Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon may actually appeal beyond the limited fanbase for horror who pipe up in our group. (I.e., someone other than me might conceivably enjoy this.) After Scream, or even Wes Craven’s earlier self-reflexive horror flicks, many proclaimed the end of ‘real’ horror (killed off by that slasher irony). More recently folks like Rob Zombie and Eli Roth splatter with an ostensibly earnest glee, thus recuperating that ‘real’ horror (and irony gives up the ghost). Behind the Mask doesn’t have its cake and eats it, too: it’s a very smart, sly critical send-up of the slasher pic which reinvigorates the genre through, rather than against, its ironic stance. I dug it.
Category: (by verdict)
A Mighty Heart
Based on Mariane Pearl’s account of her husband’s brutal murder by al-Qaeda operative Sheikh Omar Saeed, this is one of the best films I’ve seen all summer yet it is quickly disappearing into the late summer night as threequals, talking rats and John McClane gobble up audience attention. That’s too bad, because A Mighty Heart is a smart, well acted and directed police procedural that is very tricky about playing into and interrogating the spectator’s desire for justice and revenge (not to mention Western privilege). Sure, you know what’s going to happen, but the power of the film is in the details. At times disorienting, this film (shot in Winterbottom’s trademark documentary style) rarely slows down but carries the viewer into the discombobulating world that is Pakistan, cutting back and forth from Pearl’s affluent home (a makeshift headquarters for her and her associates as they wait for information) and the chaotic streets, restaurants and apartment buildings of Karachi where police search incessantly for witnesses and criminals. Continue reading A Mighty Heart
Ratatouille
I have no idea why the title is spelled this way, but…. just kidding. Bliss! A wonderful film–funny, engaging, smart, moving; the kind of kids’ movie you long to see (after so many hyperactive or tawdry maudlin blurs), where the intelligence shimmers behind every detail, where the film demands (or, better, assumes) a little bit of intelligence from its audience. But better yet: this is one of the best, most lovely pieces of cinema I’ve seen this year.
Near the opening the clan of rats scurry en masse away from a farmhouse and its shotgun-wielding, bespectacled granny. In ramshackle boats, rats spilling off the edges, each rat carefully defined to her or his own particular brand of bedraggled, they shiver, as raindrops pelt the dark-slate surface of the water all around them. There’s so much visual delight in this film–on top of the pleasures of narrative and score–that I think any of us would love it.
SiCKO
i have no idea why the title is spelled the way it is, but this is a damn fine movie. unlike bowling for columbine and fahrenheit 911, it’s nicely organized and focused, so you don’t have to spend precious mental energy figuring out how we got to Z from X and Y. the first part is devastating. the most devastating part is that you know everything about it. you have heard the stories, you know people who have gone through that, you know that, but for your nice university job if you are lucky enough to have one, you would be going through that too. you know all of this because it is your waking nightmare. you live under the constant threat that it might, that it will one day happen to you. Continue reading SiCKO
Worst (best?) Inflight Movie Combos
On a flight from Copenhagen I just experienced the following movie combo: Music and Lyrics, Maid in Manhattan, Pirates of the Caribbean II. Surely no one has had worse?
Welcome to Happiness
Following our discussion of African film, I ordered Xala up from the local library and was scanning around Netflix when I saw Gio had put this film on her queue, and when I saw that it was the director of Bamako (a film I’d read a lot about in the last year), I bumped it up the queue and watched last night: outstanding film.
laurent cantet’s time out (2001)
a few words on time out, which i just saw. it covers some of the same ground as caché, in that it addresses the pervasive discomfort of the first world’s ruling class. just like in caché, the protagonist is a middle aged man haunted by secrets, which he works strenuously at keeping from his family and in particular from his wife. also like in caché, the wife is “innocent,†not part of the husband’s secret life, outside the circle of his tormenting ghosts. unlike the binoche character, she doesn’t express this outsider status with relentless and frustrated questioning, but, rather, with long silences and wrenching looks. the silences between these people who clearly have so much they should be talking about saturate the movie and are perhaps its most disturbing feature. at the end, when vincent runs from home, the wife’s voice on the cellphone feels for a moment like a relief: finally they’ll talk! but no. vincent is out of auditory range and, in any case, muriel is once again making soothing noises without addressing any of the issues that are torturing vincent and their marriage.
Continue reading laurent cantet’s time out (2001)
Sam Fuller
I hate to shift gears, particularly since the thread on Xala is terrific, but I watched Sam Fuller’s The Big Red One last night and I was mightily impressed. I had seen this film long ago, on network television I think. Maybe it was USA or something, because I don’t recall much being deleted. But I couldn’t resist revisiting the film since it’s been “reconstructed”–that is to say, some 45 minutes have been restored. My recollection of the theatrical version is too dim to make any comments about the differences between it and the “reconstructed” version (for anyone who is interested in that, watch the bonus DVD, which has “before and after” scene comparisons). So let me instead just sing praises. Continue reading Sam Fuller
Takashi Miike’s Imprint
Holy crap. So this was commissioned for Showtime’s Masters of Horror, about which I’ve had some complaints, and then it was too much for them–and it was never aired. Set sometime in late-19th-century Japan, on an island brothel, it structurally resembles a classic ghost story of the period: embedded narratives, as a man on a quest is told ever-worse versions of a story by a deformed prostitute. And many of the elements of the story seem classical, as well: long-lost loves, embattled young child, secret twins. But beyond this familiar structure and resonant plot details, the short film contains truly unsettling, discomforting, uncanny images–bodies, babies, brutality, a very grim fairy tale that seemed unlike most anything I’d ever seen before. The story would emerge in one way that bothered me, then it’d be retold and I’d be surprised and a bit horrified by its revision, and again, and again, until I was startled, often nauseated, utterly engrossed (in every sense of that word).
Great stuff. No one but me may actually enjoy this kind of stuff, but I do recommend it. Shot with Miike’s trademark combination of stomach-churning gore and sound to accompany, intermingled with some absolutely beautiful images (e.g., a poled boat laden with customers just off shore, the red lanterns on land dimly visible in a line just over the men’s heads). Miike is the Fellini of horror–this is a very bad dream, and very good horror.
Longford
A quick recommendation for an HBO film that some may have already seen: the titular character (played by the amazing Jim Broadbent) is a somewhat fuddled real-life Lord who took up lost causes, and gets involved with the case for forgiveness and perhaps parole for the female half of a notorious child-murdering duo. Myra Hindley (the equally amazing Samantha Morton) may be truly seeking redemption, may be manipulating the old man — and the film grabs us with that tension. But what resonates even more extensively is the grip of the moral question behind the ‘truth’ of her redemption: does everyone deserve redemption, regardless of their motives? Continue reading Longford