The Movie Vampire

            Early in this decade a movie came out called High Fidelity, which got very strong reviews but was avoided by myself for a very long time.  The idea of a romantic film starring John Cusack did not appeal to me, but eventually I did see it and was surprised to find it was a very well thought out story made more endearing by the fact that it uses a music fanatic as its main protagonist.  This film was based on a novel by a man named Nick Hornby, and while the way that Stephen Frears and his team of writers adapted the film certainly had a lot to do with its success, I’d be willing to bet that the heart of what that made the film special was in the pages of Hornby’s book.  Ever since that production Hornby has been a pretty hot commodity in Hollywood, adaptations of his work include About a Boy and Fever Pitch (which was made into an English version about soccer and an American version about baseball).  But now the tables are turned, and now Nick Hornby has become a screenwriter adapting someone else’s work, in this case a memoir of a British journalist named Lynn Barber about her coming of age. 

            The film is set in suburban London circa 1961 and focuses on a sixteen year old girl named Jenny (Carey Mulligan) who is both beautiful and the smartest girl in her class.  Her parents (Alfred Molina and Cara Seymour) have her on a strict regimen that will hopefully result in her being accepted to Oxford.  One part of this regimen is that she’s taken up the cello, and this leads to a chance encounter after a band rehearsal with a man in his thirties named David (Peter Sarsgaard) who offers her a ride home.  After this encounter David begins to romance Jenny and invites her on extravagant outings with his friends Danny (Dominic Cooper) and Helen (Rosamund Pike).  Jenny’s teacher (Olivia Williams) and headmistress (Emma Thompson) become concerned with this affair and warn that it will threaten her future education, but a life with David is beginning to seem like just as viable a future to Jenny as Oxford, after all he’s able to bring her into high society without having to waste time with a bunch of petty students for three years.

            Perhaps the thing this film will be most remembered for is that it introduced the world to Carey Mulligan.  Mulligan has heretofore mostly accumulated credits for small parts on English television and is probably most noted for a small role alongside Keira Knightley in the Joe Wright adaptation of Pride & Prejudice.  Her work here has been championed as a breakthrough and I will not disagree, she has real star potential.  For this role Mulligan must be a teenager who thinks she’s wiser than she really is and has an energy that makes her standout amongst her peers.  In this sense the role is not unlike the title role in the 2007 film Juno, albeit in a completely different time and place and without the Diablo Cody-isms.  Like Page before her she is able to walk that line between appearing naïve while outwardly trying to exude sophistication and spunk. 

            She is however just one part of a very strong ensemble.  Peter Sarsgaard has the difficult task of making the audience forget that he is a thirty-something creep trying to sleep with a teenager so as to show why said teenager would fall for him.  He needs to be charming and pleasant, while also having a bit of that dark side beneath the surface.  Alfred Molina is also going to get a lot of attention for his work here, and this is well deserved.  His character is pretty funny in his often silly values, and this could have played pretty fake if the actor wasn’t up to the task.  Molina makes the father character seem like a real person, even when he’s places the value of knowing a famous author above being a famous author.   Actors in smaller roles like Cooper, Pike, Williams, and Thompson also nicely fill out the cast.

            Like Mulligan, director Lone Scherfig has emerged from obscurity as an important talent out of this project.  I’ll bring up Juno again as a point of comparison, because like Jason Reitman she seems able to give an ambitious directorial edge to her work without suffocating the material with overwhelming style.  She’s able to emphasize the glamour of Jenny and David’s outings in a way that makes it seem as intoxicating to the viewer as it does to Jenny in a way that is essential to the believability of the story.  Of course this would all be wasted were it not for the solid script by Nick Hornby who further proves that he has a knack for creating endearing and likable characters while giving them really clever, but not overly stylized dialogue.

            As I’ve established, there was a lot of talent put behind this and it shows up onscreen, but I ultimately couldn’t help but feel a bit underwhelmed by the end result.  I can’t help but think that Lynn Barber’s story was perhaps not worthy of all this talent.  It’s clear from the beginning that this relationship is heading for disaster and that Jenny is walking into a trap, so this isn’t really much of a romance. And while there are some good giggles throughout I wouldn’t really recommend it simply as a comedy, so how is this going to stand on its own merely as a story?  This is where the house of cards falls down, because as a story this is actually a pretty simplistic work preaching the moral that younglings shouldn’t try to grow up too fast, they should stay in school, and not try to take shortcuts.  Sound familiar?  Yeah, it’s basically the best written, best acted, and best crafted afterschool special ever made.  This shortcoming is made worse by a twist towards the end which prevents the character from learning something for herself and instead has the truth thrust upon her.

            If ever there has been a movie that more toughly challenges Roger Ebert’s adage that “it’s not what a movie is about, but how it’s about it that matters” in my mind.  The “what” that this movie is about is rather boring to me, but the “how” it’s about it is very strong.  Ultimately, I’m going to have to split the difference and recommend that people see this movie in order to enjoy it in the moment, enjoy the acting, enjoy the script, enjoy the filmmaking, but the whole affair is more shallow than it first appears and it avoids a lot of the tougher questions involved in favor of light-handed moralizing.

*** out of four

            You may have never heard of Ramin Bahrani, but his films are among the most important movies coming out of the United States today.  Bahrani has made three films now and while none of them have come close to penetrating the mainstream, all of them have an aura of something new and special.  His distinct style clearly owes a lot to the Italian Neo-Realist movement (some have glibly called his style neo-neo-realism), as each film depicts a character struggling to survive in poverty and he extensively uses non actors in order to make everything as authentic as possible.  I discovered his first film, Man Push Cart, on the Sundance Channel and was immediately transfixed by the travails of the central character as he tried desperately to make ends meet on the streets of New York.  His follow up, Chop Shop, also depicted a side of the big apple which has heretofore gone unnoticed by the general public and the world seemed all the more tragic because it was a child placed at the center of the film.  My opinion of both of these films has only grown upon reflection and I was certainly excited to see what Bahrani would show us next.  His newest film, Goodbye Solo, shifts locations from New York to North Carolina but this does nothing to diminish the newest fascinating slice of life from this important filmmaker.

            The film opens in a taxi cab driven by Solo (Souléymane Sy Savané), a Senegalese immigrant with a young family who aspires to become a flight attendant and leave behind his cab.  In the back seat of the car is William (Red West), a grumpy old man who’s become very depressed and disillusioned as of late.  William has made a proposition to Solo, in a few weeks he wants to be driven out to an area landmark called the Blowing Rock, he doesn’t want a return trip.  Solo asks if William plans to jump off this rock but receives no answer.  After Solo accepts a hundred dollar deposit for this grim task he decides to try befriending William in hopes of eventually dissuading him from his suicidal plans, but William may be beyond saving at this point. 

            While Bahrani’s first two films were squarely focused on a single character, this one focuses on a pair of them.  Solo, like the immigrants in the first two films, is trying to slowly build a life for himself through tedious day to day work.  Unlike the other two, he’s got a family of sort including a step daughter.  The other major character is William, who’s played by veteran bit player Red West, though if this were a mainstream film he probably would have been played by someone like Nick Nolte.  He’s a gruff old man who doesn’t speak a lot and who isn’t willing to wear his heart on his sleeve.  William always resists Solo’s attempts to help him, but one gets a sense of growing respect between the two.  This relationship could have easily turned into a saccharine weep-fest were the story placed in the wrong hands, but Bahrani does a very careful tightrope walk and makes the story real rather than contrived.

            A big part of the appeal in Bahrani’s films is the way they let you eavesdrop into the lives of people you normally don’t have contact with.  Chop Shop was particularly good at this; it was set in the middle of Queens but felt like it was set in a foreign country.  Goodbye Solo does not maintain this same sense of foreignness, but it does feel like it’s peaking into a part of the country that isn’t always fun to think about.  Bahrani has never ended on an overwhelmingly unhappy note, and each one of them has been more hopeful than the last.  The ending of Goodbye Solo is particularly strong in the way it manages to balance hope and melancholy through a few well chosen images. 

            Writing this, I consistently find myself referring back to Bahrani’s previous work and comparing.  Such is the nature of the man’s oeuvre, in a particularly auteurist way he’s managed to make statements in individual films that are magnified by their place in a larger body of work.  These are some of the best films about the American immigrant experience that I’ve ever seen and in bringing the techniques of Italian neo-realism into the 21^st century, Bahrani has crafted a unique style that has only improved over the course of three films.  I’m dying to know where Bahrani goes from here, until then we have a trilogy of excellent films to admire.

**** out of Four

            For the last decade I’ve heard people talk a lot about how technologies like inexpensive digital cameras, Final Cut Pro, and Youtube are going to lead to a surge of underground creativity.  Frankly I’ve never been too excited by the prospect, most of the stuff getting made by these amateurs are either unambitious crap that’s likely to be enjoyed only by those in the immediate family of the makers, or they’ve been boring bits of pretension made by people more obsessed with being “indie” than in making a movie that are actually worth watching.  Still the law of averages suggests that something decent would eventually come out of the whirlpool of content floating around the internet, and it looks like South African/Canadian filmmaker Neill Blomkamp may be the first person of this “revolution” to make good, thanks in no small part to his discovery by Peter Jackson.  Blomkamp was hand selected by Jackson to direct a film based on the “Halo” video game series, largely because of a short film he made called “Alive in Joburg.” The big wigs weren’t so willing to put that much money in the hands of someone who came into the business in such an unconventional way, consequently that film was indefinitely shelved.  To make up for that disappointment Peter Jackson has chipped in to produce District 9, a feature length adaptation of the aforementioned “Alive in Joburg” short.  The results produced some very unconventional trailers, and the support of an expansive viral campaign that has resulted in a lot of buzz.

            The film doesn’t make a big deal about it, but this is basically a work of alternate history.  In this timeline the world was changed when a flying saucer entered the Earth’s atmosphere in 1982 and eventually stopped in the skies over Johannesburg, South Africa and stayed in place for months.  When a team cut through the side of the ship they found a group of mal-nourished insectoid aliens, which would not be able to live on the ship much longer (which apparently stopped out of technical difficulties).  The solution that the South African government came to was to allow the aliens onto the surface, but segregate them into a large hellish camp called District 9.  The film picks up twenty years later and the slums that these aliens have been forced to live in have become even more dilapidated than it was before.  Still, this widespread segregation has done nothing to quell public fears, so the government now wants to move all the aliens into a new camp, which promises to be even worse than the old one.  Tasked with evicting all these people is Wikus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley), who they want to gather eviction signatures from all the aliens in District 9.  Of course the signing of these notices is not optional; it’s just one of the many dumb rubber stamps that governments often use to disguise blatant oppression.  While doing this task Merwe is exposed to an alien substance which begins to transform him into one of these aliens, his hybrid nature could be very valuable because it could give humanity insights into alien weaponry, but these insights would mean dissecting him alive.   As such, Merwe must break out of the complex and become a fugitive, in order to track down the only aliens that can help him.

            Any semi-educated person would quickly see that this story is deeply allegorical, both of South African Apartheid and of stories of human oppression the world over.  The aliens are the oppressed minority, the “other,” the poor, the social problem that the government would rather hide than solve.  The film’s best statement is the way it points out the absurdity of using segregation (both overt and subtle) as a means of dealing with people.  The aliens here live in the most god-awful hellhole one can imagine, the kind of place that guilt-tripping charities show children walking through in their advertisements.  To the shame of both South Africa and the world, these slums were not built for the movie; they were simply found and filmed in.  Of course it’s not the aliens fault that they live in shit, the government just put them there, and gave them no means to leave.  Since they are given no way to integrate into society they have no way to improve their condition, they are simply ignored and forced to fend for themselves with none of the resources the rest of us have.  Since society has ignored them, they’ve turned to the only ones willing to serve them, gangs of Nigerian criminals interested in acquiring their weapons.  What’s more, they need to contend with brutal cops who are pretty much their only exposure to “humanity,” and who give them no reason to respect or play by the rules of their neighbors.  The message here is simple but refreshing: if you treat others like dirt they WILL do the same unto you.

            I’d like to thank Peter Jackson, QED International, Tri-Star Pictures, and anyone else responsible for supporting this film and giving it such a confident wide release.  No matter how many problems I may have with this film (and I have many) the fact remains that this is significantly more creative than anything in theaters and I heartily recommend it over whatever market-tested bullshit its competing against this weekend.  However, I can’t help but think this is something of a missed opportunity on a number of levels.

            The film uses a vérité style and fits well in a recent trend in the style’s use in mainstream genre films like Cloverfield and Borat, as well as television shows like “The Office” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”  This film starts as a mock-documentary presumably for a fictional television station (whose logo can be seen in the corner during these sections).  This mockumentary element is not to be confused with the “found footage” format seen in movies like The Blair Witch Project and [REC], the difference being that those movies simply show footage shot by characters while this is meant to look like a fully produced documentary complete with talking heads.  But about a half an hour into the film they begin to cut to shots that this documentary crew would have no access to, the bug begins to disappear and eventually the talking heads stop talking, from here on the movie stops posing as a documentary, the handheld look remains but the film turns into a standard work of narrative fiction.  I can’t say I was a fan of the way this was accomplished, what was the point of posing as a documentary in the first place if the format was to be abandoned after about a half hour?  I suppose it could be said that this allowed for some needed exposition about the world of the film, but why the sneaky transition?  How did the fictional documentary end?  Did the producers seek to film a documentary that had a beginning, a coda, but no middle?  And if so, why so much exposition, wouldn’t the people of the film’s world already be acquainted with all this knowledge?  As for the film’s special effects; they were clearly not made with the kind of budget that Jackson himself would have wielded (the film was legitimately made independently and only distributed by a major studio) and are not top of the line, but they do work to tell the story and make up for their occasional crudeness with the creativity with which they are used.

            If you look at the marketing for this film you’ll get a pretty good sense of the film’s visual style, the film’s political overtones, and hints that there is action to be found in it.  What you will not see is any sign that the film has a main character in it, and for good reason.  Simply put, Wikus van der Merwe is a horrible character to put at the center of a film like this.  He is not a hero at all, he’s a bureaucratic pencil pusher and something of a nerd.  That could have made for a very interesting character, but they never really pull it off.   Sharlto Copley plays the guy a little too broadly comedic for my taste; I really wish they had chosen a character who is simply an average everyman to put at the center of this rather than someone who is this aggressively dopey.  But the bigger problem is that at the start of this film Merwe is a complete asshole who does hateful things that are in no way excused by the fact that he hides behind laws, red tape, and a smug dorky smile.  He’s just as bad as the killer mercenaries who do his bidding, and for most of the movie he operates entirely out of enlightened self-interest and does very little to redeem himself until he magically grows a conscious in the film’s eleventh hour.  In short, this guy is not someone the audience should sympathize with or find cool, which I could forgive if they explored the negative side of his personality more thoughtfully but they don’t, he just sort of turns into an action hero halfway through, and not a very good action hero at that. 

            Why am I picking on this guy?  Because he’s the only person in it that we really get to know and as such he has extra burdens to carry.  Few of the other humans involved get much more than a few minutes of screen time, but what’s even more criminal is how little we get to see of the non-humans.  By this I don’t mean that the aliens have little screen time, because they actually have screen time in abundance, just not meaty screen time.  In many ways this film is guilty of the same sin that the film’s fictional society is guilty of, it makes no attempt to get to know and understand the aliens.  For the most part these aliens are merely background scenery used to illustrate the titular slum; Blombkamp seems a lot more interested in the ant farm that is District 9 than in the ants that live in it.  There’s only one alien in the whole film we know by name and even he is given little personality.  Rarely do we ever see an extended conversation involving any of these aliens; I would have liked to know what makes them tick, if they do anything other than buy meat from vendors, what their culture is like, and if they have a leader. And are there any humans trying to advocate for the aliens?  What does the rest of the world think of this concentration camp?  All of these are questions the movie seems to be interested in, but it never thoughtfully explores them at all.  In many ways I wish there had been a way to explore this world outside the limited confines of a thriller storyline.  Eventually the film turns into a full on action movie, a very unique and well done action movie, but an action movie none the less.  There’s nothing inherently wrong with action films, but in many ways this just seemed a little too easy, are there not ways to deal with issues in science fiction films other than violence?

            District 9 probably does vindicate Peter Jackson’s faith in Neill Blomkamp, but only to a degree.  With this project Blomkamp has created an interesting universe; I just wish he had found something more interesting to do in it than a Hitchcockian wrong man thriller mixed with touches of Cronenbergian body horror (Merwe’s DNA predicament is straight out of the 1986 version of The Fly).  As an allegory this is interesting if not fully fleshed out, as an action film it entertains, but as a drama it leaves something to be desired.  The studios were perhaps right to make Blomkamp grow a little bit before he worked on something as big as a Halo movie.  Then again if it was going to be anything like the game that movie probably would have focused even more on action than this, but at least it wouldn’t have promised anything else.

*** out of Four

                I think at this point Judd Apatow is a guy who really doesn’t need an introduction.  I’m a big fan of the movies he’s directed (The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up) and even the first string efforts he’s merely produced (Superbad, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and Pineapple Express).  As one of the biggest Apatow apologists around it was a little painful to admit that the trailer to his newest film, Funny People, didn’t seem funny to me at all.  I’ve never been one to dismiss a movie over a trailer, but if the jokes in that trailer were the best the movie had to offer the movie seemed to have all the makings for two and a half hours of painful viewing.  I was particularly afraid to see the movie simply because I didn’t want to bear witness to the fall of God’s gift to comedy, Judd Apatow.  Eventually though, when facing a very long boring day, I decided that I needed to see a movie to fill my time and I was a lot more willing to roll the dice on a not so well received Apatow project than on some crap like G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra.  So, reluctantly, I decided to give this a chance. 

            The movie primarily involves George Simmons (Adam Sandler), a famous comedic actor who’s just been diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia.  He’s been told that, eventually, this disease will probably kill him; a revelation that results in a lot of soul searching.  He eventually decides to leave the bad, sell-out movies he’s been making in order to return to his stand-up roots.  In doing so he encounters a young aspiring comedian named Ira Wright (Seth Rogen) and decides to hire him as an assistant/joke writer.  Because Ira is currently living in a hovel with two other young comics (Jonah Hill and Jason Schwarzman), he’s eager to take the job.  A reluctant friendship forms between George and Ira, which proves to be beneficial for both of them.  But increasingly, George starts thinking about his ex-girlfriend Laura (Leslie Mann), who’s now married to a successful salesman named Clarke (Eric Bana). 

            I think the key to enjoying Funny People is to go in with the right expectations, and in this department I benefited from waiting a week and a half to see it.  The movie is not without chuckle inducing moments and clever lines, but if you go into this movie expecting it to be a laugh riot like The 40 Year Old Virgin or Superbad, you will leave very disappointed.  Still, part of the appeal of Apatow’s films has been that they tend to be genuinely compelling for reasons beyond their laugh-per-minute quotient, and this film is not an exception.  The movie I’d most readily compare it to is Kevin Smith’s film Chasing Amy, a movie that wasn’t nearly as funny as anything else Smith did but which nonetheless had an interesting story and compelling characters. 

            The film’s story is likely a very personal one for both Judd Apatow and even more so for star Adam Sandler.  We see a lot of George Simmons’ movie work like “Re-Do” (which features Simmons’ face imposed onto a baby) and “Mer-Man” (with Simmons as, you guessed it, a Mer-Man).  The movie ruthlessly parodies these kind of juvenile comedies that Sandler and similar comedians like Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy have whored themselves out to long after they needed the money.  In spite of all the money these movies make for Sandler’s character, with the specter of death in his midst they seem like a serious waste of life.  I can’t help but wonder if Sandler was reading this screenplay while he was on the set of last year’s Bedtime Stories and You Don’t Mess with the Zohan.  This isn’t the only thing about the George Simmons’ character which pretty closely resembles that of the real Adam Sandler.  It must have taken a lot of courage for Sandler to really examine his real life on screen like this and the autobiographical nature of the role brings a lot of authenticity to his performance.  Sandler may not be the greatest actor in the world, but he is indisputably the perfect person for this role. 

            The other side of this story is that of comedians like Seth Rogen’s character who have not yet had the chance to sell out. I don’t know any stand-up comedians and I’ve never been backstage at a comedy club, but I can tell that the portrayal of that lifestyle here is authentic in the same way I can just feel that The Hurt Locker is an authentic portrayal of the military.  The comics can certainly be selfish, competitive, and sometimes greedy, but for the most part they are all well meaning people who ultimately just want to follow their dreams.  They make fun of each other, but it’s all in good fun, it’s really pretty refreshing just how positive a lot of these people are and in ways that are never corny.  This is one of the few movies in recent memory that seeks to have you laughing with the characters instead of at them. 

            There’s also a third aspect to the movie, that of a love triangle between Adam Sandler’s character, Leslie Mann’s character, and Eric Bana’s character.  Unlike the rich comedian/poor comedian stories which tend to overlap and switch off between each other, this one mostly plays out in one burst all the way through the film’s third act and it almost wears out its welcome.  Still, I found a lot of truth in these segments and they were also enjoyable in their own way.  Leslie Mann works as a believable object of Sandler’s affection and Eric Bana seems a lot more compelling here than he has been in a bunch of the blockbusters he’s been featured in recently. 

            Is this the Judd Apatow movie I wanted?  Not exactly, but I like a lot of what I got.  If only this movie had some more belly laughs I could whole heartedly recommend it, but that just isn’t what this is and recommending a comedy without very many laughs is not an easy thing to do.  Still I was never bored by the movie; I felt for the characters and wanted them to be happy by the end, that’s a rare thing that should be relished.  The movie deals with the kind of questions that successful comedians like Judd Apatow almost certainly ask themselves, and here he chose to explore those questions rather than making the movie that would be the most broadly comedic and I respect that a lot.  I’m sure that Apatow is proud of this movie and that he’ll get back to making hilarious work now that he’s gotten this out of his system.  If Apatow had delivered any movie other than the one he delivered he would have, in a way, been making the same mistake that George Simmons made when he chose to star in “Mer-Man” rather than follow his dreams. 

*** out of Four

            This has been a pretty lame May for me movie-wise, I dug Star Trek but everything else that came out didn’t seem worth my time.  X-Men Origins: Wolverine looked like a blatant attempt to milk dry an already wounded series, Angels and Demons looked as stupid as the other Dan Brown properties, and Terminator: Salvation had a hack director whose intentions were only confirmed by the blatant sell-out of its PG-13 rating.  This trend of making movies PG-13 for no reason other than to make a little extra money is quickly becoming a major pet peeve of mine, I don’t demand extra sex, violence, and cursing but it’s indicative of a larger problem; one of trying to appeal to overly wide audiences and consequently making mild soulless movies made in marketing committees.  It’s beginning to seem like a PG-13 rating is like a stamp that has less to do with content and more to do with a lame attitude.  Shocking as that Terminator rating was, I was even more surprised when I learned that Sam Raimi’s new horror title, Drag Me to Hell, would also have this dreaded rating.  This shocked me first because this was supposed to be Raimi’s return to the hardcore and second because the film’s outlandish title seemed to indicate that this would be something that would revel in its content and wear a harder rating like a badge of honor.  I almost didn’t bother going to this, but unlike Terminator: Salvation, this still had a stellar director and solid reviews so I bit the bullet and went ahead to the movie.

            The film is about Christine Brown (Alison Lohman), a loan officer at a bank branch in Southern California.  She’s good at her job, but her boss (David Paymer) feels that she’s been a bit too generous with people and is thinking about giving a big promotion to the suck-up rookie officer Stu (Reggie Lee).  Under pressure from the money chasing parents of her caring boyfriend (Justin Long), Christine sees an opportunity to prove she can make “tough decisions” when an old gypsy woman named Mrs. Ganush (Lorna Raver) comes into the bank asking for a not so reasonable extension on her sub-prime loan.  Christine denies the loan to the approval of her boss, but the gypsy feels she’s been shamed and makes a scene.  Later that day, the gypsy attacks Christine and places a curse on her… with spooky results.

            You did read that right, the villain of this is a gypsy curse… gypsy.  Do they even have gypsies in this country?  It doesn’t matter; this movie is obviously taking a campy approach to the genre.  The film reminded me a lot of the George Romero/Stephen King collaboration Creepshow, which was based on old EC comics.  This is a heightened world with heightened morality; Christine is punished for her immorality toward the gypsy woman in a very ironic way.  That the film can get very predictable at times, especially regarding the very last twist, sort of goes with the territory.  What Raimi does not do is go as far into the realm of tribute as something like Grindhouse, this doesn’t feel like it should be set in the fifties and the production values are just as good as the budget allows it to be.  I do question the sometimes excessive use of CGI and not very good CGI either.

            So how is Mr. Raimi going to scare anyone without gallons of plasma?  Well he’s going to makes stuff jump out at you unexpectedly… a lot.  You know those websites that people trick you into going to that make you focus on some sort of puzzle and concentrate before some sort of creepy picture suddenly pops out and a loud noise plays and sort of give you a heart attack?  The whole first act of this movie is sort of a chain of those sorts of scares, creepy things jump out at the character often accompanied by very loud music, these blatantly manipulative tricks have often been called the horror equivalent of a pie in the face, they’re effective but cheap.  Granted, Raimi does these more effectively than most filmmakers out there, but I expect a little more from him and for a decent portion of the movie I was afraid that was all I was going to get. 

Fortunately the film improves dramatically in the film’s third act where its inner Evil Dead kicks in and the curse begins to manifest itself in more tangible ways and Christine’s predicament starts to take precedent over the jump-scares which incidentally are becoming less effective around this point.  Many have said the movie is just as good without the blood, but I’m not as willing to give him a pass as some have been.  There is one scene in particular (it involves an anvil) which almost certainly would have benefited from legitimate splatter elements.  I’m sure this release is a big opportunity for Raimi’s horror shingle Ghosthouse Pictures, and he clearly wants to get as much money out of it as possible, but it’s clear he’s sacrificed the opportunity to make as much money as possible.  But is this really a wise decision even on a financial level?  I’d think the audience for something called “Drag Me to Hell” would want over the top violence.  Sometimes marketers are too busy chasing the 13-17 market that they forget that gore sells (just ask the producers of the Saw films) and you are sacrificing an audience when you do things like that.  Raimi tries to make up for this with material that is generically gross in a “Fear Factor” way without actual violence, but this mostly just comes across as crass.

A lot of people have been receiving Alison Lohman’s performance pretty negatively.  I’ve liked Alison Lohman’s work ever since her excellent performance in Ridley Scott’s Matchstick Men.  Frankly, I think some people might be a bit too suspicious of attractive blonde women in horror films; maybe they just confused her with Lindsay Lohan whom Alison bears no relation.  I think Lohman portrays her character just fine; this is a broad performance in a genre film, it isn’t going to win Oscars or anything but it works for the film.  If anyone is annoying here it is almost certainly Justin Long.  I’ve had a firm dislike for Mr. Long for quite a while and this confirms all my suspicions.  Someone of this age being a University Professor is about as unlikely as Katie Holmes playing an ADA in Batman Begins (which isn’t to say such an achievement is impossible in either case).  Long just sort of plays himself, as he usually does.  More interesting is the work of Lorna Raver as the Gypsy woman, she totally commits to this crazy role and brings a lot to the project.

There’s a lot wrong with this movie… a Lot.  But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have a very good time with it.  This in an unashamed B-movie in the classic sense of the word, and it is a whole lot of fun.  There are a lot of bad movies that claim to have a fun factor which overcomes whatever flaws they have; the problem is that they aren’t really fun they just think they are because they could cram a lot of special effects and explosions into every frame. Many reviews will compare this film to a rollercoaster, and rightfully so.  There’s a legitimate energy that makes you forget about the problems while you’re watching it, it’s one of the few movies that really earns the right to ask you to leave your brain at the door.  I saw it as a Sunday matinee and that’s probably the best place to experience it.  This probably needs a big screen and a great sound system to make the jump-scares really work, though I’m not sure I’d be happy to pay full price for it, it is a B-movie after all. 

*** Out of Four

            Frost/Nixon is a film about a nation coming to grips with the career of a horrible war time president after he’s left office in disgrace.  How could that possibly be relevant to our times?  I ask that with all due sarcasm of course, it’s pretty obvious this moment in history is being brought up now because the nation is finally getting rid of another terrible president.  Few people are interested in defending Richard Nixon now, he did some good on broad foreign policy, but his handling of the Vietnam War and the way he dealt with descent at home was incredibly misguided.   Then of course there was Watergate, an event which was probably only the tip of this man’s iceberg of corrupt actions.  Yet, for all of Nixon’s faults there’s still something interesting about him, which is why there have probably been more movies about him then any other president of the twentieth century.  Frost/Nixon is the latest of these efforts; it chronicles the story behind Nixon’s first interview upon leaving office.

            The film begins with Richard M. Nixon (Frank Langella) resigning from office and flying away on a helicopter.  On the other side of the world an ambitious British talk show host named David Frost (Michael Sheen) watches Nixon exist stage left and is inspired, he points out how many people were watching and decides it would be a good business venture to seek an interview with the disgraced former president.  His television colleague John Birt (Matthew Macfadyen) advises against this, pointing out that CBS had a standing offer with Nixon for $350,000 and that outbidding them wouldn’t be cheap.  Frost is undeterred and manages to land the interview but at a heavy personal expense.  Frost flies out to California and hires journalist Bob Zelnick (Oliver Platt) and author James Reston Jr. (Sam Rockwell) to help him prepare for the interview which is to last eight hours and be split up over four days, only the final two hour segment will deal with Watergate.

The film’s title indicates that this is very much a story of two halves, Frost and Nixon, of the two Nixon is significantly more interesting.  Many writers and filmmakers have turned Nixon into a sort of Shakespearian tragic figure.   Nixon’s paranoia is seen as a tragic flaw that brought down a man with good intentions.  This was a new and creative observation shortly after his resignation when people started writing about him, it was interesting when Robert Altman put together Secret Honor, and it was even interesting when Oliver Stone of all people managed to find a certain level of sympathy in his biopic.  After almost thirty-five years this isn’t such a novel idea, but it at least it’s worth telling, which is more then I can really say about the Frost half.

The David Frost of this film was no Bob Woodward; he was a fluffy talk show host who managed to strike the jackpot.  This is the main problem the film has; it goes too far in trying to make Frost into a David to Nixon’s goliath.  The film depicts Frost as an entrepreneur without much of a work ethic, he spends most of his time trying to get air-time and spends his time partying before his interviews rather than preparing.  The film then has the audacity to celebrate this man for finally doing his homework at the last minute the weekend before he’s supposed to nail Nixon to the wall.  It’s an incredibly Hollywood tactic, one that greatly lowers the viewer’s respect for the man and exists for no reason other than to add a bunch of fake and unneeded suspense to the story.  I don’t believe for a minute that Frost was really this unprofessional, especially with a project he has so much invested in, and if he was he has no business being celebrated. 

What’s more, I wasn’t really that impressed by the whole interview project to begin with.  The film more or less concedes that the first three interviews were failures, and the feeble confession he manages to squeeze out of Nixon by the end is hardly the grand slam the film seems to think it is.  More importantly, why should I care if Nixon is sorry about what he did?  It’s already been proven through other means that he was a crook, his confession does nothing to set the record straight about the events, it was little more than the typical plea for sympathy that common criminals ask for after they’ve already been convicted and want a lenient sentence.  Polls taken after the interviews aired in 1977 showed that 69% of the public still believed Nixon was covering up information; this was by no means the landmark media event the filmmakers seem to think it is.  It would be like if they released a movie thirty years from now called “Couric/Palin,” about that hilarious interview and depict it as some sort of amazing moment instead of the mild curiosity that it was.  Nixon certainly deserves better than to be compared to that joke of a candidate, but if you think about it Frost isn’t that far removed from Couric, they were both mediocre T.V. personalities who managed to perform slightly more professionally than people expected.

In spite of a premise that I don’t think is really worthy of all this fuss, the film could have still worked if it had been done right, but that wasn’t the case here.  I think part of the problem is that this is movie based on a play based on news reports based on real events, it’s been filtered too far and the filmmakers might have been better off starting from scratch.  The film suffers from the usual problems films have with stage adaptations, it’s told through a series of long conversations and isn’t meant to be cinematic.  Most stage adaptations like Doubt and Glengarry Glenross deal with this problem by not dealing with it, they go ahead and set the films in one building and as a result the audience can adjust and accept the movies for what they are.  Frost/Nixon doesn’t do this, it does everything it can to look like a normal movie while having all the same problems that stage adaptations have, thus emphasizing them rather than de-emphasizing them.

What’s worse, I don’t really think this is much of a script.  The film has a lot of really clunky exposition, it explains way too much while talking about its themes in very direct and inelegant ways.  This is exemplified by a scene right before the first interview where Nixon points out that he’ll be holding a handkerchief to wipe perspiration off the top of his lip; so far so good, that’s a nice reference, but the moment is completely ruined when he goes on to tell the same story about his televised debate with Kennedy that any educated viewer will have already heard dozens of times.  Peter Morgan and Ron Howard should have trusted the audience to make that connection without their long winded explanation.  There’s a lot of stuff like that here, later on the film spends entire scenes clumsily explaining all the movie’s themes rather than just leaving them there for the audience to pick up themselves.

Ultimately Ron Howard, a director I’ve never been a fan of, is responsible for a lot of the film’s problems.  Howard has a long history of making movies filled with Hollywood clichés and then making them very bland to boot.  Here he makes the mistake of trying to adopt a docudrama style which frankly torpedoes this entire movie.  The film frequently drops into faux-interviews with supporting characters giving talking head interviews that did nothing but interrupt the film’s pacing in order to make comments which, like a lot of the script, talk directly to the themes while giving patronizing clarifications about the on screen action.

The one thing about the film that really lives up to its pedigree is the acting.  Frank Langella doesn’t work particularly well as an impression; he doesn’t really that look that much like Nixon and his voice is a fairly caricatured.  Rather, Langella’s work excels here because he can deliver the emotional payoff that his scenes require.  Phillip Baker Hall’s work in Secret Honor remains the definitive Nixon performance, but Langella earns his place in the pantheon.  Sheen is also impressive, he doesn’t have a character with the same dramatic opportunities as Langella’s, but he does makes Frost a lot more likable then he should be.  Langella and Sheen both played their respective roles on stage in London and on Broadway before embarking on the film adaptation.  Ron Howard deserves kudos for using them for the film, I’m sure he was given pressure to cast people with a little more bankability but he made the right choice.

The supporting cast is also pretty good.  I especially like Sam Rockwell as a passionate author driven to give Nixon the tough interrogation he deserves, this character was a lot more interesting to me then David Frost and I wish he had more screen time.   John Birt and Bob Zelnick are also good sidekicks in the film and Rebecca Hall does the best she can in a fairly uninteresting and thankless role as a woman Frost meets on a plane and sort of hangs around for the rest of the movie.  Kevin Bacon is fine in the sort of stern disciplined henchman type that he could probably play in his sleep at this point.  I did not like Toby Jones’ turn as a book publisher, though that opinion may be clouded by his distractingly bad makeup and bald cap.

In the end, Frost/Nixon is a very well acted movie that has its moments, but for the most part it is agonizingly middlebrow and lifeless.  It’s the same kind formulaic Hollywood movie Ron Howard has made his career on, but unlike those films it isn’t honest enough to commit to its own corniness, instead it pretends to be the type of serious historical analysis that it clearly isn’t.

** out of Four

            I grew up raised in the Catholic Church.  It was a very nice welcoming place.  Masses were long and boring, held in a large kind of spooky cathedral and led by a dude in an elaborate robe, but everyone was pretty nice.  I’m no longer religious, but the church had nothing to do with this, my experience was far removed from the usual catholic reputation of conflicted, guilt-ridden, and brooding people.  The church I grew up in was a lot different from the way Catholicism was at the beginning of the century.  The new film, Doubt, is partly about the struggles that occurred at mid century which shaped the church into the welcoming thing it is today.  It’s also about the child abuse scandal that dogs the church to this day.  More importantly it is about a woman, who in the depths of her heart is struggling with the faith she has lived with for decades.

            The film is written and directed by John Patrick Shanley and based on his own Pulitzer Prize winning play.  Set in New York circa 1964, the film is about activities in a catholic school.  The principle of this school is a nun named Sister Aloysius Beauvier (Meryl Streep) who lives up to the ruler slapping reputation of nuns at catholic schools.  As a principle she’s mean, controlling and unapproachable, very much a member of the old school of Catholicism.  The priest of the dioceses is Father Brendan Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman), someone of the new school of friendlier Catholicism.  Aloysius is clearly not fond of Flynn, but she hold back from openly criticizing him because she respects the hierarchies of the church.  A young and naïve nun named Sister James (Amy Adams) begins to notice Flynn holding an oddly close relationship with the school’s first African American pupil (Joseph Foster), Aloysius begins to suspect Flynn is behaving abusively.

            This is certainly not a film intended to show off the technical proficiency of the filmmakers.  The camera work is consistently competent, and Roger Deakin’s cinematography is quite crisp, but this is a theater adaption through and through.  The stage version was set up to be a piece with only four characters, while the film mostly follows suit, it is opened up a bit.  There are plenty of extras in the school; there are scenes of the characters interacting with students and scenes of the characters interacting with other clergy members.  The characters occasionally go outside, but at the end of the day this is very much a story where a few characters have very long conversations with each other.  Still, they adapt this for the screen about as well as they can, they don’t pull silly stunts in order to make it cinematic but they expand it enough to be its own entity.

            I think what makes the film so special is that it challenges you to like someone who’s not likable, and hate someone who is likable.  It would have been so easy for John Patrick Shanley to write a story where the potentially abusive priest were a staunch traditionalist and harsh disciplinarian, and the nun standing up to him was likable, friendly and reform minded woman who you really wanted to cheer for.  Shanley doesn’t take this easy and conventional route.  Instead he’s set up a morality tale that forces the viewer to come to grips with which character they relate to and more importantly why they relate to them.  Your opinion of the characters will change by the end, then change back, and maybe change again. 

            The major roles here have been filled by top Hollywood talent, and at the head of it all is Meryl Streep.  Streep hasn’t been working on this level for a while; she’s been doing a lot of less prestigious work lately.  She has a big challenge here in that it is essential that she makes the audience relate to her character, but the convent lifestyle is not exactly the easiest one to relate to.  She needs to exhibit a lot of material through simple looks and line deliveries, all while trying desperately to behave with the kind of restraint and dignity that her character would demand.  Streep exhibits a great amount of personal strength on her character’s behalf and does it through the simple authority of her line deliveries. 

Frankly, I can’t imagine anyone else doing this role as well as Streep does here.  She has a reputation of taking a new accent with every role, and this is no exception.  Here she has the slightest Bronx accent, it’s the type of thing 99% of actresses wouldn’t have bothered with, but it really changes a lot about the character.  It explains why the local parish is so important, and it generally gives the viewer a better idea of where she came from in life.  I think this is a tremendous performance that’s been perfectly balanced throughout the film.

Going up against Streep is Phillip Seymour Hoffman, who also has a difficult balancing act.   He needs to control his every look and motion, every line delivery.  He has to sell himself as an innocent man, while allowing the possibility of his character’s guilt to still be there, but ever so slightly.  Viola Davis has been getting a lot of huge marks for her role as the mother of the potentially abused child.  She only really has one longish scene, but she still leaves a big impression.  If anyone is a weak link here it’s Amy Adams.  Adams is quickly becoming typecast into naïve bubbly roles, and this isn’t a lot different from what she’s done elsewhere.  I wouldn’t go so far as to call her poor, but she isn’t working on the same level as the other three performers. 

These actors are working with an excellent script that features awesome dialogue.  The characters here, especially Aloysius, talk in way that’s a tad formal, but still conversational.  Basically, these are people that would never dream of using slang, but they’re still just talking to each other.  Despite all the formality, there’s still some really snappy dialogue on display here.  Aloysius speaks with strong, really well crafted sentences and argues with complete confidence.  There is a surprising amount of humor in the script given the subject matter, Shanley plays around a lot with the fact that these are nuns we’re dealing with, but they’re still human, and when they’re planning out the school activities like it’s a day at the job.  Pay close attention to the first and last lines, I think a lot of the film’s meaning can be grasped from these two moments.

I must also say that the movie is marred by a horrible trailer which gives way too much away.  I can’t blame the movie for bad marketing though. John Patrick Shanley has written a great play here, I can totally see why it won a Pulitzer.  Everything I liked about the film version almost certainly comes from that play and the way it’s performed by these actors.  Everything else is perfectly competent, but not amazing.  So, what we’ve got here is a great play being performed greatly with production that, if nothing else, usually stays out of the way. 

**** out of Four

            The Fall is directed by a fellow who only goes by the name Tarsem.  I always have something of an irrational suspicion of anyone that only goes by one name, but I must say this guy fascinates me.  Tarsem (real name Tarsem Singh Dhandwar) was a director of music videos (including the famous R.E.M. “Losing My Religion” video!) before he came out with the Jennifer Lopez vehicle The Cell in 2000.   I rented The Cell once, but was never able to finish it due to a scratched up disc that crapped out about halfway into it.  What I saw was very visually innovative, and I’m not sure why I never got around to checking out the rest of it.  Tarsem wouldn’t make another film for another six years, a work called The Fall, which debuted at the Toronto international film festival way back in 2006 and proceeded to sit on the shelf for almost two years for one reason or another.  Finally in the summer of 2008 the film would see a release with “presented by” credits going to fellow music video alums David Fincher and Spike Jonze.  I finally caught up to it shortly after its DVD release.

            The film begins in 1920s Hollywood and follows a 10 year old girl named Alexandria (Catinca Untaru), an immigrant with a broken arm staying at a hospital.  There she meets Roy Walker (Lee Pace), a stuntman who’s bedridden after a stunt gone wrong.  After a little chat, Roy begins to tell Alexandria an elaborate fantasy story, this story within a story takes up a lot of the film’s screen time and it the source of most of the film’s visual imagination.  This story is set in some kind of 18^th century near east fantasy realm, and follows five warriors who all want bloody revenge against the evil Governor Odious. 

            The catch to all this is that Roy isn’t really committed to the story he’s telling, he’s doing it as part of a Scheherazade scheme in order to trick Alexandria into bringing him morphine.  He begins by telling a pirate story, but quickly changes it to something else when Alexandria tells him she doesn’t like pirates.  This is a clear signal to the audience that Roy is making this story up as he goes, and this makes all the difference because it gives Tarsem the ability to take the story in all kinds of crazy directions in order to justify his visual imagination, and there’s an explanation for it in the story. 

            These visuals do indeed live up to Tarsem’s reputation.  The film’s art direction is really creative, and the costumes are absolutely outlandish.  I also really like how Tarsem is willing to really pull the camera really far and let the visuals play out in massive scale.  This is a rare thing in this world of close-ups and small scope.  I’d call the film completely original if it weren’t for the fact that Terry Gilliam’s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen weren’t so similar to it in style, tone, and set up. 

            As Roy gets to be in a worse and worse mood, the story within a story begins to get darker, but that’s about as deep as this project gets.  Ultimately, The Fall seems like a fairly shallow film.  The story within a story doesn’t amount to much, it just sort of exists.  Shallow though it may be, the film works very well in the moment, it’s a fun movie to watch and the production design is pretty neat.  For this reason, I’m more than willing to recommend the film, but I don’t think it’s going to have a whole lot of shelf life.

*** out of four