Lessons of Darkness

Valhalla Rising (2009): B

Nicolas Winding Refn’s latest saga of primal masculine rage, Valhalla Rising sets itself in 1000 A.D. in the Scandinavian mountains, where a mute warrior slave dubbed One Eye (Mads Mikkelsen) is held captive in a cage, only allowed out to battle for sport while tethered at the neck to a wooden post. Desperate to return to his home, One Eye escapes confinement, murders his captors, and – along with a young boy following cautiously behind him – makes his way through the mist-enshrouded hills, which Refn shoots with a panoramic awe that, along with One Eye’s blood-red visions of the future, drench the action in otherworldly portentousness. One Eye soon joins forces with Christian warriors headed to Jerusalem, though once their ship passes through a never-ending fog, they arrive in a strange land, a development that allows the director to cast a critical eye on pious true believers, man’s bestial nature, and – via One Eye’s final act – God’s capacity for forgiveness and salvation. Valhalla Rising’s portrait of testosterone-injected brutality aligns it with Bronson even as its languorous, often pretentious pace – and attendant festishizing of silence and hazy landscapes – is far removed from Refn’s Clockwork Orange-inspired prior work. If its mythologizing of its environment and male physiques (and fury) never quite leads anywhere as momentous as the early-going suggests, Mikkelsen verifies that, even without saying a word, he’s an unnervingly unhinged presence.

Hanna (2011): C+

A figurative little red riding hood searches for self, family and truth while pursued by big bad wolves in Hanna. Joe Wright’s film shares with the recent Sucker Punch a fascination with young ass-kicking girls on the hunt for empowerment and actualization, but whereas Zack Snyder’s pop-culture upchuck fetishisized via videogame and blockbuster cinema clichés, this saga blends fairy tales with grim Cold War-esque espionage. Raised in a remote Arctic cabin by her spook father Eric (Eric Bana) to be a super-survivalist, Hanna (Saoirse Ronan) flips a tracking-device switch and is soon captured by American military men, who take her to a compound where she attempts – but, due to a doppelganger switcheroo, fails – to kill icy agent Marissa (Cate Blanchett). Scored to a thrumming Chemical Brothers score, Wright’s direction has a stylishness that initially generates a mood of unreal fantasticality, his camera racing, spinning (as if falling down rabbit holes), and whip-panning through unnerving architecture and crowded urban streets, climaxing with a subway fight between Eric and four adversaries that boasts brawny single-take lucidity. Hanna’s flight from capture is a tale of self-discovery and parental responsibility and treachery, and eventually brings her into contact with a temporary surrogate family who provide a glimpse of domestic normalcy. Yet from a trio of henchmen whose leader (Tom Hollander) whistles while he works, to a visit to the gingerbread home of the Brothers Grimm, folklore undercurrents that prove initially spry and intriguing are soon rendered so leadenly obvious – eventually, there’s a confrontation with Blanchett’s evil queen in a literal Big Bad Wolf’s mouth, which takes place shortly after Hollander’s baddie screams “Here piggy, piggy!” – that they destroy any traces of nimbleness from the proceedings’ breakneck plotting.

The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006): C

The Fast and the Furious franchise goes Karate Kid-hokey with Tokyo Drift, a perfunctory and unintentionally goofy attempt to keep the series running without its stars Vin Diesel and Paul Walker. In Justin Lin’s cross-cultural racing drama, hot-rodding delinquent Sean (Lucas Black) avoids jail time by traveling to Tokyo to live with his father (Brian Goodman), whose authority is immediately negated by the film’s decision to introduce him as he bids farewell to that evening’s hooker. The land of the rising sun can’t quell Sean’s desire to race, and soon he’s teaming up with token black sidekick Twinkie (Bow Wow), being taken under the wing of hotshot hustler Han (Sung Kang), and competing for both top dog status and blank sexpot Neela (Nathalie Kelley) with D.K. (Brian Tee), the nephew of a local yakuza boss. Sean’s triumph is predestined but that doesn’t excuse the sheer torpor of his road to glory, which involves the Dukes of Hazzard-style driver learning how to “drift” (a maneuver in which you skid while under control) and engaging in a few races that Lin shoots with hyper-speed CG freneticism. By the third act, Tokyo Drift proves so intent on delivering trailer-approved imagery and sound bites that its script devolves into incoherence, though its laughableness does ultimately come full circle with the climactic, desperate-career-move return of Diesel to the Fast and Furious fold.

Hoodwinked (2005): D

A Rashomon-style riff on the Red Riding Hood fable that’s visualized with Make Way for Noddy-grade animation, Hoodwinked is so lacking in cleverness or humor that it makes the similar fairy tale-rewriting Shrek series seem downright Shakespearean by comparison. Director Cory Edwards’ film involves a frog detective’s (David Ogden Stiers) investigation into a goodie bandit, which leads him to four suspects: Red (Anne Hathaway), Granny (Glenn Close), The Woodsman (James Belushi) and the big bad Wolf (Patrick Warburton). Each of these protagonists has a different version of the night in question’s events, and those tales all reveal secrets about their teller’s true nature, so that Red is actually a martial arts badass, Granny is an extreme-sports snowboarder, and the Wolf is a reporter with a hyperactive squirrel sidekick. Such dull reinventions are typical of this one-joke fiasco, which boasts plastic-y characters and environments that look direct-to-video cheap, as well as musical numbers that prove as half-baked as the story’s plotting. Eventually ditching its Kurosawa-inspired early structure for a more traditional chase-the-bad-guy formula, and yet still somnambulistic from start to finish, it’s a film whose title clearly refers to its paying-customer audience.

Summertime Reviews

The summer movie season is in full bloom, which means it's time for another new review round-up. This one's a doozy, and includes my thoughts on Terrence Malick's latest masterpiece.

Slant magazine:
The Tree of Life (The House Next Door)
Priest (Slant magazine)
Brother's Justice (Slant magazine)
Bridesmaids (Slant magazine)
Something Borrowed (Slant magazine)
Everything Must Go (Slant magazine)
The High Cost of Living (Slant magazine)
The Guard (Slant magazine)
Blackthorn (Slant magazine)
Fast Five (Slant magazine)
Hobo with a Shotgun (Slant magazine)
Exporting Raymond (Slant magazine)
Point Blank (2010) (Slant magazine)
Last Night (Slant magazine)
St. Nick (Slant magazine)
13 Assassins (Slant magazine)
The Swell Season (Slant magazine)
The Bang Bang Club (Slant magazine)
Grave Encounters (Slant magazine)
The Bleeding House (Slant magazine)

The Village Voice:
Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (Village Voice)
Life 2.0 (Village Voice)
Cost of a Soul (Village Voice)
How to Live Forever (Village Voice)
True Legend (Village Voice)
Passion Play (Village Voice)
The Warring States (Village Voice)
An Invisible Sign (Village Voice)
African Cats (Village Voice)
The Strange Stuff: Cinemania at Tribeca 2011 (Village Voice)

Time Out New York:
The Big Bang (Time Out New York)
The Topp Twins: Unforgettable Girls (Time Out New York)
Daydream Nation (Time Out New York)
Hoodwinked Too: Hood vs. Evil (Time Out New York)
Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen (Time Out New York)

Games:
L.A. Noire (Slant magazine)
Mortal Kombat (Slant magazine)
Portal 2 (Slant magazine)

Scream 3 (2000): C-

Ghostface once again returns to kill Sidney (Neve Campbell) in Scream 3, but it’s the audience who truly suffers from this wretchedly unfocused, unscary third installment in the Wes Craven-Kevin Williamson meta-horror series. This time penned by Ehren Kruger (from a Williamson treatment), the film feebly attempts to keep its self-referentiality high by setting the action on the movie set of the based-on-Sidney’s-life Stab 3, where cast members die for real in the order they were set to die on celluloid. Rather than playing up the gratuitous pointlessness of cash-in sequels like itself, however, Craven’s latest merely adheres to the very convoluted whodunit formula (and mounds of inane exposition) that it outwardly addresses via a from-the-grave video recording by Jamie Kennedy’s genre know-it-all. Delivering another round of brunette suspects while delving into the mysterious teenage Hollywood exploits of Sidney’s mom, Scream 3 wraps itself up in nonsensical plotting – the killer magically appears and disappears, characters behave like the very horror clichés they mock, and Sidney herself is largely relegated to sitting around doing nothing – and yet, other than Parker Posey’s turn as the actress playing Courtney Cox’s tabloid reporter, it manages neither humor nor terror. Unlike its superior predecessors, this supposed trilogy-capper follows conventions without ever subverting them, thereby playing straight a story whose every twist and turn is so much ridiculous nonsense.

Scream 2 (1998): B

Scream 2 opens promisingly, with a sneak preview showing of the based-on-Scream film Stab at which an African-American couple (Omar Epps and Jada Pinkett-Smith) lob volleys about the horror genre’s racial inequity before being slaughtered by a new, copycat Ghostface killer. Ending with the sight of a victim collapsing in front of both the screen and the theater’s hundreds of costumed attendees, it’s a superbly critical image of the spectator’s culpable role in gruesome cinema, and a moment that the rest of Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson’s follow-up never quite matches. Rather than Halloween, Prom Night and other genre staples, this sequel takes its predecessor as its primary frame of reference, a natural development that pays modest dividends as it recounts the efforts of Sidney (Neve Campbell) to avoid becoming a madman’s victim at college, where – naturally – Randy (Jamie Kennedy) is enrolled in a film studies class debating the merits of sequels. A host of familiar and new faces appear in order to aid in Sidney’s quest as well as be fingered, at one point or another, as the potential villain. But just as the specific rules governing horror sequels are less inspired than those for originals, so too is Williamson’s script unable to generate the same giddy meta-twisty verve of his earlier work. Still, its self-awareness has a brashness that can be enlivening, and its dialogue with the first Scream is at times subtly inspired, even if its stagebound finale – in which the narrative pointlessly attempts to tie up its myriad strands while still tweaking and replicating slasher-movie formulas – lands with a resounding thud.

Scream (1996): B+

For a film whose genre self-awareness has now become as culturally prevalent as the very cinematic conventions it addressed, Scream remains a highly polished piece of meta-slasher mayhem. Chockablock with references to its classic horror predecessors, Kevin Williamson’s script manages the considerable feat of paying endless homage while at the same time simultaneously subverting and adhering to the “rules” of films just like itself, which are laid out by Jamie Kennedy’s Jamie Lee Curtis-loving geek during the film’s bloody climax. This tale of high-schooler Sidney’s (Neve Campbell) attempts to evade a serial killer in a Ghostface costume – a mission intimately related to her mother’s murder a year earlier – bends but never breaks the principles underlying girl-in-madman-peril sagas, exhibiting both a good-natured wink-wink sense of humor as well as a desire to produce actual thrills. It’s a delicate balancing act performed admirably by the cast, which includes Courtney Cox as the tabloid journalist who’s profited from Sidney’s family story, David Arquette as the town’s bumbling deputy, and Skeet Ulrich as Sidney’s boyfriend and prime suspect in the area’s string of slaughters. Yet even more than Williamson’s jokey allusions and self-referential plotting – which eventually twists upon itself in amusingly intricate ways – it’s Wes Craven’s stylishly frightful direction that truly gives Scream its electricity, with the A Nightmare on Elm Street auteur (who also appears in a Freddy-licious cameo) giving the material a sinister sleekness, never more so than during the iconic opening sequence of Barrymore, Jiffy Pop and malevolent prank calls.

Stepfather 2: Make Room for Daddy (1989): C-

Rarely has a sequel followed its predecessor’s exact template like Stepfather 2: Make Room for Daddy, a thoroughly imitative follow-up in which Terry O’Quinn’s serial family-killer Jerry Blake escapes mental-hospital imprisonment – after a lengthy intro inside the facility that affords no further insight into his psyche – and then poses as a suburban psychiatrist and sets about trying to marry another single mother, Carol (Meg Foster). Predictably, these efforts to attain domestic bliss are stymied by interference from Carol’s ex-husband (Mitchell Laurence) and her best friend Matty (Caroline Williams), though Jerry’s real problems are his continued sexual hang-ups – during one therapy session, he practically vomits upon hearing an oral sex anecdote – and all-around lunacy. Working from John Auerbach’s unoriginal script, director Jeff Burr stages Jerry’s workshop freakouts and backyard-cookout wedding announcement in a manner so similar to those same moments from The Stepfather that at times it’s hard to tell the two films apart. What’s not hard to discern, however, are the raft of key details that the film carelessly skims over in the interest of furthering its story, from escaped-inmate Jerry’s ability to rent a house and set up a private practice, to his cavalier attitude toward witnesses and forensic evidence when committing murder, to Carol’s pathological disinterest in learning anything about her fiancé’s past. Token gestures that posit Jerry as a manifestation of Reagan-era family values-run-amok – as when he criticizes a victim’s choice of car by stating “You should have bought American!” – aren’t enough to invigorate this lifeless retread, whose sole distinction may be its status as the only horror film with a plot that hinges on the song “Camptown Races.”

Midnight in Paris (2011): B

Love ignites the City of Lights’ magic in Midnight in Paris, the first Woody Allen film in forever to not wholly grate on the nerves. That status isn’t immediately apparent, however, as Allen’s latest opens with a beautiful if unimaginative day-to-night travelogue montage of Paris’ most famous sights (the Eiffel Tower! The Louvre! The Arc de Triomphe!) set to romantic horns, and then immediately segues into bald-faced audience-pandering via a conversation in which Hollywood screenwriter and aspiring novelist Gil (Owen Wilson) badmouths his future father-in-law’s (Kurt Fuller) Tea Party convictions as those of a “demented lunatic.” Amazing, then, that after such early missteps, the film takes a sweet, lighthearted turn once the nostalgic Gil – whose novel is about a man dreaming of the past – finds himself transported to his beloved 1920s Paris every night when the clock strikes twelve. This time-travel twist of fate puts him into contact with many of his artistic idols – including F. Scott (Tom Hiddleston) and Zelda Fitzgerald (Alison Pill), Ernest Hemmingway (Corey Stoll), Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates), Salvador Dali (Adrien Brody), Pablo Picasso, and Luis Buñuel – as well as Picasso’s mistress Adriana (Marion Cotillard), for whom he soon falls head over heels. Allen stacks the deck by both casting Gil’s fiancé Inez (Rachel McAdams) as his materialistic-harpy opposite, and by giving her a transparent perfect match in pseudo-intellectual blowhard Paul (Michael Sheen). Otherwise, though, his ode to Parisian romance and beauty, as well as to the beguiling allure of the past and yet the need to embrace the here and now, has a beauty (courtesy of Darius Khondji’s invitingly warm cinematography), a frothiness and a wink-wink sense of humor that’s enlivening, and in Wilson, he finds an on-screen proxy able to channel his anxious mannerisms and purpose-of-life hand-wringing without resorting to outright mimicry.