Lessons of Darkness

The Midnight Meat Train (2008): B-

Given its superiority to countless modern horror trifles thrust into multiplexes, it would be difficult to fathom the straight-to-DVD route taken by The Midnight Meat Train (a token theatrical release in a few random markets doesn’t count) save for one considerable detail: its gore. Ryuhei Kitamura’s adaptation of Clive Barker’s short story is so thoroughly coated in over-the-top blood and guts that even veteran genre fans will likely be astounded, the director delivering more gutted corpses, ripped flesh, removed eyeballs and torrents of blood – some of it achieved via CG, some of it done the ol’ fashioned way – than any film in recent memory. Written by Jeff Buhler, Kitamura’s tale trades in Barker’s usual brand of psycho-sexualized carnage, with everything from the titular silver-steel subway train to the plethora of penetrating blades and hooks laced with a demented eroticized charge. The story concerns photographer Leon’s (Bradley Cooper) quest to document the soul of his fetid metropolitan home, which leads him to nocturnal train slaughters performed by a silent, suit-attired butcher (Vinnie Jones). Beginning with a shot of Leon pointing and clicking his camera at the audience, The Midnight Meat Train hints at being a horror rendition of Blowup in which Leon’s act of watching and recording the fiend’s dirty deeds (which slowly infects his mind and soul) is equated with our own voyeurism. Any such thread, however, is never fully developed, of which the same can be said about the script itself. Though Kitamura’s eerily patient cinematography creates otherworldly dread, the proceedings frequently feel wobbly thanks to a raft of illogical compositions and plot holes one could drive a semi through. Still, those with a taste for the grotesque will no doubt appreciate the insanely excessive nastiness with which the film culminates.

The Evil Dead (1981): A-

Countless imitators later, The Evil Dead remains a dizzying bloodbath in which gore proves both nasty and amusing. Setting the template for thousands of subsequent followers, Sam Raimi’s debut film charts the saga of two guys and three girls as they embark on a vacation in a remote forest cabin where, in a creepy dungeon decorated with a torn The Hills Have Eyes poster, they discover the Book of the Dead and an accompanying audio recording. Once played, said tape lets loose the surrounding area’s demons, who proceed to possess the hapless twenty-somethings save for Ash (Bruce Campbell), a sweet, somewhat timid guy who begins the evening giving his main squeeze a necklace and ends it by chopping her head off with a rusty shovel (severing the inflicted’s limbs being the only method of stopping them). Raimi’s rollercoaster cinematography seems no less gimmicky now than it did in 1981, creating a freewheeling vibe that contributes to the goofy comedy that underlies the film’s over-the-top gross-out scenarios, which primarily involve Campbell – in an iconic turn both sweet and terrified – having his face splattered with crimson goo. No serious subtext to be found here, just vigorous love and respect for the simultaneous horror and humor inherent to the genre, here epitomized by an infamous sexual assault carried out by animated tree branches, the chilling sight of girlfriends morphed into milky white-eyed ghouls who taunt victims with nursery rhymes, and endless POV shots that place one directly in the line of Raimi’s projectile-fluid fire.

The Eclipse (2009): C

Unsure of what it wants to be, The Eclipse winds up only being a mishmashed nothing. In a seaside Irish town, high school woodworking teacher Michael (Ciarán Hinds) still grieves over the death of his wife, a loss that’s left him to raise their two kids on his own and has also, it seems, caused him to begin having unsettling ghostly visions of his ailing father-in-law. Again working as an assistant for the region’s annual literary festival, Michael comes into contact with novelist Lena (Iben Hjejle), who warms to him and attempts to encourage his long-tabled writerly ambitions, even as she fends off the advances of an arrogant, boorish literary hot shot (Aidan Quinn) also attending the event. Playwright-turned-filmmaker Conor McPherson provides Hinds with ample space to flesh out Michael’s tormented grief, and Hinds forcefully seizes the opportunity, conveying in his granite countenance and deliberate, slightly sleepwalky comportment the unreality of his morose predicament. Yet rather than simply allowing The Eclipse to be an introspective character study, the writer/director interjects monster movie jolt scares as well as indulges Quinn’s every hammy instinct, such that the action proves gracelessly schizophrenic, the tension generated from its protagonist’s poignant human condition undone by shock-tactic screams and slapstick farce. Noisy horror, broad comedy, and pensive melodrama are all smushed together in such a way that none of the modes feels natural, resulting in a film about survival (and its burdens) that itself is a burden to endure.

Festival Frenzy

The past few weeks have been spent covering not only new releases, but three separate Lincoln Center-sponsored film series - Film Comment Selects, Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, and New Directors/New Films. As such, I've had time for little other than writing, most of which is now finally online - and posted here (or below). For those looking for the positive write-ups amidst all these links, cast an eye toward Dogtooth and Night Catches Us. Enjoy.

In Theaters:
The Bounty Hunter (Slant magazine)
Greenberg (Slant magazine)
Green Zone (Slant magazine)
Diary of a Wimpy Kid (Slant magazine)
Our Family Wedding (Time Out New York)

Rendez-Vous with French Cinema:
Welcome (The House Next Door)
In the Beginning (The House Next Door)
The Law (The House Next Door)

New Directors/New Films:
Hunting & Sons (Slant magazine)
The Red Chapel (Slant magazine)
Frontier Blues (Slant magazine)
The Happiest Girl in the World (Slant magazine)
Dogtooth (Slant magazine)
Night Catches Us (Slant magazine)
Bilal's Stand (Slant magazine)

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.

Shadow, Secret and Apocalypse

Three new reviews for this latest round-up post, which is skimpy by and large because a few recent reviews haven't been published yet. Nonetheless, Happy End (regardless of its awful international poster, at left) is a keeper.

Out Now:
The Secret of Kells (Slant magazine)
Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew Süss (Slant magazine)

Film Comment Selects:
Happy End (The House Next Door)