Lessons of Darkness

Notes on a Second Viewing – A History of Violence

• Though Cronenberg claims to have been unfamiliar with the film’s graphic novel source material, his compositions regularly invoke comic book panels – such as a Leone-esque shot from Tom Stall’s hip during his front lawn stand-off with Carl Fogarty (above), or a climactic master shot of the entranceway to Tom’s home in which Richie’s body lies flat on the ground and Mortensen’s gun-in-hand can be seen poking out of the doorway. That said, these comic book-ish compositions are themselves modeled after images from classic Western and crime films, two Hollywood genres that AHoV is both indebted to and interested in subverting/critiquing.

• I didn’t notice it the first time around, but the name “Stall” is a really nice touch, as it subtly captures Joey’s (ultimately futile) attempts to block/impede his violent (former) self.

• Ashton Holmes’ performance is still the film’s weak link, though the moment in which his breakfast is interrupted by Tom racing into the house (thinking that Fogarty has come to kill his family) exudes a measure of believably sudden, childlike fear that films rarely show (or accurately capture) in teenage characters.

• Cronenberg’s formal mastery is impressive throughout. But that opening, extended tracking shot of the two killers outside the motel (and in their car) is truly in a class by itself.

• Maria Bello really holds the film together as Tom’s wife Edie, and not just in the two incredible sex scenes. Her performance during the scene in which the sheriff confronts Tom about his true identity, and she backs up his lie, is superbly handled. Kudos also to Peter MacNeill as the sheriff, whose initial “So that’s the way it’s gonna be” smile when he realizes Edie is going to endorse Tom’s deception shifts to a look of uncomfortable, embarrassed meekness when Edie begins sobbing – the lawman caught between thinking that she’s lying, but incapable of calling her out because there’s a chance, however slight, that her tears (and story) are genuine and any further query might truly upset the situation.

Slow Week

Not much new stuff for this week's link round-up - and certainly not much positive stuff. But I still recommend any of the below films over Smokin' Aces (out today), which grows worse in my memory with each passing day...

Today:
Catch and Release (Slant magazine)
Blood and Chocolate (Slant magazine)

The Coming Weeks:
The Situation (Slant magazine)
Starter for Ten (Slant magazine)

Crank (2006): C+

Racist, xenophobic, homophobic and sexist – Crank has some intolerance for everyone. Hurtling forward like a nihilistic PCP addict on a bender, Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor’s action film about a hitman poisoned with a drug that’ll cause him to die if his heart rate drops too low – in other words, it’s Cardiac Speed – revels in its anti-P.C. indecency. While its brazen, indiscriminate offensiveness is in tune with its crazed Loony Tunes action (and accompanying tongue-in-cheek humor), its freneticism quickly becomes exhausting, futilely trying to cover up the ludicrousness of every decision made by its dim characters. Awakening to find himself pumped full of a “Beijing Cocktail” that can only be counteracted by keeping his adrenaline levels sky high, assassin Chev Chelios (a suitably goofy-badass Jason Statham) goes on an L.A. rampage to find the adversary (Jose Pablo Cantillo) who sentenced him to this chemical-induced death. Maligning blacks, gays, Arabs and a girlfriend (Amy Smart) whom he screws on a Chinatown street as passersby stare in astonishment, Chev repeatedly proves himself a sadistic psycho without much in the way of grey matter. Fittingly, then, Neveldine and Taylor’s aesthetic ably matches their protagonist’s empty-headed smash-and-grab demeanor, jazzing up Chev’s ultra-violent encounters with flashy cinematographic gimmicks that – except for a few sweet-looking phone conversations where the person Chev’s talking to is seen in picture-in-picture squares projected onto flat surfaces – are simply so much superfluous, distracting visual noise.

Babe (1995): A-

For all its sublime charms, Babe’s most endearing attribute may be its universality, which extends from its episodic tale’s lessons about tolerance to its Hoggett farm setting, a storybook locale that feels at once Midwestern American, rural English, and sleepy countryside Australian. Based on Dick King-Smith’s children’s book “The Sheep-Dog,” Chris Noonan’s film (co-written with producer George Miller) isn’t novel in its desire to impart morals via an anthropomorphic animal fable. Yet the director’s realization of his material is pitch-perfect, with its seemingly effortless synthesis of humor and pathos almost as wonderful as is its ability to capture the sense of awe and fear that attends youth’s initial exposure to the big wide world. Separated from his family (who are sent to the slaughterhouse they believe to be heaven), piglet Babe (voiced by Christine Cavanaugh) fortuitously winds up at the home of Farmer Hoggett (James Cromwell), where he’s exposed to a diverse animal population – including loving dog Fly (Miriam Margolyes), her mean mate Rex (Hugo Weaving), and rascally duck Ferdinand (Danny Mann) – and where he proves, through pure-hearted naïveté and kindness, that character is self-defined and that differences from the norm are to be embraced rather than feared. Such themes might have been treated with manipulative mawkishness by a more aggressive directorial hand, but Noonan’s approach is sentimental without being unduly syrupy, his handling of triumph and tragedy distinguished by an aesthetic and narrative classicism as well as a respect for his pint-sized audience’s intelligence. Clearly drawn two- and four-legged characters (including Cromwell’s superb performance as the naturally iconoclastic farmer) and an expertly choreographed child’s POV are also essential facets of Babe’s appeal, though its account of the little pig’s status quo-defying quest to become a champion sheepherder is ultimately more than the sum of its parts – and, in fact, is more (engaging, amusing, clever) than virtually every comparable kid’s film of the past ten years.

Maintaining Focus

With my beloved New Orleans Saints only one win away from their first-ever trip to the Super Bowl, it's been tough focusing on non-football-related matters this week. Fortunately, a host of new review assignments kept me distracted from feverishly obsessing over this Sunday's NFC Championship game, and the (largely negative) fruits of my labor can be found via the following links.

Today:
The Hitcher (2007) (Slant magazine)

Next Week and Beyond:
Seraphim Falls (Slant magazine)
Red Road (Slant magazine)
Constellation (Slant magazine)
Avenue Montaigne (Slant magazine)
From Other Worlds (Slant magazine)

TV:
We All Scream For Ice Cream - Masters of Horror (Season 2) (Slant magazine)

Four new reviews can also be found below, including ones for Mike Judge's Idiocracy and Tony Scott's cheesball action film The Last Boy Scout.

The Last Boy Scout (1991): C+

No wonder screenwriter Shane Black’s career took a nosedive shortly after The Last Boy Scout – there was nowhere left to go but down after creating the apotheosis of the modern interracial-buddy action film genre he helped popularize with 1987’s Lethal Weapon. Jammed full of so many ludicrously cartoonish set pieces and hip one-liners that it offers up a handy compendium of the era’s favorite blockbuster tropes, this Bruce Willis-Damon Wayans adventure begins with a corny parody of Monday Night Football’s intro musical theme and then a classic running back-with-a-gun sequence (featuring future Tae-Bo guru Billy Blanks, no less!), and takes off from there into all sorts of juvenile-macho nonsense. Down-on-his-luck detective Joe Hallenbeck (Willis, rehashing his sarcastic Die Hard routine) teams up with disgraced quarterback Jimmy Dix (Wayans) to solve the murder of Dix’s stripper girlfriend (a young Halle Berry), only to find himself trying to foil an elaborate sports-gambling conspiracy orchestrated by a crooked politician and a Texas businessman who owns a pro team. Directed by Tony Scott with the overblown TV commercial-ish aesthetic that was his then-trademark (before he progressed to his current over-edited, one-second-per-shot style), The Last Boy Scout is empty and laughable in every respect. And yet despite its general lousiness, it delivers the goofy goods like few of its genre brethren, while also functioning as a time capsule for that particular cinematic moment when the cheesy action film formula – comprised of excessive explosions, endless visual flash, no logic, and incessant tough-guy quips (sample: “I’m gonna shove an umbrella up your ass and open it”) – was about to become the hackneyed (and ripe-for-parody) cliché it is today.

Idiocracy (2006): B-

Neither the train wreck Twentieth-Century Fox believed it to be when the studio unceremoniously dumped it onto DVD after a miniscule theatrical release, nor the disrespected and misunderstood masterpiece many had hoped, Mike Judge’s Idiocracy instead turns out to be simply an intermittently amusing – and sometimes lazy – satire that plays like a so-so episode of Futurama. Commissioned to be test subjects in a government hibernation program that’ll last one year, über-average soldier Joe (Luke Wilson) and hooker Rita (Maya Rudolph) instead wake up 500 years in the future to find that, thanks to dumb people’s more vigorous breeding habits, the world has become entirely populated by Butthead-grade morons. Now the smartest person on Earth, Joe embarks on a series of misadventures while attempting to return to present-day 2005, along the way discovering that sports drinks have replaced water as the planetary drink of choice, entertainment has devolved into shows like “Ow, My Balls!”, and Starbucks is the nation’s premiere hand-job retailer. It’s a scenario intended to playfully eviscerate our passive acceptance of our current corporatized infotainment culture, with the film’s cheap production design and CG effects cannily mirroring the story’s crass setting (miles-wide Costco outlets, mountains of trash, former porn stars and wrestlers as president). Yet Judge’s general disinterest in structured narrative often leads to sloppiness, so that the film undercuts its own central critique by focusing too heavily on slapdash gags and not enough on the ways Big Box conglomerates and collective apathy affect (in this case, for the worst) the global population. Junk like Code Name: The Cleaner and Man of the Year may not be a far cry from Ass, the cinematic blockbuster (featuring nothing but a static shot of a naked behind) to which Idiocracy’s citizenry flock. But at least for now, many of us moviegoers still expect more than average scatological humor and slight political/cultural commentary from the guy who made Office Space.

Basket Case (1982): B

Set in seedy, pre-Disneyfication early-‘80s Manhattan, Frank Henenlotter’s Basket Case is the kind of film a young Martin Scorsese or Abel Ferrara might have made had they been interested in tales about murderous one-foot-tall monsters with a thing for hookers’ panties. Fresh-faced Duane Bradley (Kevin Van Hentenryck) moves from upstate New York to a squalid Times Square hotel with a wicker basket under his arm, prompting just about everyone he meets to ask – in the film’s recurring gag – “What’s in the basket?” The answer is Duane’s Siamese twin brother Belial, a freakish head with arms (made out of obviously cheap rubber) whose anger over being separated from his sibling’s side has driven him and Duane (who share a psychic bond) to seek out and kill the three doctors who performed the surgery. Looking every bit as ragged as its urban locale, Henenlotter’s midnight movie classic is nonetheless a thing of modest B-movie beauty, with its ridiculous effects, excessive gore, and uniformly wooden (and often intentionally campy) performances contributing to its ramshackle appeal. Once Duane falls for a receptionist (Terri Susan Smith), an amusing romantic competition arises between the once-conjoined bros. The pint-sized creature's jealousy and psycho-sexual confusion, however, are ultimately no more ridiculous – nor more endearingly cheesy – than a flashback to the duo’s childhood in which their loving, loyal aunt reads the kids a bedtime story with a cuddling Belial on her lap.

All the King’s Men (1949): B-

Broderick Crawford nabbed an Oscar for his portrayal of Huey Long-ish politico Willie Stark in All the King’s Men, and while his full-bodied performance still holds up nearly six decades later, the rest of Robert Rossen’s Best Picture winner (based on Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel) has lost a good deal of its fierce luster. Hailed for its grittily authentic take on backwater Southern politics and the sleaze that infested it, the film now seems less a masterpiece of realism than merely a well-made – and moralizing top-heavy – Hollywood production about absolute power’s penchant for corrupting absolutely. Disgusted by the crooked officials in his Louisiana hometown, populist redneck Stark runs for office, appealing to his fellow “hicks” with a straight-shooting platform that – once he’s elected, and hungrily takes to his newfound clout – quickly goes by the wayside. As in Warren’s book, the story’s protagonist isn’t Stark but his right-hand man, idealistic former journalist Jack Burden (John Ireland), who like everyone else (including Burden’s childhood love) is so seduced by Stark’s everyman speechifying that he fails to see the monster his hero is becoming. Rossen’s efficient direction includes a number of skillful touches, including an early glimpse of Stark ignoring his wife as she criticizes the powers-that-be which hints at the man’s faulty altruism and foreshadows his impending plummet from grace. Yet even with Best Supporting Actress winner Mercedes McCambridge lending a dose of sexual desperation to the proceedings as Stark’s campaign manager/mistress Sadie Burke, All the King’s Men rails against demagoguery with fire in its belly but an unwelcome amount of flaccid didacticism – an increasingly frustrating fact given that the film’s primary positions are definitively made long before the fall-to-pieces finale.

The Globes Ain't Saving America...

Having lost all interest in awards shows like the Golden Globes and the Academy Awards, I can't muster the energy to repeat last year's running diaries.

So instead, here's a video clip for those who read my previous Globes post. It also doubles as a clue to what I really watched tonight.