What a harrowing, draining film this was. Werner Herzog is one of my favorite directors, and is perfectly suited to this, the story of Dieter Dengler, an American pilot shot down in Laos back when the Vietnam war was still being called a confrontation, and who escaped a P.O.W. camp and a treacherous jungle to make his way back home. Indeed, Herzog is so perfectly attuned to this story that this is the second time he’s filmed it; a decade ago, he made Little Dieter Needs to Fly, a documentary featuring Dengler himself telling his story.
I didn’t see that film, but this filmic retelling, with Christian Bale as Dengler, has a great deal of power to it. I have this listed as a war film, but there’s virtually no combat to be had in this; rather there’s virtually no soldier-versus-soldier combat to be had, instead giving us people on both sides of the conflict just being relentlessly beaten down by the environment around them, and by time itself. As soon as Dengler arrives at the camp, he starts talking with his fellow inmates about plans of escape, before being told he would have to wait until the rainy season for any chance of survival, which is five to six months away. Half the film is spent with the cast slowly wasting away at the camp, with food so scarce that even the guards are hungry enough to begin considering executing all the prisoners and claiming they tried to escape, just so they could go home and try to find food there. Bale is no stranger to weight loss for a movie role, as his 63 pound loss for his horrifying role in The Machinist holds the known record for weight loss by any actor for a role. It was interesting to see Steve Zahn and Jeremy Davies as fellow inmates, though, both of which had been there months before his arrival and who are basically broken-down husks more than people. Davies in particular looks barely there, as his shirtless physique resembles a concentration camp survivor more than anything else.
Eventually, of course, they make their escape, and Bale and Zahn strike off together in search of rescue. As was predicted by Zahn, this is every bit as perilous as the camp itself was. If there is a constant theme in Herzog’s work, it is that nature is an all-powerful, chaotic beast that is fully capable of destroying us if we are not constantly on our guard, and that theme is fully on display in the jungles of Laos. They are continually beset by the likes of mudslides, leeches, patrols, and the ever-present curse of starvation, which wears them down so much that they eventually make the foolhardy mistake of exposing themselves to a villager in the hopes that he will let them have some food. The ending is obviously not very much in doubt, since Dieter’s story would never have been known if he didn’t make it back (indeed, Little Dieter Needs to Fly would have been particularly hard to make), but the journey he takes along the way is just brutal and agonizing.
Rating: *** ½
Friday, November 30, 2007
Rescue Dawn
Thursday, November 29, 2007
Begotten
This is one of the fabled horror films that is pretty much impossible to acquire (unless you’re willing to drop a hundred bucks ordering a used copy from someone on Amazon). If you go to horror discussion groups like I do because I have no life you’ll occasionally see someone speaking about it in hushed, awed tones, like they got one step closer to something divine by the sheer virtue of having watched it. Now that I’ve finally acquired a copy of my very own through questionable means, I’m beginning to understand how they all felt.
There really is no other movie like this one. It’s essentially a filmed nightmare; there are no spoken words, and only a plot in the vaguest terms. What we get instead are a series of haunting images, opening with God disemboweling himself, releasing the Earth Mother from within him (none of this is explained within the film, mind you, I had to wait for the end credits to find out who these people represented), who then impregnates herself with him and gives birth to Son of Earth, both of whom wander a barren landscape until being attacked and destroyed by an unnamed group of people.
Just listed like that it sounds like an incredibly pretentious play that would likely have a total audience of five multi-lingual snobs with bad facial hair, but it is absolutely saved by the amazing visual and audio style. You know how every good horror movie has those shots within them that are just perfectly evocative of pure dread? Shots of blood dripping down a leg, or a group of cloaked people walking against the moonlight, stuff that is pure horror, and looks wonderful. This film, essentially, is a collection of those shots without any worrying about the plot getting in the way. The film is in black and white, with an overexposed negative, a grainy look, and numerous scratches to almost give it the look of a long-lost silent film print that someone just discovered in their garage. The sound is also incredible; with no spoken dialogue or music, it instead relies entirely upon sound effects, like running water or dripping blood or insects buzzing by, to give an aural feel equivalent to the visuals.
That said, the film does have a pretty big flaw, and that is its length. It’s a good deal shorter than an average movie (IMDB lists it at 78 minutes, though my copy was only 72), but it drags out too much towards the end. It would have been a masterpiece at thirty minutes; at 70+ it’s only good. Still, anyone who wants a visual representation of how to push the limits of what a no-budget film can do should definitely check this film out. Just good luck finding it.
Rating: ***
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Sawdust & Tinsel
If there’s one thing that I’ve learned from years of watching Bergman films, it’s that I never want to go to Sweden. You hear interest groups complain all the time about the poor treatment Arabs or blacks get in the cinema, but you never hear anyone talk about the decades of negative portrayals the Swedes have gotten at the hands of their resident pessimist Ingmar. All that I know of Swedish people is from these movies, and they are all filled with miserable, negative people that go around actively engaged in the pursuit of making themselves and everyone around them more miserable. That level of psychic damage can irreparably harm a nation, and if you don’t believe me, just ask the Germans what the psychic trauma of knowing they were the bad guys in two successive world wars did to their appreciation of pornography.
While Bergman had made some decent movies before this, it was here, with his (appropriately enough) thirteenth film, where he really came into his own. His familiar themes of depression and humiliation come to the fore here, as he follows a circus troupe that seems to be on its last legs as it arrives at a new town in search of the money it desperately needs to continue. Along their way, they find adversity in the form of pretty much everyone they encounter, up to and including each other. The ringleader of the show, Albert, and his wife Anne make up the main part of the film, as the two are constantly fighting for one-upsmanship in their relationship, which I think you’ll agree is always the sign of a happy couple.
The best, and certainly most easily quotable, example of their humiliation comes when Albert and his wife visit the town’s lecherous theater director hoping to borrow some of his costumes for their show that night. The director openly despises them for being the bottom rung of the entertainer ladder, and has no problem telling them so, in a searing speech in which he explains that he insults them because they let him, and that “you only risk your lives. We risk our pride,” before letting them go. This may all seem a tad harsh, but when you see how abysmal their show actually is, you’ll begin to understand.
I can’t honestly say this ranks up there with Bergman’s best works. It lacks the gravitas of such masterpieces as The Seventh Seal or Persona, as its main insight into the human condition is that we’re all a bunch of creeps, wading through the miasma of pain that is life. Frankly, I could have gotten that from almost every other film of his. For what it is, though, it is very good. This film will only appeal to a pretty select group of people, and if you’ve read this far, you probably already know if you’re part of that select group.
Rating: ***
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Manhunt
Since I had been enjoying the new one so much, I figured I’d double back and replay the original game. This was doubly important, as I had never actually beaten the game originally, instead getting about three quarters of the way through before being distracted by something or other, and then never came back to it. I’m a little ADD, I admit.
It’s interesting to go back to this after having played through the sequel to see how things have changed. The controls, for one, are absolutely better in the sequel, the most important difference being that in this one, you can’t climb over anything. This leads to such situations as you being trapped in corners by hunters when there’s visible escape paths all around you that you can’t get to because you can’t clamber up onto platforms that don’t even come up to your waist. It’s not usually an issue, but it can be maddening when you’re frenziedly running from a gang of hunters that have spotted you.
In almost every other way, though, it’s superior to its successor. It’s both longer and harder, giving it a longer shelf life than the sequel. Additionally, the enemies are more varied and interesting, with the various gangs of hunters trying to kill you each having a nice, distinctive look to them, and seem a good deal smarter than those in the sequel, which largely appear fairly oblivious to your presence (in fairness to the sequel, it at least can boast of somewhat better level design). The graphics are simultaneously worse and better than in the sequel; worse in general, as could be expected by virtue of it being a couple years older, but better in the sense that its executions are totally unfiltered, so you can watch the violence totally uncensored.
This game is certainly not going to be to everyone’s tastes. Being a game that’s basically based around sneaking up behind people and murdering them, it’s going to appeal more to horror fans than anyone else. Still, for those who can get into such a game, and if you’re reading this site you more than likely are such a person, there is quite a lot to like about this. If you have a PS2, you should certainly try to hunt down a copy.
Rating: *** ½
Monday, November 26, 2007
Hitman
Well, as promised, here’s a review of Hitman. I wasn’t really expecting this to be anything worth watching, judging by the past pedigree of movies based on video games (the best I had seen thus far was Silent Hill, and even that’s only likely to appeal to horror fans). Moreover, it was by a director I had never heard of, and starred Timothy Olyphant, a man I’ve never really been all that impressed by. Still, despite all that, I had a free pass to see it, and damn if I wasn’t going to use it.
All that said, this was actually a pretty fun movie. For an action movie, there are surprisingly few big action sequences, the film wisely preferring to focus instead on exploring the world of the mysterious organization that raises people like Olyphant from birth to be assassins, and how they would operate when forced to live in the real world. The best part of this are easily his interactions with Nika, a prostitute he rescues early on and then takes along with him “for her protection”. Trained to be a perfect killing machine, he has no idea what to do with a woman, and her attempt to seduce him leads to the film’s greatest payoff.
Somewhat less impressive are the action scenes. An early throwdown as he tries to escape a hotel swarming with Russian police works well, as does the big climax, but the battles in between aren’t so good. He randomly engages in a sword fight with several other hitmen from the Organization in a train station that just seems randomly thrown in for fear that the audience will revolt without enough action, as does a later scene at an arms dealer’s. When it focuses more on Olyphant’s interactions with Nika, or his cat and mouse game with an Interpol agent trying to arrest him, the film works a good deal better. I guess this is one of those movies that’s just kind of trapped by its genre into being a bit less than it could have been.
Rating: ***
Sunday, November 25, 2007
Live Free or Die Hard
While I confess I haven’t seen every action film that’s out this year, I can say with some measure of confidence that any other such movies are going to have an uphill battle convincing me that it, and not this film, is the best action movie of the year. This movie is that good.
It’s been twelve years since the last Die Hard movie, and poor John McClane’s life is in its usual shambles. His wife’s out of the picture, his daughter’s taken her mom’s last name and doesn’t want to be on speaking terms with him, and now he’s the only man available to save the world from cyber terrorists. Worse still, he’s accompanied on this mission by an incredibly obnoxious hacker sidekick who, in the grand Hollywood tradition, continues to perpetuate the myth that hackers are attractive people (a cameo by Kevin Smith as a fellow hacker is much closer to the truth).
While said sidekick, Justin Long, is very irritating, he’s also mostly relegated to the background as Willis takes the stage. This isn’t a Die Hard With a Vengeance type deal where they both get equal billing, Long seems to be there mainly to work computers and draw in young girls to the audience while Willis guns everyone down and blows up a bunch of stuff. The action scenes, as one might think was obvious, are really where the movie shines. The stuff in this movie is, quite frankly, so ridiculously over the top that it transforms itself into sheer brilliance. I’ll give one example of what I mean. About a third of the way through the movie, Willis and Long are being chased by gunmen in a helicopter, and flee into a tunnel to escape. Their enemies, having already seized control of the traffic system, try to draw them out by first opening up every lane for incoming traffic on the end of the tunnel they’re driving toward, and then opening up every lane on the other side, forcing them to flee their car to avoid being hit by a mass of cars coming at them from both directions by evidently suicidal drivers. Willis eventually regains control of his car and goes back to his entrance where the chopper is waiting for him, but he outdoes them by jumping out of his car just as it hits a makeshift ramp and goes careening through the sky into the copter, making it explode instantly. This is, of course, after he had already driven over a fire hydrant so that the sudden spray of water would hit the helicopter and knock one of the gunmen out of it. James Bond would have been astonished watching all this.
There’s a number of ridiculous action sequences like that, as well as some martial arts scenes and a gunfight or two to keep some variety to things. Willis’s character has evolved into a post-action hero delight; now, instead of delivering a flippant one-liner after taking down an enemy, he merely stares at all the carnage he’s wrought and starts giggling like an asshole. It’s not a completely perfect movie, but it is perfect in all the parts it needs to be perfect in. And to those who remember the controversy when this originally came out about how Willis’s trademark phrase was cut for its PG-13 rating, worry not. The unrated DVD includes it (as well as some other nicely placed profanity throughout). The unrated version also contains a free ticket to the movie Hitman, so I guess I’ll be reviewing that for all of you tomorrow. We’ll see how it goes.
Rating: ****
Saturday, November 24, 2007
Ocean's Thirteen
I would like to consider myself a fan of this series, at least moreso than the average person is, given the popular reaction to the second film. However, I am noticing here a disturbing trend with the series, as all three films thus far have run along similar plotlines, the main difference being that each new venture feels the need to make the film that extra bit incomprehensible.
I don’t really have to describe to you the plot of this movie, which helps me out tremendously since I only have a vague understanding of what was going on in it. It’s another heist at a casino, just like in the first film, though this time instead of being for money, it’s for revenge, as scheming casino owner Al Pacino has screwed over Elliott Gould, giving him a heart attack in the process. Andy Garcia, the villain in the first film, and an antagonist in the second, has now been upgraded to a cautious ally, as they go to him for help in putting the screws to Pacino.
Again, how they go about doing this exactly, I was very unclear on, but it did admittedly look rather impressive as it was happening. The problem with this film is that it’s just too cluttered as it’s whizzing on by. With such a large cast, some character shorthand is expected, but at the very least you need a really impressive villain for the characters to be going up against. Sadly, Pacino is never really given enough face time to really show off how villainous he can be. I’m not expecting him to be Michael Corleone out there, but it would have been nice if director Steven Soderbergh had at least given him the chance to give us a villain as good as his role in The Devil’s Advocate. This is clearly a film that needed some extra time to slow down and learn what it and its characters are all about. Without that, we get a lot of flash and style, but we’re left with nothing to really remember once it’s done.
Rating: **
Friday, November 23, 2007
Driftwood
This is a particularly frustrating film for me, and I have to say, despite my admitted junkie-like fixation with horror movies, I think this one would have been much better if the horror elements had been stripped out of it.
The film follows a troubled, potentially suicidal youth as his parents, panicked at the thought of their younger son killing himself like their older did, dump him at a facility to “rehabilitate” troubled youths. Such places actually do exist, though they usually operate outside of the United States so they can have more legal leeway with how they go about their rehabilitating. Our hero is fairly wooden, letting us focus more on former pro wrestler Diamond Dallas Page, who plays the charismatic and sadistic Captain, warden of this “jail that’s not a jail”. Were it just a film about their battles with each other, or of life in such a place, the film could easily work. Unfortunately, it also has to throw in a haunting by the ghost of the Captain’s nephew, who suffered a brutal death at the facility, and who wants our hero to find his bones so he can know rest.
I guess it’s kind of like if some director had decided he wanted to make a film exposing abuses at Guantanamo Bay, but felt the best way to really make people take notice would be to make it into some stupid fucking ghost movie. The film sabotages itself right at its very core. It’s well made enough, with a (mostly) solid crew of actors, and Tim Sullivan’s directing work is certainly an improvement over the meanness of his previous effort 2001 Maniacs, but it’s all in service of a work that was doomed at the script level. This is one film that would have greatly benefited from some rewrites.
Rating: * ½
Thursday, November 22, 2007
Manhunt 2
To celebrate the holiday a bit, I figured I’d give a little change of pace and do a video game review instead. After having loved the original Manhunt, I made this the first video game I’d purchased in a couple years (the last one, of course, being its predecessor).
For those that are unaware of the series, this is one of those dreaded murder simulators that you always hear politicians railing against. Like the original, about half of the game involves you hiding in shadows until an enemy wanders past, and then you sneak up behind him and execute him in a number of different ways, depending on what weapon you use and how long you stalk him. The other half, not to be outdone, involves a great many intense gun battles, perhaps even more prominent here than in the original.
The game is a great deal of fun, but it is noticeably weaker than the original game. For one, it’s both shorter and a lot easier, so you’ll breeze through it pretty quickly. For another, the ESRB bewilderingly rated it Adults Only, so to get a Mature rating they had to put obnoxious filters over the execution videos to make them more difficult to watch. I say bewilderingly because they aren’t noticeably different from the ones in the first game, so I’m not sure exactly why that was able to get a Mature rating but not this one.
Still, despite those flaws, the game is still a good deal of fun. After all, it’s about the only game series in existence where you get to actually play as the mad slasher, and not just one of his victims. More than that, the programmers seemed to be anticipating the ESRB smackdown, as they focused the game more on the gun fights rather than the sneaking around and executing people parts, so that problem is partially alleviated. It may not be as good a game as the first one was, but it’s still certainly worth playing.
Rating: ***
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
Satanico Pandemonium
This is a much better nunsploitation effort than the lamentable The Other Hell was, but I think I may have to face the sad fact that, School of the Holy Beast aside, the nunsploitation genre is doomed to never live up to its glorious potential.
The film follows Sister Maria, a devout nun at a convent who becomes ensnared by Satan and begins having constant forbidden sexual hallucinations, often ending violently, to win her over to his cause. By hallucinations, I of course mean that she begins stripping constantly and getting it on with half the people at the convent, and then usually stabbing them to death with a knife, only for us to later discover that they’re still alive (though in some cases it seems that the attempted sex did happen, as a few of her would-be victims seem a little worse for wear around her). Eventually it gets so muddled that we get hallucinations within hallucinations, and after killing the Mother Superior, the other nuns all vote for her to lead them because of her great purity and goodness, for which she plans to bring them all to Hell with her.
There are some nice over-the-top moments (my personal favorite is her speech to the Mother Superior, before killing her, when she informs her that “I do not fear Hell…for I AM Hell!!!”), but there are too many deep flaws within the film for it to work. For one, while I’m certainly grateful to our lead Cecilia Pezet for being topless in about half her scenes, they would have worked a lot better if she wasn’t so plain looking. It would easily have been ten times hotter if, instead of getting completely naked, she had gotten naked except for that hat thing nuns wear (a habit? Is that what a habit is?). If you’re going to go the kinky nun route, you may as well go all the way, I say. Another critical flaw is the ending. I won’t spoil it, but it pretty much hits the reset button on the whole film, and I can’t stand it when that happens. It’s something along the lines of Boxing Helena, for anyone who’s seen that. Oh, spoiler warning I guess for anyone out there who has seen this but not Boxing Helena. Sorry.
Rating: **
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Blood Car
Here’s yet another straight to DVD horror comedy, but sadly, unlike Murder Party this one doesn’t quite bring the goods. It’s certainly not terrible, mind you, but while Murder Party was able to stay humorous the entire way through, this one struggles a bit, giving us a good amount of filler as it tries (and fails) to get to a 90 minute running time.
It starts off rather promising too. A newsman-type directly faces the camera like he’s in an Ed Wood production and warns us of the terrible calamity waiting in store for us in the future, two weeks from now, as gas prices have risen so high that none but the rich can afford them. Enter our hero, an aspiring vegan (yay to Microsoft Word, by the way, for not acknowledging vegan as a word) and Kindergarten teacher who’s trying to make a car engine that runs on soy grass. Of course, if it worked properly we wouldn’t have a movie, and so he discovers that his engine will run, but only when supplied by blood. The rest of the movie is basically him going around looking for victims while not-very-menacing government types stalk him.
Remember what I said about it giving us too much filler? Well, the film is only about 75 minutes long, and has enough good material to last roughly 50 minutes or so. This means we a lot of boring scenes, particularly near the end when the film starts to grind to a halt. Still, there’s a good deal of good moments to it, particularly in the form of My Girl’s Anna Chlumsky, who plays a hopelessly nerdy vegan street vendor who spends her spare time drawing erotic fantasies about her and the lead. The film comes with a “Making of” documentary that I didn’t watch most of because it was almost as long as the film, but I can confirm they at least started it off right by focusing on her shower scene. God bless ‘em.
Rating: **
Monday, November 19, 2007
Red Eye
I’m not sure why I didn’t see this film when it first came out. I suspect it had something to do with me childishly refusing to see a Wes Craven film that was only PG-13 and not R. This, of course, comes from the same person that actually purchased a copy of Sasquatch, so you should be careful about listening to me when it comes to opinions on films I haven’t seen yet.
This is one of the better thrillers set on a plane I’ve seen, easily outclassing films like Flightplan and Flight of the Living Dead (though it doesn’t quite match the sheer fun factor of Snakes on a Plane). The film follows the owner of a hotel as she takes a late night flight back to her home in Miami, only to be menaced by an assassin sitting next to her who plans to use her to kill a Homeland Security higher-up who’s arriving at her hotel in the morning. The killer, as is the case with several of the actors here, looked vaguely familiar to me, so I wasn’t too surprised when I just checked his IMDB and found out he was Cillian Murphy, who I’d also seen in 28 Days Later and Batman Begins. Here he perfectly oozes creepiness, even at the beginning when he’s trying to be charming.
What I really enjoyed about this film was the actual intelligence that went into the screenplay. Neither of the two main characters are idiots, and they spend the whole flight (and the aftermath) trying to outwit each other in pretty believable ways. There’s also a great deal of tension throughout the film, as Craven really brought his A game to this effort. Despite it being PG-13 for the kiddies, he also managed to make it surprisingly violent at the end, as there’s a pretty vicious chase and end fight between the two once the plane lands (spoilers, I guess, for those of you thought it would stay in flight forever). If not Craven’s best (New Nightmare will probably always hold that title for me), it’s certainly one of his top efforts, and is one of his only good efforts that non-horror fans can enjoy too. Go check it out.
Rating: ***
Sunday, November 18, 2007
The Arena
This is one of a number of cheapo exploitation flicks Pam Grier did in the early 70s until she had developed enough star power to enable her to make less interesting movies where she wouldn’t be required to get naked. While she had already done a few women in prison films like Black Mama, White Mama or The Big Doll House, this was a somewhat more inspired effort, giving us a Women in Prison flick crossed with a gladiator movie, setting the film in ancient Rome and giving us the pretense of it being a female empowerment movie.
What “female empowerment” in this film of course means is that, after our female cast is all captured, enslaved, and constantly stripped naked and occasionally raped, they are turned into gladiators to satisfy an increasingly jaded Roman public, where they then try to overthrow their captors and strike a blow for women and slaves everywhere. This sounds a bit more interesting than it actually is. The film is actually pretty dull, despite its premise, with a good deal of filler padding out its running time to feature length. Exploitation films like this tended to be fairly rushes productions, with filming usually only lasting a couple weeks (Little Shop of Horrors was the king of this, with filming going on a scant two days), so I get the idea that the writers and director simply didn’t have enough time to think of a really interesting direction to take this, and so just went with a Spartacus rip-off with a good amount of nudity. That the characters in the film openly discuss Spartacus’ rebellion probably counts as clever in this world.
To be honest, had it just gone full-blown with the sleaze I would have liked it more than I did. I mean, hell, I did buy it after all. Unfortunately, this is a rally second-rate exploitation film. It doesn’t have enough violence or nudity to keep up its exploitative side, and it simply doesn’t have enough plot or humor to keep things going outside of the exploitation angle. This one can safely be ignored.
Rating: * ½
Saturday, November 17, 2007
Talk To Me
I had seen Don Cheadle in a number of films without really noticing him before becoming completely entranced in Hotel Rwanda, and he keeps up the momentum he gained with that film here. He has an amazing level of versatility to himself, so much so that I’m a little embarrassed to admit that I didn’t even recognize him until I went to write this review.
As with Hotel Rwanda, here he again throws himself into the role of a real-life person, the legendary D.C. radio DJ Petey Greene, who rose to fame in the 60s after a chance encounter with WOL employee Dewey Hughes (Chiwetel Ejiofor, in another great performance, though not as flashy as his role in Serenity) while serving out a prison term. After pretty much conning his way into a job as a new morning show, he rises into becoming pretty much a radio legend before completely self-destructing.
One thing I really enjoyed about this film was in how it subverted the standard routine these biopics tend to move in. While he did have a big rise to fame, complete with the apparently required self-destructive behavior to accompany his newfound success (one particularly telling incident – when MLK Jr. is killed, he gives a powerful broadcast about it that leaves his audience and co-workers in tears and makes him an instant legend, and then immediately afterward he goes to introduce James Brown at a free concert in memory of King and shows up both late and piss-drunk), he never seemed to actually want success, openly preferring to remain small time, and his career doesn’t recover after his path of ruination reaches critical mass.
Another thing that works nice is that his friend/co-worker/eventual manager/enemy Dewey is just as important a character in the film as Petey is, and their interactions with each other really form the crux of the film. Each man seems to need the other to fulfill something lacking inside, and both end feeling somewhat disappointed in the other. That this film came and went through theaters without making a ripple is baffling to me. Something this powerful and intelligent should at least have made waves among critics if nobody else.
Rating: ****
Friday, November 16, 2007
Spider-Man 3
This movie is sadly emblematic of one of the key problems that killed the Batman movies back in the mid-90s. While director Sam Raimi managed to make it through two films without resorting to overcrowding, it seems here that he has finally given in to the urge to cram two or three films’ worth of material into one. The result is a number of potentially good or great moments rushed through so much that we can’t really enjoy any of them.
The beginning of the film is dominated by Harry Osborne and the Sandman, both of whom could have easily achieved an impressive villainous role if going solo, but they aren’t given enough time to be properly developed. Harry, in order to make way for the rest of the plot, is hit on the head and develops amnesia until the final act, while the Sandman is just completely forgotten about. This frees up the middle portion of the film, where we’re given a clumsy love triangle between Spider-Man, Mary Jane, and new girl Gwen Stacy, as well as what is the weakest part of the film in Eddie Brock and Venom. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not such a purist that I need every character to have the exact same origin and story that they had in the comic, but if you’re going to change things around, then at least try to improve on the original story. They absolutely weakened Brock’s backstory here, making him a much more generic villain than he was in the comic. Additionally, one of the main points of Venom was that he was just like Spider-Man, only bigger and stronger, and Topher Grace is not the first person who comes to mind when I think big and strong.
The film does have a good number of good moments to it, don’t get me wrong. Bruce Campbell’s required cameo thoroughly steals the film, there are some good comedy scenes when Peter gets the black suit, and Sandman’s and Harry’s scenes, when they’re allowed to do more than stock villain material, works quite well. It’s just that, unlike Willem Dafoe or Alfred Molina in the first two films, they simply aren’t given any time to develop themselves, and the film suffers as a result. This is something that needed to be stretched out to two films. I don’t know if Raimi is just getting tired of doing the films and wanted to make sure he could throw in everything he had ever wanted to direct in them as quickly as he could, but he needs to calm back down and return to his earlier style, or this franchise is going to start winding down pretty quickly.
Rating: ** ½
UPDATE: Apparently Sam Raimi has gone on record saying he didn't want to include Venom in the film at all, but was pressured into it by the studio. This is clearly a case of either the studio being completely wrong, or Raimi half-assing his effort because he resented being made to include him. Either way, it drags the film down quite a bit.
Thursday, November 15, 2007
Murder Party
It’s been a pretty good year for me so far as getting decent straight to DVD horror movies. Much better than I did last year, at least, Barricade notwithstanding. This one succeeds in a somewhat different way than most of its straight-to-DVD brethren, however, by being an outright comedy that’s only vaguely pretending at being a horror film.
The film takes place on Halloween night, as an unbearably nerdy man receives a mail flyer inviting him to attend a murder party, and, cardboard knight costume on, ventures forth into the night, where he is promptly captured by a gang of loser goths who plan to videotape his death so they can win grant money from a supreme rich goth looking for artists. Of course, given that he’s been captured by a pack of short bussers, things quickly go awry and the body count starts to rise unexpectedly quickly. There’s quite a few good twists and turns along the way that I wouldn’t dream of revealing, and it climaxes with a near brilliant chase scene through the rooftops and an art gallery.
It doesn’t quite achieve the level of comedic brilliance that other horror comedies like Shaun of the Dead or Evil Dead 2 manage, but it’s consistently funny all the way through, and is crafted well enough to know to go for broke at the end. There have been a lot of quality comedies this year, and this film is a worthy addition to the pile. It’s writer-director Jeremy Saulnier’s first film, and I’m quite eager to see how he follows it up. The man shows a good deal of potential.
Rating: ***
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
Breathless
This was the first Godard film I’d ever seen, back in my college film class days, and were it not for his glowing reputation among critics it also would have been my last. At the time I found it incredibly pretentious and boring, but in following years I have fallen in love a bit with some of his other films, such as Band of Outsiders and Alphaville. So, when Criterion announced their big new DVD release of Breathless, my admiration for his other films, combined with my comically poor memory ensuring that I remembered next to nothing about the film, led me down a path of folly.
As one might expect from one of the benchmarks of the French New Wave (others include such classics as The 400 Blows and Cleo From 5 to 7), this film is incredibly pretentious and boring, following the non-adventures of a small-time gangster and his faux-intellectual New Yorker girlfriend, as they talk endlessly, pausing only to commit the occasional crime. Stylistically, the film looks like an early attempt at the present-day Ironic Age, with constant jazz music playing and the lead spending his time trying to be too cool for the room. It’s almost as if Jean-Pierre Melville (a much, much superior director) had tried his hand at making a New Wave film, a comparison that’s all the more impossible to ignore when Melville himself appears in a cameo in the film. I won’t reveal how it all ends, but I will say that anyone who is familiar with Godard’s other films will be able to guess pretty easily how it ends. He really never figured out how to properly end a film, and so ended them all in pretty much the same way.
When people snottily complain about absurd art house movies, whether they realize it or not, the French New Wave is exactly what they’re talking about. Wanting to reject the “Hollywood” style of most films, but without the raw talent to really create a compelling alternative like Bunuel or Bergman could, the New Wave directors instead just had people largely sitting around talking in dry, ironic undertones for an hour and a half. While Godard would go on to bigger and better things, this was not one of them. See it only if you want to see just how blatantly film critics can lie to your face about how impressive a non-movie like this is.
Rating: *
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
Cutting Class
For those not in the know, Brad Pitt made his grand entrance into the world of film with this, a cheesy slasher movie from the late 80s. I have to say, much as I love the guy, I am a little surprised that he got more work after the performance he gave here. I have a feeling he was banking on nobody having actually seen the film in question when he put it on his resume.
Given that this came out as the slasher genre was in the middle of imploding under the weight of a seemingly never-ending supply of cookie cutter dreariness, I went into this one mainly expecting it to be total garbage. It’s to this film’s credit then that when it finished I thought it was pretty average. The plot is fairly absurd, giving us a mystery as to who exactly the killer is. Unfortunately, it’s not much of a mystery, as he spends pretty much the entire movie breaking into locked buildings, stalking people, and generally just being a complete creep. And this is without us being given a backstory about him killing his dad and getting electroshock therapy every day for years, or how he looks suspiciously like Cody from Step By Step. There is nothing about him that doesn’t just scream Killer.
This is not to say that there aren’t any good parts to the film, because there are. Our virginal heroine’s father gets attacked while out hunting in the woods nearby at the film’s start, and spends the rest of the movie, and spends the rest of the film doing the most entertainingly slow stagger back to civilization I have ever seen. We also get to see just what kind of school system would raise its children to be murders, with a pervy principal, a vice principal that inadvertently gives one of the greatest arguments against teachers I have ever heard, and a fairly psychopathic janitor that keeps flashing back to ‘Nam. In short, the film’s adults are all really entertaining, it’s just the teens that bring it down a bit. I guess this qualifies as a middle-of-the-road slasher film then. It’s certainly not a classic by any means, but if you’re a big nut for the genre, and you’ve seen all the big ones already, this one will be a nice fix for you.
Rating: **
Monday, November 12, 2007
F For Fake
While I normally decide what movies to review before watching them, about fifteen minutes into this film I realized I just had to gush about it here. This was Orson Welles’ final real directorial work (he also directed documentaries on the making of his adaptations of Othello and The Trial, but this was his last proper film), and it shows, perhaps even more than any of his other films, just how overflowing with creativity he was.
I have this listed as a documentary, simply because that’s the closest real genre I can clumsily attach this to, but it doesn’t really fit as one. If anything, it’s more a celebration of fakery and charlatans the world over (of which Welles openly professes himself as one). He focuses his efforts primarily on two of the most famous of the 20th century, art forger Elmyr de Hory, and Hory’s biographer Clifford Irving, who would go on to produce a fake biography about billionaire recluse Howard Hughes. The film loops around these two elliptically, constantly switching back and forth between the two, doubling back to re-affirm or recant earlier testimony, and throwing so many names at us in rapid fire succession that it at times begins to resemble a Monty Python sketch. He also floods the film with so many in-jokes and random goofiness that I spent the whole time trying not to blink for fear of missing anything.
Case in point: at one part near the end, Welles relates a lengthy story about Pablo Picasso reading about an art showing of his paintings, and, upon arriving there, finds that all of the paintings there are forgeries. While sputtering in rage, he meets a woman there that he had lusted after for many years, and had done a number of paintings of. She took him home from the showing, only to reveal to him that her grandfather had been the one that made all the forgeries, and they had intended the art showing as a favor to Picasso to get him some added fame. At the end of this quiet, somber tale, the camera abruptly pulls back to reveal the crew and other cameramen, and Welles tells us “At the start of the film, I told you that for the next hour I would tell you only the truth as is known from the available facts. That hour is now over. For the past seventeen minutes, I’ve been lying my ass off.”
As a long time fan of Welles, I can say with some measure of authority that this may be the best, and definitely the most entertaining, film I’ve ever seen from him. I have seen quite a lot of movies in my day, and I have never seen one that was anything like this. Go see it.
Rating: ****
Sunday, November 11, 2007
Critters 2
I hadn’t seen this movie since I was a little kid, so after my purchase of the original Critters a year ago turned out fairly well, I was curious to see how the rest of the series would hold up. Sadly, going by this follow-up (the first of three), I’d have to guess that the series may have been best off by stopping after the first one.
This is not to say that the movie is bad, per se (although it is), it’s more that it’s a pretty big drop off from the first. The somewhat subtle humor in the original has now been replaced by wacky sound effects, giving it this weird dichotomy of being a movie that seems to have been made for children, but with brief nudity and people being eaten. The plot, like most horror sequels, is basically that of the first film, only on a somewhat larger scale. The evil space monster critters are back, and this time instead of mostly confining themselves to one small farmhouse, they are now trying to wipe out an entire Midwest town. The alien bounty hunters Ug and Lee (I so didn’t get that awful pun until I was reading the back of the DVD case for this) are also back, as well as the heroic young boy, now looking roughly college age.
The various monster attacks alternate fairly well between being pure comedy (like when the Critters swarm the town sheriff while he’s dressed up as the Easter bunny), and being, well, only semi-comedic, as when they ambush one of the bounty hunters. It’s better than most monster movies of this type, as it keeps moving along at a fairly steady clip, and there’s nothing outright dull or obnoxious about it. Indeed, there’s even a few outright clever moments to it, as when the Critters all join together at the end to create a massive ball of eating power, or the ridiculously fast response time of the bounty hunters. It’s just that there’s nothing really particularly impressive about it all, which is a real shame since the original was so much fun. I may still eventually get the last two in the series, just because part 3 marks the film debut of Mr. Leonardo DiCaprio, and part 4 is what I believe may be the first time a horror series jumped the shark by putting its monsters in outer space….IN THE FUTURE!!!!~ before it became almost a fad to do that when a series ran out of steam.
Rating: **
Saturday, November 10, 2007
Black Demons
Here it is, the last of the demons box set, and the only halfway decent one of the lot. As mentioned before, it is the third (and hopefully final) Italian horror movie to wield the name Demons 3, although instead of any actual demons, it just uses zombies. It’s also the only one in this box set that’s not actually set in Italy, but in Brazil, so we can have the added fun of them being vengeful murdered slaves.
The film involves a group of vacationers who manage to worm their way into a plantation owned by a hateful, awful Frenchman and his voodoo maid. Before long, six zombies, all with nooses around their necks, start killing everyone as revenge for having been executed 100 years before. There’s a few twists and turns, but that’s really all the setup you need here, so let’s look at where the film succeeds (or at least works better than the other two films in this set). The most immediately obvious change is in how the villain isn’t just some ridiculous crazy nun or some monster in a puffy shirt, but is instead a gang of pretty nasty looking Italian-style zombies. Not only do they get a good deal more action in than the villains in the other two films, but since their leader lost an eye before being hanged, he takes great relish in first using a sickle to gouge out his victim’s eye before the requisite murder. So that’s nice.
Another nice bit is in just how goofy the film is at times. At one point, the pure survivor girl gets menaced by a zombie in the woods, then runs what seems like a whole ten feet before falling to her knees sobbing, now that she has safely gotten away. I at first thought that she was just meekly accepting her fate like a lot of bad horror characters do, but no. Apparently the zombie just couldn’t be bothered.
Don’t get me wrong, this is a bad movie as well. It’s just that, after the atrocious two other movies in this box set, a halfway decent effort like this felt like goddamn Citizen Kane. If you happen to find this on the shelf at Blockbuster, and you’re jonesing for a more obscure Italian zombie movie (and let’s face it, if you’re reading this blog, odds are good that you get that craving at least occasionally), you could do a good deal worse than this one. Believe me, I know.
Rating: **
Friday, November 9, 2007
Demons 3: The Ogre
For a long time I thought this movie was actually a different one, due to its rather convoluted family tree. The first two demons movies, which I really liked, were written and produced by horror maestro Dario Argento and directed by Lamberto Bava. For some reason, however (I would guess due to a falling out between the two, though I admittedly have nothing but the films themselves to back this up with), they parted ways when it came to the third film, and Lamberto directed this one without any help from Dario. Dario, meanwhile, went on to write an produce another movie called Demons 3: The Church, with his protégé Michele Soavi. Both films came out within a year of each other, and given how much Soavi’s film resembled the earlier Demons films, I just foolishly assumed The Ogre and The Church were one and the same. Umberto Lenzi, never one to avoid jumping in on a piece of the action, made another Demons 3 called Black Demons a couple years later, which is also in this box set for handy comparisons sake. I can’t imagine where I could have gotten so confused.
At any rate, this really doesn’t have anything in common with its predecessors. While they both involved people getting transformed into a zombie-like plague of demons with pointy nails and lots of drooling and scariness (much like Demons 3: The Church did), this instead involves an American family that goes on vacation to a villa in the Italian countryside so the horror novelist mom can finish her latest book. Unfortunately, this villa appears to be haunted by an ogre (well, the title calls it an ogre, at least – it looks a good deal more like a man in a Seinfeld-ish puffy shirt and a monster mask bought at a local Halloween store) that lives in the basement and has been invading the wife’s dreams since she was a young girl. The movie spends most of its running time trying to leave things ambiguous as to whether or not the ogre is actually real, or if the wife is just crazy, so let me alleviate any of your concerns: yes, it is indeed real, but can also be made fake somehow. I wasn’t really clear on this, and the Nightmare On Elm Street-ish ending seems to actively try to obfuscate what actually happened.
This is a pretty poor movie, all told. Without Argento to help him out, Lamberto Bava really flounders here, making a dull, muddled mess of a film. Most of the movie is spent with the wife being shrill and hysterical as absolutely nothing happens, reminding me of nothing quite so much as the wife in Shock, another Lamberto turd. That’s 0 for 2 so far with this box set, and only one movie left to try. Not good.
Rating: *
Thursday, November 8, 2007
The Other Hell
I’m not even sure if I should necessarily call this film nunsploitation, even if it’s about a series of murders in a convent. What it is instead is so dull and tame that not only does it not really deserve to be called a nunsploitation film, it barely deserves to be called a film at all.
The first film in a box set of three demon films I picked up, this film follows a padre as he is sent to investigate a series of mysterious deaths at a convent. His initial lines of questioning are not exactly promising; during one conversation, in a perfectly understated manner, the mother superior shrieks at him “Well there’s no mystery in this convent I assure you!!!”. This is naturally the way to behave when there’s nothing to hide. The groundskeeper is similarly helpful, telling the padre that he loves dogs more than people because they don’t talk and try to share secrets.
There’s a good deal of nonsense about the evils of penises and having children, and there’s one laugh out loud moment when an old nun, scandalized that one of the younger ones had a baby and wanted to keep it, grabs the infant and throws it in a steaming pot. Once this scene came up, I immediately began to reevaluate my feelings toward the film, but it not only quickly goes back to the dreariness of the rest of the film, it also gives a good reason for the baby to be killed, since its dad is apparently the devil or something.
How bad is this movie? It’s poor enough that it froze up a couple times on me, and I’m not going to try to exchange it for a perfect copy simply because it isn’t worth the damn effort. It has enough good moments in it to avoid an outright zero star rating (the baby scene is probably worth half a star on its own, and there’s another one where someone is strangled with a rosary), but it’s not much better than that. This is a rather ominous beginning to a theoretically promising demon box set.
Rating: ½ *
Wednesday, November 7, 2007
It's Alive 3: Island of the Alive
I’m going to tell you this as a friend: the only reason your infant child has not tried to murder you is because it lacks the ability to do so. Had it been born a giant mutant baby like the ones in this series, and thus been capable of murder straight out of the womb, you would be dead now. It’s only when they’ve had several years of life with society beating the evil out of it that a child begins to lose its bloodlust, its murderous rages finding safe outlets in movies, video games, and comic books rather than in cutting open the necks of neighbors and in throwing explosives at small animals. If the human race were to come out of the womb already able to walk, as some animals are, then it would not still exist today. Our collective weakness at birth is an evolutionary protective measure, necessary for the continued safety of our entire species.
Sadly, this deep profundity is not found as much here, as, like all great horror series eventually must, this film kind of falls apart. There are two fatal flaws with this movie, one in the casting, and one in the overall concept. The more instantly glaring problem, and one that never gets better at any point, is in that of the lead, Michael Moriarty. A quick look at his IMDB bio reveals that I’ve seen him in exactly one other movie, Pale Rider, and I can only hope Clint Eastwood had the decency to kill him swiftly in that. He sleepwalks his way through this film, throwing out irritating smart ass remarks at everyone that he doesn’t even try to make funny, just irritating. He is a complete pest, which is all the more glaring when considering I watched this back to back to back with the first two films, and got to see the abrupt, major decline in the quality of actors/characters. He really is the pits.
The other problem that cripples the film is that, unlike its prequels, this film doesn’t focus solely on the universal problem of killer infants, but instead has the foolish audacity to let them grow up into evil adults. This is accomplished by a judge ordering them all to be shipped off to an island uninhabited by man where they can live out their natural lives, at least until a government expedition to study them is launched, with the tedious Moriarty along as an expert. Naturally the expedition is doomed, and soon Moriarty is “forced” to take the demons back to Florida with him (I put forced in quotes because he is so blasé about it that you get the feeling he really doesn’t care that they just killed a bunch of people, nor that they are using their bodies for food while sailing back to the U.S.). Moriarty’s child wants to go to Florida because they all have mental homing beacons for their parents, and Moriarty’s estranged wife is living there. I’m not sure why all the rest wanted to go there, though, but maybe they had heard about the way cool goth punk clubs they evidently have down there.
Every time a horror series goes on long enough, it eventually turns into garbage. Some, like Halloween or Psycho, manage to hold out for a while and have a good two or three quality sequels before falling to pieces. Some, like the Puppet Master series, are just crib deaths, sucking at their very inception. The It’s Alive series falls smack dab in the middle, giving us two good movies before it turned into shit. Still, I guess two good movies for about ten bucks isn’t bad at all, even if they’re attached to a third, less fortunate film.
Rating: *
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
It's Alive 2: It Lives Again
People get really stupid with their children. You see it all the time in the news: a man has just been convicted of ritualistically murdering an entire town, and as the judge sentences him to death the guy’s mom bursts into tears because her beautiful child doesn’t deserve such a harsh punishment. Everyone wants to think that their kid is going to be the next president or physicist or what have you and help save the world, but the reality is your child is about a thousand times more likely to be a gang member or a serial killer or a crack whore than someone that’s going to make any kind of real positive difference in the world. If I impart no other knowledge to my readership, let it be this: your child, at some undetermined date, will actively seek to replace you, and the only way you’ll be able to retain your place on this world is by ending his or her existence first. I’m talking violent revolution here, people. Do you have the nerve to join me?
This film, set a few years after the original, places us in a world where the mutant babies are coming out frequently enough to warrant the presence of pretty much the entire police force at the maternity ward of a hospital just in case the child about to be born winds up trying to eat everyone. Of course, since the police fully intend to kill the baby fresh out of the womb, the dad takes it upon himself to kidnap the doctors and force them to deliver the baby while on the road, before a dark rendezvous where a group of scientists takes the baby away to a secret facility where the mutants can be studied and (ideally) taught to live in peaceful coexistence with man. The facility itself, once the parents sneak themselves away there, is quite interesting; the original father of a mutant baby, Mr. Frank Davis whose tale was shown in the original, is spoken of in hushed tones, like a towering cult figure. There’s more vague environmental mutterings here as well; a crazy scientist working there spouts off about how the babies are the next step forward in evolution, and are specifically designed to adapt themselves to all the pollution in the world, this despite not a one of them ever having been tested to see how well they can handle pollutants at all.
The main characters, like in the first film, seem to be fairly realistic, fleshed out people, with both parents rather ferociously trying to protect their children from the law, at least until the babies get loose and start attacking everyone they encounter. Frank Davis, when he makes his climactic arrival, doesn’t quite have the impact of Harry Lime, but at least he tries. The ending, once the parents have finally started to get on board with the need to wipe the damn abominations out, is also really fun, giving us a great combination of police ingenuity and police incompetence. If it’s not quite as good as the first film, it’s pretty darn close.
Rating: ***
Monday, November 5, 2007
Recommend a Movie
Since I've plowed through most of my holiday backlog, I figured I'd take the chance and let you all make this into a more interactive blog by allowing you to all make your own ignorant, ill-informed suggestions as to what I should be critiquing next. A chance like this doesn't come along every day, though it is likely to remain a permanent feature, so act now while you still can!
It's Alive
I only got introduced to director Larry Cohen last month, with his borderline brilliant film God Told Me To. While that film’s plot was so insane that I was terrified of the thought of trying to write a review for it (*** ½, by the way), I was eager to see more of his work. Thankfully, not only had I unknowingly already ordered a three pack of perhaps his most famous films here, but the films in question show that he is a man who clearly knows what buttons to push with me.
Children, as you may know, tend to be horrid little creatures. They scamper about, destroying everything in their path like tiny little strip miners and contaminating countless otherwise wonderful old movies with their awful attempts at precociousness. Worst of all, because they’re smaller than us and very easily hurt, we’re not supposed to call them on any of their awfulness, even though you all know full well that the only sane choice in this world is to assault them in restaurants when they act up and show them how precarious their continued existences on this planet are. It’s why I’m so theoretically in love with the Evil Child genre, even though it rarely works out well in practice. What a treat, then, to witness the It’s Alive series, and see how these films should be done.
The film starts with a loving couple at a hospital, as the wife begins labor and the husband goes to the waiting room to sit around with his friends and clumsily discuss pollution and how the human race is destroying the planet. Faster than you can say “clumsy foreshadowing”, his wife has given birth to tragedy, as the baby is an evil mutant that kills the entire operating staff and makes its escape. The manhunt is now on, but is hampered by the fact that the mother is desperate to protect her murderous little monster child, even though her husband is much more gung-ho about killing the little demon seed and fixing his genetic mistake.
What I love about Larry Cohen’s movies is just how realistic they are. Not in the sense that I feel an evil mutant baby would come out of the womb and instantly kill a roomful of people, though let’s be honest, it’s gonna happen someday. No, what I like is how he takes an insane horror scenario like this and fills it with what feels like actual real people, not the one-note cardboard idiots that normally populate movies. The parents really do seem to be the sort of people you could expect to meet in real life, though hopefully without carrying the one child with them. The film also has a really nice climax, as the child has been wounded and chased into the sewers, and the massive manhunt draws in its net. While I’m sure there have been better evil child movies made, I cannot for the life of me think of a one. You should definitely check this one out.
Rating: *** ½
Sunday, November 4, 2007
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
This was a rather curious film. It’s French director Jacques Demy’s ode to the old Hollywood musicals that were only really beginning to die out around the time this was made, and so was full of a great deal of flourishes in the style of the big, loud MGM musicals like Singin’ in the Rain or The Band Wagon. In many ways, it succeeds, as in the vibrant color scheme that just seems so full of life you want every color film to be in Technicolor. Where it somewhat falters is in how, rather than throw in specific songs, as was the style, every line is sung instead.
This does admittedly have the effect of keeping the movie constantly flowing. Not a minute goes by anywhere in the film where someone doesn’t belt out a line, or the musical interludes keep everyone moving along at a nice dance. And yes, while there are also no dance numbers, the actors do all seem to be moving about pretty gently, as though music was playing for them while they were filming, and it’s all they can do not to burst into a full dance. However, this also highlights the biggest problem with the film. While it keeps moving at a steady clip, it doesn’t have the real high points that a more normal musical would have had. There is no scene here that comes close to the euphoric feeling of Gene Kelly singing in the rain, or the sheer romantic delight of Fred Astaire dancing cheek to cheek, or even the great comedic value of Gene Wilder and Peter Boyle trying to put on the Ritz. We’re left with a film that’s a bit too understated for its own good.
I guess this fits the story pretty well, as the tale is of two people from different life paths – a girl (played by Catherine Deneuve) destined for wealth and fame, and her lover, an unambitious mechanic, separated by war, and then prodded by family into taking more suitable partners. It’s the complete antithesis of the traditional American view of Love Conquers All, and while both are undoubtedly happier in the long term once they come to grips with their new relationships, it still feels totally like both are merely settling for their second choice.
I get the feeling that I might like this a bit more on a second viewing, but as it is I’m just left feeling a little disappointed that it wasn’t more than it wound up being. For what it is, it does it rather well, but when I think of what it could have been I’m just left wishing it had been something else.
Rating: ** ½
Note: While Amazon Associates doesn’t seem to want to let me link you to the film in my normal way, it is still available here
Saturday, November 3, 2007
A Christmas Carol
This is probably the most famous version of Dickens’ classic story, due mainly (and justifiably) to the performance of its lead Alistair Sim. This is the first time I’ve ever seen Sim at work, and I am eager to see him again. He is the lynchpin that holds an otherwise somewhat shaky film together.
Part of the appeal is certainly that, being both the title character (the film was originally titled “Scrooge”) and being a generally miserable, crotchety old man, he gets all the really good lines. A large part of it, though, is certainly his face. To say he has an unconventional look to him would be most charitable. To say that he looks as though he had been shot in the face at some point in his youth would be a bit closer to the truth. It’s one of the most distinctive faces I’ve seen in the cinema, and it suits his character perfectly.
I like to imagine that most people would already be familiar with the story, but in case there are any holdouts among my readers that are willing to read inane movie reviews but not classic literature, the story is that of a miserly old banker who has no friends and no love in his life other than money, who is visited on Christmas Eve by the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future, showing him how he needs to change his life to avoid being damned. He awakens Christmas morning a new, and somewhat mad-looking, man, and rushes out to embrace everyone he had previously kept at arm’s length, and uses his long-accumulated wealth to become one of the city’s great philanthropists, God bless us everyone.
Okay, the ending is incredibly schmaltzy, as old Christmas films tend to be (this is as opposed to present day Christmas movies, where the heavy hand of irony forces us to avoid any schmaltz in favor of lots of bad slapstick humor), and there’s my Precocious Child alarm was tripped when Tiny Tim first showed up, but in general the good of this film does outweigh the bad. Sim alone is probably worth seeing the movie for, and let’s face it, even if this isn’t one of Dickens’ best works, it is still Dickens, and that carries a good deal of weight.
Rating: ***
Friday, November 2, 2007
Hercules in the Haunted World
This is a rather curious entry into Mario Bava’s filmography. Mostly known for being Italy’s premiere horror director of the 60s and early 70s, this was an early effort in his career at helming one of a series of films about Hercules that were popular in Italy at the time. Before he had made his breakthrough as a director, he had done FX work on the first couple Hercules films with Steve Reeves, so I suppose this was his attempt to reconnect with his roots or some such nonsense.
There are two immediate flaws with the film, one major and one minor. The minor one is in how it follows the then-standard Italian method of dealing with international casts by having all the actors speak their dialogue in their native language and then overdubbing it all into whatever language the country its being shown in speaks. This means that everyone’s voices are pretty poor, even poor Christopher Lee, despite being English himself. The more important flaw is that, due to this being an ongoing series of films Bava otherwise had nothing to do with, he had to change his own style of directing to fit in with the series. While a number of his standard flourishes and stylistic devices are still in effect, the film has an inherent lightness and goofiness to it that is completely at odds with the bulk of Bava’s work, and you can sense he’s not entirely certain how to deal with it. You can tell from the plot, of Hercules and his friend Theseus going to the Underworld to rescue Hercules’s girlfriend Princess Deianira, that he did want to try to blend the Hercules series with his own horror films, but it’s an uneven fit.
The main problem with the attempt at blending the two is the unrelenting cheerfulness of the film. Despite them roaming around the Underworld, surrounded by theoretical dangers, and menaced by Christopher Lee back in the human world, it’s pretty much impossible to feel any worry for them at all. There’s a really clumsy attempt at a wacky sidekick with Telemachus, who goes stumbling through the landscape like he’s doing battle with the Three Stooges, and he really brings down every scene he’s in. The film’s main saving grace comes at the climax. Even when directing one of his weakest efforts, Bava still knows to close out the film with a bang, as Hercules winds up having to fight off an army of the undead commanded by Lee. Only here does Bava really show off all his visual skills, creating a nicely nightmarish vision that partially makes up for the poor writing.
As sword and sandal films go, I guess this one is at least as good as the majority, though it falls pretty far from the top films in the genre like the Sinbad movies (and, as should seem obvious, the FX in this are nowhere close to Harryhausen's). Bava throws in enough flair to keep it perfectly watchable, but it doesn’t transcend its genre enough to do more than that.
Rating: * ½
Thursday, November 1, 2007
Gone Baby Gone
If this film is representative of what we have to look forward to with Ben Affleck’s directorial work, I hope he never goes back to acting. With this film, he moves into that pantheon of actors-turned-superior directors that a surprising number of his predecessors have already joined.
The film is based on a novel by Dennis Lehane, who also wrote the novel Mystic River. I haven’t read either, but I can say that I enjoyed this film a good deal more than his previous effort, which didn’t quite achieve the emotional intensity it was trying for. This one hits its emotional notes perfectly, largely by paying such close attention to its characters, making them all seem like actual people you’d see in some dive bar in Boston.
The plot concerns Casey Affleck as a low-rent detective in Boston who’s called in on a kidnapping case. The child of a local junkie has gone missing, and the police don’t have any leads. It’s one of those stories where everyone seems suspect, and every character is holding something back, usually for surprisingly intelligent and well-defined reasons, something that’s a bit of a rarity with these kinds of movies. I can’t reveal more of the plot, as that would do the film a great disservice, but it unfolds with a great, slowly building relentlessness, as the various lies, and lies upon lies, are slowly stripped away, until we’re left without any real heroes or villains, just genuine pain, and people trying to do what they think is right, and failing.
Affleck directs all this with a sure hand; like his fellow actor-directors such as De Niro, Gibson, and Eastwood, he knows to trust his story and let it play out slowly, giving his actors room to breathe and work magic for him. Were this year not already so crowded with more likely Oscar contenders, I’d wager this would have won a couple acting awards, if nothing else. At the very least, it deserves a few nominations, not the least of which should go to Casey, who between this and The Assassination of Jesse James… has really come into his own this year. It’s not the best film I’ve seen this year, but so far it’s definitely in my top five.
Rating: *** ½
