Get Out

Or now you know how black people really feel about white people. This very funny and quite scary movie written and directed by comedian Jordan Peele is a feat of tonality. It can't be easy to make a scary movie funny, and a funny movie scary, but Peele achieves both. Even more admirable than funny and scary is how disturbing and polemical the movie aims to be.
The plot, which has no holes -- rare for a horror movie -- is simple: Rose, a white girl (the very game Allison Williams) takes her black boyfriend Chris (the excellent Daniel Kaluuya) to meet her parents (the great Catherine Keener and Bradley Whitford), somewhere deep in leafy, tranquil suburbia. Peele's hypothesis, which is shared by Chris's trepidation but not by Rose's enthusiasm, is that nothing good can come of that.
If you happen to be black, merely walking through the most bucolic white suburb can be fraught with menace. Rose talks back to a police officer in a way that could get her boyfriend tasered, beaten to a pulp, shot, or all of the above, and the officer just lets her go. This sets the tone for the rest of the film.
And then you have the well-meaning white people. They, and this is one of the movie's sharpest jabs, are the ones to worry about. Because Black people know where you stand if you are a wearer of white sheets. But if you are a hippyish wealthy liberal who insists on hugging you and saying "my man" every three words, they may not be so sure.
I once went to a Christmas brunch in a wealthy town in upstate New York and the white people there made the party guests in Get Out seem like a bunch of hippies. I have never felt more out of place anywhere, but that's another story. Peele gets it right, from their terrible Talbots outfits to their clueless, condescending bonhomie which includes an unhealthy obsession about Black male athletic and sexual prowess. Worse, the two Black people employed by Rose's parents (Betty Gabriel and Marcus Henderson, both great) are docile, polite servants, incapable of opinion or volition, let alone rebellion. There is something weird about them. It is later on that we realize with horror what that is.
Peele brilliantly translates racial issues into the tropes of a horror film. Horror films are about our deepest subconscious fears. This begs the question as to why nobody has explored the subject of American racism through horror before. Does it hit too close to home? Get Out certainly does, and that's what makes it so successful. Its multiple layers of satire work in parallel with the racial terror.
If the first part of the movie is about the frisson of social racial discomfort, the second part leaps into the horror scenario. This is symbolic, psychological territory that posits that Black lives may not matter to white people who continue to see black people as expendable property, regardless of how liberal they pretend to be. It's inflammatory, and I would say, timely and necessary stuff, which Peele leavens with a hilarious subplot involving a T.S.A. agent (the magnificent LilRel Howery).
To Peele's credit, the plot has no groaners. A big chunk of exposition explains why bad things happen to Chris, and there's a convenient coincidence, but everything is deftly handled through humor and solid plotting, and it works dramatically. Everything that is set up at the beginning is paid off neatly at the end. And you do not see the twists coming.
But what stays with you is the feeling of something deeply awry, of being all alone and out of place, of not really connecting with anybody, of having to decode and let pass all the crazy, uncomfortable stuff people say to you. Have you ever been in a house in the middle of nowhere in which you cannot connect, nor have anything in common with the people in it? That in itself is a horror. Is this a metaphor for how it feels like to live in America when you're Black? This movie is full of such potent, accurate metaphors.
There have been complaints that the movie is anti-white, but people need to get a hold of themselves. It's a broad satire that doesn't pull any punches. Get Out is a funny but seriously provocative polemic about race relations in America, cleverly disguised as entertainment.

Movie Bites

So many movies, so little time. Here are some mini-reviews of things I' ve seen recently:

The Measure of A Man

I recommend this small, powerful film in which the hero (the great Vincent Lindon) is a guy who loses his job and is willing to do anything to have one, until his conscience says "enough". It takes place mostly in a kind of French WalMart. Director Stephane Brizé wrests nail-biting suspense from a conversation with the guy in the unemployment bureau, from confrontations between security guys in the store and people whom they catch stealing. No swelling string section when the hero stops at nothing to do the heroic thing. Just the relentless fight of every man, every day, for dignity.

Krisha

A heroic fuck up, Krisha, the title character of this strange and powerful movie, is a larger than life walking disaster, played with ferocious, self-destructive panache by Krisha Fairchild. Director Trey Edward Shults, who wrote, directed, produced and acts as Krisha's son, uses his family members and recombines them to tell the story of a Thanksgiving dinner from hell thanks to the arrival of this middle-aged woman whom the family views with condescension and very little patience. And for good reason. She abandoned her son, she's a drunk, and she is way too long in the tooth for her aimless, needy, self-indulgent antics. Her fragility belies an almost industrial-grade energy for self-sabotage. You know that when a humongous turkey is introduced, and she is in charge of it, things are going to go very, very wrong. Shults weaves this tale with equal doses of dark humor (not that the other family members are that sane), family horror, and true heartbreak. It's all somehow wonderfully cathartic.

Miles Ahead

Don Cheadle is fantastic as Miles Davis in this quirky, invented episode in the great trumpeter's life, which Cheadle himself directed and co-wrote. While I understand Cheadle's resistance to make this a conventional biopic, and his aim to capture Davis' unruly spirit (which he nails, here and there), the plot is too silly and it conspires against Cheadle's push to show Davis's anarchic side. Still, after this year's Oscars so white brouhaha, here's a very deserving performance.

 

Green Room

Jeremy Saulnier's genre exercise in horror makes absolutely no sense and wastes an interesting premise (a touring rock band falls prey to a skinhead militia), in this tepid, arty slaughterhouse flick. There is no suspense, just dull spurts of mangled flesh. It's nicely shot and is peppered with dry humor but nothing is believable, much less the elegant Patrick Stewart, sporting his usual plummy British accent as the urbane leader of the neo-nazis.

The Invitation

A truly disquieting and unnerving movie that is undone by a mostly amateurish cast, The Invitation is a dark little tale of cultish obsession that takes place in the Hollywood Hills, a perfect little metaphor for the obsessive LA self-improvement culture. A couple is invited to dinner with old friends whom they haven't seen since a terrible loss happened. The evening turns out to be more than an innocent dinner party. Director Karyn Kusama displays a very good hand at making this evening as creepy and uncomfortable as possible. She is aided by the great John Carroll Lynch as a guest with a quietly menacing air, and by convincing performances by Logan Marshall-Green, Tammy Blanchard and Lindsay Burdge as the hippie chick from hell. It's really too bad that the rest of the photogenic cast cannot muster the chops to make it feel like they've actually known each other for years. Still, the overall icky feeling and a fantastic twist at the end make it an interesting option among horror films.

The Witch

With the words "A New England Folktale", director-writer Robert Eggers sends us into a world of potent archetypal imagery that slowly and effectively creeps under our skin. A devout man (Ralph Ineson) and his family are banished from a community of Puritan settlers and they move to the edge of ominously looming woods. Soon weird things start happening. But they are not the sort of weird things we're used to in horror movies. This is not about ghosts or haunted houses. It's about the ancient iconography of evil and in particular of witches, which were all the rage in 17th century New England.
The family is vulnerable to evil for several reasons. Although concrete reasons are not given, the father is expelled from the community because of the sin of pride. Apparently, he feels these people are not pious enough. He looks like a dead ringer for Jesus Christ, which is no accident. He may be devout but it turns out that, as most people, he is human and prone to deception. More dangerously, he has a lovely young daughter, Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy), who is becoming a woman, and so she is vulnerable to be a conduit for evil. She is the very image of purity and does nothing remotely inculpating, yet horrible things happen around her. The movie lays bare the raw symbolism of the idea of witches, which has to do with the fear of female power, from virginal purity, to ripe seduction and wrinkled old age.
I kept thinking, "these are the people who founded this country": inordinately righteous, and superstitious, prone to mass hysteria on account of their obsession with the devil. They are not too different from the speaking in tongues evangelicals who try to impose their judgmental worldview on everybody else today. But this is not really a movie about politics. The most original aspect of The Witch is that it is about a system of beliefs and a set of myths and symbols that we have almost forgotten, but that took hold of people's consciences, imaginations, and their subconscious minds for centuries. Nowadays, the powerful images of folk tales trickle down to us in watered down and almost comical horror movie tropes, or have been defanged by the likes of Walt Disney, who stripped them of their powerful sexual and psychological connotations and rendered them in pastel colors. Eggers brings back the originals with a vengeance.
Is Thomasine a witch or not? She protests her innocence at every turn, but she also exudes a quality of mischief and sensuality that could well be a sign of perfidy. She has lustful, or at least, troubled dreams and in a pivotal scene, she acts rather seductively towards Caleb, her younger brother (the excellent Harvey Scrimshaw). She is not ashamed of her beauty and her growing power, and these may be subtle but undeniable signs of her corruption. According to Christian beliefs, the way the devil works is by shifting shapes and taking the appearance of goodness. We don't really know because Eggers sticks to the ambiguity of whether she is a witch who orchestrates chaos, or she is a pure, innocent creature who is the victim of very bad mojo.
If the movie takes its time establishing the daily life of the family, the moment bad things happen, they increase gradually to a bizarre pitch. But nothing is predictable and shocks do not come at set intervals, which is wonderfully unnerving. One of the most unsettling, if not downright scary scenes, involves a possession that makes the one in The Exorcist look like a cheesy Vegas extravaganza.
And the use of metaphor is beautiful. As he writhes in demonic possession, Caleb vomits, not day-glo green bile but a fully formed apple, an ancient symbol of sin.
If you know your iconography of evil, the sight of Black Philip, a horned goat, is a dead giveaway that the devil has made itself at home. Because it is a folk tale, everything is metaphor: the woods, Thomasin, a rabbit, an apple, the father. But because it is a movie, it feels real and it plays with our sense of reality. Are supernatural things happening, or are these the visions and dreams of an impressionable Thomasine? Is the family in the clutches of mass hysteria?
In most horror movies, at the end of the scare fest order is restored, goodness wins the day, or the door is left open for a sequel. This is one of the few horror movies that doesn't end with a return to normalcy. This is very unsettling, not only because evil is triumphant, but because it makes us notice how inured we are to overused storytelling clichés.
The Witch is subtlely creepy. The cinematography by Jarin Blaschke is beautiful, with only candlelight or natural light throughout, and the use of ominous camera pans works its scary magic.
If I have qualms, they are that perhaps Eggers is a little too obsessed with authenticity and that the characters speak with accents that are hard to understand. Although the music by Mark Korven is applied mostly effectively, there is a moment at the beginning where it stacks the deck unnecesarily. And some of the motivational cogs of the plot were not clear to me. But Eggers has a firm grasp on creating powerful, disturbing imagery. He understands that this archetypal imagery is very basic, but that's where its power lies. I was very impressed with the costume design, with the coarseness and cut of the clothes, and it turns out that prior to this, he was a costume and production designer. This is a very solid debut feature.

Crimson Peak

I felt sorry for the actors. Guillermo del Toro's mashup of every gothic storyline known to man is only terrifying in its cheesiness. I have never been a fan of Del Toro's excessively corny fantasies, and this one takes the cake. A goulash with chunks of plots from Cinderella, Jane Eyre, vampire stuff, ghost stories and heavy borrowing from movies like The Shining, Crimson Peak is heavy-handed and overstuffed.
Where to begin? Young Edith Cushing (as in Peter Cushing, one supposes) consorts with ghosts. The ghost of her dead mother appears to her with a warning about bewaring of Crimson Peak, whatever that means. Edith (Mia Wasikowska, a good actress that seems to be stuck forever in the 19th century), soon falls in love with the dashing and charming Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston, valiantly giving it his all). He has a somber sister, Lucille, (Jessica Chastain, who smartly understands that the only way to go is camp) who is suspiciously jealous of Edith. They live in a remote and ghastly house somewhere in England, where they manufacture red clay or red pigment that comes from clay, the color of blood. I won't go into the intricacies of a plot that Del Toro doesn't bother clarifying. All I can say is that one look at that dilapidated mansion out of the Chapultepec amusement park, and Edith should have either redecorated or run for her life. That she does neither is a sign that the director has no sense of humor, or of human nature.
The movie is a hodgepodge of ideas that he didn't really think through. I was convinced, for instance, that this was a solidly PG-13 movie until a ridiculous sex scene and then a plot about incest that seems to have sprung from the feverish imagination of a 14-year old. The motivations of the Sharpes are unclear: do they need money to keep the family business going, or they need blood because they are evil? Beats me. I defy anyone to recount the plot of this movie coherently.
Del Toro's ghosts look like the kind of Halloween decorations you buy at J.C. Penney's. They are too cheesy to be really scary. I pined for movies like The Innocents or even The Sixth Sense, in which the apparitions are deceptively real and truly spooky, not ghoulish puppets that are ridiculous rather than scary. Apparitions that are manipulated with clanging sound effects are not honest scares, and this is the cardinal sin of this movie. A horror movie may be cheesy and improbable and stupid, but if it manages to scare us, it has done its job. That is not the case here. If people jump, it is not because Del Toro knows how to stage a scary scene, it's because he uses loud sound effects instead.
The production design is meaninglessly cluttered, the costume design is an exaggerated parody of Victorian dress; even the nightgowns have puffed sleeves. The wigs are outrageously phony, the lighting makes everything look like a garish disco in the 1980's.  The somber elegance of real Victorian gothic, the perverse stylishness of an Edward Gorey are absent here.
I was reminded of Mexican telenovelas. Chastain, in particular, seems to be channeling the evil villainess Catalina Creel in Cuna De Lobos (Cradle of Wolves, a fabulously campy Mexican soap from the 80s). I also thought of cheesy Mexican horror films like El Santo Vs The Zombies. It is not inconceivable that these are some of Del Toro's influences. The question is whether he knows this. He seems to take his own cheesiness too seriously.

It Follows

It doesn't really. A collection of scattered, potentially interesting ideas fizzle out in this silly horror movie. The premise is that something scary is unleashed against you when you have sex. In real life this may range from HPV to gonorrhea to herpes to AIDS, all way scarier than the people (zombies? undead? It's not clear) who appear to be following the poor horny fools who shag. Imagine if you took these sexually invoked zombies to instill sexual panic in the general population. A disaster movie about abstinence! That would be interesting. But It Follows sticks to a bunch of inarticulate, generic young adults and wastes every opportunity that its own premise promises.
I was wondering if the easy way out from this horror would be to simply use a condom, but the movie never addresses the possibility, as it doesn't really care about the rules it sets up and then changes at will. Character and motivation are never established, so we don't understand why the heroine of the movie makes crazy choices, for instance, as when in the throes of sheer terror she decides to run to a park alone at night and sit on a swing. Unless there are good reasons for the bewildering choices characters make in horror movies, the audience is distracted by the whys. As in, why are you so stupid?
Writer/director David Robert Mitchell toys with the disturbing notion that this post-sexual haunting may be a cruel prank, a sort of urban legend that drives people crazy, since no one else can see the followers. What if it is all in their heads, a sort of suggested hysteria? That's the movie I would have loved to see. Psychological terror is always far scarier and suggestive than the supernatural. The director flashes this idea at the audience but soon abandons it, as he does every potentially interesting story turn. He skims over the juiciest parts of his own premise.
It Follows has all the elements of a classic horror movie (and too many of its well-worn tropes) yet Mitchell doesn't have the attention span and the focus to carry them out. For instance, he establishes that the girl has two creepy teenage neighbors who like to spy on her. But he underestimates their potential to confuse and soon forgets them. The movie is full of such arbitrary and absurd nonsequiturs.
Still, it is fun to find yourself scanning the frame for these shapeshifters, who sometimes look like normal people, sometimes are naked, sometimes look like ghouls. It would be nice to know who they are: the bereft after sex? The people who don't have any? It's a mystery.
It is fun to not know who is real and who isn't, and Mitchell handles this particularly well in one scene. But then random stuff starts happening and one loses faith in a movie that does not follow its own rules. There is one effectively staged, truly scary moment, achieved with nothing but the smart use of a tall guy and excellent timing.  The rest is a lot of aimless padding and lazy writing.
The overwrought, manipulative music score doesn't help. There are a couple of well-staged moments (ripoffs of Polanski and David Fincher) within disorganized sequences, but the movie makes no sense. The ending is a total dud. I didn't follow it.

What We Do In The Shadows

Probably the sweetest vampire movie ever made (and certainly the best vampire movie made with Kickstarter), What We Do In The Shadows is reminiscent of Roman Polanski's The Fearless Vampire Killers, but it is more of this day and age. It is a very funny, well made documentary about a trio of vampire roommates living in New Zealand, written, acted and directed by Jermaine Clement and Taika Waititi, both from the unparalleled Flight of The Conchords.
A documentary camera crew gets the vampires' dispensation to follow them around in their daily, or rather nightly lives.
Viago (Waititi) is an adorable 18th century romantic who is a clean freak, and the den mother. Deacon (Jonathan Burgh) is the rebellious one, a bit of a slob with a Nazi past who likes to knit, and Vladislav (Clement) is like an Elvis figure (he looks like singer Engelbert Humperdinck) with a fading penchant for torture. Petyr is a dead ringer for Nosferatu and the oldest of them all. He is not very social.
They bicker about house chores and endure the complicated rules that govern them (aversion to sunlight, stakes, crucifixes, etc), at odds with life in modern Wellington.
The vampires, whom one immediately feels like calling "the guys", are fully individuated characters with peculiar quirks and feelings. They are friends, they had girlfriends, they like people. They are desperate to do certain things, like get into nightclubs. They are not unduly ravenous, and at least Viago is a considerate eater, although for a clean freak, he's a bit messy. Some humans (like Jackie, a housewife and submissive servant of Deacon), want to be bitten so that they can be immortal, but vampires are fickle and they don't always oblige. Some, like Nick, get bitten and learn the hard way that they cannot eat chips anymore and they cannot go around telling everyone they are vampires. There is also a human called Stu (sounds like Stew) who's Nick's best friend and who is almost irresistibly plump and juicy. A clique of werewolves looks suspiciously like hipsters.
The tone is smart and sweet, and many delightful and imaginative details, visual gags and fine jokes bear repeated viewings. It is no wonder that this movie has won several audience awards at festivals. It has a lovely spirit, without vulgarity, no gross, lame humor and is surprisingly well made, for the small budget. It has a great music score and it also makes wonderful use of the ancient paraphernalia of evil. And of snapshots taken through the guys' eternal lives.
According to medieval representations, the guys are supposed to be super bad, but they are adorbs. What We Do In The Shadows is far more subtle, smart, and knowing than most American comedies, and at the same time it is super accessible, a testament to the fact that you don't need millions of dollars to make a superior comedy (or any movie, for that matter). A real charmer.

The Babadook

Horror movies are more directly metaphorical than perhaps any other genre. They express through overt symbols or tales the fears, traumas, repressions, and terrible fantasies that lie within us. Those of us who love horror movies, who love sitting in the dark enjoying these little sufferings, know that to abandon yourself to an invented fear is deliciously cathartic.
Embrace what you fear is the unspoken mantra of scary movies and it is smartly and sensitively demonstrated by this lovely, scary Australian film from Jennifer Kent; a powerful illustration of the horrors of repressed grief.
It is anchored by a spectacular performance from Essie Davis as Amelia, a young widow who lives alone with her son Samuel (the angelic Noah Wiseman). Samuel is a bit of a weirdo, a quirky child who always speaks his mind and has a robust imagination. He is scared of monsters and has fashioned ways of protecting himself and his mom from them. 
One night, Amelia finds an odd nighttime story to read him called The Babadook (reminiscent of Edward Gorey on steroids), and she reads it to Samuel in bed.
Soon enough things start going bump in the night. Samuel has been obsessing with monsters all along and Amelia is at the end of her tether with him. Now she starts imagining things too.
Kent keeps the ambiguity alive as things get scarier and weirder. Is there a real presence in the house? Is Samuel a bad seed, or is sweet Amelia losing her mind? The psychology of the characters is very sound. They have been through a terrible ordeal of loss. The child is acting out on some very primal fears and guilt, and so is his mom. Her hubris is to pretend that after what she has been through everything is all right.
Kent is great at creating a sense of dread in the audience but also at highlighting the power of metaphor in almost every scene. The movie unleashes a catalog of commonplace horror tropes. Beds shake and invisible powers drag people by the feet, but there is more convincing poetry (and terror) in the source of the fear that is gripping them both.
Good acting is not usual in horror films, but Essie Davis' gives one of the best performances in the genre. She changes mercurially, from a shy, lonely nurse at a nursing home, to the victim of a violent nervous breakdown. The movie would not be as chilling if her story and her veracity were not as grounded in psychological reality.

The Conjuring

Or how $13 million make everything better. This horror film by James Wan shows a marked improvement of his skills since Insidious ($1.5 million). It has a robust budget, a better cast, it is better directed and better written and it succeeds in having a good amount of chills and scares. It is based on the real-life exploits of Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga), apparently some very busy demonologists, and a case of a possessed house in the 70s.  
The Conjuring is too frantic when it could benefit from a more sustained, lingering pace; but the first third, when a family moves into a remote house and things start going bump in the night, is effectively scary because we don't see anything. When we start seeing things in horror movies, the ghosts, spirits, and demons always seem cheesy and they break the spell. You know they are actors in makeup and special effects. But if you can't really see what's behind the doors, that is quite unnerving.
The camera work and the editing are very effective, and in some instances beautiful. Wan's problem may be that he has too many ideas, too many ways to spring up the scares. Sometimes the camera pans unbearably slowly, a la Kubrick, sometimes it is deranged and handheld. And the movie entwines two separate plots: the story of the Perron family and their house from hell, and the story of the Warrens and their work cleansing houses of evil spirits. If you can suspend your skepticism that the only way to fight demons is with holy water, wooden crosses and the Vatican's blessing, this movie is bound to scare you. This storyline raised a lot of questions for me. Do demons only attack Catholics? Could you fight Satan with a star of David, a crescent moon or a statue of Buddha? Anywho, I could believe that the house where the Perrons (Ron Livingston and Lili Taylor -- so good to have her back) move in with their five daughters is possessed by evil spirits; I'm not so sure about Satan and his distaste for the Catholic faith. 
Still, it is interesting how good actors can raise the level of a horror movie just by showing up. Case in point is Vera Farmiga as Lorraine Warren, whose performance is so grounded and convincing, she roots the movie in reality. As does Lili Taylor, as Mrs. Perron and her excellent five daughters.  I was grateful that at some point someone finally suggests moving out, which is what I would have done the first ten minutes upon arrival and at the first hint of freezing cold and the smell of rotting meat, but here there are good reasons for having to stick it out: 1) apparently, those pesky demons will follow you to the nearest Holiday Inn. 2) and, much better, this working class family has no money. They can't even afford a hotel. They have put everything they have into buying this hellhole. They're screwed. 
The Conjuring has some story problems and it is too action oriented, but I have faith that Mr. Wan, as he matures, will come up with an unbearably scary film, if his good hand at terror continues growing steady. For a typical horror film of today, The Conjuring is a good, scary bet.

Style Gets In The Way

Simon Killer

I really wanted to like Simon Killer, a film by Antonio Campos, from the team that created the very creepy Martha Marcy May Marlene.
The premise is promising. A young American man, (Brady Corbet, excellent, when you can see his face) is drifting in Paris after breaking up with his longtime girlfriend. He is lonely and brooding. He's bad news. I expected a tense, atmospheric film about a guy who loses his marbles and causes mayhem. And it is, albeit directed in the most pretentious way possible, thereby doing a disservice to the actors and to the story. The cinematography is deliberately precious and exasperating. Every scene is too long, what we see of Corbet's committed performance mostly lies in looking at the back of his head or his headless torso. The guy is in Paris. I don't expect a travelogue and visions of the Eiffel Tower, but it drives me crazy when filmmakers think that the only way to capture a character's alienation is by showing us only the nape of his neck, or by shooting everything at navel level.
I think about Roman Polanski's The Tenant, which is also about a guy who is losing his marbles in the City of Lights. There is not much physically of Paris in that film, but the little ironic details, the corner cafe with the surly barkeep, the apartment building with the creaky stairs, the nosy neighbors with their dogs and baguettes, give you a concentrated sense of Paris, and more importantly, they make the protagonist feel even more disconnected and adrift from everything and everyone. If the camera never opens up, there is less contrast, less irony and less drama. You care less about the character. The style calls attention to itself, and takes the audience out of the story and into tedious despair.
Simon Killer is too self-conscious, too deliberately hermetic. The plot is a bit contrived. Simon falls in with a hooker, Mati Diop, (also excellent, if underwritten). A wonderful scene where he orchestrates his own beating in order to insinuate himself into her life, gives you a chilling glimpse of how manipulative he is, and what he is capable of. I wish the rest of the movie was as sharp as this scene. Instead, Campos chooses a contrived plot development about the couple trying to extort money from embarrassed johns (do the French care?) and he also chooses to dwell on the sex, which is alienated and semi-violent and which feels as deliberately "provocative" as the rest of the movie. Worse, I had a feeling that the director was getting off on the violence against this woman, and that he lost the way of his story to direct his loving gaze at a bunch of sleaze.
Simon Killer does, however, have a fantastic soundtrack. The music playing on Simon's earphones is modern and happy and this provides a haunting contrast with his increasing isolation.

Upstream Color

This movie by Shane Carruth makes Simon Killer look as mainstream as an afternoon special. Here the style gets even more in the way of a very complicated story about humans being poisoned with some stuff coming from worms or pigs or both. I couldn't really tell because Carruth does all kinds of narrative jigsaw puzzles but steadfastly refuses to explain or establish anything. The movie is nicely shot, but the two main actors are bland ciphers we know nothing about (Carruth plays the male lead; he is no actor). After a while, I lost hope of ever trying to understand, not what was going on, but the point. The movie seems to be an environmental horror and a love story (between cyborgs; the couple is as exciting as two cold fish). These two seem to have something in common. Both seem to have been infected by whatever it is that is making humans have no willpower (worms or pigs or both). They never talk about it. She looks at his scars and does not think to ask, "Gee, you too? What's up with that?" At some point they hide in a bathtub. I never understood why. Two minutes later they are in bed, unconcerned with hiding anymore. At some point, my patience deserted me and I left.
I have noticed that deliberately obtuse movies such as this, with broken sequences, inexplicable behavior by characters and random surrealistic touches, tend to be described as poetic. This is an insult to poetry. True poetry requires structural and dramatic rigor, it requires enormous coherence and it is by nature, articulate. It requires getting out of the filmmakers' head, and into real human feeling.

The cardinal sin of movies is boredom. A close second, pretentiousness (they are closely related). I prefer to be bored than to have to sit through pretentiousness. It kills my soul.

Mama

A promising, well made, if uneven movie by Andrés Muschietti, Mama has a lot of great ideas, but it's muddled by too much reliance on fantasy and contrived plot points. The good news is that, as scary movies go, this one at least has a very interesting subtext: it's not just about two yahoos in a house with a ghost and a video camera. It's about the dark side of mothering, a very scary subject.
Two feral girls are found and adopted by their uncle and it turns out that they have survived five years in an abandoned cabin (with fabulous mid-century furniture, somehow) by eating cherries, because "someone" has been taking care of them. The kids are fantastic, in particular, the younger creepy one (Isabelle Nélisse). They move like strange animals and are utterly terrifying, although they are not evil in themselves. The uncle is married to a rocker (Jessica Chastain, trying hard to look punkish), who doesn't have a maternal bone in her body. As they move to a new house, they realize that "Mama" has followed them and wants them back. Some of the movie is truly creepy. Muschietti relies too much in jolts of sound effects to make you jump in your seat, but there are a couple of truly spine tingling moments. In the best scene of the movie, the little one, Lily, is cheerfully playing tug of war with someone unseen, while Jessica Chastain is oblivious to the presence of a very heavy spirit in the kids' room. It is loving, innocent play, yet it is terrifying. Also moving is the fact that the older sister, Victoria, realizes that she is not so attached to Mama anymore, that she rather have the consolation of a flesh and blood mother, and the warmth of a normal home on Earth, and this causes her real, devastating pain, as well as fear. Lily, meanwhile, is completely transfixed by and attached to Mama, as she seems to also be more comfortable in the world of shadows than in life. This division between people who have life affirming tendencies and those who seek comfort in darkness is beautifully rendered. It is very poignant, and rings true that it is the youngest one who can't detach from the ghost's love. Her loss at a very early age has stunted her, and in many ways she is still a baby. The visceral feelings that maternal love evokes are a great subject for a scary story. Yet Mama misses many opportunities to further explore these attachments, or the way the girls react to their new lives. Instead it relies on facile plot turns and wasted characters. An embittered aunt who wants custody of the girls makes a third maternal character and I was hoping she would be yet another source of pain, the greedy wanna be mother, but she only serves as a plot device for a rather contrived ending. As for Mama herself, her story is harrowing enough to make her haunt parentless children forever. If only her ghost would remain a suggested shadow, a rustle, instead of an increasingly garish special effects creature, with an uncanny resemblance to Julie Taymor, were she stretched on a rack. But having Guillermo Del Toro as a producer usually means that some cheesy creature (as well as deeply overwrought music) will make an appearance, despite the fact that the suggested, the ominous, and the unseen are always a million times creepier and scarier.
I must confess, I don't care for fantasy. I avoid Hobbits, Harry Potters and Middle Earths like the plague. In a similar vein to Del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth, Mama aims at fantastic horror, but the more fantastic it is, the less horrifying.

Les Miserables

This is what happened to my soul in the two hours and thirty eight minutes that I endured, like a  prisoner in Guantanamo, sitting in a theater with nothing but darkness coming from the screen. My soul ran for its life and hid in a remote, safe place where the asphyxiating ugliness of this movie could not strangle it.
I sat there trying to shield myself from the ineptitude, the dreariness, the forced bathos, the insincerity, the repetitiveness; from the costly futility of the entire doomed enterprise. Some doomed enterprises, like Cloud Atlas, have a shred of vitality fanned by their own belief in their ridiculous convictions. You can tell everybody involved knows it's a major dud, but they soldier on. This movie doesn't even have that. It is exhausted and exhausting and it has the energy of a funeral procession for someone deeply unloved. People in it behave like they are going to the gallows, everything is a last gasp. Hence all that crying, I assume. There is no joy, no fun and no life in it.
I could feel nothing but dread (and lethal boredom). Dread at the thought of Hugh Jackman opening his mouth to sing in a register that threatened to break his vocal chords, and my ears. Ordinarily, Jackman is a charming, talented performer, but this movie has the dubious distinction of making you loathe him. It also has the distinction of making you never want to read Victor Hugo's original novel. It is unfathomable to see this film and infer that the source material is any good. This is how criminally bad this movie is. The writers-composers took what is known to be a good story, and turned it into dreck. Tom Hooper's bizarre clumsiness as a director delivers the coup de grace. It murders the story.
I felt dread and pity at the sight of Russell Crowe, looking like he'd rather be waterboarded with piss, than stand once more in that stupid parapet with his tiny little nothing of a voice, and have to sing those dreadful songs. Russell Crowe singing is like "Garbo Talks!"; not a good idea. Whatever macho mystique the man had has been vanquished by his participation in this movie. If I were him, I'd be throwing phones at the producers.
I felt dread at the effluvia of snot and tears coming of Anne Hathaway's face as she sang, or rather as she heaved, with an unseemly, vulgar, and totally unprofessional lack of control, through that fucking song from hell (they are all the same, and they are all infernal).
When the miraculous face of Eddie Redmayne appeared, I almost fainted with relief. Soon he was crying rivers too, though he can sing. Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter, the official Victorian wench of filmdom, were charged with bringing enforced jollity, and they tried, but even their efforts seemed leaden.
Les Miserables is a horror movie from which there is no escape. It is like the cult hit The Room, but with money and stars. That is, it is the un-cinema; everything that a movie should not be. It seems to have been made by someone who doesn't know how to frame a shot, how to light a scene, how to make people move in space; let alone choose people who can sing. For some amateurish reason, Tom Hooper, a man who apparently is deaf and blind, decided to frame all the characters in extreme close up. This is a movie with no backdrops. You can't see anything beyond anyone's nostrils. Paris looks like a mound of gray turds.
The music is like an interminable barn dance but in a heroic key. Yet it has the gall to treat itself like an opera, so instead of talking between "songs", there is recitative. This is the one instance in which I was praying for the action scenes to happen, for bayonets to pierce bodies and cannons to explode, so that people would stop singing, and put us, Les Miserables in the audience, out of our misery.

Out and About

Yours truly is happy to collaborate with Out.com writing about, what else, Movies!
Here's my first dispatch about 5 great movies you may have missed this year and five more coming down the pike.  I am happy to report, my post, which appeared today, is no. 6 in the most popular list! Enjoy!

Hitchcock

Or a sunny fairy tale about the genesis of Psycho, of all things. This enjoyable morsel by Sacha Gervasi (ANVIL! The Story of Anvil), improbably turns the story of how one of the greatest artists in the history of film made of one of the scariest movies of all time into a sweet little fable with a happy ending. If it wasn't for the two gigantic actors who portray Alfred Hitchcock and his wife, Alma Reville, it could have bordered on the ludicrous. But it is a joy to watch Anthony Hopkins and Helen Mirren deliver the goods, separately and as a long lasting couple. Hopkins doesn't look anything like Hitchcock, and his cumbersome make up still doesn't make him look anything like Hitchcock, except for the girth. But his characterization is dead on. He is as hilarious as Hitchcock was in his eccentric "master of suspense" persona. For Alfred Hitchcock was a brand. He was as much of a genius in the creation of his own marketing as he was as a film director. Hopkins delivers the quicksilver wit, with extensive pauses between words and a full beat before striking the punch line, just like the original. He is a hoot. His Hitchcock is at once grand caricature and something smaller, more vulnerable, more complicated. A very controlling man, a huge child with enormous, but being British, equally repressed appetites (which explain the rounded figure), a famous director who found himself wielding enormous power, particularly over his female actresses. I don't know if its a trick of camera and makeup or if it is Anthony Hopkins who achieves a chilling distance in his gaze, but this aloofness, this feeling that Hitchcock was always an alien in Hollywood, makes the portrayal rise above caricature.
There is a lot that could be really hokey in the movie, like the sequences where Hitchcock imagines conversations with Ed Gein (Michael Wincott), the real life serial killer on whom the book "Psycho" was based. But Gervasi sustains a lighthearted tone, immeasurably helped by pretty solid casting. He gingerly mentions the dark aspects of Hitchcock's personality without really investigating them, but they are there, more as discomfiting quirks than as truly sinister traits: Hitchcock's obsession with his actresses (the mistreatment of Tippi Hedren in The Birds was yet to come); his emotional blackmail of Vera Miles (Jessica Biel); the way he supposedly got Janet Leigh (a good Scarlett Johansson) to scream her heart out in the legendary shower scene.
But the movie also belongs to the unsung hero in Hitchcock's life, Alma, his wife and creative collaborator, who apparently was in no small part responsible for some of her husband's most brilliant artistic choices, like insisting on using Bernard Herrmann's score over the shower scene, or suggesting he kill off the leading lady before page 30, a first in the history of film. Always toiling in the shadows, but a known secret inside the industry, Alma was a woman of her time, making herself and her talents disappear in favor of the big man. We are reminded that she was once his boss; by this stage, they had been making movies for about 40 years. They were old fashioned in their mores, yet adventurous and visionary as artists. There is a very poignant turn in Alma's story as she is seduced by a colleague (Danny Huston), only to discover that, like Hitch, he is only using her for her brilliance. Mirren then has a controlled, beautiful meltdown where she finally reads Hitch the riot act that almost elicited cheers from the audience. It is a beautiful speech, writerly wishful thinking, and she nails it with such force, grace and skill, it's a cri de coeur for all unsung females who support and even improve their partners' celebrated achievements, with little recognition. Or for all those average, yet valuable women who are eclipsed by more gorgeous ones.
Hitchcock is also, and most enjoyably, about making an independent movie. A famed director, at the peak of his career, finds himself trying to get a movie made that no one will touch with a ten foot pole. Even Hitchcock, who was at the time the most famous film director in the world, could not get financing for what was seen as schlocky material, anathema to casting megawatt stars like a Cary Grant or a Grace Kelly.
At the peak of his career, fascinated by the horrid Ed Gein story, Hitchcock decided to make a B-movie, with second tier stars, for a very low budget, which he financed himself. This was the genesis of Psycho, one of the most revolutionary films of all time. In the few scenes involving Ed Gein and his sleazy serial killer grotesquerie, it implies the genius of Hitchcock in turning a seedy story into an elegant, black and white masterpiece of horror.  I wish this film explored more what made Hitchcock a great artist. I applaud that it gives Alma Reville her due, but it cheats Hitchcock of his own genius. We never really see him exercise the elegance of his creative thought, or his masterful craftsmanship.
I can't decide if Gervasi's lighthearted choice is cool or ridiculous, but it is great fun. Hitchcock is a triumphant comedy about a persevering artist, and a lot of the joy in it comes from relishing in hindsight the happy outcome of the story. We are all thrilled by Psycho, by the fact that Bernard Herrmann's music and that shower scene are now universal icons, by how Alfred Hitchcock, a prolific artist, continued making fresh masterpieces in his old age (The Birds, Frenzy), almost as if Psycho had given him a second wind.

The Bay

Or nature's payback time. It is unfortunate that this environmental horror flick by Barry Levinson opened on the same week that Sandy ravaged the East Coast. There were exactly six people at the screening I saw (too soon?) but this movie deserves a much wider audience. It is in the vein of all those supposedly found footage screamers like the Paranormal Activity series, (same producers), but the difference is that there is a good director at the helm. You can see Barry Levinson's nimble hand in the great direction of actors and in the realistic delivery of dialogue, which is one of his trademarks. Usually these movies have wooden B-listers who can't act their way out of a paper bag. Nobody in The Bay is well known, but they are all solid character actors, and it makes a difference.
Now, I am past the point of exhaustion with the DIY camera horror flick genre, a la Blair Witch Project. Remember when one could be scared shitless without a cheapie iPhone or video camera shaking all over the place? Still, Barry Levinson uses every small camera known to man with panache, he has a sly sense of humor, and the movie, if not particularly suspenseful, is really icky. The gross out parts are fabulously gross. The Bay is an environmental horror movie, where people get horrible boils and something eats them from inside. It's enough to make everyone become an advocate for the Green Party.
How scary is it when the water you drink, bathe in and cook in is polluted with mutated organisms (courtesy of industrial agriculture, and literally, chicken shit) that eat you from the outside in? The Bay is a combination disaster and flesh eating bacteria movie. The plot (screenplay by Michael Wallach) is rather flimsy, and more could have been made about evil corporate interests in cahoots with politicians that suppress information about pollution. Although it has a couple of jumps, it delivers more atmosphere and heebie jeebies than suspense. It's the way the story is framed that blunts the panic. It is narrated by a survivor, to whom nothing really happens, which dulls the sense of urgency; the worst already happened. Even though the use of consumer cameras adds realism, it takes away scariness, because the camera never lingers long enough on anything or anyone to create a sense of menace. Too much jumping around. The equipment that records the mayhem adds an extra screen, and thus, distance, which in my view, makes it less scary. One misses the ominous gliding camera work of Kubrick or Polanski. The kind of point of view of being immersed in the action that makes your hair stand on end is sadly not present in this movie, although Levinson stages certain events off camera that are all the more disturbing for being out of sight.
The Bay is smart, as these movies go, but it could be smarter. Even though it takes place in a very small town in Maryland, it doesn't use the mass hysteria that could quickly be unleashed by twitter and the internet. The CDC and FEMA are portrayed as cumbersome, slow bureaucrats, while it would be more exciting if everybody actually freaked out and contributed to exacerbate the problem. The small community is cut off from the mainland, but we don't see how or by who. I imagine that a lot of this is due to a small budget (the reason why these films are so profitable and why they use mini cameras). Still, Levinson gets a lot of mileage out of his "found" footage. Particularly gleeful and effective are shot after shot of people splashing around, jumping in the water, swimming in the pool, (very reminiscent of the opening of Jaws), completely unaware of the poison that lurks beneath the surface. It's very American, to celebrate the 4th of July (as in Jaws) without a care in the world, oblivious to the fact that the damage we do to the Earth, even in this little All American town, is going to come back, according to this movie, to bite our tongues off.

Sound of My Voice

More icky and creepily atmospheric than suspenseful, Sound Of My Voice is an fitfully interesting, if under-delivered trip into the recesses of a crazy cult in Los Angeles, led by Maggie, a beautiful, charismatic woman (Brit Marling, who wrote and directed with Zal Batmanglij), who claims to come from the future.
A young couple, he is a journalist and she is a reformed Hollywood producer's spawn, infiltrate the cult to try to expose it. As is to be expected, the skeptic ends up being more vulnerable to the con than his more open girlfriend.
The material about the cult, and how this woman, Maggie, manipulates her acolytes is quite fascinating. Marling gives a quiet, eerie performance, using the hushed, phony-sacred tones of the most annoying yoga teachers, to purge her followers of their own free will. The cult dynamics feel quite authentic, and every time we're in her compound, a pedestrian basement in a generic suburban home -- that is, a wall-to-wall carpeting creep fest -- the movie is mesmerizing. The problem is in the protagonists, played by Christopher Denham and Nicole Vicious, two weak, uncharismatic actors with little chemistry or chops. Maggie's storyline seems to have been given much more attention by the filmmakers, but the couple ends up taking most of the screen time and their dialogue sounds amateurish and undercooked in contrast. Lots of opportunities are wasted to explore their relationship, and it is rather puzzling that their conflict is avoided, instead of being exploited for maximum drama and suspense.
Some of the plotting is clunky and the pacing is too slow for a movie that promises to be suspenseful. I can understand why the scenes at the cult are shot in real time, to enhance the oppressive isolation of those in the basement; but they go on too long and the tension in the movie fizzles out. The final ironic twist was another disappointment. A good final ironic twist should deepen and illuminate, confound expectations in a felicitous way, but this one feels just lame, particularly when the movie makes clear that Maggie is a fraud. In the hands of more canny directors, the ending could have been a nail biter, but it falls totally flat. Still, there is a lot that is interesting in Sound of My Voice, particularly the stubbornly uncommercial yen to explore dark corners in sunny places, and the strong, impressive presence of Brit Marling, a promising new actress.

The Cabin In The Woods

Quite a surprising mashup parody of science fiction and American horror movies, The Cabin In The Woods grows on you as it turns out to unleash some high concept mayhem in a much more trippy and meta way than the Scream movies. 
It is hard to explain the premise without giving it away, which would be a sin, for if there is something truly fresh about this movie is that you definitely don't see any of it coming. A group of five good looking, inconsequential young adults retire to a remote cabin in the woods for some r&r. The place is spooky, but that's not the half of it. They are unaware that they are part of a greater narrative that belongs to another genre and becomes more and more bizarre. It is quite entertaining. One of the characters is the classic stoner who ends up being more clear and aware than anyone else. His inclusion made me think that writer-producer Joss Whedon and writer-director Drew Goddard probably burned several fat ones while they were coming up with ideas. The plot twists pile up, systematically and right on time, and the movie is surprising, even nasty fun. It is diverting, but alas, not delightful; clever, but not entirely meaningful. It's too busy trying to nail all the frantic paces it has to go through to let itself breathe. As is typical, they spend more time in plot mechanics than in making the most of their fantastic concept. This is a pity, because the concept is an illustration of the fact that all horror movies are some sort of a cathartic collective nightmare, some kind of massive purification ritual (while this sounds really pedantic, the movie manages to make it fun and cheesy).
I wish they had been a little less pitch perfect about the idiot stock characters of the American horror film and given us more funny, endearing characters to root for. The actors (who are complete unknowns to me), are competent, but their characters don't matter. This is done on purpose, but it feels very emotionally disconnected. I had far more fun watching the always excellent Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford effortlessly chew the scenery in roles I cannot disclose.
The same with some of the movie's better gags. There is a stunning sequence when all hell breaks loose that would be even more magnificent if the filmmakers allowed themselves to linger for a few seconds more on the fantastic chaos they unleash.
The movie has a liberating feeling of we're going to get away with this, just you wait. It thrives in its own contrariness. Stuff that never happens in American movies happens here, so you sit there thinking, this cannot be happening right now, it is not possible that they are going for this. Which just makes me rue how conditioned we are by the trite narratives of heroes and happy endings. This film, which is unabashed about exposing the inherent cruelty, the two-way sadism of horror movies, is out to have some fun at the expense of the genre, and while it is not scary at all, it is quite fun.

An Old Fart Game

Well, now we know why the Oscars are so irrelevant, so bland, so boring, so conventional. Because the Academy is comprised almost exclusively of white alte cackers. 
The LA Times culled the numbers in shocking infographics.
The numbers are appalling:

• 94% white
• 77% male
• 2% black
• Less than 2% Latino
• 14% people under 50
• Median age is 62

The absence of women is appalling, the dearth of Blacks and Latinos is appalling, the dearth of young working talent is appalling. But while the dearth of people of color is somehow less surprising, I find the lack of women across most important categories (writer, director, producer, executive, cinematographer) absolutely dispiriting. How can we expect the Academy to have more minorities if they don't even have women! It is very disappointing that an industry that makes so much money and has so much cultural influence throughout the world is so disgracefully behind the times.
That is why they vote for aberrations intended to make it look like the Academy is progressive, making matters even worse, because movies like Slumdog Millionaire and The Help are condescending heaps of false piety.
Bizarrely, not everybody who is nominated is automatically invited to become a member, which would make the most sense to me, unless the Academy aims to belong in the fossil wing of the Museum of Natural History. 
To make matters worse, some important members have the nerve to disdain these findings. From a comment on Deadline Hollywood Daily:

From the article…”I don’t see any reason why the academy should represent the entire American population. That’s what the People’s Choice Awards are for,” said Pierson, who still serves on the board of governors. “We represent the professional filmmakers, and if that doesn’t reflect the general population, so be it.”
I completely agree. This is a group representing an industry. Who cares if it’s diverse?

Indeed, the Academy doesn't have to mirror US demographics to a T, but what arrogance. This window into the make-up of the Academy simply reflects the reality of Hollywood as a whole. I find it very unfair and very sad, and quite alarming that instead of being jolted by it, they are defensive. This is the typical response of members of a boys' club.
Now, the Academy is an invitation only club and they can have the rules they want. Or maybe not. But if they want to be relevant, and they want more ratings, and they actually want the Oscars to stand for something meaningful, it would behoove them to diversify. Bringing in James Franco and Anne Hathaway is bad cosmetic surgery, and obviously didn't work. Have a younger, newer, more diverse membership with more adventurous tastes and a wider frame of reference. This may give comedies and independent films a better chance, which may bring a wider audience. In the end, even though the Oscars have always been nothing but a brazen PR stunt, it is in the interest of Hollywood to make people feel passion for movies. This is not going to happen if they keep creaking while the rest of the world zips ahead.

I'm already disenchanted with many of the nominees, the glaring omissions and the sinking feeling it's going to be particularly gnarly his year. Billy Crystal? He's funny, but we might as well hoof it to a crumbling hotel in the Catskills and call it a day.
I am going to shoot my TV if A Separation doesn't win best foreign picture, and the politics here are complicated, in a field that has both a Holocaust movie and an Israeli movie, neither of which shines a candle to the Iranian film. (I'm writing a separate post on this complex issue).
If The Help wins, I might have to shoot innocent bystanders.

The Woman In Black

A lovely, surprisingly effective and intelligent ghost movie starring Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter to you), Ciaran Hinds and the formidable Janet McTeer. This is a scary movie about unendurable grief. Radcliffe plays Arthur Kipps, a young widower lawyer who is sent by his firm somewhere to the marshy north of England to settle some defunct lady's estate. When he gets there, the villagers won't help him and horrible things start happening to children. Radcliffe is affecting in an almost silent performance as the young man.
Most scary movies have flimsy premises and are lazily written, rarely bothering with character. This film is an exception, with a solid screenplay, adapted from a novel, that sets and pays everything off beautifully. Director James Watkins relies a lot on slamming doors and pounding sound effects, but he does make you jump many times. He also sustains tension and suspense chillingly and, rare for the genre, has tremendous empathy for his characters. The Victorian atmosphere feels authentic, misty and cold, with scary looking windup toys, sinister dolls, and the terrible sight of innocent children destroying themselves. It's such a pleasure to watch a horror movie that looks beautiful, and not shot in cheap, apoplectic video, for a change.  Watkins is stylish, restrained and wonderful with shocking apparitions. He also has a bit of a sense of humor.
The plot has a couple of excellent unexpected twists, and one of the reasons it works is because we are invested in the character, who for once, is not an idiot, but a susceptible young man in mourning, with a young child himself and therefore open to the apparitions of ghosts. I wish there was more of an intimation that perhaps all of these ghastly scares are happening only in his mind (this movie is very reminiscent both of The Innocents and The Others), and that he had more of an inner conflict, because once he becomes unafraid of the ghosts, we become a little less afraid ourselves. The story could go further and raise the stakes much higher, but it opts for more emotional grounding than just scares. Still, this is a mature, poignant film that truly sympathizes with unendurable grief, grief so monstrous that it wishes the worst kind of harm in those fortunate enough not to harbor it. More importantly, The Woman In Black delivers plenty of scares, which is all that matters in this kind of films, most of them extremely well earned (the audience kept tittering and laughing from sheer nerves), yet with a very touching aura of unfathomable sadness. 

The Devil Inside

Or The Curse of The Blair Witch Project. Ever since the surprising success of that seminal film, everybody wants to make a cheap horror movie that makes a lot of money. It's a good strategy: you shoot a horror story on a shaky video camera and pretend it's for real. This saves the producers tons of money, but it also helps with the scares and the word of mouth. Paranormal Activity followed a similar model. Things go bump in the night: let's turn on a video camera in the dark and see what happens. It worked. Scared the hell out of millions -- made gazillions at the box office. The Devil Inside attempts to follow the same logic, but it has one fatal flaw: it is perhaps the most egregious example of waste of a really good premise because of utterly terrible writing.
The writers have a good hook: What if during the course of an exorcism the demon transfers to someone else? Awesome idea. Scary as hell. What they have no concept of is drama, structure, or storytelling. What they wrote conspires to undermine the premise from the first second onscreen. Their biggest mistake is to frame the story as an already finished documentary on a case of demonic possession. This bleeds the story from any suspense. Things have already been decided by the main character, Isabella Rossi, (Fernanda Andrade, a pretty zero), before the movie begins.
First scene, we hear a 911 call from a woman announcing a triple murder, with subtitles in case we miss it. Then we hear her say she did it. Then they cut to the police investigation and the videotaping of the crime scene, where they show and tell us what already happened. No one seems to have any reaction to the grisly murders or the religious paraphernalia in the house. Then we see Isabella, who again tells the story of how her mother committed these murders in the course of her own exorcism. Then she says the same thing again to some doctor. It's numbingly boring. Isabella seems to be borderline autistic; she barely registers any cogent thoughts or feelings about her mother. I blame the writers, whose script sounds like it was written on a napkin by cocky but lazy junior high students.
It gets worse. The mother was sent (it is never explained how, or by who) to a mental hospital in Rome. This also happens outside the movie. So Isabella hires a young videographer who seems to suffer from Parkinson's and she DRIVES around in Rome (I thought this was preposterous: an American driving in Rome without the slightest sign of panic). She signs up for an EXORCISM school, that seems to accept, according to Isabella's helpful voiceover, people from all walks of life.
At school, she meets two rogue priests who perform exorcisms without the Church's permission. The two young priests, who have the bearing and the moral authority of two Williamsburg slackers (Max Von Sydow, they're not), actually ask her to come witness an exorcism so she can see if her mom is crazy or possessed. Nobody ever stops her from doing anything. The movie is full of missed opportunities, holes the size of craters, schematic characters with either no conflict or stupid conflicts, and plot threads that are brought up to be forgotten, like for instance, the poor bedeviled mother.
Now, the saddest thing about this movie (besides the fact that it made $34.5 million this weekend) is that buried among the stretches of dead time and inane arguments, there are two or three very good moments. Writer-director William Brent Bell has a wonderful conception of how victims of possession look like, and how they suffer. No green goo and cheesy effects. The possessed are clearly people in torment, and their bodily torture is very realistic and scary. Suzan Crowley, the woman who plays Isabella's mother, is absolutely fantastic in her very thankless role. She is scary, creepy (with the aid of very well done voices), but she manages to be human and convincing and not ridiculously over the top (like say, Keira Knightley in A Dangerous Method). The scene where Isabella sees her mother for the first time in 20 years, as badly written as it is, made the audience stop fidgeting, texting, and talking amongst themselves, and I believe it is entirely because of this actress' incredible performance. A scene where a young woman gets exorcised is a long stretch of agony, but very well done, with the aid of an actress who must be a contortionist.  (It's always women who get possessed by demons. Why?) The priests may look like video store clerks but the lack of pomposity and artifice in the exorcisms is effective and refreshing.
The use of video camera effects was a little tiresome, but the use of special effects was judicious and very well applied. The scariest jump in the film is simply a guy who is sitting on a chair and then he's not. Great creepy details, like the eye of Isabella's mother looking at us through the monitor, when she is clearly looking at the ceiling. There is an audacious scene at a baby's baptism that is truly shocking. These things made the audience look back from whatever it was they were doing on the long stretches of pointless stuff not happening.
Credit must also be given to cinematographer Gonzalo Amat (full disclosure: he is a dear friend), who while, too generous by far with the camera's shakiness, he also creates some creepy, interesting images with very cool framing, and milks the lo-fi quality of video to the utmost benefit of the scary scenes.
I would love producers to declare a moratorium on the cheap video look, but to judge from opening weekend box office, we are surely cursed with more of the same for eternity. I hope that when they do the inevitable sequel, they write a better script and apologize to paying audiences for probably one of the worst endings ever to appear on a movie screen.
The Saturday night New York audience I saw the movie with, actually loudly booed the ending. And these were not fans of Ingmar Bergman. People were truly pissed off. I heard a girl say "these writers suck". Perhaps the filmmakers and producers are laughing all the way to the bank, but I would not be surprised if bad word of mouth lowers the numbers next week. On top of shoddy, padded writing, and the lack of a conclusion, an end title urges us to find out "the truth" at some website.
This is getting old.

We Need To Talk About Kevin

Mothers are supposed to be endless repositories of unconditional love and patience, but what if they have a hellish child? The premise of a failed relationship between a mother and her newborn baby is very interesting and never before seen, that I know of, in film. Can you think of any other movie about a resentful mother with a very bad kid? What can a mother do when confronted with having to love a succubus who hates her back? According to writer-director Lynne Ramsay, nothing, which is the main reason why this movie is a mess.
Be it far from me to cast aspersions on the great Tilda Swinton, who is as good as she can be in such a wrongheaded movie. It is not her fault that she is miscast as Eva, the mom of the Kevin in question. Swinton has such intelligent charisma and such a powerful personality that it is hard to believe she would be such a passive masochist, particularly in the hands of a rotten toddler. She's not easy to believe as a suburban American mom either. In this film she is an incomprehensible doormat, and doormats, even when played by La Swinton, are a lost cause to the audience.
With a more linear structure, this could have been a disturbing horror movie about a demonic child. Had it been a cheesy horror movie, or something in the vein of Stephen King, it would have been more interesting. Artsy-fartsy as it is, it just doesn't make much sense. In the first part, we see Eva living like a ghost, having flashbacks of a better life and of horrifying events caused by Kevin (Ezra Miller). Ramsay jerks the audience around for a good while until she finally decides to clarify what happened. Even though the movie exerts a visceral pull, especially in its second half, Ramsay's treatment of the topic is so pretentious and elliptical, that little works.
The story takes place somewhere in upstate New York, in what looks like a European's cliched idea of the American suburbs, complete with a supermarket scene with fake cans of tomato soup. In the aftermath of some truly hellish misbehavior by teenage Kevin, Eva, ostracized by the community, finds work at a crummy little travel agency too pathetic to feasibly exist. Although we see that in her former life she enjoyed a big house and fancy clothes, we never understand exactly what it is that her husband Franklin (John C. Reilly) and her do to lead such an economically robust life, especially since they seem to be eternal hippies.
Missing in this movie about a mother is what is most important to parenting, which is common sense. Scene after scene of a satanic toddler, who then becomes a little boy, who then becomes Ezra Miller, being utterly evil, and there is not one timeout, not one screaming match, not one comeback from a frustrated parent. It never occurs to anyone to send this seriously deviant kid to a child psychologist. The sole time Eva loses it, the boy ends with a broken arm, but even then it looks like he deliberately hurt himself to torture her. Franklin is too naive and unbelieving about Eva's complaints about the kid. The kid, of course, is cherubic when dad is around, yet even when he witnesses some horrendous lip on him, Franklin just shrugs it off as boys will be boys. The casting of Reilly, who is excellent at playing easy-going men-boys, is rather hamhanded. On the other hand, you cannot cast Ezra Miller and be deliberately oblivious to his astonishing otherworldly beauty, which could either be a source of his always getting away with murder, or is not believable at all (aren't all those crazy kids with murderous fantasies usually gangly nerds?) The movie ignores this as it does most of reality. Hence we wait for two hours for Eva to put the kid in his place, but she never fights back. She doesn't even fight back when as a teen, Kevin really harms his sister. This was the last straw for me.
Ramsay doesn't want to spoil her arty movie with the coarse banalities of daily parental drama, so the way characters react in this movie has absolutely nothing to do with reality. There is no outside world to speak of. No teachers, no PTA meetings, no counseling experts. Eva is alone in her belief that this child is out to get her. Again, if this movie was in the hands of someone with creepiness in their mind, this could be bone-chilling. Is Eva imagining the child's malevolence? But Ramsay is more interested in showing the aftermath of destruction in Eva's psyche. She is his mother, but it's hard to understand why she sticks by him. She doesn't even like him. Ramsay punctuates Eva's depression with a very annoying country and pop music soundtrack that further removes the story from real life. Style gets in the way. Still, as flawed as it is, this film manages to create significant disquiet. In a culture that always finds justifications for the worst human behaviors, usually along the lines of an abusive childhood in the past, this movie turns this explanation on its head. It's the kid who abuses the loving parents, without apparent reason. Kevin is just evil to the core. What would you do with a kid like him?