Another Year in Movies
Movies, life, movies, love, and movies
Wednesday 26 October 2016
Daybreakers (2010)
Monday 24 October 2016
War on Everyone (2016)
The most immediately apparent feature of War on Everyone is the oddly bipolar nature of so many of the film's elements. This affects the setting, the characters, and even the plot itself. Taking these points in order, the setting is confused. This is McDonagh's first film to take place completely outside of Ireland, but precisely where it does take place is not very clear. This time the story unfolds in New Mexico, in what is definitely either 2016 or 1976. In spite of the certain presence of various modern objects (mobile phones, Xboxes, etc.), there seems to a a half-hearted effort made to create period detail from an earlier decade. Fashion sense, cars and even haircuts scream 'Disco era', as does much of the film's soundtrack, but with no commitment it seems more gimmicky than scene-setting.
This weird datedness carries over into the characters themselves, particularly the leading duo, Bolaño and Monroe (played by Michael Peña and Alexander Skarsgård respectively). Character construction is notably thin when "kinda racist" is in serious danger of breaking into the top three most significant character traits of our protagonists. This may well be another facet of the confused time setting - racist cops in the 1970s are hilarious, but not so much in 2016. Admittedly, this pair are billed as bad lieutenants archetypical crooked cops, albeit relatively toothless ones. But the problem with wanting your main characters to be self-serving and wanting to tell a fairly traditional buddy cop story is that one motive is incompatible with the other. Both characters are really just garden variety jerks, with a sprinkling of quirks masquerading as individuality. Bolaño spouts random factoids and potted philosophy, and remains likable or interesting mainly due to Peña's own obvious charisma. Monroe has slightly more in the way of development, but is still just a loose collection of tics. He's alcoholic, likes Glen Campbell, and has an unusual stooping posture that is a result either of his consistent state of drunkenness/being hungover or is a necessity in order to keep his face in the frame with Bolaño's. (Peña is reportedly 1.7m tall, while Skarsgård is almost 2m.) The supporting cast are serviceable enough without being exceptional, though David Wilmot's comedy Irishman Pádraic does land a few of the film's biggest laughs, and rather deserves his own spin-off with Malcolm Barrett's Reggie. But for the most part they exist only as a mechanisms to advance the plot, not as personalities.
Speaking of which, this movie would be fine if not for a certain plot development that comes roughly three quarters through its running time. Prior to this point, the film is cartoonish and excessive to an extent, but the tone is solidly light. The biggest dramatic aspect thus far has been that Monroe drinks too much. All of this changes with a particular revelation concerning the actions of the aggressively British villain, Theo James' "Lord" Mangan. Suffice it to say that he does something utterly reprehensible. This development lands like a drop of dye into a glass of water, tainting the entire thing a very ugly shade. Certain topics ought never to be used as merely incidental plot points or as lazy "noble" motivation for previously dodgy characters. It both fails to give appropriate attention and weight to the element itself, and it causes that single event to distort every part of the story that comes before and afterwards. McDonagh is capable of blending comedy and tragedy, but this is not blending. This is blue cheese in a bowl of cornflakes: it doesn't belong there in the first place, and it leaves a foul smell over everything.
Enjoyment of this movie is possible, but only through considerable audience indulgence and participation. We must ignore the appalling elephant in the room, and focus on jokes that run the gamut from genuinely hysterical to crashingly misguided. There is nothing sufficiently original to merit a real recommendation, and like so many "just okay" movies from this year, it will probably be quietly forgotten, save perhaps as a new example of extreme tonal dissonance.
Thursday 20 October 2016
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)
Saturday 8 October 2016
Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991)
The new heroes are more interesting as plot devices than as people, insofar as they offer more compelling ways for Freddy to murder them. Carlos is hearing-impaired, allowing more freedom to use sound (or the lack thereof) as an element in creating fear. Spencer is an obnoxious early-'90s stereotype whose twin loves of video games and weed are the cause of perhaps the silliest Krueger kill, as Freddy maniacally wields a joystick and giggles as his victim battles his way through jerkily-animated cartoon adversaries. The child abuse back-story is, of course, assigned to the sole female among the teenage protagonists, Tracy, casting an unpleasant pall that is grossly at odds with the film's generally silly tone. While Freddy was originally conceived as a paedophile, this was wisely discarded as in bad taste, and the series has never handled this topic well, though the movies redeems itself somewhat by not having Tracy killed along the way. And John Doe, the Last Son of Springwood, exists almost canonically as a mere plot point, as though we could possibly be surprised at this point that the one to vanquish Freddy could be a woman.
Said woman, Maggie, is Freddy's heretofore-unmentioned amnesiac daughter. As movie twists go, this is only slightly better than Aperaham Lincoln, and only slightly worse than the reaslisation that it was 2004 all along in terms of credibility. After five previous movies it is disappointed that his most important female nemeses, Nancy and Alice, play no part at all in finally slaying Krueger. Maggie is perfectly functional, but Freddy's last stand and apparent demise do not feel earned. And yet, remarkably, her inclusion is emphatically not the most contrived or incredible surprise revelation in the film.
The original Nightmare is a fairytale through and through. A wicked and ugly man stalks children while they are most vulnerable, invading their dreams and toying with their lives. Freddy is simple and elemental, exploiting a universal of human experience: the need to sleep. He kills the children in vengeance for the sins of their parents. Or not, as the case may be. Broadening a mythos is no bad thing. Revealing that the source of Freddy's power to be three man-faced, skeletal snake-gods is borderline incoherent. Where did they come from? Why did they choose Freddy to empower int his way? Why do apparently ancient and powerful beings care about the petty revenge of a chargrilled child-murderer? No-one knows, and we're not supposed to ask. What can be known is that the final film in the epic saga of Elm Street is a bizarre moment to introduce these chuckling puppets as the foundation for the whole bloody affair.
The most potential-laden aspect of this entire film is also the part least focused upon. The film is set ten years into the future, which is apparent from the utter lack of any set decoration that could not be found easily in 1991, and the town of Springwood has been left utterly bereft of children. This oddly apocalyptic setting is rich with possibility; a city of haunted adults left hopeless and helpless by the loss of their little ones. A story about the parents of Springwood banding together to vanquish the demon that stole their kids away might return the series to the darker tone of the original. If nothing else, it would serve as a pleasant change from the uselessness of grown-ups common to most slasher flicks. Alas, we get one scene of the harrowed denizens of Springwood, and then the notion is completely forgotten.
Having listed at length the many flaws and missteps of this film, I confess that I still enjoyed it greatly. The first six films of the series, despite their increasing camp and absurdity, are all engaging and entertaining in their ways. Freddy's Dead has enough creativity and gruesome nonsense to get by, and as a finale to the whole story, the ending has enough weight to balance the lightweight fluff that the franchise had become. Certainly this is much better than anything Krueger-adjacent that came afterwards.
Thursday 6 October 2016
Godzilla/Cozzilla (1977)
Saturday 1 October 2016
Sleeping with the Lights On
It's October at last, the second month of the year that I consider prime horror territory (the first is April, home to Dundee's very own horror movie festival Dundead). As such, I wanted to offer a few ill-considered musings on why some of us enjoy seeing mind-bending terror and stomach-churning violence, as well as a personal history of my relationship with the genre that has come to dominate a considerable part of my filmic experience.
The first piece of media that I can recall finding truly terrifying was Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of The War of the Worlds. A teacher of mine, when I was roughly 8 years old, thought it a good use of her time to share Wells' classic with her charges, allowing us to listen to segments on Friday afternoons. While not strictly horror - though most near-apocalypses are a little unnerving - I was utterly petrified. The "Ulla!" exhaltations of the Martian fighting machines became the mental accompaniment to nightly dread of the dark, and the abduction-crazed alien monsters that presumably lurked within. Even today it remains one of the most evocative experiences of my young life. While I have come to love the novel greatly, listening to the musical adaptation still leaves me with an irrational unease, though no longer any real fear.
This fact might hint at some of the foundational elements of the horror genre itself. In my view, horror requires the successful suspension of disbelief in order to truly horrify, and has a tendency to focus upon a fearsome Other. Suspension of disbelief is, of course, important for fiction in general, but horror requires of its audience such a visceral reaction that a lack of engagement can be utterly fatal. This is the reason that in my own case psychological horror will always be more frightening than anything supernatural; while ghosts and goblins strain my credulity, the torments of the mind can seem very real. A Nightmare on Elm Street may be my favourite slasher franchise, but Halloween (prior to the overtly mystical shenanigans of later installments) is scarier. Less essential but still almost universally common is the idea of some force, internal or external, that means to do you harm. This may be some outside aggressor, human or elsewise, or an opposition within the self, when a disassociated and diseased mind turns against itself. This feeling is frightening on a primal level. While in real life this mistrust of the unknown can lead to bigotry, tribalism and fanaticism, horror fiction acts as a kind of channel and catharsis. They allow us to experience terror on our own terms and in a controlled environment. Return for a moment to A Nightmare on Elm Street, which offers a great example of this notion: what scares us loses its power as it is recognised and understood (though Freddy only weakens when he is figuratively, and not literally, faced). Fear, shorn of any real danger, gives us both an adrenaline rush and a teachable moment.
Successful teaching requires that a student be at least partially invested in learning. This explains why the next stage of my development as a horror hound was so bereft of education. Fast-forwarding to my teenage years (and bypassing my juvenile philistinism regarding The Exorcist), horror became something at which to laugh, if not outright sneer. I don't take full credit for this. Doubtless it's a trick of memory, but it seemed like the horror genre was particularly marinaded in absurdity and failure during my peak cinema-going years. Given the ubiquity of atrocious remakes of '80s slasher flicks, cack-handed adaptations of horror video games, and miscellaneous cinematic idiocy, I may not be entirely misremembering.
A couple examples will help to illustrate my somewhat infantile attitude to horror at the time. Walking out of a film is a bold statement of dissatisfaction in which I have never personally engaged and that I have only rarely seen performed. The finest example I have ever witnessed came at the climatic moment of Orphan. The story of a family who adopt a strange little girl - and featuring the least responsible bereaved parents in movie history - there comes a twist in the tail of the tale. Upon this revelation, the entirety of the sparsely scattered audience, excepting my own party, left the theatre en masse. We may have left too were we not paralysed with laughter at the absurdity of what was happening both on and off the screen. This hysteria was a relatively common occurrence. I used to take regular trips to the cinema with groups of high school friends, more-or-less for the expressed purpose of lampooning and mocking whatever lacklustre horror was showing that week. Silent Hill stands out as a particularly strong memory, turning the highly-influential survival horror franchise into visually faithful but absurdly plotted horror schlock. The point at which the film's resident creepy little girl raises her arms, proclaims, "Look at me. I'm burning." and promptly spontaneously combusts was the point at which the laughter may have crossed over from raucous to obnoxious, at least as far as other cinema patrons were concerned. Silent Hill may be one of the most faithful and successful adaptations of a video game ever made, that says more about their consistent awfulness than about its own quality.
A film I ought to have walked out of was the 2010 remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street (there may be an unintended theme here). This is not because it was the worst film I have ever seen, but because this was the most holistically abysmal experience I have ever had in a cinema screening. While I am not innocent (I was foolish enough to watch Wes Craven's classic right before setting off to see the re-heated retread), circumstances conspired to create much discomfort. Allow me to paint a picture: I am sitting in the front row, at the extreme left, of an auditorium overflowing with spectators. Because of this, I am separated from most of my friends and must tilt my head at such an angle that acute neck pain is a certainty. Tilting my head to see is fairly fruitless however, as the screen is so close as to be blurred almost beyond recognition in my defective eyes. I am watching a film that is so tedious that, if I didn't know better, I'd consider its soporific effect a brilliant meta-effect used by the director to allow us to share in the experience of the exhausted protagonist. And given the utter boredom induced by the film my dear friend sitting next to me required regular updates as to what was actually going on. So I am forced to recount the unengaging and worthless plot of an inferior movie that I can barely see to someone who is unable to follow the turgid plot and anonymous characters. It wasn't even bad enough to merit the riffing that made films like Silent Hill, The Grudge 2, and The Final Destination, among others, so damned entertaining.
I was not the type of kid to surreptitiously watch horror after my parents had gone to bed, nor did I haunt discount cinemas to catch the latest gore-soaked B-movie. This does make me feel like I missed out on a formative childhood experience, at least among those who later obsess over the macabre and the sanguine, but I'm attempting to make up for lost time. The aforementioned Dundead has become my Easter, a yearly opportunity to worship at the altar of horror new and old, and every year brings a discovery of at least one genuinely brilliant film. I intend to spend October filling in further gaps in my knowledge - conveniently ignoring that most of the films I watched in September were also horror - by finishing up the big three of slasher franchises, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween and Friday the 13th, and only briefly taking time out to enjoy The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.