Author: reynolds

Other kinds of horror

Rather than a sneaky, smirky post on this under my Halloween thread, Hubert Sauper’s documentary Darwin’s Nightmare deserves its own focus. Ostensibly the title comes from the ecological fuck-up extraordinaire in Lake Victoria, where the introduction of the Nile Perch–while economically a boon–has been an environmental disaster, decimating other fish species. But, as noted, these fish created a booming fish export industry in the surrounding cities and villages… Continue reading Other kinds of horror

Ten Canoes

A really fine film. Rolf de Heer (who did the very, very, very different Bad Boy Bubby) here works with Peter Djigirr and the people of Ramingining to shape a story that recounts a distant cultural past and evokes a distant storytelling tradition. The film has two frames: as the camera languorously pans over and through remote Arnhem land in northern Australia, a narrator talks to us of his ancestors and of stories told; we eventually come upon a group of men, making canoes to hunt geese, one of whom begins to tell his younger brother a tale of misplaced love in the distant past; the ‘central’ story is that tale told, in the tale told. (And even in that told, when characters imagine or hypothesize about what has happened or might happen, we get enactments–stories unfolding within the story, within a story.) The film moves back and forth, playing with our expectations (the narrator laughing at our impatience). Continue reading Ten Canoes

Two great Tilda Swinton performances

Or–maybe a better post title–The Return of the Excellent Issue Film. Saw in theaters the superb Michael Clayton, which has a first half begun with a voice-over monologue by Tom Wilkinson and follows up with a pitch-perfect succession of rants, debates, and asides that struck me as the richest dialogue I’d heard at the movies in some time. The second half softens the impact, becomes more conventionally a conspiracy-of-corporate-malfeasance thriller, and the dialogue fades more into the background… but hoo boy does it roar when it begins. A shout-out for the egoless and yet compassionate portrayal of a corporate-lawyer baddie by Tilda Swinton: she turns what could be a cartoon villain, and potentially a misogynist depiction of the icy castrator, into a detailed and generous portrait of a complex woman as torn by divisions as the protagonist. Everyone in this is good, and the writing whistles, and the film races along–and comes to a conclusion that offers us the kind of meat-and-potatoes closure we want while also keeping us hungry, uncertain, concerned. It’s a damn good film.

Swinton is equally strong in the small wonder Stephanie Daley, about a young girl who hid her pregnancy and then either killed or suffered the loss of her infant at birth. Swinton is the psychologist grappling with her own pregnancy, a prior stillbirth, and confusions over her self and her relationship with husband Timothy Hutton. Amber Tamblyn is excellent as the accused young girl. For the first half, it felt too often like the winner of a short-story competition, all these carefully-drawn parallels between the protagonists, a slew of complications which felt like sincere issue-picture problems to be resolved (gender, power, choice)… but by the second half I was glued to the set and the emotional repercussions, underplayed and entirely earned, ripple out with no clear sense of closure or completion. I really dug this film, too.

Halloween Time

So–as the month proceeds, I’m committed to seeing some horror films. The following three sort of fit the generic bill, but alas while most clearly intra-genre two of the films also failed to bring the noise.

1408 is well-shot and lovingly attuned to genre tradition. It’s also about as much fun as staying in a hotel room. A jaded hack writer kicking out quasi-travelogues of the supernatural (John Cusack, using his sad and grim faces mostly, instead of his other two options–the blank or the smiley) goes into one “evil fucking room” and haunting ensues. In the story by Stephen King, it’s pretty stripped down; I don’t recall a backstory which gives a rationale (sort of) for the writer’s jadedness (this is NOT a spoiler–the requisite dead kid) which did give the film its small bit of emotional juice but also drained out what remained of my pleasure in the film. Why didn’t this work? Again, I liked the turn to the traditional–no torture scenes, just ghosts and evil spaces. But I was never spooked in the least, and mostly I was bored. I kind of blame Cusack… and maybe it’s unfair, but damn he seemed more impassive than jaded. Everything seemed tamped down, controlled.

Black Sheep wants to be uncontrolled, the opposite of tamped down–revved up, Peter-Jackson-crazed with gore and the slapstick potential of extreme horror. But the film suffers from a very similar ailment as the above: while utterly loony in its premise (genetic sheep turned killer, also somehow able to transfer sheep-ness into humans bitten so that we get a few transformations), and in love with endless shots of sheep munching happily on piles of innards or grabbing and stretching bits of rubbery flesh farther than you ever thought biologically possible, the film was also boring. It was so utterly conventional in its enactment of its strange premise that the helium seeped out and instead we get a pretty tedious straightforward horror film, saved only slightly by a relative competence in its execution, a lack of pretension, and some decent enough acting. I enjoyed the trailer more than the film, though.

Black Book probably deserves another thread. I thought about sticking it under our thread on Soderbergh’s Good German, because this film seems a far more effective embodiment of classic war-time Hollywood narrative married to a bleaker, more cynical critique of those films’ romanticism. I watched, and quite enjoyed–Paul Verhoeven updates this WWII melodrama, infusing it with a vicious sense of human nature (and occasional flashes of ironic situational humor) and an intriguing willingness to play the horrors of that war (somewhat explicitly addressed) as fodder for thrilling suspense. I was very taken by the lead Carice van Houten, who is fearless and enthralling in her performance–capturing exactly that sense of the ’40s heroine in her semi-hardboiled yet earnest attitude. Sebastian Koch (from Lives of Others) is also quite good. I guess what drew me in, besides the strong acting and excellent pacing and suspenseful story, is that I kept thinking that it seemed a rather glib way to tell the story, and the film seemed self-conscious of its own glib repression or exploitation. . . and yet it’s not ironic or winking in form (which we might say of Soderbergh’s film). Not really horror, but occasionally horrifying, and–like many reviewers I cautiously toss this word out–entertaining.

Duck, You Sucker

Yeah. Since we’re talking politics in the ‘seventies threads, here’s a fine little piece of genre entertainment with its tongue in cheek, heart on sleeve, and hand on Mao’s little red book, from 1971. Opening with a quote from the Chairman about the necessity of violence in a revolution, Duck plays sincerely and with silly abandon (often at the same time) with the mythologies of the bandit and the revolutionary. Continue reading Duck, You Sucker

Writers writing, actors acting

Two quick reactions, one very effusive.

A couple weeks ago I saw Away From Her, the directoral debut of Sarah Polley, adapting a short story by Alice Munro about a woman drifting into Alzheimer’s, grappling with the loss, while her husband does, too. Julie Christie gives an amazing, subtle central performance, as does Gordon Pinsent. It’s got a careful, slow rhythm, is edited with a non-linear precision that echoes the confusions of this disease, and is so utterly, perfectly crafted that it felt (alas) like a room impeccably designed and then hermetically sealed. Nary an emotion crept into my viewing.

I’m being rough–and I hadn’t posted on it to avoid this kind of easy slam. ‘Cause it is a good film, a “good” film, a good for you film, and all that. But tonight I watched a film with similar ambitions–written with a delicate precision, acted with great intensity–yet this film in large part succeeded, often quite astonishingly. The Secret Life of Words stars Sarah Polley, Continue reading Writers writing, actors acting

You shitty, shitty, shit-faced Danes.

Saw two films with ambitions to reframe the satire of corporate mindsets, one of which fell apart (or maybe never really cohered at all), the other of which I loved.

Severance sends a group of corporate-office types out for some team-building in the backwoods of Hungary, then sics some rejects from Hostel at ’em. The film’s set-up–and its snarky title–gave me high hopes, as it promised to be a scary slasher flick and a caustic deconstruction of cutthroat capitalism. Alas, it was not to be. The humor is mild, rarely cutting; the cutting, too, is mild, and rarely interesting.

Meanwhile, Lars von Trier’s The Boss of it All seemed in reviews to be all trite concept (actor hired to impersonate a boss never seen by the office) and trite aestheticism (yet again, von Trier trots out some technical device meant to bang your head against the fourth wall–a camera that randomly shifts its framing of the shot, so that characters are seen from the bridge of their nose up, or four-fifths off to the left of our view). It was, however, a hoot–and smart, returning to old themes for this director (the purpose of art, the failures of sentiment, the hopeless inadequacy of realism) and this genre (the narcissism of corporate ambition, the false bonhomie of community, the acidity of greed) but working all kinds of lovely and–despite so much obviousness–many subtle, sly, often outstanding variations. It’s one of my favorite films of the year. Continue reading You shitty, shitty, shit-faced Danes.

I’d’ve shot Marvin Gaye if I was Marvin Gaye’s dad

Kris is watching “The Office,” episodes I saw late last night, so I wandered upstairs and decided to see what Netflix might offer for instant queuing. I fancied the moment akin to me old college days, when I was green in judgment and grateful for whatever hack horror film I could muster up on cable, so I consciously sought out some crap I would probably never allow myself to actually have sent to my home, simply because it’d seem too much like paying to see them. (And, for any of you who’ve questioned my judgment, you can imagine what someone with my almost degree-zero lack of taste might prefer not to pay to see.) So I found a little early-nineties horror-satire called Satan’s Little Helper, the work of one Jeff Lieberman who various very interesting fan blogs call an unsung hero of indie popcorn horror. (Check out the fantastic final girl blog.)

That all said, and I’d be wasting your time if you had anything worth doing, which you don’t, Little Helper wants to be a satire of our love of violence, always a tricky move best attempted in a genre other than brutal-killers-on-the-road or slasher flick. It’s intermittently interesting, but shot on a budget that would be pleased to be called shoestring, with atrocious acting especially from the terrible eponymous kid Helper, but I did think the thing had some pizzazz and style in its almost classical framing, editing, and development. I enjoyed a little of its manic violent (‘though actually fairly non-graphic and muted violent) wit. Still, it’d have been a lot more fun at 2 a.m. on Cinemax, me half in the bag.

But now I had this itch. What to do? And I remembered, since Jeff recently taught the film and wondered what I’d thought of it, that I had yet to watch my downloaded copy of Martin McDonagh’s academy-award-winning short film Six Shooter. It’s outstanding–funny, vicious, strangely moving. Continue reading I’d’ve shot Marvin Gaye if I was Marvin Gaye’s dad