Fulfilling the Promise of Jump Scares in MOTHER! and WINCHESTER

Ah, the venerable jump scare.

Wait. I mean the cheap overused jump scare.

You know the jump scare. The protagonist is rummaging in their medicine cabinet for a tonic to soothe their moderate-to-severe plaque psoriasis, then they find it, breathe a sigh of relief, whew, then close the medicine cabinet and, OH MY GOD THERE’S A SERIAL KILLING TAX ATTORNEY IN THE MIRROR STANDING BEHIND THEM!

Or the protagonist is running from the serial killer, clutching to their chest the medicine that soothes their moderate-to-severe plaque psoriasis, and they duck behind a tree. Breathing heavily, they peek around the left side of the tree to see if the serial killer is pursuing them. Then they turn back to the the right and, OH MY GOD THE SERIAL KILLING JUNIOR LIFEGUARD IS STANDING NEXT TO THEM!

Usually the jump scare is telegraphed to the audience by shot composition (establishing an “empty” spot in the frame that will be filled by a serial killer), audio cues (music and ambient sound dropped to low levels to be filled by a blast of noise), or both. And, because we’ve been bludgeoned by a million jump scares, usually the audience can feel a jump scare coming from five kilometers away, so we tense up and wait for it, wait for it, until OH MY GOD THE SERIAL KILLING MUSHROOM FARMER IS ACTUALLY INSIDE YOUR BOTTLE OF MODERATE-TO-SEVERE PLAQUE PSORIASIS MEDICINE!

The suddenness of the jump scare (empty–>filled; quiet—>loud) is what makes it superficially effective. And I’d be overusing the term “overused” if I, once again, called the jump scare overused. But it’s overused.

The other day, we did an odd double feature: WINCHESTER in the theater and MOTHER! at home on DVD. You could say these two movies are loosely connected as “haunted house” flicks. And that tenuous connection is probably all that binds them–outside of their use of jump scares.

WINCHESTER is a period horror film that follows a morally dubious analyst/therapist/mind doctor as he assesses the sanity of the Winchester rifle company’s president in 1906. She’s an old lady who lives in a spooky mansion that’s under construction 24/7 as she attempts to build a room in her house for each unsettled ghost that’s been killed by her company’s rifles. That’s a lot of ghosts; it’s a big, and growing, house. In this film the jump scares are used in the standard way. If you want to annoy your girlfriend, take her to see WINCHESTER and whisper “jump scare” whenever you sense one coming. I doubt you’ll miss any of them. And now she won’t either. Nor will the retired guy with the gray ponytail sitting in front of you.

MOTHER! (or, to write it in Darren Aronofsky’s preferred way: mother!) is described on the DVD case as a “psychological thriller” which is what marketing people call any drama that is weird and/or tinged with violence. What the movie actually “is” or “is about” is open to debate but what it is not is a genre horror film. Which makes its semi-frequent use of the jump scare, especially in the beginning of the film, intriguing.

The film is maybe an exploration of the destructive muse/artist relationship or perhaps the destructiveness of love or possibly a retelling of the Edenic collapse or something else that will require four hours of rumination and/or absinthe to reveal. Whatever it is, it isn’t simple. It follows a couple in their secluded county home–the sole setting in the film. He’s a poet, she’s renovating the house. They reluctantly welcome people into their home and things go weird.

The camera work, in particular, is sensuous, with beautiful flowing tracking shots that follow characters through the house that are punctuated with cuts to reverse angles of their faces. Lovely. So why mix in jump scares? It’s like pinning a chicken McNugget on a chateaubriand steak.

Well, as cheap and overused as the jump scare is, it’s effective (when constructed well) at filling the outside of the frame with unease/tension. To explain: Using jump scares emphasizes the idea that the audience’s POV is restricted by the picture frame. If we actually were in the bathroom with our protagonist, we’d just say, “Dude, there’s a fucking serial killing train conductor behind you.” But we, as an audience, are limited in our vision. We can only see what the camera allows. And jump scares tell us that outside of the frame there be monsters, ghosts, and serial killing milliners. It makes a promise to the audience: you can’t see everything that’s happening in this world–don’t trust what’s outside of the frame. Things will occasionally jump into the frame to scare us. And, possibly, they will lurk there, just outside of our vision (and our consciousness).

WINCHESTER, a pretty dumb period horror movie, uses jump scares to tell us that there are ghosts outside the frame who will, at regularly spaced intervals, pop out to scare us. Standard horror shit. MOTHER! uses jumps scares to tell us, also, that there are things outside the frame that will eventually intrude into our POV. It’s the same promise. But what unfolds outside of our POV in MOTHER! (and how Aronofsky showcases it) is much more grandiose and unnerving than CGI ghosts. And the extended and exhausting finals sequences in MOTHER! make good on the promise of jump scares in ways WINCHESTER can’t even begin to touch.

As MOTHER! hurtles (and I mean hurtles) toward its conclusion, the off-frame world mutates darker, and then it’s revealed on-screen as the rest of the off-screen world mutates darker, which is then revealed on-screen, and so on.

Can’t figure out what that’s like? Imagine you’re standing in a field of tall grass. The only thing in the field is a tree that’s directly in front of you. You slowly spin in circles. The next time you see the tree it’s turned into soldier pointing a gun at you. But you keep spinning. Now the soldier is a flaming house. The next time it’s a rotting whale carcass standing upright. Every time the “tree” is out of your view (off-frame) it changes into something else. Something increasingly worse. So you cannot trust the off-frame world–it changes against your will and is out to get you. It’s visceral.

Whereas WINCHESTER uses the jump scares to fulfill the promise that there are ghosts floating around off-screen, MOTHER! uses jump scares to fulfill the promise that the entire world off-screen will fluctuate and morph. Nothing is safe; nothing is in your control.

I’m not sure I liked MOTHER! but it is purposeful, well-constructed filmmaking. Visceral filmmaking. And it takes a gifted filmmaker to turn the much-maligned jump scare into an effective, and important, part of an art film’s vocabulary. A small victory but, I think, an important one.

 

Broken Tone and the Weight of Violence in Guillermo Del Toro’s CRIMSON PEAK

 

One of the sharpest darts in Guillermo Del Toro’s quiver of film skills is imbuing the violence in his films with an unnerving truth and viscerality. Visceralism. Spellcheck doesn’t like either of those words I made up but it can go to hell.

(Speaking of hell, Hellboy doesn’t quite bear this opinion out but, c’mon, it’s a comic book film.)

But “truth” and “viscerality,” I mean that the violence in his films is often precise and horrifying. It appalls–but not in a gore-slick slasher film way. Human beings destroying other human beings is contemptible and vile. See: PAN’S LABYRINTH.

In perhaps the film’s most disturbing sequence, Captain Vidal, that evil son-of-a-bitch, beats a peasant farmer to death with a bottle. The suddenness of his striking, the way the farmer’s face crumples and craters under the blows, the sickening sound effects, how his elderly father whimpers for mercy–it all combines into a melange of motherfucking grimness. It’s graphic, and it’s the first death in the film. After watching it, I can feel the rage and evilness it would take to kill someone. And it makes me sick. That’s the power of this sequence–there’s a weight to it. This is real violence–not Tom Cruise picking off faceless cartoon henchmen or the Hulk punching faceless cartoon aliens. It paints everything that follows a lot darker. It recalibrates the tone for the film. Violence is not amusing–it’s a horror.

The face-cratering sequence in PAN’S LABYRINTH is echoed in a sequence in CRIMSON PEAK in which our hero’s Rich Daddy is murdered. His face is pounded over and over again into the corner of a porcelain sink. This face-cratering death is less surprising than Captain Vidal’s farmer assault, but it’s just as brutal. And graphic. And shocking. And the carnage is revisited in a literal post-mortem scene.

And, just like in PAN’S LABYRINTH, this first violent death in CRIMSON PEAK recalibrates the tone of the everything that follows. We see that this isn’t just a ghost story with fake-y supernatural violence–it’s a story with dirty, grim, human-on-human violence.

But the film’s goofy third act doesn’t follow through on this promise–and that’s one of its main flaws.

The first two acts in a nutshell: Bookish and beautiful Edith (Mia Wasikowska) eschews the socialite’s life in turn-of-the-century Buffalo, New York with her rich father, preferring instead to work on her novel. That is until penniless nobleman Sir Edward Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston) enters the picture and, with the help of his frostily enigmatic sister Lucille (Jessica Chastain), conspires to seduce Edith and steal her family’s fortunes. Naive and radiant Edith falls for Edward, Rich Daddy is murdered, and our story relocates to the Sharpe’s familial manor in gloomy old England: Crimson Peak. Exploring the opulent squalor of the dilipitated manor, Edith discovers two things the audience figured out ages ago: 1) that she’s being poisoned so brother/sister can get all her Buffalo money and 2) brother/sister touch each other in their no-no places when nobody’s looking. Dark times indeed. Luckily for Edith, her childhood friend Dr. Alan McMichael (Charlie Hunnam), crosses the Atlantic to rescue her. This sets up the chases and fights that end the film.

But here’s where things fall apart. With those “chases and fights” that give the film its predictable Hollywood ending, Guillermo Del Toro reneges on the promise of the violent sink-to-face murdering of Rich Daddy. The promise that his characters suffer and hurt each other in ways that reinforce the idea that violence is evil, awful, disturbing, disgusting.

Instead, our protagonists turn into action film avatars that shrug off broken bones and mortal-seeming wounds to leap, punch, and stab each other in satisfying crowd-rousing ways. Edith is pushed over a third-floor railing, tumbles spine-first onto the second-floor railing, bounces off, and then slams into the parquet floor below. When she wakes up, Dr. Alan informs her that her leg is broken but he’s set the bones.

Does this stop her from running and jumping and climbing and fighting Lucille like a goddamn ninja? Nope, not at all. Just as having a knife plunged into his left armpit and then his chest doesn’t stop Dr. Alan from evading his captors, fighting for his life, and hiking through a snowstorm to the nearest village.

Lucille is stabbed also but it just makes her angrier. Of course. She’s a bad guy.

Edward, not one to be left out, is stabbed too. But he also takes a knife to the face, causing him to burble while his eye fills up with blood as he expires. But rather than make us ponder the grim horrors of violence, this mechanism is more movie-magic-interesting (would that really happen if you got stabbed in the face?) than horrifying.

The tone set by Rich Daddy’s death has been long since shattered. Edward’s death is a mere moment of entertainment with only the power to keep us watching rather than feel anything. The violence done to Edith and Dr. Alan are plot points that are designed, unsuccessfully, to imperil the inevitable Hollywood ending. They’re head fakes as the plot clanks on. Violence becomes an airy insignificant thing.

It’s an empty paint-by-numbers finish to the story. It’s a sharp dart blunted for Del Toro. And that’s kinda sad.

 

 

10-ish Minute Review: THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES

Daniella, having seen this movie at some point in the foggy past, remembered THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES as a scary thriller/suspense-y/horror-y flick. We shrugged off the fact that it was in the “Drama” section of Casa Video rather than “Horror,” because, hey, they had SNAKES ON A PLANE in the “Horror” section so maybe it was just a slight misclassification.

Turns out it was. But only because it should’ve been shelved in the “Fancily Edited Movies with No Suspense and No Point” section. And that section doesn’t exist. At least not at Casa Video.

The story, as it is, centers around Richard Gere, a well-coiffed newspaper reporter, trying to figure out who the mysterious Mothman character is that’s showing up in a small West Virginia town. People have seen the Mothman. People have heard the Mothman’s fuzzy digital voice on the phone. The Mothman has whispered weird koans in people’s ears that seem to foretell disasters: “99 on 9 in Denver” is interpreted as a warning about a plane crash that kills 99 people. And so on. The Mothman hasn’t really harmed anyone, but he’s hanging around, harassing people like a bored teenager.

As Richard Gere is pulled further into his pursuit of answers, the movie tries to tread the fine line of “Are these people consumed with a mass paranoia?” or “Is there a supernatural creature harassing the citizens?” Or, in other terms, is THE MOTHMAN PROPHESIES a psychological thriller or a monster movie?

Spoiler alert: we never find out. Or… it’s actually neither?

What is the Mothman? Why is this happening? Hewing close to truth (and this is a “based on real events” movie), these questions aren’t answered. Using his newspaper reporter resources, Richard Gere analyzes some recordings of the Mothman and finds out that its fuzzy digital voice isn’t human. He talks to a doctor who became enamored with the Mothman and ruined his life. And that’s about it. Outside of one split-second appearance that’s written off as a hallucination, the  Mothman monster only appears on-screen as frantic sketches in people’s notebooks–everyone’s least favorite scary movie trope. See above.

So after almost two hours of characters explaining what they heard, telling what they saw, and the audience hearing the fuzzy digital Mothman voice on the phone a few times, we’re treated to no answers and no resolutions.

…which could work if the movie wasn’t structured as a star-driven drama (the movie is told through the perspective of, and is ostensibly about, Richard Gere’s main protagonist character).

But it is.

So here’s the problem: because the actual interesting questions of the movie aren’t answered (what is the Mothman/why is this happening), but this is a star-driven movie, the filmmakers are forced to try to structure the story so that our protagonist gets a cathartic, redeeming ending.

This is rather clumsily set up by having his wife die tragically at the beginning of the movie. Giving Richard Gere a sad backstory enables the filmmakers to switch the main question of the movie from “What is the Mothman?” to “Will Richard Gere be able to let go of his past?” And thus, toward the end, the Mothman sends Richard Gere a message that his dead wife will call him on the telephone at some appointed hour. Will Richard Gere give into the Mothman luring him deeper into the rabbit hole and answer the telephone or will he be able to LET GO OF HIS PAST and not answer the telephone?!?!?!

Yes. By switching the main question of the film from “What is the Mothman?” to “Will Richard Gere let go of the past?” the emotional resolution of the film boils down to whether or not he answers the goddamn landline telephone. He doesn’t. Hooray?

The lameness of this is pretty clear. I see it. You see it. The filmmakers saw it. That’s why this is not the real ending of the film. Instead there is a climactic effects-budget-busting action set piece in which a bridge collapses and Richard Gere must save his potential new love interest from a watery grave.

And, since this a Richard Gere movie, he must be the hero somehow. Simply not answering a landline telephone is not enough for star movie actor. So he has to show off all his brave hero moves by saving innocent bystanders when the bridge is collapsing and then rescuing his potential love interest by utilizing the Hollywood powers that allow him to swim down to a sunken car, hold his breath for 3 minutes while performing rescue actions, see in perfect clarity at the bottom of a fast-moving river full of bridge debris at night, and escaping the sunken car so he can haul up her unconscious body while both of them are wearing full winter clothing.

When in doubt: ACTION SEQUENCE. Even if it doesn’t fit the tone or central ideas of the story.

It’s this lack of clarity in what THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES is about (and even what kind of movie it is) that makes it a frustrating viewing experience. It’s a fascinating real-life story that’s crippled by its star-driven structure.

Come for the over-the-top editing and cinematography (at least they had fun), stay for the feeling of ennui that washes over you when the credits roll.

 

 

 

10-ish Minute Review: POLTERGEIST

First off: I’m doing a bad job keeping the writing of these reviews to 10-ish minutes.

Second off: behold tiny geisha Elvis!

Third off: POLTERGEIST is not a good movie.

And I think the reason why mostly has to do with poor storytelling tactics from the writers (Steven Spielberg, Michael Grais, Mark Victor) and the director (Tobe Hooper).

We start off with the “normal family in suburbia” sequence. Then we have the “poltergeist-y moving chairs and bending silverware” sequence.

So there’s a natural build there. The next sequence?

How about a “tree monster appears in a storm and tries to eat one child while another one is sucked into a different dimension” sequence.

…and the wheels fall off.

Because after rocketing from “normal family” to “tree monster” the movie slams to a halt with the “parapsychologist investigators do some investigating” sequence that turns into an expositional quagmire including a loooooong boring dialogue scene that’s delivered in whispers.

Then some more poltergeist-y stuff.

Then another expositional quagmire starring the tiny geisha Elvis pictured above doing some monologuing.

Then a seeming climax with wormholes and demon/beasts and strawberry gelatin and a rope. Victory!

Then, puzzlingly, we have another “normal family in suburbia” sequence where the family, after nearly losing two of their children to horrifying supernatural events, stops moving out of their cursed house so they can GO ABOUT THEIR NORMAL ROUTINE FOR NO REASON. This includes the mother taking a long luxurious bath and trying to dye her hair. The children are sleeping in a bedroom that, the previous day, CONTAINED A WORMHOLE FULL OF DIMENSION-SPANNING DEMONS THAT ABDUCTED ONE OF THE CHILDREN.

The above sequence exists solely so movie can then attempt a second climax (in other instances perhaps a positive thing). This, at least, prevents the mother from spending 2-3 hours filing her nails and taking up some new hobbies while her children sleep in a cursed house that has actively been trying to kill them.

Things happen. The family escapes.

The house implodes into a different dimension and it’s revealed that a greedy real estate developer is the actual villain of the story (perhaps the most resonant message you get watching this film in 2016). The family finally has to move. Perhaps not because they want to, but because there is no more cursed house for them to voluntarily stay in anymore.

Let’s avoid discussion of plausibility, though, and focus on the crappy structure of the film.

As mentioned, after a promising start, POLTERGEIST immediately redlines with the supernatural shit hitting the supernatural fan: tree monster, inter-dimensional vortex, abducted daughter. Then, in order to navigate this red-lined shit-hitting supernatural state of affairs, the writers create a sequence and set of characters (parapsychologist investigators) that exist entirely for exposition purposes. Later on they create another sequence with another character (tiny geisha Elvis) that exists for the same expositional purpose.

A large chunk of this movie consists of duplicate expositional sequences–and that’s inherently poor storytelling. Having a character enter the story to just to explain things is lame. Sometimes unavoidable but always lame. More than illuminating the old “show don’t tell” saw, this approach robs the audience of the experience of working through and exploring this unreal situation with a character. Preferably the protagonist.

But worse yet, there is no real protagonist in the film. There is no one actively driving the plot forward. The family is befuddled throughout the movie. When they need help, an outside character enters and fills them in. When that doesn’t work, ANOTHER OUTSIDE CHARACTER enters and fills them in. They seem to overcome their supernatural enemies, but it turns out that the second outside character was wrong too! Then, somehow, the house eats itself and the movie ends. The parent characters may do some yelling and rescuing here and there, but they’re reacting to the situation at hand, not actively moving the plot forward.

So instead of creating this red-lined supernatural shitstorm and letting the audience follow a protagonist as he/she/it presses forward to a resolution, the movie goes like:

Normal world.
Shitstorm.
Exposition.
Exposition.
Fake ending.
Ending.

The “poltergeist” type of ghost was, in 1982, mostly unknown horror territory in the movies. And some of the supernatural sequences in POLTERGEIST are conceptually intriguing. But without a true protagonist or sound plot structure, the movie doesn’t cohere into anything solid. It takes more than an iconic movie poster and three interesting ideas to make a good movie.

Come for allure of seeing an overrated horror film, stay for the challenge of figuring out why the filmmakers prominently feature the family’s Golden Retriever in some scenes then totally disregard its existence in others.

 

10-ish Minute Review: ROSEMARY’S BABY

I thought I’d already seen ROSEMARY’S BABY, but soon realized that I’d only seen the last third or so. Huh.

Having recently caught a screening of Polanski’s earlier “woman trapped in an apartment with paranoia and bad dreams” film, REPULSION, at the Loft Cinema, I can see how each informs the other, but ROSEMARY’S BABY is a less forcefully claustrophobic flick. Less visceral, more measured. And funnier.

The most striking thing about ROSEMARY’S BABY (besides the horrible clownish makeup job on Mia Farrow’s Rosemary when she’s ill) is the unsettling way Polanksi and editors Sam O’Steen and Bob Wyman cut between scenes. Rather than rely on standard tropes (Dutch angles, sickly color palette, off-key music, etc.) to put the audience at un-ease, the filmmakers instead use scene transitions to jar the viewer.

How?

The bulk of the scenes transitions in the first 2/3 of the movie follow this formula: finish a scene with an overly abrupt cut (sometimes on sound) and immediately jump into a camera movement during the next scene. Don’t cut to an establishing or orienting shot. If cutting on sound between two scenes, don’t cut on similar sounds. Use wardrobe to signify a time change.

An example: there’s a scene where a young lady Rosemary has befriended has fallen out a window and splattered on the pavement below their apartment building. Rosemary and her husband (John Cassavetes, great in the role), amidst the police and crowd, talk to the older couple the young lady was living with. Rosemary and her husband leave the couple  and enter the apartment courtyard. The cut happens while Rosemary and her husband are still walking away, but in frame, and while the older couple are in mid-motion consoling each other and while an off-screen police siren is starting up. The next scene starts with a  camera already in motion roving over Rosemary and her husband in bed.

So what does this editing strategy accomplish?

It creates a “shock + motion” feeling. The abrupt cut disrupts the viewer’s flow and, by immediately going into a moving camera during the next scene, the viewer is already playing catch-up. It’s not quite whiplash, but there’s no real relief. This technique is particularly effective during Rosemary’s pregnancy when it seems like things are moving quickly beyond her control.

The effect is also low-key enough to signify things going awry behind the scenes in Rosemary’s life. Her husband hasn’t changed his self-centered and buoyant personality nor is he overtly hostile to her, but he’s allowed some really really really really horrible things happen to her without her knowing. Really really horrible.

Really? Really.

This strategy wouldn’t work as well without a counterpoint, though, and the filmmakers give you a nice fat traditional establishing shot early on in the film that satisfies this role. There’s a wide angle shot of  Rosemary and her husband entering the courtyard of their new apartment building. It lingers on the fountain for a few seconds before they enter, then follows them as they walk through. Peaceful, normal, traditional.

It’s a simple shot, but stands out because of its traditional setup and leisurely pace. The filmmakers don’t cut to Rosemary and husband as they’re entering–it cuts to the wide shot early to give you breathing room before they come in. In the story, things haven’t started to go off the rails yet, so this setup makes sense emotionally. A calm before the quietly roiling storm.

In the spirit of ROSEMARY’S BABY, I’m going to abruptly cut to the next paragraph.

Come for the shocking horror elements (Satan rape, anyone?), stay for the moments of twisted comedy in the final scene.

** Trivia note: Rosemary’s husband, an actor, gets a big break by taking on a role when the original actor goes blind. At one point in the film, Rosemary telephones the blinded actor to ask him some questions. The voice on the line? An uncredited Tony Curtis.

10-ish Minute Review: SLEEPY HOLLOW

Let’s start with the good: this 1999 Tim Burton film was lensed by the now-legendary Chivo Lubezki. You may remember him for winning back-to-back-to-back Oscars for GRAVITY, BIRDMAN, and THE REVENANT. He also cinematographied the shit out of CHILDREN OF MEN, which includes boner-inducing long takes full of action and Clive Owen.

So this movie looks incredible. Or, at least, fun and interesting. Almost all the scenes are shot in a semi-monochromatic haze that suggests a foggy dawn or a foggy dusk or a particularly moonlit night (in the fog) or a visual manifestation of creeping dread. Basically it puts you in a time-swirl so day could be night or perhaps we’re all mad. It’s evocative but not subtle, but hey, this is a Tim Burton movie.

The story and the acting are hammy and uneven. The humor mostly consists of Johnny Depp being squirted in the face with gross things. His Ichabod Crane has a potentially amusing backstory that’s told in fits and starts. He was raised by a earthy, free-spirited mother but, since this is the 1700s, she ends up in being tortured in an Iron Maiden because they hated witches back then. And women. Especially women wearing cleavage-baring impractical dresses.

This leads young Ichabod to take a 180-degree turn from whimsical things and become a detective. Not just a detective, but a detective who’s going to convince his barbaric New York colleagues how to apply reason and logic to the law! Since his barbaric colleague hate him, they send him to solve the Mystery of the Headless Horseman over in po-dunk Sleepy Hollow.

So his internal conflict is, ostensibly, the battle between magic and science. As a proponent of CSI: Sherlock-style crime-fighting, he’s faced with an otherworldly, unexplainable Headless Horseman and must decide how to proceed.

Spoiler alert: it’s through pratfalls and passing out in the mud.

Other highlights include a wooden Christina Ricci in a thankless love interest role, Casper Van Dien in an even more thankless role as the local model/bully, and a 56 year-old Christopher Walken playing the almost superhuman Hessian killing machine who becomes the Headless Horseman.

Also, Johnny Depp getting squirted in the face with gross stuff.

Come for the cinematography and atmosphere, stay for the 4th beer you’re drinking that will make the limp story and hacked-together ending seem satisfying.

some paragraphs on A PIGEON SAT ON A BRANCH REFLECTING ON EXISTENCE

A PIGEON SAT ON A BRANCH REFLECTING ON EXISTENCE (2015)

Where viewed: Loft Cinema in Tucson, AZ
Experience with film: none, although I like dark Scandinavian films.

Writers: Roy Andersson
Director: Roy Andersson
Principal Actors: Holger Andersson, Nisse Vestblom

Starting with three short scenes of “death” and ending on a meditation on “homo sapiens”, the Swedish feature A PIGEON SAT ON A BRANCH REFLECTING ON EXISTENCE is series of vignettes that train you to see the dark absurdity of life, then turns your guts inside-out.

The roughly 40 scenes play out choreographed moments of mundanity with a razor-sharp sense of internal comedic timing. Example: As her class stomps through their steps, a flamenco instructor can’t help pawing one of her sweaty, young male students. A later scene has a ship captain pacing the cobblestone street outside a restaurant, trying to ascertain over the phone just when the party he was meeting up with cancelled on him. While his conversation plays out in its banality, we can see inside the restaurant and so we watch, silently, as the flamenco instructor once more tries to grope her reluctant student–this time over wine. In this scene, the laughs come from anticipation of something breaking loose in the background of the scene. You experience the build and release. Other scenes hit you like a brick thrown by an unseen assailant. A highlight of this is the invasion of a bland little modern-day pub by King Karl XII, complete with cavalry and footmen marching outside.

This looniness, played straight, gives the film the feeling of a book of Donald Barthelme stories sliced up and played at 33 1/3 RPM instead of 78. Technically, the part of the film that impressed me the most was the lack of camera movement. Each scene plays out in front of a fixed camera. Each scene is timed, composed, and choreographed with an organic precision. Only toward the end, when the relationship between our two bumbling gag-gift salesmen/protagonists, do we get any cuts within a scene. Otherwise, you’re left to patiently wait for each vignette’s curveball.

At some point the waiting, for me, turned from the Land of Anticipation toward the creeping border of Boredome. I reached the moment when I wondered “are we almost done” rather than “what’s going to happen next”. But in an incredible example of perfect timing, the film turns its gaze toward us. Literally. Accusingly. Horribly. This is the “homo sapiens” section. And it burns.

After this section, stray pieces of the film start to cohere. Lines of dialogue are imbued with a heavy, dark significance. The film pivots from observations of picayune absurdity to sadness and condemnation. But it’s thrilling stuff and the message feels wise rather than cynical. It’s an easy thing to say the World Is Shit–it’s far more difficult to show us our complicity, make us reflect on our own brooding inhumanity and misplaced trust in civilization. That’s an artist working with the assuredness of a master thief.

I don’t have the breadth of knowledge to call it a masterpiece, but I’m putting this film on a personal pedestal.

a paragraph on LOVE IS STRANGE

  LOVE IS STRANGE (2014)

Where viewed: laptop/bed
Experience with film: none

Writers: Ira Sachs, Mauricio Zacharias
Director: Ira Sachs
Principal Actors: John Lithgow, Alfred Molida

The first three sequences of LOVE IS STRANGE create a situation that would lend itself well to dramatic exploration–an older gay couple prepare for a big day in their lushly appointed NYC apartment; then it turns out their big day is their wedding, after 39 years together, which they celebrate; this leads to George (Molina) being fired immediately from his music teacher job at a private Catholic school. With George unemployed and Ben (Lithgow) not pulling in any cash as a retiree/painter, the couple is forced to sell their apartment and live apart with friends and relatives while planning the next stage of their life together. Soon George is sleeping on the couch of their former downstairs neighbors, while Ben stays at his nephew’s apartment, sharing a bunk bed with the nephew’s teenage son. That the couple is forced to live apart is the main dramatic hinge of the film. It’s a good set-up for either a comedy or a drama. Unfortunately, the film chooses neither, instead descending into a series of abandoned premises. One such abandoned situation: the nephew’s son has been accused of stealing old French books from the school library, which he denies vehemently–until Ben reveals to his nephew that he found the books under the son’s bed. The nephew is mad that Ben didn’t tell him earlier to save all the fighting and denials from his son, and the son surely must be mad that Ben has betrayed him. He’s lost all possible allies in a foreign household. You’d think that there would be more after this, now that the apartment has been turned into a powder keg of resentment and mistrust, that the filmmakers will dive into the consequences, the characters’ revelations, the actual drama. But you’d be wrong. Instead of diving in, they instead let the film slide off the surface of these situations and continue to the next episode. The books aren’t mentioned again. Once we’re past the half-way mark, the film shifts from descending into abandoned premises to devolving into plot shenanigans. The film has set the stakes very low, having gone to great lengths to explain that a different family member has plenty of space for both men to live together in upstate New York. So it opts to artificially inject some drama into the sagging plot by giving Ben a sudden medical problem. Old reliable. Then the film chooses to solve the characters’ main dilemma via deus ex machina (a stranger George meets is moving out of his rent-controlled apartment–would they like it?) which is another symptom of slapping a series of premises together instead of plotting a narrative. Now, a film can be episodic or loosely structured and still feel complete. Or at least satisfying. But LOVE IS STRANGE lacks commitment to its episodes and its structure. It never bites, it never follows through, like when you throw your dog a piece of broccoli and the animal gums the greenery, then drops it. That the film ends on an agonizingly long (and unconnected) scene of the nephew’s son and his new girlfriend blankly skateboarding down the street was appropriate.

Lee Van Cleef + Kung Fu = BLOOD MONEY

This review was originally published at allography on June 23rd, 2010.

Back in the day of fantastical antiquity, Greek historian Herodotus claimed he knew where cinnamon came from (the origin of the spice being a particular puzzler back then): in Arabia, there lived giant cinnamon birds that collected the spicy sticks from an unknown land and built nests out of them. Case closed.

Apparently, the cinnamon traders made this little narrative up to justify the high price of the product. This makes me happy. If you’re going to make up a story, you’ve gotta just GO for it, giant birds and all. Glorious gutsiness. East versus west (spice trade). This week’s movie: Blood Money starring Lee Van Cleef and Hong Kong action star Lieh Lo.

We all know that the ’70s was a great decade for film. Early Scorsese and Star Wars. Straw Dogs and Serpico. Godfather. I love the smell of napalm in the morning. ADRIAAAAAAAN!

A new generation of American auteurs were rising. Kubrick was still kicking. Lucas and Spielberg were busy inventing the blockbuster. Blah blah blah. Now we’re left with Jar Jar Binks, DeNiro and Pacino joylessly cashing their checks, and Leonardo DiCaprio playing hardasses.

Let’s ignore these things and celebrate true awesomeness of ‘70s cinema: spaghetti westerns and kung fu flicks. Loose plots, fast gunslinging, and fists of steel. High-energy, low-budget, un-fussy films.

I’d call Blood Money a “romp”, but I think that’s a term that made-up film critics use to describe shitty family movies starring Tim Allen. And that would severely neuter the unadulterated joy this movie gave me. So let me give you a capsule synopsis:

A thief (Lee Van Cleef) and a martial artist (Lieh Lo) track down a treasure. The treasure is of course hidden, and the clues have been tattooed on four attractive women’s asses. Our intrepid duo is being tracked by an insane preacher and a massive Native American brawler. Ass jokes abound. Lieh Lo has a crush on the final girl, and said girl has been summarily captured by the insane preacher. Lee Van Cleef wields a gatling gun in the final throwdown, and Lieh Lo beats the shit out of people.  Gunfights!  Kung fu stunts!  Bare asses!

If you’re going to go for it, GO for it. Carlo Ponti and the Shaw Brothers went for it in this super-collaboration and the result is a shaggy, delirious mash-up of fun movie genres. There’s the old western whorehouse and the wise kung fu mentor.  One hero who refuses to use guns and one who chews up the sets in a hail of bullets. As the tagline reads, “The fastest gun in the West meets the most brutal hands in the East.”

The camerawork is active. The Spanish countryside looks appropriately rugged. The plot is efficient, entertaining, and absurd. The soundtrack is jazzy and weird. The characters are outlandish. The dubbing isn’t quite synced up. In the last scene (which takes place in China), Lee Van Cleef is toted off screen on a silk-covered litter, with two Chinese men straining to keep from dropping him.

I love Pixar movies and I love James Cameron movies alike because they’re so careful.  Everything is polished and honed and slotted into the film in the most precise way. That said, I love messy movies like Blood Money because of their boundless energy and desire to entertain. The early tear-jerker montage in Up and the final battle scene in Avatar are incredible in terms of design and execution, but are they more enjoyable than watching Lee Van Cleef strap a Civil War-era machine gun to a horse and storm into a fortress to rescue a girl with a map tattooed on her ass? I don’t know. That’s an unanswerable question, kind of like asking if I’d rather be Usain Bolt or LeBron James for a day. Which superhuman freak would you rather be? Would you rather be able to outrun a Prius or jump over your house? They’re both too awesome to decide.

But there’s a special pleasure in watching the Beady-Eyed King of B Westerns having a grand time in this campy mash-up. Why can’t more movies be fun without being calculating? There’s a special place in heaven for both people who laugh freely, and filmmakers who can give you a true gleeful romp. No fuss, no hip irony, no designs on your conscience or emotions. No overwhelming budgetary hubris.

So put down your 3-D glasses. Return your ticket to see Toy Story 3. Break your DVD of (500) Days of Summer (please). And wallow in the blazing pistols and fists of Blood Money. Variety is the spice of life, you know?

Accepting / Excepting INCEPTION

This review was originally published at allography on August 9th, 2010.

What time is it? What country are we in? Why are all the urban areas vague? Where are all the signposts and markers to ground us? When did we get to Sydney? How did we get anywhere in the movie? Can you remember? Clearly, following the rules of the game, the whole movie’s been a dream unfolding in Leo DiCaprio’s manly brain. Keep spinning, top!

Christopher Nolan uses the absolute minimum amount of CGI that he can in his movies. Which is laudable, applaudable, and remarkable considering how blockbustery he’s become. It’s not easy to reject the binary code infiltration of film these days—especially when you’re blowing up Gotham City and diving down a Leonardo DiCaprio rabbit-hole.

There’s a part of my brain, let’s call it the Disbelief Node, that rejects the notion of Leonardo DiCaprio as a bad-ass dude. (It also blinks and rolls its tiny node eyes whenever Angelina Jolie grips a gun on-screen.) The patchy beard, the cherubic face, the movie-star mug: Robert Mitchum he ain’t. Or even Robert Wagner. But somehow, during Inception, that reject-a-star Disbelief Node was curiously silent. Sure, DiCaprio’s been playing a lot of damaged men lately. And he also looks like he’s been diligent about drinking his protein shakes. But, I realized on the drive home from the cineplex, the real reason why he seems mightier and fightier in the film is that his character spends a lot of time bossing Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Ellen Page around. They’re both tiny and could, perhaps, fit in a fanny pack if you folded them up carefully enough.

When Nolan ends the film on that shot of the god-damn top spinning, I wanted to blow a wet, sloppy raspberry at the screen but I’m very conscientious about not disturbing my fellow movie-goers, so I just muttered some half-hearted invective under my breath as I heaved myself out of the comfortable darkness of the theatre and into the garish afternoon light. Really, you’re going to end the movie on a Final Ambiguity? One that whispers gently in the movie-goer’s ear, “Why don’t you just scoot on back to the ticket window and lay down your ten bucks to get another crack at this movie?”

My hopes were low and dim of Joseph Gordon-Levitt, late of the tediously cute hipster rom-com (500) Days of Summer, pulling off his fight scenes with the sort of aplomb I wanted from this action movie. (And let’s be clear, this is a heist movie that features the unapologetic Commando-like slayings of countless faceless enemies. ((And it had to be a heist movie. How else could Christopher Nolan get a zillion dollars’ worth of Americans to sit through the 100 minutes of exposition that open the film?)) ) But I was surprised and excited that his bony frame becomes distinctly slinky and wraith-like while he scuttles around the walls in the zero-g hallway duel.

Playing detective to clear up the Final Ambiguity is not on my agenda. I would, however, re-watch the movie to root out the Moments of Choreographed Normalcy that Nolan slips in there every once in awhile. My favorite moment in The Dark Knight is a bit of Choreographed Normalcy that pops up in the very beginning. The film opens with the clown gang in the early stages of a bank robbery. Two of them zipline onto a rooftop and one clown doesn’t stick the landing. That’s it. I love that because it’s a nod to the reality of the totally fake situation. Yes, this clown-masked bank robber, if he were to zipline onto the rooftop, could perhaps botch his landing.

The reason Choreographed Normalcy mesmerizes me is because Nolan is such a super-competent director that you know those bits are in there on purpose. As a film-maker, he’s just so… competent. I can’t even think of a different word to use. Everything fits, everything works, everything is… you know. He lacks the bravado of Scorcese and the weirdness of Lynch, so his movies aren’t as gripping or risky, but they’re just so well-made that they inspire awe. Monolithically competent.

And, let’s be clear, the film is a logic problem wrapped up as a heist movie.