Lessons of Darkness

Humpday (2009): C+

Striving for naturalism while pivoting its action around a preposterous conceit, Humpday locates truth mostly on the margins of its too-cute-for-school story. Ben (The Puffy Chair’s Mark Duplass) is a married homeowner trying to have a baby with wife Anna (Alycia Delmore). His Seattle domesticity is rudely interrupted when college friend and free-spirit world-traveler Andrew (The Blair Witch Project’s Joshua Leonard) unexpectedly shows up on his doorstep in the middle of the night and, a day later, invites him to a party at a house of hedonism (the front door reads “Dionysus”). There, after many drinks, the two decide to enter an upcoming amateur porn festival by making and starring in a film whose hook will be two straight guys having sex. It’s a premise practically begging to be dubbed boundary-pushing. However, despite Ben and Andrew’s copious man-on-man hugging, basketball-wrestling, and endearing use of the word “fuck,” Lynn Shelton’s central narrative device plays less like a ribald means of exploring the boundary between hetero and homo male camaraderie than as a gimmick that could be replaced by countless other dares and, thus, seems to have been chosen primarily for its maximum titillation potential. In a superb morning-after scene, Ben and Andrew’s decision to go through with their porn plan is revealed to be driven by a case of I-won’t-back-down macho pride and ego, with both men compelled to make smut as a means of both living up to their own (phony, idealized) notions of self as well as rebutting the other’s stereotypical conception of themselves. Boasting strong lead performances, Humpday’s occasionally acute depiction of male psychology (specifically, maturation anxieties) is matched by its pinpoint portrait of marital dynamics, highlighted by an opening scene in which Ben and Anna both opt for sleep over sex. Yet such insights are tethered to a tale that’s not only impossible to swallow and too satisfied with its own tee-hee provocation, but ultimately devoid – thanks to a climax that goes limp at the money-shot moment of truth – of anything much to say about sexuality or friendship.

The Hurt Locker (2008): A-

Kathryn Bigelow makes rock ‘n roll action films – heart-racing, pulse-pounding genre flicks that, when necessary, employ outsized melodrama to enhance balls-to-the-wall mayhem. The Hurt Locker is no different, save for the fact that it does so within the context of the Iraq War, a conflict that’s largely been treated by Hollywood with ponderous moralizing. Bigelow situates her saga in Iraq but eschews cable-news pontificating, stripping her scenario – about a bomb squad’s tour of duty – down to its nail-biting essence. Politics don’t factor into the equation because, in reality (and in action films), the pressing concern isn’t the why but the how, with Bigelow’s clock-ticking scenarios exhibiting a canny understanding of both soldiers’ experiences as well as the demands of slam-bang cinema. A procession of expertly orchestrated set pieces that use hot-button topicality for base thrills, the director’s latest proves a rousing return to form after the lackluster K-19: The Widowmaker, delivering a heady dose of suspense that’s enlivened by her sharp psych portraits, in particular that of Staff Sergeant James (Jeremy Renner), the three-man team’s hotshot newbie whose cockiness borders on adrenaline-junkie insane.

Bigelow twice employs super-slow-mo to show-offy effect, but the gestures are forgivable because the images exude a simultaneous sense of awe and horror at chaos. Despite exploiting real-life situations for fictionalized kicks, The Hurt Locker doesn’t glorify war, its status as a procession of mounting-anxiety episodes turning the proceedings into an almost experimental snapshot of the day-to-day rigors of military service. Which is to say, Bigelow doesn’t shun realism, yet she also refuses to be wholly beholden to it. It’s a tack that lends her tale – whether during her protagonists’ attempts to disarm an IED on an urban street, or survive a sniper ambush and standoff in the middle of the desert – a balance of hardscrabble realism and, in the image of soldiers wearing astronaut-ish bomb-protection suits, an eerie sci-fi quality that furthers the impression of Iraq as a hostile alien landscape. In its downtime glimpses of James blowing off steam brawling with comrades Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Eldridge (Brian Geraghty), or a shot of him sitting on his bed staring at a photo of the son he left at home, his enormous helmet on his head, the film penetratingly expresses its subject’s increasingly frazzled headspace, in which self-preservation is a game, death is an omnipresent specter, and the rush of the moment becomes, as prologue text too neatly spells out, “a drug.”

Bigelow cuts to the quick with her depiction of James, so sharply delineating his psychological state through high-tension sequences that it’s disappointing to find the director resorting to contrived scripting with James’ off-the-grid efforts to avenge the murder of a young Iraqi boy who sold DVDs at the army base. It’s the one time when The Hurt Locker’s make-believe seams show, though the misstep is short-lived, and Bigelow proves shrewd enough to incorporate the incident’s lingering effects on James – via a later revelation – without undue embellishment. Bigelow may not say anything revolutionary about military duty but her film confronts wartime experiences with minimal bullshit, conveying the vital camaraderie of service through the bomb squad’s natural banter, the taxing concentration required by combat in the sight of James and Sanborn spending hours patiently looking through a machine gun’s lens, and the unmatched high that comes from life-or-death predicaments. Harrowing and horrifying, The Hurt Locker delivers the visceral, heart-in-throat action goods, and in doing so, gets at more truths about Iraq than its preachy Rendition, Redacted and In the Valley of Elah brethren.

Dead Snow (2009): B-

Tommy Wirkola does the time warp with Dead Snow, self-consciously shouting out to his favorite ‘80s horror films – Evil Dead, Friday the 13th, April Fool’s Day – while unevenly replicating Sam Raimi’s whirligig blend of terror and comedy. With a set-up so archetypal it has to be overtly noted as such, a group of vacationing Norwegian med students travel to a remote mountainside cabin, where they promptly goof off, get wasted, and flirt, at least until a mysterious stranger appears at their door one night to inform them about the region’s dark WWII history. Turns out, there’s an “evil presence” lurking in these snowbound parts, and it has something to do with the Nazis who, fifty years earlier, fled a local uprising for the hills and– as an intro chase sequence suggests, and the subsequent mayhem confirms – continue to roam as cannibalistic zombies. Writer/director Wirkola’s debut seems constantly in the process of homage, though never so literally that it proves vexing. Nonetheless, his funny-scary intentions are undercut by too little engaging (and competently edited) action, as the combative second-act – in which the shadowy fiends are revealed to be former SS stormtroopers – is long in coming and short on visceral thrills. With its last gasp, however, the film catches a second wind, its home stretch generating eerie claustrophobia via a 360-degree rotation around a buried-alive face, and bleak wit from a superlative final showdown coated in torrential arterial sprays. It’s not enough to wholly redeem the preceding action, but the climax – not unlike Raimi’s own return-to-‘80s-form Drag Me to Hell – dispenses a healthy dose of rowdy, hysterical nastiness.

Blood: The Last Vampire (2000): C

Blood: The Last Vampire combines hand-drawn characters and computer-generated environments to create an aesthetic that imparts a chilling sense of otherworldly unease. Were the story even half as compelling as the imagery, Hiroyuki Kitakubo might have crafted an animé classic. As is, however, his supernatural story skimps so heavily on narrative details that it can barely sustain its measly 48-minute runtime. The obliqueness of his script is initially tantalizing, hinting – during its opening stanzas, in which a young girl slaughters a subway rider and is then ordered about by an American cohort (Joe Romersa) – at enough compelling mystery to whet our appetites. Alas, nothing substantial comes of this story about named Saya (voiced by Youki Kudoh), the last remaining “original” vampire who works for the U.S. government hunting and killing blood-sucking vampire demons disguised as humans. Sent undercover in 1966 at a Japanese military base’s high school to discover and dispatch these creatures, Saya dons a schoolgirl uniform and then wields a blade to devastating effect, along the way protecting a nurse (Saemi Nakamura) who does little more than cowardly whimper. Throughout, Blood: The Last Vampire has style to burn, but mostly offering up repeated shots of Saya scowling and slashing her way through bloody battles, the film comes across as a prologue teaser for a yet-to-be-established franchise.

I Love You, Man (2009): C+

Taking the bromance subgenre to its logical end point, I Love You, Man follows engaged, friendless Peter Klaven (Paul Rudd) as he embarks on a series of platonic dates with guys to find a best man, and eventually falls into a budding hetero relationship with single Rush fanatic Sydney Fife (Jason Segel). John Hamburg’s film (co-written with Larry Levin) is basically an extended Seinfeld episode in which male friendship is recast, through traditional rom-com scenarios and goofy innuendo, as a romantic affair, replete with a by-now familiar mixture of bawdy humor and sentimental sweetness. I Love You, Man is amusing enough in its formulaic, visually blah way, thanks in large part to the chemistry shared by Rudd and Segel. Rudd inhabits Peter with his usual brand of wimpy everyman snark while adding small traces of pitiful insecurity, and Segel undercuts Sydney’s self-possession with hints of doubt and loneliness. More importantly, the leads bring unpredictable verbal wit to drearily limp incidents – really, is rocking out to Rush all that funny? – though no matter the number of amusing quips, Hamburg’s film still ends up feeling like a tossed-off Judd Apatow photocopy.

Quarantine (2008): B-

The third of 2008’s first-person-perspective horror outings after Cloverfield and Diary of the Dead, Quarantine uses its aesthetic conceit for a zombie tale that’s not as frightening as it should be, but still better than the average Hollywood scare-a-thon. An adaptation of Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza’s Spanish-language original [Rec], John Erick Dowdle’s film is a straightforward story of a news reporter, firemen and police officers, and average citizens all trapped by the government in an apartment building wracked by a rabies-like virus that turns the infected into flesh-eating monsters. The gimmick is that the action is viewed through the video lens of local TV reporter Angela’s (Jennifer Carpenter) cameraman (Steve Harris), a by-now hackneyed device which nonetheless pays mild dividends as an immersive technique that successfully creates the illusion that one is an immediate, involved player in the mayhem. Director Dowdle’s sharp framing doesn’t call great attention to itself – a shot of a body plummeting to the floor is a particularly deft example of carefully staged pseudo-verité. When all hell finally breaks loose, Quarantine begins to sputter in part because its scares feel too familiar, and not unruly enough for what’s ostensibly presented as found-footage chaos. What creepiness director Dowdle does generate, though, can be attributed mainly to his shrewd pre-zombie set-up, in which he manages the not-inconsiderable feat of endearingly humanizing his soon-to-be-terrorized protagonists.

Taken (2009): B

Single-minded and suitably rough around the edges, Taken offers B-movie action via a story that plays out like a modern-day version of Hardcore. After a lifetime spent putting his covert-ops job before his family, divorcé Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson), in an attempt to rehabilitate his relationship with 17-year-old daughter Kim (Maggie Grace), reluctantly agrees to let her take a trip to Paris. Mere minutes after her arrival, however, she’s snatched by Euroscum, which is bad news for the snatchers, given that Bryan is uniquely equipped to hunt and kill them. Director Pierre Morel (District B13) briskly sets-up and executes his premise, depicting globalization as having created terrifying new hazards for young, pretty, naïve girls, while also understatedly casting Bryan’s tactical skill-sets as akin to parenting. Taken stokes audience (especially male) rage with its little-girl-lost-into-sexual-slavery scenario, then satisfies bloodlust with a series of hectic, brutal fight scenes in which Neeson – looking spry and granite-tough – viciously dispatches hordes of Bosnian, French and Arab capitalist pigs and/or immoral deviants. Morel’s visually chopped-up action would have further benefited from the clean, muscular compositions of his District B13 set pieces, but it’s difficult to quibble with a lean, mean genre flick that has the ability to both thrill and – with a late-act gunshot to an innocent bystander – also surprise.

Coraline (2009): A-

Among Coraline’s many triumphs is its employment of 3-D as an immersive technique that doesn’t bring the action to you (via gimmicky shots of stuff leaping out at the audience) but, rather, invites you inside the action’s cinematic space. The rich, layered depth of director Henry Selick’s 3-D images provides a purely sensory thrill, amplifying the down-the-rabbit-hole vibe of his story about a young girl named Coraline who escapes her drab regular life by crawling into a parallel one through a small door in her family’s new rented home. Based on a book by Neil Gaiman, whose alternate-reality narrative is analogous to his prior Mirrormask (and, of course, Alice in Wonderland), Selick’s stop-motion-animated story is dark and magical, a saga of adolescent discontent and longing that so dynamically careens between set pieces of elation and dread that one hardly has time to soak in all the twirling, tumbling visual marvels enveloping the screen. What Coraline discovers on the other side of the secret door is a warm, cheery facsimile of her domestic world, where a doting “other mother” lavishes love and attention on her with such glee that Coraline is initially able to overlook the fact that things seem too good to be true, and that her replica parents (and everyone else in sight) has menacing black buttons for eyes. Those button eyes affectingly speak to Coraline’s desire to be seen (and intimate the threat of her other-mother’s gaze), and are emblematic of the chilling, subtly handled means by which Selick evokes primal adolescent fears and anxieties. With sinister surrealism and effervescent showmanship, Coraline spins a fanciful yarn whose every facet seems drawn from its plucky protagonist’s psyche.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008): C

Leave it to Woody Allen to muck up a threesome involving Scarlett Johansson and Penelope Cruz. Then again, given that Allen’s recent track record has been uniformly blah – to the point that even bemoaning his fall-from-grace has become a tiresome requirement of critiquing his yearly output – it’s hardly surprising to find Vicky Cristina Barcelona tripping over its faux-salacious selling point. Via narration so heavy on exposition it immediately tips over into self-parody, Allen’s film makes clear, in its opening scene, that best friend protagonists Vicky (Rebecca Hall) and Cristina (Johansson) are polar opposites, the former a levelheaded yuppie loyal to her responsible fiancé, and the latter a free-spirit sexpot who only knows what she doesn’t want. That these two share no similarities makes their friendship seem like a screenwriting device, but then, everything about Vicky Cristina Barcelona feels that way, with the awful narration and equally unnatural dialogue (Johansson doesn’t utter a single authentic-sounding sentence in the entire film) all defined by their Woody-ness, to the point that one can almost hear him reading the scenes himself off the page. The contrived story involves the duo’s unexpected relationship with a Spanish painter (Javier Bardem) who rocks their world even after inviting into the bedroom his murderous, suicidal ex-wife (an overdoing-it Penélope Cruz). Bardem oozes charm as the impossibly calm, open-minded, seductive artist, but his character, like Cruz’s hysterical nutjob, comes off as a one-note concept, not an actual person. Once again working in a beautiful European locale with which he has no intrinsic connection, Allen’s direction proves blandly impersonal, thereby reducing the proceedings to a travelogue snapshot of Barcelona’s key tourist spots.

Them (2006): C

David Moreau and Xavier Palud’s Them uses, as its basis, [spoilers follow] a killing spree perpetrated by a group of French kids between the ages of 10 and 15. The youthfulness of its villains is, I presume, supposed to make its story more chilling, though the opposite unfortunately holds true. Once it becomes clear that schoolteacher Clémentine (Olivia Bonamy) and boyfriend Lucas (Michaël Cohen) are being stalked by middle-schoolers, it’s hard not to feel embarrassment for them, two adults who can’t kick the crap out of a bunch of filthy, scampering punks whose main scare tactic is the use of a children’s rattling toy. Then again, Clémentine and Lucas are the types of dim-witted horror protagonists who eagerly separate from each other to investigate areas where they’re bound to be sitting ducks, who scream instead of silently hiding, and who barrel forward with all the thoughtfulness of a donkey tumbling down a flight of stairs. Directors Moreau and Palud stage a thrilling sequence in which the duo escape from their isolated, rural Bucharest house – which is randomly preyed upon by pint-sized hooded attackers in the dead of night – as well as a mildly taut final chase. Yet given that it forces one to root for dolts incapable of properly assessing their traumatic situation, as well as affects a based-on-a-true-story guise while indulging in stale genre clichés (such as an attic room decorated in Halloween-borrowed flapping sheets), the film is mostly an exercise in frustration.