Lessons of Darkness

Darkness (2004): D

“Darkness is very wise,” says Giancarlo Giannini's doctor during the climax of Jaume Balagueró’s ghost story Darkness. He must have been watching a different movie. Petulant American teenager Regina (Anna Paquin) and her dysfunctional family move to the Spanish countryside and into a haunted mansion that, unbeknownst to the new tenants, was constructed years earlier as a temple for unholy rituals. Soon enough, life in the house becomes kooky, from flickering lights and the appearance of child specters to young Paul (Stephan Enquist) receiving inexplicable neck bruises. Unfortunately for the mentally stable Regina, Dad (Iain Glen) is too crazy, and Mom (Lena Olin) is in too much denial about her clan’s problems, to pay much attention to the escalating supernatural events. Balagueró, withholding information in a vain attempt to create mystery and elicit (ultimately non-existent) scares, doesn’t waste time exploring the seemingly ripe theme of cultural dislocation, and his stranded performers – especially Paquin and Olin – seem confused about who their characters are. The underlit finale tries to rectify the horrifying tedium of the preceding hour-and-a-half with a dose of creepy fatalism. Yet aside from a picture of three aged, eye-less women that’s obsessed over by the family’s insane patriarch, there’s nothing very frightening about this shallow, stupid spookfest.

Memorial Day Muck

Despite being sick this Memorial Day, I've got a host of new reviews for this weekend's - as well as upcoming - would-be blockbusters. I think you'll be surprised at which ones I found worthwhile...

This Weekend:
The Longest Yard (2005) (Slant magazine)
Madagascar (Slant magazine)

Coming Soon:
Cinderella Man (Slant magazine)
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (Slant magazine)
The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D (Slant magazine)

Another DVD for a Classic Film:
The Americanization of Emily - DVD (Slant magazine)

And keep in mind that reviews for other new and future releases (including Bomb the System, Tell Them Who You Are, and A League of Ordinary Gentlemen) can be found in earlier posts (below) or in the Alphabetical Archive.

The Sith Hits the Fan

Given our culture's collective insanity over Star Wars, I'll begin by noting that my review of Episode III – Revenge of the Sith is directly below this post. Those less interested in George Lucas' overhyped piece of cinematic space junk, however, can check out five other new reviews, covering films that range from great (1955's Bad Day at Black Rock) to infernally lame (Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist).

Paul Schrader's head-spinningly dull Exorcist prequel:
Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist (Slant magazine)

An interesting doc about professional bowling:
A League of Ordinary Gentlemen (Slant magazine)

Upcoming dramas about graffiti culture and Italian society:
Bomb the System (Slant magazine)
Caterina in the City (Slant magazine)

A classic film on a decent DVD:
Bad Day at Black Rock - DVD (Slant magazine)

Finally, my review of The Interpreter is also below.

Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith (2005): C

Thankful it’s over, I am. After two pathetic prequels and an avalanche of out-of-proportion hype, George Lucas’ intergalactic saga concludes with Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith, a ponderous series finale that finally depicts Anakin Skywalker’s (Hayden Christensen) transformation into Darth Vader. Lucas still hasn’t learned how to infuse his technically impressive CGI spacescapes with anything approaching compelling human emotion, and Episode III’s wooden dialogue remains awash in goofy names (Mace Windu sounds like a window-cleaning solution, Count Dooku like a children’s cereal), laughable references to kids as “younglings,” and lines such as “Hold me like you did by the lake on Naboo.” While nominally better than its immediate predecessors thanks to a pervasive atmosphere of catastrophic doom, the film’s set pieces are either overly frantic (the opening aerial dogfight) or dull clones of past installments’ superior fights (Anakin and Obi-Wan’s duel pales in comparison to Episode I’s three-way lightsaber skirmish). And even worse, the long-anticipated Dark Side denouement arrives, somewhat surprisingly, with little more than a whimper. Lucas tries to infuse his juvenile franchise with a political subtext that equates Supreme Chancellor Palpatine/Sith Lord Sidious (Ian McDiarmid) with President Bush. Yet given that the Star Wars films are models of black-and-white, good-vs-evil fantasy – their lack of subtlety epitomized by the staging of Anakin’s descent into villainy on a planet awash in hellfire – it’s nearly impossible to take seriously any parallels between the gray-shaded real world and Lucas’ galaxy far, far away.

The Interpreter (2005): C

The fate of fictional world diplomacy hangs in the balance in The Interpreter, Sydney Pollack’s crummy – and politically gutless – suspense yarn about a Secret Service agent (Sean Penn) who investigates a United Nations interpreter’s (Nicole Kidman) claim that she overhead a plot to kill a visiting African dictator, only to discover that she might be involved in orchestrating the assassination. The first Hollywood production shot in the U.N.’s hallowed halls, Pollack’s film is nonetheless too cowardly to address actual global events, instead concocting a make believe African country called Matobo, a fictional dialect called Ku (which Kidman and company speak with straight faces), and endless speeches about how revenge (whether personal or national) corrupts the soul and should be forsaken in favor of forgiveness. It’s hardly surprising to find liberal power player Penn making a movie extolling the greatness of peaceful U.N. mediation, but by draining any pertinent real-world discourse from the proceedings, Pollack also makes his film irrelevant. As a straightforward detective story, there’s one great sequence involving a tension-wracked confluence of events on a NYC public bus, but the script (by Charles Randolph, Scott Frank and Steven Zaillian) doesn’t really know how to keep its cards close to the vest, and thus the shadowy villain is identifiable the moment he appears on screen. Coupled with some didactic, tin-ear dialogue and two great actors floundering in material beneath them (not to mention poor Catherine Keener, given the thankless role of Penn’s featureless sidekick), The Interpreter proves to be a political thriller afraid of politics and bereft of thrills.

A Less-Than-Chilling 13th

Perhaps Monster-in-Law or Unleashed (two films I haven't yet seen) will provide moviegoers with some scares on this Friday the 13th. But the two films reviewed below - Will Ferrell's disappointing new family comedy, and a documentary on global child labor - are, unfortunately, neither terrifyingly bad nor frighteningly good.

Kicking and Screaming (Slant magazine)
Stolen Childhoods (Slant magazine)

For some real shocks, check out Takeshi Miike's bodily fluid-saturated Visitor Q. Or, if you're simply interested in seeing Paris Hilton bite the big one (figuratively, not literally), there's always the new House of Wax. Both are reviewed below.

House of Wax (2005): C

House of Wax argues that for every pair of twins, one is awful and one is good. When it comes to classic films and remakes, the same also usually holds true, a fact bolstered by this lousy Jaume Serra-directed reimagining of 1953’s Vincent Price chiller. Maintaining only the title and central conceit of its predecessor, this flashy, derivative riff on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre involves Carly (Elisha Cuthbert), her ex-con twin brother Nick (Chad Michael Murray), and their group of friends – including the abominable Paris Hilton – as they camp out in the woods on their way to a “big game,” discover an abandoned town dominated by the titular house, and wind up being hunted by a serial killer who likes to turn his victims into wax sculptures. Its grimy aesthetic (which mimics the constantly ripped-off Seven) and rote fiend (who looks like Geddy Lee crossed with Leatherface) are tiresomely familiar, and there’s a preposterous illogicality to a wax museum being made of actual wax (and, thus, extremely susceptible to fire). By and large, House of Wax is simply a mundane slasher flick populated by blandly pretty people who look really good in sweaty tank tops. Yet the film gets bonus points for Hilton’s videotaped spike-through-the-forehead death scene, which (more so than an earlier, direct reference) proves to be a mordantly amusing allusion to the heiress’ infamous sex tape and a sly riff on our culture’s morbid, love-hate fascination with celebrity.

Visitor Q (2001): A-

No one does taboo-smashing, boundary-stretching outrageousness quite like Takashi Miike, and Visitor Q is the scandalous pinnacle of his extreme cinema canon. A family of degenerates is falling apart: TV reporter Kiyoshi (Kenichi Endo), interested in filming his whore daughter for a news program, has sex with her instead; his son Takuya (Jun Mutô), tormented by bullies at school, takes his frustration out on his mother by beating her with switches; and his wife Keiko (Shungiku Uchida), scarred by her son’s blows, prostitutes herself for money to buy heroin. Into this dysfunctional clan appears Visitor Q, a mysterious guest who – through violent blows to the head, sexual favors and documentary videotaping – acts as both a voyeuristic witness to, and catalyst for, the family’s transformation into a well-adjusted (if nonetheless perverted and homicidal) unit. Miike’s film – a loose remake of Pasolini’s Teorema that also exudes the zaniness of Francois Ozon’s Sitcom – is a cornucopia of shocking sights, from Keiko’s kitchen floor-soaking lactation (a miraculous symbol of her rediscovered maternal instincts) to Kiyoshi’s necrophilic nookie with the cadaver of his colleague and former mistress (“Come on, let’s do it. I don’t care if you’re a corpse!” he pronounces before acting on his unsavory impulses). Despite this mayhem’s stunning, pornographic inappropriateness, Visitor Q eventually reveals itself to be both a sly critique of reality TV as well as a conservative statement about the decay of the Japanese family – and the necessity of traditional familial roles – during which each character reassumes his or her “proper” place in the household (father/provider, mother/nurturer, son and daughter/dutifully loyal offspring). But social commentary or not, any film brazen enough to interrupt a sex scene between a man and a dead woman with a joke about fecal matter is, to put it bluntly, the shit.

Oldboy (2005): C+

Like so many of its vengeance-driven genre brethren, Chan-wook Park’s stylish but slight Oldboy wants to have it both ways. The tale of a loudmouth named Oh Dae-Su (Choi Min-Sik) who is imprisoned in a grimy hotel room prison for 15 years and, once released, is given five days to uncover the reason behind his captivity, the film is ultimately a cautionary tale on the ruinous consequences of revenge. Yet rife with vicious battles and gruesome disfigurement, this Memento-type thriller also voraciously indulges in the same brand of blood-soaked grisliness that its story depicts as futile. Thus, Oldboy, in effect, argues for its own pointlessness. Early scenes set in Dae-Su’s cell – with its rotting green-yellow hues and pallid TV-generated glow – have a David Fincher-esque sumptuousness, and there’s a surrealistic beauty to a prolonged fight in which the crazy-haired protagonist, with a knife in his back, hacks his way through a corridor full of weapon-wielding thugs. The ultimate revelations about Dae-Su’s incarceration, however, are so thematically shallow and out of left field that the film comes off as a visually dazzling stunt determined to drown out its own emptiness with hip, gory violence.

May Flowers?

May is in bloom, but of the five new releases reviewed below - four of which are in theaters right now, one of which (Mindhunters) will be out next week - only a couple avoid my withering criticism.

The pretty good:
Crash (Slant magazine)
Double Dare (Slant magazine)

Not So Much:
Kingdom of Heaven (Slant magazine)
A Hole In One (filmcritic.com)
Mindhunters (Slant magazine)