by John Bruno, who performed the same job on Avatar, Terminator 2, The Abyss, Poltergeist, and Heavy Metal. Those are among the most visually engrossing films ever made. I assume Breaking Dawn, which looks like a Nick Jr. cartoon, will not be listed on his resume.
** 1/2 out of ****
Friday, November 11, 2011
TAKE SHELTER (2011): Drizzle
Take Shelter sets itself up for a nor'easter and delivers a late afternoon shower. It's like a big hurricane that by the time it reaches you has already been downgraded to a tropical storm. The movie proves to us in its gripping first half that it's too smart for the meandering second half, and it contains a tour de force performance from Michael Shannon that it does not deserve.
Much like William Friedkin's Bug (which also starred Shannon), Take Shelter is an exploration of paranoid schizophrenia from the inside out. Curtis (Shannon) is a working-class family man with a caring wife, Samantha (Jessica Chastain), and daughter, Hannah (Tova Stewart). He has a good job, enough money to get by, health insurance, and friends. People respect him. His best friend and co-worker, Dewart (Shea Whigham), looks up to him. He lives a good life.
Then the nightmares begin to come. Curtis begins to see things in the sky that others do not: signs of a big storm coming. He sees raindrops that look like motor oil. He has a dream that the family dog attacks him, and another that zombie-like people kidnap Hannah.
Curtis takes action. He chains the dog up in the backyard. He begins renovating an old storm shelter in the backyard. Others don't understand why he feels the urgent need to do this, but Curtis does.
In the movie's early scenes, Shannon and writer-director Jeff Nichols create one of the most compelling portrayals of schizophrenia yet put on screen. What sets Curtis apart from most examples of mental illness is that he knows all along that he is sick, and there is nothing he can do about it. Just as with any disease, mere knowledge that he is sick is not enough to make him well. Curtis knows that what he's doing is ridiculous, but knows he has to do it. Because he is embarrassed, he hides it from his family. He reads up on mental illnesses. He talks to his doctor, who recommends he see a psychiatrist that is far out of his budget range. He knows of schizophrenia because his mother (Kathy Baker) was committed to a mental hospital when he was 10.
His disease progresses with terrifying logic. Samantha begins to worry. The amount of money he spends renovating the storm shelter begins to inhibit Hannah's upcoming cochlear implant surgery. His visions and nightmares affect his performance at work. Curtis's biggest fear is all that he has will be taken away from him, and he begins to see his fears come to life around him.
It's a shame, then, that the movie goes stagnant after its first hour. The tension, ever so gradually ratcheting, goes loose and the movie lets us off the hook. Curtis's disease becomes repetitive rather than progressive. A climactic fight between Curtis and another character seems to come out of nowhere, and one explosion of emotion from Curtis seems phony and histrionic.
The special effects, too, begin to get in the way, notably Curtis's recurring vision of birds flying in a strange formation. The birds are obviously the creation of CGI, and are so cartoonish that they take us right out of the picture. Better to use the Orson Welles method: shoot a few birds in close-up and use montage to make it look like a whole lot. The image of the storm-filled sky is also all too obviously animated.
The ending is a letdown. Without giving away too much, I can say that the movie might have ended perfectly with Curtis throwing open the shelter doors. Rather, it tacks on a coda that is meant to be foreboding but is only confounding and silly.
Take Shelter is a film of rare sensitivity; it is a gripping portrayal of a man who is always depended upon to be strong, brought down by the weakness of his fear. I doubt any actor other than Michael Shannon could have played this role successfully, and I would not count him out for an Oscar this year. Though the movie fails him in the end, his performance alone is enough to recommend it.
** 1/2 out of ****
P.S. Shannon has become one of my favorite actors over the past few years, and I feel the need to cite two previous standout performances of his that might otherwise go unnoticed: as a disgruntled mama's boy in Werner Herzog's underseen and brilliant My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, and as a white supremacist murderer in Bob Odenkirk's spotty but still quite funny Let's Go to Prison. Both films require him to segue between buffoonishness and imposing intimidation, which he does seamlessly. He's been compared to a young Christopher Walken, and rightly so. Walken is the only other actor who might possibly pull off this exchange, from Let's Go to Prison:
Shannon: "You remind me of my daddy."
Will Arnett: "I'm sure he was a great man."
Shannon: "I killed him."
Arnett: "You didn't kill him with kindness, did you?"
Shannon: "With a hammer."
Much like William Friedkin's Bug (which also starred Shannon), Take Shelter is an exploration of paranoid schizophrenia from the inside out. Curtis (Shannon) is a working-class family man with a caring wife, Samantha (Jessica Chastain), and daughter, Hannah (Tova Stewart). He has a good job, enough money to get by, health insurance, and friends. People respect him. His best friend and co-worker, Dewart (Shea Whigham), looks up to him. He lives a good life.
Then the nightmares begin to come. Curtis begins to see things in the sky that others do not: signs of a big storm coming. He sees raindrops that look like motor oil. He has a dream that the family dog attacks him, and another that zombie-like people kidnap Hannah.
Curtis takes action. He chains the dog up in the backyard. He begins renovating an old storm shelter in the backyard. Others don't understand why he feels the urgent need to do this, but Curtis does.
In the movie's early scenes, Shannon and writer-director Jeff Nichols create one of the most compelling portrayals of schizophrenia yet put on screen. What sets Curtis apart from most examples of mental illness is that he knows all along that he is sick, and there is nothing he can do about it. Just as with any disease, mere knowledge that he is sick is not enough to make him well. Curtis knows that what he's doing is ridiculous, but knows he has to do it. Because he is embarrassed, he hides it from his family. He reads up on mental illnesses. He talks to his doctor, who recommends he see a psychiatrist that is far out of his budget range. He knows of schizophrenia because his mother (Kathy Baker) was committed to a mental hospital when he was 10.
His disease progresses with terrifying logic. Samantha begins to worry. The amount of money he spends renovating the storm shelter begins to inhibit Hannah's upcoming cochlear implant surgery. His visions and nightmares affect his performance at work. Curtis's biggest fear is all that he has will be taken away from him, and he begins to see his fears come to life around him.
It's a shame, then, that the movie goes stagnant after its first hour. The tension, ever so gradually ratcheting, goes loose and the movie lets us off the hook. Curtis's disease becomes repetitive rather than progressive. A climactic fight between Curtis and another character seems to come out of nowhere, and one explosion of emotion from Curtis seems phony and histrionic.
The special effects, too, begin to get in the way, notably Curtis's recurring vision of birds flying in a strange formation. The birds are obviously the creation of CGI, and are so cartoonish that they take us right out of the picture. Better to use the Orson Welles method: shoot a few birds in close-up and use montage to make it look like a whole lot. The image of the storm-filled sky is also all too obviously animated.
The ending is a letdown. Without giving away too much, I can say that the movie might have ended perfectly with Curtis throwing open the shelter doors. Rather, it tacks on a coda that is meant to be foreboding but is only confounding and silly.
Take Shelter is a film of rare sensitivity; it is a gripping portrayal of a man who is always depended upon to be strong, brought down by the weakness of his fear. I doubt any actor other than Michael Shannon could have played this role successfully, and I would not count him out for an Oscar this year. Though the movie fails him in the end, his performance alone is enough to recommend it.
** 1/2 out of ****
P.S. Shannon has become one of my favorite actors over the past few years, and I feel the need to cite two previous standout performances of his that might otherwise go unnoticed: as a disgruntled mama's boy in Werner Herzog's underseen and brilliant My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, and as a white supremacist murderer in Bob Odenkirk's spotty but still quite funny Let's Go to Prison. Both films require him to segue between buffoonishness and imposing intimidation, which he does seamlessly. He's been compared to a young Christopher Walken, and rightly so. Walken is the only other actor who might possibly pull off this exchange, from Let's Go to Prison:
Shannon: "You remind me of my daddy."
Will Arnett: "I'm sure he was a great man."
Shannon: "I killed him."
Arnett: "You didn't kill him with kindness, did you?"
Shannon: "With a hammer."
Saturday, October 22, 2011
PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 3 (2011)
That the Paranormal Activity series has stuck comfortably close to its formula is no surprise. Sticking to formula is generally how long-running series succeed: look at Final Destination, or Saw, or Halloween or Friday the 13th or A Nightmare on Elm Street or "Law & Order." The third entry in the wildly successful series wisely doesn't cheat on its gimmick: the entire film is presented as found footage, edited together after the fact.
The first film, directed by first-timer Oren Peli, was a brilliant shiver-inducing piece of work. It was fascinating in its simplicity; though we never believed for a second that it was authentic, each scene was unquestionably real. For part 2, director Tod Williams (The Door in the Floor) effectively guided the film through the pitfalls of its pop culture identity, and balanced the framing device of the original with a few tried-and-true horror movie formula tricks to make it an entertaining thrill ride, even if it lacked the raw power of the original.
In Paranormal Activity 3, the gimmick begins to get just a little bit tired. Peli made a huge splash by setting most of his film at night, with the characters all asleep and one stationary camera recording all the devious things that they don't see. Williams continued the trend in part 2 by opening the footage up to the whole house, with three security cameras doing the same duty.
Here, the contribution of directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman is to set the film in the 1980s, with several VHS cameras recording all that happens. It's an interesting premise, since the limits in technology prevent the characters from recording more than 6 hours at a time, viewing and editing requires a great deal more work, and tripods are clunky and can easily tip over. The directors do just enough with this idea that we wish they had done more: videotapes always seem to be in plentiful supply, even though the characters use 4 per camera per day. Though the movie features a constant "retro" timestamp at the bottom right, it still appears to have been shot on digital video in widescreen; if it had been shot on actual VHS, it might have come with an eerier found-footage atmosphere, kind of like the 16mm black-and-white camera in The Blair Witch Project.
We meet Katie and Kristi, the two sisters we got to know in the previous two films. Here, they're young children, played by Chloe Csengery and Jessica Tyler Brown. They live fairly happily with their mom Julie (Lauren Bittner) and mom's boyfriend Dennis (Chris Smith). Then Kristi begins talking with an invisible friend she calls Toby, who warns her not to tell anyone of their conversations.
The quiet nighttime scenes, so scarily foreshadowing in the first film, are perfunctory and inert here. The usual bumps in the night take place. Light fixtures sway, doors squeak shut, bedsheets ripple. Something appears to be coming from Kristi and Katie's bedroom closet. In the middle of the night Kristi gets up and talks to the closet door, which is just behind the camera and to the left. It does not say much for the intelligence of the characters in this movie that after viewing the footage each day, nobody thinks to point the camera at the damn closet.
By nature of the movie's premise, it still comes preloaded with a bit of urgency. Since it's supposedly been edited down from many hours of found footage, there is the sense that every scene has a reason for being shown, which calls the audience's attention to all parts of the screen at all times. The movie revisits the now-famous device in which the timestamp speeds up and then slows down to signify that something important is about to happen. This is a surefire way to raise tension, but the series has used it so many times that it has barely any effect anymore.
Still, the movie does deliver the shocks it promises. The directors, who previously made the documentary-style Catfish, have mastered the first-person format well enough so that we still find terror in what we don't see. They find a brilliant device in the oscillating camera, constructed by Dennis from an oscillating fan, which pans from the living room to the kitchen with the ostensible purpose of showing us what's happening in both rooms, but with the ulterior purpose of concealing what's happening in the other room at the time. This paves the way for a few wonderful scares, my favorite involving a crafty babysitter.
Also, unlike the ultimately disappointing part 2, this film spends comparatively little time on plot and, like the original, devotes most of its time to setting up the tension. Though there is a backstory about demons and witches, it is only a McGuffin and the movie mostly dismisses it in favor of suspense. It also ramps up the tension considerably toward the end, leaving us with a third act which is, if nothing groundbreaking, appropriately spooky and satisfying.
Though Paranormal Activity 3 still manages to keep the popular franchise alive, the wrinkles are beginning to show. Both sequels have been significantly less tight than the original, and have been regressing into horror movie cliche. Take, for example, the repeated use of the It's Only A device. A character hears a noise, goes to check it out, and a startling BANG! Turns out it was only the wife, or the kid, or the cat, or the dog. Since the footage in Paranormal Activity 3 was allegedly found and edited into shape by a third party, we have to assume this person was thinking, "I know there are horrible things to come, but I think I'll throw in this part where it was only the wife, just for giggles."
** 1/2 out of ****
The first film, directed by first-timer Oren Peli, was a brilliant shiver-inducing piece of work. It was fascinating in its simplicity; though we never believed for a second that it was authentic, each scene was unquestionably real. For part 2, director Tod Williams (The Door in the Floor) effectively guided the film through the pitfalls of its pop culture identity, and balanced the framing device of the original with a few tried-and-true horror movie formula tricks to make it an entertaining thrill ride, even if it lacked the raw power of the original.
In Paranormal Activity 3, the gimmick begins to get just a little bit tired. Peli made a huge splash by setting most of his film at night, with the characters all asleep and one stationary camera recording all the devious things that they don't see. Williams continued the trend in part 2 by opening the footage up to the whole house, with three security cameras doing the same duty.
Here, the contribution of directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman is to set the film in the 1980s, with several VHS cameras recording all that happens. It's an interesting premise, since the limits in technology prevent the characters from recording more than 6 hours at a time, viewing and editing requires a great deal more work, and tripods are clunky and can easily tip over. The directors do just enough with this idea that we wish they had done more: videotapes always seem to be in plentiful supply, even though the characters use 4 per camera per day. Though the movie features a constant "retro" timestamp at the bottom right, it still appears to have been shot on digital video in widescreen; if it had been shot on actual VHS, it might have come with an eerier found-footage atmosphere, kind of like the 16mm black-and-white camera in The Blair Witch Project.
We meet Katie and Kristi, the two sisters we got to know in the previous two films. Here, they're young children, played by Chloe Csengery and Jessica Tyler Brown. They live fairly happily with their mom Julie (Lauren Bittner) and mom's boyfriend Dennis (Chris Smith). Then Kristi begins talking with an invisible friend she calls Toby, who warns her not to tell anyone of their conversations.
The quiet nighttime scenes, so scarily foreshadowing in the first film, are perfunctory and inert here. The usual bumps in the night take place. Light fixtures sway, doors squeak shut, bedsheets ripple. Something appears to be coming from Kristi and Katie's bedroom closet. In the middle of the night Kristi gets up and talks to the closet door, which is just behind the camera and to the left. It does not say much for the intelligence of the characters in this movie that after viewing the footage each day, nobody thinks to point the camera at the damn closet.
By nature of the movie's premise, it still comes preloaded with a bit of urgency. Since it's supposedly been edited down from many hours of found footage, there is the sense that every scene has a reason for being shown, which calls the audience's attention to all parts of the screen at all times. The movie revisits the now-famous device in which the timestamp speeds up and then slows down to signify that something important is about to happen. This is a surefire way to raise tension, but the series has used it so many times that it has barely any effect anymore.
Still, the movie does deliver the shocks it promises. The directors, who previously made the documentary-style Catfish, have mastered the first-person format well enough so that we still find terror in what we don't see. They find a brilliant device in the oscillating camera, constructed by Dennis from an oscillating fan, which pans from the living room to the kitchen with the ostensible purpose of showing us what's happening in both rooms, but with the ulterior purpose of concealing what's happening in the other room at the time. This paves the way for a few wonderful scares, my favorite involving a crafty babysitter.
Also, unlike the ultimately disappointing part 2, this film spends comparatively little time on plot and, like the original, devotes most of its time to setting up the tension. Though there is a backstory about demons and witches, it is only a McGuffin and the movie mostly dismisses it in favor of suspense. It also ramps up the tension considerably toward the end, leaving us with a third act which is, if nothing groundbreaking, appropriately spooky and satisfying.
Though Paranormal Activity 3 still manages to keep the popular franchise alive, the wrinkles are beginning to show. Both sequels have been significantly less tight than the original, and have been regressing into horror movie cliche. Take, for example, the repeated use of the It's Only A device. A character hears a noise, goes to check it out, and a startling BANG! Turns out it was only the wife, or the kid, or the cat, or the dog. Since the footage in Paranormal Activity 3 was allegedly found and edited into shape by a third party, we have to assume this person was thinking, "I know there are horrible things to come, but I think I'll throw in this part where it was only the wife, just for giggles."
** 1/2 out of ****
Thursday, September 29, 2011
Shock and Yawn: THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE (FIRST SEQUENCE) (2010)
The Human Centipede suffers from what psychologists call the availability heuristic. The availability heuristic is the assumption that a certain event is likely or possible because of how easy it is to imagine. More and more movies suffer from it nowadays, especially as the increase in CGI makes more things that might be impossible in real life more likely on screen. Events are decided based on how easy the image is to put together, rather than how likely the event would be to happen. It’s easy to imagine Bruce Willis casually stepping out of a car that’s spinning out of control, like he does in RED, but not quite so plausible in real life.
It’s also easy to imagine a German scientist kidnapping tourists and sewing their lips to each other’s anuses to make one big long segmented animal. Disgusting, yes, but easy to imagine. That is the starting-off point for Tom Six’s (his real name) The Human Centipede. The trouble is that’s pretty much his ending point too.
Dr. Heiter (Dieter Laser, his real name) is quite a madman indeed. He introduces himself as Germany’s foremost surgeon for separating conjoined twins. Over the course of The Human Centipede (First Sequence), he kidnaps several people, sedates them, and when they wake up, they are joined together, one in front of the other. This explains why he was the conjoined twin guy and not a gastroenterologist.
It’s at this point that even the most sicko horror fan begins to ask what the point is. There really isn’t a whole lot of bodily terror in the film; there’s a lot more wincing and almost-vomiting to be done at the mere description of the premise than at anything that happens in the film. The scenes of the human centipede are filmed gingerly enough so that we’re sure that the actors aren’t being put through the same trials as the characters.
The grotesqueness of the premise has led some critics to compare Six to David Cronenberg. Let it be known that Cronenberg’s superiority is not limited to number of syllables. While Cronenberg dealt with bodily invasion just as gleefully, many of his films were political and social allegories that used their gore to make a point.
Six hints that he’s going to go there at times. Early in the film, one character has a chance to kill herself rather than go through such a horrible experience; this might have posed the question of at which point life becomes not worth saving. The fusing of three people together might have made an interesting allegory about loss of individuality; what happens when you, formerly a human being, are now just a cog in a larger organism and have to do your part to make it work? You don’t have to look too deep to see the parallels to Communism.
For the most part, Six is content to stick with the old Friday the 13th formula. Hapless victims get lost in the woods, are preyed upon by a maniac, try to escape to no avail, are tortured. The end. The problem with the film isn’t that Six has no boundaries and pushes the envelope too far; rather, it’s that he’s too Hollywood to do anything interesting with the film. His Human Centipede is at heart the same as any paint-by-numbers big-studio flick that takes a grabber of a premise and leaves it to die.
The production is slickly made and extremely well-shot for what it is. Six and cinematographer Goof de Koning (his real name) make Dr. Heiter’s house into a living, breathing, antibacterial nightmare with long constrictive corridors and very few windows. Six stages several very effective chase scenes all within those walls: no easy feat.
Mr. Laser, who looks like Christopher Walken with a facelift, plays Dr. Heiter as well as he can under the circumstances, though the role is really impossible to play. How to play a man so dementedly brilliant, yet so stupid that he doesn’t realize why the back end of the centipede is going to die of dysentery eventually? Why wouldn’t he realize that a human centipede is no good if the front segment is the only one that survives? Most mad scientists have a madness that speaks to their purpose.
The three segments of the centipede—Akihiro Kitamura, Ashley C. Williams, and Ashlynn Yennie, in that order—are completely believable. All Kitamura has to do as the centipede’s head is scream epithets in Japanese. Well, what would you do if you were the head of a human centipede and spoke only Japanese?
Six is not an untalented director, and I suspect he may have a future making normal films. His path will probably follow that of John Waters, who started out making trash and graduated to some truly great (if not completely untrashy) films. The Human Centipede is Six’s Pink Flamingos, and now that he’s gotten everyone’s attention he will move on to better things, like... let me check... The Human Centipede 2. So there you go.
* 1/2 out of ****
It’s also easy to imagine a German scientist kidnapping tourists and sewing their lips to each other’s anuses to make one big long segmented animal. Disgusting, yes, but easy to imagine. That is the starting-off point for Tom Six’s (his real name) The Human Centipede. The trouble is that’s pretty much his ending point too.
Dr. Heiter (Dieter Laser, his real name) is quite a madman indeed. He introduces himself as Germany’s foremost surgeon for separating conjoined twins. Over the course of The Human Centipede (First Sequence), he kidnaps several people, sedates them, and when they wake up, they are joined together, one in front of the other. This explains why he was the conjoined twin guy and not a gastroenterologist.
It’s at this point that even the most sicko horror fan begins to ask what the point is. There really isn’t a whole lot of bodily terror in the film; there’s a lot more wincing and almost-vomiting to be done at the mere description of the premise than at anything that happens in the film. The scenes of the human centipede are filmed gingerly enough so that we’re sure that the actors aren’t being put through the same trials as the characters.
The grotesqueness of the premise has led some critics to compare Six to David Cronenberg. Let it be known that Cronenberg’s superiority is not limited to number of syllables. While Cronenberg dealt with bodily invasion just as gleefully, many of his films were political and social allegories that used their gore to make a point.
Six hints that he’s going to go there at times. Early in the film, one character has a chance to kill herself rather than go through such a horrible experience; this might have posed the question of at which point life becomes not worth saving. The fusing of three people together might have made an interesting allegory about loss of individuality; what happens when you, formerly a human being, are now just a cog in a larger organism and have to do your part to make it work? You don’t have to look too deep to see the parallels to Communism.
For the most part, Six is content to stick with the old Friday the 13th formula. Hapless victims get lost in the woods, are preyed upon by a maniac, try to escape to no avail, are tortured. The end. The problem with the film isn’t that Six has no boundaries and pushes the envelope too far; rather, it’s that he’s too Hollywood to do anything interesting with the film. His Human Centipede is at heart the same as any paint-by-numbers big-studio flick that takes a grabber of a premise and leaves it to die.
The production is slickly made and extremely well-shot for what it is. Six and cinematographer Goof de Koning (his real name) make Dr. Heiter’s house into a living, breathing, antibacterial nightmare with long constrictive corridors and very few windows. Six stages several very effective chase scenes all within those walls: no easy feat.
Mr. Laser, who looks like Christopher Walken with a facelift, plays Dr. Heiter as well as he can under the circumstances, though the role is really impossible to play. How to play a man so dementedly brilliant, yet so stupid that he doesn’t realize why the back end of the centipede is going to die of dysentery eventually? Why wouldn’t he realize that a human centipede is no good if the front segment is the only one that survives? Most mad scientists have a madness that speaks to their purpose.
The three segments of the centipede—Akihiro Kitamura, Ashley C. Williams, and Ashlynn Yennie, in that order—are completely believable. All Kitamura has to do as the centipede’s head is scream epithets in Japanese. Well, what would you do if you were the head of a human centipede and spoke only Japanese?
Six is not an untalented director, and I suspect he may have a future making normal films. His path will probably follow that of John Waters, who started out making trash and graduated to some truly great (if not completely untrashy) films. The Human Centipede is Six’s Pink Flamingos, and now that he’s gotten everyone’s attention he will move on to better things, like... let me check... The Human Centipede 2. So there you go.
* 1/2 out of ****
Sunday, September 25, 2011
Helplessness Blues: Steven Soderbergh's CONTAGION (2011)
Steven Soderbergh's Contagion starts out as the kind of epic thriller that was Irwin Allen's specialty: a large-scale disaster unites a team of big movie stars who work together to fix it. It ends, however, with a sincere plea for order and patience in a world of chaos and mistrust. The movie tracks the global spread of a fatal disease, but at the outset a plague of cynicism has already taken its toll.
The world in which it takes place is eerily real. The movie chronicles a near-apocalypse that, based on how the public tends to react, I believe could happen. An outbreak of a deadly flu-like virus originating in China, or perhaps Chicago, is spreading faster than scientists can examine it. It's airborne and scoots from person to person with a mere touch. The average person touches his or her face thousands of times a day, one character explains. That's a big deal, when you consider what else that person has touched.
A vaccine might be feasible in three months, after the virus has been created in a lab, developed into an antivirus, tested on animals and then on humans. When thousands have been killed in 14 days, this is not a promising solution.
An epidemic specialist (Kate Winslet) gathers evidence about the virus. Lab scientists (Jennifer Ehle, Elliott Gould, Demetri Martin) work to create a vaccine. A WHO doctor (Marion Cotillard) investigates the disease's origin in China. A CDC official (Laurence Fishburne) tries to juggle the entire situation. A conspiracy theorist blogger (Jude Law) points fingers at the government's ties to pharmaceutical companies, and rallies his alleged 12 million readers around his skeptical vision.
The panic spreads even faster than the disease. There is no cut-and-dry way to deal with the growing disaster, as I suspect there would not be in real life. Certainly everyone would agree that the CDC does need to keep certain things secret to avoid widespread panic, but how much can be kept from the public before it starts to demand answers? How do you tell someone that there is a 1 in 4 chance he's going to die? How do you keep police on the streets when they're in danger of dropping dead? Firemen at work? Grocery stores open? How do you stop looting from happening? How do you explain to a nation of people afraid of sudden death that they need to wait 3 months for a vaccine? One government official makes the questionable suggestion, "Let's make sure nobody knows until everybody knows." Uh-huh. Law's slimy would-be journalist salts the wound, leading people onto a bogus holistic cure, which prompts riots at drugstores when supplies run low.
As he did with Traffic, his multi-plotted exploration of the drug business, Soderbergh weaves in and out of each facet of the story with ease, casting recognizable actors in each key role to help keep them straight. Also like Traffic, Contagion is a movie about good people trying to do their jobs the best they can under the circumstances, where there is no right answer and they have to settle for the least wrong. Even the smarmy blogger isn't completely wrongheaded.
The cast is stellar. Fishburne in particular returns to form after some years toiling in the depressing Matrix (and the even more depressing 21). The crooked-toothed Law is a perfect balance of rightful questioner, Glenn Beckian populist rabble-rouser, and sleazoid opportunist. The presence of should-have-been-Oscar-winner John Hawkes, though he only appears in a few short scenes, lends the film a heartbreaking humanity, so that the scenes within the government are more than mere procedure. Only the sections of the film that follow Ehle and Cotillard come up short; though they make sense within the plot, their characters seem too good to be true.
At the center of the film is Matt Damon, in one of his best performances yet. He plays Mitch, whose wife, Beth (Gwyneth Paltrow), is the first known infected. Damon surprisingly channels Gregory Peck, playing a husband and father who takes it upon himself to remain cool, collected, and reasonable while the world crumbles around him. When his daughter (Anna Jacoby-Heron) turns up uninfected, he does exactly the right thing to protect her and keeps doing the right thing, as a calming antithesis to the public's riotous reaction.
Soderbergh has said that he set up to make a realist version of an Irwin Allen movie, and that's what he's done. Contagion is a brilliant exploration of a feasible outbreak, as well as a warning to a cynical public who are quick to point blame when things go wrong, but too numb to notice how often they touch their faces.
*** 1/2 out of ****
The world in which it takes place is eerily real. The movie chronicles a near-apocalypse that, based on how the public tends to react, I believe could happen. An outbreak of a deadly flu-like virus originating in China, or perhaps Chicago, is spreading faster than scientists can examine it. It's airborne and scoots from person to person with a mere touch. The average person touches his or her face thousands of times a day, one character explains. That's a big deal, when you consider what else that person has touched.
A vaccine might be feasible in three months, after the virus has been created in a lab, developed into an antivirus, tested on animals and then on humans. When thousands have been killed in 14 days, this is not a promising solution.
An epidemic specialist (Kate Winslet) gathers evidence about the virus. Lab scientists (Jennifer Ehle, Elliott Gould, Demetri Martin) work to create a vaccine. A WHO doctor (Marion Cotillard) investigates the disease's origin in China. A CDC official (Laurence Fishburne) tries to juggle the entire situation. A conspiracy theorist blogger (Jude Law) points fingers at the government's ties to pharmaceutical companies, and rallies his alleged 12 million readers around his skeptical vision.
The panic spreads even faster than the disease. There is no cut-and-dry way to deal with the growing disaster, as I suspect there would not be in real life. Certainly everyone would agree that the CDC does need to keep certain things secret to avoid widespread panic, but how much can be kept from the public before it starts to demand answers? How do you tell someone that there is a 1 in 4 chance he's going to die? How do you keep police on the streets when they're in danger of dropping dead? Firemen at work? Grocery stores open? How do you stop looting from happening? How do you explain to a nation of people afraid of sudden death that they need to wait 3 months for a vaccine? One government official makes the questionable suggestion, "Let's make sure nobody knows until everybody knows." Uh-huh. Law's slimy would-be journalist salts the wound, leading people onto a bogus holistic cure, which prompts riots at drugstores when supplies run low.
As he did with Traffic, his multi-plotted exploration of the drug business, Soderbergh weaves in and out of each facet of the story with ease, casting recognizable actors in each key role to help keep them straight. Also like Traffic, Contagion is a movie about good people trying to do their jobs the best they can under the circumstances, where there is no right answer and they have to settle for the least wrong. Even the smarmy blogger isn't completely wrongheaded.
The cast is stellar. Fishburne in particular returns to form after some years toiling in the depressing Matrix (and the even more depressing 21). The crooked-toothed Law is a perfect balance of rightful questioner, Glenn Beckian populist rabble-rouser, and sleazoid opportunist. The presence of should-have-been-Oscar-winner John Hawkes, though he only appears in a few short scenes, lends the film a heartbreaking humanity, so that the scenes within the government are more than mere procedure. Only the sections of the film that follow Ehle and Cotillard come up short; though they make sense within the plot, their characters seem too good to be true.
At the center of the film is Matt Damon, in one of his best performances yet. He plays Mitch, whose wife, Beth (Gwyneth Paltrow), is the first known infected. Damon surprisingly channels Gregory Peck, playing a husband and father who takes it upon himself to remain cool, collected, and reasonable while the world crumbles around him. When his daughter (Anna Jacoby-Heron) turns up uninfected, he does exactly the right thing to protect her and keeps doing the right thing, as a calming antithesis to the public's riotous reaction.
Soderbergh has said that he set up to make a realist version of an Irwin Allen movie, and that's what he's done. Contagion is a brilliant exploration of a feasible outbreak, as well as a warning to a cynical public who are quick to point blame when things go wrong, but too numb to notice how often they touch their faces.
*** 1/2 out of ****
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