AUGUST 2013 MOVIE PREVIEW

This has been a completely grueling summer, right? I'm not just being an unpleasable grouch? Because it feels like no matter how much I lower my expectations, they still end up being too high. Anyway, it's all going to over soon, and we can start looking forward to the at least potentially exciting movies of September and even more October, which is both so close and so far away...


2.8.2013

There's nothing about the "antagonistic buddy cops" genre that can possibly still be exciting or surprising at this point, but it's also an unusually reliable formula: just make sure the two actors are well-paired and have good chemistry. And all signals point to Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg having perfectly fine chemistry in 2 Guns. Like to be a classic? Clearly not. But it should at least be fun enough to not be a waste of time, and that is where we've ended up at this point.


7.8.2013

They made another Percy Jackson movie. Isn't that dear? Anyway, Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters is all set to be the first dead-on-arrival YA lit adaptation of the month. There's also a terrible, terrible looking pot smuggling comedy, We're the Millers, with a cast that's simply much too good for it to possibly be as grating as the trailer implies.


9.8.2013

The DisneyToon Studios spin-off Planes looks stupid and bland, of course, but I can't possibly be alone in thinking that it's probably going to be an improvement over Cars 2, right? The animation doesn't look excruciating, and there's no Larry the Cable Guy. God, I hope there's no Larry the Cable Guy.

That being said, the smart money is on Elysium, one of the few promising films of the month. I wasn't hugely up on director Neil Blomkamp's previous film, District 9, but heady and visually impressive sci-fi - and the film looks to be both of those things - will be an unusually refreshing chaser at the end of this particular season.


16.8.2013

I love about August that it ends up being crammed full of weekends that feel like catch basins, for movies that are perhaps too promising to get dumped outright, but not nearly appealling enough to merit any real attention. And the most schizophrenic weekend of the summer - maybe even the year - is easily the one that bears witness to Kick-Ass 2, the sequel to a snotty, nihilistic movie that I hated; to Paranoia, an office espionage thriller that feels like it's been lying around since 1994; to Jobs, a hagiography starring the infinitely punchable Ashton Kutcher; to The Butler, a Lee Daniels film about apolitical politics. Speaking as one with an established Daniels fascionation, the last of these is easily the standout to me, but everything here seems weirdly flat in disparate, but equally aimless directions.


21.8.2013

Hey look, it's another stillborn YA literary adaptation! The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones, though I think that if one of them is going to do at all well, it's clearly going to be this one.


23.8.2013

Thank God, a movie that I feel absolute no ambivalence towards, only straight-up joyous, childlike anticipation: The World's End, the third of Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg and Nick Frost's Cornetto Trilogy, and since Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz were both ingenious genre deconstructions and hilarious comedies, it stands to reason that this should be, at a minimum, awfully good.

Probably not awfully good: home invasion thriller You're Next, which has been sitting around since 2011 and was made by one of the later perpetrators of the totally useless V/H/S.


28.8.2013

Two lawyers and ex-lovers are teamed up to defend a terrorism suspect in Closed Circuit. On the subject of movies that feel like rejects from the 1990s.


30.8.2013

Do you like One Direction? Probably not, because I really don't imagine that there's any overlap between their audience and this blog's. Nonetheless, if you are interested in a 3-D One Direction concert film, One Direction: This Is Us (advertised under the far superior title (1D3D) exists, so go see it, or whatever.

Ethan Hawke's inability to make movies that are good when Richard Linklater isn't involved continues with Getaway, where he and Selena Gomez fight criminals, or whatever.

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BANGKOK DANGEROUS

I beg your pardon, but Only God Forgives is complete bullshit. I'd like there to be a more intellectually suitable way to put my feelings than that, but I'd also like it if Only God Forgives wasn't such an artistically denuded, pointless waste of time and talent.

That's what's awful about it, really: this is a movie that was not made by incompetents. Writer-director Nicolas Winding Refn is every bit as much in control of his art as he was making Drive, his much-adored previous collaboration with Ryan Gosling in the role of a barely-speaking tough guy in a world of inexplicable and uncontrollable violence; there's no doubt that this is the movie he wanted to make, and he's still quite obviously the man who created Bronson and the Pusher trilogy, both of which I personally find to be more satisfying accomplishments than Drive. Only God Forgives is a strong piece of filmmaking-as-craft, and it's buoyed by truly breathtaking cinematography by Larry Smith, a sometime collaborator of Winding Refn's whose career started in a series of "not quite a full DP" projects with Stanley Kubrick. So you know he's bona fide, and his overwhelming saturation of the film in blankets of color (there are many moments in the film which consist visually of literally nothing but one shade of red and one shade of black) gives the film an incredibly compelling visual personality that you simply cannot deny.

So it's that much more frustrating that Only God Forgives ends up having no point. Of course, that's not entirely fair or accurate. It definitely has a "point" that is made clear from the title on down: violence and retribution are a devouring cycle which can only be broken by the truly self-sacrificing, and while forgiveness is the only thing that can make the world better, it is the hardest thing to imagine, let alone practice.

This translates to ninety of the most redundant minutes I have seen in a movie theater in a very long time. The plot concerns a pair of American brothers in Bangkok, mixed up in the drug trade. The elder, Billy (Tom Burke) decides one night that the cornucopia of prostitutes available in that city just isn't enough, so he insists on finding a teenage girl, whom he promptly rapes and beats to death. Her father (Kovit Wattanakul) is able to get his revenge when the corrupt police officer Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm) permits him access to the killer, though Chang thereupon chops off the avenger's right hand. Billy's younger brother, Julian (Gosling) quickly figures all of this out, but he can bring himself to kill the man who killed his brother, understanding that Billy brought it upon himself, and soon his hellacious gorgon of a mother, Crystal (Kristin Scott Thomas) has arrived in Thailand to destroy all the men who had a role in her beloved older boy's death.

And once all those pieces are in place, Only God Forgives launches into a cycle of events from which it never deviates: Crystal berates Julian, he doesn't respond or even alter his expression, somebody is killed in revenge for somebody else's death, Chang chops off a hand to make a moral point, and then he sings karaoke. It is remarkable how much that includes every single event that happens after the 20-minute mark, except for one dinner where Crystal humiliates Julian in front of his favorite prostitute, Mai (Yayaying Rhatha Phongam), talking about the relative sizes of her sons' penises.

It's a telling scene, because it exists for no real reason other than to let Scott Thomas burst forth with a roar of crudely operatic dialogue, and her entire performance exists for no other purpose than to be extravagantly campy and wicked in speaking those lines. Things that only exist for one reason, and it's not even a very good reason, tend to crop up all the damn time in Only God Forgives, a movie which has one single argument and one single way of presenting that argument dramatically and visually, and it makes that presentation over and over again until after far, far too long, Gosling's character finally says "fuck it" (or rather, he doesn't, because he only says like, literally, 40 words in the movie) and puts himself in the way of all that repetitive violence.

Whatever impact the film makes, it has absolutely nothing to do with its threadbare characters, nor with its depiction of Thailand, which despite all Winding Refn's talk about his influences and his desire to evoke the culture is as generic and Othered as I can remember seeing it in recent cinema, depicting a world where the brown people are hookers or killers, and the white people are swallowed up whole by a society that cares for neither Crystal's screaming monstrosity nor Julian's heavily emasculated inability to act or communicate. Most of the impact comes entirely from the style, which has a thrilling Pop-Art sense of colliding colors in an attempt to create sensation through sheer abstract imagery, or from Cliff Martinez's somewhat unimaginative but fulfillingly driving score. Or, especially, from the much-publicised violence, which isn't quite as brutish and disgusting as the most breathless reports would have you believe - any habitué of Asian horror has scene plenty of stuff far more grotesque than anything that goes on here. But it's still pretty gory and unsparing, particularly regarding its omnipresent, impressively squishy sound design, and the variety of angles from which Winding Refn shows (or, more often than I'd expected, refrains from showing) the various dismemberings and disembowelings that are scattered across the film's landscape.

Impressively committed, sure, but it's also quickly tedious and one-note, and this I cannot forgive. The film being nihilistic and unpleasant (for it is both) is one thing, but it's nihilistic and unpleasant to no purpose at all, and the only thing about any of this that flickers with any kind of life is Scott Thomas's deranged performance, which I found to be memorable and striking in all of the very worst ways. All in all, it feels angry and punshing; like the director was very mad at people who enjoyed Drive, and wanted to make them suffer - "no, this is what I meant, meaningless, brutal violence that's too numb to be either exciting or off-putting". Only God Forgives just drags and drags, sullen and mean and boring as shit. It's absolutely gorgeous; it has that and only that in its favor, and it's not remotely enough.

2/10

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: I LOVE ROCK AND ROLL

The byword of the Canadian Summer of Blood has been that there's Just Something Special about Canadian horror filmmakers: even when their films are no "better" than the analogous United States productions, there's some kind of increased sense of maturity and intelligence. That is, they are frequently shitty-ass slashers and all, but they are shitty-ass slashers involving somewhat more grown-up characters and vaguely real-world situations.

Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare - the Region 1 DVD released by Synapse Films bears the onscreen title The Edge of Hell, but we'll have no more to do with that - does its little bit to prove that Canadian movies are more ambitious and expansive than their southerly cousins, but in a spectacularly different direction. It demonstrates how the Canadians can even improve upon jaw-droppingly awful "so bad it's good" movies, relative to us Yanks. Simply put, Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare is the absolutely funniest bad movie I've watched in months,* exuberantly hopeless and unabashedly cheesy, made with an infinitely quantity of optimism and not even a dram of cinematic talent. Nothing in it failed to make me exquisitely happy, and that was before we ever arrived at the OH MY GOD twist, which had been spoiled for me; and yet knowing what happens is not the remotest preparation for actually seeing it. Which is why, as I write these paragraphs, I haven't yet decided if I will be sharing that twist or not.

Structurally, the film is a slasher at heart, so it's no surprise that it opens up with a Prologue Of That Terrible Event, when a family in a farmhouse is happily puttering about, preparing for their day - Dad (Chris Finkel) is washing up, Mom (Clara Pater, an alias of producer and first AD Cindy Sorrell or Cirile, if the IMDb is to be trusted - and in this particular case I am dubious that it is, on her right name anyway) is putting together breakfast, and Little Billy (Jesse D'Angelo), who is never given a name, but he ought to be a Little Billy, dammit, is reading in his bedroom. A malevolent force enters the kitchen, and soon all the family is dead at the hands of the emphatically unconvincing skeleton monster living in the oven. Whatever has invaded the house, it runs around at floor-level, skittering like a playful little kitten as the credits parade forth, giving us our first sense of what Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare plans to imply is, despite all the evidence, rock & roll.

Ten years later - we know that it's ten years later because of dialogue that says something like "HEY YOU GUYS THIS IS THE PLACE WHERE A FAMILY DISAPPEARED TEN YEARS AGO. IT HAS BEEN TEN YEARS. SINCE THE FAMILY DISAPPEARED", to find a metal group packing up to drive to that same little farm, which we now learn is outside Toronto, because frontman John Triton (Jon-Mikl Thor, about whom we'll have much to say presently) feels that they need to get far away from the hustle and bustle of life, and fine someplace quiet and isolated to crank out ten minutes of music before their contract comes due in five weeks. Also, as Triton passionately and emphatically proclaims, almost like he was getting paid by the National Film Board of Canada, that Toronto is a hip and happening locus for all the arts. Which doesn't precisely square with the idea that they've gone to the ass-end of Bumfuck to be away from anything hip and happening, but John Triton is vast, and contains multitudes. Besides, if he had any idea what he was suggesting, he probably wouldn't have encouraged his band, the Tritonz, to bring their girlfriends, or newlywed wife, in the case of the bass player with the overreaching name Roger Eburt (Frank Dietz), the second AD).

At the farmhouse, the Tritonz and their audaciously square manager Phil (Adam Fried), introduced wearing a jacket proudly proclaiming him a member of the Archie Club, get to the hard work of recording their amazingly, awesomely metal songs, where "metal" should be understood to mean "closer to metal than it is to, say, folk rock", leading off with a Jon-Mikl Thor composition called "We Live to Rock", and dammit, but John Triton patently does live to rock, though none of his bandmates are much in agreement; they, mostly, live to fuck, albeit a particularly cuddly and monogamous fucking it is for such hardcore metalheads. Triton's girlfriend Randy (Teresa Simpson) particularly is annoyed by her boyfriend's rock-centered lifestyle, as to judge from the sheer number of scenes where she essentially announces that he can use whatever orifice, she just wants his damn cock. And she is consistently rebuffed.

Inevitably, the Evil Whatsit that was hanging around before is peeved at these chaste, clean-living rockers, and starts to pick them off: first by impersonating Lou Anne (Jillian Peri), the uncompromisingly bitchy girlfriend of incompetent drummer Stig (Jim Cirile), and in this guise devouring Phil (first, it adopts the shape of what I can only rightly call a Cyclopean penis hand puppet, and it then does what I can only rightly call ejaculating into Phil's coffee). Others follow: Stig, who loses his mind-blowingly atrocious Australian accent when he becomes possessed by evil, and also suddenly learns how to drum; Roger and wife Amy (Liane Abel); keyboardist Dee Dee (Denise Decandia), who has just started sleeping with guitarist Max (David Lane), who gets one of the all-time most awesome death scenes in slasher film history, yoinked right out of the frame like a Looney Tune.

Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare is like one of those birthdays where you open all of your presents, and then there's a bonus present hiding in the other room, and then there's another bonus present that ties into it: no matter how certain you are that it simply must be winding down, there's always something new and deliriously wonderful waiting for you. Unforgivably bad, one-note performances that exacerbate how flat and boring the characters are; satanic beasts played by puppets so cheerfully dumb looking that you could imagine them on a kids' show; absolutely hilarious terrible metal songs, and underscore that sounds more like the New Age shit they play in a hair salon than anything that anybody has ever called "metal"; a scene involving slutty groupies who show up, do nothing, fail to remove their tops (which, is clearly what the scene is structurally designed for); the crazily awful sex scenes; the unending zeal of Thor's performance, with his giant hair and eyeliner and total commitment to every word he says and movement he makes. Not much surprise there: Thor also produced and wrote the thing, and while it was director John Fasano's project from the onset, the animating force is clearly the massive slab of pectoral muscles and absolutely no ability to modulate his emotions onscreen.

Culturally and thematically... shit, did I really just start a sentence about Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare that way? Well, culturally and thematically, the film is pretty overtly a counternarrative to the anti-metal censuring sweeping North America in the '80s, and largely complete by the time the film came out in 1987. The Tritonz are a silly, affectionate parody of the stereotype of a metal band, with enough of a deliberate subversion in things like the professionalism and the lack of indiscriminate sex that you can tell it's totally on purpose, and the way that the rockers turn out to be a force for good, in the end...

I really don't think I can get away without at least gesturing in the direction of the film's stupefyingly terrible final twist, the one that pushes Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare from "this is charmingly hokey, badly made, but so silly in its badness as to be worth watching" to "OH MY HOLY SHIT, GO WATCH THIS MOVIE NOW". Which is, incidentally, my official recommendation, so if you want to be totally free of spoilers, this is your last chance to bail.

So, John Triton turns out to be an archangel, and all the band members were fake, based on bad horror movies (the "oh, I wrote this deliberately to be bad, so you can't accuse me of being a bad writer" card is among my least favorite, but there's something so daft about the fact that Thor is calmly speaking to the world's shittiest rubber Satan doll at the time that I cannot being to blame the movie for it), and now Archangel Triton, wearing just a tiny studded leather bikini bottom - if you tend to assume that metal is cryptically homoerotic, you must see this movie - punches the Devil back to hell. Setting aside the insurmountable number of plot holes this creates (why did Triton have terrifying shower sex with his girlfriend if she never existed?), the mere fact that Thor was able to conceive of this logic-raping chain of events already puts him in the Bad Movie Pantheon; not merely a "fuck you" to the stereotype of The Devil's Music, but a psychotically self-promoting bit of absurdism - who writes a part for themselves where they strut around in a teeny weeny speedo and flair their gigantic hair while standing in front of Klieg lights? - and theologically inexplicable.

The movie has absolutely everything you could possibly want from high-spirited trash: a menagerie of uniformly dodgy foam monsters, an especially dodgy foam Beelzebub in the climax, clumsy dialogue, bizarrely flat performances, an ending that straight-up makes no sense, fantastically misplaced ambition, and a scene where a blond with too much mascara and huge tits parades around in a shower. And Jon-Mikl Thor even has a girl with him at the time! Truly, this is a movie for all people, and its giddy, infectious stupidity makes it one of the easiest recommendations in this history of the Summer of Blood. It's ludicrous, and it has a giant, soppy heart, and if you can't be delighted both at the cosmic ineptitude and at the phenomenally innocent enthusiasm with which it is executed, I cannot help you.

Body Count: 11. Depending on how you define "body".

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: WHITE PEOPLE FINDING THEMSELVES IN JAPAN

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: the year's third superhero movie, and the last of the summer, The Wolverine finds the title character traveling to Japan to face down his demons and understand himself again. This has a tendency to happen, though it seems, oddly, to only infrequently involve the Japanese themselves.

It is not just that the good and bad exist side-by-side in Sofia Coppola's 2003 breakthrough film Lost in Translation: the good and the bad are intractably yoked, occupying the same space and growing out of the same moments in the film. A movie of the film that is equally as good without being in any way bad could exist; but it would needs be an entirely different movie almost from the ground up. Anyway, I come to praise LiT, not to bury it, and I would not give up all the good within it for something far more vexing and awful than what is bad with the film. But that is not the same thing as demonstrating that the badness does not exist.

The film, for the benefit of those who weren't around during its luminous cultural moment a decade ago, is about two well-off media types from America cooling their heels in Tokyo for a bit: Bob Harris (Bill Murray) is a movie star (some dialogue suggests that he's reached the "richly deserved slowdown" phase of his career) in town to make some television and print advertisements for Suntory whisky; Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) is a recently married young woman who's tagged along with her photographer husband (Giovanni Ribisi) as he's on assignment shooting a Japanese band. Both of them are already largely dissatisfied with their life situation - Bob's marriage has also hit the "slowdown" phase and his conversations with his wife back in the states have the tenor of a dry, marginally acrimonious business meeting, while Charlotte is terrified that she made the wrong choice, as her husband seems interested in absolutely everything in the world besides her - and being in a place where they don't know the language on top of how immoderately different the culture is in seemingly every way has only sharpened the feeling of isolation and being locked out of life. They happen to cross paths in the bar in the Hyatt where they're both staying, and recognising a kindred soul in each other, they strike up a relationship that isn't precisely romance or friendship though it includes elements of both. What's really happening is that they've each found in the other an anchor, something real and tangible in a place that feels far more anarchic and incomprehensible than the mere word "foreign" can possibly imply, and bonding in that way at that time makes them more emotionally intimate, we suspect, than either of them has ever been in their lives.

Now, about that good and bad part. The good thing is that this stuff works: Murray and Johansson are both at their all-time career bests, with Coppola's not-yet-notorious affection for the sorrows of the affluent giving the film an excellent depth of insight into and understanding of its characters - it being Coppola's beat not merely that she sympathises with poor little rich girls because their lives resemble her own, but that, having thus sympathised with them, she is able to bring all sorts of interesting and unique insights into their suffering as humans, not as members of the elite. Certainly, Lost in Translation triumphs as a slow-burn character study, in which the two Americans are pinned against a backdrop of the inexplicable and the incomprehensible, responding in the minutest ways to the colorful but alien world around them. It is a film of static medium wide shots, with stock-still protagonists and movement in the frame violating that stillness; it is a film of reaction shots (Murray absolutely excels at projecting a sense of amused terror); it is a film of ellipsis (Charlotte remains opaque in many ways, and we come to know her emotions more than we know her, if you follow my meaning). It is a subtle film that occasionally and not always successfully stabs out overtly with its idea that here are two people who need something to cling to and find it, showing both their sense of dislocation from their normal lives and from this exotic vacation, and drawing them into one another's affections so lightly that it's impossible to say when or why or how it happens.

The bad stuff is that, as a result of being made a backdrop for these character moments, the nation of Japan and the city of Tokyo are made colorful but totally unknowable objects, and the issue here is not necessarily one of racism, or easy reductions about how everything in Japanese culture is wacky (though the talk show scene, at least, feels like a pretty cheap joke), but simply of impoverished curiosity. Coppola has, at times, made her deep understanding of a particular sphere of humanity and her apparent disinterest in anything outside of that sphere work for her; it's a necessary element of Somewhere, and perhaps the driving force of The Bling Ring, which I persist in believing to be her best movie. And it is, at least, an explicable facet of Lost in Translation, which requires an inscrutable culture to underlie its characters' sense of disassociation, but it feels kind of icky when that narrative function is ascribed to an actual society of actual people, filmed so gorgeously in Lance Acord's clear-eyed, appealingly contrasty cinematography. The characters don't have much legitimate curiosity about Japan (though Charlotte attempts to fake it), but Coppola's movie is torn apart acting as though it does, while functioning as though it's sort of turned off and superior to this whole "Japanese" thing, with the strange food, the odd video games (the joke is in the movie: guitar-shaped controllers are no longer exotic), the unfortunately comic prostitutes, the digital everything everywhere. The film tells us that it's a tone poem about Tokyo, but it doesn't really care about the city except in that it facilitates jokes that are much, much broader than anything else happening onscreen.

That's a frustration; it is not remotely a film-destroying problem. This is still primarily a character study, and it is a fantastic one, though Coppola demonstrates a few too many times that she understands Bob more than the autobiographical Charlotte and finds him more compelling; the young woman (made younger by Johansson's pointedly baby-faced, virginal performance) is never entirely clarified like we might want, and while I will go to my grave profoundly grateful for the opening close-up shot of Johansson's ass in sheer pink panties, I cannot begin to explain it on aesthetic grounds or figure out anything it's doing that doesn't boil down to the male gaze (if nothing else, the fact that the actress's head is cut off by the edge of the frame makes it hard to think of this as a non-objectifying shot), which is all the more galling in a movie by a female director.

Still, even Charlotte emerges as a captivatingly broken figure, hunting for some kind of stable life she can't describe or perceive, needing human contact as desperately as any person in a movie ever has. That, ultimately, is the reason Lost in Translation works so well: it dramatises the desire to understand and connect with another human consciousness flawlessly, using a simple aesthetic, tightly reined-in performances, and a haunting mixture of minimalism and bustle in the audio mix to craft a series of feelings projected onto its two central vessels. It's all a bit clinical, and the script needed one more draft to be entirely balanced (Murray gets all the best lines, and while the ambling feeling of the scenes is great, a couple of them probably didn't need to be included at all), but this awfully rich stuff, and the film magnificently depicts a very specific mental state too shaded and delicate for most movies to feel comfortable approaching it. It's as tiny and tender and utterly touching as chamber dramas get.

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TONY SCOTT: THE FAN (1996)

With The Fan, we arrive at a very curious question that isn't really as interesting as I probably think it is: can a performance be too good for a movie?

The reason I ask this is because The Fan pairs the slick manipulations of a Tony Scott-directed thriller with the Method acting of Robert De Niro, and I frankly don't think that the movie survives it. There's something unmistakably crude and trashy about the plot, in the manner of a beach potboiler; I certainly have no problem with the content at all, and I think that a lot of what the director does to bring Phoef Sutton's screenplay to life is exactly what a disreputable, overwrought bit of imaginative scuzziness needs to really thrive on the screen as enjoyably nasty, nihilistic fun. But De Niro's main character - certainly not a protagonist, not even an anti-hero; this is full-on "we are trapping you in the mind of a maniac" stuff - is rather more convincing and intense than Scott's glossy directing; given the opportunity to play a psychotic man always on the brink of completely flipping out finally suffering the chain of events that push him right into madness, the actor dug and found the most expressive, shattering way he could to play that role, not as a cackling "movie psycho", but as an acutely damaged personality, giving the history of the character weight and depth and making his actions seem fully plausible and grounded in a cracked but authentic worldview.

All of these things are unmistakably good things for an actor to do; actors get awards for doing it all the time. And as far as great screen psychos of the '90s, De Niro's Gil Renard is certainly one of the most viscerally dangerous. Which is, I'm pretty sure, not to the film's benefit. The Fan isn't a closely attentive study of a decaying mind, like fellow De Niro vehicle Taxi Driver; it's not even a savage howl of vile energy designed solely to break out souls a little bit, like William Lusting's Maniac, the film I found myself thinking of most often during The Fan. It's a cartoon, a mellerdrammer; it's a nasty thriller and it wants a nasty thriller bad guy, someone more like Anthony Hopkin's robust Hannibal Lecter or Jack Nicholson's Jack Torrance.

Simply put, De Niro makes the absurd thriller plot of The Fan too real, and in the process he makes the whole thing pretty massively unpleasant to watch. Not every movie needs to be pleasant, of course. But this is a Tony Scott picture about a crazy baseball fan who starts stalking his favorite team's star player. It's not a film where we'd expect to be subjected to the viciousness of the human spirit, and not one where any single element besides De Niro's performance supports that kind of thing. The film benefits in honesty, but it suffers in watchability: Gil's head is not a place that it's very nice to be at all, and the film isn't built to turn that into something constructive and meaningful. So it just ends up being grueling and disturbing in all the wrong ways; a film like, again, Maniac, is equally distasteful, but at least it feels like we're being funneled to some kind of end point. The Fan is structured as a generic thriller and being weighted down by the pain of a fractured psyche prohibits that.

The film, anyway, takes place in San Francisco, where the Giants have just acquired, at stupendous cost, superstar Bobby Rayburn (Wesley Snipes). The team's fans are overjoyed, none more than Gil, for whom baseball is the only positive outlet in a life that is gone completely to shit: his ex-wife (Patti D'Arbanville-Quinn) openly detests him and his attempts to manipulate their son (Andrew J. Ferchland) into becoming a smaller version of himself have gone spectacularly awry; his job as a knife salesman at the company founded by his father has been misery ever since it was taken over by businessmen selling cheap crap.

So it hurts Gil more than most when Rayburn ends up choking almost the minute the season starts: deprived of his lucky jersey #11, already claimed by fielder Juan Primo (Bencio Del Toro), the star's mental game is on the rocks. True fan that he is, Gil doesn't blame Rayburn for this; he understands the potency of a lucky number, which is why he takes the opportunity, one night, to murder Primo in the Giants' locker room. Impressively, his insane behavior only increases from here on out, as he decides that Rayburn lacks motivation and respect for his team's fans, and a little bit of violent coercion might help matters.

It's probably the case that even under the best of circumstances, The Fan would end up a deeply flawed movie. The script is shaggy as all hell, to begin with, with just enough cutaways to Bobby Rayburn's self-doubt and the politics of baseball that it takes up too much screentime to be used in such an uninteresting way - it's not a film about Rayburn's experiences and the controversy about his payday (an entire character played by Ellen Barkin exists solely to make sure we get that this is an Important Thing to Discuss), but it's so interested in those things that it must be, and this is a problem that never resolves, even without closer examination of the case of one Gil Renard. Who, as intense as De Niro's performance lets him be, is nonetheless not a very compelling figure: not nearly universal enough to stand in for All Sports-Loving Men, his story doesn't end up having a way in. Watching the movie is about observing a psychopath, not having that psychopath reveal anything to us about how we live. It's certainly not something that helps with the sense of nihilism.

Where the film does work, though not exceedingly well, is as an exercise in genre mechanics: this wasn't Tony Scott's exact wheelhouse, but he does a pretty fair job of keeping the tension throbbing, always letting scenes play out just slowly enough that we're given plenty of opportunity to imagine that Gil is surely going to snap right... about... It's not all good - I fervently question the director's decision to rely on Rolling Stones songs on the soundtrack as much as he does - but in terms of pacing and modulation of tone, The Fan has the mechanics of a satisfying, though not especially original psycho thriller.

The script lets it down; ironically, Scott's most inspired direction is at the exact same place as the story's most ill-supported twist, when it introduces a kidnapping where too many people have to behave too idiotically for it to feel genuine. And yet the grim cinematography (by Dariusz Wolski) and the angry music (by Hans Zimmer) combine with Scott's lingering direction to make all of it feel legitimately tense, while just barely keeping you from noticing the weedy writing until after it's all over.

All in all, The Fan is a roughly-assembled, mean movie: flashes of solid genre filmmaking keep it from being a wash, but it's really not much fun at all, and anything that attempts to explore a man's anxiety at being professionally and personally emasculated by having him threaten baseball players with hunting knives needs to at least thnk about being fun; there are ways of approaching that theme that are not at all silly, but this just isn't one of them. And Scott, for all that he's largely responsible for the things that work best in the movie, wasn't sincere enough to mount a legitimate investigation into masculine crisis, anyway. There might well be a truly great version of The Fan, but it needed a different lead actor and director and at that point we've pretty much described a different movie altogether than this alienating, frequently competent but never truly impressive misfire.

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SLOW DOWN, YOU MOVE TOO FAST

2013 has been a remarkably mediocre year for American animated features, but even in the company of Monsters University and Despicable Me 2, there's something special about Turbo, the second and final DreamWorks Animation project of the year (following The Croods, which is starting to look like an elder statesman). It is mediocre; unabashedly so. But it's more than just that; it is aggressive, poisonous in its mediocrity, not just denuded of imagination and creativity but openly contemptuous of the idea of such things. It's so mediocre, so proud of how much it dislikes itself, that it's downright mean. I think what pushes it over the edge is the casting of Hollywood's current favorite Asian, Ken Jeong, as a tiny, sassy old Chinese woman, it apparently being the case that the only thing that Jeong could possibly do to become more goddamnably irritating than he has been was to double-down on sexism to help flavor his minstrelsy.

The film is not, as you would certainly be led to believe by the concept, DreamWorks's outright carbon copy of Pixar's Cars. Indeed, the rival studio has taken a much classier route here: Turbo is an outright carbon copy of Ratatouille. A small animal wants to do something that small animals oughtn't be able to do, he is encouraged because of the slogan of a famous French-accented practitioner of that same art, his relatives mock him and want him to come back to reality (Turbo condenses the crabby father and dim brother into one figure, the crabby brother), he ends up joining forces with a somewhat dream-addled human who speaks to him using a cutesy nickname and a vaguely simpering tone of voice. All that's missing are the consummate artistry, a pulverising emotional climax, and likable characters.

Anyway, the film follows Theo (Ryan Reynolds), a garden snail living in a tomato patch in a Los Angeles neighborhood, whose overriding desire is to drive a racecar, like his hero, French-Canadian Indy 500 champion Guy Gagné (Bill Hader), who always sagely notes, "no dream is too big, and no dreamer is too small". Theo's brother Chet (Paul Giamatti) is the cold voice of reason, but when Theo goes wandering on a particular despondent night, he ends up falling into the engine block of a car in a street race, and is saturated in nitrous as a result, which turns him into a mutant with all the abilities of a car: headlights, car alarm, radio, and the ability to buzz around at 200 miles per hour. When he inevitably fucks up and gets himself and Chet thrown out of the snail community, they end up falling in with a group of non-mutant racing snails who are kept by the impossibly bored shopowners in an impossibly low-rent Van Nuys strip mall. One of these, starry-eyed taqueria employee Tito (Michael Peña), immediately sees how this magnificently fast snail can be a great attraction to draw clients to the mall, begins to plan a great scheme to win acclaim and fame for him and his friends. Before you can say, "God, are you sure this is only 96 minutes long?", Theo - now calling himself Turbo - has managed to secure a spot in the Indy 500, on the grounds that the rules don't say a snail can't race.

Paint-by-numbers, yeah, but that's not the problem here. In fact, I admire the grace notes by which Turbo attempts to not be so ridden with clichés; the unconventional choice of location, undoubtedly motivated by the street racing scene in Los Angeles, already gives the film enough of a unique set of characters (when was the last time that most of the prominent characters in a wide-release animated movie were voiced by non-white actors? Ever?) that it stands out on that front, even if it's not entirely to the film's credit: no polyglot Van Nuys mixed-race neighborhood, no Kim Ly, the cringely rancid Jeong character. But also no Michelle Rodriguez riffing on her The Fast and the Furious character, and if I have to have the former, I am glad it's tempered by the latter.

No, the problem is more dire than being creatively uninspired: it's uninspiring, with no characters who are easy to like, either in design (other than making them all fluffy cartoon colors, no real attempt is made to make the snails not look like snails, and they're just not appealing animals), or in characterisation and performance. Reynolds has such a smarmy voice; good for his character in The Croods, dreadful for his earnest dreamer here. And with so many side characters to keep track of - besides Turbo, Chet, and Tito, there are five other slugs and four other humans who count as "major" even before we get to the lazy choice to put Guy Gagné in the film in the flesh, whereupon he turns out to be a loathsome villain (frankly, I think that if nothing were changed about the film other than making him a decent man, a driven competitor and fair sport, Turbo would be so much radically better than it is as to be unrecognisable) - nobody has any chance to break out. All the time the movie has to spare on characterisation is "oh, this one is Samuel L. Jackson, so he's sardonic", or "this short, oddly Harvey Fierstein-looking fellow is Luis Guzmán, so you know he's easily flustered and cowardly", and while that's the studio's all-time favorite trick, it's rarely worked less effectively than it does in Turbo, which ends up populated by notions of characters rather than characters themselves, and the dismal interplay between Reynolds and Giamatti does not remotely cut it as far as giving us anybody to root for.

It's too bad that the thing sucks so hard as a character-driven narrative, because it's actually fairly handsome looking; there's a shot of Turbo/Theo looking mournfully over US-101 and all the cars blurring past that's as beautiful as anything in any animated film this year, and the neon details on the snails (don't ask) are entirely pleasing to the eye. The whole thing is as technically accomplished as anything DreamWorks has ever made (the humans are every bit as solid as How to Train Your Dragon, the studio's current standard-bearer in that direction), and if technique were the sole reason we went to watch cartoons, I'd have little to say against it. But we also go for heart and brains, and Turbo has absolutely none of either. It's as soulless as anything in this barbaric year for animated pictures, and then some.

4/10

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TIM AT TFE: MY KIND OF TOWN

This week's essay: in honor of Film Experience founder and editor Nathaniel R visiting Chicago this weekend, a brief tour of movies that best capture the feeling of the city that I love above all others.

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DISNEY SEQUELS: IN THE TINKLING OF AN EYE

Inasmuch as it's possible to feel sorry for a movie, I do feel sorry for Pixie Hollow Games. Originally pitched to be the fifth and last of the Disney Fairies features, with a release in 2012, it ended up being swapped with what was then being called Tinker Bell and the Mysterious Winter Woods, sliced to a third or less of its running time, and released as a 22-minute special that premiered on the Disney Channel in November, 2011.

I feel absolutely disgusting saying this about a Tinker Bell movie, but Pixie Hollow Games really badly needed to be longer. At 22 minutes, it has exactly enough time to express its story in the most concise way possible, and establish its setting in the shortest number of lines you could imagine, and if the only thing we cared about in our filmed entertainment was efficiency, like we were programming a children's station in East Germany in the '70s or something, then there'd be nothing wrong here at all. But I hope and pray that nobody needs to have it explained why including only the absolutely essential narrative beats to tell a coherent story isn't inherently a satisfactory way to approach things. There needs to be room to let the story breathe, to let the characters have a chance to live as anything other than bullet points on an outline, to let the world sink in, especially with Pixie Hollow Games taking a look at such a completely different element of the fairy world than Tinker Bell and the Lost Treasure and Tinker Bell and the Great Fairy Rescue.

It is the time of the titular games, something like the Olympics of the fairies; already we've hit a point where it would be nice if the film would talk a little - or at all! - about the way that the games work, how they came to be, what their significance is; as transparently as they're a knockoff of the Triwizard Tournament from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, it couldn't have hurt to also think about copying J.K. Rowling's knack for creating a synthetic historical backdrop for the event. But not at 22 minutes, no way. We are not primarily focused on Tinker Bell (Mae Whitman) in the games, which surprised me; instead, the main focus is on two garden fairies, Tink's good friend Rosetta (Megan Hilty, replacing Kristen Chenoweth and going rather overboard on the sassy Southerner bit), and the newly-created Chloe (Brenda Song), the first garden fairy in memory who's actually excited about the games, and also the first, as far as we can tell, who's a bit of a tomboy.

No pair of garden fairies has ever won the event before, and the past four years running have been won by the champion team of storm fairies, Rumble (Jason Dolley) and Glimmer (Tiffany Thornton) - the sudden proliferation of fairy sects is another thing that might have been fun to explore a bit, but several of the new teams aren't even named - so Rosetta is content to put in a minimal effort and get back to creating beautiful plants. But chance keeps them alive through the first couple of events, and soon, Rosetta is anxious to avoid disappointing Chloe especially, and all her other garden fairy sisters (and one token brother) generally, and so she tries her best to play hard and win, even if it is against her prim and image-obsessed nature. If I tell you that the final event pits Team Garden against the haughty Team Storm, the ultimate underdogs versus the ultimate bad winners, I pray you are near enough a hospital that the heart attack that this surprise brought on will prove not to be fatal.

We're in appallingly safe territory here, though after the galling "why would a little girl want to do science?" theme of Great Fairy Rescue, I am pleased that the Fairies franchise has returned to generally mature and intelligent life lessons that, if I had a 9-year-old daughter, I would be content to let her watch and absorb these lessons, before telling her to turn off the cartoons and come watch some Lucio Fulci with Daddy.* It's not groundbreaking - none of the Tinker Bell movies are "groundbreaking" - but even in America in the 21st Century, it is still worth confirming for an audience of little girls that, if sports are your thing, that's totally okay. And if some preening jock boy snorts about how you're too "pretty" to be physically active, he's pretty much a dickweed that you can go right ahead and ignore.

As with all the Fairies films, there's also a more gender-neutral lesson, about how sometimes you might be confronted with doing something outside your comfort zone, and it's a good idea to suck it up and do that thing, rather than make everybody kind of hate you by simpering about how much of a precious snowflake you are. And in the process, you might even end up having a good time.

So, great, right? Nice lessons, harmless storytelling, satisfactory characters, especially with the ghastly comic relief duo Bobble (Rob Paulsen) and Clank (Jeff Bennett) being shunted off to act as color commentators, where they can't get in the way of the plot too much. And that's all swell, but Pixie Hollow Games suffers anyway from a flaw that might also be a function of its condensed narrative, for maybe there were more subplots for more characters when this was going to be an hour and a quarter long. I'm referring to Rosetta's prominence above all the other fairies (except Chloe, who just gets thrown right at us like we're supposed to give a shit about this brand new nobody), when, frankly, Rosetta sucks. I imagine that there is some carefully-moderated children's message board where Rosetta fan fiction rules the day and "who loves Rosetta?" threads spread like the dandelions Rosetta herself would undoubtedly nurture along, but for myself, Rosetta is my least favorite of the core fairies, and sometimes, you know how you overhear what you just said, and you suddenly regret it? I only just realised that I had an internal ranking of the characters in the Disney Fairies franchise, and I feel unbelievably awful about it.

But anyway, fuck Rosetta. Seriously, she's the worst, and having to pay attention to her at the expense of everybody else for 22 long minutes is not, by any means, where the series seems like it was supposed to go. It's a weird shift of tone, and one I do not approve at all.

Still, sometimes one must admit that one is a 31-year-old male watching stories aimed at pre-teen girls, and having any opinion isn't necessarily becoming. At least the film has a sensible message that feels intelligently-shaped despite it's somewhat clichéd nature (and, in 2011, "it's okay for girls to play sports" wasn't the most triumphantly groundbreaking direction the series could have gone). It's rushed enough to feel basically pointless as a narrative, and its protagonist is tedious, but it's better than harmless, and "harmless" is already something of an achievement in contemporary children's entertainment.

Oh, and the animation is still the exact same thing, because why wouldn't it be? There are some nice textural effects with water and dust, though, so it's at least as attractive as any of its predecessors. And it's pretty damn sleek for TV animation, which is after all what it was. But talking about the animation of the Tinker Bell movies is starting to feel pretty dumb.

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: ROLLING A NATURAL 1

I'm going to name a game, and I want you to think for a moment about the person who plays it.

Dungeons & Dragons.

I guarantee, with 99% confidence, that you're thinking of a stereotypical nerd. There is literally one reason for you to be thinking of anyone else, which is because you're a D&D player yourself. I do not claim this is an accurate perception, or fair: that's just how it is. We live in an age where "geek chic" is a thing, where knowledge of comic book arcana has become the coin of the realm in discussing the biggest and most popular movies that come out every summer, and all that; but table-top gaming is still strictly thought to be the realm of the most impossible caricatures of socially inept white males. Think of a D&D player; you have thought of the most harmless human being on God's earth. Even LARPers are more intimidating; at least they're physically active.

Which is what makes it virtually incomprehensible to anybody born later than around 1976 or so (including myself) that there was a span of time in which D&D was accused of being literally evil. Sort of like how Harry Potter was accused by some fringey Christian groups of promoting witchcraft, if Harry Potter was a tiny, put-upon niche entertainment and not the biggest literary phenomenon of a generation. Like that moment, the assault on the game came from the usually paranoid religious crackpots, though the infamous Satanic Panic humming in the background was richer soil for such pants-wetting hysteria than anything J.K. Rowling had to face.

From that fucking weird cultural moment comes Skullduggery, a 1983 Canadian production in which a tabletop gamer is driven by his dungeon master to kill people. And boy, just saying that one sentence already does a massive amount of work unpacking the movie, because to be blunt: this is a fucking incoherent movie. The first hour is shitty and weird, but reasonably easy to follow; the last 30 minutes is among the most totally incomprehensible stretches of cinema I have ever seen. Plainly, the intent was to make a symbol-driven metaphor, and individual frames suggest David Lynch at his most exuberantly psychotic. But Skullduggery is about as far from Eraserhead in terms of conceptual focus, meaning, and plain old talent as it is possible to go. Whatever meaning writer-director Ota Richter thought he was instilling into the movie - and it's extremely clear that he had a very particular meaning in mind; the imagery is too consistent and interrelated for it to be an accident - he did not bother to encode in such a way that it's at all possible to tease it out, nor (more importantly) can I imagine why any viewer would remotely want to spend that much time with the film. A really great incoherent art film electrifies you enough that you want to, you must unpack its layers of meaning, but Skullduggery is such an intellectual and artistic sinkhole, such a meandering, dead-end slog that simply making it all the way to the end of its brutal 95 minutes feels like a real personal triumph; and going back to try to figure out what all of the metaphors and references mean? Life is far, far too short.

The magic starts right off the bat. As bland sans-serif credits play out over a blue field - exquisitely "video production in the '80s" it is, too, the film introduces us to its theme song. Some kindly soul uploaded it to YouTube, so you can simply listen to it without my feeble, grasping attempts to describe it, but if you are not able to do that, suffice it to say that it's some unholy marriage of disco, goth rock, and a Mega Man level soundtrack, and a sample of the lyrics include

Heavy breath,
Passion in your eye.
Skullduggery! Skullduggery!

And as the singers belts out "skullduggery", they emphasise the syllables, each as its own entirely discrete unit, as "skull-dah-guh-reee". It's fantastic.

The action opens in a sequence that insists on calling itself "Canterbury, 1382," though a more pathetically ratty 1382 - with an establishing shot of a manor home easily 300 years later than that - you would hardly dare imagine. Here we find an evil sorcerer (David Calderisi) and his assistant (Wendy Crewson) talking enthusiastically about being evil and how evilly they plan to evil it up, paying obeisance to the Spirit of Evil, a jester doll that looks like the filmmakers sneaked it out of a family-style pizzeria one night. Their particular evil plot involves killing King Adam (Thom Haverstock), a sullen-looking sort who's sitting on his rinky-dink throne doing fuck-all when the evil pair come and kill his guard. The woman then offers him a choice of apples, one of which will kill him; he chooses poorly, and dies in remarkably low-key agony as his queen (Pamela Boyd) swoons. Or dies. It's not clear, but it involves the sorcerer cursing all her descendants to suffer nonspecifically.

Just like that, we shimmy on up to 1982, in Trottelville, U.S.A. Here we meet another Adam, and even beyond the name change, it's clear that he's the descendant being discussed earlier, since he is also played by Haverstock. He's employed at a costume shop owned by a Mr. Sluszarczuk (Jack Anthony), and... Dating? Lusting after? Not lusting after? Anyway, he's friends with Sluszarczuk's daughter Barbara, who just so happens to be a dead ringer for the evil assistant from the prologue. They're members of a role-playing clique, though the game they play doesn't resemble anything I'm familiar, including D&D jargon with a chintzy posterboard pop-up castle on a game board. We arrive as Adam is busy creating his character - a warlock, dun-dun-DUUUNNNNN! - and in a widely-mocked moment (not that Skullduggery is "widely" anything), Barbara practically goes into orgasm right at the table as she observes that he rolled a 7, in charisma. The highest score ever! And for all that this is a shockingly awful moment, shockingly awful moments are all over the damn film, and at least this one serves a purpose: as Adam starts to lose his identity and think of himself as "really" the warlock he's playing (a spoiler, perhaps, but really, you'd have to want the movie to outsmart you if you don't see that one coming), he proves to be quite the chick magnet, despite having dark enough circles under his eyes that he looks like Cesare from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Dorothy Hamill hair. Having that many women throw themselves at him is absurd enough with the fig leaf of magical charisma; without that, the movie would actually manage to be more stupid, as hard as that is to imagine, considering the final results.

So anyway, Adam becoming a warlock somehow awakens his ancestral curse, and gives him actual low-level magical powers, which he mostly just uses to knock shit down. Like the jester puppet, I'm sorry, Spirit of Evil, that happens to be on the wall in the room where they're all playing.

If I were going to lay out the plot in every warp and weft, and pause for all the lines of dialogue that are monumentally awful and delivered terribly, this review would never end. So let's just gloss over the rest: Adam brings costumes to a talent show at Trottelville Junior College, which we see in exacting detail. The Adam & Eve sketch and the Medieval Lovers sketch that play here trigger Adam's genetic memories of 1382, and he tries to kill one girl but fails spectacularly. Later, he has a vision of a girl being strangled by a python, though to everyone else, she's just having a heart attack. Also, there's a magician being portrayed as some kind of cryptic figure, and we never learn anything about him or any of this, really. It's just a messy, 20-minute narrative dead end that furthers the film's symbolism and repeated imagery (Adam & Eve, bunnies, the mystery figure playing a puzzle), is not remotely interesting, and doesn't even begin to explain anything.

Having dealt with the boring part, the film switches over to the trashy part. The group's dungeon master, Chuck (David Main) lays out the rules for a new campaign, in which the adventurers have to capture a witch in white robes; apparently Adam immediately leaves, because we never see them play, and he's stalking a nurse at the hospital where Barbara works. How this is all meant to work is one of the film's greatest mysteries, but the vomitorium of symbolism waiting in the wings is enough to make all of the other confusing seem downright sedate.Anyway, Adam stalks and kills, stalks and kills, and brings back a sample of white cloth to the game to prove that he won. Everybody transparently thinks he's nuts, and this doesn't bother any of them.

Then comes the last campaign: infiltrating Villa Evel to kill all the Satan-Demons there, or some such. As it just so happens, Adam happened to kill a woman with an invitation to the real-life Villa Evel masquerade that very night, so once again, he skips out of the game immediately to sneak in using a stolen invite - unnecessarily so, since he's on the guest list, and host Dr. Evel (Calderisi, finally making his second appearance as you just knew he had to) happily greets him by name. At this point, the tedious non-thriller of the first act and the limp slasher film of the second turns into an outright clusterfuck of misaimed, incompetent Art Film, playing for all the world like the orgy scenes in Eyes Wide Shut as directed by somebody whose patience and awareness of basic filmmaking technique rivals Ed Wood's. The difference being that, unlike a Wood film, Skullduggery is not doing anything on accident. It is purposeful and deliberate as all hell, with every random shot of an Adam & Eve puzzle or the appearances of a janitor with a tic-tac-toe board on his back increasing with every new death (but not in any one-to-one way) clearly there because Richter had an extremely specific idea plotted out. What that idea might possibly be, Skullduggery does not indicate, any more than it bothers doing anything with its symbolism: my best guess is that it's about Original Sin, but more in the "Original Sin is a thing" sense, than in the "Here's my interesting dramatic use of Original Sin".

In and around the conceptual awfulness, the film is just horribly made. The acting is bad at every turn: in the talent show, it even ends up in the meta-badness of watching an actress do a bad job of playing a bad actress. The film keeps splitting its time between visually pungent scenes of low-stakes horror and broad comedy (fat people in bunny suits! a slutty nurse who takes Adam's psychosis as lust!), punctuated by Benny Hillish musical cues, and I genuinely cannot say which is the worse; both are improvements over the stillborn symbolism, but all of it is down around the very lowest level of achievement that you could scrounge up.

Is this an attempt to subjectively present the mind of a young man driven mad by ancient curse and too much role-playing (the twist ending clarifies that the whole game was just an excuse to manipulate Adam into evil. Or maybe it wasn't. But I think that's what we're meant to take away)? That's possible. It doesn't work, but it's possible. It's also just possible that a bunch of people had a bunch of ideas and crammed them all in one movie, not caring if there was any reasonable flow between moments, not minding if entire chunks of plot seem totally divorced from the whole, not bothering to go back and check that everything was answered by the time the movie ended. Silly, leadenly pretentious, scuzzily sexist and violent; it is a film that mangles tones together, and strings everything along with terrible writing and flat characters delivering unreadable dialogue with glassy looks of disinterest, one and all. I've seen many a bad movie in my day, but dear reader, this one very nearly broke me. It's not just bad cinema, it's hardly cinema at all, just a clusterfuck of notions made without a trace of skill and dragged out for one of the longest, most willfully confusing, and totally joyless 95 minutes you could ever spend.

Body Count: 15? 16? Not all of the deaths are entirely clarified by the editing, but I'm confident it's one of those two. Most of these are pretty bland, but there is a threefer when two men trying to gang-rape a woman are pinned along with her to the wall, by a spear. Take that, Friday the 13th gored-while-fucking scene!

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TONY SCOTT: CRIMSON TIDE (1995)

To me, Crimson Tide has the feeling of being a homecoming of sorts for director Tony Scott: in large part because it returned him to the comforting bosom of producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, five years after Days of Thunder. There are plenty of just fine movies that Scott made without those producers; there are plenty of just fine movies those producers made without him. But their aesthetic mentalities just fit together so nicely - much more nicely even then Simpson/Bruckheimer and Michael Bay, who first collaborated earlier the same year with Bad Boys - that it feels like a proper Tony Scott film again, indulging in all his strengths as a filmmaker, however dubious they might be. I refer to his gung-ho love of iconic masculinity; his ability, honed in making TV commercials and never quite abandoned anywhere in his whole career, to present any subject in a serious of glamorous product shots; his flair for depicting high-tech machines with reverence that doesn't quite fall on the wrong side of pornography.

Also, not for nothing, Crimson Tide is the first time that Scott worked with Denzel Washington, who'd end up anchoring the director's late-career run of movies, and is frequently the best thing about any of them. It wouldn't be for another nine years that the two would collaborate again, so it's not really possible to argue that this movie has any kind of continuity with their later projects together. But it's surely not an accident that Washington appeared in more Scott films than any other leading man, and just as the relationship between the director and producers seems to be "right" on some deep level, because they were so closely aligned in what they wanted their movies to be, the relationship between the director and actor is equally as right, though for a largely opposite reason: Washington's considerable authority and the gravity he brings to every role, just by virtue of his screen presence, have the tendency to add a sense of sobriety and human solidity to a filmmaking aesthetic that does, after all, tend to thrive on shallow style with no real interest in character or emotions.

All of this adds up to Crimson Tide being, in my estimation, just about the best of all Tony Scott's films, with the possible exception of the singularly uncharacteristic The Hunger. It's just one of those glossy popcorn movies where everything goes right: on a purely experiential level, it's exciting and zippy, it's as much eye candy as you could possibly force out of a movie that's set, for easily 80% of its running time, on a submarine, and it raises interesting moral questions that actually require you to walk into the movie willing to think about what's going on, not just passively receive it as vigorous spectacle. It's just the right mix of smart about its subject and enthusiastically shallow about its presentation to hit the best kind of sweet spot for intense summertime fun that you don't have to feel even a little bit embarrassed about liking; it's a sleek, perfectly-tuned machine that hums along so sharply that it doesn't even register what an all-around boys' club it is (the last time we see a woman, let alone hear one speak, is around the seven-minute mark), or how wildly implausible the central conflict is, so far afield of anything that might actually occur onboard a U.S. Navy nuclear submarine that the Navy refused to provide the filmmakers with any resources whatsoever, no matter what a tongue-bath the film ends up being to the manliness and technical potency of that agency.

The film's plot, wildly implausible though it be, is admirably straightforward and cleanly expressed - there are few things indeed I've come to appreciate more as the years go by than a popcorn movie with a nice clean narrative. Lt. Cmdr. Ron Hunter (Washington) has just been assigned to the nuclear sub U.S.S. Alabama, as executive officer underneath the well-respected Capt. Frank Ramsey (Gene Hackman). The two men are both very capable and respectful of each other, though they have somewhat different views on appropriate military behavior, with Ramsey preferring a strictly hierarchal, "no questions asked" approach to discipline, while Hunter - who has never served in combat, unlike his new boss - takes a much more questioning, democratic approach ("We're here to preserve democracy, not practice it", Ramsey tartly explains at one point, in the film's best line). This would ordinarily not be a problem, except that tensions are high right now with some unrest in Chechnya and a rebel leader blaming the United States for the miserable state of post-Soviet Russia, and wouldn't you know it, but he might have control of his country's nukes. So the Alabama is ordered to launch a nuclear strike against Russia, and even this isn't the problem: Hunter is visibly unhappy to be part of the command structure making that attack, but he's willing to follow unambiguous orders.

The problem happens about halfway through the movie: a communication about the nuclear attack starts to come through, but a rebel-controlled Russian sub has been giving the Alabama some grief, and it's right at this moment that the communications link goes dead. Hunter, aware of the gravity of launching a nuclear strike, wants to reestablish communications to find out whether their orders were just countermanded, while Ramsey, aware of the potential gravity of notlaunching a nuclear strike, does not want to wait a single minute. So does the simmering, but ultimately inoffensive tension between the two officers spill over into an act of mutiny, with Hunter relieving the increasingly raging Ramsey from command and the crew of the Alabama splitting along any number of fractures into two camps.

There is one thing the movie does poorly - two, actually; the emphasis on the Chechen rebels in the opening scene is entirely disproportionate to the amount of actual narrative importance they serve; they're a MacGuffin, and the film starts out like it wants to stake a for-real political claim that it never remotely follows through with. The big flaw is that we know exactly what kind of movie we're in for, and we know what happens when you cast Denzel Washington in this role and Gene Hackman in that role, and so there is not a drop of tension that it might actually prove to be case that the Alabama is still under orders to launch nukes. But even with that massive caveat in place, the film plays an exquisitely modulated game of comparing both sides: Ramsey is surely the more personally unpleasant of the two men, but he's never made "the bad guy" in any melodramatic sense, and the movie gets a great deal out of mileage from the simple question of which man, given all the knowledge they have at their diposal, is acting in the right. The film itself answers that explicitly as both, and neither, and that's part of what makes Crimson Tide such a uniquely thought-provoking mindless submarine thriller: it allows the "other" side to seem completely reasonable and well-judged, if you accept the basic principles that Ramsey works under.

And so we end up with an unusually sophisticated and beautifully-acted two-hander about strong-willed, aggressive men facing each other down and refusing to budge; and I do not want to denigrate the contributions of a nicely-packed ensemble cast with some particularly fine character performances (including one of the best of James Gandolfini's pre-stardom roles, more subtle but maybe even better than his work with Scott on True Romance) by calling the film a two-hander. But really, that's where Crimson Tide thrives: in its dramatisation of the clash between to men in a tight space that grows tighter by the moment. Everything is ultimately driven towards that, as the inside of the Alabama, colored in searing primary colors by Dariusz Wolski and framed in many uncomfortably shallow medium shots, becomes as suffocating as any movie submarine this side of Das Boot, both an extension of the struggle between the two men and even, to an extent, an explanation for it; we get a real sense of how much it costs them to be crammed in together simply because we're crammed right in with them.

It's awfully direct, even spare: one conflict, the stakes are nuclear Armageddon, ready, set, go. For good and not as good, everything in the movie is designed to heighten the impact of that conflict, from Hans Zimmer's Wagner-indebted score (right at the dawn of the period where he became much too content to recycle clichés, with none of the creativity of his earliest and newest work), to the abrasively harsh sound design (rightfully nominated for Sound and Sound Effects Editing Oscars). It is not a movie with unimagined depths, or nuances that you only pick up slowly: it puts everything out there, and gets us tremendously worked up in knots just like the crew watching this situation reach the boiling point, while demanding that we think about it, rather than just have that feeling of tension for the sake of it. By God, it works beautifully; it's as good a thriller as 1995 produced, keeping things as simple and direct as possible and trusting that the interplay of two great actors at their most frayed will keep the movie alert and alive and intense. And boy, is it ever those things, all of them.

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THINGS THAT GO CLAP IN THE NIGHT

Inevitably, "the first movie ever rated R just because it's so damn scary" creates expectations that cannot be met, not by The Conjuring, probably not by anything. In fact - allowing that "scary" is the only thing even more personal and subjective than "funny" - I don't even suppose that The Conjuring is the scariest movie about demonic possession directed by James Wan; I was certainly freaked out more by his PG-13 Insidious, anyway. So now that part of the review is out of the way.

But just because The Conjuring isn't, perhaps, the scariest horror movie made in the last decade (though it unabashedly deserves a spot in the conversation), that doesn't necessarily mean that it doesn't have a good claim on an even better title: it's one of the best horror movies of the last decade, mechanically, structurally, and even in the story it tells, which ends up being a surprisingly intelligent exploration of interpersonal behavior for a film whose aims are so unfussy and low-brow. This wants to be nothing but a ghost story: to give you the shivers and creep you out, maybe to make you jump a couple of times. Wan and his screenwriters, twin brothers Chad and Carey Hayes, are not even a little bit interested in fixing things that aren't broken, and it is notable about The Conjuring that it follows, exactly, every little detail of haunted house movies as they have become ossified in the post J-horror age, ones as shitty and bland and disinteresing as The Messengers all the way up to ones as... actually, they've almost all been shitty, bland, and disinteresting lately. Which is what makes it profoundly cool that The Conjuring, using all of the exact same tools as The Unborn or Sinister or whatever (and that's not to say that the okay-not-special Sinister and the savagely bad Unborn are on the same plane of cinematic existence), is able to be so much more than any of them are, up to and including a third act that, for no apparent reason, is good.

By which I mean, as any horror follower knows - certainly, anybody who saw and loved the first deliciously spooky first hour of Insidious knows with particular intensity - paranormal movies have a much harder time than almost any other breed of horror at sticking the landing. The reason why is easy enough to understand: they thrive on the inexplicable and the unpredictable, the sense of genuinely, fearfully not knowing what's making those noises in the damp basement. The second that the wizened old spiritualist drops in and sees visions of the dead girl, or the crusty old townie reminisces about that creepy old lady who used to sing to her dead son in the woods out back, the threat becomes known, and contained, and domesticated - domestication murders horror. Horror is, by its nature, the violation of domestication. One of the reasons that all of the very scariest horror movies, which for me would include such things as The Haunting, The Shining, and Paranormal Activity, end up working is that they keep piling up the inexplicable until they end, or not even then - what is up with the Overlook Hotel anyway (in the movie, at least)? Resolution and explanation don't happen until the last few minutes, or not at all, and the experience remains uncheapened.

What makes The Conjuring amazing and wonderful and worthy of some kind of overwrought hype, if maybe not the exact hype it has received, is that it maintains its tension and mood and atmosphere and everything, without having to pull a Haunting. Which, to be very clear, is a movie it apes skillfully and rewardingly, in its balls-out use of sound effects to drive most of that atmosphere, rather than a nonstop string of jump scares (there are, indeed only a handful of real honest-to-God jump scares in the film, and one of them, dear reader, got me so good that I yelped. Right there in the movie theater, I yelped). In fact, The Conjuring plays its "hey, we've identified the angry poltergeist" card right where every other movie with the same structure does: long after the little girl is speaking to the imaginary friend that seems unusually specific, shortly after the mother has an experience that she cannot begin to explain that terrified the shit out of her, and a little bit before the noisy-ass scene where a character is thrown around the room as lightbulbs explode. It's that formulaic: you could set your watch by it.

And yet, the explanation is made, the ghost is identified, and The Conjuring doesn't drop even an inch in being as scary and creepy as it was before - which, to be fair, might mean that it goes from "not at all scary" to "still not at all scary": fear is subjective. I can't name another movie, definitely not another movie made in the 21st Century, that navigates that turn so smoothly and effectively and satisfyingly, and I frankly don't know how it works. I guess James Wan is just that good at controlling mood and making it clear that just because the threat has been identified, that doesn't mean it's no longer threatening. Such a magnificent evolution that man has made in the nine years since his feature debut, Saw! The best film of its franchise, sure, but still a grubby, unappealing piece of aimless nastiness. Better yet, his second feature, Dead Silence, for which The Conjuring frankly feels like an apology at times, as though he understood why each element of DS went wrong, and knew how to fix it, and did so.

Anyway, I haven't said a word about the plot, and we're almost a thousand words in. Based on a previously undisclosed file from the case histories of Ed and Lorraine Warren, the famous paranormal investigators whose fame and reputation resides largely on their validation of the story behind The Amityville Horror - one of the most thoroughly discredited "true haunting" stories of the 20th Century, which tells you all you need to know about Ed and Lorraine's skill - The Conjuring tells of the events that befell a Rhode Island family in 1971: Carolyn Perron (Lili Taylor) and husband Roger (Ron Livingston) have just sunk the last of their money into an old house, moving their five daughters in and hoping against hope they can make this all work somehow. It very quickly becomes obvious that they cannot, when littlest child April (Kyla Deaver) starts to talk about her new little friend, when second-littlest child Cindy (Mackenzie Foy) starts up with particularly creepy sleepwalking, and everybody is noticing inexplicable things going wrong. So Carolyn finds the Warrens (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) giving a lecture in Massachusetts, and begs them to help her out. What the find unnerves them badly, particularly with the psychic Lorraine still weakened from a particularly nasty haunting a few months earlier. Badly enough that they want nothing to do with the Perrons; badly enough that they must help the family, or else tragedy is surely a matter of "when" not "if" and "when" is almost certainly "fucking soon".

The Conjuring is not an Ibsen play, and its characters are not the richest, deepest, most intriguing you could hope for. But Wilson, Farmiga, and Taylor, at least, is a lot of talent for one junky horror movie: you can imagine one of them in shlock, sure, but all three together promise something a bit more nuanced than just another damn haunted house and raging dead witch-ghost. And then there's Joey King, who has officially become my favorite under-16 actress in America, as the middle Perron child, and we've got here a cast of legitimate characters played by legitimate actors, and if its theme of the fragility of motherhood isn't quite as vigorously, impressively explored as in the thematically adjacent The Descent, the mere fact that we've got a movie about a meanspirited demon in which there's even a whisper of that kind of psychological shading is far more than I'd expected or hoped for out of a movie whose big calling card was "clapping hands emerging from darkness is hella scary".

Which they are, and it turns out the film's best scene was spoiled in that exquisite trailer, though its second- and third- and fourth- best scenes are nearly as good. Which is all to say: the film might not be as scary as promised, but it is scary, and even when it is not scary, it's telling a richly creepy, beautifully filmed (John R. Leonetti's shadow-tinged cinematography is exemplary, creating a totally unrealistic but effective mood), astonoundingly competent story of the old "sitting around the campfire, trying to scare the shit out of your little sister" mode. I have no little sister, but if I had, I would be proud to force her to watch The Conjuring, which really couldn't be a more perfect version of the thing that it is; it does not push boundaries but does excellent work within the boundaries that others have established, and it's honestly hard for me to imagine what more you could expect or want from a ghost story: it creeps, it crawls, it sneaks up on you and goes "boo!", all without missing a beat or running out of steam, and it does all of this in the most delightful way ever.

8/10

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: THE DEVIL'S WORK

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: ghosts in a haunted house, demonic possession, it's all fair game in The Conjuring, a giddy old ghost story of the best campfire tradition based on the case files of noted paranormal investigators/professional frauds Ed and Lorraine Warren. Not that stories about demons and Satan need to be giddy; some of them are far too serious to think about such plebeian matters.

There are billions of people, all of whom have different opinions about things. So I assume that plenty of folks think the 2000 "Version You've Never Seen" of The Exorcist is head and shoulders better than the 1973 theatrical cut, and they owe thanks to William Peter Blatty, writer and producer of that film, and author of it source novel, and the main driving force behind the creation of the extended cut. They're also probably the best possible candidates to watch The Exorcist III, for that film, released in 1990, was the one and only Exorcist film that Blatty himself directed (it was his second and final time behind the camera), adapting it from his 1983 novel Legion. Though he was forced by the studio to make severe changes to the film's climax - changes that the filmmaker and some of his actors have stated in later years fundamentally ruined the movie, and looking at the details, it's not hard to disagree with them - this still remains the most direct delivery system of the man's ideas in cinematic form.

As one of the people who urgently doesn't prefer the Blatty cut of the original Exorcist, and largely regards most of the problems of either version as stemming from what I am inclined to call the "Blattyness" of the material, I'll admit upfront that I certainly am not the best candidate to watch The Exorcist III, and having now done so, I do not entirely care for what I saw. It's still easily the best film in the franchise after the original, if that's worth anything. After all, this is the franchise that includes Exorcist II: The Heretic, one of history's most notoriously vile sequels. We're not ranking Godfather pictures here.

Now, I have not read Legion; but on the evidence, it seems that the movie is probably more of an adaptation of that book than it is a sequel to the first movie, given the way it silently revises character relationships in directions that simply aren't compatible with what we saw in '73, which the movie insists was actually '75. It's certainly not the most complete transgression against the dignity of the original possible, regardless. Have I mentioned The Heretic yet this paragraph? Because shit, man. Blatty could have turned the material into rock-opera featuring the ghost of Father Merrin as the emcee of a discotheque in Heaven, and The Exorcist III wouldn't be as far from the spirit of the original as The Heretic was.

Surprisingly, The Exorcist III doesn't make any attempts to disavow The Heretic, fixing entirely on those characters who weren't involved with that first sequel, and never directly contradicting anything that happened there. Where we are is that Lt. William Kinderman (George C. Scott, replacing the late Lee J. Cobb) of the Washington, D.C. police is investigating the death of a 12-year-old boy, one that unnerves him for two reasons. First is the severity of its profanation of religious imagery. Second is that a few details seem to square with the case of a brutal serial killer from the '70s called Gemini, executed 15 years ago, though Blatty doesn't see fit to let us know that Kinderman picked up on this for quite a long while, one of a great many writing decisions that just don't make any damn sense. Kinderman is consulting with his friend, Father Joseph Dyer (Ed Flanders), on this most upsetting case, but it's about to start getting way more upsetting when a Catholic priest is butchered in a confessional, and Dyer himself ends up in the hospital, where he proves easy pickings to be the third victim in the apparently resurrected Gemini killer spree.

I'm glossing over a lot, but the devil is in the details, ha-ha. We figure out pretty early on - the bestial growling and overdubbed voice-of-many-tormented-souls dialogue are big tells - that the killer is possessed by a demon; the fact that the story's title is either Exorcist or Legion, depending on the medium would already have us thinking in this direction, naturally. But we're just that much smarter than Kinderman, for whom ideas about religion and spirituality simply don't matter in the day-to-day, and who doesn't start to put things together for an awfully long time. Eventually, he finds a patient in the psych ward of the hospital where he's investigating Dyer's murder, who claims to be the Gemini killer, though Kinderman is rather disturbed to find that the patient much more resembles his long-dead friend, Father Damian Karras, who last died during the successful exorcism of Regan MacNeill in the '70s. In a nifty gesture that was forced on Blatty, who used it to his advantage, the version of this character we see when he's possessed by the legion of malevolent spirits is played by Brad Dourif, while the moments that Karras's body is being left mostly alone are played by Jason Miller, who played Karras in The Exorcist. Because that is, after all, where this is going: the demon forced out of Regan, pissed at being beaten by those meddling priests, was able to manipulate the spirit of the evil Gemini killer into Karras's dead body, though it's taken a decade and a half to undo the physical corruption of his brain enough for that body to be useful as a vessel for revenge against those who played a role in casting that demon out. In the meanwhile, the Gemini has been body-hopping into the doddering old dementia patients of the same hospital, using them as meat puppets to enact the demon's will.

I guess that's a little spoilery, but 23-year-old movie and all. Anyway, you cannot possibly discuss The Exorcist III without having all that out there, because it's the only way to get across that the film feels, frankly, like Exorcist fan fiction. Surprisingly creative and internally coherent Exorcist fan fiction, but there's always a weirdness about the way this bends the characters - Karras is a demon zombie now? For real? - that simply doesn't fill a need. It feels very much like somebody was spouting off some diatribe about what they'd do with Kinderman (that obvious fan-favorite), and ending it with, "I mean, wouldn't that be so fascinating to see what would happen?" Yeah, probably. Would I have been much happier if these speculations hadn't been anointed with the legitimacy of canon? Unquestionably. Let us say that it feels like a good-faith attempt to make an Exorcist sequel that was going to come out anyway more decent than it had to be, rather than a story that thrives on its own and justified the making of a sequel.

Story aside, The Exorcist III is a mind-blowingly daft bit of moviemaking, suggesting that Blatty had seen and loved many films without ever really paying attention to how they worked. And to be entirely fair, I don't know how much of this is a direct result of the studio's tinkering and chopping; with Blatty's original cut held to no longer exist, none of us ever will (I'm guessing the studio didn't insist on all the painfully on-the-nose symbolism, though; a calling card of the unseasoned filmmaker). But it's a frightfully amateurish bit of filmmaking, primarily worthwhile for Gerry Fisher's rewardingly '70s-style cinematography.

The dialogue is stiff and talky; fine, that's kind of Blatty's thing, and The Exorcist itself bogs down far more often than its biggest fans concede in blocks of speeches about theology. But The Exorcist had William Friedkin at the height of his powers driving it forward; in The Exorcist III, an unforgivable number of dialogue scenes (that is to say, virtually all of them) are cut according to the most primitive idea of an editing pattern imaginable. One person talks: you see them in close-up. The film cuts to another person in close-up; they talk. It cuts back to the first person. Over and over. It's the absolute worst: even if you don't notice it in specific mechanical terms, it's the sort of thing that interferes with how the scenes play, reducing them to nuggets of speech that plop out, one by one, no flow between ideas and no relationship between characters. It's something that you'd only do deliberately if you were trying to make a parody of film students; first-year film students at that, because overlapping dialogue is literally one of the first things they teach you in editing class. Do we blame editors Peter Lee-Thompson and Todd C. Ramsay for this? Did Blatty simply not give them enough coverage? It's bizarre, nor is it the only editing problem: scenes pervasively and continually end a half second or so early, right at the instant that dialogue ends and not with a beat to let the film draw a breath. The net result: a film that has some of the worst flow between and within scenes that I can imagine.

And the ending (which Blatty directed, though not happily), is a fucking nightmare: comically absurd in its great big gore moment, utterly out-of-place, badly staged, confusing, and bogged down in terrible, generic exorcism movie dialogue.

It's not otherwise incompetent - though some of the looped dialogue is mixed so terribly that I'd like to believe it's on purpose, if I could imagine what that purpose might be - and in places, The Exorcist III is irreproachably great. In places, it's also quite stupid: almost the first thing that happens is a crucifix sculpture of Jesus opens its eyes as evil tries to break into a church, like one of those dolls with weighted eyes that move if you stand it up. But when he gives up the talky shit and actually attempts to make an atmospheric horror-drama hybrid (for it never remotely jumps into horror theatrics without couching it in character business and theme, two things that I don't believe Blatty is as good at writing as he plainly believes), it is genuinely chilling and unnerving - its absolute best scary moments are creepier than anything in The Exorcist itself, in fact, particularly when the terrible sound mixing is turned to the film's advantage and makes the demon seem like something not quite in reality.

Above and beyond anything else, as horror, as theology, or as a character study, the film has George C. Scott and Brad Dourif, whose scenes together are nothing less than exquisite. Scott is good in the whole film, mind you, but the scenes he shares with the demonic psychopath are on a completely different level: even the choppy editing settles down into languid two-shots and fascination with Dourif's horrifyingly intense monologues. It is the one point where the movie effortlessly achieves the sense of soul-sickness that it otherwise has to fight for and only rarely attains; the one place where the stated exploration of evil on a spiritual and physical level rises above the talky philosophisin' and becomes real, tangible, and genuinely upsetting. It's not a huge amount to build a movie on, but it's absolutely brilliant stuff, and nothing else in The Exorcist III is remotely bad enough to rob it of its pitch-black power.

Reviews in this series
The Exorcist (Friedkin, 1973)
Exorcist II: The Heretic (Boorman, 1977)
The Exorcist III (Blatty, 1990)
The Exorcist Prequels:
-Exorcist: The Beginning (Harlin, 2004)
-Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist (Schrader, 2005)

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