American Horror Story (Episode 1)

It's the classic setup: a family, on the verge of falling apart, moves into a old house with an unnerving backstory (the previous owners killed themselves). Could the house be... haunted? Probably. But here's the twist: there's like 80 twists. The girl next door with Down Syndrome likes to sneak into the house and proclaim "You're going to die here!" There's a fucked up fetish suit in the attic that may or may not come to life and rape people. The maid appears as an old woman to the mother, but as a sexy young trollop to the father. The father is a psychiatrist, and one of his patients may be able to turn in to (or summon?) a monster. Some dude with a burned face seems to be hanging around near the property, watching the family. And like a million other things I didn't mention.

Okay, so this is not technically a movie, but I thought since there was a new horror TV series debuting this month, I'd include the first few episodes for the marathon. Reviews for American Horror Story have been brutal, and I can kinda see why, but I was tickled enough with the pilot that I want to stick around for at least a few more episodes. At the very least, I'm intrigued with the format. Usually, when there's a horror themed television show, it's either an anthology series (Twilight Zone, Tales From the Crypt, Tales From the Darkside), or if it's an ongoing story, it's more of an episodic/procedural/monster-of-the-week type deal (X Files, Supernatural) with some serialized elements. So I'm really curious to see how this is going to work, a horror series that is presumably telling one, extended story.

The pilot has (serious) problems, but there's some creepy touches, some novel ones (the maid thing is kinda unique), and sometimes a sort of knowing, campy tone that let's you know they are trying to have fun with all this weirdness. It has way, way too much story for one episode of TV, but I suspect that's supposed to be part of the appeal: it's like they are trying to pile on every plot, every stock image, every cliche from every horror movie you've ever seen onto one show. I can't say that I'm at all drawn into the story yet, or that I care how the solutions to any of the countless mysteries they've set up, but I am curious to see just how thick the writers keep laying it on.

This is by some of the folks that did Glee, and this pilot was directed by co-creator Ryan Murphy. And he seems kind of like a shitty director. Well, that's a little unfair: some individual shots are kinda cool (those ghost twins walking out from behind either side of the mother was nifty), but it's all been edited into ADHD incoherence. Brief scenes of two people conversing will be broken up into what seems like 10 different shots for no discernible reason. Much like how Murphy ruined all the song and dance scenes in the Glee pilot with his unwillingness to hold a shot long enough to show a complete action (one of the main reasons I have never watched another episode of that show), he kills a lot of the atmosphere here by breaking everything up so much. Some times, it's clearly intended for effect (there's a scene where the mother thinks someone is in her house, and the editing gets herky jerky to, I guess, show her panicked state of mind), but it just looks ugly and incompetent. The only time it maybe kind of works is during a bizarre, strobe lit suspense sequence set in the basement, but it works because the point is that the scene is supposed to be visually confusing. Credit where it's due, that scene is one of the highlights of the episode.

Ha, kinda funny that I just wrote more about an hour pilot than I did about any of the full length features so far. But I guess it's just because I'm really into the idea of a new horror series, and I care enough that I don't want them to fuck it up. I'd say there's just enough here in the pilot that I'm willing to stick it out for at least the rest of October.

Grade: C+

Let Me In

In this remake of the popular Swedish horror film Let the Right One In, a creepy little social outcast, pent up because of the constant bullying he receives, begins a strange friendship with the girl who moves in next door. Only, the girl is not really a girl, you see, but a ferocious vampire much, much older than her childlike appearance would indicate. Soon, each learns that the other may be of value to them.

I liked Let the Right One In well enough back when I saw it, but I've felt that it's been greatly overrated by its fans. It has many admirable traits, including its stark, chilly atmosphere and strong performances. But I suspect its reputation is, in part, due to a common reading of the film that I don't share. I've noticed that many folks see the film as a tale of youthful romance with a dark undercurrent; all I see is the undercurrent. The boy and the vampire don't love each other, each is simply fulfilling a need of the other. The boy, obsessed with knives and crime photos, is essentially presented as a future serial killer, and the vampire is clearly manipulating the boy in order to make him her new "familiar" (the Renfield to her Dracula) now that her old one is used up, to hunt up food for her and protect her.

Well, fans of the romantic interpretation of that film are going to love Let Me In, which plays it more ambiguously but ultimately offers a heavier implication that the relationship is actually love and not just the pimp/whore manipulation I saw in the original. It's admirably dark and violent for a mainstream American movie, but I do feel like it tries to soften a few of the edges from the story and let the audience off the hook of having to think about the deeper implications.

Some of the reviews I've read made this sound like a near shot-by-shot remake of the original, but I don't think that's exactly fair to director Matt Reeves. Now, it's been a while since I saw the original and thus I don't have the clearest memory of it, but it is obvious that Reeves copies some of the major set pieces directly, closely follows the outlines of the plot, and takes major inspiration from the original film's tone. However, this isn't a carbon copy like Quarantine was to REC. There are plenty of noticeable, major changes, and in fact the best scene in the remake is a new one: an attempted murder gone horribly, hilariously wrong, leading to a spectacular car crash, all done in one show-offy shot. I wasn't enamored with Let Me In, but I left with a little more respect than I previously had for Reeves, whose last film, the very well-received Cloverfield, I did not particularly care for.

Grade: B-

The Best Movies of 2009... That I Actually Managed to See

Not looking to do much analysis, just wanted to note that I saw a rather large number of good 2009 releases, and wanted to list the films that I would legitimately consider great. Of course, this is about a month and a half too late to mean anything, and there's still a shitload of movies that sound good that I haven't caught up with. So this is hardly a definitive or meaningful list. More of a diary entry that can hopefully offer up a few recommendations to people who read this.

I honestly don't have a clear favorite from last year and don't feel the need to rank these, so it will be in alphabetical order:

Adoration

After seeing Exotica early last year, I got a full-on evil robot chubby for the films of Atom Egoyan. I've read critics who don't like the fractured-timeline method of storytelling that he often employs, saying that it makes his stories unnecessarily convoluted. I feel that his style is to restructure his narrative in such a way to make it more compelling than it would have been if told chronologically, plus it encourages the viewer to actively participate in his films and not simply passively accept them. Adoration ranks with his best work, foregoing some of the movie sensational aspects of some of his other movies for a more down to earth, moving story exploring different aspects of identity: personal, familial, racial.

Adventureland

It's too bad that Greg Mottola's sweet, perceptive coming-of-age-for-grad-students comedic drama was sold in trailers as a laugh a minute, spiritual sequel to his Superbad. I don't think people knew what to expect, and probably felt let down when the movie amused them but didn't make them bust a gut. Adventureland perfectly captures that feeling of post-collegiate ennui, when the once seemingly infinite possibilities the world offered you shrink considerably, and you find yourself living at home once again because you can't afford to pay rent. Don't get me wrong, I love Superbad to death, but not being a cog in the Apatow machine has freed Mottola to put a little more visual craft into his filmmaking, and to make something that feels more personal. Good use of pop music to establish an era and a tone. Also, I knew I liked Jesse Eisenberg, Kristin Thomas and Martin Starr, but who knew Ryan Reynolds could drop the sarcasm and deliver a performance this good?

Antichrist

I've mentioned this one enough already, so no need to regurgitate here. Did you hear that some Danish video game company is planning on making a video game spin-off/sequel? How the fuck does that even make sense? Where is there left to go with these characters or with this story?

Avatar

I almost feel like a dick for heaping praise on the highest grossing movie of all time, you know? It's been rewarded enough, so I won't ramble. I really did love the movie. Yes, I agree with everyone that it does not have a great screenplay (although, you know, I do think it's efficient and reasonably well structured). But the filmmaking brought the spectacle and the movie magic in spades, two things I am very fond of. Case in point: the wonderful moment during the finale when big blue Zoe Saldana sees Sam Worthington's human body for the first time and cradles him in her arms is a potent combination of romance, excitement, strangeness, and mindbogglingly perfect special effects. Moments like that only come along so often.

Coraline

As the one person on the planet who doesn't much like A Nightmare Before Christmas, no one was more surprised than me that Henry Selick would make a movie I'd connect so strongly with. Besides the obvious visual pleasures, and the fact that Coraline is shockingly dark and unsettling for a children's film, I like the fact Coraline the character is something of a weirdo and bitch (though still likable), in stark contrast the insufferably cute protagonists we typically get in movies like this.

The Girlfriend Experience

I dig that Steven Soderbergh tires something new with each movie, but it means his output is hit or miss. Last year's The Informant! had a great performance by Matt Damon and some weird twists on the corporate thriller genre, but seemed a times slackly structured and was surprisingly ugly looking. The Girlfriend Experience was more of a risk but I thought produced a greater reward. Starring a porn star and a cast of unknowns, with a fractured timeline and a slightly lethargic pace, it's not exactly his most accessible work, but it's a thoughtful and moving examination of the intersection of sexual, social and economic attitudes in post-Bush America.

The House of the Devil

Take a look here for my thoughts and jump in on the discussion below.

The Hurt Locker

I did a long post back in the summer outlining what I loved about this movie; I haven't seen it since and it really begs for a repeat viewing. I wouldn't say it was my favorite of the year, but I am kinda hoping that Kathryn Bigelow gets the Oscar for her work, if only because I'd like to think it would mean some sort of retroactive recognition for Point Break.

Inglourious Basterds

So, Quentin Tarantino has apparently climbed entirely up his own ass at this point and into a fanciful land of make believe, making movies whose context only involves other movies, with no relation to real life. Still, as much as I'd like to see him crawl out of himself and make a movie with more of a basis in reality, I thought that Inglourious Basterds has been the best of his movies-about-movies period. Although the film clearly has several themes it returns to (interrogation, psychological warfare, deception/performance, revenge/poetic justice), I don't believe Tarantino was trying to make any sort of statement about war, or about revenge turning the Jews into Nazis themselves. I just think the film, like his others, is essentially amoral and is more about Tarantino trying to entertaining, amuse, and enthrall his audience by flexing his cinematic muscles. Scenes exists to be great scenes, not to carry a coherent statement or worldview. And on those terms, the film is glouriously successful (forgive the pun). The drawn-out, nearly half hour suspense sequence in the basement bar is up there with the sniper scene in The Hurt Locker for the best crafted piece of cinema in '09.

The Limits of Control

Although I recognize that this is not a film for all tastes, I'm still a little surprised at just how negative its reception was. Were people seriously expecting Jim Jarmusch to deliver a traditional crime thriller and not, you know, a Jim Jarmusch movie? The Limits of Control is a further distillation of the sparse, meditative style Jarmusch has explored in movies like Dead Man; its use of crime/gangster movie iconography makes it something of a spiritual sequel to his Ghost Dog. I think its the best movie he's made since that one, and probably the best looking film he's ever made (thanks to cinematographer Christopher Doyle). Other attributes include Jarmusch's typical offbeat humor, a deconstruction/stripping down of crime movie tropes, something of a self-reflexive commentary on art and on Jarmusch's style, and heap loads of mysteriousness and mind-over-matter mysticism. Check out Jonathan Rosenbaum's brief appreciation of the film here, where he aptly compares it to Le Samourai and Point Blank.

Ponyo

No, I guess its not Miyazaki's best film, but that doesn't make it any less of a great film, feel me? He's back in little kid, My Neighbor Totoro mode here, and this tale of childhood friendship as eye-poppingly beautiful, narratively engaging and emotionally reassuring as his best work. We've come a long way with computer animation, but I treasure the fact that Miyazaki has been a holdout for hand-drawn animation. There is something of a tangible, sensuous quality to his work that is maybe lacking in modern animation.

A Serious Man

Right up there with their best work, the Coen Bros' latest marries the oddball, precisely scripted humor of comedies like The Big Lebowski and Raising Arizona with the melancholy, existentialist inquiries of their more "serious" films such as No Country For Old Men or Miller's Crossing. The result is a film that feels the most heartfelt of their filmography, and provides the most elegant expression of their worldview. For filmmakers often accused of condescending to their characters, the movie creates a lot of empathy for its protagonist, a Jewish science professor in the 1960's who finds himself questioning the meaning of existence, while his life slowly falls apart around him. The result is both hilarious and depressing. The Coens may be cynical atheists, but I think A Serious Man also confirms that they are humanists as well.

A Single Man

I've never been a big Colin Firth fan, but left the theater very impressed with his work after seeing this one. His role, as a closeted homosexual in the 1960's mourning the death of his long-term lover, seems like the kind of role where he'd get a bunch of big "Oscar" moments; impassioned speeches and crying and the like. But one of the things that was so great about this film and Firth's performance is how his depression is internalized; his carefully honed exterior only gives the briefest glimpses of the interior turmoil. First time director Tom Ford (best known as a fashion designer) makes this into a powerful sensory experience... perhaps its gimmicky, but I like the way he films Firth in muted tones, except on rare moments when Firth finds himself reconnecting with other people in his life, and brighter colors suddenly find their way into the palette.

Still Walking

I don't really follow the Oscars, but if I were to personally hand out the award for best director, I would be inclined to give it to, or at least have nominated, Hirokazu Koreeda. The material he works with in this film is dark and depressing in places, involving a family observing the anniversary of the accidental death of the oldest son. Yet Koreeda's complex, deep focus staging, and precise, controlled (almost disciplined) framing add a life and beauty that might not have been there otherwise. For a movie about loss, regret, and the ways family members inflict emotional violence on each other, it's surprisingly lively and enjoyable.

Two Lovers

Everyone was so busy focusing on Joaquin Phoenix's (probably fake) meltdown last year that no one noticed that he gave one of the best performances of his career. I had seen one other film by James Gray before this (We Own the Night), a beautifully crafted cop thriller with a silly, stupid storyline. This one marries Gray's obvious technical abilities with a more down to earth, heartfelt story about a depressed young man who finds himself torn between his affections for a sweet girl-next door-type and a bad case of l'amour fou with a high strung nutcase who actually does live next door (played by Gwyneth Paltrow, also great here). Like some of the other films on my list this year, Two Lovers seems like it could be a slog, but instead is often funny and lively, almost effortlessly straddling humor and heartache the whole way through.

Up

It was a great year for animation, wasn't it? The latest in a long line of great Pixar flicks, Up continues the Ratatouille trend of being a secret action movie on top of being a delightful comedy, a touching character drama, and a magical visual experience. It was also the only movie I've ever seen that had the entire theater crying within the first 15 minutes. That's got to be some sort of record, or something.

You, the Living

Swedish filmmaker Roy Andersson's precisely shot, kinda surreal, cynical satire of modern society suggests some sort of unholy alliance between Jacques Tati and Luis Bunuel, although that description doesn't quite do it justice. Suffice it to say that I've never seen another movie quite like this one, and I'd call it hilarious if it wasn't so fucking bleak.

Offspring

Jack Ketchum adapts this nasty little movie from his own novel. A tribe of feral children roam the wilderness, raiding homes in the night to murder and cannibalize the inhabitants, and to find a woman to abduct so she can breast feed their baby.

I'll say this for Offspring, it doesn't fuck around. I definitely wasn't expecting to see this many children get shot in the head in a horror movie. The movie is decidedly a mixed bag. Let's be honest here, the premise is kind of stupid. It would probably lend itself better to a fun horror movie rather than the grim, disturbing, outrageously violent final product.

To varying degrees, I've enjoyed all the other Jack Ketchum movies I've seen (Red, The Lost, The Girl Next Door). The different might have been that Ketchum didn't adapt those works himself, I don't get the sense he's much of a screenwriter. The dialogue is often over-written and clunky, the movie is too brief and builds little momentum, the structure is way fucked up. Too many characters are introduced, cutting between 3 or 4 different groups of people, just to have most of them unceremoniously killed off before they do anything. There is one instance in the film where this is effective, where someone I assumed was the main character ends up biting it relatively early. Mostly it's just unsatisfying, for example we spend 10 or 15 minutes with this one guy, establishing that he is an evil, cruel prick with the potential for violence, but this just turns out to be a red herring, he spends the rest of the movie as a victim and eventually dies.

Some of the violence is effective and disturbing, and the film is never boring, but I have to give it the thumbs down. It's simply too absurd to be so grim.

An American Crime

Sunday, October 5, 2008

This was a real interesting one to watch, because it was based on the same true story as The Girl Next Door, about a particularly horrific case of child abuse. That one was sort of the exploitation/horror movie version, and this is sort of the A-list, artsy version.

Well, I have to give it to American Crime in terms of acting and cinematography. The cast includes Catherine Keener, Ellen Page and James Franco, so obviously it's strong on that front, and it has an effective aesthetic quality that the flatly shot Girl Next Door lacked. But, in all honesty, the two movies came closer to a tie for me. Maybe Girl Next Door was less factual and more exploitative, but it was also more effectively disturbing, at least in part due to it's willingness to wallow in the ugly details. An American Crime is a classier movie, but it holds a lot back. Since I can't see much of a point to this story except to be disturbing, that's a clear disadvantage. AAC creeps you out a bit. GND gets under your skin.

So maybe what I'm saying is that this was a better made film, but the other one was more effective. Both, to me, didn't seem to have much of a point or insight on the material, they were more a sad, shocked look at a very ugly story. Since their perspectives are similar, I can only comment that one was better in a technical sense, and one was better in a gut-reaction sense.

The Lost

Thursday, June 19, 2008

We spent the last part of my vacation in Harrisonburg packing up Shenan's old apartment, and visiting with Patrick and Chris. And if you thought my other vacation posts were bad, it's gonna get really rough here, since I'm having trouble remembering what we watched. Alcohol consumption was liberal, and now the sequence of events is a little hazy for me.

This was the other movie in the Jack Ketchum set, and I was extra excited because it was directed by the fellow who did I Know Who Killed Me. If you haven't seen that one, it's a movie where Lindsey Lohan becomes a double amputee and has her first sex scene, and it's one of the most fascinatingly bad/good horror movies in recent years.

This is legitimately a better movie than that, and in fact it's got a much nicer visual polish than The Girl Next Door did. I liked it. The director is definitely a showoff, that was clear in IKWKM, and he could tone it down, but at least he knows how to point a camera in a dynamic way. That counts for something. Although, he does way overuse pop/rock/metal music blasting on the soundtrack to underscore nearly every scene. Knock it off dude, leave that shit to Scorsese.

I felt like there was potential for a better movie. It starts off with a bang, then slows down and becomes one of those movies where you know the main character is a nut and it's just a matter of time before he cracks, so there's a lot of suspense building under the surface. The buildup, sadly, takes way too long and the movie loses the tension as a result. Then, when he finally snaps, it doesn't have the same impact. We've been expecting it too long.

I think enough of it works, and I really liked the lead performance. The guy kind of looks like a better looking version of a young Crispin Glover, and is almost as good at going over the top. But mostly he's great at just creating this bizarre character and letting him simmer... it's a very peculiar and original kind of nutcase, and the movie is equal parts horror and character study, which I dug. I think the final result may be a failure, but it's an interesting failure that I mostly enjoyed. Count me in if this guy makes another horror movie... I'd like to see him try for a genuinely good one, but another crazyass I Know Who Killed Me would be good, too.

The Girl Next Door

Tuesday, June 17, 2008

This is not that crappy Risky Business knockoff. This is a creepy, disturbing, low budget horror movie I bought on a whim in a two-pack of movies based on Jack Ketchum books. I have never read one of his books, so I'm not exaggerating when I say it was a whim.

Anyways, I thought the movie looked a little flat visually but overall was pretty effective. It's got a lot of disturbing stuff, most of it involving young kids, so I think a lot of people would probably hate it. But I can respect a movie that does this kind of thing well.