Disturbia (D.J. Caruso, 2007, USA) September 26, 2007
Posted by Daniel Stephens in : Horror, 2000s, Film reviews, Thriller/Suspense, Romance , add a commentDir. D.J. Caruso; screenplay by Christopher B. Landon, Carl Ellsworth; starring Shia LaBeouf, Sarah Roemer, Carrie-Anne Moss, David Morse
If the best thing about Disturbia is how it updates the age-old story of the mysterious next-door neighbour for a 21st century audience groomed on mobile phones, Ipods, and online gaming, we’re clutching at straws. I’m talking about the sort of straws Tom Hanks couldn’t get his hands on in The ‘Burbs (there was no following people around taking pictures on phones, or getting mini-DV footage of the culprit doing nasty deeds). Yet he, and the film, was better for it. Indeed, dress-up any bad movie in all the bells and whistles you can find from jump cuts to scantily-clad young actresses to pop culture references and you’re still left with a bad, uninspired cinematic experience.
Director D. J. Caruso has potted around the film industry as a producer and second unit director on many throwaway Hollywood movies of the past few years. His notable work on the poor sequel to Stakeout and the mildly entertaining Drop Zone provide clues of his inspiration when at the helm, but it’s his own films that give a clear indication why Disturbia is just another notch on his C.V. that fails to succeed. One of the major problems I had with the movie was how it appeared to be two different films pieced together at around the forty minute mark. You can stick half an apple and half an orange together and call it original but what you really have is a rather odd looking fruit salad. When he makes it work in his 2002 thriller The Salton Sea it’s intriguing and entertaining, but when it doesn’t (Taking Lives didn’t know whether it was Seven or a feature episode of The X Files, and likewise Two For The Money tried to be too many things and was let down by a poor third act) it’s an unfortunate but glaring example of a director trying to be better than he is.
In Disturbia it’s unclear whether Caruso wants to play on suburban culture (the sort of American dream paranoia characterised by 1950s television, and youth culture and the breakdown of the family unit in seventies movies by Spielberg and Lucas) or indeed homage the techniques and style of Hitchcock’s suspense thrillers. Certainly, there’s obvious reference to Hitchcock’s Rear Window and Spielberg/Lucas protégé Robert Zemeckis’ What Lies Beneath, but Disturbia fails to live up to its inspirations. Because the film is so derivative it becomes far too predictable and loses any suspense the director attempts to build in the final third. It’s far too easy to spot what could be termed the ‘binocular shock reveal’, where a long lens is used to track around a position in space – for example empty windows in an apartment block or house – and suddenly someone or something appears in full view. It’s even easier to spot ‘whodunnit’ by unoriginal red-herrings that, because of their overuse, act as giant arrows pointing directly at those culpable.
Yet, perhaps the worse thing is that it takes forever for the film to get going. We’re forced to watch American Pie without the jokes for forty minutes as, after a good set-up, the plot meanders around Kale Brecht’s electronically monitored house arrest, his frustrating attempts to occupy himself (I suppose if this was American Pie he’d be masturbating furiously, but Caruso has him downloading music, playing online gaming, and testing the range of the electronic tag strapped to his ankle), and spying on the neighbours. It could have been so much fun with a bit of mystery and some oddball characters but Caruso forgets about plot development or the themes of loss established in the opening sequence, deciding to have Brecht vie for the attentions of the beautiful girl next door. When the characters eventually decide that something nasty is going on and investigate, the audience has already been lost. It all untangles so quickly you don’t have a chance to take it in, and there’s very little to care about. Caruso makes the cardinal sin of creating people who you can sympathise with (and therefore don’t want to see come to any harm) but fails to ever put them in a situation where you genuinely believe they are in danger. Even when the annoying best friend Ronnie seems to be a goner, Caruso has Brecht casually playing tonsil tennis with Ashley Carlson (Sarah Roemer). Is he not upset about losing his friend? Of course he isn’t because Ronnie is still alive and kicking, making the supposedly surprising reveal of Ronnie’s reappearance a complete failure.
Essentially, D. J. Caruso’s film wants to be part Rear Window, part The ‘Burbs, part What Lies Beneath, but ends up like an unfunny version of American Pie meets The Girl Next Door with a murder-mystery lumped on the end. Disturbia’s crowded collection of influences, its director who tries to do more than his limited talent allows, and its untidy, predictable script, make for a viewing that’s as uneasy as the movie title would suggest. And sadly, that’s not a complement.
Rating: 1 out of 5
Strange Conversation - Issue 2 - June 2007
Posted by Daniel Stephens in : Strange Conversation Back Issue Archive , add a comment
Table of Contents: Issue 2, June 2007 (Click on title to read article)
1. TOP 10 Horror films of the 1980s
2. Short Film In The UK - 8-Part Feature
3. Not Just Another Dead Soldier: Subjectivity in Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan
4. Classic 80s: Into the psyche of a broken man…revisiting John Landis’ Into The Night
5. Hammer Horror & British Cinema - 1930 to 1970
8. Film Review: A Cock And Bull Story
10. Film Review: Happy Endings
Strange Conversation’s SCENE OF THE MONTH
An American Werewolf In London (John Landis, 1981, USA)
In John Landis’ delightful comedy-horror, David Kessler’s very dead best friend returns from the grave to tell him at the next full moon he’ll turn into one hell of a hungry werewolf.
Strange Conversation’s SHOT OF THE MONTH
Say Anything (Cameron Crowe, 1989, USA)
The iconic image of Lloyd Dobler trying to win his girlfriend back by playing ‘their’ song on his Ghetto Blaster.
R.V. (Barry Sonnenfeld, 2006, USA) June 1, 2007
Posted by Daniel Stephens in : Comedy, 2000s, Film reviews, Action/Adventure , add a commentDir. Barry Sonnenfeld; screenplay by Geoff Rodkey; starring Robin Williams, JoJo, Cheryl Hines, Jeff Daniels, Kristin Chenoweth
I’m not saying my sister has bad taste in films, I’m just saying our tastes differ, and when she recommended Robin Williams’ 2006 film R.V. to me, I had some reservations. I had seen the trailer and liked what I’d seen but thought surely it was a low-grade National Lampoon’s Vacation with childish humour that didn’t equate very well with an adult audience. After watching it, in many respects I was right, but Sonnenfeld is a director who for me personally, makes three bad films to every good one, and while R.V. might be bereft of the wry sarcasm and ensemble selection of characters from Harold Ramis’ National Lampoon’s Vacaton, it maintains the fish-out-of-water histrionics and innocent, familial values that made the aforementioned film so endearing. R.V. isn’t a great film, but it certainly doesn’t deserve to be ignored by anyone wanting ninety minutes of escapist fun. Yes, it’s aimed at young teens, and it’s slot on Sunday afternoon television is already assured, but Robin Williams has a ball with his character (getting back into comedy after several dramatic roles), and while the humour might not be to everyone’s liking (indeed, comedy can be such a fickle genre to review), I found myself getting caught up in the physical eccentricities of it all and really warming to it.
The film reminded me of a few eighties movies, perhaps the reason I liked it so much. It has an obvious homage to Richard Donner’s The Goonies when the family of characters find themselves falling down a rain-soaked hill that looks uncannily like a waterslide. There’s a little bit of Parenthood in there, and most certainly National Lampoon’s Vacation. Indeed, the film takes on the very same ideals, which make it interesting for parents who watch it with their kids. The film begins with Robin Williams’ character Bob Munro telling his very young daughter that they will be the best of friends forever. We then cut to several years later when the daughter is a rebellious fifteen year old who not ‘hates’ her father. Munro finds himself being alienated from his family – he works too much and doesn’t get to spend time with his wife, while his son struggles to come to terms with is small stature, and his daughter desperately seeks individualism. Munro himself can’t really understand where it all went wrong. He started a family and, effectively, in working hard to support it, has become a bit-part player. This sets up the vacation, which Munro uses as a ruse to get to a business meeting he doesn’t want to tell his wife about. Throughout the journey, Munro begins to bond with his family and learn about himself, especially the value of a family unit.
You could easily say it’s pretty rudimentary storytelling, almost contrived, and it is to a certain degree, but Sonnenfeld keeps the pace up and never allows the film’s message to become preachy. Where it falls down is in the characters beyond Munro, who are little more than caricatures. His wife is dutiful but wants the exuberance of their early relationship to come back, his son and daughter are both rebellious but all they really need is some tender loving care from their father; it’s uninspired and seriously hampers the film on multiple viewings. But what makes the film so watchable is Williams, who energises the movie with his great physical humour, his love of comedy excreting from every pore.
R.V. is enjoyable in a innocent, childlike, Sunday-dinner-round-the-table, type of way. If nothing else, it’ll keep the kids happy for a couple of hours.
Rating: 3 out of 5
Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny (Liam Lynch, 2006, USA) May 29, 2007
Posted by Daniel Stephens in : Comedy, 2000s, Film reviews, Action/Adventure , 2 commentsDir. Liam Lynch; screenplay by Jack Black & Kyle Gass; starring Jack Black, Kyle Gass, Jason Reed, Ronnie James Dio, Tim Robbins, Dave Grohl, Ben Stiller
Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny is a film aimed primarily at their fans. It’s also targeted, unfortunately, at those who enjoyed This Is Spinal Tap, the Beatles in Yellow Submarine, rock opus Tommy, or Eric Idle in The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash. But beyond its novelty, it pales in comparison.
At times, the film seems more concerned conforming to rock and roll conventions like the psychedelic hallucinations brought on by a rampant overindulgence with acid that made Yellow Submarine so unique but ultimately completely rubbish. The Beatles movie might have been a strange affair with little merit, but at least it was honest. The Pick of Destiny wants to be the Yellow Submarine of the MTV-generation, it wants to celebrate music like Tommy, and it desperately wants to be as funny as This Is Spinal Tap, but it’s nothing more than a poorly-scripted set of sketches (Black and Gass are much more suited to their television work and comedy sketches seen on The Complete Masterworks).
Jack Black tries his level best to make it work, and has some amusing moments, but he’s not helped by Kyle Gass who reminds me of a middle-aged man at a wedding party trying to score with the twenty year old bridesmaids. Gass is a master of the guitar but he’s a terrible actor.
Apart from a beautiful transition for the opening credits when electric guitar-driven music is seamlessly dissolved into an orchestral score (this is right about the time when you’ve still got high hopes for the film), it’s incoherent, messy, and seriously lacking in laughs. I’m both a fan of Tenacious D and Jack Black, but this isn’t a celebration of rock n roll, it’s a feature-length promotion for a sub-par rock album that won’t sell very well.
Rating: 2 out of 5
Déjà Vu (Tony Scott, 2006, USA) May 22, 2007
Posted by Daniel Stephens in : Uncategorized, 2000s, Film reviews, Action/Adventure, Thriller/Suspense, Sci-fi/Fantasy, Crime , 6 commentsDir. Tony Scott; screenplay by Bill Marsilii, Terry Rossio; starring Denzel Washington, Paula Patton, Val Kilmer, Jim Caviezel, Adam Goldberg, Elden Henson, Bruce Greenwood
As the closing credits begin at the end of Déjà Vu, a title appears commemorating the people of New Orleans for their ‘strength and enduring spirit.’ Clearly, the film alludes to those who lost their lives, and the many that tried to save life, after Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005. Yet, the film has more close ties to the unnatural disaster that appeared in New York on the 11th of September 2001, and that eternal question of ‘what if’. What if you could go back in time and stop those planes from taking off? The film shares the sentiments of other time travel movies such as Back To The Future, and more recently, Frequency and Timecop, but at its heart, it’s a quintessential American hero movie. It’s about facing adversity and challenging all the one holds sacred.
After a bomb explodes on a boat in New Orleans, ATF agent Doug Carlin (Washington) begins to investigate, finding some unexplainable ties between himself and one of the female victims. When he learns that she was found dead an hour before the explosion he begins to question the line of enquiry and the FBI invite him to help with their enquiries. He’s introduced to a new piece of technology that allows its viewers to see events as they occurred four and a half days prior. However, they can’t pause or rewind the footage and they can only view events four and a half days before the present day. Therefore, they have to wait until they can watch the footage of the exploding boat. Their job in the mean time is to decide where to look on the boat, and who to look for, as they only get one chance to get it right. But when Carlin realises they can influence the events in the past, stopping the tragedy before it happens becomes his prime objective.
There’s was a moment around the fifty minute mark where I felt the film was being far too complicated for its own good. Scott takes the influences of big brother, CCTV, and government spy satellites one step further from his own 1998 film Enemy Of The State. Here he depicts a way of seeing into the past and uses very specific scientific details to tell us just exactly how it works. However, the threat of total invasion of privacy is quite apparent in Enemy Of The State, the way the government watches the world is believable and based on fact. Déjà Vu bends the rules slightly, taking fact and adding quite a lot of fiction. Certainly when the film really gets going, it’s a roller-coaster of adventurism, explosions, bad guys, and car chases, but Scott never really sets his audience up for the fantasy aspect of his story. Suddenly we are asked to stretch are imagination from a hard-nosed police investigation (with the psychological angle of a cop seemingly breaking down) and a mysterious terrorist threat, to a time-travel fantasy about folding the space-time continuum, Einstein-Rosen bridges, worm holes, Wheeler Boundaries, and EM pulses. When Carlin asks, ‘What if there’s more than physics’, I’m pleading there isn’t. The problem is that it comes out of nowhere, and while it is a twist in the tale, the surprise element is extinguished my confusing science and the attempt to fuse reality with unreality. It’s fundamental storytelling – take for example, Jurassic Park which, setting aside all the marketing campaigns, began by showing us a caged beast attacking game keepers. It set-up what was to come. In Back To The Future, Robert Zemeckis filled the early part of the movie with ‘time’ metaphors, and in Frequency we are introduced to the mystical qualities of the Aurora Borealis and hearing old radio broadcasts. In Déjà Vu, Scott throws in a few red-herrings (the film’s title is a clue, as is Carlin finding a voice recording left by himself, finger prints in a building he never knowingly went to, and a message seemingly addressed to himself) but doesn’t completely set-up the big, time-traveling jolt to the system, and even then, behind all the science, he can’t hide the odd plot hole. While you could argue the plot intricacies make for a more fulfilling second viewing, and in effect, directly set-up what is to come, the film simply does not prepare the viewer for its change of direction. Essentially, I wasn’t ready to suspend my disbelief so suddenly, and it takes some time for everything to position itself back into place.
However, when the movie settles back down, and you take on-board that essentially the film is about influencing events that happened four and half days ago in order to prevent tragedies in the future, there’s enough high-octane thrills to make you forget about any problems you might have with the film’s plot logic. Indeed, while I have reservations about the middle part of the film, the first fifty minutes is intriguing, while the last half hour is thrillingly eventful. A lot of the thanks have to go to Denzel Washington who provides another powerhouse performance, and beautifully grounds the fantastical with a very raw representation of a man desperate to save life.
Déjà Vu might not be as polished as Scott’s Enemy Of The State, or as well-orchestrated as the director’s other collaboration with Washington on Man On Fire, but it’s frequently more enjoyable than Spy Game and Domino. It is at times a little over-complicated with a messy plot but it’s an entertaining action movie that never outstays its welcome.
Rating: 4 out of 5
Strange Conversation - Issue 1 - April 2007
Posted by Daniel Stephens in : Strange Conversation Back Issue Archive , add a comment
Table of Contents: Issue 1, April 2007 (Click on title to read article)
1. Classics 80s: Vol. 1 - Withnail and I
2. Remembering Black Christmas: Bob Clark 1941 - 2007
3. Oh, shallow Queen: Stephen Frears’ Oscar winning film
4. Alien in the monstrous grasp of womankind: Critiquing the work of feminist writers Creed & Mulvey
5. Love Film: Saving space for the DVD Collector
6. What’s the formula of the High-Concept movie?
7. Film Review: Tequila Sunrise (Robert Towne, 1988)
8. Film Review: Heat (Michael Mann, 1995)
9. Film Review: City Of God (Fernando Meirelles/Katia Lund, 2002)
Strange Conversation’s SCENE OF THE MONTH
An American Werewolf In London (John Landis, 1981, USA)
In John Landis’ delightful comedy-horror, David Kessler’s very dead best friend returns from the grave to tell him at the next full moon he’ll turn into one hell of a hungry werewolf.
Strange Conversation’s SHOT OF THE MONTH
Say Anything (Cameron Crowe, 1989, USA)
The iconic image of Lloyd Dobler trying to win his girlfriend back by playing ‘their’ song on his Ghetto Blaster.
Jason X (James Isaac, 2001, USA) May 20, 2007
Posted by Daniel Stephens in : Uncategorized, Horror, 2000s, Film reviews, Sci-fi/Fantasy , 1 comment so farDir. James Isaac; screenplay by Todd Farmer; starring Kane Hodder, Lexa Doig, Chuck Campbell
The beauty to watching a film you have zero expectations of is that when it delivers, in the smallest, almost insignificant way, it can be a thrilling event. Jason X might be yet another addition in the Friday The 13th franchise but its way better than some of the awful later sequels. You can tell it’s post-Scream with its self-reflexive attitudes but unlike many of the slasher films that appeared after 1997, director Isaac puts most of his effort into playful use of the character and to not taking itself too seriously. The film is silly and at times quite funny, but it doesn’t insult its audience by trying to be something that it’s not. Isaac knows his limitations and runs with what he’s got. It makes for a frequently enjoyable entry in the series.
After the federal government fail to kill Jason through various executions including hanging and electrocution, they decide, because of his ability to regenerate dead tissue (oh, that’s how he keeps coming back to life is it!) that he needs to be experimented on. However, he escapes when they try to move him to a new facility and Rowan (Lexa Doig), a government official sent to make sure he stays locked up, gets killed trying to get Jason in the cryogenic freezer. Four-hundred years later, a group of students and their teachers, find the perfectly preserved bodies of both Jason and Rowan. Taking the bodies back to their spaceship, they manage to revive Rowan, but by the time she’s told them about Jason’s destructive capabilities, it’s too late and the killer is running a deadly rampage aboard the ship.
It would be foolish of me to continue singing the praises of Jason X without clarifying that it isn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, a very good movie. The production design is awful, and the plot is a cobbled together mismatch of all the Alien movies. In fact, you can make up the whole story from each of the Alien films. For instance, scientists find the cryogenically preserved body of a woman who defeated an unstoppable killer (the beginning of James Cameron’s Aliens), and then bring her and the killer aboard their spaceship which docks with a larger mother ship (the set-up in Ridley Scott’s Alien). We then see the scientists and students not heeding Rowan’s warning about Jason (David Fincher’s Alien 3), before the unscrupulous Professor Lowe decides he can use Jason for his own monetary gain (a plot thread that runs through Jeunet’s Alien: Resurrection). There’s also the whole idea that Jason can be used for military purposes which is a prominent idea that features in all the Alien movies, and when Jason does start to reek havoc onboard the spaceship we see a group of gun-toting mercenaries trying to bring him down (seen also in Jeunet’s film, as well as Cameron’s first sequel).
Yet, the film works because it’s a crazy confectionary of outlandish ideas hinged on a tried and trusted plot, and generic conventions. As a slasher film it’s a rather turgid and hardly frightening experience, but the playful use of Jason as an entity certainly makes it a worthwhile viewing for the post-Scream generation. For fans of the original film, it rather makes a mockery of the heritage with Jason, just like Freddy Krueger and Micheal Myers, becoming a comic freak show that a paying public can throw things at. But, it’s an enjoyable mishmash of teen slasher cliché and science-fiction intrigue. The whole last twenty minutes has to be seen to be believed.
Rating: 2 our of 5
The Friday the 13th Series so far:
Friday The 13th (Sean S. Cunningham, 1980, USA) - The raw and bloody original was a lot less influential than people think. It was massively inspired by John Carpenter’s Halloween and not nearly as good. Rating: 3 out of 5
Friday The 13th - Part II (Steve Miner, 1981, USA) - The second film is the first where Jason actually is the killer. It’s more enjoyable than the original film but far too similar. Rating: 2 out of 5
Friday The 13th - Part III (Steve Miner, 1982, USA) - It’s exactly the same film as the previous two, with the unfortunate bonus of 3-D. Rating: 2 out of 5
Friday The 13th - The Final Chapter (Part IV) (Joseph Zito, 1984, USA) - The film stars a young Corey Feldman who has to come to his older sister’s aid when Jason takes a fancy to her. This is silly fun and follows a very similar path to the films that proceeded it. However, it’s a better film than Part III and the most enjoyable of the sequels. Rating: 3 out of 5
Friday The 13th - A New Beginning (Part V) (Danny Steinmann, 1985, USA) - The best sequel is followed by the worst. A plotless mess and the worst Jason Voorhees film in the franchise. The fifth film tries to reignite the series after Jason is seemingly killed for good, but it fails to do a good job, simply stringing together bloody deaths for the sake of showing off the latest prosthetic and make-up effects. Waste of time. Rating: 1 out of 5
Jason Lives: Friday The 13th Part IV (Tom McLoughlin, 1986, USA) - A coherent plot helps Part IV be one of the better sequels. Rating: 3 out of 5
Friday The 13th Part VII: The New Blood (John Buechler, 1988, USA) - A nice premise that sees a sort of Carrie V Jason battle is sadly under-developed. However, it makes for some fun sequences and a little inventiveness to what had, by this time, become a rather dull retread of the same plot line. Rating: 2 out of 5
Friday The 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (Rob Heddon, 1989, USA) - A terrible mess that lacks any sort of plot. There’s some nice special-effects towards the end but you’d have fallen asleep by the time you get to them. Rating: 1 out of 5
Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday (Adam Marcus, 1993, USA) - Jason gets killed at the beginning which is about the only decent bit of the movie. Rating: 1 out of 5
Freddy Versus Jason (Ronny Yu, 2003, USA) - A gimmicky piece of rubbish seeing Freddy Krueger battling Jason Voorhees. On paper it seems like a crowd-pleaser but it’s bad filmmaking 101, and isn’t as fun as Jason X. Rating: 1 out of 5
Doom (Andrzej Bartkowiak, 2005, USA) May 18, 2007
Posted by Daniel Stephens in : Uncategorized, Horror, 2000s, Film reviews, Action/Adventure, Sci-fi/Fantasy , 6 commentsDir. Andrzej Bartkowiak; screenplay by Dave Callahan & Wesley Strick; starring The Rock, Karl Urban, Rosamund Pike, Ben Daniels
In one of the great self-reflexive moments that Kevin Smith does so well, Ben Affleck tells Matt Damon in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, ‘you gotta do a safe picture, then you can do an art picture. But then sometimes you gotta do the paycheck picture because your friend says you owe him.’ It’s a great little moment in a great little movie, and fittingly, describes the sentiments of Rosamund Pike who turns up in Doom surely because she either has bills to pay or she owes a friend. The Libertine, Pride And Prejudice, and the Devil You Know actress surely knew what a mess she was getting herself into when she read Callahan and Strick’s script. I’ll just backtrack for a second – did I just say it took two people to write this awful film – I think I did.
Essentially, Doom is like a high-budget TV movie with nothing resembling conflict, characterisation, or originality. Any videogame conversion to the big-screen can be forgiven for a lack of original material but the film struggles to find any conflict within its rocket-scientist mumbo-jumbo and over-complicated plotting. For a film that concerns a group of combat marines going into battle (after a distant planet issues a distress call), you’d expect a certain amount of tension, but director Bartkowiak seems either unable or unwilling. There’s a silly moment when The Rock tells his marines it’s ‘game time’ as they exit a helicopter to go into a building. The marines check the area for danger as an elevator opens with the audience half expecting something nasty to appear. Alas, it doesn’t and the men enter the elevator. Danger must surely be close? Not exactly, as the marines find their floor, we learn they’ve entered a building that acts, much like an airport, and transports them to the planet that needs their assistance. Essentially, they’re at a futuristic airport. So, we wonder, why all the gun-ready, macho-posturing as they first got into the elevator, because there was no danger whatsoever. Retrospectively, it’s laughable, as you could see the Wayans brothers or the Zucker’s using such a gag as parody, not serious, supposedly tension-building drama. In fact, I countered at least three false starts for The Rock and his gang of idiots before they face any real danger. By then, I’d switched off and started self-palm reading, something that was difficult because it was far too dark to do it properly, and secondly, I have absolutely no idea how to palm read.
Fundamentally, Doom is a complete failure because it doesn’t do the one thing it should. That is, to offer exciting and dramatic action, underscored by a relevant and overpowering threat. You think about the films it wants to be - Aliens and Predator - and they both had what was required in abundance. In Aliens, even before the marines face any direct threat, tension is created because they go to a planet they and the audience know could be populated by evil, unstoppable monsters. The fact that when they initially get there, everyone on the planet has disappeared, heightens this level of suspense (what happened? Why? Where are all the people?). The soldiers are faced with desolate corridors, artificial lighting beginning to fade, and the obvious signs of struggle, a last stand. Likewise, in Predator, when the soldiers find another slain group of marines, they begin to question what exactly they are up against. Can they defeat it, where another group of soldiers failed? Both these scenes appear well before any proper combat and yet the audience is left excited in anticipation. Doom is far too confused in its build-up, pedestrian-paced, and makes the cardinal sin of paying homage to films far better than itself.
Perhaps, the film’s main problem is Bartkowiak, a cinematographer-turned-director, whose credits at the helm include Romeo Must Die and the Steven Seagal film Exit Wounds. He paints Doom in stylish blacks and greys, with futuristic colour flourishes, and doesn’t allow himself to show too much of the excellent production design, wisely keeping it in shadow. Yet, his control of off-screen space is less refined. He struggles to focus our attention as the messy plot that features caricature, paper-thin characters has them scattering all over the place. Bartkowiak doesn’t know whether to stick or twist, and we’re left with a languid pace that meanders on a very confused course. He draws too much on what other filmmakers have done before, and can’t overcome the clichéd script with its uninventive plot and awful dialogue. The film is also devoid of humour, something that has certainly helped other videogame and especially comic book adaptations.
Maybe I went into the film with higher expectations than I should have had. I didn’t expect an especially great action film, but I did expect a sense of adventure. When Bartkowiak goes to Doom-vision (filming the shot in much the same way as the game is played in first person perspective) I felt it was inspired. At the very least it celebrated the film’s roots, and gave the videogame fans something intrinsic to enjoy. It was also a very good piece of filmmaking (but arrives far too late in the movie), probably attributed to Bartkowiak’s cinematographic background, as he uses fast-paced edits and a claustrophobic mise-en-scene to place the audience directly into the action with danger all around. Yet, unfortunately, it’s one bright spot in a great expanse of humourless, tensionless black. Doom is uninspired, big-budget Hollywood. Where have we heard that before?
Rating: 1 out of 5
Into The Psyche of a Broken Man…revisiting John Landis’ Into The Night May 16, 2007
Posted by Daniel Stephens in : Comedy, 1980s, Desert Island Films, Drama, After Hours at Cafe 80s, Film reviews, Action/Adventure, Crime , 7 commentsInto The Night (John Landis, 1985, USA)
Dir. John Landis; screenplay by Ron Koslow; starring Jeff Goldblum, Michelle Pfeiffer, Dan Aykroyd, John Landis, Bruce McGill, David Bowie, Richard Farnsworth, Clu Gulager
John Landis might be remembered for Trading Places, Blues Brothers, and An American Werewolf In London. He might also be remembered by his detractors for the unfortunate incidences that occurred during the filming of The Twilight Zone, but for me, his career should almost be defined by his 1985 masterpiece Into The Night.
The film, starring Jeff Goldblum and Michelle Pfeiffer, is a little seen gem (not unlike his vampire flick Innocent Blood) that sheds the genre trappings of say An American Werewolf and the iconic prominence of stars and celebrity in, for example, Trading Places, Blues Brothers, or Coming To America. It’s a film that focuses on character, very much inspired by its time, with Landis not having to worry about special-effects (ala man changing into werewolf) or eccentric spectacle (look no further than The Blues Brothers or Animal House). It’s Landis’ most assured piece of filmmaking, and debatably, his greatest ever achievement.
The film is also prominent because it was the first Landis made after the tragedy of 1982 when Vic Morrow, Myca Dinh Le, and Renee Shin-Yi Chen, were killed when a helicopter stunt went wrong. Landis and other production crew were initially blamed and charged with manslaughter. Many people still hold Landis responsible for the deaths but the fact remains that after a long trial, Landis and the other crew members were acquitted in a court of law. The director was clearly deeply affected by the terrible deaths – more than many give him credit for – and this can be seen in Into The Night. His vision is pessimistic and bleak. He shows a disregard for commercialism and a materialistic world, and uses Los Angeles (the most fictionally abused city by American cinema, where dreams are made and broken) as his backdrop. His main character is confused, alone, miserable. He can’t sleep, almost an indication he has to spend more waking moments in his misery than those who can sleep. The film is very a much an investigation into what happens when conventional life loses its boundaries and suddenly a cavernous space opens up with infinite possibility. It’s about a frightening reality that isn’t governed by pop-culture, television adverts, or consumerism. Landis depicts a world where we have to make choices – not always the right ones – but choices that aren’t necessarily straight-forward. Ed, the main character, learns what he wanted by the end of the movie but can’t fathom what it is at the beginning. The choice, therefore, isn’t always in front of us, and we might never know what it really is, but it exists.
Retrospectively, it is wonderful how director John Landis has actor Jeff Goldblum working in a plain office doing a job that needs no other distinction than appearing awfully boring, and probably requiring its workers to turn-up nine to five, five days a week. His job description is not required, the only thing worth noting the fact it has something to do with the machination of technology. It’s an idea that extends to his life in that he is so bored with the everyday machination of his being (like in the board meeting when his turn to speak interrupts the flow because he isn’t doing his work properly), he’s inadvertently trying to break down the boundaries of the familiar conventions that bind him. It’s almost as if he wants to breakout but he can’t bring himself to do it - a fear of the unknown, of what isn’t conventionally part of his life - preventing his desperation to break free. The fact he has insomnia signals that inadvertent rebellion. Coming home one day to hear his wife screaming in orgasmic pleasure with an anonymous stranger triggers his pursuit of change – his pursuit for adventure.
Into The Night shares some similarity to Scorsese’s After Hours - two films that flirt with the idea of ‘ordinary’ thirty-something men working in jobs that appear to trap them, both looking for the catalyst that opens new territory and new ideas. They share the femme fatale and both are primarily set at night, but these films are not about a lewd concourse between a man and a woman, they’re about musing about life outside of one’s own and finding adventure when the walls of the American dream have broken down.
Into The Night begins with a plane landing, followed by shots of corporate Americana before gently moving towards a quiet suburb, entering the bedroom of a house owned by Ed Okin (Jeff Goldblum). He sits in bed, wide awake, next to his sleeping wife. Ed has insomnia. He tells his friend Herb (Dan Aykroyd) who recommends he uses it to his advantage and should take the late flight to Las Vegas. He’s unsure at first but when he comes home to find his wife having an affair, he heads to the airport. Parking the car, Ed takes a moment to survey his predicament, but his attention is quickly removed to a distraught young woman who gets in the car and begs him to drive away. Four armed men chase the vehicle out of the parking lot but Ed is able to escape. The girl tells him her name is Diana (Michelle Pfeiffer), and that she doesn’t know why the SAVAK (Iranian secret police) are following her, but they murdered her friend as they got off the plane. Ed probes her for information that she isn’t willing to provide, she just asks him to take her home. However, Ed is about to get more than he bargained for as an already long night begins to throw up more mystery, more murder, and a lot more intrigue, as he inadvertently becomes another player in a dangerous cat and mouse adventure, set against the backdrop of a cold Los Angeles night.
Essentially, Into The Night is about superficiality, in that life is based on false pretences. If we live our lives by pre-conditions what will happen if we are faced with a series of unconditional, uncertain avenues? Ed Okin is told that Diana (Michelle Pfeiffer) has nothing of her own, that she has only what is given or what she takes. This is mirrored in him because his own life is simply based on what has been given to him such as the conventions of getting married, having a steady job, a car and a house – all things that are supposed to equate to happiness (in both the conventional sense of the word, and the way such life choices are viewed by common American values) but there’s something distinctly missing in his life. He’s accepted all these things because he knows of no other way but if they are supposed to make you happy, then why isn’t he? Director Landis continually abuses our senses with the superficial world that surrounds us – Diana is a model for instance, and Ed examines the stylised photos at her apartment. Her brother idolises Elvis and tries to live like the man himself, driving around in a car that proclaims ‘The King Lives’. Indeed, when Ed and Diana visit a film set in search of her friend, it is the artificial props that cause Ed a problem as he leans against a false wall and falls through it, and sits on a papier-mâché rock crumpling it to a pulp. When he tries to make a call from a payphone two prop engineers look at him questioningly as they pick up the prop and take the phone from his ear.
It’s interesting that the men that chase Ed and Diana around the city destroy every place they visit looking for clues to their whereabouts, as they put to the scrap heap the very physical embodiments of the superficiality that bind us. They break a film director’s awards, smash televisions, vinyl records and stereos. In essence, Landis reverses the narrative psychology of the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ character roles, in that what the corrupt, and potentially evil SAVAK are doing is the very thing Ed needs to save himself. The SAVAK agents are not content with what is given to them, they are chasing the riches. When Ed and Diana meet, it’s at the airport and Diana asks Ed why he is there. He tells her that his life isn’t working out somehow, but Diana wonders why he is drawn to the airport. He has no answer, but it seems to lead to the idea that he inadvertently tries to chase the riches, like his insomnia being an inadvertent rebellion to life’s constraints. The airport signifies a place of relatively infinite possibilities with its key to the world – other countries, other cultures, other people. Finally, when cornered by the Iranian secret police and questioned Ed starts to fictionalise his reason for being caught up in the situation – ‘I’m on her majesty’s secret service, we’ve got the place surrounded’. Shrugging he says, ‘I’m really from immigration, we thought you had some illegal aliens working around here.’ Ed begins to breakdown the superficiality that binds him, embracing it, consciously fictionalising his predicament into a fantasy world that holds no such boundaries, conventions or constraints.
Landis paints Ed’s adventure much like a dream, Goldblum’s forlorn facial expression indicating he can’t remember the last time he slept. He allows bits of information to come through but Landis captivates the viewer by a languid narrative that is part road-movie, part mystery, which seems at times as rebellious to convention as Ed wants to be. Landis takes the film on quite unique tangents, his unhurried pace a sign of Ed’s tired insomniac. In between quips about American consumerism, he keeps Ed and the audience in the dark, much like the night that surrounds them, and through following a rather arbitrary plot direction Landis is able to instill the indistinctive, incomprehension of a nightmare that bares no outcome. Indeed, the film could be seen as Ed’s dream played-out in reality, though it takes the form of a nightmare because that is how he sees his life. It’s ironic then, that to learn from a nightmare you have to stay awake all the way through it, but that again is another example of the film’s rebellion of constraints that bind society.
Whether Into The Night is an interpretation of Ed’s dream or reality itself, it’s quite unforgiving in its bleak outlook. Landis depicts a world of corrupt excess and pessimism rooted in big business capitalism that permeates from characters that are seemingly miserable in their riches, or chasing such riches within the confines of violent, greed-ridden crime. The SAVAK want Diana’s diamonds and are willing to kill anyone that gets in their way, while a mysterious French entrepreneur with a British henchman also wants to get their hands on the loot (Landis using their very different nationalities to suggest that the problem is hardly local, perhaps a rather haphazard criticism of globalisation), all manoeuvring in the criminal underworld. Yet the ones that have riches fair no better as Diana’s ex-sugar Daddy is a dying cripple who hates his wife, and whose many expensive cars lay soullessly in an oversized driveway. Similarly, a Hollywood producer is more dismayed at his film awards being smashed than the well-being of his trophy-girlfriend. When the police ask he claims he doesn’t know what happened to her even though her dead body lays a hundred yards away on the beach, his preoccupations going no further than his broken living room. Landis provides a quite horrid sense of life based on commercialised excess to the point of it being an epidemic that breeds through a weakened, consumerist society. This is beautifully depicted in Diana’s brother whose fascinated, idolisation of Elvis Presley has turned him into a social misfit who struggles to even afford a downtrodden, one bedroom apartment. In a sense, it isn’t apparent what Ed really wants, but he doesn’t know himself, because his life has become alien to him. When a gun is held against Diana’s head and he’s facing the possibility of his own death, he says: ‘Let me ask you something, maybe you can help me. What’s wrong with my life? Why is my wife sleeping with someone else? Why can’t I sleep?’. This is a haunting reminder that the answers are a little hard to come by when the reassuring conventions that govern one’s life have broken and you’re looking beyond the profit-margins and collector’s items, the adverts for cheap dinners and the fast cars that guarantee the trophy-blonde.
Into The Night has been criticised for being overly self-referential and it would be unwise to overlook Landis’ constant use of cameos in the form of ‘director’ friends that show-up constantly in the movie (from Lawrence Kasdan, David Cronenberg and Landis himself, to Amy Heckerling, Jonathan Lynn, Paul Mazursky, and Don Siegel, plus many more), and his homage to one of the first films that could be termed post-modern - Bud Abbott and Lou Costello Meet Frankenstein - which is shown within the film. In many ways, Into The Night acknowledges itself as an entity apart from the ‘real’ world, much like the nineties vogue kick-started by Wes Craven with New Nightmare and continued through Scream and its sequels. Here were movies where the characters acknowledged their existence within a film, their lives governed by conventions set out in fictionalised accounts within previous films. It’s certainly an idea that examples Landis’ love of movies, but also shows how popular culture governs cultural identity as reality and fiction blur, so that they are hardly separate entities at all. Taken at face value, this is as superficial as the phony-reality the film criticises, but at its root it’s a post-modern fear of mass cultural identity disappearing into itself, so that Ed’s question of ‘what’s wrong with my life’ becomes the rather more complex ‘what is life itself?’
Landis has certainly concocted an enjoyable journey into the enclosed, urban expanse of inner-city Los Angeles - an ‘island’ surrounded by the build-up of its own excesses. Ed’s adventure is frequently amusing, largely through Goldblum’s laconic, deadpan performance but Landis juxtaposes the humour (the SAVAK’s pursuit painted in cartoon-like styling as if they are bumbling bad guys following a treasure map) with reasonably graphic violence (when a girl is drowned, and when David Bowie’s psychotic Englishman kills some people who offered to help Diana). The film takes no half-measures right down to a genuine fear of the upper classes, and a lack of confidence in an evidently corrupt police force. Yet the film’s sense of ambiguity (both in Ed’s character whose core is born out of an existentialism that is suggested by the world that surrounds him, and in the mystery of Diana’s femme-fatale) is what holds everything together. The film’s episodic nature is far more fulfilling than the term might suggest, each segment offering another clue to Ed’s predicament and his world, rather than a narrative cog for the plot to move forward. Landis is far more concerned with Ed’s life than Diana’s survival, that everything that happens is simply a clue to where ‘X’ marks the spot, not in terms of hidden treasure but in Ed himself. For Ed, the ‘gold’ is the answer to his question ‘what’s wrong with my life’, and for Landis, it is the utterly brilliant premise for us to find out. This is a true, underrated, eighties classic.
Rating: 5 out of 5
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A Cock and Bull Story (Michael Winterbottom, UK, 2005) May 12, 2007
Posted by Daniel Stephens in : Comedy, 2000s, Drama, Film reviews , add a commentDir. Michael Winterbottom; screenplay by Frank Cottrell Boyce; starring Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon, Keeley Hawes, Shirley Henderson, Dylan Moran, Jeremy Northam, David Walliams, Gillian Anderson, Kelly MacDonald
Said to be an un-filmable novel (and probably rightly so), approaching the movie adaptation of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy you’d be forgiven in wondering just how the hell director Michael Winterbottom pulled it off. Well, he didn’t, exactly. It isn’t that the film doesn’t look at both the ‘life’ and the ‘opinions’ of Laurence Sterne’s titular character, it’s more that it rolls it all up into a bite size bundle of non-linear narrative, film within a film within a film inventiveness, and wry satirical asides which celebrate the originality, humour and post-modern techniques of the original literature. So how do you adapt a selection of books that cannot be cinematised – you don’t. You use the books as inspiration for a film that is as unique, as weird, and as funny for a 21st century audience as the books were to18th century readers.
You’ve got to praise Michael Winterbottom if only for his willingness to take chances. You’ve also got to thank him for giving the British film industry an injection of vitality, always producing edgy films that flirt between mainstream and niche, art house cinema. In many ways, he’s a modern day auteur, one who works within his own constraints, unhindered by Hollywood sensibilities. Sometimes it doesn’t quite work (9 Songs), often it does (24 Hour Party People, Road To Guantanomo), but rarely is Winterbottom’s dark, cynical outlook portrayed without style and intelligence.
For A Cock and Bull Story the director takes Tristram Shandy’s difficulty in finding meaning in his life, or ability to articulate his feelings in a linear form, and weaves them round Steve Coogan’s attempts to portray the character on film. This is all going on while Coogan has to deal with his off-screen relationship issues and the birth of his first child. The film seemingly taps into the rampant market of reality television, providing its audience with a behind-the-scenes look at art imitating life imitating art, with the awkward, surreal comedy of Charlie Kaufmann. Indeed, the film isn’t a far cry from Kaufmann’s own Adapation - a film he wrote for director Spike Jonze about the writer’s struggles to adapt Susan Orleans’ The Orchid Thief.
Coogan’s portrayal of Shandy is intermittently interspersed throughout the movie as he both plays the character and acts as narrator. Fans of the books the film is inspired by shouldn’t see the movie expecting a glorious, Peter Jackson-telling of an age-old story. Indeed, there isn’t much of the page that reaches the screen. This becomes a nicely implemented sub-plot with the characters squabbling about what should and should not be in the movie. But it’s Winterbottom’s use of the literature to mirror that of a modern story, where Coogan’s fictional representation of himself struggles to come to terms with the birth of his baby, and can’t find time for his ‘girlfriend’ (not his wife as he likes to remind people), that is the main draw. There’s an absurd but brilliant moment when Coogan, playing Shandy, is entombed in a freestanding womb as the other characters mock him. It both works as a representation of Shandy’s obsession with his own birth and insecurities, with Coogan’s feeling of entrapment as an actor, a father, and a public figure.
But the greatest attribute of the film is its two leads. Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon are superb. Friends in real life, the two British actors play off each other with a comic ease that cannot be manufactured. Brydon’s brilliant impression of Coogan’s television character Alan Partridge is one of the film’s funniest moments, showcasing in all its glory the self-reflexive attributes of the movie. In many ways, it’s this self-reflexive, knowingly-cynical, satire that makes the film so appealing. The movie opens with Brydon and Coogan playing themselves in the make-up room as Brydon muses over the colour of his teeth. Later, Coogan complains about the size of heal on his shoes, and while wearing a rather bent latex nose, asks his girlfriend if she would have had a baby with him if he looked like this in real life. The glorious self-mocking comedy is a staple of both Brydon and Coogan’s comic brand, totally lacking in pretension, and works so well in much of their improvised scenes within the movie as well as underlying the difficulty in bringing such literature to the big screen. In a sense, their self-mocking behaviour is indicative of the film’s irresistible approach to adapting the books – if you can’t do them justice, make fun of your failed attempts in doing so. It’s unique, it’s funny, and it’s rather charming.
If anything the film can be too clever for its own good. The non-linear narration of Shandy’s story disjoints the linear ‘making-of’ sections which takes something away from the overall effect. Indeed, Winterbottom’s approach might be too left-field for those wanting a serious adaptation of Laurence Sterne’s work. However, it isn’t as if the director doesn’t take the source material seriously, because the film’s inspired humour and style are clearly influenced by Sterne’s wayward thinking. Further, it shouldn’t be forgotten that the component parts of the movie add up to a whole that is as weird and interesting as Tristram Shandy himself, and rather than mocking the literature, mocks the filmmakers attempts to adapt it for the big screen. Evidently, as the film is as digressive as the novel, what can only be described as a loose cinematic version of ‘The Life and Opinions’, is in fact, a celebration of the books, the forward-thinking technique, and of Sterne himself.
In many ways, Winterbottom couldn’t have made a better stab at it. He’s not only made a very competent movie that is both funny and endearing, he’s made a story for a new audience. Perhaps that oft-used word ‘adaptation’ should really be ‘adaptability’. A Cock and Bull Story is adaptable for an audience pruned on high-concept Hollywood exports. In taking care of that unfortunate problem he’s made sure Sterne’s inventive 18th Century writing isn’t an excluded niche that doesn’t fit the mainstream. That, for me, is the film’s lasting and most important attribute.
Rating: 4 out of 5