Movie(s) of the Week: The Long Halloween Triple Bill

Halloween is finally upon us, so here are a few classicks for you to enjoy... or endure.

Valerie and her Week of Wonders
Dir: Jaromil Jires

A surrealistic masterpiece by Cezch director Jires. Valerie unfolds like an especially odd and sometimes very scary dream. It's both beautiful and quite disturbing.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre [1974]
Dir: Tobe Hooper

A work of sheer, grinding, relentless, terror. Tobe Hooper's uncompromising - and yet bloodless - debut is still genuinely disturbing 35 years on from its first release. It's also several million times better than Marcus Nispel's prettied up, deeply unfrightening, remake.

Martyrs
Dir: Pascal Laugier

Martyrs-AVI-Xvid-1/10 - MyVideo
The best film of 2009 to date. The best horror film of the last decade. A thought-provoking, terrioising masterpiece. Watch it late at night, and cower behind your nearest pillow.

Enjoy

24FPS at LFF: Days 5 and 6

空気人形
[AIR DOLL]
DIR: Hirokazu Koreeda
CAST: Bae Doo-na, Arata, Itsuji Itao


I don’t care if you’re male or female, straight or gay, if, 45 minutes into Air Doll, you aren’t head over heels in love with Bae-Doo-na then, honestly, you and I have nothing to say to one another.

Hirokazu Koreeda’s fish out of water fantasy is about Nozomi (Bae), a sex doll who one day comes to life (as the movie has it she ‘finds a heart’) and, unbeknownst to her owner (Itao), she begins wandering the streets of what appears to be a small Japanese town where they live. Nozomi gets a job in a local video and dvd rental store, and her young co-worker (Arata) falls for her. The film then proceeds to follow Nozomi as she learns about the world and how finding a heart can be both wonderful and painful. From that summary it sounds like Air Doll could go one of two ways; seedy or sickly. That it doesn’t fall into either of those traps is partly thanks to a screenplay that is layered and intelligent, but in the main it’s down to Bae Doo-na.

Bae is a South Korean actress who first came to my attention as the girlfriend of Shin Ha-kyun’s character in Sympathy for Mr Vengeance. She had previously acted, impressively, in Japanese in the slight but entertaining Linda Linda Linda. Here she’s got a rather more challenging role than that of a high school student. There’s little to draw on for a character like Nozomi. Bae’s casting is the film’s masterstroke. I’ve previously described her as a Korean Audrey Hepburn, and never has that comparison been more apt than it is during Air Doll. Like Hepburn, Bae has something innate, a level of sweetness, goodness and charm that seems just to emanate from her whenever she’s on screen. As it did with Hepburn this can make her seem naïve, even childlike, and that’s what makes Bae so perfect as Nozomi.

Nozomi has to be a blank slate, but never be boring. As well as being rather irresistible, Bae happens to be a brilliant actress, and right from the off she’s wonderful as Nozomi. She takes in the world around her with such wide-eyed, childlike, glee that you can believe it’s first time she’s ever seen it. While this is fun for the first half hour or so after Nozomi comes to life, there are more layers to both the film and the performance, with Bae especially moving as she discovers what human life is like; the existence of birthdays, for instance, and of loneliness.

Air Doll has a bittersweet streak, but it’s largely a comedy, and a very funny one at that. Many of the laughs come from the fact that Nozomi knows so little of life. A couple of especially funny sequences deal with the fact that when she sees a woman with visible seams on her tights, Nozomi mistakes them for the moulding lines she has on her legs and arms. The scene in which she gives this bemused woman some make up, and tells her it will cover up the lines is both sweet and very, very funny. Because of the nature of its main character, Air Doll has quite a lot of nudity. Koreeda and Bae handle this beautifully. There’s, much to my surprise, nothing prurient about the film and its nudity, and though Nozomi is very childlike it is never uncomfortable or unnatural seeing her in that context, because the film has such an innocence about it.

This is Bae Doo-na’s film to the exclusion of all others. It’s not that the rest of the cast aren’t fine, Arata is especially good as the young video store clerk who instantly falls for Nozomi (and who could blame him) and Iato is teriffic in the pivotal scene in which Nozomi reveals that she’s now alive. The thing is that, good as their contributions are, they are simply outclassed by Bae. Even director Koreeda, though, his imagery is memorable and sometimes both witty and moving in and of itself, finds himself being upstaged because Bae is so good that it’s hard to take your eyes off her and notice the beautiful construction of his framing.

The only real problem with the film is that it begins to lose steam just a little towards the end. Trimming the 120 minute running time by perhaps a quarter of an hour, mostly from an overlong ending, which is the only time an otherwise sweet film strays into saccharine, would probably result in a tighter and even more rewarding experience. Some may find Air Doll aggressively quirky, but for me, for the most part, the tone is perfectly judged, which is quite a brilliant juggling act on the part of Hirokazu Koreeda. Make no mistake though, Air Doll is a confection and the fact that it tastes so very sweet is thanks almost entirely to its amazing lead performance.


THE DISAPPEARANCE OF ALICE CREED
DIR: J Blakeson
CAST: Gemma Arterton, Eddie Marsan, Martin Compston



British director J. Blakeson’s feature debut begins with one of the most striking sequences of the year, sadly it can’t maintain that level of quality throughout.

In silence, two men (Marsan and Compston) buy tools, locks, a bed, and other DIY items. In a shabby flat they block up the windows with boards, soundproof a room, bolt the new bed to the floor, and fix metal rings to the bedposts. Then they get in a van and kidnap Alice Creed (Arterton), bring her back to the flat, tie her to the bed and strip her. These first ten minutes of The Disappearance of Alice Creed are simply brilliant. There is an eerie calculation to everything these as yet unnamed men do, a disturbing dispassionate feeling about the whole thing and the fact that Blakeson has the entire sequence unfold in silence only makes it more horrifying. For its first half hour Alice Creed feels like an especially unpleasant and disquieting sort of exploitation film; Arterton is stripped and exposed to her kidnappers and the camera within minutes of her taking, and that’s about the most dignified thing that happens to her for a while. The banal process of keeping the victim confined but healthy is seen in some detail, and has a real impact because, like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, which was surely an influence, Blakeson’s film implicates us in the horror unfolding before us. This isn’t a comfortable place to be. The first 30 minutes of this short film are skin-crawlingly difficult, but though it may be seen as a relief, when this passage of the film comes to an end, it instantly becomes less engaging.

A key character relationship, which I won’t spoil here, becomes clear at around the half hour mark. At that moment I saw the whole film, knew exactly how it was going to unfold, exactly where it would end. Much to my disappointment the film trod exactly the expected path, with me a mile ahead of its every step. This is a shame, because there’s plenty to recommend The Disappearance of Alice Creed, even outside of its opening half hour. Most notable are the excellent performances of Eddie Marsan and Martin Compston as the kidnappers. They are two sides of a corrupt coin; Marsan all force and bluster and Compston nervous, subjugated, but conniving. Two very different performances then, but each is equally powerful. Unfortunately Gemma Arterton lets the side down. Arterton is a beautiful girl, but on this evidence she’s not a great deal more than a pretty face. One character notes that fear can’t be convincingly acted, and Arterton often bears that out. Generally she does this by acting her socks off, she’s trying really hard, and that’s exactly the problem. Compston and Marsan are both very natural, but with Arterton you can always see the cogs turn, always catch her acting.

Despite a low budget, Blakeson and cinematographer Philipp Blaubach achieve a strong look for the film. It’s immediate and lo-fi, but never cheap or amateurish. Indeed in that first passage of the film the intimacy of Blakeson’s camera work, and the extensive close ups, add immensely to the effect the film has on its audience. Despite the fact that it doesn’t entirely work, The Disappearance of Alice Creed still represents a promising debut for Blakeson. Most of the film’s scenes work in and of themselves - a couple of lo-fi set pieces involving a stray bullet are unbearably intense - the problem is that Blakeson never quite manages to draw them together, or to overcome the predictability of his screenplay. For a moment at the end of the film it seems that Blakeson is going to go in an unexpected, and stunningly bleak, direction with the ending. Sadly he lacks the courage to follow through with what would be a much more plausible, if darker, close to the story and instead ends on the note, indeed the shot, I had long expected.

There is much worth seeing in The Disappearance of Alice Creed, but as a whole it simply doesn’t work. With such a tiny cast the fact that there is a weak link fatally undermines the film, as does the fact that after the half hour mark there’s not a surprise to be had for the last hour of the film. Here’s hoping that Blakeson, who certainly has talent, can go on to make something more consistent next time out.


DEAR LEMON LIMA
DIR: Suzi Yoonessi
CAST: Savanah Wiltfong, Shayne Topp, Maia Lee,
Zane Huett, Beth Grant, Melissa Leo


Suzi Yoonessi’s first feature is clearly one long in gestation, based on her teenage diaries and expanded from her short film, it’s a rare beast - a deeply personal film with wide appeal.

I walked into Dear Lemon Lima completely on a whim. It was what happened to be showing next, and there were still good seats available, I knew nothing about it at all. For a moment I thought I’d made a horrible mistake. It was because of the credits, they’re written like a 13 year old girl’s diary; an overload of cutesiness - so much pink. I was worried I’d just walked into something so sugary that I was going to walk out a diabetic. I shouldn’t have worried. Dear Lemon Lima is a genuinely smart and funny teen comedy. It’s definitely not cutesy, silly at times, sure, but it also feels real and at times hits you hard with emotion. It also manages to do this without any swearing, any violence, any drug use, or any sexuality. It’s a true family film, not just suitable for anyone over the age of 10, but enjoyable for both kids and adults as well.

You couldn’t really accuse Dear Lemon Lima of being especially original. It draws liberally from high school movies of the past - a pinch of Revenge of the Nerds here, season with some Napoleon Dynamite there - but it remixes all its influences into something entirely diverting on its own terms. The plot really has two strands, both revolving around half Eskimo 13 year old Vanessa Lemor (Wiltfong). The first deals with her still potent feelings for the love of her young life, Philip (Topp), who breaks up with her as the film opens. The second sees her putting together a team of her fellow outsiders for her school’s ‘Snowstorm Survivor’ competition, based on the Eskimo Olympics. It’s not especially groundbreaking, and you can spot many of the plot’s turns several miles off (though one, beautifully handled by Yoonessi and the cast, really did throw me for a loop) but Dear Lemon Lima isn’t trying to spring plot twists on you, its job is largely to make you laugh, and it does that with a consistency rare in recent cinema.

Like a lot of American indie films of late, Dear Lemon Lima is deliberately offbeat and quirky (the tone sometimes calls to mind Little Miss Sunshine), and there are some lovely left field jokes. Most of these revolve around Beth Grant, the wonderful character actress who plays the school principal. There’s a great deal of fun had with her love of multiculturalism, and Grant plays it brilliantly, just dancing on the edge of going over the top. There are also many laughs mined from the teenage travails of Vanessa and her friends. There’s a bittersweet edge to these sequences, while they are certainly funny there is also an unmistakable ring of truth to them (thanks to the fact that Vanessa’s diary is substantially based on Yoonessi’s own writing from when she was 13). There aren’t really all that many jokes in Dear Lemon Lima. I laughed a great deal, but the laughs arise out of the very real oddness of the characters lives rather than a series of gags.


Yoonessi’s screenplay is excellent. The kids are very well drawn, and very believable as teenagers, rather than what adults think teenagers sound like. If anything it is the adult roles where the script falls down, as they tend to be rather one note, ciphers almost. However, the atmosphere of school is captured beautifully; the caste system that’s always in operation, and the way that people can be ostracised by it for no particular reason. Though Dear Lemon Lima is never a cruel film, it does capture the casual cruelty of teenagers incisively.

Of course you can have the best script in the world, but it’s all for nothing if the cast can’t deliver it. Here Suzi Yoonessi has assembled the best young ensemble I’ve seen on screen in a long time. Savanah Wiltfong is a brilliant lead. This is her first movie, and she seems to carry it on her shoulders comfortably and assuredly. If there’s any issue with her casting it is only that she’s rather too pretty to be such an outcast. However, Wiltfong overcomes this with a very real and engaging performance. It’s nothing showy, but commendably she’s able to make her dialogue sound as if, rather than having been written for her, it is occurring to her in the moment. Shayne Topp also does nice work, sliming his way through the film as Philip; a young man with an ego the size of a planet (he reminded me a little of my own younger brother at 16, sorry Tom). The rest of the young cast is equally outstanding, but special mention must go to Zane Huett, whose performance as Hercule is genuinely moving, and his crush on Vanessa is sweetly and subtly played.

Dear Lemon Lima is a wonderful find, a sweet and very smart film that will make you laugh and very possibly cry. It really is one for all the family. I just hope that some smart distributor picks it up for UK release, because films like this are too good, and too rare, to just sit on a shelf. Seek it out.

24FPS at LFF: Day 4

마더
[MOTHER]
DIR: Bong Joon-ho
CAST: Kim Hye-ja, Won Bin


When mentally disabled Yoon Do-joon (Won) is arrested and charged with the murder of a schoolgirl his mother (Kim), convinced that her son is innocent and the confession coerced from him by the police is false, turns private detective, vowing to find the real culprit.

With acclaimed films like The Host and Memories of Murder, Bong Joon-ho has shown himself to be something of a genre buster. Mother is his fourth film, and it continues to show that Bong is ploughing the same furrow; combining serious dramatic events with slapstick absurdity. Whatever the qualities of this film, it suggests that Bong is something of a one trick pony. That said, Bong is clearly a filmmaker of some considerable talent. Mother looks great, and several of the less serious moments really stand out, memorable by their sheer strangeness. One of the most striking of these is the opening, which sees a very serious looking Kim Hye-ja standing in the middle of a field, and then beginning to dance for no apparent reason. It’s totally out of step with the film, and seems to have no relevance to the character at all, but it’s so weird that it stands out.

While Bong’s style is sometimes slyly amusing, it doesn’t really mesh with the more noirish thrust of the story. Both styles are fine in and of themselves, but watching Mother can be a schizophrenic experience. The problem with the film’s detective story is pretty simple; the answer is obvious and predictable. Bong does lead us down a couple of blind alleys, but they are pretty easily spotted.

The one thing that really stands out about Mother is the acting. Whatever critics have so far had to say about the film as a whole, they’ve all fallen over themselves to praise Kim Hye-ja. I’m not going to break with that tradition. Kim is brilliant as the panic-stricken, over-protective mother who must focus herself and try to find a way to help her child who can’t help himself. It’s a performance that begins with a maternal warmth, but slowly and credibly the character becomes colder, more ruthlessly focused until, towards the end of the film, ice appears to run in her veins. It’s a nice, subtle, piece of character acting and Kim carries the entire film on her shoulders, elevating something that without her would be entirely unremarkable.

For his part, Won Bin also does fine work as Do-joon. It’s a smaller part than you might expect, and for an hour in the middle of the film he all but vanishes. When he’s on screen though Won gives good account of himself, with a performance that suggests he’s put a lot of work into studying the behaviour of adults with profound learning disabilities. The way he, panic stricken, keeps playing with his phone at a vital point, not knowing whether or not to call his mother, is an especially well-acted moment.

It’s not that Mother is a bad film, it just feels very clunky. The gear changes don’t work, and the mystery at its centre just isn’t mysterious enough to sustain the interest. It is barely 24 hours since I saw the film, and already it has all but completely slipped from my mind. However, Kim Hye-ja is so good that to write it off entirely would be a shame.


CHLOE
DIR: Atom Egoyan
CAST: Julianne Moore, Amanda Seyfried,
Liam Neeson, Max Thieriot



Remakes are everywhere, but this one seems to have ducked in under the wire, without the internet baying for blood. This is perhaps because Anne Fontaine’s Nathalie, on which Atom Egoyan’s film is based, is neither a horror film nor an avowed classic.

I haven’t seen Nathalie, so obviously I can’t compare the two films, but for the first hour of its running time I really thought Chloe was going to be great. It really is a crying shame that as the film enters the home stretch that is its third act the wheels fall off in rather spectacular fashion. The basic story sees Catherine (Moore) beginning to suspect David (Neeson), her husband of twenty years, of having affairs. To test him she hires Chloe (Seyfried) to approach him, and report back to her on what David does. As Chloe relates the affair that she’s begun with David, Catherine also finds herself drawn to the beautiful young woman.

Six or seven years ago you could probably have fairly described me as one of the world’s biggest Julianne Moore fans. It wasn’t hard to imagine why; between 1993’s Short Cuts and The Hours in 2002, Moore was on a winning streak as big and impressive as any in film, giving brilliant performance after brilliant performance, and seeming like a totally different person every time she stepped in front of a camera. Since then, a very brief cameo in Children of Men apart, it’s just been awful. The succession of turkeys, and the laziness of the performances by an actress so obviously gifted, is staggering. See, or don’t, such films as Laws of Attraction, Freedomland, Trust the Man and Next for proof of how the mighty can fall. It’s been a rough few years as a Julianne Moore fan. Fortunately - finally - Chloe marks a proper return to form. For the first time in a very long time not only did I not feel like I was watching Julianne Moore, rather than her character, I couldn’t hear the wheels turning. There’s nothing here that feels calculated or contrived (not, at least, in Moore’s acting). Every nuance, every flicker of emotion is out there for us to read on her face, and yet she’s not actorly, she’s not over-emoting; she squares the circle of making Catherine an open book to us, but closed off emotionally to the other characters. This is fantastic, detail-oriented work. Welcome back Julianne. I missed you.

When Julianne Moore is on this sort of form it’s a big ask of any actor to hold their own against her. Liam Neeson, by virtue of the script rather than his performance, largely blends into the background, but he and Moore play off each other well, and the slight chill and distance between them creates a believably strained relationship such as you might expect between a couple drifting apart after 20 years together. The film was finished after the death of Neeson’s wife Natasha Richardson, and it’s a testament to his talent and professionalism that you can’t see that join.


The younger performers are more problematic. Max Thieriot flounders in what, to be entirely fair to him, is both an underwritten and a cliché laden role as Moore and Neeson’s surly teenage son. Amanda Seyfried has a demanding role, and initially she does well. There’s an effective unknowability about her Chloe, and a harsh, dispassionate tone that means that you feel Catherine’s hurt as Chloe relates her encounters with David, especially when, in a hotel room, she describes to Catherine the sex she’s just had with her husband.

Unfortunately, though it is also very much the fault of the screenplay, Seyfried’s performance is much of the reason that the film falls apart in its last half hour. There is a key shift in Chloe’s character and Seyfried just doesn’t have the chops to pull it off, which renders many late scenes, particularly one in Moore’s office, laughable.

With his last couple of films the normally rather austere Atom Egoyan has embraced on screen sex with some gusto. Where the Truth Lies was eventually notable almost solely for its sex scenes. That’s not the case with Chloe, but you can bet that when it opens many column inches will be devoted to the copious nudity and to the brief, but pretty explicit, sex scene between Moore and Seyfried. It has to be said that the two women have fantastic chemistry, right from their first scene together there is an undercurrent of barely repressed sexual tension between them, and when it boils over at the end of act two it does so in a scene as memorably sexy as the much remarked upon lesbian sex scene in Bound. It’s refreshing to see such an uninhibited take on sex in a relatively mainstream American film. Like many of his other films, Egoyan’s work in Chloe has a very designed feel to it (Christine and David’s house, for example, always feels like a set, as does Christine’s glass walled office). There’s little naturalistic here, but it’s hard to complain much about that when Egoyan’s shots are as beautifully designed and well thought out as they are here.

In the excellent first hour of the film there’s only one real issue, and that’s that there’s nobody to root for. Catherine, David and Chloe all come off as fundamentally self-serving and unsympathetic, but you forgive the film because you get sucked into both the fine character driven drama and the sexy erotic thriller undertone. Unfortunately, in the last half hour, the film goes bonkers. Suddenly the measured, almost cold, pace and tone of the film is gone, the ending of the script we’ve so far been following seemingly replaced by the last 40 odd pages of generic erotic thriller 2b. Julianne Moore remains excellent, and if she notices how silly things have become then she doesn’t show it, the same can’t be said for everyone else. Seyfried goes from giving a decent performance to being hilariously bad, and for his part Egoyan trades his artistically composed frames for some jaw-droppingly stale clichés straight out of the how to shoot a straight to video erotic thriller handbook. It’s a terrible shame, and undermines what really should have been, if not an especially original film, a notably high quality and truly adult drama. Still, see it for Julianne Moore.


PARTIR
[LEAVING]
Dir: Catherine Corsini
Cast: Kristin Scott-Thomas, Sergi Lopez, Yvan Attal


Though she’s flirted with the mainstream, and had large roles in such popular fare as Four Weddings and a Funeral and The English Patient when you mention the name Kristin Scott-Thomas you’ll mostly see blank faces staring back at you. That’s a terrible shame, because she’s among the best actresses working in world cinema.

Like last year’s I've Loved You So Long, Catherine Corsini’s film finds Scott-Thomas acting in flawless French. As Suzanne, an English woman married for some 20 years to Samuel (Attal), but now embarking on an affair with Spanish builder Ivan (Lopez), leading to a messy and bitter divorce, Scott-Thomas is just brilliant. Her dialogue is beautifully delivered, and filled with expression and meaning. This, of course, is an actor’s job, but so frequently when they are working in a second language their performances can seem rote and bereft of expression, that’s absolutely not the case with Kristin Scott-Thomas. That isn’t all that makes her performance special though. Great actors are great listeners, and when you watch her reacting to what other people say there is such richness, such emotion in her silent reactions. This is a performance played as much in the physicality of its relationships and in what plays behind the eyes as it is in the dialogue, and that’s what makes it truly special, a real, three-dimensional portrait.

I’ve seen Sergi Lopez act in three languages now; his native Spanish, French and English, and in each he’s been outstanding. He’s an actor who seems to change completely in each role. It’s genuinely difficult to connect Ivan with Capitain Vidal from Pan's Labyrinth, or with Harry from Harry, He’s Here to Help. Lopez has often played bad guys in the past, but though Ivan is an ex-con (we never discover what he did) he’s no villain. Instead Lopez plays him as a very genuine, very normal man, largely driven by circumstance - that circumstance being that he and Suzanne have fallen in love. It’s tough to play very ordinary people, because they don’t tend to have the operatic notes that it’s rather easy to reach in acting. Instead roles and films like this demand smallness, subtlety and intricacy, and Lopez delivers beautifully.

These two outstanding performances tower over the film, and that’s probably a good thing, because frankly Catherine Corsini’s screenplay and direction, though there’s nothing wrong with them, are pretty generic. We’ve seen this tale told a thousand times, and we know pretty well where it’s going to end up (though Corsini doesn’t help that with a structure that opens proceedings with a moment that takes place about five minutes from the end of the film).

Scott-Thomas and Lopez also threaten to drown out Yvan Attal’s performance. Samuel isn’t as well written as Suzanne and Ivan, and Attal ends up having to spend most of the film playing a single note. He does it well, but the character is just too thin to really register. However, when the focus is on Suzanne and Ivan, as it is for much of the 85 minute running time, Leaving is strong stuff. The chemistry between Scott-Thomas and Lopez is electric; their sex scenes pulse with energy, and whenever they share a scene once their relationship has begun you can feel that hunger for one another, especially in Scott-Thomas’ last few scenes in the film.

Leaving certainly isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty well made on the whole, and though it is short it doesn’t feel compromised by its length. The characters are strong and individual (even if Samuel isn’t the most rounded of characters) and the ending is near perfect, leaving us on a note of some ambiguity, rather than spoon-feeding us for an extra 10 minutes. The film is only really lifted out of the ordinary by the two leading performances, make no mistake though, those two performances make Leaving a must see.

Movie(s) of the week: Long Halloween double bill 3

I'm posting this a day early, first because I'm at the LFF all day tomorrow and secondly because next Saturday is Halloween, and I've got a triple bill post planned for all hallows eve itself.

Cannibal Holocaust
Dir: Ruggero Deodato

You may well find Ruggero Deodato's infamous video nasty to be a hateful, disgusting film. It is unspeakably violent, incredibly lurid and exploitative and unrelentingly gory. It features real sequences of both animal and human death (Deodato bought in footage from the atrocities in Cambodia, which forms the 'last road to hell' segment of the film). The thing is that, for all Cannibal Holocaust's lurid nastiness, its also a really great movie. The acting is a litte ropey, but Deodato's brilliantly maintained conceit of setting the film up as a documentary, abd in the second half as found footage, makes that easy to excuse. It is also this construction that gives the film much of its undeniable power. Cannibal Holocaust is a film that hits you between the eyes and dares you to look at it. You should, because while its tough this is groundbreaking, often brilliant, horror cinema. I can't embed the video, so simply click the title for the film.

Freaks
Dir: Tod Browning

Even now the BBFC seem to view horror with something of a disapproving glare, like a parent shooting a look at a naughty child. In the 1930's though, they were far less amused. Freaks, Tod Browning's beautiful, melancholy, film about a family of circus freaks was victim of one of the longest bans in BBFC history. The was made in 1932, but only saw a UK release (under the old X certificate) three decades later. The film has lost some of its power to shock (the uncut release is now a 12), but it reamins beautiful, creepy, and brilliant.

Comments Fixed

Last night it was brought to my attention (thanks CountChocula) that the comments on the blog were not working because when asked for word verification there was no box displayed for you to enter that word in. I have now removed the word verification step, though comments remain fully moderated.

So you can now tell me how awesome/shitty you think I am to your hearts content.

Enjoy.

24FPS at LFF: Days 2 and 3

LIFE DURING WARTIME
DIR: Todd Solondz
CAST: Alison Janney, Shirley Henderson, Ciaran Hinds,
Christopher Marquette, Paul Reubens, Ally Sheedy



Nobody could accuse Todd Solondz, the provoc-auteur behind Welcome to the Dollhouse, Happiness and Palindromes of making easy films. Life During Wartime is no exception. A cold, caustic, challenging film, it will likely split audiences right down the middle.

Life During Wartime is a pseudo-sequel to Happiness, taking place 11 years on from the events of the first film it again follows the extended Jordan family, and the various people in their lives. The odd thing, and I’ve no idea if this was always what Solondz intended, or if it was a decision forced on him by circumstance, is that though the characters are the same the entire cast has changed. It’s quite distracting at times - more so with some characters than others - the performances aren’t the problem as much as the fact that the old cast is near constantly at the back of your mind. If you can shake off the spectre of Happiness, a very strong film begins to emerge in Life During Wartime.

The main thrust of the story sees Joy (Henderson) is separated from her husband Allen (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman in Happiness and now, in a truly strange piece of casting, by Michael K. Williams of The Wire). Joy goes on a trip to visit her older sisters, first to Florida to see Trish (Janney), who is now dating a much older man (Michael Lerner), whom her young son greets with suspicion. Joy then finds herself in California visiting Helen (Sheedy), now a successful, Keanu Reeves dating, screenwriter. The whole time Joy is dogged by visions of long dead Andy (Reubens), who once took her on a disastrous date. Meanwhile, Trish’s ex-husband Bill (Hinds) is released from a 10-year prison sentence for molesting friends of his now college age son Billy (Marquette). There is, as you can see, a lot to keep track of, but Solondz’ screenplay manages to find enough time to give us full and developed portraits of all the characters, both old and new.

One issue with a lot of Solondz’ films is that his work can feel less like a complete film than a series of self-contained scenes, almost as if he were staging a series of beautifully designed one-act plays. That flaw is very much on display here, and yet I almost didn’t mind, because even though they don’t draw together entirely satisfactorily the individual pieces that make up the film are each so well formed that they work beautifully in and of themselves. This is perhaps best seen in the scenes featuring Charlotte Rampling (as an older woman who picks up Bill at a bar) and Ally Sheedy. They are both outstanding scenes. Rampling does her ice queen act to practiced perfection, and her withering “It was hard work, I’m old” is so cutting you almost expect Ciaran Hinds to bleed. Ally Sheedy, though, what a wonderful surprise. Just seeing Sheedy on screen now is rare enough, and that’s a terrible shame, because in her last two truly notable roles (this and High Art) she’s given searing, Oscar worthy work that just leaps off the screen at you. In just ten minutes Sheedy completely runs away with the film. She’s bitchy, hurtful, awful and absolutely hilarious, especially in her repeated references to Keanu. Those scenes are just brilliant, as good as any I’ve seen recently, and yet the movie would essentially be the same without them. There are many scenes like that in Life During Wartime.


Most integral to the film are Alison Janney as Trish and Shirley Henderson as Joy. It’s great to see these actresses get a proper showcase, both do consistently outstanding work in supporting roles, and here prove just as effective in leading parts. Janney, to her immense credit, is probably the only cast member (besides Ally Sheedy) who makes you completely forget the actor who previously played her part. She’s got some challenging scenes and, early on, some of the least realistic of Solondz’ always somewhat awkward dialogue. The fact that she can make the scene where Trish tells her 12 year old son (Dylan Riley Snyder) that she’s in love with the man she’s just been on her first date with (among other, much more inappropriate, things) play as naturally as it does is proof that she can do just about anything on screen. Henderson doesn’t entirely banish the spectre of the outstanding Jane Adams, but she does bring her own interpretation to Joy, and is very effective. Henderson’s mousy quality, both in her looks and her tiny high-pitched voice, works extremely well for a character who spends her life being buffeted between and manipulated by other people.

There are some deeply uncomfortable moments in Life During Wartime, and this being Todd Solondz, they are drawn out over as long a period as possible, in order to make us laugh and squirm in pretty much equal measure. There are times – as in a dinner scene when Trish, her much older boyfriend Harvey (Michael Lerner) and their respective sons get together for the first time, and the desperately sad scene between Bill and Billy – when you almost feel like you want to get away from the film, so uncomfortable is it. These, though, are among Life During Wartime’s best, and in the case of that dinner scene, funniest, moments. The cast is large, but they all do strong work. The only real problems for me were Paul Reubens, whose performance as Andy seemed simply to be a Jon Lovitz impression and Ciaran Hinds. I can’t take anything away from Hinds, he’s very good in the film, but he’s just so far from Dylan Baker’s performance that I couldn’t connect the character in Happiness with the character in Life During Wartime.

At times, like all of Solondz’ films, Life During Wartime dwells in ugliness. There’s little explicit here (brief topless shots of Rampling and Janney are as upfront as the film gets in that respect) but like Happiness this is a film about the evil people do to one another, about psychic violence (literally, in the case of Joy and Andy’s conversations). More than that, Life During Wartime is about the consequences of people’s actions, the way that what Bill did destroyed his family so completely that his younger children have been told that he is dead, the way that Andy tries to make Joy guilty for his suicide, and so on. Yet as it dwells in this ugliness, the film is quite beautiful to look at. Solondz and cinematographer Ed Lachman give it a highly designed, slightly unreal, look. It’s a very formal looking film, at times almost stagey, but always striking.

To be honest, reviewing a Todd Solondz film is almost a useless exercise, if you’ve seen any of his films before chances are you know what you’ll think of this. You either loved or hated the last one you saw, and Life During Wartime won’t change your mind. If you are new to his work, then this is as good a starting point as any, you won’t bring the baggage of Happiness to it and you can be sure of several outstanding performances and a beautifully shot movie. You can also be sure of seeing something that you aren’t going to feel ambivalent about, that in itself ought to be reason enough to catch this film.


Морфий
[MORPHIA]
DIR: Aleksey Balabanov
CAST: Leonid Bichevin, Ingeborga Dapkunaite, Andrei Panin


Apparently heroin is bad. Really bad.

Morphia is based on a series of semi-autobiographical short stories by Mikhail Bulgakov. The film is set in Russia, during the winter of 1917, and tells the story of Dr Polyakov (Bichevin), a young surgeon who arrives at a remote hospital which has had to endure several months with just a paramedic (Aleksandr Mosin) and two nurses (Dapkunaite and Svetlana Pismichenko) to sustain it. Polyakov is talented and well liked (especially by Dapkunaite’s nurse Anna), but after a vaccination leaves him in pain he begins to develop an addiction to the morphine that Anna administers. As time goes on he sinks deeper into addiction, and begins to take Anna with him.

Morphia is a technically excellent film. You can’t fault Aleksey Balabanov’s shot selection, the period detail is brilliant, the lighting is stunning, and always realistic to the fact that the locations of the time seldom have electricity, and the production design team simply out do themselves. Special mention must also go to the effects make up artist, whose work makes the many scenes of operations - especially one horrific amputation - so hideously close to reality that you can almost smell it.

Another laudable aspect of the film is its acting. This is what drew me to the film in the first place. Ingeborga Dapkunatte, a Lithuanian born actress, has been living in London and working in the UK for some years now. She’s one of those actresses that you are likely to recognise, she does a lot of small parts on television, and always impresses, but she seems to have struggled to find big roles here and I thought it would be interesting to see her in a large part in her native language. Dapkunaite doesn’t disappoint. She’s a warm and charming presence as nurse Anna, but also brings solid dramatic weight to all her scenes. She sometimes disappears for long stretches of screentime, and when that happens the film misses her.


Alexsandr Mosin is perhaps even better, he gives a nicely layered portrait of Vlas the paramedic, making us believe that this is a man who has seen just about everything, and yet is still able to greet it with a little black humour and a degree of optimism, along with Dapkunaite he’s a chink of light in an otherwise dark film. Leonid Bichevin looks a little young for the lead, but then Polyakov is supposed to be relatively newly qualified, it can be a little distracting though that he sometimes looks to be in his very early 20’s. However, Bichevin is a solid actor, and he takes you along on Poyakov’s dark journey.

With all this quality on display, it is a shame to say that it often feels like it is allowed to go to waste by the script and by the construction of the film. A major issue is that Balabanov seems to feel the need to acknowledge with his structure the fact that the film is based on short stories, and so we get innumerable title cards breaking up the narrative. Winter. The First Injection. First Amputation (an odd one, given that the film features only one amputation). They come up with irritating regularity, some segments last less than two minutes, and every single time a new card came up I felt jolted out of the film. It is as if Balabanov wants to remind us that we’re watching a movie, I can’t imagine to what purpose.

Perhaps the biggest problem with Morphia is the simplest. I really didn’t care. The script never gives Polyakov enough depth to make him truly compelling and, good though Bichevin is, that meant that I never really cared what happened with his morphine addiction. I was far more interested in Anna and in Vlas the paramedic, and would much rather have seen what happened with them at the hospital rather than follow Polyakov into his addiction treatment. The film’s ending should have left me shocked and shaken, but instead it left me feeling, so what? This is a shame, because there are enough good things in Morphia (especially Ingeborga Dapkunaite’s performance) to make it worth seeing, but it’s hard to recommend a film that wants to be hard hitting but ends up so easy to shrug off.

Review Post 53: Katalin Varga

KATALIN VARGA
DIR: Peter Strickland
CAST: Hilda Peter, Norbert Tanko, Tibor Palffy



“Revenge will set her free”, says Katalin Varga’s misrepresentative tagline. That summary primes you to expect a visceral vengeance thriller, more along the lines of Thriller: A Cruel Picture or Oldboy. That’s not what Peter Strickland’s debut is.

Shooting in Romania, Strickland spent his life savings of £25,000 to make Katalin Varga. It was money well spent, because the film he has emerged with is the best directorial debut by a British filmmaker in a long time. Katalin Varga is a haunting slow burn of a film, whose final moments will stay with you long after the fade out. The story sees the eponymous Katalin (Peter) leaving her home village in Romania after an argument with her husband, and taking to the road with her 10-year-old son Orban (Tanko). She says that they are going to visit her sick mother, but it soon becomes clear that she has other matters to deal with, and that they are connected to the reason that her husband no longer wants to speak to her, or to Orban.

What Katalin Varga lacks in visceral thrills it more than makes up in tension. Right from the start there is a mystery at the centre of the film - why has Katalin left her home, what’s the secret driving her? It’s not hard to guess, though the details, when they come, are pretty shocking. The tension really ratchets up in the second half, beginning when Katalin meets a man named Gergely (Roberto Giacomello), and it starts to become clear why she’s taken this trip. After that meeting, though it still remains slow, almost stately in its pace, the film really becomes a thrilling watch, as Katalin is pursued on her journey, and, finding her ultimate quarry, discovers that he’s very different to what she expected.

Hilda Peter, who, as far as I can tell, had never acted in film before is absolutely extraordinary as Katalin. She’s in almost every scene of the film, and is genuinely fascinating to watch. A beautiful, sharp featured, woman in her early 30’s, Peter has what is perhaps best described as a malleable face, she seems to change from scene to scene, to look different depending whether Katalin is at that point playing mother, seductress or avenger. Her best moment, and the film’s, comes in a five-minute monologue that reveals the full story behind the secret she’s been keeping during the film’s first hour. Peter’s matter of fact recitation of the story hits you like a punch in the gut, and you can also appreciate the many levels on which the scene is working, how the tone plays completely different ways for each of the two other characters in the scene. It’s quite possibly the best piece of acting you’ll see in 2009.


This isn’t to say that the rest of the cast fails to impress. Young Norbert Tanko gives a fine, natural performance as Orban and Tibor Palffy is brilliant, making a character who would, in any other movie, probably be a one dimensional figure of hate layered and almost sympathetic at times. It’s clear that Peter Strickland has a strong command of his cast, as he draws good work out from even the bit parters.

Strickland equally clearly knew exactly what he wanted visually, because Katalin Varga never looks cheap, indeed it is a gorgeous film. Strickland gets a lot of value for free, simply by virtue of filming in such beautiful countryside, but a bad filmmaker can make the most beautiful place in the world look ugly. Strickland’s eye for his characters surroundings calls to mind Terence Malick. What’s really notable about the look of this film though is how, without his shots feeling overly contrived or designed, Strickland achieves such beautiful compositions, and how he manages to give the camera a real freedom, often shooting handheld, without succumbing to the shaky-cam fad.

There aren’t many negative things to say about this film, but on the downside, though the performances and imagery remain strong all the way, the credibility of the script takes a slight dive after that show-stopping monologue. There’s also a tiny issue with the ending. For my money it is just one shot too long. If Strickland had gone out on the shocking cut to black that comes before the credits the film’s already strong impact might have been even greater. However, these are nitpicks about a great film. I’ll be keeping an eye on both Peter Strickland and Hilda Peter from now on, and if you like good movies then you should too.

The Long Halloween: Triangle

TRIANGLE
DIR: Christopher Smith
CAST: Melissa George, Michael Dorman, Henry Nixon,
Rachel Carpani, Liam Hemsworth



Beginning with the distinctly average Creep, British director Christopher Smith has now made three horror features. It’s almost impressive that from that less than brilliant start he’s managed to regress with each film.

Roger Ebert coined the term idiot plot, to describe movies whose central problem would be easy to solve if the characters weren’t idiots. Triangle has a classic idiot plot, and a collection of jaw-droppingly stupid people to go along with it. The setup is pretty sensible; a group of twenty-something friends go out on a yacht for the day, along for the ride is Jess (George), a waitress who the boat’s owner Greg (Dorman) has invited as an attempt at a first date. The boat is caught in a storm and capsizes. After some time a huge liner pulls up alongside the wrecked boat, and the group gets on board. That’s when it all goes to hell. Someone is stalking the group, killing them off one by one. We then find that the boat is stuck in a time loop, so we get to see the same events three times over.

What do you do when you’re stuck in a time loop and want to get out? Surely you change the sequence of events. Certainly if you’ve already tried twice (and discovered that you’ve probably tried a whole lot more times) doing things one way and failed, you change tack. That’s the problem at the heart of Triangle. Jess is a moron. Confronted with evidence that what she’s doing to escape this loop has failed on at least 50 previous occasions, she proceeds to do EXACTLY THE SAME FUCKING THING again. I don’t know how to sympathise with a horror heroine that dumb, and if you can’t sympathise with the final girl, that’s just death in a horror film.

Jess may be an idiot, but she does at least have a modicum of personality and depth, as well as a defined goal (getting back to her autistic son). The same can’t really be said of the other characters, who can all be reduced to a single trait. Greg: Goatee, Downey (Nixon): Tool, Victor (Hemsworth): Muscles… and so on. So we’re stuck on a boat, with five people, four of whom have no personality, watching pretty much the same thing happen three times over the course of an hour. Scary. It’s just so boring.

As a horror fan you accept that the plot usually comes second to the scares and kills, but you still expect that there will be a story. Triangle doesn’t really have a story, I’m not sure it even really has an idea - a coherent one anyway. This total lack of inspiration is evident in the fact that Smith’s script follows the idiot plot all the way, rather than letting Jess grow a brain, it’s evident in the endless repetition. It’s perhaps most evident in how, after he hits on what could have been a haunting ending, Smith hammers home a point that we - not being idiots - have already got with another 10 minutes of superfluous scenes. The final major problem with the screenplay is this: why? Why is any of this happening? The film doesn’t seem to know or care, it never even poses a theory. It’s just happening because that’s what the script says.

Melissa George gives a competent performance as Jess, but the acting is adequate at best, and the same goes for the direction. Christopher Smith isn’t a bad filmmaker; he’s just an utterly average one. There’s nothing here that stands out, except perhaps the look of the antagonist. Smith says that Triangle was written before he’d even heard of Timecrimes, and I believe him, I’d be interested to know if it was filmed before he heard of Nacho Vigalondo’s (considerably better) film though, because there is a real déjà vu when looking at Smith’s cloth bag masked killer.

I get so annoyed watching British horror these days, because when this, and Eden Lake and Tormented and Lesbian Vampire Killers are getting decent sized releases quality films like Mum and Dad are going direct to DVD and The Disappeared and The Daisy Chain haven’t even seen an official release yet. Triangle is nothing like as bad as, say, Halloween II, it’s just boring and lazy. Skip it.

The Long Halloween: The Complete NOES Part 2

A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Child (1989)
Dir: Stephen Hopkins

Like The Dream Master before it, this fifth Nightmare has a decent central idea. This time Alice (a returning Lisa Wilcox) is pregnant, and Freddy is able to use the dreams of her unborn child - somehow - to infiltrate into the world when she and her friends are awake. You could almost call this inspired: the enemy quite literally within, and Freddy making the ultimate invasion into the body and consciousness of his nemesis. Unfortunately this fine idea is wrapped up in a near totally incoherent movie, which lurches from set piece to poorly executed set piece with all the grace of a 20 stone man attempting to do ballet.

The problem is that, again, it’s all too clear that the storyline is an afterthought, the least important aspect of a script whose real purpose is to provide Freddy with more opportunities to make winking wisecracks as he kills. Most of these sequences are as bereft of scares and inspiration as they are laughs, but one manages to be surprisingly effective. One character is, for no reason really, a comic book fan and so he’s sucked into a comic for his dream sequence and in a very cool touch he becomes a drawing and when Freddy kills him all the colour drains out, of course even this is undermined by a terrible one liner (Freddy: Told you comic books was bad for ya!)

As with The Dream Master, Freddy is the biggest problem with this film. Drop the ‘comedy’ and you might have something here, but with it the tone of the film is massively confused and Freddy lacks any value as either villain or bogeyman. It is easy to tell that the film was shot and edited in just 8 weeks. The performances are awful all round (Robert Englund looks like he wishes he were dead) and some of the cutting is really dreadful. Most of all though the trouble is that the film makes absolutely no sense, it’s just a bunch of scenes, there’s no sense of a progressing story and even if there were, the characters are all so bland that it wouldn’t matter, because why would you care?

The Dream Child should be a better film than it is, and the fact that it is so bad is purely a matter of greed. If someone had taken some time with this film, with this idea, it could have been one of the best of the series. Oh well, next time, right?


Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991)
Dir: Rachel Talalay

You thought The Dream Child was bad? You thought it couldn’t get worse then Freddy’s Revenge? You were wrong, bitch. Once again a Nightmare film begins promisingly, this time with a caption: "Do you know the terror of he who falls asleep? To the very toes he is terrified, because the ground gives way under him, And the dream begins... ” - Friedrich Nietzsche. Amazingly, just 10 seconds later, all hope of a good film is pretty much lost, when that card is followed by this one: “Welcome to prime time, bitch” - Freddy Krueger. Kill me.

Even at their very worst, the previous Nightmares all had something interesting about them - a cool death scene here, an inexplicable homoerotic subtext there - Freddy’s Dead doesn’t. This abominably terrible film plays like somebody saw the worst stand up routine in history and decided to chop it up and insert it, line by line, into one of the worst horror films ever made. How bad is this film? Well, Pirates of the Carribean: At World’s End isn’t the worst film Johnny Depp has been in, or the least coherent.

Where to begin? How about with Freddy? His first appearance in this film has him dressed as witch, riding a broomstick and saying: I'll get you, my pretty! And your little soul, too! That, sadly, may be one of his best one liners in this film. The other really sad thing about Freddy here is how awful he looks. David Miller returned to do Freddy’s make up, but was constrained to sticking with the commercial look established in Nightmares 4 and 5. The results are shocking. Freddy looks like he’s got egg on his face literally as well as figuratively. The effect is comical rather than horrific; indeed it’s the only funny thing in the film.

The acting is spectacularly terrible. Englund appears tired and bored; if he’s not actually reading his lines from cue cards then he’s doing a very good impression of someone who is. It sometimes seems as if the film has been written to give Englund lots of screentime, but as little as possible to do. One endless sequence sees him attempting to kill a victim through a video game, which allows Englund to spend about ten minutes just sitting in a chair cracking abysmal jokes. At times the film resembles a cartoon, especially when Freddy pops up on TV and hits Johnny Depp in the face with a frying pan. So, it’s like a bad stand up set, like the worst Looney Tunes ever made, what it is never like is a horror film. The other performers are barely worth discussing, except to note that I think Lisa Zane spent the entire production of this movie in a coma, and that Breckin Meyer was indeed always that irritating.

Director Rachel Talalay had worked in some capacity on all the previous films, so it made sense that she be given her shot at directing. The results are just embarrassing. Her best shots are solidly uninspired, but her worst are absolute abominations - check out the stunningly awful shot that rotates around Freddy and Lisa Zane endlessly, first in one direction, then another - it’s a shot that says ‘I’ve seen the prom scene in Carrie, look, I can copy it’. I’ve never seen the 15-minute last reel in 3D, but it’s all stuff pointing awkwardly at the screen. Freddy’s Dead is a hideous film to watch, because it is poorly shot, and because the editing is like a 90-minute car crash.

This really is one of the worst horror films I’ve ever seen.


Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994)
Dir: Wes Craven

After six films in seven years, Freddy Krueger was pretty worn out. He’d gone from being a hideously burned ultimate bogeyman to a slightly melty-faced ‘comedian’ who killed. His creator, Wes Craven, had deserted him after being re-written on the third instalment, and, he felt, cheated out of a piece of the huge financial reward that New Line Cinema had reaped on the back of his work. New Nightmare came out of a discussion with New Line boss Bob Shaye, in which those money issues were addressed and Shaye asked Craven if he’d like to write one more Nightmare, saying that New Line ‘feared they had killed Freddy off too soon’.

The result is one that rewrites the rules of franchises. Artistically speaking returns are supposed to diminish as a series goes on, the seventh film in a franchise is not supposed to be the best. It just doesn’t happen. Except in this case. Craven ignores all the previous sequels, and instead reduces them to fodder for a film that is all too seldom given the credit it deserves as a truly groundbreaking piece of horror cinema.

New Nightmare takes place in the real world, and stars many of the key talents behind the series as themselves. Craven’s clever script posits the idea that Freddy was, in fact, an ancient evil, and that in creating Freddy he had trapped that evil inside the story of the Nightmare films, but now that the films are over that evil is attempting to escape, in the form of Freddy, into the real world. The one barrier? Heather Langenkamp; to escape, Freddy must defeat the actress who played the character who twice defeated him - the first to do so. Craven melds fact and fiction to brilliant effect. Langenkamp, John Saxon, Robert Englund and Craven all play themselves, and Langenkamp’s storyline is, to a degree and with her permission, drawn from her real life, in which she was stalked and telephoned by an obsessed fan, and is married to a special effects artist. This is very evident in Langenkamp’s performance, which is brilliant, especially as she becomes more and more unhinged as the film goes on.

Craven also resurrects the true Freddy Krueger. Here he’s genuinely frightening for the first time since the third film, and his make up is completely re-designed, again by David Miller, and the splitting skin look that he’s been given is really creepy, Miller regarded it as the definitive version, and up to this point I’d be inclined to agree with him. What really makes Freddy scary again though is Robert Englund’s performance; the actor really recaptures the utter evil of the character, and there are several genuinely scary sequences here, not least a brilliant reprisal of Tina’s death from the original film, only this time with Freddy visible as he kills Heather’s son’s babysitter (Tracy Middendorf). The whole film looks great, with the huge set for ‘Freddy Hell’ being especially impressive, along with some extremely memorable sequences with Freddy, not least when he appears in the sky, picking up Dylan (Miko Hughes) on one of his claws.

Craven really cuts loose with this film; it’s a confident, intelligent piece of work that he hasn’t come close to matching since. Scream got a lot of credit for introducing postmodern horror, but Craven did it first and best with New Nightmare which, as well as being gripping and scary, deconstructs both the horror genre and, through a doctor character, the rush to censorship. I wish Craven would get back to doing something this interesting with the genre.


Freddy Vs Jason (2003)
Dir: Ronny Yu

Freddy Vs Jason exists in a strange limbo. It doesn’t really belong to either the Nightmare franchise or the Friday the 13th franchise, and yet it is completely bound up with them. I wasn’t going to include it in this round up of the franchise, but on re-watching it I found it such an enormously fun guilty pleasure that I felt I had to cover it briefly.

I couldn’t claim that Freddy Vs Jason is a good film. The script is ropey, the characters are cardboard cutouts, the plot is beyond silly, and the acting is shockingly poor, all I know is that I enjoy the hell out of it anyway.

I think the key, at least looking at it as a Nightmare film, is that it has a respect for the history of the franchise (see the references to Hypnocil, established in Dream Warriors) and that, at last, it manages to square the circle of making Freddy both evil and funny. This is what Nightmares 4, 5 and 6 would have been like if they had worked. Freddy still has a cruel streak mile wide, but that is complemented, rather than leavened, by his jokes. It also helps that the make up has again been refined, and I think this is the best Freddy has ever looked.

Ronny Yu’s visuals are stylish and imaginative, making the violence as beautiful as it is brutal (witness Jason, on fire, stalking kids through a cornfield). There’s such viciousness to this film, and unlike most of the Elm Street sequels, it doesn’t shy from the bloodier images. Freddy and Jason tear literal chunks out of one another in a series of really painful looking fights. This may be a dimwitted film, but I challenge any fan of either franchise to fail to enjoy it.

The Long Halloween: The Complete NOES Part 1

I was going to write 8 full length reviews for this post, but as I watched the films it occurred to me that most of them simply didn’t warrant 1000 words or more consideration, that, and when the remake opens next year I’ll want to do a Versions post comparing Wes Craven’s film to Samuel Bayer’s. So here are some thoughts, in mini-review form, on this venerable series. However, I'm still going to post this in two parts, because apparently I think 500 words constitutes a mini-review.

I’m assuming that most people have seen these movies, and so there may be mild spoilers.

A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
Dir: Wes Craven

The early 80’s was boom time for slasher films. People were hungry for horror and it was being delivered both at the cinema and on a new fangled technology called video. Hundreds of slashers were made, most now justly forgotten. There were a few gems though, and A Nightmare on Elm Street still stands out as one of the very best slasher films ever made. Wes Craven is a master of the genre, and in Freddy - or, as he’s known here, Fred - Krueger (played in all eight films reviewed here by Robert Englund) Craven created one of the screen’s great original monsters. Krueger is a child murderer, himself burnt to death by the parents of the children he murdered on Elm Street, and now stalking the remaining Elm Street children in their dreams, wielding a razor fingered glove as weapon.

Craven said that his intent with Krueger’s backstory was to create the most corrupt monster he could imagine, and with Englund’s help he succeeds. In this first outing Freddy is a true monster; there’s no sympathy, little humour, and absolutely no pity in the way he acts. Put together with the character’s look - a fantastic, horrific, burn make up by David Miller - Englund’s performance creates a genuinely unnerving villain. Craven and DP Jacques Haitkin use a very small budget ($1.8 million) to create some truly memorable and haunting, if low tech, visuals. Some of the simplest effects in the film would now be realised with CGI, but Freddy’s extending arms (which were on fishing poles) and his face coming through the wall (which was made of spandex) still impress because they are obviously real.

In addition to Englund the cast, composed mainly of young newcomers, generally does well. Heather Langenkamp has worked mainly in TV since Nightmare, but she’s a strong lead, and gives Nancy resourcefulness and toughness of a kind rare in ‘final girls’ of the 80’s. She also has to carry some of the weightier dramatic scenes in the film, and does so with aplomb. Amanda Wyss is engaging as Tina, and that makes the reversal that Craven pulls on you when he kills her off early (in perhaps the film’s most startlingly visceral and truly nightmarish scene) genuinely shocking. Johnny Depp, who makes his debut as Nancy’s boyfriend, seems ill at ease, and overacts at times, certainly there’s nothing here to suggest the sort of masterful subtlety we’d see in Edward Scissorhands just six years later. The adults are a bit of a mixed bunch, John Saxon is good as Nancy’s cop father, while as her mother Ronee Blakley fumbles her big dramatic scene, when she has to tell Nancy about what the parents did to Krueger.

The rough edges are certainly there, but they don’t really matter, because Craven’s concept is so strong, and the film gains such momentum, that it is carried over the rough patches. The only real problem is the ending, which is extremely anticlimactic after such a strong build up. Still, A Nightmare on Elm Street entirely deserves a place in the pantheon of horror classics.


A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge (1985)
Dir: Jack Sholder

The Nightmare franchise opened with a massive mis-step in the shape of this very strange sequel. It’s set five years after the original, but takes place in an extremely obvious 1985 - witness the costumes, the music and the Kate Bush poster in the main character’s room. It completely changes the main idea behind Freddy Krueger who, instead of attacking kids in their dreams possesses Jesse (Mark Patton) so that he can attempt to cross over into the real world. This isn’t a bad idea in and of itself, but the execution is incredibly sloppy.

First off the script, assuming such a document existed, is flat out terrible. Wes Craven had a cast of well-rounded characters to kill off; these kids (most of whom look about 30) couldn’t muster a rounded personality between them. Most of them may as well not have names as you learn so little and care so little about them that they could just be grouped together in the credits as ‘corpses in waiting’. Sholder’s shooting is unhelpful; he shrouds the film in darkness, but lends it little atmosphere. This means that we never get to admire Kevin Yagher’s first go at the Freddy make up, and also that when the viscera should begin to fly we can’t really see it, it’s the worst of all worlds really.

These problems, however, are small beer compared to that of the casting. I’m willing to accept that Kim Myers - a cute Meryl Streep lookalike who plays Lisa, Jesse’s would be girlfriend - may be able to act and is defeated by the screenplay. Mark Patton is another thing entirely. First he doesn’t have the look of a horror lead; he’s too soft, girlish almost. This is borne out in his voice, or more specifically in his scream, which we hear a great deal of and which never ceases to be funny. Patton gives an outrageously camp performance, but also manages to set his face in a single expression, which is something akin to ‘huh?’ and never alter it for the film’s entire running time.

There is one thing about Nightmare 2 that is interesting - utterly misplaced, but interesting - and that’s the homoerotic undertone that runs through the film. One dream sequence begins in a leather bar, and ends with Jesse’s coach tied up, naked, in the school showers being whipped to death by a towel wielding ‘Freddy’. Then of course there’s the whole issue of Freddy trying to possess Jesse’s body “Fred Krueger!... He's inside me... and he wants to take me again!” You could even read the film as a fight between good (straight, personified by Lisa) and evil (gay, personified by Krueger and the Gym teacher) lifestyles, and Lisa’s final battle with Freddy as her attempt to rescue Jesse from homosexuality. I’ve spent too much time in film studies classes, clearly, but seeing Freddy's Revenge in this way does at least distract from how dreadful a film it is at every possible level.


A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987)
Dir: Chuck Russell

It is to New Line Cinema’s credit that, even though Freddy’s Revenge made more at the box office than the original Nightmare on Elm Street, they realised that the abrupt change of direction that made that film the strange beast it is was a misstep. To put the franchise back on track they turned to its creator. They asked Wes Craven to write and direct Nightmare 3, but he was already contracted for another film. He did write a script though, and gets a co-writing credit here. His big contribution was twofold. First, his screenplay brought back original heroine Nancy Thompson (again played by Heather Langenkamp), now a grad student training as a therapist and specialising in sleep disorders. Second, the central concept of the Dream Warriors - kids in a sleep clinic who find that in their dreams they have powers that can be used to fight Freddy - was Craven’s, and would power the franchise for a loose trilogy of sequels beginning here.

Craven’s screenplay was heavily re-written, and it is pretty easy to see the joins. In Freddy’s Revenge the process of leavening Freddy’s initial menace with some humour had begun, but it is in Dream Warriors that we first begin to see the seeds of what Freddy was ultimately to become; a shitty stand up comic with knives. The one-liners are perhaps less forced and painful here than they would become, but they still sound odd, and negate the essential menace of the character. Between these and other moments of silliness (the kids powers really can be painful, especially when one character declares himself the wizard master) there are some fantastic shock scenes.

After some seriously uninspired death scenes in Nightmare 2 this film really ups the ante when it comes to invention. Dream Warriors contains some of the series’ strongest nightmare sequences, with standouts including Kristen’s (Patricia Arquette) dream involving a huge Freddy snake and perhaps the series single coolest and most painful looking death in which Freddy rips a characters arteries out of his arms and legs and uses him as a puppet. Here, and in several more sequences, director Chuck Russell really outdoes himself, showing a talent for both visceral moments and tension. Russell also manages to draw good performances from his cast. Arquette and Langenkamp make for good feisty heroines, while John Saxon also reprises his role to good effect. As Freddy Robert Englund is as good here as he ever was. He seems to have more pure fun with the part in this instalment than any other, but he’s also still scary and evil.

Dream Warriors isn’t a great film by any means, and there are a lot of moments that clunk horribly, but when it comes together this is fun and engaging horror cinema and easily the best of the true Nightmare films not directed by Wes Craven.


A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988)
Dir: Renny Harlin

I find The Dream Master a disappointing sequel to Dream Warriors. Nightmare 3 was hit and miss, but it hit a good portion of the time, had some fine acting and several startling nightmare sequences, all wrapped in a story that, while not exactly great literature, held together. The Dream Master really marks the beginning of a precipitous fall in the quality of the Nightmare films. That’s especially disappointing because the idea behind The Dream Master, which runs with the themes of Dream Warriors, is a pretty good one.

The film introduces a new nemesis for Freddy. Alice (Lisa Wilcox) is a friend of dream warrior Kirsten (now played by the rather unfortunately named Tuesday Knight) who finds that she can acquire all her friends dream powers, and use them to become the dream master, making her a match for Freddy. Incidentally, one thing the Nightmare series has always done right is present a strong, smart and self reliant heroine who is match for a monster, and Alice certainly belongs to that tradition. The problem is less with the story than it is with the script, which lacks colour, character and coherence. More than ever there is a feeling that the script was built around ideas for Freddy gags. ‘Gags’ is a metaphorical term; what effects artists call their work, but here, sadly, it’s also a literal term. The Freddy sequences have now become little more than a setup for the character’s dreadful one-liners. He began as the most evil thing Wes Craven can think of, but just four years later Freddy has become a vaudeville act with fake blood. Take this for example: Dan: Krueger! Freddy: Well, it ain't Dr. Seuss. They’re all that bad.

Antoher problem with film is the acting. Robert Englund does still seem engaged, but the feel of Freddy has changed so much that Englund can’t make him threatening any more. Tuesday Knight is a decent facsimile of Patricia Arquette, but a poor substitute. She’s got the look but lacks the talent, and Kristen, too, feels like a different character. The rest of the kids have pretty minor roles, and are all pretty wooden while waiting to be killed off. Lisa Wilcox does have a big role though, and Alice is probably the best-written and most rounded character in the film, but Wilcox can’t quite pull it off. She’s fine in the earlier part of the film, but when she has to go and fight Freddy she lacks the necessary steel, and that means that despite fine effects work from Kevin Yagher and Screaming Mad George - which results in some of the series’ most striking make up designs - the finale doesn’t really come off.

Renny Harlin does what he can, but he's pretty much hobbled by his material. Visually Nightmare 4 doesn't lack for style, but narratively it is broken. On the whole, if the original Nightmare on Elm Street was a scary night of theatre, The Dream Master strays dangerously close to pantomime.

Review Post 52: Ong Bak - The Beginning / The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus

ONG BAK - THE BEGINNING
DIR: Tony Jaa / Panna Rittikrai
CAST: Tony Jaa, Sorapong Chatree



Tony Jaa famously went a little nuts while making this film in the jungle. One day the director/star disappeared from the set, and didn’t return for two months. This may go some way to explaining some of the shortcomings of this film.

Ong Bak - The Beginning, has nothing to do with the first film. This film is set in the 1400’s, as opposed to modern Thailand, and there is never any mention of Ong Bak. In the first film Jaa was a novice monk, here he’s a bandit seeking vengeance for the death of his father. Really though, who cares about the plot? This, like all martial arts films, is really about wanting to watch people punch and kick each other in various breathtakingly choreographed ways. The big problem there is that this film gets so bogged down in what is a deeply simplistic and rather poorly told plot that it takes forever to really get going. The last twenty minutes are one long, punishing, awesome, action sequence but up until then there is the feeling that Jaa and co-director Rittikrai are treading water.

The love interest is especially botched. The film spends a long time in flashbacks building up a love interest for Jaa, and when the film has them meet again towards the end… nothing happens. It as if someone forgot to write the scene. This is perhaps a small mercy, because Tony Jaa may be an amazing screen fighter, but he’s a terrible actor, and his squeaky voice doesn’t help, as it completely lacks gravitas. Perhaps it is unfair to denigrate Jaa for his acting, after all, Jackie Chan is no actor, nor is Yuen Biao.  The difference is that those performers have real screen charisma; you connect with them. Jaa is a blank slate - an unspeakably hard blank slate who is amazing at martial arts, sure, but a blank slate nevertheless.

Still, the first 70 minutes of the film have smattering of decent action, and the insanity of the last 20 minutes makes up for the fact that much of what has gone before is often pretty dull. Jaa’s movies famously claim to use no wires, no doubles and no CGI. That’s certainly in evidence here, as the final fight, which sees Jaa take on a frankly ludicrous amount of enemies, looks genuinely arduous and painful. The choreography is fluid, varied and stunning and Jaa and Rittikrai film the mayhem beautifully, always making sure that you can see the action, rather than obscuring it with the shaky-cam and hyperactive cutting so fashionable in Hollywood action films. Most jaw dropping is perhaps the prop sequence involving an elephant, which boasts stunts that one imagines even Jackie Chan might have balked at. There are also an admirable variety of styles on display here. Jaa’s thai boxing had become rather tired by the end of Tom Yum Goong (a.k.a. The Protector / Warrior King), but he’s learnt the lesson and here uses weapons - particularly a three sectioned staff - and traditional kung-fu to fine effect.

Ong Bak - The Beginning isn’t a great martial arts film, and may leave you feeling short changed, with an ending so abrupt it seems that the makers just ran out of film. That said, there are twenty minutes of near peerless action to enjoy here and if you like martial arts movies then that might just be enough.


THE IMAGINARIUM OF DR. PARNASSUS
DIR: Terry Gilliam
CAST: Heath Ledger, Christopher Plummer,
Lily Cole, Andrew Garfield



Terry Gilliam may be the unluckiest filmmaker alive. Disaster has befallen many of his films, both during and post-production, and The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus nearly ended up as the second film he was unable to finish.

The story of The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus concerns the eponymous character’s (Plummer) bet with the Devil, here known as Mr Nick (Waits). The currency is souls, the wager whether the easy pleasures of Mr Nick’s world or the imagination fuelled world behind Parnassus’ magic mirror can capture more and the prize, initially eternal life for Parnassus, has changed over the course of 1000 years. Now Parnassus must beat the devil to five souls or Mr Nick will take his daughter (Cole).

Unless you have spent the last 21 months on Mars you almost certainly know that about halfway through the production of Dr Parnassus the film’s star, Heath Ledger, died of an accidental drug overdose. Terry Gilliam was good friends with Ledger, having previously worked with him on The Brothers Grimm, and wanted to finish the film and preserve Ledger’s final performance. He managed to do so through a rather brilliant re-conceptualisation of Ledger’s role in which, each time the character of Tony enters into the realms of fantasy he is played by a different actor - Johnny Depp, Jude Law and finally Colin Farrell. In any other film this would have been a ludicrous solution to a seemingly intractable problem, but because of the nature of this film the device not only works brilliantly but it plays so naturally that you could believe that this was always how the film was supposed to be. Each actor gives us a different side of Tony, and they all do sterling work given the unusual nature of the job.

As you might expect of a film with a production history as troubled as this, Parnassus is a mess. Sometimes it is a terrible mess, at other moments it is a glorious mess, but it always remains a mess. The story sounds clear enough in the summary, but throwing Tony into the mix adds a lot of unnecessary complications into what is already a compelling tale before he comes along and the film starts to stumble in a second half that folds in on itself over and over, eventually beginning to trip over itself. The fact that Mr Nick keeps changing both the rules and the final prize in his wager with Parnassus doesn’t help either. At times I thought I’d quite like a flow chart to help me follow this movie.

Story, however, often seems like a secondary consideration for Gilliam, his often dazzling visuals taking precedent. He certainly doesn’t disappoint on that score here. There are moments of breathtaking visual loveliness; Cole’s dance with Farrell leaps to mind, as does the world of the Imaginarium as a whole. The only downside to the visuals is that sometimes it looks like the money has run out. This is most notable during Jude Law’s sequence, in which the CGI looks like something out of an early Playstation game. Whenever what we are looking at exists physically it is wonderful, with costume and production design departments outdoing themselves in every scene.

The performances are also something of a mixed bag, with some surprising ups and downs. Ledger, sadly, isn’t very impressive. He’s supposed to be British, but his accent goes on a world tour in every sentence with words that are in estuary English, then broadly American, before emigrating to Australia. You can’t fault the energy of his performance, or the sense of fun that comes from it, but it’s a shame that the technical aspect of it is so slipshod. Winning the wooden spoon is British actor Andrew Garfield, who is determinedly wooden as a young man who travels with the Imaginarium and is in love with Parnassus’ daughter Valentina. As Valentina, Lily Cole is the big surprise of the film. Cole is a model, and you can see why, she’s a stunningly beautiful, doll like redhead. Cole is also, apparently, incredibly intelligent (she’s at Cambridge University) and in her performance you can see the work of a smart and talented actress. What she lacks in experience Cole makes up in screen charisma and vivid emotion. She’s the emotional centre of the film, and the idea of the wager works largely because she is so good, especially in the scene in which she discovers the truth from her father. Christopher Plummer is effective as Parnassus, but he actually has little to do and little real effect on the story other than as device to make it possible. A mischievous performance by Tom Waits, who has an enormously good time hamming it up as Mr Nick, is also a real treat.

At times The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus feels less like a film than it does the contents of Terry Gilliam’s mind, emptied onto celluloid. This result in some wonderful oddness (a chorus of Policemen in suspenders singing “We Love Violence”) but also in a film that often feels disorganised and never quite pulls together in a satisfying way. This problem rears its head as Gilliam seems unsure how to close the film (settling, sadly, on a forced happy ending that runs against the grain of the film). Like much of its director’s work Dr Parnassus is frustratingly uneven, but when it works it can be dazzling.