Lessons of Darkness

Saint (2010): B-

A slasher-film homage that reimagines Santa Claus as an undead demon, Saint accurately rehashes genre conventions, even if it chooses not to be the least bit scary. Going for more grind-and-gristle than the superficially similar, more fantasy-oriented Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale, and working from the Dutch conception of the jolly old soul, Maas’ film portrays St. Nick (Huub Stapel) as an old-world Freddy Krueger, an evil bishop who preyed upon innocent children, was torched for his crimes by the local townsfolk, and now returns astride his steed as a melted-face ghoul – whenever there’s a full moon on December 5th – to butcher the naughty and nice alike. Maas doesn’t just shout out to Wes Craven but, during a long sequence involving three high school girls walking home from school that’s set to twinkling piano music, John Carpenter as well. Those tributes lend a cheeky verve to the eventual battle between St. Nick – who wields a long circular-bladed staff, and is accompanied by crispy-zombie Black Peters – and both local high schooler Frank (Egbert Jan Weeber) and suspended cop Goert (Bert Luppes), the latter of whom saw his family killed by St. Nick as a child. Chugging along at a laid-back pace, Saint may not deliver much horror, but it hits its time-honored gory and goofy notes with an endearing wink-wink sense of slaughterhouse humor.

The 2011 Tribeca Film Festival

Neon Flesh (2010): D

On the basis of Neon Flesh, writer/director Paco Cabezas really loves Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, except he wishes it had done more to celebrate misogynistic immorality. Ricky (Mario Casas) decides that, to please the hooker mother (Macarena Gómez) who abandoned him on the streets at twelve and who’s now getting out of prison, he’ll open up a brothel for her, aided by his friends Angelito (Vicente Romero) and the Kid (Luciano Cáceres). This plan comes to involve the help of a transvestite and the purchase of some skanky prostitutes whom Ricky and Angelito gladly abuse and exploit, including the cold-hearted decision to sell a young African woman’s baby, and then sell her into porn slavery. More problematic still, it greatly infuriates a local crime boss (Darío Grandinetti) who has a monopoly on the area’s sex trade. Cabezas delivers the ensuing orgy of guns, screwing and swearing with derivative flash (split screens, transitional wipes, character-intro title cards), thereby cementing his material as just another Tarantino photocopy without unique style or verve. In fact, the only distinguishing characteristic of Neon Flesh – which also, in an amazingly inane twist, has Ricky’s plans complicated by his mom not remembering him due to early-onset Alzheimer’s – is its disgust for women, whom it unironically reduces, in a manner just like its dully hateful protagonists, to blow-up doll punching bags whose sole purpose is whoring themselves so that unrepentant Ricky might finally acquire his mommy’s love.

2011 Tribeca Film Festival

Underwater Love (2011): B+

A Japanese “pink film” (i.e. soft-core porn) that’s also a giddy musical set to the absurdist tunes of French-German pop duo Stereo Total, Underwater Love concerns the difficulties that arise for factory worker Asuka (Sawa Masaki) after she meets a kappa – a mythological human-fish creature that has a beak, a turtle shell on its back, and a bald scalp that requires constant watering – and it turns out to be the reincarnated boy she had a crush on in high school before he drowned at seventeen. This meeting becomes even weirder when the kappa, whose name is Aoki (Yoshiro Umezawa), decides that he wants to be with Asuka, even though she’s engaged to her boss Hajime (Mutsuo Yoshioka), whose over-the-top enthusiasm for the upcoming nuptials (he pastes pictures of himself and Asuka over the models in wedding magazines) is almost as intense as his horniness. Pink film titan Shinji Imaoka’s saga is a bizarre hybrid that oozes oddness while simultaneously treating its heroine’s emotions with sincere compassion. That synthesis is also found in regular Wong Kar-Wai DP Christopher Doyle’s cinematography, which captures its out-there sights – Aoki’s arms-outstretched greeting poses, a giant, magical “anal pearl” that wards off the God of Death – with a stylized naturalness (sudden zooms, tilting pans, environmental lighting) that heightens the proceedings’ fantasticality. From characters bursting into bubbly dance routines set to upbeat songs with randomly ominous lyrics, to an explicit encounter between virgin Aoki and Asuka’s whorish colleague, Underwater Love marries the real and the unreal with charming bizarreness.

2011 Tribeca Film Festival

Fight Club (1999): A-

Fight Club ostensibly celebrates the very things it eventually decries, though that’s in keeping with its fundamental schizophrenia. David Fincher’s 1999 cult classic isn’t a simple A-B construct – its cinematic (and, thus, mass-market) glorification of its characters’ bruised-knuckle anti-materialism may be contradictory, but Jim Uhls’ script (based on Chuck Palahniuk’s novel) is at heart a shrewd, scintillating work rooted in an investigation of varying degrees of masculinity and extremism. Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), the id to our nameless protagonist Narrator’s (Edward Norton) ego, is a sexy beast because his ethos, in its nascent form, is as well; only when truly embraced in practice does his destructive-self-help philosophy reveal its true, ugly primal underbelly. That shift is reflected in director Fincher’s exhilarating treatment of his gonzo tale, in which Tyler and Narrator’s early creation of their fight clubs has a brutal sensuality and appeal, while the later sparring-session bludgeoning of a pretty boy (Jared Leto), and the death of a Tyler acolyte (now working for a new mission dubbed Project Mayhem), are presented as the sadistic lunatic inevitabilities of unchecked machismo and its resultant fanaticism.

The final shot, then, of lovebirds staring at a skyline of terrorism-produced crumbling skyscrapers captures the fundamentally irreconcilable duality of Palahniuk’s caustic satire – interior unity via external devastation – without passing judgment. It’s a pitch-black smirk of a conclusion, a shrug at the insanity of healing thyself (and finding genuine amour) by obliterating the world. That humor courses throughout Fight Club, from its early slams at Ikea consumer culture (by way of a vision of Narrator’s apartment as a catalog layout), to Narrator’s blackmailing self-fisticuffery in his boss’ office, to his final, futile attempts to combat the very underground movement he begat. Both Pitt and Norton, playing off each other’s clashing visions of masculinity with eroticized wit and verve, have never been better. That’s similarly true of Bonham Carter as Narrator’s kindred wayward soul Marla, who seeks genuine emotional engagement by visiting support groups for the dying, and also – as with her screamy bedroom romps with Tyler, which are akin to the fight clubs – through physical pain. Just as Bonham Carter sexily wields a cigarette like few others, so too does Fincher handle his material with unparalleled eroticized agility, his CG-enhanced, Dust Brothers-scored aesthetics (an impossible zoom here, a bit of Shining-style auditory howling there) lending his better-living-through-annihilation film heady, electrified life.

The Adjustment Bureau (2011): C

The battle between divine determinism and free will takes mundane form in The Adjustment Bureau, the story (loosely inspired by a Philip K. Dick tale) of a hotshot young politician named David (Matt Damon) who, after meeting the apparent girl of his dreams in ballerina Elise (Emily Blunt), unwittingly walks in on a group of gentlemen in fedoras whose job is to tweak reality in order to keep people on their fated paths. George Nolfi’s paranoid film charts David’s efforts to be with Elise despite the preventive measures of Richardson (John Slattery) and his well-dressed henchmen, who are following a “plan” set out by a godly “Chairman” that stipulates that neither David nor Elise will achieve their lifelong goals if they remain together. The notion that love drains people of career/artistic motivations is the sole stimulating notion proffered by the script. Yet like so much of the narrative – from Damon’s political career being sabotaged by a published photo of his naked ass, to the sympathetic motives of adjuster Harry (Anthony Mackie) – that idea is painfully underdeveloped and eventually ignored in favor of chases through temporal-portal doorways. Damon and Blunt’s sparks during their initial men’s-room meet-cute sets a reasonably amorous framework for David’s quest to make his own destiny. Unfortunately, bigwig adjuster Thompson’s (Terrence Stamp) explanation of why his bureau’s services are necessary – apparently, mankind squanders every opportunity to properly rule itself – is thin gruel. And a third-act full of contrived plot twists reveals that the film’s chief interest isn’t plumbing philosophical questions of fate, providence and autonomy but, instead, wallowing in skimpy fairy-tale romanticism.

Women in Trouble (2009): D

A female-centric bit of Tarantino/Almodovar-ish nonsense, Women in Trouble offers a cornucopia of chatty intertwined tales concerning women whose common links are both their need to tell special someones how they really feel, and to engage in long conversations while dressed in bras and panties. Writer/director Sebastian Gutierrez’s story is structurally clichéd – what with his various players’ lives randomly intersecting during the course of one eventful day – but, worse still, his characters are uniformly unbelievable and two-dimensional, an issue compounded by the filmmaker’s serious consideration of their bland emotional plights. Porn star Elektra Luxx (Carla Gugino) is the center of this turgid saga, grappling with an unexpected pregnancy while trapped in an elevator with Doris (Connie Britton), both of whom promptly strip down to their skivvies (because of a heat wave) in a manner not unlike porn stars Bambi (Emmanuelle Chriqui) and Holly (Adrianne Palicki) while preparing to whore themselves out to a movie producer who – crime-comedy cliché alert! – is offed by mysterious baddies right before their tryst. Gutierrez’s fondness for having his leading ladies disrobe before thoughtfully discussing their problems or dealing with crises is driven less by the film’s phony sluttiness-as-female-empowerment intentions than by a more base desire to simply ogle. Yet even that isn’t nearly as frustrating as the drama’s simplistic psychologizing, lame cross-cutting (which is routinely accompanied by rapid-fire still-photo montages), and pitiful stabs at being risqué, which is epitomized by two separate incidents that posit oral sex as dangerous, as well as one woman’s trip down childhood-bestiality memory lane.

Faster (2010): C-

The Rock cooks up a return to kick-assery in Faster, and the smell is borderline-rank. A transparent bid by its star to reestablish his badass credentials after a string of family films, George Tillman Jr.’s B-movie is a revenge saga about Driver (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson), who gets out of prison hell-bent on killing those who – in a double-cross after a bank robbery – murdered his brother. Though the Rock’s biceps practically bulge off the screen, his weapon of choice is an enormous-barreled revolver, which he puts to good use offing cretins while two pursuing cops (straight-and-narrow Carla Gugino and shady, heroin-shooting Billy Bob Thornton) follow close behind, cleaning up his messes. Tillman Jr. cross-cuts between flashbacks and various narrative strands – including a superfluous, time-consuming one involving a tech geek-turned-yoga-master-turned-assassin (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) and his girlfriend (Maggie Grace) – but no amount of sizzle can mask the inherent lack of momentum and imagination to Driver’s murderous rampage. Whereas Faster practically begs for excessive vengeful executions accompanied by so-stupid-they’re-funny one-liners, Tillman’s film goes for blunt, pedestrian violence and lots of silent grimaces from its lead. That Driver’s quest begins with him literally rising from the dead gives the proceedings a faint Point Blank vibe, but unlike that John Boorman-Lee Marvin neo-noir classic, this turgid actioner is a hollow poser through and through, devoid of true ferocity, heat and – as confirmed by a late, infuriatingly contrary-to-character act of mercy – guts.

Incendies (2010): B+

The last will and testament of an emotionally remote mother sparks an investigation into the past in Incendies, Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Wajdi Mouawad’s play. That inquiry is carried out by French-Canadian Arab twins Jeanne (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin) and Simon (Maxim Gaudette) after they hear from notary and family friend Jean (Rémy Girard) that their mom Nawal’s (Lubna Azabel) final wish was for them to deliver letters to the father they thought was dead and the brother they didn’t know existed. These instructions lead the amenable Jeanne and intractable Simon to leave their native Quebec for an unnamed Middle East country that resembles Lebanon, where mysteries await about Nawal’s role in a ruinous war between Muslims and Christians, a tale that inevitably intertwines the personal and the political in increasingly harrowing ways. Hypnotically blending physical spaces and time frames, Villeneuve’s material vacillates between Jeanne and Simon’s journey and Nawal’s troubled early years, which involved a pregnancy with a Muslim rebel that cast shame on her Christian family, her later near-fatal experiences at the hands of a death squad, and her assassination activism against her fellow Christian militiamen. The effect of such a structure is to convey the persistent pull of what’s come before on the present, as well as how those disparate eras are (like two sides of a conflict) engaged in constant states of retaliation. Via a script and visual schema that constantly separates characters and events, the film narratively and aesthetically addresses the traumatic fissures born from exiled existence. Depicting violence with bluntness and exhibiting empathy for its protagonists’ quests for individual and familial identity, Incendies’ culminates with a finale that hinges on geographic and pure-luck coincidences that (like a recurring mathematical theme) are contrived enough to indelicately reveal the author’s manipulative hand. Regardless, they don’t mitigate the emotional stomach-punch shock of the story’s climactic Greek tragedy bombshells, which make horrifyingly real the fact that civil wars are ultimately crimes against ourselves and those we love the most.

Fright Night Part II (1988): C-

Nothing more than a cheapo regurgitation of its predecessor, Fright Night Part II once again finds teenager Charley (William Ragsdale) enlisting the help of TV horror-movie host Peter Vincent (Roddy McDowall) to combat the forces of vampiric evil. This time, that bloodsucker is a woman, Regine (Julie Carmen), and she temporarily gets her fangs into Charley. In most every other respect, however, Tommy Lee Wallace’s follow-up does little to muck with formula, wasting countless time – and trying its audience’s patience – on scenes in which Charley tries to convince Peter and/or his girlfriend Alex (Traci Lin) that a vampire is in their presence, or vice versa. As before, the monsters are revealed through the use of Peter’s cigarette-case mirror and Charley’s true quest is getting his paramour to agree to sex. All the while, Wallace stages laughable neck-biting killings involving a roller-skating, crazy-haired mute and a “hey dude” lothario vampire (Jon Gries) who, perplexingly, looks more like a werewolf. Terror and humor are non-existent, but more frustrating is the general lack of the very meta gestures that made the first Fright Night a clever riff on genre cinema. Consequently, the only unique feature of this dud is its success at dousing virtually every single momentous incident in smoke-machine haziness.

Fright Night (1985): B

Charting meta-horror terrain nine years before Scream would make it ubiquitous, Fright Night celebrates genre clichés even as it exposes them as such. In anonymous Small Town, U.S.A., teenage scary-movie buff Charley (William Ragsdale) turns away from his frigid girlfriend Amy (Amanda Bearse) at the moment she’s about to spread her legs so that he might get a better look at new next-door neighbor Jerry Dandrige (Chris Sarandon), who moves in with a coffin and soon begins entertaining hookers that are reported dead on the following day’s news. Charley’s suspicions that Jerry is a vampire are soon confirmed, but Amy and intolerably cackling friend “Evil” (Stephen Geoffreys) don’t believe him, nor does former horror icon-turned-late-night movie host Peter Vincent (Roddy McDowall), at least until a visit proves that Jerry is lacking a mirror reflection. Writer/director Tom Hooper (Child’s Play) generates little outright terror and his gore effects are not only excessive but dull. Still, he makes up for a dearth of scares with cheeky self-referentiality, with his film – led by protagonists well-aware of vampire rules and regulations – underlining (and thereby playfully validating) the time-honored fictional conventions to which it adheres. Sarandon makes a devilishly menacing batman, exuding a mature sexuality that’s both at odds with Charley’s virginal pubescence, and that’s given some bi- undertones via his relationship with evil man-servant Billy (Jonathan Stark). Ultimately, though, it’s McDowall’s gleefully over-the-top performance as a washed-up Van Helsing – his name, Peter, an obvious nod to Hammer films legend Peter Cushing – that’s Fright Night’s true lifeblood.