Movie Trailer: The Dead (2010)

CULT MOVIE REVIEW: Source Code (2011)

Duncan Jones’ impressive 2009 science fiction film Moon obsessed on the notion of identity.

Set on a sterile, high-tech moon base, the tale involved a lonely astronaut (played by Sam Rockwell) who was not really who he believed he was. In fact, his identity had been farmed out to a global corporation and shared amongst a team of human clones who only “dreamed” they were really human.

Both understated and haunting, Moon was a cerebral exercise that, in both visualization and mood, echoed such classic 1960s outer space efforts such as 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Journey to the Far Side of the Sun (1969).

In 2011’s exhilarating sci-fi thriller Source Code, director Jones dramatizes another tale (this time by writer Ben Ripley) about a location where identity and technology intersect.

In this case, that juncture is a secret military project “Beleaguered Castle” (named after the card game for one…) that boasts the capacity to create closed “parallel realities.”

It’s not actually time travel the audience is informed, but rather “time re-assignment.”

In particular, Afghanistan veteran Colter Steven (Jake Gyllenhaal) is sent into the final eight minutes of another person’s life to…investigate the environs and solve a devastating crime. Colter can experience those eight minutes as many times as he needs to, and do virtually anything to anyone to accomplish his task.  In the real world, we are told, his actions are immaterial, relative only to the pocket universe he inhabits on each eight-minute sortie.

As the film commences, Colter finds himself on board a moving train and conversing with a lovely young woman, Christina Warren (Michelle Monaghan). But Colter doesn’t know her, and when he spies his own reflection in the window glass, Colter doesn’t recognize the face staring back at him. Christina seems to think that Colter is actually Scott Fentress, a school teacher and friend. 

And then a bomb blows up on the train, killing Christina and all the other passengers.

But Colter doesn’t die.  Instead, he awakens in a strange, dilapidated military capsule. There, he communicates with an official named Goodwin (Vera Farmiga) who explains to him that he must complete an important mission on the train, lest a second terrorist attack involving a dirty bomb prove successful.  The authorities must know the identity of the bomber.  Colter must determine it.

Again and again, Colter goes back into the train (into the source code) to experience those final eight minutes of Scott’s life.

In one go-round, Colter attempts to get a hold of a gun, but is apprehended by the authorities on the train. In another experience, he follows a suspicious-seeming man of Middle Eastern appearance off the commuter train and into a station bathroom, but learns his quarry isn’t the bomber.

After the first several “repeats” of these similar eight minute scenarios, veteran sci-fi watchers may get a sinking feeling.  They may fear they are watching one of those Star Trek: The Next Generation “time loop” episodes (“Cause and Effect”) in which events repeat and repeat until the tech-puzzle is solved, and space/time is restored.

But about mid-way through Source Code, the film takes a daring turn entirely consistent with Duncan Jones’ protean film canon, when Colter learns more about who he is, where he is, and what, precisely he can and can’t do in those eight minutes.

Suddenly, the events on the train become a compelling, fast-moving, two-track affair. Not only must Colter identify the mad bomber (and the location of the bomb), he must investigate himself and Beleaguered Castle too, using Michelle’s cell phone and Internet connection.  What Colter discovers is, much like the climactic revelation of Moon, both haunting and emotional. 

Back at the capsule, the authority behind Beleaguered Castle is a no-nonsense man named Dr. Rutledge (Jeffrey Wright), who insists that Colter is “just a hand on a clock,” and threatens the young man with the equivalent of perpetual servitude.  He also keeps telling Colter that his experiences on the train are ”only a shadow” and cannot effect this universe.  

Rutledge talks a great deal about Quantum Physics and “parabolic calculus” and in a nod to that subject matter, Scott Bakula  — star of Quantum Leap — plays a crucial (voice) supporting role in the film.

In many ways, Source Code reminded me of the brilliant low-budget science fiction film Primer (2004), which mapped out overlapping time-lines in a consistent, crisp, profound and sometimes maddening way.  While watching that film, I really felt the need to take notes and watch scenes more than once.  But I also felt amply rewarded for putting in the energy to do so because every narrative thread fit together, and there was nary a wasted scene or moment.  Source Code is a bit more commercial in conception and execution than Primer but also unceasingly smart.  In fact, I suspect that the ending of the film is so smart that it could easily be interpreted in more than one way.

If you don’t want to know anything further about Source Code’s denouement, I suggest you stop reading this review here, and simply see the film.  If you like good science fiction thrillers, you won’t be disappointed.

Still with me?

Are you sure?

Okay…

If you do want to know more, here’s my interpretation of the film’s finale, which makes the happy ending a little more intriguing and far more palatable.  

The key to understanding Source Code, in some ways, comes down to a line of dialogue from the film’s mad bomber, an anti-government domestic terrorist named Derek Frost.  Derek tells Colter at one point that “The world is Hell, but we have a chance to start over in the rubble.  But first there has to be rubble.”

After Derek is apprehended and Colter completes his mission, he goes back on the train one more time with the help of Goodwin…and he does so to see if there is, indeed, a chance to start over in the rubble, even after the end of the eight minute span. 

In other words, Colter tests a theory.  If he captures Derek Frost and averts the detonation of the bomb in the parallel reality…will said parallel reality continue after those brief eight minutes, striking off into a new path?  Or will it stop, because that’s as long as it has ever lasted in previous iterations (wherein the explosion was not prevented and the bomber not captured)?

The answer to that key question of a universe’s longevity is actually encoded in the almost subliminal imagery flashed across the screen each time Colter goes back inside “the source code” and alternate universe.  

The image I write of is easily mistaken for a visual distortion or special effect, but it’s not.  It’s a reflection of a real location that Colter visits in the film’s valedictory scene. 

And since Colter sees that location (which he could not have first-hand knowledge of…) virtually every time he travels through the time re-assignment vortex, the answer to his fate is pre-ordained.  He can extend that universe. 

And indeed, in the end of the film he does just that.  He builds a new life out of the rubble of his old life (and death), leaving behind a career of obligation and duty that ultimately separated him from his loved ones.  This time, he chooses simple human connection; a connection, specifically, to Christina.

But here’s the thing.  This is not, apparently, a conventional happy ending that overwrites the universe of the film’s running time.  In our “consensus” reality, the train bomb still goes off (though the dirty bomb detonation is averted thanks to Colter), and Christina and the other passengers still die a horrible, unnecessary death. 

And Colter is still trapped in Beleaguered Castle, in perpetual servitude to the less-than-pleasant Dr. Rutledge.  That universe there will continue to go on as Colter knew it (and as we know it, as viewers of the film).

However, Colter continues to exist in an alternate universe of his own making; one that picks up after he saves the day by averting the train bomb.  This is an entirely new track, but not the track we have watched throughout the film. 

It it would be easy to conclude that somehow Colter’s actions changed the “real world,” when I would argue that’s perhaps not the case.  His actions seem only to change the different reality in which Colter dwells after the last eight minute sortie.  But after all, that’s enough, right? 

Critics have compared Source Code to Ground Hog’s Day (1993), but there’s nothing about the premise played for laughs here.  Instead, the film asks the audience to consider what it would mean to have less than a minute left to live. 

Could a whole universe unfold in that minute?  A whole lifetime? 

I admire how Jones escorts us through Colter’s last instant with Christine and than poetically elongates it, creating a kind of perfect bubble of human happiness in the instant before…well, what exactly?  Destruction? Conception? 

It’s a lyrical and emotional ending, and Duncan Jones is good at mining the film for strong emotional content.  Gyllenhaal gives a strong performance too, in a role that, in some ways, proves highly reminiscent of his work in Donnie Darko (2001).

Source Code is one of those unexpected and rare treasures that starts out with a compelling premise, and then grows more and more compelling the longer it continues.  Source Code’s intelligence and sense of heart sort of sneak up on you.  By the time the film reaches its lyrical conclusion, you may be surprised at just how emotionally-invested you feel in the characters and the journey they have undertaken. 

Like human beings at their very finest, Colter makes “every second count” in Source Code, and director Duncan Jones follows suit with a sci-fi film as thrilling and passionate as any I’ve seen in a good, long time.

>CULT MOVIE REVIEW: John Carpenter’s The Ward (2010)

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During the last twenty years, or since 1994 at least, director John Carpenter’s biggest problem may just have been that good is simply not good enough for many of his devoted admirers, and for many mainstream critics as well.  Myself included.

When gazing at Carpenter’s career accomplishments, it’s not difficult to discern why such high expectations endure.

This a man who has directed legitimately great action pictures (Assault on Precinct 13 [1976], Escape from New York [1981]), several superb horror films (Halloween [1978], The Fog [1980], The Thing [1982]) plus a plethora of films that are widely hailed as cult classics and gaining more respect and devotion by the year (Big Trouble in Little China [1986], Prince of Darkness [1987], They Live [1988] In The Mouth of Madness [1994]).  

Additionally, Carpenter’s films are re-made by Hollywood virtually every day (not always to good effect). And at the height of his mainstream popularity in the late eighties, movies with even tenuous relationships to the director were being sold in television commercials on the basis of having originated from “the mind of John Carpenter.” (Black Moon Rising).

So anticipation for a new Carpenter film is always sky high, and hungry horror fans desperately want him to deliver “another” Halloween or The Thing.  

Carpenter’s first feature film in ten years (since Ghosts of Mars) won’t satisfy that particular desire…if satisfaction of such a desire is even possible.

And yet, there should be no mistake about The Ward, either.   It’s a handsome, sturdily-crafted genre film, and an effective yarn that, until the very end, cloaks its true nature suspensefully.  In some ways, John Carpenter’s The Ward distinguishes itself most by what it is not, rather than what it is.  But more on that cryptic-sounding description in a moment.

“Welcome to Paradise”

The Ward tells the story of a young girl named Kristen (Amber Heard) in the year 1966.  After intentionally burning down a white, rural farmhouse, she is taken to the imposing, grim North Bend Psychiatric Hospital. 

There, she is warehoused on a ward with a group of girls who have been similarly designated “lost causes.”  The other girls show Kirsten the lay of the land, including “The Sad People:” a couple who occasionally look down mournfully at the girls from Dr. Stringer’s (Jared Harris) office window. 

The girls in the ward are treated cruelly by the staff, and live on a steady diet of pills and electro-shock therapy.  Even more disturbing than that, there appears to be some kind of angry specter haunting the Ward: the decaying corpse of a former patient, Alice Hudson.

Alice apparently wants revenge against the current inhabitants of the ward for some unspecified wrong, and sets about capturing the girls…one by one.  After Alice takes her captives, they seem to disappear from the hospital, and Kristen can’t get answers from the uncooperative, sullen staff.

“You can’t get them to tell you anything around here,” she is informed.

Finally, Alice comes calling for Kristen, a real “survivor.”  Kristen confronts Dr. Stringer and demands from him the truth about Alice Hudson.

“I don’t like the dark. Bad things happen in the dark.”

Although some critics have pointed out surface similarities between John Carpenter’s The Ward and another horror film of recent vintage from another big name director, the final resolution of the drama here is almost less important than the specifics of the journey.   First and foremost, The Ward seems to be a mood piece.

In particular, Carpenter’s The Ward provides a detailed evocation of a bygone era (and also, therefore, that era’s belief system).   With touches both small and meticulous, the film crafts a case regarding American society’s abandonment of the mentally ill.  They are locked them away in fearsome places such as North Bend, a mid-20th Century facility that, today, seems both prehistoric and barbaric.  The film opens (over the main credits) with disturbing images (literary and visual) of the mistreatment of the mentally ill across the span of history.

Carpenter’s camera lovingly lingers on the byzantine details of this unpleasant purgatory: on an antiquated intercom system, on an old record player, on the ward’s one and only TV set (which plays scenes from the Bert I. Gordon movie, Tormented [1960]), and the crumbling, utilitarian, labyrinthine walls of the facility itself. 

Carpenter’s camera probes, stalks and otherwise explores this setting relentlessly.  As viewers, we thus visually glean the idea of the Ward as a maze from which there is no escape.  There are paths up and down (a dumbwaiter in the basement; an uncooperative elevator to traverse floors) but there is never a way out.  The only exteriors in the film, after the prologue – to the best of my memory – are establishing shots, or one brief view of the courtyard.  But mostly John Carpenter’s The Ward remains inside the belly of the beast.  And without giving away the denouement, this is an example of form expertly echoing content.

Since The Ward concerns mental illness, Carpenter also uses a wide variety of techniques to suggest the fracturing of sanity, or consensus reality.  He carves up the characters’ already crumbling sense of  time and space with frequent dissolves and jump cuts.  Such visual styling make a point about the brevity of human life, but also the seemingly-eternal nature of North Bend by comparison.  Characters seem to jump and hiccup, shift and disappear, in the sands of time.  But the walls of North Bend are forever.

Above I noted that what John Carpenter’s The Ward “isn’t” is perhaps as critical as what the film ”is.”  Permit me to explain. This is a horror film entirely devoid of any self-referential twaddle, goofy self-conscious “look at me” moments, and many of the bells and whistles that have come to adorn the genre in the last few years. 

Instead, there’s an almost old-fashioned sense of naivete to the characters and their setting here that, in terms of Carpenter’s own career, harks back most closely to Halloween (1978).  The movie isn’t over-girded with distractions and since there’s no googling, no texting and no cell phones are present, The Ward’s atmosphere is something akin to landing in a time warp. 

At times during the film, we feel like we are in 1966 too, in that mental ward of the damned (which to my eye, resembles Kubrick’s Overlook from an exterior perspective…) right alongside Heard’s Kristen.  Heard is pretty compelling in the film too (though I didn’t care much for in Drive Angry), and here she closely resembles a young Tippi Hedren, especially when she pulls her hair back.

One scene in the film that perfectly captures the innocent nature of the film’s characters.  The girls of the ward put on a record album and begin to dance together without self-consciousness.  It feels like a completely spontaneous, childish moment – an outburst of joy — right down to the upbeat nature of the 1960s rock music.  The scene only shifts to something darkwhen Carpenter unexpectedly switches angles on us – to an ominous tracking shot moving, pushing into the room.  It’s as if the reality of the maze, of North Bend itself encroaches on this bubble of innocence and shatters it before it can truly breathe or flower.

Some critics have commented negatively on Carpenter’s ubiquitous, trademark tracking shots and pans, noting that they are overdone or in some way boredom-provoking. 

Again, I differ.  These shots effectively create an almost trance-like effect in the audience, lulling it into a false sense of security before the next jump scare, zinger or attack.   For all intents and purposes, The Ward is about visiting a very specific, pre-Internet world and getting trapped there for ninety minutes, unable to navigate a way out.  The devil is in the details and in the accomplished visual presentation. Carpenter truly aces this aspect of the film. 

I’ve also read some critics wonder why Carpenter made this film at all, and the answer seems plain based on the imagery of The Ward.  He had the unique opportunity to recreate the year 1966 on film, and a dark corner of 1966 at that.  Creating that era — a moment from his own youth, even – must have proven an irresistible assignment for the director, and the period details here are nothing shy of exquisite; from the knobs on the electroshock machine to the look of the glass drug syringes (which we see breaking human skin).

There’s no doubt this is a different Carpenter than we have seen in some time.  For all their respective virtues, Vampires (1998) and even my beloved Ghosts of Mars (2001) featured at least some sense of cheesiness or cheeky humor.  Not The Ward.  This film is stripped down, efficient, and serious.

The only question then, becomes, are such virtues enough to earn Carpenter the approbation of audiences today?  Some fans may feel he has ably re-connected with his sense of focus, but has done so in the wrong vehicle: a predictable and fairly familiar story of mental illness and abuse.

I’m not sure this is the wrong vehicle, frankly.   While it’s absolutely true that The Ward is not a cerebral, idea-a-minute effort such as Prince of Darkness, They Live, or even In The Mouth of Madness, The Ward does land us — in visceral terms – in a pretty horrific corner of the Earth.

In the last two days I’ve reviewed Dawning, a horror film by a newcomer, and The Ward, a horror film by a master.  Both directors and both productions superbly forge atmospheres of dread and pin down the specifics of a very frightening, limited location (a cabin the woods, and a mental hospital in the 1960s, respectively). 

Recent horror films such as My Bloody Valentine (2009), Friday the 13th (2009),  Piranha 3-D  (2010) and A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010) have all failed rather egregiously in this regard.  My Bloody Valentine was set in a poor mining town, but that world never felt real and was never excavated in the slightest.  Setting was mere backdrop for the film’s 3-D, coming-at-ya effects.  A Nightmare on Elm Street was gruesome, and yet never actually scary.  Piranha 3-D was stupid in an aggressive, muscular and fun fashion, and yet never for a moment did it create a world that audiences could believe in, recognize or “get into.”

With efforts such as Dawning and Carpenter’s The Ward it’s possible (though not probable…) we’re seeing the genre self-correct; moving back to a sturdier foundation, one constructed upon mood, atmosphere and close attention to details of mood and setting. 

The old pleasures of the horror film, you might even term these welcome touches. 

I certainly hope that’s the case.  John Carpenter’s films usually age remarkably well, rising above their flashier contemporary brethren and standing the test of time. 

There’s absolutely no reason to suspect The Ward is going to be any different.

>CULT MOVIE REVIEW: Dawning (2009)

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I always appreciate horror films that accomplish a lot with very little, and director Gregg Holtgrewe’s Dawning (2009) fits that bill rather nicely.  Dawning is an ultra low-budget, rough-around-the-edges affair, but one well worth seeking out if you’re in the mood for something off-kilter.  Awkwardly-stated, it’s sort of The Evil Dead (1983) meets The Blair Witch Project (1999)…only with no special effects and no monsters.

Well, that’s not a completely accurate description. 

There are monsters in this film, but at times they appear to be of the personal, self-doubting, human variety rather than the demonic one.

In short, Dawning concerns a dysfunctional family that comes together for a weekend retreat in the woods but soon encounters Something Evil. 

That evil is either an invisible, monstrous creature that seizes on interpersonal weakness and human foibles, or the Monster from the family’s collective Id: the self-doubt of the dramatis personae made manifest; a sense of personal paranoia that grows and grows and roils and roils until murder is the only possible outcome.

Dawning follows college-aged siblings Chris (Jonas Goslow) and Aurora (Najarra Townsend) as they visit their estranged father, Richard (David Coral) at his cabin in the woods.  The opening scenes hark back to both The Evil Dead and Romero’s Night of the Living Dead as a solitary car traverses a patch of wilderness on an isolated highway.

Richard, the patriarch of the family and a recovering alcoholic, has separated from Chris and Aurora’s mother and is now dating a woman named Laura (Christine Kellogg-Darrin).  Meanwhile, Chris is contemplating quitting school, and Aurora is still scarred by her parents’ divorce and her father’s lack of attention and devotion.  Laura feels that his children won’t accept her as a substitute for Mom.  Each character, then, has some kind of demon to battle, and one which threatens to disturb the familial “peace.”

As Chris and Aurora arrive at the remote cabin,  the happy family reunion quickly turns awkward with recriminations, guilt-trips, accusations, and innuendo.  Then, the family dog is mysteriously wounded while the family gathers for a camp fire to roast marshmallows.  The dog bleeds out and must be put down in a highly disturbing scene.  

After a time, another disturbance breaks the quiet solitude of the forest night.  A mad, armed stranger (Daniel J. Salmen) breaks into the cabin unexpectedly and holds the family at gunpoint.  “You can’t leave,” he tells them. “If you leave, you’ll die.”

“It’s waiting,” he insists, describing some unseen monster that apparently murdered his girlfriend.  This night visitor may or not be the murderer of the family dog.  And what he says about a monster may or may not be true. 

That’s as much certainty as Dawning ever grants the audience.

The family attempts to overpower the stranger and notify the police about their predicament, but the phone lines are out, or at least behaving…strangely.  And bizarre, unearthly noises keep emanating from the woods and from the roof of the cabin.  After a time, each member of the family disappears into the woods.  And when they are seen again, they seem different…wrong.

Finally, Chris and Aurora try to reach  his car and flee the cabin, but the unseen force pursues.
Soon, dawn will break, but will anyone be left alive to see it?

There are no recognizable actors in Dawning, no monster special effects, no major stunts,  and the narrative does not develop in any conventional or recognizable Hollywood fashion. 

I reckon the last bit, at least, is a good thing. 

Buttressed by an unsettling musical score, some excellent cinematography and a lot of really canny editing, Dawning proves an arresting and suspenseful experience.  I’ve never seen another film deploy this particular technique before, but at several critical junctures during Dawning, characters hear their own worst thoughts vocalized in the voices of their beloved family members. 

Now, in the actual cuts, we never actually witness those family members speaking such unkind, ugly words. It’s all craftily accomplished so that it becomes plain that the characters are hearing opinions that have never actually been stated by another human being. 

Those insults and attacks are either the Monster’s doing or simple human insecurities somehow being broadcast.   But the effect is insidious: like having a nagging, betraying, personal Iago in your ear at all times, saying just the thing to confirm your own low opinion of yourself.

It’s all rather unsettling, and highly imaginative, and Dawning plays diabolically on the idea that something evil is tearing this family unit apart, and that it thrives on division and insecurity.  In today’s environment, with so much anger and division poisoning the national dialogue, the film also erects a powerful case that we are all hearing our own ugliness echoing in our heads, assuming it comes from others, and then striking back. 

As I stated above, it’s quite possible there is no monster in the film, just a sweeping, multiplying sense of mistrust and dysfunction.  Even the film’s revelatory shot — seen in a flash of lightning — could be no more than a phantasm.  From one point of view, it’s as if all the dysfunction of the family coheres into a supernatural entity and then threatens its creator.   The component parts of this particular Beast are substance abuse, resentment over divorce, anger over Richard’s brand of judgmental machismo and other aspects of interpersonal strife and alienation. 

Again, I can’t stress enough that Dawning is a really low-budget horror film, one that stretches its meager budget to the fullest, but which can’t really show you anything besides some very troubled characters arguing inside a small cabin for eighty minutes.  For some viewers, this clearly won’t be enough.

Yet Dawning will get under your skin and discomfort you – in large part because of the ambiguity of the monster — if you attempt to engage with it and meet it half-way.  Given the hostile response by some to The Blair Witch Project, I suspect this film will not play well with everyone precisely because it leaves so much to the imagination, and determinedly defines so little.  It’s the polar opposite of most genre films being made today.  No fast-cuts, no elaborate special effects, and little concentration on grue and guts. 

The film’s performances are serviceable and sometimes more than that, in the case of the impressive Goslow. But in so many significant ways, Holtgrewe is the real star of Dawning.  As a director, he’s got a strong eye for composition, and the unique ability to craft frightening images just by carefully observing natural vistas, or holding a shot perhaps a little longer than usual.  Dawning ably and gamely plays with form, and as a result doesn’t look, feel, or sound like the average, processed genre film.

In fact, it may “dawn” on you during a viewing of Dawning that many genre films of considerably higher budget could learn a thing or two about crafting atmosphere and suspense from this little diamond-in-the-rough. 

>CULT MOVIE REVIEW: Skyline (2010)

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Purportedly the first in a sci-fi film franchise by the Brothers Strause (AVP: Requiem [2007]), the 2010 alien invasion movie Skyline (2010) is literally a wonder to behold. 

Unfortunately, I mean that description in both the positive and negative senses. 

The film’s amazing special effects sequences re-define “shock and awe” ably, with Los Angeles falling under siege from impressive alien ships for most of the film’s running time.   Without reservation, I can state that the Brothers Strause execute some jaw-dropping, gorgeous  shots of extra-terrestrial attack in the film, and more importantly get across some authentically powerful ideas about what it might feel like for the average Earther to suddenly awaken to, well, planetary regime change.

Yet for each great effect, and each great concept featured in Skyline, there’s also the undeniable sense that the movie’s narrative is developmentally arrested.  In particular, the film’s first half-hour is a long, slow haul through screenwriter hell as shallow rich people talk about nothing, argue about nothing, and generally act like narcissistic reality-tv show personalities. 

If human life in 2010 is really this inconsequential, really this petty, really this shallow, then go ahead and bring on the brain eating aliens; that’s all I can say.

When the going gets tough, the tough just get indecisive in Skyline, and the not-very-likable young characters endlessly argue the merits of staying in one place to hide, or making a run for it in broad daylight.  It’s this terminally uninteresting and extended case of — cue The Clash — “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” that makes the film feel not only enormously frustrating for the viewer, but which makes the storyline feel terminally stalled.  An alien invasion is happening outside a high rise apartment, and for much of the film, the protagonists just hide in their room, peeking out timidly and arguing the same point. Stay or go?  Go or stay?  

 After awhile, you just want the characters to do something, anything, to move the plot forward.

Don’t You Get it? We’re at War

In Skyline, Jarrod (Eric Balfour) and his girlfriend, Elaine (Scottie Thompson) visit Jarrod’s friend, Terry (Donald Faison) in Los Angeles after he has become a success in the movie industry, specifically in special effects. 

Meanwhile, Terry is cheating on his girlfriend, Candice (Brittany Daniel) with his assistant, Denise (Crystal Reed).  At the same time, Jarrod and Elaine argue because Terry has offered Jarrod a job there in California, and she doesn’t like L.A.  Elaine is also “late” and informs Jarrod that she is pregnant with his child.

After a night of celebration, the group awakes at 4:27 am to witness a blinding blue light outside the windows of Terry’s high-rise apartment building.   Anyone who looks at the light is mesmerized by it, and “sucked” outside.  Jarrod narrowly survives this fate when Terry pulls him back from the precipice. 

Some time near dawn, Terry and Jarrod head to the roof to see what is happening outside, and learn that the blue flares are present all over the city.  Worse, at every instance of the unearthly illumination, unsuspecting humans are being drawn high up into the air, into the bellies of strange, bio-mechanoid spaceships.

An escape attempt goes wrong as aliens invade the city, and Terry is abducted by one of the invaders.  Later, the survivors join up with the apartment manager, Oliver (David Zayas), and watch from Terry’s apartment, as the U .S. Air Force engages the alien ships in combat.  The battle ends with the U.S. forces decimated, and an alien ship nuked.  Unfortunately, the extra-terrestrial ship rises triumphantly from the mushroom cloud and begins to re-assemble and regenerate itself.

Jarrod, who is feeling strange effects from his first encounter with the blue light, leads Elaine to the roof, in hopes that an Army helicopter they witnessed earlier will return and rescue them.  After another pitched battle, Elaine and Jarrod are captured by the aliens as well.  As they are sucked up into the sky, they share a tender, final kiss.

Meanwhile, all over the world, the human race falls to the alien blitzkrieg.  Aboard one ship, Elaine watches as the strange aliens remove and then absorb human brains.   But there’s something different about Jarrod’s brain…

They’re not dead.  They’re just really pissed off.

Skyline has received really terrible reviews from most film critics, and certainly there are reasons why that’s been the case.  But before I delve into the film’s many valleys in quality, allow me to take a moment to examine the film’s creative summits.

First of all, Skyline does a surprisingly effective job of introducing and maintaining the mystery of the extra-terrestrial incursion on Earth.  Many War of the Worlds-type films open with alien saucers and war machines arriving, and then decimating the Earth with energy beams that we recognize as variants of lasers; variants of our technology.  Then, the aliens send in the ground troops (Battle LA, which I haven’t seen), and combat on terra firma ensues.

Here, the Brothers Strause go another, more intriguing route.  They introduce alien technology that feels, well, legitimately alien, or at least unfamiliar to us.  The blue light that comes down to hypnotize and catch humans is actually a pretty creepy device, and tremendously powerful in forging terror in a surreal, nightmarish fashion.  As one character rightly notes, “who wouldn’t want to look at something so beautiful?”  The idea is that the blue light suffuses an area of the City, and curious humans – by their very nature — are drawn to gaze at it.  Of course, if that happens, it’s too late and the aliens have you.

The second part of the alien attack equation, also splendidly visualized, involves human bodies being drawn upwards into the underbelly of the mecha-organic spaceships.  At least early on, the film doesn’t over-do this view or special effect and again, real terror is generated.  We catch two or three glimpses of hundreds of human beings — seeming to defy gravity — pulled up through the air in a terrible cluster.  It’s an odd, incongruous and disturbing inverse image of what our nation witnessed on that horrible day, September 11, 2001.    There, bodies plummeted down to the ground from the heights of the World Trade Center.  But this opposite image — with bodies sucked skyward by some alien force – nonetheless resonates.  It seems both frighteningly recognizable and absolutely, horrrifyingly un-real.  It is a defiance of the Laws of Physics as we understand them; but that’s just fine because the source is alien. 

My point here is that any alien force with the high technology to get to Earth from another solar system would also likely possess weapons of invasion far in advance of anything we could accurately imagine or comprehend.  They wouldn’t come with bullets and missiles and machine guns.  Instead, the alien arsenal would likely be terrifying, extremely efficient and wholly alien to us.  For all of its myriad flaws in storytelling, Skyline really broadcasts this idea dramatically.

The alien ships themselves — in all their various and sundry iterations — are a wonder to behold too.  They seem to be an unholy combination of machine, squid and insect, literally swimming through our skies, seeking out prey.  Once more, the special effects are downright amazing; so much so that the reality of alien siege is immediately and viscerally established.  Looking at the alien tech, you can readily believe that these beings and their machines could dominate our world in a mere three days.

And even here — in the pitting of alien tech against human tech — Skyline gets a few things right.  About mid-way through the film there’s an extraordinary battle between our unarmed drones and the alien ships.  There’s a stealth bomber, armed with nukes, in the mix as well.  In most alien movies, an aerial attack like this would be a total rout, with the Earth forces repelled and destroyed, and nuclear missiles rendered ineffective immediately.  Skyline treads a more original path, and really gives the audience hope that the human counter-attack is going to work.  The drones and the Stealth bomber acquit themselves well, and the nuclear missile takes down the alien ship, smashing it to pieces.

And then – again — we see something really alien occur.  The vessel starts to regenerate itself; literally pulling pieces back together from the scattered debris.  In alien invasion movies such as this, we’re accustomed to invisible force fields that protect alien saucers or such, but here, just a little twist, a ship picking itself up and re-assembling, gives the impression of something new, that we haven’t seen a dozen times.

I can’t fault the Brothers Strause for their imagination or execution of the aliens featured in the film; they do a terrific job in this arena.  I just wish that these skilled special effects experts had devoted as much energy and imagination to the human and narrative elements of Skyline.  

For instance, as Skyline reveals, the giant monsters from outer space are here to rip out our brains and, well, eat them up.   That is an incredibly hoary idea, and one you couldn’t get published with in this century.  But more to the point, it doesn’t make a lot of sense.  The aliens come to our planet to steal and use our brains as a power source (think of the A.I. in The Matrix [1999] co-opting our bodies as batteries…), but how does a culture from somewhere in a solar system or galaxy far, far away design and build its tech around something found, ostensibly, only right here on Earth? 

Before they got here to eat our brains, how did they move their incredible machinery from their planet to ours? I appreciate the idea that the aliens are here on Earth to rob a precious resource, but  the whole brain angle plays as pulpy, simplistic, and unconvincing. 

Also irritating is the fact that probably nine-tenths of the human race in Skyline go through exactly the same process as Jarrod, and yet he is the only person who begins to develop, ahem, alien powers that come in handy during the finale.  We see Elaine go through the same procedure in the film as well — the blue light – but she isn’t changed or altered as Jarrod is.  So is he just a fluke, or — again like The Matrix — is he The Chosen One?  The guy with the power to save all our brains?!

Someone might note at this point that all these questions could be answered handily in the inevitable sequel.  That may be true; but as a standalone Skyline still plays as a bit…stupid.  And the sentimental, senselessly romantic moment in which Jarrod and Elaine share an intimate kiss inside the alien light stream (as they are hundreds of feet in the air…) adds to the feeling of general dopiness.

That grandiose, romantic kiss in mid-air isn’t earned by Skyline because the characters mostly come across as petty and mercurial, capricious and arbitrary in their concerns.  In the first half-hour, they argue over nothing of consequence.  Elaine is angry that Jarrod is offered a job in L.A.  Is that his fault?  He could still turn it down.  But she’s needlessly mopey and hostile about it.   When he asks her why she didn’t tell him she is pregnant, she replies that she didn’t want to ruin his trip to California?  Really?  Then why has she been such a bitter pill to deal with since setting foot on the tarmac?

Later in the film, Elaine is malleable and changeable to the point of comic absurdity.  Elaine argues that the survivors should stay and hide in the apartment, but lets herself be dragged outside by Jarrod, and disaster ensues.  Later, she continues to argue that it is best to stay inside for the time being.  At this juncture, Jarrod’s eyes turn milky and his blood vessels turn dark – a telltale sign of the alien influence — and he argues again that they should go outside and attempt to rendezvous with an army chopper.    Jarrod and Oliver fight, and Jarrod says that he is not leaving his “family” behind.

This alien/emotional outburst miraculously changes Elaine’s mind, and she willingly goes outside, to the roof, with Jarrod when she was just arguing the opposite course of action.  So tell me: if your significant other began evidencing signs of physical alien takeover, would this make you more or less likely to follow his lead?  Would you change your mind or stick to your guns?

So much of Skyline plays like that bizarre moment.  The screenplay is not merely nonsensical, it’s anti-sensical, if that’s a word.  For instance, early in the film Jarrod notes that the aliens aren’t hovering over the marina, so they should get out on the water pronto.  All the sudden, I had visions of Signs (2002), and water-fearing alien invaders.  But here, the idea is left entirely undeveloped.  Why aren’t there any ships over the water?  Is it a coincidence?  Or is Jarrod actually onto something?  The movie never, ever decides; it just sort of floats the idea of water as a sanctuary, so the survivors have something to further argue about before dying.

Another difficult to swallow plot element involves Elaine’s pregnancy. While carrying a child in her womb, Elaine gets exposed to alien takeover light, gets grabbed and squeezed by an alien bio-mechanoid arm, and is contaminated by the fall-out of a nuclear bomb in close proximity.  All this occurs before she is air-lifted and yanked hundreds of feet and sucked into an alien spaceship. 

That’s one tough baby she’s still carrying in the film’s last scene, let me tell you.

Moment by moment, scene-by-scene, Skyline piles absurdity and frustration upon absurdity and frustration.  People look directly at nuclear blasts and don’t go blind.  Nor, in close range, do they get radiation sickness.  Alien probes can climb stairs to reach the roof, but  don’t stop to check individual rooms where the survivors are hiding.  A lighter doesn’t light at a crucial moment, and then, at another crucial moments does light.  A character named Oliver lectures Jarrod about survival (“The city’s a vacant lot…we need to survive“) and then turns around and commits suicide when he could have just run out of the room and escaped an alien threat entirely.

Again, not just nonsense, but vehemently, proudly, courageously anti-sense.  That’s Skyline in a nutshell.

Still, “beggars can’t be choosers,” as one character in the film notes.  At least in Skyline you can actually see the action, which differentiates it from the Strause Bros.’ previous, horrible outing, AVP: Requiem.  That movie was so dramatically under-lit, you just kind of gave up half way through.

On the other hand, actually seeing the impressive action in Skyline gets one’s hopes up that the movie’s storyline is going to prove as powerful and affecting as the awe-inspiring special effects.  And the Strause Bros. just don’t pull it off.  After we finished watching the film, my wife was silent and I asked her what she thought.

Her answer was a quote from the movie’s hilariously bad dialogue: “I’m not dead, I’m just really pissed off.”

That made two of us.

CULT MOVIE REVIEW: The Last Exorcism (2010)

The first-person camera horror film or “found footage“ movie has become all the rage with genre filmmakers over the last few years, and I enjoy the form very much. 

When handled well (Cloverfield [2008]) or exquisitely-well ([REC] [2007]) the first-person subjective horror movie boasts an incredible amount of immediacy and urgency. 

Contrarily, when this type of film is not done so well (Diary of the Dead [2007]), examples of the genre can come across as artless and even amateurish; like a bad reality show on basic cable.

While not nearly as strong or as powerful as [REC], The Last Exorcism nonetheless utilizes the form of the “found footage“ mock-documentary horror film to good effect. 

Specifically, director Daniel Stamm’s effort focuses a great deal on character, much more so than most films of this type, which often tend to focus on one location, or on one emergency situation.

In this instance, the character at the heart of the drama is the colorful Reverend Cotton Marcus (Patrick Fabian) of Baton Rouge, Louisiana.  He’s a glib but good-hearted “performer” who chooses the Christian Church as his stage.  Cotton followed his proud father into the Church and now sees to it that the Sunday morning sermons are never boring.  He does card tricks for his flock; he uses props and special effects whenever he can to spice things up.  He doesn’t think he’s playing with people’s lives; he just thinks he is putting on an entertaining show.

Marcus may (or may not…) be a genuine man of faith, but he is abundantly cynical about the nature of man.  In particular, he is troubled that some men can so easily manipulate the gullible or the ignorant, especially in terms of faith and religious belief.

To wit, Cotton has for years conducted exorcisms (with taped demon noises and other special effects as background noise…) that are shams; but which nonetheless give the suffering souls some belief and sense of comfort that they have been healed.  At first, Cotton believed that his involvement was a public service of sorts, and participated happily.

On news, however, that a girl has died during an especially violent exorcism (as was also the case in The Exorcism of Emily Rose [2005]), Rev. Marcus experiences a change of heart.  In a moment of self reflection, he decides that “doing God’s work” in this instance means going against the Church and exposing exorcisms (and demon possession…) as frauds.

To that end, Cotton invites a documentary crew to follow him on his “last exorcism” in Ivanwood, Louisiana.  There, an innocent teenage girl named Nell (Ashley Bell) is allegedly possessed by a demon and murdering her father’s livestock on a nightly basis.  The camera crew will observe as Cotton  guides Nell and her family through the possession, revealing for the documentarians all the tricks of his trade.

And then, of course, Cotton will collect his cash and leave for home.

…But of course, that’s not at all how things end up.  Not at all.

The early portions of The Last Exorcism do a stellar job of introducing Reverend Marcus, inter cutting ably between talking-head interviews with Marcus and his wife and B-roll footage of his father’s “demon book,” which contains all the names of the demons that might possess the living. 

These early passages are highly engaging, and more importantly than that, are just about the best “faked” moments you’ve probably seen in a found footage horror film lately.  The chronicle of Cotton’s life in the Church — and his reasons for turning his back on the barbaric practice of exorcism – seem very, very authentic.  There’s no hint of fakery or of “acting” in these moments.  You accept the character and his choices as real.

These moments also lay out the beginning of Cotton’s intriguing character arc.  I won’t reveal the parameters or trajectory of that arc, but suffice it to say that the glib-but-good-hearted showman is landed into a harrowing situation wherein his beliefs and faith are called into question.  His very words are held to account.

He must finally decide: Man of God or Show Business Charlatan?

As The Last Exorcism settles down into the heart of Nell’s case, in an isolated, rural farmhouse, the movie grows increasingly creepy and disturbing. 

There’s a constant tension present in the screenplay and its presentation between opposing philosophies.  Is Nell mentally disturbed?  Extremely susceptible to fundamentalist indoctrination and the suggestion that she’s possessed by a devil?  Or is she actually harboring a demon?

In my review of Vanishing on 7th Street yesterday, I discussed ambiguity a great deal, and how horror movies can use ambiguity to make audiences uneasy.  When certainties are removed from narratives, and subtleties and questions creep in, we grow more and more susceptible to the movie’s twists and turns.  The Last Exorcism succeeds largely by fostering this brand of uncertainty, and by presenting us a very dramatic, very colorful lead character to navigate that uncertainty.  So not long after we have met Nell and her family, we start to wonder the movie’s all-important question:

Who, precisely, is conning whom?

Is Cotton playing the family?  Or is the family playing Cotton?  And if the latter is true, what is the reason behind that act?  Is Cotton actually up against a diabolical showman with many more “special effects”  in his quiver?

Commendably, The Last Exorcism also innovates some with its by-now-familiar first-person subjective P.O.V. form.  In one unexpected moment, Nell — apparently possessed by the demon — picks up the video camera and goes on a murderous bender (with the family cat as victim…).   That’s something these first-person movies don’t show often: the killer literally ”possessing” our eye on the narrative events.

I also enjoyed the film’s setting, in rural Louisiana.  The region has existed under “six different flags” over its long history, and the place is what Cotton calls a melting pots of different beliefs “rubbing up against each other.”   In other words, the perfect setting for a supernatural horror film.

I’m not entirely thrilled, let alone satisfied with The Last Exorcism’s denouement.   The film’s last shot is an unnecessary swipe from The Blair Witch Project (1999), and the resolution of the ambiguity — of the film’s central mystery – is confusing.  Cotton’s actions during the last act are wholly understandable: he must select a side and fight for it.  But I do have questions about the motives of some of the other supporting characters involved in the climax, especially as it pertains to earlier behavior in the film.

Despite this, I still recommend The Last Exorcism for fans of the found footage horror sub-type, and also for horror movie enthusisasts in general.  Patrick Fabian has created a  memorable character in Reverend Cotton Marcus, and I enjoy how the movie frequently weighs the moral pitfalls of his character.  Cotton is responsible for his words…even if he doesn’t mean them or even entirely believe in them, and The Last Exorcism hammers that point home effectively. 

If Cotton — in his capacity as an expert – tells Nell’s father that “death is the only salvation” for a person possessed by a demon, then he’s at least partially responsible when the farmer picks up a shotgun and aims it at his daughter, point-blank range, in an effort to save her soul. 

Cotton slowly becomes aware of his responsibility, and that’s what keeps him from extricating himself from the growing horror..and stuck in that farmhouse.  He realizes that his words and his choices have played a critical part in what is happening.  And in a weird, unsettling way, this aspect of The Last Exorcism is actually a reflection of our current national discussion.   When do words go too far?  When should “showmanship” for entertainment’s sake cease?  When do entertaining words become a call to unfortunate action?

I don’t want to belabor that point, because we all see this matter differently, but The Last Exorcism is an interesting meditation on personal responsibility, and an excellent character study of a ”showman” who makes questionable choices.

And as opposed to Nell, the devil didn’t even make Cotton do it…

CULT MOVIE REVIEW: A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

Over the last several years, I’ve become something of a pragmatist in terms of horror movie remakes. 

There are so many of ‘em out there (and so many still coming our way…) that the only to broach them fairly – and at least relatively objectively — is to take them on a case-by-case, individual basis. 

So I try to find the good where I can, even if it is a re-vamp of a classic that is under the spotlight. 

And facts are facts: “remakes” of The Thing (1982), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), Nosferatu (1979) and The Fly (1986) remain some of the  best horror films ever made.  You might even add 1988′s The Blob to that select list too.

Given this reality, it makes no sense to boast a blanket philosophy against horror movie remakes.  You take the risk of dismissing something good if you do. 

The problem is that there are so many remakes — arriving in such rapid, heavily-hyped succession — that it’s indeed difficult to distinguish the wheat from the chaff.

What I’ve detected, in broad strokes, in this current crop of genre remakes  –  (2000 to 2010) – is that the best ones appear to be those that replace the original’s sub-text with an updated, relevant one. 

In other words, the remakes must reveal something valuable to us about our lives in the here-and-now.  They can’t just be disposable ”jump” and “jolt” roller-coaster rides.

In other words, a remake can’t be the “same” movie as the original because times have changed and different talents are involved.  But if a remake excavates a comparative path to quality – gazing at our world  as it is now; pushing the boundaries of today’s cinema, etc. – then it very may well offer something worthwhile to commend it.

I believe that Marcus Nispel’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003), Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead (2004) and Alexandre Aja’s The Hills Have Eyes (2006) all fit that bill. 

Are these remade titles all-time classics like the originals from which they sprang? 

Only time can answer that question for certain.  But I think, at the very bare minimum, they are good movies that honor the memory of the originals and also boast their own distinctive visual and contextual identity.

Also – and I realize this is a highly controversial judgment — I feel that history may judge Rob Zombie’s Halloween movies more kindly than many of us (including myself, at times…) do right now. 

Why?  Although Zombie’s Halloween remakes are drastically different from Carpenter’s in approach and aesthetic, they do substitute an artist’s legitimate, if controversial, individual vision.  Is it the vision that I prefer for Michael Myers?  Absolutely not.  I prefer Carpenter’s minimalism.  I prefer Michael Myers as the Shape – as an ambiguous, mysterious figure — not as an abused child.

But it seems both foolish and unfair to deny that Zombie’s Halloween movies represent the efforts of a  distinctive artist taking risks, making bold choices and pushing things to the limit….especially given Zombie’s other, generally well-regarded contributions to the genre (namely House of a 1,000 Corpses and The Devil’s Rejects).

This is a very long preamble to a discussion of the remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010). 

But I believe it is abundantly necessary to spell this all out, in meticulous detail, because this is one case in which a remake is almost stereotypically awful.

I didn’t want my distaste for this movie to be erroneously perceived as a complaint against the remake form in toto.  It’s too easy to dismiss my review if that were the case, and I don’t want that to happen. 

Long story short: Samuel Bayer’s A Nightmare on Elm Street is shallow, poorly-made, and wholly lobotomized — yes, downright stupid — compared to the Wes Craven, 1984 source material.  The remake fails to scare; it fails, even, to generate interest around its by-the-numbers “investigative” storyline.  More than anything, the movie plays like a bad remake of  an obscure J-Horror, like One Missed Call, perhaps.

Of course, the new Nightmare on Elm Street cannot be the old one.  I don’t expect it to be.  But it fails on the creative basis I wrote about above.  It doesn’t replace what was so good about the original Craven film with anything of comparative value or quality.   The remake fundamentally misunderstands the original’s point-of-view and is a pale, play-it-safe, whitebread effort.  It pushes no boundaries in terms of the genre; it is a dull, unimaginative piece of work.

Let’s talk a bit about the original Nightmare on Elm Street for a moment. 

I often describe Wes Craven as the genre’s social conscience, and his first Freddy Krueger film is Exhibit A.  The 1984 film is not merely about a dream killer stalking teenagers; it’s about something much deeper in human nature.  In particular, A Nightmare on Elm Street concerns the idea that it is a sin to bury the truth – no matter how painful – and far better to face it…to dig it up and show it the sunlight.

Wes Craven gets at this important idea in a few significant ways.  The parents of Elm Street (who murdered Freddy), lie to their children, like Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp), about their crime, and so the sins of the fathers — the lies — return to impact the children. 

We see the price of denial and repression all through the film.  The Thompsons have divorced.  Nancy’s mother hides in the bottle — she’s an alcoholic — so she doesn’t have to face the truth about the vigilante action (murder…) against Krueger.

Unlike her parents, Nancy digs and prods at the truth to save her own life.  She won’t hide from the truth about Krueger, and Craven actually makes an intelligent comparison in the original film (in an English high school class, no less), between Nancy and Shakespeare’s Danish prince, Hamlet. 

Both characters seek the truth about “their fathers,“  even though those truths are uncomfortable.

Society wise — and I’m authentically sorry this upsets or angers conservatives — this dynamic also reflects dramatically what was happening in political America in the mid-1980s. 

Ronald Reagan, an avuncular, father-figure was by-and-large telling Americans that they could have it all.  They could have tax cuts and spend heavily on defense and not cut entitlement; and there would be no consequence, said Reaganomics.  There was a price, of course: the deficit ballooned dramatically in the 1980s.  

Again, the sins of the father were being visited upon the children.  Who would pay down the national debt?  The children of Elm Street all over America.

Again, I don’t mean to offend, but genetically-encoded in A Nightmare on Elm Street is this notion of a battle between Americans generations.  The generation that denies and represses the truth (the middle class parents of Nancy’s Elm Street; the Establishment of the 1980s) and the younger generation, which would hopefully learn to do better and grapple with problems rather than pawn them off to their own kids, a generational IOU.  

“I’m into survival,” Nancy notes at one important point in the original film, and this is critical commentary about the times.  As youngsters of that era (and I was close to the same age as Nancy in 1984…) many of us indeed worried about our survival. 

Again, not to harp on President Reagan (whom I appreciate for his handling of the Challenger incident, for example), but he was the President who joked on an open mic that bombing of Russia would begin in “five minutes.”  He was the President who incorrectly stated in a debate that nuclear missiles could be recalled from submarines after launch…which was not true.  He was the President who said that Jesus would return in his life time and that we were likely the last generation. 

This is not political attack or partisanship…these are facts.  These are the things the man said, and as children and teenagers, we heard and internalized the messages from the Bully Pulpit.  We had to be into survival, like Nancy.  It was up to us to determine the truth, and fight back against lies.

At the end of the original Craven film, the only way to defeat Freddy is for Nancy to turn her back on him.  Not ignore him, not deny his existence but — knowing full well what and who is he is — take away his power in the open.  In other words, take the wind out of his sails; solve the problem.  Give it no more power over the course we steer. 

This was an important turning point in the development of the character of the Final Girl in the Slasher Movie Paradigm.  Nancy took responsibility for defending herself; and for beating the Bogeyman.

The point is that – if you so choose — you can gaze at Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street on multiple layers.  As a frighteningly good horror film; as, thematically, the idea that things repressed return as symptoms…and must be faced.  Or, as a political point about the context under which the film was produced: the so-called “apocalypse mentality” of the 1980s. 

Through Wes Craven’s careful layering of elements (including literary allusion to Hamlet), the film opens itself up to interpretation and analysis.  It becomes about “something” other than a guy with finger knives, slicing and dicing nubile teenagers. 

In terms of structure — and the act of  pushing the horror film format forward — Craven blended the naturalistic-style Slasher Paradigm of the early 1980s with “Rubber Reality,” infusing “knife-kille” horror again with the supernatural…and the spectacular.  That was a big deal at the time, and it opened the way for rubber reality horrors such as Hellraiser (1987) and even Candyman (1992).

So here comes the remake in 2010, and instead of similarly commenting on our society now, it plays it safe and sound in every regard, and actually subverts the messages and meaning of the original film.

How does this movie play it safe? Well, consider how characters have changed since 1984 to become more timid, more bland.  In the original film, Nancy’s mother was an alcoholic because she buried the truth.  Here she is not.  Connie Britton plays a concerned mother who counseled against killing Freddy.  See, she’s reasonable and nice, not a law breaker, not a vigilante, and certainly not a heavy drinker! 

In the original film, Rod was a legitimate juvenile delinquent — a “rough” kid.  Here, his replacement, played by Thomas Dekker, is not.  He’s just another typical suburban kid; one who happens to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.  In the original film, people believed Rod could be guilty of Tina’s murder because he was a bad boy “from the wrong side of the tracks;” because he had a history, and because he was deemed unacceptably lower class by the middle class.  Not here.  

In the original film, the parents of Elm Street are depicted as outright negligent.  Remember Tina’s Mom and her boyfriend, and how he asked “are you comin’ back to the sack or what?” while Tina was facing the prospect of a terminal nightmare?  Not here.  Tina’s surrogate — Kris — faces the exact some death as Tina, but there are two important differences.  First, her mother is not negligent; she’s just a stewardess who needs to go to work, to take a flight.  And secondly, Kris does not have premarital sex before she dies (as Tina did, with the “bad boy,” Rod.)

So this is a far more timid, milquetoast, safe depiction of the American middle class.  No parental negligence. No alcoholism.  No class warfare. No premarital sex, even. 

But the most important and sickening change is that this Nightmare on Elm Street believes it is absolutely okay (and even commendable) that the parents of Elm Street have lied to their children about the truth of their pre-school age-abuse at Freddy’s hands, and his subsequent murder.  Where the original film was about digging and excavating the truth, no matter what, this film is about keeping the unpleasant things down and out of sight.  

At the end of the film – I shit you not — Nancy actually thanks her Mother for lying to her (to…her…face) about Freddy.  “I know you were just trying to protect me.  Thank you,” she says. 

Okay, so the new A Nightmare on Elm Street totally undercuts the very theme of the original; the meaning of Nancy’s journey.  That’s established.  The question becomes: what does it replace that theme with?

Well, nothing really.  

The new film doesn’t work on multiple levels.  It doesn’t even work on one simple level actually; it’s not remotely scary.  As far as I’m concerned that’s the base-line for a horror movie.  It must scare.  It must excite.  It must get the blood pumping.

On that front, this remake tips its hand in the first five minutes, revealing Freddy in close-up during a “micro-nap” in a diner.  Remember how the original film kept Freddy in the shadows, giving the audience only glimpses of the dream avenger? 

Even that sense of artistry and patience is gone.  We know who we’re up against from the get-go — before the title card, actually — and exactly what he looks like too.  True, this Freddy does look more like a burn-victim and less like a Halloween witch, but I’m not totally certain that’s a fair trade.  After all, Freddy is supposed to be a supernatural avenger, not merely a walking corpse.   

Of course, one might argue legitimately that everyone knows who Freddy is by now, so the remakers had to show him — full make-up monty– early and get it out of the way.  I disagree: going into a remake a director/writer/producer can’t just take as a given that the movie’s Bogeyman villain is so well-known that he’s not scary.   

Au contraire: the mission is to re-invent him so he is scary again.  Generating real horror requires patience. We should build up to Freddy’s appearance; experience a sense of anticipation in his absence. What’s he going to look like, now?

And this is not an impossible task, either.  Wes Craven did it well, re-inventing Freddy as a kind of Uber-Evil for Wes Craven’s New Nightmare in 1994.  Explicitly, he connected Freddy to antecedents in the genre like Nosferatu (1922) and the story of Hansel & Gretel.  In this way, we understood that his brand of evil had always been with us.

So I don’t ask for the impossible here, only that the movie provide us a new Freddy who is as terrifying to us today as the original was in ’84, or in the re-imagined 1994 film. 

I should hasten to add, other directors have accomplished this task as well.  The zombies in Dawn of the Dead (2004) were rendered new and scary by their frightening speed, and a twist in their life cycle (only a bite passes the infection, not death in general).  And the clan of the new The Hills Have Eyes actually consisted of mutants; those who had been exposed to atomic testing in the desert.  That new wrinkle fit into the remake’s argument about American international power, and Red and Blue States in the era of the War on Terror (and remember the death by American flag in the eyeball)? 

In all these cases,  significant changes to a classic “monster” (or group of monsters) were broached, but something imaginative was substituted for the old.  Nothing imaginative is substituted in A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010).  Freddy talks a lot, but cracks fewer jokes.  This sort of makes him dull, and less scary too.  Now he’s debating about “what he wants” from the teens before killing them?  Let’s just have a conference call too…

In terms of the teen characterizations, the new Elm Street is a disaster.  In the original film, audiences strongly identified with Nancy.  She was a brave kid, digging and probing to learn the truth, and dealing with Freddy…even engineering booby traps to stop him. 

But we also identified with her because she was a regular kid, and the movie featured scenes with Nancy and her friends just being kids.  Remember the scenes at Glenn’s (Johnny Depp’s house) in which they goofed off with a boom box and a sound effects tape?  These scenes reminded us how young they were; and how precious their lives were.  For god’s sake, — premarital sex or not — they were innocent kids.

The new movie never once shows Freddy’s would-be-victims acting like people or teenagers we can identify with.  They are morose, pale, fatalistic and imperiled from the movie’s beginning.  They are undistinguished and uninteresting in the extreme.  If this is an accurate reflection of kids today, then we’re really in trouble.  They can google and text, all right, but not crack a smile (or apparently get a tan). 

The new Nightmare on Elm Street also lacks the slightly-seamy, lower-class vibe of the original, and especially the energy of Craven’s original.  This movie is so dull, it’s the audience who wishes for a micro-nap. 

It’s true that the movie re-stages all of the “trademark” moments of the original film: Tina’s death, the body bag dragged by invisible hands, Rod’s death in a jail cell, the final sting-in-the-tail/tale with Nancy’s Mom, the boiler room locale, and Nancy in the bath-tub with the Freddy glove.  But it gives these moments no psychic weight, no importance, no relevance.  We’ve seen these moments before.  What’s the twist? 

Again, look at how Dawn of the Dead, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Hills Have Eyes played with expectations, and the set-pieces of the varied source material.

Again, it’s like New Line made A Nightmare on Elm Street’s “Greatest Hits” movie, but forgot to tell an interesting story, with interesting, human characters, within a context that is meaningful to us now.  The movie’s opening dream set-piece is a prime example of how this film and the sterling original are determinedly different…and not in a good way.

In the first, original film, we see Tina (Amanda Wyss) emerging from a white light in a long, dank tunnel.  She is vulnerable, in her pajamas…and alone.  She walks towards us down that long hallway, and a lamb inexplicably crosses her path.  It’s all slightly unreal, with strong dream imagery.  The corridor and light symbolize the tunnel, perhaps, between the dream world and the real world, and lamb is innocence being led to the slaughter.  The images mean something beyond a surface level.

In the new movie, a kid named Dean is in a diner, walks back into the kitchen, and meets Freddy.  He doesn’t die.  He wakes up, and talks to his worried friends for five minutes.  Then, in plain view, he falls asleep again, meets Freddy and dies.   Again, in plain view. This is underwhelming and, more so, does not hint at the power and symbolism of our dream life.  It’s so very literal and unimaginative, and this is, frankly, unforgivable in a film that should have great fun playing with the concept of dreams.

Here’s my final assessment of the film: “Well, the producers got fat and Freddy got famous, but somebody forgot to make this movie more than a cliff-notes version of a classic, and Krueger wasn’t scary anymore, just like that.”

It’s a shame.  New Line Cinema is “the House that Freddy Built” and the studio dishonors its benefactor with this by-the-numbers, uninspired remake.   A Nightmare on Elm Street, 2010 edition, isn’t fun, isn’t scary, and it doesn’t mean a darn thing except a quick buck on opening weekend.

CULT MOVIE REVIEW: The Book of Eli (2010)

The Book of Eli (2010) is a post-apocalyptic action movie from the visual and thematic tradition of the Sergio Leone Spaghetti Westerns starring Clint Eastwood as “The Man with No Name.”

Accordingly, the film is set mostly outdoors against a backdrop of Big Sky, and particularly lovely to look at. One rousing action scene late in the proceedings is positively brimming with visual invention, and proves a real highlight.

In broad terms, the overall production design, the character blocking, the iconic positioning of Eli in the frame, and other visual facets of the drama are truly exemplary, and therefore well worth lauding.

Yet ultimately I feel somewhat conflicted about the film. In emotional, purely human terms, The Book of Eli plays as markedly flat compared to the harrowing The Road (2009), for instance. And most importantly, the deep religious message it conveys is not handled in an appropriately inspiring or nuanced manner.

The Book of Eli is set thirty winters after an unnamed apocalypse in which the sky opens up and burns to a cinder most of the human population. The surviving populations of the world blame this global catastrophe on the Bible (but not the Koran, and not the Talmud, apparently…). Thus all copies of the Bible — everywhere — are burned.

Three decades after this terrifying day of disaster, a humble “walker,” Eli (Denzel Washington) makes a dangerous pilgrimage West carrying what may be the planet’s final Bible in his satchel.

The book in his possession soon lands Eli in direct conflict with a small-time tyrant named Carnegie (Gary Oldman), who believes that ownership of the valuable tome will permit him to control and dominate an unruly population. Eli also befriends a young, impressionable slave, Solara (Mila Kunis), who takes up the book’s learning with Eli. There is a final battle between Eli and Carnegie for possession of the Bible, and the end of the trek occurs at a sort of book repository/monastery on Alcatraz.

There are many truly fine elements at work here. The action sequence I mentioned above is a real humdinger. It finds Eli and Solara hiding in an isolated house in a western desert as Carnegie and his goons attack, utilizing superior firepower. The camera lunges back and forth between Eli’s position and Carnegie’s position, but eschews all conventional film cutting. Instead, (under the auspices of some amazing CGI…) we travel “through” bullet holes, race along the battlefield floor, pivot suddenly and zoom in the other direction, sometimes even through carnage and fiery debris. This is a dazzling and fresh way of visualizing a gunfight, and it’s fluid, fun and exciting.

As a film buff, I also appreciated the plethora of touches here that appear purposefully reminiscent of Clint Eastwood’s “Man with No Name” feature films (which in turn, I suppose, are purposefully reminiscent of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo).

Eli may possess a name, but like his Spaghetti Western predecessor, he boasts a personal code in a mostly immoral terrain… and is a highly-skilled fighter, proficient, in particular, with a sword.

Remember in Yojimbo how Mifune’s ronin chopped off the arm of an opponent with his sword? Early on, The Book of Eli presents a similarly violent sequence.

And like The Man with No Name, Eli is a fellow who brooks no nonsense from anyone, and is a loner, an outsider in the culture around him. He ignores or skirts reigning authority, and again like Eastwood’s character, seems to be more than a mere mortal. Just as The Man with No Name survived hanging (twice…), so does Eli seem to endure and survive extreme physical challenges (like gunfights and a battle with a chainsaw-wielding opponent). Although Eli is joined by Solara, he gets no substantive help from the community he ultimately helps.

So clearly, Eli is a heroic archetype, one perfectly in keeping with the Western and Samurai/ronin traditions he arises from. To accentuate this important connection to cinematic heroes of the past, the Hughes Brothers frequently shoot Denzel Washington from below, or in iconic silhouette to accentuate his power, virtue and strength. A variation on this idea involves a focus on the eyes. When you think of Leone’s pictures, one of the first images that leaps to mind is a close-up of Eastwood’s steely, penetrating orbs. In purposeful contrast, Washington’s eyes are shielded almost constantly by opaque sun-glasses, to make way for a final act surprise twist. But the sub-text of the warrior’s sight is part and parcel of both “The Man with No Name films” and The Book of Eli.

Post-apocalyptic films have re-purposed Westerns before (The Road Warrior was Shane, wasn’t it?) and The Book of Eli picks a very good, very efficacious model to emulate in these classic Italian genre films. This Hughes Bros. movie also seems to acknowledge its myriad post-apocalyptic genre roots, especially with the prominence in one frame of a poster from the 1975 film A Boy and His Dog.

I also noted some real similarities between The Book of Eli and the 1936 H.G. Wells’ penned film Things to Come, particularly the section of that classic movie involving “Everytown” in 1966-1967, post-apocalypse. In that middle-portion of Things to Come, Ralph Richardson’s petty tyrant “The Boss” dominated a local population as a Dark Age for humanity loomed, and he even had a female squeeze at his side. Oldman and Jennifer Beals play similar roles here, in a comparable setting and situation.

Interestingly, however, ideology has changed dramatically from Things to Come in 1936 to The Book of Eli in 2010. In Things to Come, John Massey arrived from a pacifist socialist organization “Wings over the World,” which almost literally forced a global government and New World Order on Richardson’s tyrant and his warring people. Eli, by contrast, is a kind of fundamentalist missionary re-asserting the tenets of Christianity in a world where morality has largely vanished.

Another commendable element of The Book of Eli involves a useful, real-life historical analogy: the book-preserving souls on Alcatraz led by Malcolm McDowell are highly reminiscent of the Irish Monks, who, in the Dark Ages, took it upon themselves to preserve the literary treasures of Antiquity. Without their tireless and truly amazing efforts, much of humanity’s greatest works would have been lost to the barbarism of the day. In The Book of Eli, another Dark Ages is broached, and the same thing occurs: human ingenuity is championed. Encoded here, then, is a worthwhile message about literature and books: that they hold the legacy and promise of the human race.

Even the broad religious message of The Book of Eli I found eminently worthwhile. Simply put, the movie states that some people view religious belief as a method of control (Carnegie) and some see it as an authentic road to salvation and redemption (Eli). I appreciated the even-handedness of such a take; the yin-and-yang of the approach.

But then…there’s this other aspect of the film that I found just didn’t quite work for me. And yes, it involves Eli and the overtly religious aspect of his heroic quest. In crafting an interesting variation of “The Man with No Name” character, the makers of the film have gone too far for my taste. They’ve made Eli, actually, superhuman.

One of the most jarring and incongruous aspects of The Book of Eli is the style of fighting adopted by Eli during the frequent clashes. This is a malnourished, tired, ragged character adorned in layers of ratty clothes…and yet he moves at super-human speeds, as though a well-fed, highly-trained, agile martial artist. There’s another handicap at work too that would seem to preclude such precise fighting movements. I get what the movie is trying to do; to offer a Christian version of Eastwood’s character, but Eli is very clearly God-Powered.

He’s a Holy Warrior whose very quest is blessed by the attention of the Almighty Himself. At one point, he recounts a story that God spoke to him directly as a child, and instructed him to take the Bible out west.

Helpfully, God has thus made Eli virtually invulnerable in his ability to evade bullets, and fulfill his holy purpose. In one shoot-out set on a busy city street (another sequence taken right from the Western genre…), a half-dozen or so men open fire on Eli with blazing pistols. He is so confident in his continued survival that he does not even take cover. He just walks away in the middle of the wide open avenue, his back to the bad guys, as they shoot at him. And, he survives, without a scratch.

Even Eli’s enemies perceive that he is, well, specially…endowed. One of Carnegie’s minions states, in hushed tones: “It’s like he’s protected somehow. Like nothing can touch him.”

Too often, alas, that’s the level of nuance and subtlety at work. The ambiguity of the “Man with No Names” films is sacrificed for this modification in the format, and I submit it’s a near-fatal subtraction from the formula.

I should specify. As intelligent and yes, even spiritual viewers, we are not asked by The Book of Eli to contemplate the notion that God could be guiding this battle, or Eli’s very destiny. Rather we are told, in no uncertain terms, and in fight after fight, sequence after sequence, that the Almighty has got Eli’s back. And I feel very strongly that this takes much of the suspense and intrigue out of the film.

Put another way, it’s the difference between believing God exists and is possibly affecting outcomes and destinies, and the definitive knowledge that God is, well, perched on the third cloud from the right, micromanaging our affairs with a cosmic blackberry. What I’m saying is that God is a mystery (even the Greatest of All Mysteries…) but this movie negates that mystery, spoon-feeding the audience easy answers. Not only is Eli righteous, he is literally on a misson from God, to quote The Blues Brothers.

We have no such certainty about the Divine in life, so why make God’s presence and agenda so certain, so uninspiring in the movie? I mean, that’s what faith is all about, isn’t it? The belief that God is present even though we can’t get text him, message him or e-mail him, right? If God is constantly our dutiful co-pilot, as is suggested in the film, then faith is actually moot. Who needs belief and faith when bullets can’t touch you?

But here’s the considerable problem the movie’s approach opens up: if God can deliver messages directly to Eli, and render Eli virtually impervious to all but point-blank bullet wounds, he can surely just materialize the Bible on Alcatraz, right? Or, God could have prevented all the Bibles from being burned in the first place if he disapproved of that particular outcome.

In fact, the “history of the world” as depicted in The Book of Eli is baffling and contradictory. There’s a global disaster, and we’re led to believe that every surviving American — even those living in the Bible Belt, burned their Bibles in response. There must be hundreds of millions of such Bibles in this country…and all but one of ‘em get torched. Yet, as I noted above, the Koran and the Talmud both survive.

We can extrapolate from this oddity in the story that the survivors don’t blame a “God” figure for their suffering, but specifically, a Christian God. Why else take it out on the Bible, and not the other religious books? And see, this nugget of information leads to even more problems. If everyone in the post-apocalyptic future has so thoroughly rejected the Bible, how is brandishing one going to grant the despotic Carnegie total control over his citizens?

Now, the people of this future era may be young and naive and living in a world without books, but it was their parents who burned the Bibles, so wouldn’t they have at least some knowledge of it? If, as a parent, you deemed Christianity and the Bible responsible for the wholesale destruction of the Earth, so much so that you had to go on a book-burning tear, wouldn’t you also, you know, tell your children: beware, these beliefs destroyed the planet?

On another tangent, if every Bible on the Earth were indeed burned, wasn’t this God’s plan too? And if Christianity really was the cause of the destruction of the planet, why would Eli want to re-introduce the very thing that hundreds of millions of people — even in the Bible Belt, even devout Christians — massively assessed responsible for the destruction of the planet?

In short, The Book of Eli wants to be a movie about how the world needs more Christianity in it. Yet by the movie’s own storytelling details, Christianity is apparently what destroyed the world in the first place. There’s a whopping narrative contradiction there. This is weak writing.

Scrape the surface of The Book of Eli and you detect how the narrative details don’t make a lick of common sense. A spiritual movie is wonderful, but I would submit that a spiritual movie must work even harder to tell its story in a fashion that conforms to the tenets of our consensus reality. God doesn’t erect actual protective force fields around those he loves, does he? We experience the Divine (if we see the Divine at all) in the little human truths, in an unexpected moment of grace, in the innocence and love of children, etc. That’s an approach I would have preferred; one with a sense of nuance and subtlety.

But The Book of Eli’s approach to religion is unnecessarily broad, and too unambiguous. The movie wants to be about the mystery of faith, but it is so obvious, so callow, so crushing in its depiction of the world, that it actually obliterates the necessity of faith.

This would have been a far stronger (and much more inspiring…) film if it had concerned a man struggling with, and ultimately re-affirming his faith. As it is, the movie is about a man with rock solid certainty that God has spoken to him directly, and who is never challenged in that belief. Eli begins and ends the movie as a Holy Warrior. He doesn’t grow, he doesn’t change.

It’s a creative and imaginative idea to make the archetypal Man with No Name a religious crusader. I just wish The Book of Eli had tread more deeply into the mysteries and profundity of belief and faith instead of presenting certainties that we, as humans, just don’t receive on this troubled, mortal coil. It takes the fun out of an action film to know that God is intervening on one side, and that the result of a war is already decided.

Eli’s book is never opened to us, the audience. It’s slammed shut before we get to read the first page for ourselves.

But golly, the cover is terrific.

CULT MOVIE REVIEW: Inglourious Basterds (2009)

Director Quentin Tarantino may have intentionally mangled the English language with the misspelled title of his latest cinematic effort, Inglourious Basterds (2009), but this prodigious talent speaks the language of film with a perfect accent.

Although Tarantino’s production shares a title (sort of…) with 1978′s The Inglorious Bastards (from director Enzo G. Castellari) there’s not actually much similarity between the two efforts. Both films are set during World War II, and both films concern an important mission behind enemy lines.

After that, leave your expectations at the door. The 1978 film is a low-budget exploitation actioner (with Bo Svenson and Fred Williamson), but Inglorious Basterds is Tarantino’s trademark specialty: art-house exploitation.

In other words, Tarantino doesn’t craft anything remotely like an action yarn here. Instead, Inglourious Basterds is an almost sedentary, deliberately-paced film about personal warfare, not the international, global variety we’ve come to expect from the WWII film. This isn’t Saving Private Ryan (1998). No beaches are stormed. No wartime platitudes are reinforced.

“Looks like the shoe’s on the other foot,” The Powerful and the Powerless in Inglourious Basterds

The backdrop for this 2009 drama is indeed the war effort in general, and a group of American soldiers behind enemy lines, but the guts of the narrative involve feelings of personal disquiet: the overwhelming feeling of powerlessness engendered by the Nazi Regime, and the Basterds’ dedicated attempts to give the Nazis a taste of their own medicine.

Some scholars and pundits have suggested that the film is morally facile, a simple revenge picture that makes the American Basterds (Jewish-American soldiers…) as reprehensible as the Nazis they fight in Europe; but that doesn’t seem legitimately the case.

Tarantino’s focus isn’t necessarily on brutal, bloody violence, but on power, and how it feels to be the party without it. The Basterds in the film, as well as a Jewish cinema owner named Shoshanna (Melanie Laurent), exact violent retribution against the Nazis, it is true. But, oddly — in almost every situation — it feels not like eye-for-an-eye Draconian violence, but rather an assertion or re-assertion of self, or self-actualization, if that’s possible.

This is why, I suspect, the film’s fiery final sequence quotes extensively from De Palma’s Carrie (1976) and the famous sequence at the Prom. Both movies concern the victimized pushed too far, taking back the power for themselves in an apocalyptic showdown.

I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself, however. Inglourious Basterds is a film consisting of five separate, even episodic chapters. The first chapter “Once Upon a Time in Nazi-Occupied France” goes a long way towards establishing the feelings of personal powerlessness the Nazis so ruthlessly exploit.

A dairy farmer who is hiding Jewish refugees in his house is visited on his remote farm by Colonel Hans Landa (Christophe Waltz), who is nicknamed “The Jew Hunter.” Landa gains entry to the house, enjoys a glass of milk, switches the conversation from French to English, and then — without even verbally leveling much of a threat — makes the weeping farmer, LaPadite, surrender his hidden wards. The refugees are then brutally shot down, and only 18-year old Shoshanna escapes the massacre.

The conversation between Landa and LaPadite is lengthy. It goes on and on, and Tarantino holds the scene for a duration approaching twenty minutes. The aspect of this scene that makes it work so splendidly (and makes it increasingly suspenseful as it continues…), is the very thing that remains determinedly unspoken: Landa’s total and complete domination of the poor farmer. LaPadite has no options; no recourse; nowhere even to lodge a complaint. He can’t fight, or he will sacrifice his family. He can’t bargain, either. There’s absolutely nothing to be done. Landa comes into his home, is unfailingly polite and courteous…and is completely in control. The Nazi has no need to flex his muscles (or twirl his metaphorical moustache), to assert his authority. His authority simply…goes without saying.

This powerful and frightening idea recurs in Chapter Three, “German Night in Paris.” Shoshanna, now a cinema owner in France hiding under the name Emmanuelle Mimieux (think Yvette Mimieux), unexpectedly meets Nazi sniper and war hero Zoller (Daniel Bruhl). He is starring in Goebbel’s latest propaganda film, Nation’s Pride, and he quickly devises the notion that Shoshanna’s cinema should host the film’s premiere.

Again: she is not asked about this. Her counsel is not sought. She is not given an out so she can politely demure. Instead, she is escorted to a nearby restaurant and introduced to Joseph Goebbels (Sylvester Groth), who also immediately and unquestioningly assumes her total and complete cooperation. Like Landa in Chapter One, the Nazis here are not over-the-top schemers or brutal torturers for us to sneer at. Instead, they are so confident in their total authority that there’s no need for showy demonstrations (as we would no doubt see in lesser films…).

In the most dramatic example of Shoshanna’s utter powerlessness in the face of the Nazi domination, Hans Landa even gets to dictate to the cinema owner when she should eat her strudel. She is about to take a bite, but he has forgotten to order whip cream. “Wait for the cream,” he utters with a wolfish smile.

It isn’t a request. It’s an order.

Thus, in albeit strange fashion, the Nazis in Inglourious Basterds are more frightening than almost any you’ve ever seen depicted before in a movie. They appear courteous and civil, but that’s only because their domination is unchallenged; unquestioned. These men walk the Earth as Gods: every demand met, every order followed, every desire sated.

From the predicaments of the farmer and Shosanna in their respective chapters, the audience quickly detects how the basic human freedom of choice (even the choice when to eat your dessert) has been removed from those living in territory occupied by the Germans. Tarantino’s selections (in actors; in tone; in holding on a particular scene) all play this idea out adroitly. The scene set in the Tavern is not much different: an S.S. officer strides onto the scene and expects to have his demands for attention met, without question.

The eminently just punchline comes in the film’s valedictory scene (and shot). The leader of the Basterds, Aldo Raines (Brad Pitt) has been forced to cede authority to Landa. Landa thinks that – as usual — he is totally in charge. He has become used to his unlimited, unspoken power. And with one powerful, if small act, Raines questions that assumption….with a knife. It’s not just revenge for the sake of revenge; it’s not bloody for the sake of gore. It’s a lesson, actually, in what freedom represents; and the fear that people feel when that freedom is stolen from them. When Aldo carves swastikas on the foreheads of his enemies, he is questioning what the Nazis believe is unquestionable; their total authority and superiority. Aldo does not kill, but he makes the Nazis experience fear — and powerlessness — for the first time.

“We’re going to make a film. Just for the Nazis.” Homage and Tribute in Tarantino’s Film

Inglourious Basterds also proves intriguing in much the same the fashion as Tarantino’s other films. In other words, the movie functions as a dedicated homage to other war films, and as a tribute to the culture of movies itself.

In ways simple (Aldo Raines = Aldo Ray) and ways complex, Tarantino gets in some edgy commentary here about the power of images; about the power of the medium itself.

Even casting is vitally important. For instance, horror director Eli Roth plays the “golem” nicknamed “The Bear Jew,” the Basterd who brandishes a baseball bat against recalcitrant Nazis.

We already associate Roth with scenes of extreme violence and gore thanks to his role directing (the masterpiece…) Hostel (2005), and so the actor’s participation in what promises to be the film’s most violent scene works commendably to the movie’s advantage. Here comes Eli Roth doing what Eli Roth does best…or so we think.

But Inglourious Basterds is a movie about movies in deeper, more meaningful ways too. A propaganda film, like Goebbel’s “Nation’s Pride,” could conceivably galvanize a demoralized nation, we are meant to understand. It could literally turn around the war, and that’s something that can’t be allowed to happen. How Shoshanna subverts Zoller’s film is one of the film’s highlights; especially since her “phantom edit” plays to what is literally a captive audience.

Likewise, a movie critic like Hicox (Michael Fassbender) could conceivably boast the knowledge to make for an effective undercover agent in France, although a hand signal (not entirely unlike “thumbs up” or “thumbs down“) could also doom him.

And finally, as Inglourious Basterds trenchantly reminds us, a film can be an instrument of propaganda or an instrument of justice. Film might even be, literally, a weapon. Film reels double as the bomb that kills Hitler in the film’s denouement.

And there’s another thing about movies that Tarantino tells us. They have no overriding responsibility to be true to the historical record. I mean…we all know how World War II ended, but Tarantino provides us a more satisfying, fairy tale, movie ending: one in which the powerful are given a lesson in powerlessness, and those without freedom find — even for an instant — liberty’s power.

Inglorious Basterds is not the place to seek historical accuracy; it’s a place to ponder the ways that movies – as propaganda or vehicles of justice/vengeance — can satisfy and offer emotional closure regarding a whole variety of issues. Isn’t it better, really, that a Jewish woman victimized by the Third Reich should bring it down? If we could write our own endings, isn’t this the dramatic, poetic one we’d want? The underdog has her day, and the scales of justice are righted. Since this isn’t real life, why not?

“I think this just might be my masterpiece.” Or “That’s a Bingo.”

Given the importance of movie history and film in Inglorious Basterds, I find it fascinating that the last act in the film quotes so heavily from the work of Brian De Palma.

I mentioned Carrie at the Prom vs. Shoshanna at the Premiere, but it’s much more than that too.

Notice, for instance, that the interior of Shoshanna’s cinema is colored and designed to resemble the palatial interior of Tony Montana’s Miami home in Scarface. There are staircases bracketing both sides of the central hall, with a ledge above — on the second floor — and, finally, a room (in the center of the frame…) leading back to a private domain (office or auditorium).

In Scarface, this grand hall is where Tony goes out in a blaze of glory (“Say Hello to My Little Friend…”). In a very real way, that’s also Shoshanna’s fate.

Both characters also share something else in common: they went from being powerless, to possessing all the power. Only in Tony’s case, he misused and abused that power (through a drug haze). By contrast, our sympathies remain with Shoshanna throughout Inglourious Basterds. She is setting things right (and ending the war…), not committing a cocaine-addled suicide.

Why quote De Palma so extensively here? Well, we know that Carrie is in Tarantino’s top five favorite film list (at least last time I checked). But the images and compositions that recall De Palma are well picked for reasons of theme and recognition too. Both Carrie at the Prom: the victim taking out the victimizers and Tony’s last stand: a staccato suicide by machine gun — embody an important part of our contemporary pop culture lexicon. Carrie is about the effect that cruelty has on a person, even a good person. And Scarface is about power corrupting, absolutely. Shoshanna may be Carrie; and Hitler may be Tony Montana, in some sense..

One of the things that I admire most about Inglourious Basterds is Tarantino’s manner of making the intimate seem epic. This movie is about a big topic indeed (World War II) but it features almost no scenes of battle or any traditional war scenes, for that matter. The film consists mostly of a scene in a farm, in a tavern basement, and, finally, in a cinema. We see no tanks, no infantries on the move, and no impending air strikes.

Instead, Tarantino hammers home his theme of the powerful versus the powerless, and does so with just a handful of very interesting, very human characters. The drama is entirely intimate though, in typical Tarantino fashion, it’s the human behavior is also a bit exaggerated in some caes. In the case of Aldo Raines, I would argue it’s almost cartoonish. But even he reflects something vitally important.

Sometimes you need bravado in the face of a powerful enemy.

Inglourious Basterds reveals that Raines has that bravado in spades, but even moreso, that the film’s director does.