Falling somewhere inbetween the promising Donnie Darko and the disasterous Southland Tales, The Box is essentially a very stylish bad movie. After the epic failure of Southland Tales, writer/director Kelly needed to make a film that would appeal to a wide enough audience to rescue his career and it appeared that The Box would be it. After seeing it I can say it’s just as idiosyncratic as his previous work with many familiar science fiction elements popping up. Based on the short story “Button Button”, the film plays like an episode of The Twilight Zone (for which the story was previously adapted) as directed by Dario Argento. There was a lot to admire in this film, Frank Langella is great, as is his makeup, there are some genuine scares and paranoid creepiness but the film also captured a sort of 70’s cheese so accurately it was hard to take seriously (and the film wanted to be taken seriously.)
I’ve decided after a few days of mulling it over that I didn’t really like this movie but not because it wasn’t a good movie. I liked that the film seemed to have room to breathe absent from the generic romantic coming-of-age film suggested by the trailer. Carey Mulligan was great in the lead (though her character seems too wise for being 16), Peter Saarsgard’s casting instead of someone British was puzzling but he did well in the role. I actually really enjoyed the film until I realized that I had been swindled by a twist that I wont spoil. The film succeeded perfectly and it frustrated me.
This past weekend my dad came up to visit so we could watch as many horror films as we could in 72 hours. This year we saw 14: 6 in the theatre, 4 of which were double-features, and 8 on DVD, 3 of which were new releases each arriving with a wave of hype.
‘Zombieland’ is a zombie comedy starring Woody Harrelson & Jesse Eisenberg as the last survivors of a zombie apocalypse. It’s pretty hard to ignore the comparisons to ‘Shaun of the Dead’, which is unfortunate because that film was so brilliant that it becomes more apparent this film doesn’t have much to add. The opening credits are some of the most inventive and visually stunning I’ve ever seen but this is unfortunately the highlight of the film. The script has a some clever ideas, the “rules for survival”, for example are cute, but surprisingly for a film called ‘Zombieland’ the film manages to shortchange the zombies! The zombie deaths aren’t very interesting, no characters are ever put in danger and long stretches of film have no zombies present at all. When the characters arrive at the mansion 2/3 of the way through, the film begins to sag and never recovers. The film is fun but slight, especially after wading through the zombie films of the past decade and comparing this to the brilliant ‘Shaun of the Dead’.
‘Paranormal Activity’ is ‘The Blair Witch Project’ for kids who probably didn’t see that film a decade ago. Anyone who has seen that film, as I did once (only) during limited release, will know that this film is nothing new. The premise is that a couple sets up a camera in their bedroom to capture supernatural goings-on, which is supposed to build suspense as their situation worsens. The daytime scenes are repetitive and don’t seem to build in intensity, the nighttime scenes take too long for anything to happen and by the time it does it’s over! The audience I saw the film with was audibly disappointed when the film ended and I can’t blame them. The bottom line is that people wanted to be scared and they weren’t. The hype for this film was extremely out of control and we were all extremely disappointed.
‘Trick ‘R Treat’, a Halloween anthology originally scheduled for release 2 years ago, finally saw a direct-to-DVD release earlier this month. Direct-to-DVD generally means that the film is terrible but that’s not actually the case. The problem with most anthologies is that they are always so uneven, certain stories are great and some aren’t. ‘Trick ‘R Treat’ manages to avoid this by weaving all the stories together with a ‘Pulp Fiction’-style chronology that jumps backwards and forwards in time during the course of one Halloween night. The film is actually great fun, a smart fun horror film actually set at Halloween (which is rarer than you would think). I can see why a film like this didn’t get a theatrical release, nobody knew how to market it. At times it feels more like a great TV special than what most audiences have come to expect out of a horror film, but it’s worth seeking out and one of my favorite discoveries this year.
After a great trailer, some Sundance buzz, and missing the BAM screening I had tickets to earlier this year, I was pretty excited to see this “Brilliant…Electrifying…Amazing” film. Unfortunately, with the exception of Tom Hardy’s magnetic performance the film is pretty much a dud. The film is hardly the fastpaced, stylized, hilarious true story it promises, instead a monotonous series of fights with no development or progression whatsoever.
The backstory shown in the trailer is pretty much all the insight you get as the film dives right into Bronson’s first prison sentence. We don’t know why this man would be possessed to do these things and we don’t ever see the perspective of the film change. Scenes are cut to pop or classical music without regard for their importance. Other than it looking cool why are we hearing this song while the prison guard walks down the hallway? When it’s all over we don’t know any more about this characters inexplicable violence than when we started. So what was it all for?
As a longtime Coen Bros. fan, who has been deeply disappointed in their recent work (‘Intolerable Cruelty’, ‘The Ladykillers’ and ‘Burn After Reading’, their “Ugh Trilogy”), I was surprised at how much I was surprised by this film. Because I was out of town I wasn’t able to see the film until last weekend which makes ‘A Serious Man’ the first Coen film since ‘The Big Lebowski’ that I didn’t see on opening weekend. All of this worked to the films advantage.
‘A Serious Man’ is a black comedy set in 1967 about Larry Gopnik, a Midwestern professor who watches his life unravel. His wife wants a divorce, his kids only want his money or to adjust the television antenna, and a student attemps to bribe him as his tenure acceptance is called into question. The setup seems classic Coen, (or even John Hughes who also relished putting his characters in situations that get impossibly worse), but the film has a tone all it’s own.
The cast is unknowns who are familiar faces at best, (a fantastic change of pace from the star studded mugging of ‘Burn After Reading’), and only helps the believability of this world. Michael Stuhlbarg is great in the lead and you really feel for him every step of the way. The time and place is so specific (and so Jewish!) I wish I had known some of the more inside jokes, but I like that the film doesn’t stop to explain them. If you get it, great and if you don’t the film doesn’t care.
The film shows how absurd and futile religious institutions are and acts as a morality play. The ending is shocking and unexpected and the fact that it ends where it does makes me admire the film even more. Stacking this and ‘No Country For Old Men’ together gives me hope we still haven’t seen everything the Coens are capable of.
Over the past few years I’ve come to appreciate Pedro Almodóvar. It helps to date someone who is obsessed with him, but it also helps to grow a little older and revisit his films from a different perspective. I can remember hearing about ‘Talk To Her’ everywhere for about 6 months when it was released. When I finally saw the film on DVD I couldn’t understand what the fuss had been about. I rented ‘All About My Mother’ and felt like I was missing something. I liked both films but didn’t understand why a cult had formed around either.
I saw a pre-release screening of ‘Bad Education’ and had a violent reaction against it, so it wasn’t until I was won over by the charms of ‘Volver’ that I began to appreciate him. I could now appreciate ‘Live Flesh’ or ‘Women On The Verge of a Nervous Breakdown’ because something had clicked. (Embarrassing to admit, I had a similar reaction to David Lynch having completely opposite reactions to his work before and after watching “Twin Peaks”.) While I’m not sure that his films will ever be my favorite, I can understand his appeal. His style is unmistakable, vibrant characters, genre-blurring plotlines, always tweaking and refining his obsessions.
‘Broken Embraces’ is about a blind screenwriter, a millionaire and their obsessions, in the center of which is Penelope Cruz as Lena, an aspiring actress. The film, which jumps between present day and the early 1990’s, is unmistakably Almodóvar and even directly references ‘Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown’. Many familiar actors are present through a twisty narrative that has dashes of humor, questions of identity and scenes so gorgeous looking you will want to eat the film. A montage to Cat Power’s “Werewolf” is beautiful, unexpected highlight.
One of the films weak spots, unfortunately is it’s characters. Penelope Cruz is fantastic in the film but her character isn’t given enough to do. She’s the object of desire instead of a character who we journey through the film with. The blind director (perhaps by design) doesn’t build much sympathy either. The biggest misstep in the film, however is the final act where characters do too much confessional secret spilling that is more predictable than it should be and wraps things up too neatly. Almodóvar said before he introduced the film that it plays better on the second viewing so I’ll have to trust him on that. I think he’s earned it.
