Scream and Scream Again

Jeez, where to begin? Um, someone's abducting people and amputating their limbs. And also there's a foppish serial killer on the loose, killing women that he picks up at a nightclub. And also there's this weird, apparently well-funded neo-Nazi type group up to no good. And a big guy going around killing people with the Vulcan nerve pinch. And don't forget the oddball scientist who claims he's just doing medical research, but happens to keep a giant pit of acid in his backyard.

I've developed something of a taste for the British horror films of the 60's and 70's, but I had a bad feeling about this one when I started it up, and instead of an orchestral score it was some obnoxious jazz fusion nonsense. I knew what this meant: instead of a classy, elegant production a la one of the better Hammer Dracula movies, this was going to be one of those offbeat cheapies, complete with sloppy handheld camera work, a dull color palette, and bad sound.

The bad news is I was right. The good news was that, though it wasn't any good, Scream and Scream Again was completely fucking crazy and that's better than nothing. As you can tell from the above description, it has enough plot for probably 5 bad horror movies, attempting to make up for quality with quantity. It took a little too long me to realize this, but about halfway in it dawned on me that this was probably supposed to be something of a horror/comedy. Certainly no one could have made something this ludicrous, thinking it was a serious film.

Even with all the stories vying for attention, this one is kinda slow and has a few too many dull stretches. More disappointing: Vincent Price, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee all get top billing, but their roles are little more than cameos. (Price, at least, factors significantly into the finale).

So, not very good, but not a waste of my time either. And it has at least one completely awesome subplot that I wish had gotten more screentime/been dragged out more: a man wakes up in the hospital, and finds that his leg has been amputated. And every time he wakes up, another limb is missing. That is some hilariously horrifying shit, and I wish more of the film had been in that vein.

Grade: C

The Sleeping Car

A down and out former journalist, recently divorced, tries to get back on his feet by moving to a new town, getting a new place, and going back to school. His new apartment is, oddly enough, the sleeping car from an old train, and wouldn't you know it, the car turns out to be haunted by the ghost of "the Mister," the anal-retentive train conductor responsible for a major train crash.

This may sound like a backhanded compliment, but The Sleeping Car is the most affable horror movie I can recall watching in a long time. I know that's not usually a quality you're looking for in a horror movie, but there's a real laid back charm to this one that I appreciated. Since there's barely any real plot (just the usual hokum where the protagonist slowly realizes his place is haunted, the ghost kills a few people, final showdown, etc.), the movie mostly ends up being about the characters sitting around, bullshitting, and enjoying each others company.

An American Werewolf in London's David Naughton leads the cast, and he brings a similar goofy, wisecracking charisma to The Sleeping Car. (Come to think of it, this might be the only other thing I've ever seen him in). The female lead is Judie Aronson, which probably means nothing to you, but I recognize her as the hottest, most likable girl from Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (and she also had a small role in After Midnight). She and Naughton have good chemistry together, despite him being way too old for her (the movie comments on this, at least), and the smartass screenplay is content to devote a lot of screentime to them bantering and trading one liners. His Girl Friday it ain't, but it's still good fun. There are also enjoyably silly roles for Kevin McCarthy and Jeff Conaway.

It's ironic, in most other Nightmare On Elm Street wannabes from this era, you usually tune out during all the dialogue scenes and perk up for the murders and special effects. This time, it's the opposite. It's almost a shame that it has to be a horror movie at all, because most of the special effects are a little on the cheap and unconvincing side. Although, I suppose there is some genuine fun in seeing Jeff Conaway get mutilated and eaten by a fold out couch. The big finale is a little awkwardly staged and feels a tad inconsequential, but honestly the movie built up enough good will at that point that I had fun any way. Don't set the bar too high, and I think fans of this sort of crap can enjoy the charm of something light and likable like The Sleeping Car.

Grade: B-

Vanishing On 7th Street

Everybody in the world is minding their own beeswax, when suddenly the world is engulfed in darkness and most of the population is devoured by some sort of weird shadow entity. A very, very small group of survivors holes up in a bar and tries to plan a way to escape the city.

Over the past decade or so, Brad Anderson has established himself as a reliable director of quality horror movies and thrillers. Although Vanishing On 7th Street doesn't quite match his best movies (for my money, Session 9 and Transsiberian), it's a brisk, exciting post-apocalyptic thriller with a cool, novel villain.

Maybe a little too brisk. My only major complaint with the film is that at 90 minutes, it could stand to be a good 20 or 30 minutes longer. Post-apocalyptic movies tend to get a lot of their flavor from atmosphere and world-building, really fleshing out the details of the devastation in order to mine all the pathos. Vanishing On 7th Street is more breathless; the world ends in the blink of an eye and its a mad dash for the few survivors to try to stay in the light and not succumb to the darkness. Which, now that I think about it, is kind of a unique take on the genre, and it really emphasizes the fast and heartless nature of the threat. Still, I think a little more screen time showing us a little bit more of the world outside of the bar the heroes are hiding in would have helped sell the premise a little better. Maybe they didn't have the budget for it.

The cast is good (I've discovered that Hayden Christensen is a serviceable actor when he's not working for George Lucas), the screenplay is streamlined for maximum forward momentum, Anderson makes good use of light and shadow (he better, given this premise), but I'd say the real standout element is the villain. It's sort of a whispering, moving shadow with the impression of human figures (its victims, most likely) inside of it, and when it gets you, you vanish, gone in an instant, leaving behind only your clothes. This leads to some awesomely abrupt/shocking ends for some of the major characters, just the way I like it.

Grade: B

TrollHunter

A trio of students in Norway are making a documentary about poaching, and try to latch themselves onto a suspected poacher. Instead, he turns out not to be poaching at all, but rather hunting down and exterminating escaped trolls for the Norwegian government.

Okay, at this point I feel like I've written more screeds on the internet about my distaste for most phony documentary horror movies than I've had hot meals in my life. So I don't want to be a broken record here, but let me at least give the greatest hits. The main thing is I just resent the way the format makes filmmakers think they've been given a license to ignore the basic tenants of competent film making. Awkward framing, choppy editing, incoherent shaky cam, pointless zooms, lazy storytelling, etc., all suddenly become acceptable in the name of making the movie look "realistic." TrollHunter is just another in a long line of movies to cover up shoddy directing with this tired gimmick.

Which is a shame, because I think there's a dynamite concept here for a deadpan horror/comedy. The trolls are inherently ridiculous, but everyone treats them with grave sincerity; it's a great dynamic. Too bad every time the trolls show up, the audience is treated to five minutes of a cameraman waving his camera around as he runs through the woods, showing us a bunch of blurry trees while the shot cuts every 3 seconds despite the fact that we should probably be watching an uninterrupted take.

Grade: C

Valerie and Her Week of Wonders

In this oddball Czech film, a pubescent girl undergoes a sexual awakening, via a journey through a weird dream world of ghouls, vampires, and lots of lesbians.

Valerie and Her Week of Wonders isn't a horror movie in the normal sense. It's more of a surreal art film with a fair amount of horror-influenced imagery. It's main aim is to strike a partly beautiful, partly nightmarish dream-like tone and sustain it for an entire film. Appropriately, I was kinda tired myself when I watched it (had to start and stop it a few times while I drifted in and out), and so it played even more like a series of odd, semi-connected images than I've heard it already comes across as. In other words, I'm a little hazy on the story specifics, but it sounds to me like most other viewers are, too.

I don't think there's anything bold, or unique, or striking enough here that would put it on the level of Lynch or Bunuel, but it's still got some solid atmosphere and some memorable imagery. It looks fairly low budget, but manages to nail that elusive, half-remembered nightmare feeling even with its limited means. I'd say the main problem is the frequent menstrual and sexual symbolism grows stale pretty quickly, and the atmosphere gets repetitive and isn't really enough to hold interest, even for the film's brief run time of only 75 minutes or so.

A note of interest to at least one person who might read this: the film was supposedly a serious influence on Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves, and although it's been a long time since I've seen it, I'd say the tones of the two movies are pretty similar. So if you liked that one, this one is worth your time as well.

Grade: B-

Scissors

A socially awkward, shut-in young woman (Sharon Stone, because who else would you cast as a socially awkward shut-in?) is assaulted and almost raped in the elevator of her apartment building. Despite the reassurances of her shrink (Ronny Cox), she is convinced that the rapist is still out to get her. Meanwhile, she meets with her friendly neighbor and his intense, crippled twin brother (both played by Steve Railsback!), getting entangled in some sort of power struggle going on between the two men. Then things really start to get weird.

Scissors is the kind of movie it's probably best to know little about before you see it, so I don't want to spoil too much of the story. The real gimmick of the film doesn't kick in until nearly half way, but as far as I can tell, every description of the film online gives it away as if it's the overall premise. Suffice it to say that the second half is mainly confined to one location, has a solid gimmick, and works in part because its not the direction the movie initially seems to be heading in.

Usually with these kinds of high concept thrillers, they try to get to the high concept right away, only to find out that it can't really sustain feature length. This usually results in the movie running out of steam and having to resort to endless subplots, distractions, plot twists, etc, to reach the 90 minute mark. (Just recently I saw The Perfect Host, which was extremely guilty in this regard.) So I think it's pretty nifty the way Scissors starts out as a different kind of thriller, before abruptly taking a left turn.

This is good, overwrought thriller material, with a story melodramatic and audacious to a degree worthy of DePalma, even if stylistically it is nowhere near his level. It's got psychodrama, sexual hysteria, creepy dolls, seriously over-elaborate set design, and a killer with a ridiculous motive and even more ridiculous master plan. So needless to say, this was right up my alley.

The cast is top notch (even the seemingly miscast Stone really gives it her all), working straightfaced with ludicrous material, and I think I kinda love that Railsback goes to great pains to play two distinct characters and (SPOILERS) both characters turn out to be completely extraneous to the plot, one a romantic interest and the other a red herring. Scissors is by no means a classic, but those with a taste for silliness played straight, like myself, will dig it.

Grade: B

Aftermath

In this short Spanish horror movie, a mortician sticks around after hours at the morgue for some overtime. And by "overtime," I mean he mutilates and rapes a female corpse. Ick.

I think that description right there would be enough to turn most folks off of ever watching Nacho Cerda's Aftermath, but bear with me here. I'm not recommending it, and I didn't even like it too much myself, but it's better-made and more ambitious than you might expect from a film that, on it's surface, seems like the worst, most exploitative trash. It's a 30 minute short, shot without dialogue, although it definitely makes, uh, shall we say strategic use of some very evocative sound effects. Which isn't to say they keep the really nasty stuff off camera; graphically speaking, this one goes there. There's no denying that on a very basic level, this is a work of provocation, but I'd say there's some evident technical skill behind the camera that makes the overall result seem less crass (at least, a little). This isn't some tossed-0ff, low budget, cult audience sleaze; it's a real film with real style, real atmosphere, and real ideas.

In fact, I'd go so far as to say the film might be aiming for some level of disgusting profundity. The film that Aftermath most obviously brings to mind is Stan Brakhage's remarkable, near-unwatchable autopsy documentary/art film The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes. Like that film, I genuinely think that Cerda is trying to grapple directly with the ugly realities of death. As much as this does come off as a bit needlessly vulgar, I think it's clear from the way the film ends with a closeup of the victim's obituary, that our empathy is supposed to lie with the corpse (even if its just a corpse) and not with the necrophiliac. It's not a film designed for the audience to enjoy the gross special effects, it's a film designed to make the audience sad and contemplative. And that's, ultimately, where I think it fails. I'm pretty hardened to this stuff, but Aftermath is just a little too imaginative in its nastiness, and there's a distancing effect. It's aiming for something like existential despair, but I'd say it mainly just succeeds at being gross.

I see that Cerda has another short film or two, plus a horror feature, so I may get around to watching one or more of those before the month's up.

Grade: C+

After Midnight

In this terrifying bone-chiller, a group of college students meet at their professor's house to let it all hang out, chug-a-lug and shout, stimulate some action, get some satisfaction, and find out what it's all about.

No, I'm sorry. That's not right. Actually, their professor is teaching some class on the psychology of fear, and basically they all get together to tell scary stories. It's an anthology film. In the stories: a man and woman break down in the middle of nowhere and find themselves seeking help at a creepy looking old mansion; a group of teenage girls break down in the bad part of town and find themselves terrorized by a crazed vagrant and his vicious, well-trained dogs; finally (no break downs in this one) a phone messaging service operator with a broken leg hears a murder over the phone, and finds herself next on the killer's hit list.

I'm a sucker for a good horror anthology movie. Or even a not that good horror anthology movie, as is the case here. I tend to prefer these kinds of stories to be short and sweet, with a good twist ending, which isn't really the case with After Midnight, although technically the first story has a twist ending. These are all more in the vein of "oh shit, something's chasing me and I have to get away from it" type horror stories, which is funny because those don't seem like the kind of scary stories you sit around and tell your friends. I can only imagine, if instead of the stories being short films we just saw the characters in the wraparound story talking, there'd be a lot of scenes of people saying "And then the girls ran from the dogs into another room. And then into another room, and then down a hallway."

Still, this is silly, reasonably well-made 80's fun. It's never boring, it's got some enjoyable special effects (especially during the nonsensical finale) and I'll probably never have the need to ever watch it again in my life.

One (probably not intentional) hilarious touch: during one of the wraparound segments, the power goes out, and the professor says he thinks he has some candles he can light. Cut to the next scene, where the room is now filled with, like, 50 different candles of varying sizes eerily lighting the room. Who keeps that many candles?!

Grade: C+

We Are What We Are

After the death of their father, three teenagers and their mother find themselves awkwardly trying to take over the family business. Unfortunately, that family business involves abducting, killing and eating people for bizarre ritualistic purposes.

To me, We Are What We Are was a bit of a swing and a miss, but it did enough right that I enjoyed and appreciated the effort. The approach is slightly arty and very serious, while still trying to deliver the goods in terms of suspense, creepiness, grotesqueness, etc. The tone is mainly somber, and it has a very muted, desaturated color palette that sets a downbeat mood without going over the top into slick, designer grittiness territory. The performances are strong across the board.

Honestly, though, the film could stand to have a little more fun. You can see the potential for something a little more lively in the scenes where the siblings awkwardly stumble their way through abduction and murder, something with a little more dark humor, a little more energy, a little more excitement. But We Are What We Are is committed such to its dreary tone, that all its major set pieces are basically nonstarters.

Worse, it gets harder and harder to take the film seriously as the final act gets more and more ridiculous, yet the tone stays grim. Now, you know me, I'm not someone who cares about realism or believability in movies. I don't sit around picking out plot holes or applying logic where it's not required. What I do hate, however, is contrivance, and the last 20 or 30 minutes has to keep piling contrivance on top of contrivance to keep the story going and have it reach its predetermined ending place. It has a few too many coincidences, too many characters doing stupid things just to keep the plot rolling, too many major events happening with clockwork timing. When you can see all the gears turning in the screenplay, it's hard to stay invested.

As a side note, the reason this film was originally on my radar was because it was directed by a fellow named Jorge Michel Grau, who I assumed was the same Jorge Grau who directed Let Sleeping Corpses Lie, a flawed but cool mid-70's zombie movie that I have a certain affection for. Only it turns out that they are two different people, just two dudes with the same name who both happen to direct horror movies. If this Jorge Grau makes another horror movie, I think there's enough potential evident here that I'd be on board, even if I didn't feel this one was successful.

Grade: C+

Faceless

After his sister is disfigured by one of his patients, a crazy plastic surgeon and his sexy assistant begin abducting beautiful women, keeping them prisoner beneath his clinic. With the help of a former Nazi surgeon, he plans to cut of the face of a woman and transplant it on to his sister. Meanwhile, a private detective (played by Robert Mitchum's much less handsome, charming or talented son Chris) investigates the disappearance of one of the women.

Faceless is just a sleazed-up, sexed-up, gory ripoff of the French horror film Eyes Without a Face (which I'm considering rewatching this month), but that could have been a good thing. It was a lot slicker looking, with better production values, than I was expecting from a Jesus Franco movie, and the premise is still solid even if there was no chance in hell it could ever hold a candle to Georges Franju's classic. Mostly, though, it blows its potential on a glacial pace, with way too much downtime between major events, and too many go-nowhere subplots. In particular, Mitchum's story probably takes up 1/4 of the film but could have been excised entirely; for all his character accomplishes, he might as well have just shown up during the finale, instead of treating the audience to 4 or 5 scenes of his investigations that don't really have much to do with the rest of the film.

I was going to grade this one much lower, but if I'm being entirely honest, doctors freak me out and the idea of forced surgery is still a really creepy one to me. What I'm saying is, despite some unconvincing special effects here and there, the two relatively brief surgery scenes in this film, where a paralyzed victim helplessly watches as their mad doctors cut her face off, did get under my skin a little. So, credit where credit is due. Unfortunately, there's not enough of the creepiness to make up for the rest of the film and its general lack of quality in direction, writing, and acting, but it helps keep it from being a total wash.

Grade: C-

Return of the Revenge of Your Vice is a Horror Movie Marathon and Only I Have the Netflix Queue

Oops.

So the last few months have been interesting. I had some weird health issues that may or may not be in my head, I kicked off a new school year at work, I got married, I went on a honeymoon. All in all, I guess some good excuses for not really updating this thing, but the truth is my silence has actually been more inspired by laziness, a lack of self confidence, or sometimes a touch of apathy. Just this week, I was going to sit down and turn out a brief post about my admiration for Contagion and Drive, but I ended up second guessing myself that I had anything interesting to say about them (or the writing skills to even properly express my thoughts about them), and after a few minutes of trying to work through it, it just didn't seem worth the effort.

Well, no more. If there is one thing that could shake me out of my funk, it's the return of my annual "Your Vice is a Horror Movie Marathon and Only I Have the Netflix Queue" challenge. I'll keep introductions brief. You know the drill: I'm gonna spend October trying to watch as many horror movies as I possibly can, and each movie will get a short post on my blog. I am planning on keeping last year's addition of assigning letter grades to each movie, even though I think it's silly, reductive and arbitrary. It's also fun.

In the comments below, I'd appreciate any recommendations for movies to cover this month. Keep in mind, I have seen a fuckload of horror movies in my life, so I'm looking more for off the beaten path type stuff (unless there's, like, a classic or something you think I should watch because you want to hear my take on it.) Thanks!

Like a Rat to the Bone: GIRLY and Creepy British Sexual Psycho-Drama Horror Cinema

GUEST POST

Hi all you readers of Dan’s blog! Shenan here. I am normally but a humble reader like yourselves, consuming Dan’s thought-provoking and insightful movie commentary from my bat-cave (er…office), usually while putting off some sort of analysis to be performed or report to write, adding my own thoughts in the form of comments not usually comprised of anything longer than a few sentences.

But three factors have brought me here today, writing to you in this format: a) I’m really bored at work. Really bored. Without going into too much detail, some changes at my workplace have left me with very little actual work to be done lately, and I need to keep my brain from atrophying; b) Dan’s been in a little bit of a blog-rut lately, finding himself unmotivated to churn out posts. And good fiancees write guest-posts for each other, right?? Right!; and c) we just watched GIRLY. I was very, very taken with this movie. And I begged Dan to write a blog post about it. His response? “You write a blog post about it.” While I think he originally meant it in the sense of “Oh, hon, can you find out your grandma’s mailing address?” “You find out my grandma’s mailing address! Why don’t you marry it if you love it so much!”, I took the suggestion to heart, and decided to write a guest post about it.

So. Here I go. I’m not sure if I really have anything to say about it that’s intelligent or insightful on the scale of Dan, but I’ll try! I admittedly owe much of my (comparatively small) movie-savvy to hanging around with Dan, but I did shell out thousands of dollars for a Johns Hopkins graduate education in writing, so maybe I’ll at least find a way to use some big words (maybe). If nothing else, maybe I’ll intrigue you enough to go see this flick yourself.

GIRLY, titled MUMSY, NANNY, SONNY, & GIRLY in its original UK release, is a 1970 British….horror? Horror-comedy? Creepy sexual psycho-drama horror flick? It’s hard to categorize. It was originally based on a stage-play, though apparently deviating significantly from it, and really, I’m surprised this shit flew back in late-60s/early-70s Britain. But then, I wasn’t alive back then, so maybe I’m underestimating how edgy British theater/cinema was back then.

The essentials of GIRLY are such: a “family” (how or if any of them are actually related is never explicit) exists, consisting of Mumsy, the matriarch; Nanny, the (surprise!) nanny; and two children, Sonny and Girly. They live in a sprawling English estate near enough to the town/city (I assumed London? But then, that’s probably the only English city this ugly American knows) for the “children” to walk to.

I say “children” because Sonny and Girly are clearly in their late teens, if not 20s. All the members of this family live their days in an elaborate role-playing existence, assuming never-aging parts in an upper-class English family, and go by no other name than the monikers that summarize their familial roles. Meaning that Sonny and Girly, while obviously adults biologically, dress in school-child outfits, build sandcastles and play cowboys and Indians, sleep in giant cribs in rooms full of toys, and talk and behave with childish mannerisms. Nanny helps govern the children, always remaining subservient to the head-of-household, Mumsy (a father figure is never present, or mentioned).

But it gets weirder.

“The Game,” which is what they refer to this elaborate role-played life as, is governed by rules (because all children need rules, of course! All families operate on rules. That’s what keeps things running smoothly). Most of those rules are set and enforced by Mumsy. And one of those rules, of course, is that no happy childhood is complete without friends. So Sonny and Girly lure London’s lonely—those without family or friends to miss them, mostly tramps and bums—back with them under the promise of a bath, a hot meal, and a good deed being offered up by two well-meaning children. They then trap these men (always men) there, force them to take part in The Game as another child being looked after by Mumsy, and “send them to the heavens” (i.e., kill them) if they violate any of the rules. The rules which include not fleeing the family.

Writing this down, Charlie Manson? Good.

Without giving too much away, the crux of action begins when Mumsy decides that Sonny and Girly targeting the usual crowd of urban bums and tramps over and over is garnering them some suspicion. Thusly, the kids decide to stake out a high-class party in the suburbs. They “befriend” a highly intoxicated pair exiting the party: a woman and the male companion (possibly a prostitute?) she hired to accompany her to the party. Sonny and Girly engage them in an all-night play session at a local park, during which they push the woman off the top of a slide, killing her and convincing the still very drunk man that he killed his female companion. They take both the living and the dead of the pair back to their house, and you can see where the rest of this is going. The man (only referred to in the movie as “New Friend”) is subjected to a ridiculous, humiliating existence as one of Mumsy’s children, following her rules and ultimately fearing for his life at every turn, should he violate the rules or even just displease one of the family members. Until, that is, he realizes that there are real people underneath these characters—ones with sexual appetites, even though sex has no place amongst children or in a Nice Family—and decides to exploit these appetites to pit them against one another.


So there’s the basic plot. Now here’s my take on it. GIRLY, to me, works so well as a horror movie because it really gets under your skin, and it does so not by showing you disturbing, horrific, or graphic images. You won’t see any eyes gouged out or limbs slowly gnawed off by rats. It gets under your skin by metaphorically gnawing, for an hour and twenty minutes, on all your sensibilities.

Your sensibilities about the family. About age, hierarchy, and authority. Your sensibilities about the fact that things that appear to be loving and innocent on the surface should actually being loving and innocent at their core—not evil. Your sensibilities about reality, about existing in a reality that you know to be false and distorted, but being powerless to the bounds of that reality. I mean, the whole thing plays like a nightmare: one where you’re trapped with an evil family not your own, forced to do things that may not seem evil or scary on the surface, but become nightmarish because they’re just not right. They’re not what the “you” you know yourself to be would do. And you’re doing them against your will. Who hasn’t had a dream that follows along those lines, and couldn’t shake the icky feeling afterwards? It’s the same fear we have about the authority of governments, or religions, or any structure of power that sets the rules and the bounds of reality, tells us what is right, what is wrong, who we are, and how we are to operate. If we have no verifiable source of objective truth, who is to keep those with this power in check?

Perhaps most importantly, though, it plays on your sensibilities about sexuality, about sexual control, sexual power, and sexual domination. Now don’t get me wrong: this is the America of the 21st century where, thanks to Dan Savage and Alfred Kinsey, I (and scores of others) have an open, honest, accepting, and healthy relationship with sex in all its intricacies and possibilities. A relationship free of shame, with the knowledge that everyone does it, and that all the stuff you do that you think no one else does? They probably do. So I tell you in all honesty that I’m not easily creeped out, sexually. In fact, this whole movie sounds like a romping good time for the right group of consensual adults. But the key word there is “consensual.” There is something very creepy, even verging on horrifying, about being controlled, humiliated, and put into a regressive role or state of sexual maturity against your will. And lest you have any doubts…I think it’s all but spelled out in title cards that this is all very sexual for Mumsy.

“Adults” is another key word, actually. The fact that, when confronted by New Friend about how long she can really stand to play a child, Girly seems to not accept that there is a reality beyond this family, makes me wonder if perhaps she was impressed and indoctrinated into the family at a young age—perhaps when she actually was still a girl. But a girl she is not, though she plays one. And you can tell that Girly is aware of her budding, or maybe long-repressed, nature as a sexual being, especially around New Friend. Is he committing some sort of sexual sin himself by eventually having sex with someone who is so clearly a child, emotionally? It is legally considered statutory rape, after all, to have sex with a mentally ill or mentally incompetent person. You wonder this, while feeling slightly dirty the whole time yourself for noticing, inexorably (there’s my Hopkins-worthy word!), that Girly pulls off those short little schoolgirl dresses smolderingly; that her long lashes, faux-innocent expressions, and teasing laughter could heat up a frozen dinner in an igloo (and there go those Hopkins-grade metaphors!)

Like I said. It gets under your skin and stays there. Gnawing.

Sorry for the novel, Dan! But I get the feeling that your readers have pretty elastic attention spans….when they’re eating up your delicious words, that is. Hopefully they’ll indulge mine.

Rubber: Celebrating Cinema for No Reason

Right away I realized things weren't quite going to be what I expected. Rubber had been marketed as something of an off-the-wall horror/comedy about a sentient car tire that can blow up people's heads with its thoughts. And though it does feature said tire, the tire is only one part of a much more bizarre whole, and horror never really enters the equation. This becomes clear during the opening scene, where a cop climbs out of the trunk of a patrol car and proceeds to explain directly to the audience that every great movie has an element of "no reason." This is something of a mission statement for Rubber. Of course, the cop's examples don't really make a lot of sense (for instance, he explains that Adrian Brody's character in The Pianist has to go into hiding for "no reason"), but maybe that just proves Rubber's point.

Then it turns out that the cop is not just telling this information to you and I, but that the audience of the film are actually, uh, characters in the film. They are a group of people, gathered in the desert for reasons never explained, who peer across the land with their binoculars and watch (and I guess somehow hear) the story of the sentient car tire.

This introduction is followed by a strange, delightful sequence of pure visual storytelling, as the tire comes to life and enters the world. We see it learn to roll (it stumbles and falls a few times before getting the hang of it). We see it discover and learn about other objects, other living things. And discover that it likes to break them. And when it learns it can't break a bottle, we learn that it has the ability to make things explode with its telekinetic powers. The sequence is very sensuous and immediate, almost has the feeling of a nature documentary, except of course for how absurd it is. Because of the film making, but also because of our need to anthropomorphize, you actually begin to empathize with the tire. So, naturally, at that very moment, the film cuts back to one of the audience members saying "This is the first time I've ever empathized with a tire!"

It's about here that I should stop describing the "plot" of Rubber, since most of the fun is that you have no idea where it is heading from minute to minute, and any story it does is establish is continually, gleefully, ruthlessly deconstructed and devoured. The story of the tire, which seems like it broadly fits the outline of a bad horror movie, is cut off at the knees as the film takes bizarre tangent after bizarre tangent. The "audience" and film interact in ways that seem to have a subterranean logic, only we're never let in on what exactly that logic might be. Layers of reality are stripped away, only to be reapplied. In between all of that is a lot of absurdity, and a good number of laughs.
This is not a film for all (or most) filmgoers, but I kinda loved it. It seems to me that, philosophically, it shares some of my ideas about the possibilities of cinema. It all boils down to the "no reason." While I'm sure I could do intellectual backflips trying to justify Rubber as a comment on filmgoing, on narrative, a seminal work in the theater of the absurd, etc., a lot of its appeal comes from just luxuriating in its profound oddness. I'm all for over-analyzing movies, but sometimes as filmgoers I think we have a problem with over-intellectualizing them. We're always looking for subtext (political, social, emotional, whatever), or a literal explanation, or a grand thesis that explains a film, or a scene, or a shot, or even just a small detail. That's all well and good, but sometimes a film's power or worth is more aesthetic, or abstract, or at the very least comes from something less logical, less easy to put in words. Sometimes a film exists for "no reason" other than to be itself.

Which is to say, Rubber is kind of a celebration of itself, of the way it is shot, of the cleverness and subversiveness of its (lack of) story. I wouldn't want most films to be like this, but I'm glad director Quentin Dupieaux made this one. He supposedly has another film in the works, which I'm officially excited for, although in some ways Rubber feels like a great magic trick that can only be pulled off once.

Dispatch From A Last Minute Staycation

The problem with working at a university is that the fiscal year ends in June, so any of my vacation days not used by the end of this month are lost. I tried to see if I could have my days carry over for the honeymoon in September, but alas they could not (no worries: I'll have plenty of next year's vacation days to use for that). Since Shenan just started at a new contractor and hasn't accrued any vacation, I find myself yet again taking an impromptu stay at home vacation just for the sake of not losing the whopping 14 days I didn't use this past year.

Which is cool with me. I'm not big on traveling in general, and we're going to Germany for the honeymoon in just 3 months anyway. So I plan to spend the next few weeks watching a ton of movies, playing a ton of video games, and probably imbibing a lot of alcohol.

I don't think I'm gonna blog about all the movies (that's what the Twitter is for), but I did want to put down a few words on some of them.

I watched Eric Rohmer's A Tale of Winter and Jose Luis Guerin's In the City of Sylvia less than a day apart, and couldn't help notice they shared a crucial plot point (which I won't name), and both have a similar sort of climax set on a public bus. Yet the two films, both delightful in their own ways, couldn't be more different.

Winter is archetypical Rohmer; a witty, dialogue heavy story about verbose Parisians waxing philosophical about love and life, with a few whimsical twists of fate. The story is about a young woman who has a brief but passionate affair with a man she doesn't know, and ends up having his child. Unfortunately, when the two lovers parted ways, she accidentally wrote down the wrong street name on her address and has since never heard from the man, and has no way of contacting him. This causes complications with her future boyfriends, as she holds on to the hope that the man will one day return, and hence she can never quite seem to fully commit to her other relationships.

This leads to a lot of soul searching, etc, and lots scenes where lovers argue in over-analytic, over-intellectualized in that indelible Rohmer fashion. I've never seen a bad Rohmer film, and this is no exception, even if it's not his best. There's a kind of comforting uniformity to the majority of his films, they are warm and familiar without quite being repetitive or trite. If I have a problem with A Tale of Winter, it's just that it doesn't always cohere the way Rohmer's best films do; I confess that I'm not sure what this film's earnest philosophical discussions about the nature/existence of the soul has to do with the basic story.

Sylvia, in stark contrast, is a film where long chunks of time go by without any dialogue at all. Guerin's film revels in pure cinema and visual storytelling in a way Rohmer never would have attempted. David Bordwell did a great breakdown, here, of one of the film's best sequences, in which a seemingly mundane scene of various people sitting outside at a cafe turns into a virtuoso cinematic performance. Guerin creates tiny narrative threads within the various tables, and then teases them out by creating a clear but complex series of shots, framing and reframing the patrons over and over again in various combinations that keeps the viewer actively engaged, even as "nothing" seems to be happening. (Bordwell notes a great moment where a customer in the background kisses her boyfriend, but is framed in a way that makes it look kinda like she's kissing a man in the foreground). Nothing more dramatic happens than a waitress getting an order wrong, and yet the sequence is funny, compelling and creates a weird kinda subterranean human drama going on between all the patrons. Sort of an illustration that "everyone has a story," no matter how banal.

Sylvia begins by showing us a young man but explaining almost nothing about him. He goes to the cafe to do some people watching, sketching pictures of the women he sees, until he spies a beautiful woman leaving the cafe... and begins to follow her. Lest you think the film takes a turn into thriller territory, with the man being a serial killer or something, let me be clear that nothing that overtly dramatic ever happens in this film. Although we eventually learn more about the man and what he's doing, and the scant "plot" does have a few unexpected developments, this is more a film about the process of watching, and the behavior of people being we watched. The man idly people watches, unaware of his presence, and we watch him, unaware of us. I don't know if I'm doing a good job of selling this, but I was completely enamored with In the City of Sylvia and could not recommend it more to others who enjoy a little bit of pure cinema from time to time.

On a final note, I had promised myself that I wouldn't bother with The Hangover Part 2. I'm not exactly a big fan of the original to begin with (although I do think it's funny), and the trailers for this made it look like such a cynical, pointless cash grab that I almost felt insulted just watching them. Does Hollywood really think my standards are this low? I really didn't want to support it. But I was itching to do a double feature while on vacation, and it worked perfectly with Kung Fu Panda 2, so I figured what the fuck.

(BTW I'm delighted to report that KFP2 turned out to be every bit as good as the original, which snuck past my low expectations back in 2008 and really kicked my ass. The sequel maybe isn't quite as laugh out loud funny, but the animation is even more elaborate and beautiful, and the at times nonstop action sequences are eye-poppingly spectacular and genuinely exciting. Loved it.)

Well, holy shit, I was expecting bad, but not this bad. I knew the film was going to be an obnoxious rehash, but I at least figured there would be a few solid laughs along the way. No such luck. Hangover 2 is not only the most creatively bankrupt film I've seen in ages, it's a comedic dead zone on top of everything else. It carbon copies the original to such painstaking degree it's almost like a second draft of the same screenplay; nearly every scene, nay, nearly every moment is a blatant corollary to a moment from the original film. It's not just the exact same plot told with the exact same story structure, they even repeat most of the original film's jokes with only slight alteration. Even the surprise "celebrity unexpectedly shows up in cameo role as themself" is the same: it's Mike Tyson. Again. That is the opposite of a surprise.

The best thing about the original was Zach Galifianakis's performance as oddball brother-in-law Alan, which was obviously something of a starmaking role for the comedian. There was a sense in the original that Galifianakis really took the character and ran with it; it was so in line with the sense of humor he displays in his standup that it's not hard to imagine that he did a lot of improvising. I don't know how they fucked it up, but somehow they managed to make Galifianakis unfunny. The key to Alan's character is as much of an offputting weirdo he is, he's still somehow strangely lovable due to his puppy dog earnestness. Part 2 turns him into a pissy, unpleasant jerk who spends most of the movie whining about how no one else appreciates him. After this and the not abysmal but not good Due Date, I'm convinced that director Todd Phillips doesn't actually understand Galifianakis's appeal, despite being the one to give him his big break.

The Best Film I've Seen So Far In 2011

Wow. We're coming up on three months since I last updated this blog. I don't know what to say. It's true this has been a busy time (I got engaged back in January, so there's wedding planning; work has been busy; I'm voluntarily giving up more of my free time in order to be social like a normal person), but I don't think that really accounts for my silence. I've watched a metric shit-ton of movies in the past few months, so it's not like I'm lacking for topics, either. It's just... I either haven't had a lot to say, or haven't been able to effectively express the things I wanted to say. I tried doing a 2010 horror movie roundup in January as I've traditionally done, but then realized I hadn't seen enough new releases to make it worthwhile. I tried to do a general best of 2010 list, got halfway into and realized I had nothing interesting to say about any of the films and quit.

It's weird. Back in December I did two of my favorite posts ever, but it feels like that dried the well. And not in a bad way; I'm still having an intensely gratifying experience watching a lot of great movies, I just don't feel the need to share my opinions as often as I used to. In some ways that feels to me like maybe that means I'm in a healthy, happy place where I'm content keeping my hobby to myself.

On the other hand, I do miss some of the back and forth on here, and I do miss being able to go back and see where my head was at at different points in my life, especially when it comes to movies (although Twitter gives me a micro version of that). Plus, Your Vice is a Horror Movie Marathon and Only I Have the Netflix Queue is insanely fun for me every year, and it would be stupid to have this blog be completely inactive the other 11 months of the year. So here's a short post to keep this baby from dying completely. I'm not really ready to do any full-on critical analysis, so just consider this a brief recommendation of what has been my favorite film so far of 2011. (We'll see if this changes if Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives ever makes it to D.C.).

I caught Michelangelo Frammartino's Le Quattro Volte this past Sunday and was completely blown away. It contains no dialogue of substance, and there were no subtitles to translate what little dialogue there was (and no need for subtitles). The film is about an old man, and then about a baby goat, and then a tree, and finally it's about smoke. And what it implies is that all four things are essentially different stages of the same being; whether that connection is meant to literally imply reincarnation, or if the interconnectedness of everything is just metaphorical isn't really of importance to me. Each story flows into the next and into the next in such a beautiful and elegant way that the effect is near-transcendental. (This is high praise coming from an atheist).

This is all told in a serene, deliberate manner that I suspect most folks will find painfully boring. I wouldn't blame them. For those of us who can tune in to what Frammartino is doing, however, the film is hypnotic. It can also be surprisingly (unintentionally?) funny and is deeply harrowing at one point (a scene involving a baby goat getting lost in the woods, which was almost too painful to watch), but it's goals are bigger and more ambitious than that, I think it is attempting to be an almost spiritual experience. If I read some of the imagery correctly, the film's ethos might be something like when people tell you they are "spiritual, but not religious," only a lot less insufferable than that.
There is a lot of masterful visual storytelling involved here; I've already mentioned that the story and its ideas are conveyed without dialogue. There's little of anything resembling a traditional plot. Frammartino does a lot of wonderful things with precise framing, complexly choreographed long takes, and a lot of simple but profound cause-and-effect editing. Already one scene is becoming (justly) famous amongst cinephiles, a long-ass take involving a stubborn sheep dog, his flock, a procession of worshipers reenacting the crucifixion, and a precariously-parked truck, that keeps building and developing in unexpected ways. The staging of the shot is so mind-bogglingly complex yet so perfect that you sit in awe of the entire sequence. (It apparently took something like 21 takes to pull off). It also has the best, most precise acting by a dog you will ever see in your life.

Through style alone, Frammartino elevates the natural and the everyday into something fascinating and profound. (My favorite quote about the film might be AO Scott's "You have never seen anything like this movie, even though what it shows you has been there all along.") For those out there willing to try something new, I can't recommend Le Quattro Volte enough.


As for going forward, I'm hoping to keep updating before the horror movie marathoning in October, at least sporadically, but I need some ideas. Feel free to chime in. Neil Young has a new Archives Series release coming out in a month or so, so I may use that as an excuse to catch up on a few of the additions I made after completing Journey Through the Past last year. And I might do a similar project with another group or artist I'm into (although definitely not one with as huge of a catalog as Neil's), so let me know if you think Warren Zevon, Smashing Pumpkins (and anything Billy Corgan related), or Steely Dan (plus Fagen & Becker's solo albums) might make for a good retrospective. (I also thought about doing Opeth, but I don't think enough folks listen to them to care). This is supposed to be a movie blog, though, so if anybody has any good ideas for movie-related posts, I'd love to hear them.