Off the beaten path

I’ve seen so little at theaters–aside from some kidcentric dreck–and even my home viewing is more infrequent (and obvious, mostly releases everyone else has seen and commented on). I know you’ve missed me, and have had to console yourselves with Arnab and Chris’ respective updates on films Luc Besson produced, or John keeping us abreast of Jerry Lewis’ excellence, or Russian gangsters’ redirections to strange and new cyberlands. Well, rest easy. I’m back. And rather than sticking to stuff you’ve seen or are likely to, a couple of recs for interesting if imperfect films.

(I have tried out a number of other less-familiar titles that fell mostly flat. Ben Wheatley’s Kill List got a lot of raves for allegedly scaring the bejesus out of folks while keeping things black-comic kitchen-sinky, like Pinter mashed up with Wicker Man. *That* mash-up DOES sound awesome. This film isn’t, or wasn’t that mash-up. The lowbudget zombie flick The Dead shifts focus to Africa, and has opportunities for reframing the genre in colonial, or neoliberal, or at least political terms. It doesn’t, instead opting to recapture that ol’ Romero vibe, and is successful at doing so. But the story’s thin, some performances flatter, and I thought it managed to be even more boring, albeit less histrionic, than “The Walking Dead.”)

But Ti West’s low-budget The Innkeepers is worth tracking down. West’s House of the Devil got love from us, and most quarters; this film is also emphatically disinterested in the corny, splattery tedium of most modern horror. So of course he struggled for distribution. It came out on VOD, so I paid to see it on tv, which is a shame because its sound design and sensibilities demand a big dark theater, full of other freaked-out people. It’s an old fashioned spookfest, set in a maybe-haunted hotel, tracking a couple of desk clerks who think they could record some ghosty goodness for a website, and fame. The film takes its time, lingering in tracks down corridors, the slow pans around a room. You are constantly looking into the corners of frames, trying to hear that subtly off bit of noise–time stretches, and you pay intensified attention to space. It’s a wonderful exhibition of how horror works. But it’s more M.R. James–not big bang scares but an increasing dread, offset (or, as a complementary mood, enhanced) by two goofy, likable central performances. Arnab, it wouldn’t freak you out too much. Very enjoyable.

For something completely different, Tom Tykwer’s 3 is an homage to Truffaut’s Jules and Jim inflected by many of his aesthetic tics and tropes: time distortions and temporal remixing, space and the city (Berlin) as a key character, talky but playful digressions on art, politics, philosophy, science. A longtime art-world couple each find themselves drawn to and seduced by a scientist. That’s mostly it. I could imagine many would find this insufferably pretentious, but I thought its humane performances grounded the film; it seemed to love flirting with Haneke or Truffaut or Wenders but would, without dully banging the irony drum, almost quote such impulses. I cared about the characters, delighted in the formal play, enjoyed its ambitions to be sexy and talky and all sorts of mashed-together sorts of films. It doesn’t wholly hang together, but I loved the ambition.