Vacancy (2007)
A creepy film could be made from Vacancy’s premise, maybe Polanski at his sickest, or George Sluizer from the original The Vanishing. (Although Sluizer is also repsonsible for the god awful American remake of The Vanishing so who knows.) I thought everyone knew this, but judging from just ok horror movies like Vacancy they obviously don’t. The mundane, the obvious, the normal, these things are scary.
A motel that specializes in snuff films is scary, but a motel that looks like the bastard heathen offspring of the Bates Motel and the flop house in Eaten Alive is NOT scary. No one would stop here, because its OBVIOUS. Make the motel a sweet little mom and pop store with a very kick ass continental breakfast and you’ve instantly racheted up the tension by five clicks.
To borrow from Stephen King’s Danse Macabre, a great horror film gives you the uneasy impression that its creator is authentically deranged. Vacancy, like most modern horror movies, gives you the impression that its creator has watched a lot of other, better movies whose creators were authentically deranged. There’s nothing at stake in Vacancy, because we feel safe; the film plays by the same, boring, bullshit rules, and, the one time the film breaks those rules, it takes it back and apologizes for the indiscretion.
Vacancy is competent, which puts it ahead of two thirds of what constitutes your typical horror film, but, even that is a liability in the end. The film may provoke you to say “cool shot” here and there, but it doesn’t raise your pulse. It barely has a pulse of its own.
Mildred Pierce
After raising two children, weathering a marriage to an unfaithful man (whom she later curiously characterizes as “loving”), and starting a successful franchise, all poor, poor (I would add a third poor but I’m trying to be a bit more subtle than the movie), poor (ah, fuck it) Mildred Piece wants is the love and acceptance of her daughter, Veda. Veda, a spoiled shrew, finds her mother to be a working class embarrassment; having learned, apparently at an early age, that old money is much more honorable than new money. The other kid loves Mildred but dies. Tears are shed.
Joan Crawford is Mildred, and its one of her most iconic roles, also one of her most ironic if her real daughter’s various claims over the years are to be taken seriously. Pierce was directed by Michael Curtiz (Casablanca, The Adventures of Robin Hood). Pierce was based on what I imagine to be a much tougher novel by James M. Cain. Pierce won several Oscars (including Crawford) that year. Pierce sucks.
The film is watchable from moment to moment in that politely pretend to like anything that has the vague smell of classic kind of way, but, a few hours later, you may find Pierce nawing at you as I did. The annoying (and pointless) racism. The absurd martyr fantasy. The boring, shallow characters, and their obnoxious habit of pronouncing their traits for the audience (Well, Mildred, you’ve always known that I’ve hated work!)
Everything is so one dimensional that you actually find yourself rooting against Mildred, hoping that the film eventually, just to break the repetition, forces her to locate a backbone. That hope is as feeble as the movie. A really good, nasty soap opera could’ve been made here, but this is one of those “important” movies that can’t be bothered to have a pulse.
Superbad (2007)
It would seem now that producer/sometimes director Judd Apatow, over the course of three summers, has told the definitive, epic story of the clueless, sex deprived white man of the 21st century. We’ve covered his forties
(The 40 Year Old Virgin), his intiation into sort of adult hood
(Knocked Up) and now, with
Superbad, we’re backtracking again to his teenage years, and the never ending pursuit of booze, which is actually a pursuit for sex, which is actually a pursuit for some sort of comfort that teens associate with the full arrival of adulthood. The realization of that to be a myth is, of course, the driving thematic point of
Superbad.
Superbad will be compared to many movies, John Hughes, Amy Heckerling, other Apatow movies, Dazed and Confused, but its really a pop stoner’s revisit of American Graffiti. Both films have their characters brushing up against a version of the Pharoahs (one of Superbad’s scarier than the genre requires moments), both have a Wolfman Jack (here embodied by Seth Rogen and Bill Hader in some of the film’s most surprising scenes), and both end in a bit of sad, shit we’ve reached the end finality.
Superbad, and this is what distinguishes the film from even some of the better entries of the genre, also has a strong current of goofy, druggy, hipster surreality. About two thirds of the film seems to have taken up permanent residence in its hero’s (Jonah Hill, Michael Cerra) heads, the episodes are charged with the kind of hurlyburly sexual menace that can only come from a frightened, insecure, overly infatuated with porn adolescent.
Superbad is about watching too many movies, and playing too many video games and masturbating too much, and its about the very contemporary new sense of humor of the young white guy. The film acknowledges the dangerous dislocation that all of that saturation can yield, and, as a result, the obligatory third act growing up scenes feel honest and authentically unsettling. This film has some John Hughes and Amy Heckerling and John Landis in it, but there’s some Paul Thomas Anderson and Alfonso Cuaron floating around in its creative mojo too.
I may have forgetten to mention that this thing is often uproarious, and that is, of course, most important in any mainstream comedy. The script (by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg) is appealingly loosey goosey and free associative. The dialogue starts out self-conscious, and then tops itself with non-sequitur upon non-sequitur, and you find yourself laughing more at the cumulative effect than any one joke.
The direction here, by Greg Mottola, is also the sharpest of any Judd Apatow production. If you want to see the great Freaks and Geeks reborn as an unsettling farce of media obsessed teenage terror, see Superbad, one of the best films of the year.
Posted on August 21st, 2007 in 2007, Reviews, Comedy | Comments Off
nicolekidmanalienssatirerepeatasnecessary.
Many critics have been taking the easy swipe at Nicole Kidman having to pretend to be lifeless to survive the aliens in her new, supposedly underwhelming
The Invasion. I’m not above that jab myself, but then it hit me. Screw Iraq.
The Invasion should have been about the celebrity culture. I’m not kidding, this could have been a fresh, relevant way to adapt Jack Finney’s novel
Invasion of the Body Snatchers for the fourth time. Celebrity culture is just as timely as Iraq, and, arguably, as potentially damaging to our country.
Or combine the two, and tackle how the celeb obsession distracts us from issues such as Iraq. Dress it up with some aliens, get some free satire with Kidman’s name, and you’ve, at the very least, got something with some ambition.
I won’t be seeing The Invasion this week, I have to pick my battles, but I do highly recommend the Philip Kauffman/Donald Sutherland Invasion of the Body Snatchers if you are drawn to the subject matter.
Hardcore (1979)
When Paul Schrader’s chilly, distant, intellectualized sensibility fits the subject matter
(Affliction, Autofocus, portions of his
Exorcist) the results can be extraordinary. When they don’t, and they don’t fit
Hardcore, his films feel like particularly boring, borderline inhumane exhibits at the Calvinist Guilt Science Emporium Road Show.
Schrader’s bad films are all theory, no feeling or story, you grab what he’s dealing with without giving the slightest of damns what happens. This is why Martin Scorsese was such an ideal interpreter of Schrader’s work. Scorsese isn’t perfect, and he can be overrated in stretches, but he understands, lives and dramatizes feverish obsession and guilt like nobody’s business.
Hardcore, like portions of the Scorsese-Schrader Taxi Driver, was evidently informed by that particular generation of directors’ pre-occupaton with The Searchers. You wouldn’t have to read too deep to get that here. George C. Scott is Jake, but he’s playing a haunted, immovable man of few words in the Wayne in The Searchers mode, only here Scott’s superiority isn’t under examination.
From the get go Scott is above the pornographers who’ve apparently made off with his daughter and there’s no friction or temptation. Scott is a prig here, the kind of character Harvey Keitel’s Sport assumes DeNiro to be in Taxi Driver, and if there wasn’t a little girl mixed up in this, you’d probably root for the pornographers.
I counted exactly one human moment in Hardcore and that’s early on when we can hear the strains of Neil Young’s haunting “Helpless” as Scott questions a porn clerk about a movie his daughter appeared in. That and Peter Boyle’s amusing supporting performance are it.
Rescue Dawn (2007)
Rescue Dawn is not a great Werner Herzog movie.
Rescue Dawn is a very good studio movie that happens to be directed by Werner Herzog. This is not a backhanded compliment,
Rescue Dawn is largely an engaging, sturdy, disciplined escape/man versus the extremities of nature film. But it lacks the charge of the truly crazy that powers Herzog’s
Aguirre or
Grizzly Man.
If Herzog was looking for a more bankable star who’s sensibility matches his own pet themes (or that of Klaus Kinski), he could have hardly done much better than Christian Bale, one of the best actors of his generation who happens to be obsessed with the variety of circumstances that can whittle a good looking actor away into a skeleton. Bale’s work (in my look at Harsh Times, I actually wrote that he deserves an easy paycheck romance to make some money and get some rest) is similar from film to film, but he hasn’t grown old yet, he finds a special twitch in each character, and he loves to score points on their blind, preening entitlement.
The same thing goes for Herzog, who gets away with returning to the same themes over and over because he so refreshingly unpretentious about it. A Herzog film is not an art house cruise, it may be indulgent, it may be partially unsuccessful but they are always, unquestionably, about what authentically haunts or powers Werner Herzog.
The lack of pretension, the matter of factness, the no bullshit one thing after another, the performances, Herzog’s typically masterful command of the ambient sounds of nature, the minute shots of plants and creatures, the startling dislocation of it all; these are the reasons Rescue Dawn doesn’t play like another battle veteran cry for Oscar. Herzog doesn’t sentimentalize Dieter or the other prisoners here, they are shown as men at the brink of madness, self-absorption and manipulation, and they act accordingly.
This affords Jeremy Davies the opportunity to do another of his Solaris shambling weirdo numbers. I don’t usually buy Davies (and I actually like the Solaris remake otherwise) but he works here, primarily because he pushes his gaunt lunched outness into the realms of the matter of fact. Steve Zahn, it must be said, is career defining here, but, again, there’s no comedian trying too hard to win your approval vibe. Zahn’s Duane is what he is, and it will probably, unjustly, do nothing for his career as a result.
The ending is too pat, regardless of whether it happened or not (the film is based on a true story, and is also a fictional redo of Herzog’s documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly). The patriotism of the end, the uplift, seem a little inappropriate and out of character with the demons that normally populate the head of a Herzog protagonist.
Otherwise though, Rescue Dawn is a very potent, stripped down entertainment. An old song (we need to team up to get away from the bad guys despite incredible odds) redeemed by an exceptional singer. Here’s hoping, though, that Herzog goes truly nuts again real soon, and brings Bale with him.
Bogdanovich scheduled to Run down a Dream.
I haven’t done much day to day stuff here at BC (I know, need to do more, yeah, yeah) but I was just over at Hollywood Elsewhere and a project was mentioned that I had never even heard of. That its a documentary by Peter Bogdanovich is enough. That its a documentary by Peter Bogdanovich concerning Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, evidently, called
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: Runnin’ Down a Dream, is more than enough. Hate that title though.
Tom Petty is under appreciated because he’s so legendary he’s taken for granted, but the dialed down simplicity of his albums age well, and he served as a gateway drug to many other great folk/rock artists for me.
Peter Bogdanovich is one of the great rising stars who flew too close to the flame stories of the 1970s, and has been under appreciated ever since people decided that his last interesting film was Paper Moon. (Seriously, watch the charming The Cat’s Meow, or the pretentious, uneven, but still fascinating Texasville, or the corny, sentimental, but still fully felt Mask, or The Thing Called Love (which is all of the adjectives I just ascribed to Mask.)
Bogdanovich has also written one of THE books about Orson Welles, one of THE books about virtually every classic star of the yesteryears, and probably one of THE books about the legendary Hollywood filmmakers that I can’t get my damn hands on.
The documentary is slated to play at the NY Film Festival (9.29-10.14). Being that’s its four hours long, I would imagine that Dream will very nearly immediately be on DVD as opposed to theaters, but that’s just a guess.
Check out the HE article here:
A Disjointed Ramble about Hitch.
Yesterday was Alfred Hitchcock’s birthday. I caught this toward the end of the day, but was running on fumes, and whatever I would’ve wrote would’ve been, in a best case scenario, unreadable. The pictures of Alfred Hitchcock are, of course, an institution. Most anyone with a serious interest in films has gone through the Master’s filmography, or at least the major high points, by their fifteenth year or so. This sort of thing can lead to taking a major artist for granted simply because he’s been rammed down your throat by cultural osmosis.
Alfred Hitchcock’s work is still undeniably incredible, and he made some of the most personal popular films that I’ve ever seen: think the kink of David Lynch crossed with the audience grabbing savvy of a Spielberg film, and you’re close.
Notorious in terms of lean, mean economy, is possibly Hitchcock’s greatest film. It’s not his most obsessive or personal (I still vote Vertigo) but it does imbue a very conventional war time espionage story with a gripping, breakdown of the house unit paranoia. This film is another Hitch expression of blue balls, of repressed fury at not being able to screw the starlets or legends who did their best work under his supervision. Make no mistake, Nazi or not, Hitch sympathizes with the Claude Rains character here.
Notorious is a great, great movie, (it helps that it actually moves) with a finesse, a sexiness, that is rarely encountered in big movies today. Cary Grant is terrific, and Ingrid Bergman is moving and vulnerable in the way everyone except me found her to be in Casablanca.
I really loved the Friedkin on PCP pyrotechnics employed by Paul Greengrass in The Bourne Ultimatum, but Hitch wrung more excitement out of three people walking down an excruciatingly long flight of stairs.
Vertigo is also as good as the populace would have you believe. The film is perverse in a Lauraish kind of way, but more romantic. Vertigo has long been said to represent Hitch’s fascination with (and perhaps Svengalish manipulation of) his leading ladies, and I can support that, but I think Vertigo may also be the supreme example of the warring artistic temprements of Alfred Hitchcock: the cynic and the romantic. Hitchcock wants to be the romantic, but he can’t ever quite believe in it enough to really commit to it (though Rear Window is pretty close: a lovely, conventional romance that happens to be draped in anonymous urban despair.)
Notorious, Vertigo, Rear Window and the smart, entertaining, iconic North by Northwest are probably my favorite Hitchcock pictures. This week watch something of his that you’ve never seen, or that you haven’t seen in a long time. As good as they are, leave Psycho and Rear Window on the shelf for the time being. I think I’m going to finally catch up to Rebecca or maybe Family Plot (Hitch’s last film) to commemorate the birth of the man who defined many people’s idea of the thriller for four or five decades.
Review: Once (2007)
Once opens, with a bit of urgent melancholy, as Guy (Glen Hansard) plays his lungs out on a street corner to a largely uninterested crowd of passersby. The opening, with the slow fade of the title, immediately conjures a sense of need, of being lost, of trying to find your own bit of mojo in a group of people who only seem to be interested in stealing from you (in a bit that’s funnier than it sounds.)
The entire film is executed with similar economy. I couldn’t help but wonder what Cameron Crowe thought when he first saw Once; the film weds its love story to its music in a way that Crowe, good intentions aside, could never quite manage in his labored, bloated Elizabethtown.
Guy meets Girl (Marketa Irglova) and the two, after some initial annoyance, find that they share both past disappointments and an affinity for music in common. They begin to hang out, and play together, and, well, that, and the terrific soundtrack (primarily by the two leads) is the entire film. Once is Brief Encounter with a live, catch on the fly musical current, one of the few narrative films I’ve seen that truly feels like an album.
I liked Once and I found the music, performances, and that final shot, all very moving. But the film’s chief asset: its minimality, (I’m trying to avoid the word slight), is also mildly annoying. Guy and Girl are saints, and they, some economic compromise aside, lead lives that seem to be devoid of much of the conflict of the day to day.
They work jobs that may have seemed a bit dated in a Charlie Chaplin film. Guy repairs vacuum cleaners with his dad, Girl sells roses and, I think, cleans houses. There’s no real temptation here, nothing so much at stake. Again, this is all clearly by design, but the design leaves little for surprise, particularly in a genre as shopworn as this one.
It’s Once’s story of a man finally finding the necessary push to create, to collaborate, to challenge himself, that I found most moving. The all night recording sessions, the driving around late to celebrate, these scenes have a ring of truth and exhilaration. Hansgard and Irglova are also immensely charming, selling you on characters that may have (well, still) come off as a little pat otherwise.
Review: The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)
Jason Bourne goes home this time, as the tagline for
The Bourne Ultimatum promises. Does that mean that this new film differs in any significant way from what Jason Bourne did or found out in the prior installments of the series:
The Bourne Identity or
The Bourne Supremacy? The answer is, as you’re suspecting, a resolute no. And it doesn’t matter, because the Bourne films, while essentially remakes of one another, have grown more and more superb in execution: fast, breathless and aware of exactly what they are. The appeal of the series is very meat and potatoes and very no bullshit. These things don’t have a bunch of creatures and illusions of grandeur that stretch out over running times that Kurosawa would’ve found intimidating.
I rewatched the first two films earlier this week, and, while I remembered preferring Supremacy in the theatre, I found the first film appealingly small and cozy in the living room, with action scenes that are thrilling in their matter of fact approachability. The Bourne Supremacy is directed by Paul Greengrass (of United 93 and now Ultimatum) in an exceptional all media speed demon style, but it wears out its welcome a little before it ends, the technical virtuosity overpowering the already slim story.
The story is just as slim in Ultimatum (the big revelation is one of the big no shits of the year, essentially boiling down to a famous actor telling Bourne that he’s a super agent) but the story and the action aren’t at odds with one another this time around. There’s no story. action. story. action template here. The film is one large tapestry of pursuit, ass kicking and sometimes, when absolutely necessary, corny exposition.
There are three sequences in Ultimatum that I’m cofident will go down in the history books of action filmmaking. The first involves Bourne helping a too eager reporter (Paddy Considine, terrific, but I’m disappointed he wasn’t recruited to play an assassin, excuse me, an asset) elude various governemental surveillance that plays like the younger, more inventive, brother of a similar scene in Minority Report. The second and third are entertwined: the best chase of the series that morphs into the best hand to hand combat scene of the series.
The actors have improved all around, and they were already formidable. Matt Damon was a bit dull early in his career, but now, as he’s closer to forty than thirty, he’s beginning to look the part of a superhuman spook, the lines of his face lending a pathos the script doesn’t have time to provide. Damon is a remarkably unindulgent actor for his generation, he refuses to court the audiences’ sympathy (see the underrated The Good Shephard) and, resultingly, receives our sympathy anyway. David Strathairn, Joan Allen, and Scott Glenn, as govermental brass of varying moralities, do wonders with the typical jargon laced ops discussions that offer periodic breaks from the mayhem.
The Bourne Ultimatum is virtually plotless, has no real characters and tells you nothing you didn’t already know, but the film epitomizes what Roger Ebert has said in the past: what a film is about is unimportant, its how its about it that matters. The Bourne Ultimatum is a head rush, one of the most purely exciting movies in some time, a truly 21st century Hitchcock picture.
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