Lessons of Darkness

Repo Men (2010): C

Tantalizing at first and then increasingly tedious thereafter, Repo Men has a sci-fi set-up primed to deliver commentary on our callous, insufficient health care system, and then doesn’t do so. Lay the blame squarely at the feet of director Miguel Sapochnik and writers Eric Garcia and Garrett Lerner, who after establishing a near-future in which the sick purchase pricey artificial organs from private companies, and have them surgically removed by the titular grim reapers if they don’t keep up with monthly installment payments, use it for nothing more than a tepid action-chase thriller. In this dystopia, which in its billboard-enhanced aesthetic closely resembles Blade Runner, expert repo man Remy (Jude Law) chooses, after much nagging from his wife (Carice van Houten), to give up his slice-and-dice job to become a desk-jockey salesman. This plan doesn’t please his bloodthirsty partner Jake (Forest Whitaker), and doesn’t come to fruition either once he suffers a serious workplace injury and wakes up to find that he’s had a literal change of heart to go along with his figurative one. After firmly establishing his characters and milieu, director Sapochnik does a hatchet-job on Remy’s development of a conscience, and from there, Repo Men spirals into a bloody mess, with Remy – unable to pay for his new mecca-valve – going on the run, falling in love with a cyborg junkie lounge singer (Alice Braga), and being hunted by Jake. Law and Whitaker do their best with so-so material that favors arterial spatter to serious emotional drama, and Sapochnik’s staging of hand-to-hand combat is at least coherent. Unfortunately, his saga is sluggishly paced, of minor consequence, and increasingly derivative in form and content, right down to a slow-motion-enabled corridor slaughterfest lifted from (or an homage to, your choice) Oldboy, replete with cranium-shattering hammer.

Alice in Wonderland (2010): C

Alice in Wonderland is exactly what one would imagine a Tim-Burton directed adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s novel to be – tons of menacing, slightly grotesque creatures, an ethereal-yet-tough female protagonist, and Johnny Depp as a supposedly delightful weirdo. As such, Burton’s latest re-emphasizes the nagging impression that the director is stuck in a creative rut, making pictures that are a tad too well-suited for his idiosyncratic style and, thus, feel dispiritingly ordinary. Burton strays from his source material by advancing his Alice’s (Mia Wasikowska) age to 19 and transforming her trip to Wonderland (or, as its denizens call it, Underworld) into a return visit, one in which she must fulfill her destiny as a Jabberwocky slayer. Alice falls down the rabbit hole after fleeing a public marriage proposal by a repugnant aristocrat, thereby making her adventure about female self-actualization and empowerment, a twist that might have worked if Alice’s real-world feminist stance had any metaphoric relationship to her surreal Wonderland exploits. Alas, aside from a few stray Wizard of Oz-ish parallels (her future mother-in-law is positioned as a virtual Red Queen), Alice never convincingly melds its two realities into complementary images of the same whole, thereby diffusing the story’s thematic potency. This shortcoming is a shame given that, aside from Burton’s gift for spiraling imagery and Helena Bonham Carter’s performance as the petulant, giant-headed Red Queen, there’s not much to visually admire about the proceedings, which are doused in outlandish CG effects that rarely astonish. 3D doesn’t help matters, the greater distance between foreground Alice and digitized backgrounds merely calling attention to the green-screen work at play. And neither, ultimately, does Depp, who as the Mad Hatter – re-imagined as a tedious Alice sidekick whose insanity is the result of post-traumatic stress – once again succumbs to mannered goof-offery that takes the now-standard, ho-hum form of wearing clown make-up, speaking in a funny accent, and acting foppish.

The Runaways (2010): C

A rebel yawn of a rock n’ roll biopic, The Runaways focuses on the rise and fall of the titular ‘70s all-girl group and, specifically, the twin paths taken by leather-and-growl lead guitarist/songwriter Joan Jett and Fawcett-glamorous singer Cheri Currie. In the hands of writer/director Floria Sigismondi, said stories were marked only by clichés about broken homes, the primal sexuality of punk rock, and the dangerous allure of drugs and stardom. Despite being the only band member of any note (sorry Lita Ford, here functioning as just a screamy malcontent), Jett (Kristen Stewart) is reduced by the film to a mere fashion-model cipher, defined by her leather jacket, matching black hair and too-cool-for-everyone nods, winks and bisexual come-ons. Stewart isn’t to blame for the fact that the character, stripped of a history or personality, is a nothing, but – despite avoiding her usual lip-biting – the actress nonetheless can’t even get the poses quite right, her every riot-grrrl act coming off as dress-up affectation. In the phoniness department, she’s matched by Fanning, who struts about in skimpy whore lingerie with the bruises and glassy eyes of a junkie, and unconvincingly spouts vile like “You’re nothing but a filthy pussy.” True, Cheri is given a backstory involving her absentee mom, alcoholic dad, and the loyal sister whom she callously abandons in favor of chasing her superstar dreams. Yet these sequences, like the countless scenes of on-the-road debauchery and tossed-off mentions about how the Runaways’ fem-rock is trailblazing, are watery stuff, sketched hastily and without care for novelty or vitality. All the twirling, drug-smeary camerawork can’t mask the emptiness of The Runaways, a film with zero to say about either its characters or its music milieu, instead vainly falling back on the Runaways’ decent song catalog, an air of reckless lasciviousness, and a typically gonzo performance by Michael Shannon (as outrageous music producer Kim Fowley) to prop up dramatically barren material.

Mother (2010): A-

Bong Joon-ho nominally returns to the scene of Memories of Murder’s crime with Mother, re-immersing himself in a small-town community teeming with quirky lowlifes and deep dark secrets, and shaken by a sexually motivated murder. Yet if the setting – and, for that matter, the tone of inquisitive, slightly scornful detachment – remains the same, the focus has somewhat changed, as Bong’s latest is less overtly a work of social commentary than a rigorous character drama-cum-morality play. Once again reconfiguring the police procedural genre to his own idiosyncratic ends, Bong’s tale casts its gaze on the titular, unnamed mother (Kim Hye-ja), introduced here in a surreal prelude in which she wanders through a forest meadow and then, for the camera, breaks into a bizarre, melancholy dance. Cut to the “real” world, in which mom – who works as an apothecary herbalist, doing some illegal acupuncture on the side – watches over her mentally handicapped 20-something son Do-Joon (Won Bin) from afar with such intensity that she barely notices almost amputating her own finger. Such maternal devotion, however, doesn’t fully materialize until Do-Joon, shortly after getting into trouble with the law for beating up guys who sideswiped him with their Benz, is arrested for the murder of a promiscuous high school girl.

Convinced her son is innocent, the matriarch embarks on her own investigation into the crime, providing Bong with a whodunit premise ideally suited for his unnerving widescreen compositions, full of extreme, penetrating close-ups and fraught with anxious interpersonal spatial dynamics. Mother’s cinematography always seems on edge and clinically incisive, with empathy in short supply but fascination at a fever pitch, a mood amplified by Lee Byeong-woo’s disquieting score and by Hye-ja’s magnificently disturbed central performance. Driven to protect her boy at all costs, Hye-ja’s mom is a study in unrestrained parental fidelity. Yet Bong isn’t after squishy pathos here, interweaving suggestions of incest, sexual dysfunction and unhealthy emotional relations, as well as interjecting into scenes destabilizing imagery (perhaps imagined by characters, and often casting doubt on the narrative’s particular reality), in order to heighten an off-kilter atmosphere fostered by the realization that all parties involved are concealing a nasty urge or two. Mother and son are at once recognizably human and yet mordantly cartoonish, and as the depths of their manias are slowly revealed (and Hye-ja’s mom is compelled to take drastic action to achieve her ends), they come to epitomize larger, rampant cultural afflictions.

Though encased in a procedural guise, Mother also flirts with melodrama, albeit of a cold, dispassionate sort. Hye-ja’s increasing desperation borders on hysteria and, like Do-Joon’s dim-witted cluelessness, her anxiety and fear aren’t endearing; one watches these two as one would deformed butterflies trapped under glass, with bemused fascination and horror but little else. Yet despite its remove, Bong’s film is thoroughly entrancing, a strange, disorienting snapshot of motherly protectiveness – and the blunt, corrupting amorality it can breed – driven to its self-destructive extremes. A mommy dearest of a most twisted kind, Hye-ja’s protagonist doesn’t become warped along her journey so much as merely expose her true, distorted nature, in the process providing a glimpse at the root cause of her neighborhood’s pornography-and-self-interest amorality. Depravity abounds from dreamy hip-shaking opening to unbearably haunting finale, in which the pain of memory proves so acute as to engender an unstoppable longing for ignorance. It’s here, in the climactic sight of a lost soul embracing its spot on a (literal and figurative) voyage of the damned, where limbs flail and bodies undulate in a dance of mad, giddy oblivion, that Bong’s film conflates its story into a politicized portrait of the horrifying desire for, and ramifications of, willful amnesia.

The Ghost Writer (2010): B

So-so material elevated by stirring direction, or formally impeccable craftsmanship wasted on a sluggish suspense yarn? No matter your glass-half-whatever perspective, The Ghost Writer functions largely as a showcase for its under-house-arrest helmsman Roman Polanski, whose latest is a subtle visual stunner awash in creeping paranoia and anxiety. Hired to ghost-pen the autobiography of a recent Tony Blair-ish British Prime Minister (Pierce Brosnan) under fire for alleged war-on-terror human rights violations – a job that opened after the original scribe died under mysterious circumstances – an unnamed writer (Ewan McGregor) soon finds himself entangled in a web of political and romantic intrigue. Despite hot-button parallels, Polanski isn’t interested in dissecting current military and homeland security issues, sidestepping real debate in favor of thriller tension and unease, a mood he expertly crafts via a Martha’s Vineyard granite-and-glass compound setting that exudes menace, as well as deep-focus cinematography marked by visual lines expanding into the frame. The result is a feeling of drowning, which props up a narrative that, despite well-nuanced performances by Brosnan, McGregor and Olivia Williams as Brosnan’s canny wife, bogs down in a second act short on heat. An understated late showdown between McGregor’s ghost and Tom Wilkinson’s intimidating professor is so taut as to distract attention away from the low-stakes game being played. Yet bringing one back to earth, the film’s central, climactic revelations prove ho-hum, apt to make one wonder what all the fuss was about and, ultimately, make one wish that Polanski’s superb artistry – highlighted by a gorgeous final shot that, matching an earlier image, conveys the impossibility of wrestling control and order over looming, imposing forces – was at the behest of less disposable material.

Shutter Island (2010): C+

Dialed up to 11 for nearly all of its bloated 138-minute runtime, Shutter Island adapts Dennis Lehane’s novel with a baroque extravagance that can’t compensate for lousy pop-lit source material and a script (by Laeta Kalogridis) that both fails to elicit engagement with its characters and invest its puzzle-box story with meta-cinema weight. In 1954, federal marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) travels with new partner Chuck (Mark Ruffalo) to New England’s maximum security mental hospital Shutter Island to investigate the disappearance of a patient named Rachel Solando. Once there, however, it turns out that nothing is what it seems, both with regards to the clinical work being spearheaded by Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley) and Teddy’s true motivations for visiting the remote facility. Except that it doesn’t even take that long for Scorsese to intimate that strange things are afoot, as an opening tracking shot through a ship mess hall to a sweaty Teddy puking his brains out, immediately preceded by the Taxi Driver-ish sight of Teddy’s boat emerging from ghostly mist, makes plain the unreliability of this presented fiction. And things become even hazier once Teddy and Chuck hear the amazing particulars of Rachel’s escape, which would have had to involve miracle upon miracle.

Scorsese establishes his set-up with a beautiful array of tense widescreen compositions, luxurious tracking shots, and (with aid from longtime collaborator Thelma Schoonmaker) a series of jarring cuts that heighten the overall impression of reality tearing at the seams. Soon after his investigation begins, Teddy begins seeing his dead wife (Michelle Williams) in fiery hallucinations overflowing with grand gestures – CG effects, rear-projection, fast-forward and rewind (dig that cigarette smoke reentering the filter) – and set to an array of haunting classical-composer cuts assembled by Robbie Robertson. Whereas these technically dexterous sequences are rousing in the moment, they overstay their welcome in nearly all cases, a situation that soon extends to Shutter Island as a whole as it barrels toward a conclusion that any genre-schooled viewer will see coming from the opening frames. That journey is an intermittently thrilling one populated by a peerless cast which also includes Max von Sydow, Emily Mortimer, Jackie Early Haley and Patricia Clarkson. Yet their performances, like DiCaprio’s central one, become infected by the same overcooked out-thereness that plagues Scorsese’s direction, which turns every other storm-cloudy shot (weather = psychology here) and line of dialogue into a dum-dum-DUM moment. The proceedings quickly feel fatigued, as if run aground by ominous-itis.

Cinephile that Scorsese is, Shutter Island melds film noir, Holocaust drama, horror scareshow and Agatha Christie mystery, all while pivoting around an M. Night Shyamalan conceit noticeable so early on that it drains most of the story’s juice. Scorsese in fact telegraphs this denouement with such clunkiness that it almost seems as if he’s determined to expose his pulp material’s true nature so he can then get on with casting the film – which fundamentally revolves around notions of heroic fantasy projections and delusions being used as tools of denial from traumatic realities – as a metaphor for the act of cinemagoing. Unfortunately, the prolonged nature of a misdirection-laden second act and a climax that doesn’t end until every last question has been explicitly answered suggests, ultimately, that the film’s obviousness is less a clever ploy than merely a symptom of the director’s heavy hand. Which isn’t to say that, scene to scene, Shutter Island’s overwrought style can’t be entrancing – few directors can generate such menace and terror from a single silky pan or jarring edit. But beholden to plot above all else, the film’s audio-video barrage ultimately just puffs up corny B-movie material to the point of distension.

A Perfect Getaway (2009): B

David Twohy doesn’t reinvent the wheel with A Perfect Getaway, the key to both the film’s minor successes and shortcomings. Interested in straightforward B-movie suspense laced with a dash of wink-wink self-awareness, Twohy’s film concerns a vacationing couple in Kauai – screenwriter Cliff (Steve Zahn) and new bride Cydney (Milla Jovovich) – who, while backpacking in the mountains, hear that a pair of newlywed murderers are loose on the island. Wouldn’t you know it, they then immediately find themselves faced with two sets of suspects: a menacing pair (Chris Hemsworth and Marley Shelton) angry over being denied a hitchhiking ride, and a super hunting/camping twosome (Timothy Olyphant and Kiele Sanchez) who seem a bit too handy with a knife. Twohy lets his story’s central guessing game play out with patient tautness, and his cast’s performances – whether directly addressing the issue of “red herrings” and “second-act plot twists,” as Olyphant does, or merely exuding a playful “how dangerous am I?” ambiguity – keep the mystery lively. It’s too bad that Twohy telegraphs his climactic surprise from the opening-credits prologue, yet his otherwise capable misdirections are sturdy enough to cast minor doubt on the final outcome, just as his generally clean, gimmick-free direction keeps the action lean and swift. A third-act filled with too much flash and sizzle, as well as dull flashback exposition, mucks up the preceding tense atmosphere, but as far as modest genre exercises go, A Perfect Getaway nonetheless gets enough right. 

The Crazies (2010): B

 Working in a vein similar to – if not quite as successful as – Zach Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead do-over, replete with intro use of a Johnny Cash song (here, a cover of “We’ll Meet Again”), Breck Eisner’s remake of George A. Romero’s 1973 The Crazies is a testament to the value of understated genre craftsmanship. In the type of small town U.S.A. John Mellencamp would adore, a local sheriff (Timothy Olyphant), his doctor wife (Radha Mitchell) and his deputy (Joe Anderson) attempt to deal with a fast-moving plague outbreak that’s turning their neighbors insane. As in Romero’s version, water polluted by a mishandled government bio-agent is the culprit, and the gas-masked military – which quickly shows up to contain (i.e. slaughter everyone in) the area – is as dangerous as the lunatic townsfolk. Though Eisner’s fleet-footed film never develops its characters beyond two-word descriptions, his cast’s rock-solid performances and his get-to-business approach are more than enough to compensate for the material’s inability to create strong empathetic connection to its main players. Similarly, the director may not contextualize his mayhem in contemporary hot-button fears and anxieties as Romero did, but his no-nonsense stewardship keeps the action consistently taut, moving swiftly from one cleverly conceived and executed set piece to another (highlights being a stop at a car wash and a resourceful knife-to-the-throat). From its society-in-flames scenario to its apocalyptic zombie-ish imagery, no new soil is tilled here. Yet The Crazies’ suspense is effective enough to eventually eclipse its familiarity, the film a tried-and-true B-movie content to simply do its job well.

Sherlock Holmes (2009): A-

Like a jaunty, boozy, fisticuffing night spent at a nineteenth-century cockney brothel, Sherlock Holmes rocks and rambles, steams and swings, bounces and blazes with the type of electricity it wasn’t clear director Guy Ritchie was capable of generating. Kickstarted by a jangly old world-new world score that oozes breathless verve, Ritchie’s vision of the renowned sleuth is in fact an assured reinvention, imagining Holmes as a frazzled mastermind with theatrical flair, martial arts skills and a voluminous intellect that he naturally employs in the service of mystery-solving. Ritchie’s film opens with a fleet-footed race through the dark, grimy London streets and catacombs to arrive at a black magic ceremony orchestrated by murderous Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong), whom Holmes and trusty sidekick Dr. Watson (Jude Law) – a voice of good sense and, thus, the bickering foil to loose-cannon Sherlock – ably foil. This success, however, is only a beginning in Michael Robert Johnson, Anthony Peckham and Simon Kinberg’s live-wire script, which proceeds to briskly map out not only its protagonists’ siblings-soulmates relationship but also tease out the true nefariousness afoot, which revolves around the executed Lord Blackwood’s apparent rise from the grave and subsequent plot to use the dark arts to seize control of jolly old England and, thereafter, the world.

Aided by Philippe Rousselot’s evocative cinematography, Ritchie shoots London like a grubby nascent metropolis escaping psychic and Satanic superstitions to be reborn, violently and unhappily, as a mecca of industrialized modernity. That tension is at the heart of Holmes’ battle with Blackwood, the former a champion of deductive reasoning and science and the latter an embodiment of the otherworldly. Yet cannier still is the way that Ritchie weaves such historical-transition undercurrents into the very fabric of Holmes, from an early gag involving a palm-reader informing Watson of his future with his fiancé (Kelly Reilly) to a finale staged atop the under-construction Tower Bridge, a striking symbol of the shifting tides upon which the film so swiftly rides. Nonetheless, this holiday season franchise-initiator is first and foremost predicated on a blockbuster blend of comedy, sexiness and action, and in that vein the director – after a decade spent failing to fulfill the promise of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels – is also up to the challenge. From an extended apartment-to-street-to-shipyard brawl with a French behemoth to two beautifully composed sequences in which we become privy to Holmes’ astute mental assessment of, and plans to take down, an adversary – moments shot in slow-mo and narrated by the detective – the film is whiplash quick and twice as exciting.

Ritchie provides the energized stewardship while his cast – benefiting from characterizations and dialogue that crackle – deliver the sensuality and humor. Strong’s silky-deep voice brings menace to Blackwood and, as Holmes’ former paramour and expert conniver Irene Adler, Rachel McAdams mix-and-matches toughness, vulnerability and calculating deception with swoon-worthy aplomb. Law, meanwhile, seems positively enlivened by Watson’s perpetually vexed (and secretly smitten) attitude toward his partner as well as his acidic rat-a-tat banter with Downey Jr. As for the star himself, Holmes proves an even more delicious role than his seemingly tailor-made Iron Man gig. The Baker Street sleuth’s unparalleled mind affords Downey plentiful opportunities to milk smarty-pants arrogance for laughs, and the character’s newfound combat competence presents numerous chances for physical intrepidness. Yet it’s ultimately Downey Jr.’s idiosyncratic conception of Holmes – brilliant in a fidgety, socially retarded, mad genius sort of way, and rough-and-tumble in a manner that prizes brains over actual brawn – that brings the material to life. Downy exudes lively, muscular magnetism and more than a dash of debonair charm but isn’t afraid to make his hero foppish or foolish. In the actor (as well as Ritchie’s) hands, he’s a modernized Holmes both faithful to his origins and vigorously unique, an ahead-of-his-time icon here resurrected, fittingly and thrillingly, for the modern age.

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009): C

Boundless creativity can be a shortcoming if not channeled properly, a fact proven by The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus as it barrels from one extravagantly whimsical set piece to another. Terry Gilliam has never been a director prone to inhibition, and that’s increasingly become both his blessing and curse as a filmmaker, with the latter holding more true of his latest. His first original screenplay since Brazil, the film concerns immortal magic man Doctor Parnassus (Christopher Plumber) who, while travelling around modern London in a Howl’s Moving Castle-ish stage-vehicle-home contraption with his assistant Anton (Andrew Garfield) and 16-year-old daughter Valentina (Lily Cole), both continues his age-old battle with the Devil (Tom Waits) and hooks up with a seemingly resurrected amnesiac named Tony (Heath Ledger). As Ledger died during production, Gilliam enlists the help of Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Collin Farrell to play Tony when he enters into the Imaginarium, a portal into Parnassus’ mind where dreams and nightmares come to life. It’s a deftly executed workaround, but one that doesn’t improve the proceedings’ helter-skelter messiness. Actors race about, make exaggerated faces, and confuse nervous, anxious mannerisms for quirky idiosyncrasy, all while Gilliam frantically but unsuccessfully attempts to fashion an actual story – something about the Devil coming for Valentina on her 16th birthday if Parnassus can’t best him in a wager over collected souls – out of slapdash, seemingly improvised sequences awash in uneven CG effects. Lionizing the power of the imagination as an ultimate ideal, Parnassus feels like a collection of ideas in search of a sturdy framework or at least a passing connection to reality. As it is, the film feels like a patchwork quilt of prior Gilliam elements from The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, The Fisher King and especially The Brothers Grimm, right down to Ledger’s overcooked gonzo turn.