MINNESOTA NASTY

A second review requested by Gabe P, with thanks for contributing twice to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

The hook of the dark comedy Drop Dead Gorgeous is that contestants at a small-town beauty pageant are being killed off, which isn't quite what it's about, actually. Some contestants are killed; more are not. I concede that this disappointed me a bit more than was reasonably fair, for what we're left with is still an effectively black-hearted satire from the last great era of sharp-tongued nasty comedy, around the end of the '90s and beginning of the '00s (Drop Dead Gorgeous was released in 1999). There are problems within the film, undoubtedly, but pulling its punches isn't one of them.

The blunt viciousness of the film's sarcasm is almost immediately obvious: it starts by trumping up the impending Sarah Rose Cosmetics American Teen Princess Pageant, a name that's just sufficiently awful to believe that somebody would absolutely cram all those nouns into one string. From here, writer Lona Williams and director Michael Patrick Jann (who'd cut his comedy teeth with the legendary '90s TV sketch comedy The State and has since returned to television's bosom - Drop Dead Gorgeous is his only feature film) shape their material into a mockumentary, a choice that would seem cloying and obvious just a few years later, but was still quite a crafty way to go in '99. And beauty pageants are the exact kind of subject matter for which the mockumentary form is best-suited.

This particular beauty pageant is the branch of the American Teen Princess Pageant that takes place in Mount Rose, Minnesota, under the guiding hand of 1978 winner Gladys Leeman (Kirstie Alley), the wife of the richest man in town. In 1995, Leeman's own daughter Becky (Denise Richards) is exactly the right age to compete herself, but she's one of several contestants the film watches: some of the others include sexed-up Leslie Miller (Amy Adams, in her first film), deaf advocate Jenelle Betz (Sarah Stewart), and other bubbly, goofy figures, but the one who clearly matters the most is Amber Atkins (Kirsten Dunst), who dreams of using a pageant victory as a launchpad for a career in broadcast journalism. Living in a trailer with her alcoholic mother Annette (Ellen Barkin, under-used) and even more alcoholic family friend Loretta (Allison Janney), the upbeat, earnest Amber is the polar opposite of the languid, spoiled Becky, and the film is structured largely around their unspoken but increasingly hostile rivalry, while a grand total of two of their fellow contestants are killed during the course of pageant season. But even just two is enough to thoroughly rattle Amber, who figures out that she was, in fact, the target of the second attack.

I have generally mixed feelings towards the film on the whole, but there is one aspect of it that I adore with all my heart: Dunst is fucking wonderful in the third-billed role that's nevertheless clearly the lead. Everybody in the movie other than Richards has trotted out their most colorful Upper Midwestern accent - it wouldn't be exaggerating an inch to suggest that Drop Dead Gorgeous is a deliberate Fargo knock-off (and I believe, the only one that exists), right down to Kristin Rudrüd, Jean Lundegaard herself, in a small but greatly memorable absurd cameo - and this is mostly comes from a place of broad, snarky comedy, not against Minnesotans themselves, necessarily, but against the vindictive politicking of small American rural towns that the Minnesota accent so vividly evokes. Dunst is the solitary exception: her performance, at odds to everything else in the film, is sincere and humane, finding the guileless enthusiasm and striving ambition that comes from being smart and poor in a small community, and choosing to combat that with optimism rather than resentment. And she funnels all that through the lilting singsong of her accent, transforming it from a joke into a source of inner steel and hope. A film as savage in its outlook as Drop Dead Gorgeous constantly runs the risk of being too sour for its own good; there are filmmakers throughout history (Billy Wilder races to mind) who could make great art from smug cynicism and acidic satire, but it takes a very deft touch to make that funny and not rancid, and Jann doesn't always prove that he has that touch. The central presence of Dunst as a completely likable, sympathetic, aspirational figure is thus vital for the film to stay above water.

Which isn't to say she stays above the film's cruelty (she doesn't: she has a few cutting, self-centered lines, and a scene where she literally dances around a corpse), nor that there's nobody else in the movie who is mostly or completely enjoyable: Adams is excellent, bring such a lack of shame or frailty to her "town whore" role that she completely knocks that stock type on its side, and Janney goes so far beyond merely redeeming a one-joke character into the bizarre hero of her own very different film that it no longer feels like a supporting comic performance, it's more like watching reality warp a little bit around her.

Which is to say: there's a lot of greatness within the film, and its deeply hostile critical reception in 1999 is thoroughly unearned. At the same time, there's a lot of flatness and misjudged humor in the film, also, and that reception is completely understandable. Drop Dead Gorgeous is an extraordinarily mean film, sometimes to its definite benefit, given the sense of dangerous, unpredictable comedy that emerges. More often, it's not so much to the film's benefit at all: more often, the meanness isn't shocking and bracing and hilarious, it's just, well, mean. The two clear points at which the film simply goes too far for even fun bad taste to excuse it are its depiction of the Japanese adoptive parents of contestant Molly Howard (Tara Redepenning), a sudden and swift injection of cringe-inducing Engrish minstrelsy, and the treatment of Mary Johanson (Alexandra Holden), the previous year's winner, suffering from anorexia. There's a line between "making fun of the poisonous culture of negative body imagery inherent to beauty pageants" and "making fun of the dangerously ill", and the film's depiction of Mary shoots past that line without even noticing it was there.

Those are extreme examples, but it's not uncommon at all for the film to commit so hard to its sardonic mockery that it flattens: not into something acutely unpleasant, necessarily, but frequently into something where the jokes are being stomped to the curb. Alley's performance, for example, is technically great and psychologically acute; but it's not really funny except in patches. One running gag about a pageant judge who's also a chickenhawk sputters no matter how hard the poor actor saddled with the role, Matt Malloy, tries to give it some pep. Another running gag about people who think they're on the show Cops is justified solely because it has a great payoff, and not because the initial set-up is anything other than musty and desperate.

As will happen to films with really distinctive personalities that were shamed by critics and ignored by audiences the first time around, Drop Dead Gorgeous has acquired for itself quite a sturdy cult in the years since it premiered, and I can absolutely see why. The acting is generally sharp, there are a good number of quotable lines and unexpected moments, and its manipulation of mockumentary aesthetics is more thoughtful and persuasive than anything done by Christopher Guest and his coterie in the same form (that said, Guest's films are more lively and funny, which makes up for it). I simply can't join them in their appreciation. It's simply too caustic to be as funny as it easily should be with this scenario and in some cases these exact lines of dialogue; it's too angry at its characters to be fully incisive. But the highlights, even granting that, are terrific; Drop Dead Gorgeous is a hard film to love, but it deserved better than being tossed out with the garbage.

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: B-HORROR IN THE 1960s - PARTY MONSTER

There was always going to be a mash-up of the nuclear monster movie and the beach movie sometime in the mid-'60s. B-movie producers, as a breed, are too good at mimicry and chasing the latest fad with Terminator-like focus for the two biggest subgenres of cheap drive-in programmer to go unwed for too very long. It just happened to be Del Tenney, a moderately successful stage actor who reinvented himself as a filmmaker in the 1960s, who was the first of those producers off the post, releasing The Horror of Party Beach (which he also directed) in June of 1964, about ten months after American International's smash hit Beach Party first made the film a possibility. And how grateful we all are that Tenney shouldered his way up to the bar before anybody else could. It's easy to imagine a beach party horror movie made with bland competence, generic junk food that's a bit dopey and mostly forgettable, like dozens upon dozens if not hundreds of other horror movies in the '50s and '60s that aren't bad, certainly aren't good, basically aren't anything at all.

Thankfully, The Horror of Party Beach isn't any kind of forgettable generic anything: it's one of the great fun-bad movies of the 1960s B-movie circuit, high octane camp that's so ridiculous in so many ways that it's impossible to suppose that Tenney and screenwriter Richard L. Hilliard weren't at least slightly doing it on purpose. You don't cram that many unbelievably awful gags into a movie's opening 15 minutes if you don't want your first impression to be one of unrelenting corniness and fearless stupidity. For that matter, you probably don't lead off with the film's opening credits either, with all their stilted, hip flashes of car racing edited together with uncommon messiness and incoherence, while the soundtrack bellows out with singularly inauthentic surf rock.

It could also just be unbridled incompetence, mind you, an impression much sealed by the material that comes in after those credits are done. The driver of that racing car is teen-ish adult Hank Green (John Scott), who has in tow his girlfriend Tina (Marilyn Clarke), and the second the film properly starts up, they launch into a conversation that's a concentrated blast of badly-written exposition ("I know about your experiments in that laboratory!" is a line, and it ends up meaning absolutely nothing like you suppose it might) and deeply uncomfortable close-ups that appear to be trying to zoom all the way into Clarke's pores. Anyway, the film's inanities start hard and fast, and they don't let up. Not even five minutes from the start - that's five minutes including the credits, mind you - we've already seen the local radioactive waste dumping crew tipping big metal barrels into the ocean, and we've seen that toxic goo start to congeal over a skeleton in a shipwreck, forming into the film's monster with what I confess to be impressive effects work for a low-budget joint, though the comically severe "you should be terrified right now" music makes it rather more funny than even a little bit creepy. Nor do the superimposed fish help.

The first sequence is something like a codex of beach movie tropes as they had already congealed into existence, intercut with Tina's murder by the newly-created sea monster. So we get lots of alarmingly bad surf rock played with anxious determination by local band the Del-Aires, lots of alarmingly bad dancing as the extras Tenney tossed together gyrate randomly and with no obvious organic connection to each other or the music, and lots of ancient, wheezy jokes, presented as insert shots of people we'll never see again. At one point, the camera stares, hungrily, at a girl's bikini'd ass for several seconds before crash zooming out to a pair of filthy boys doing the staring. One turns to the other and says, with unfounded alarm, "That reminds me, did I bring my hot dog buns? That kind of wheezy joke. Hank and the local biker gang get into a fight over Tina, who retaliates by going swimming alone, where she gets assaulted by a suit that plainly didn't come cheap, but looks regrettably goofy, with giant Muppet eyes and a mouth that's all full of... like... feelers, I guess? It looks like a bunch of cigars stuffed into a novelty Gill Man dispenser. And despite the profound inadequacy of the monster and the appalling effects - the stuntman rubs chocolate syrup on Clarke's abdomen, and that's enough for the "violent attack" - Tenney stages this with extreme gravity and menace, all long-ish shots of Clarke flailing and screaming while the music goes hard. The tonal shift between the wacky beach shenanigans and the grisly killing could almost be brilliant, if it was handled with even the smallest measure of artistry.

The most amazing thing about this extended beach party opening is how much it has almost nothing to do with the remainder of the film. Hank comes back, and the monster comes back of course, but the great majority of the remaining movie essentially starts from scratch, with Hank's mentor Dr. Gavin (Allen Laurel) trying to figure out what the creature is so it can be stopped, while his daughter Elaine (Alice Lyon) balances her desire to make out with Hank and her sense of abashment that he's only on the market because his girlfiend was just horribly murdered. That's making it sound rather more clean and streamlined than is the case: in fact, the screenplay of The Horror of Party Beach is a deeply inelegant affair, a series of disconnected anecdotes roughly shaped into a plot-like substance. Some moments, like an extended sequence of three women lazily trying to escape this murderous hellhole for the safety of New York City, don't even have the decency to involve the characters or settings established anywhere else in the film.

Tenney charges through this aimless material, with its nonsensical technobabble (Gavin declares that they can use carbon-14 dating to determine the genetic makeup of the monster at one point, in one of the most overtly wrong things I have ever encountered in a movie that wasn't making a joke of it), casual racism (Gavin's made Eulabelle, played by Eulabelle Moore, is a cringing black maid of a sort already years behind the curve in '64, going on and on about voodoo), logic gaps, and colossal tonal shifts, and makes a movie that is, if never remotely satisfying as drama, at least frantic enough in its pacing to only rarely be boring. He's terrible at the nuts and bolts of directing: the performances are variable down to the level of individual line readings that end someplace different than they started, while there are obvious flubbed takes left in the finished film. And where any clever B-movie director would work hard to keep monsters that looked this stupid as a background threat, hanging around in shadows and fragmentary quick cuts, Tenney puts it - them, in fact, a detail the script doesn't explain - front and center, with even the most moody, atmospheric shots lit such that no matter how dark and threatening the backgrounds get, the monsters themselves are bright and wholly visible.

This is in keeping with the overall feeling of The Horror of Party Beach, which is that's some kind of ersatz object, barely a movie at all. It was shot on the beaches of Connecticut, but everything about it borrows from the vocabulary of Los Angeles-based beach movies, the original sin from which it never recovers: it explains the overcompensation of the opening sequence, the shrillness of the music, and the general uncertainty that crowds out every actor and plot beat. Movies of this sort were cranked out in the L.A. metropolitan area on a weekly basis, and the people there knew how to do them; Connecticut had no native presence of cheap-ass indie productions, and a constant feeling of "are we doing this right? Is this how we do this?" coats everything: the production, certainly its approximation of surfing culture.

I say all of that like it's a bad thing, but of course it is the film's chief strength. Lousy B-movies are thick on the ground, and rarely were they thicker than the 1960s; The Horror of Party Beach is weird enough and vividly incompetent enough to feel genuinely special and - I will not say "unpredictable", since every last thing about it has been taken from the nuclear monster handbook. It has an unconventional feeling, though, one that's not to its credit as a beach comedy or a horror movie, but is manna to the lover of weird, colorfully dysfunctional bad movies.

Body Count: 7, along with the entirety of a slumber party numbering "over 20", plus apparently dozens or hundreds of bodies during the monsters' reign of terror - the film is alarmingly bad at chronology among its other sins, and we have only the alarmist newspaper headlines to go on here.

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: SCI-FI HORROR - IN GOO WE TRUST

There is very little about 1958's The Blob, on paper, that distinguishes it from all the other God knows how many dozens of films from that decade that pitch a bunch of small-town teenagers against some kind of monster from outer space, a mad scientist's lab, or maybe just a good old-fashioned nuclear disaster. It was in color at at time when that was still novel for a genre film of limited budget, but that wasn't distinctive enough for distributor Paramount (it was an independent film produced by newbie Jack H. Harris), who stuck it as the B-side of a double-feature, following their in-house I Married a Monster from Outer Space. It's cheap as all hell, the story is paint-by-numbers in every way except its vagueness about what its titular monster is all about, and the 28-year-old lead actor is hilariously unconvincing as a high school student. Or, frankly as a 28-year-old. And the rest of the cast is exactly like any other set of generic nobodies plucked from a casting agent's second-string binder.

All that being true, some one-of-a-kind alchemy was going on, because The Blob is anything but generic. Of all the movies made on this basic model at that time, I'm not sure that there's another one to have risen so far above the crowd in popular esteem, which it did almost immediately: it was so much more popular than I Married a Monster that Paramount was obliged to swap the two films and focus their marketing on The Blob. In later years, the film became one of the handful of genre films from its era to receive a remake, in 1988; it enjoys the even rarer distinction, for B-picture, of securing a spot in the Criterion Collection. The ingredients might be almost exactly the same as so many long-forgotten drive-in programmers, but the completed dish is incredibly special, one of the most personable sci-fi horror films of its generation, though I am not entirely sure I would necessarily run right along into calling it, therefore, one of the best.

The two most obvious pillars of the film's success are its rather unconventional monster, and that weathered 28-year-old playing the good bad boy hero Steve Andrews. Because that actor, in just his second appearance in a feature, was none other than Steve McQueen, future embodiment of all things cool and manly in the 1960s, in his starmaking role. Now, I would not be so brazen as to suggest that what McQueen is up to in the film counts as great acting, or even notably good acting; there's really not much in the script by Theodore Simonson and Kate Phillips (the pen name of retired actor Kay Linaker) that would enable an actor to rise to particularly impressive heights, and it would take somebody with more experience than McQueen had to outthink writing like this. What he had, though, in naturally-occurring quantities that very few movie stars throughout history could compete with, was effortless charisma and innate screen presence. Seeing that talent turned towards of loners and thieves and other assorted tough guys is pretty much standard-issue Charming Rogue stuff; there's something much more bracing (and I imagine it was more bracing yet in '58, when nobody knew who the hell McQueen was) about watching that funneled into a teenager. For American teenagers are, by their nature, the most swaggering and image-obsessed figures in God's creation, and even as McQueen is almost hilariously incapable of looking the part, he has the flinty, antagonistic attitude down cold. Steve Andrews is, and I say this in all due awareness of the dangers of hyperbole, the most interesting teen male in a horror film of the '50s or '60s: there's a sharpness to him not found in other hero types, and a moral backbone rare in the hoods and greasers (who are found in this movie, and treated with unusual sympathy).

The relative uniqueness of Steve among his cinematic peers points out one of the subtler points that might help explain The Blob's impact: this is a film that treats its teen characters with unusual respect and dignity. This was, lest we forget, during the first generation of teenagers as the driving force in mass culture (which, as I take it, is an exclusively post-WWII phenomenon), and teens as movie protagonists - and villains, and the whole entire casts of movies - had become fairly common, but you'd have to look a long time for a movie prior to this that so fully stands behind its teen characters, from the conventionally good Steve and his girlfriend Jane Martin (Aneta Corsaut) to the punks off doing punk things like sullenly watch very daft-looking experimental horror film at the midnight show (you'd swear that it had to be a parody, it looks so incomprehensible, but it actually exists: it's a 1955 film called Dementia), in opposition to the adults who disregard, misunderstand, or openly hate them and dismiss their warnings of a mysterious terrible blob-thing from space digesting humans whole. Though for all that The Blob puts forth, with some passion, the idea that adults need to trust the kids more, because even the naughtiest teens are still basically decent, the film's efforts to provide plausible reasons for giving everyone reason to disbelieve Steve and Jane are quite thorough, right up to the point that the blob gives up hiding and eats its way through a movie theater. It helps the film as horror: the inability to budge the authorities to do anything starts to take on the logic of nightmare. And it helps it as drama: it feeds Steve and Jane's frustration and gives them more weight as characters. Which is an insane thing to say about a drive-in movie, but there it is. It is, of course, not a character piece as such, particularly in moments such as when one character's whole family turns out to be dead, and by the end of the scene, he's apparently forgotten, in his and the film's anxiety to make sure that a dog made it out okay. But for junk food, this one has unusual interest in making its characters plausible people whom we like because of their actions and intelligence, not just because it's a movie and they've been plugged in as our identification points.

But I have drifted, without mentioning the film's other great triumph: the blob. It's utterly primitive, just silcone gel with red dye being shaken from offscreen, being squeezed through holes, and such. It's also one of the great original movie monsters of an era, for it is one of the most totally alien of alien beings. Hell, the fact that it's so clearly a prop adds to its effectiveness: while it oozes towards its victims and across models with what has to be malevolent intent, the eye and brain refuse to process it as a living thing at all. It can't be resolved into anything explicable, either visually or in the writing, so it comes off as a destructive force that can't be understood or predicted in any way, and thus cannot be fought. And, just as an added bonus, it turns a darker shade of red throughout the movie, a subtle and incredibly gross touch.

In a lot of ways, The Blob is all the usual junk: it openly wears its threadbare budget in its conspicuous sleight-of-hand editing, and one of the most transparently fake car rigs I have ever seen in a movie. The characters are undeniably written with more sympathy and thoughtfulness than the usual teen pandering crap, but the cast, beyond McQueen and Earl Rowe as the main cop, simply don't have the chops to make any kind of remote impression (that being said, nobody is bad, and that's an achievement in this kind of film). But it's junk with conviction, as director Irvin Yeaworth (a veteran of Christian devotional shorts) refuses to play up ridiculousness promised by the jaunty Burt Bachrach/Mack David theme song and inherent to the scenario. He runs the film like a jungle cat, slinking along and pouncing, and while the scale of the production isn't conducive to much in the way of creative imagery, it says a lot that Yeaworth always shoots the blob, even in its smallest form, from angles that make it seem imposing and distressing. That's the film in a nutshell: it takes itself its characters, and its monster very seriously. There are holes in the script and holes in the production, and it really doesn't have much subtext beyond "I feel ya, kids, grown-ups are the worst" (you could squeeze some Cold War "devoured by the conformist blob" rhetoric out of there, but what '50s horror film didn't have anti-Soviet undertones?), all of which make it hard to support calling it one of the all-time great sci-fi horror films, as is frequently done. But it's a genre essential, and infinitely more rewarding in every regard than it has the slightest reason to be.

Body Count: Unclear. Even the cops whose job it is, theoretically, to know this, can't do better than estimating in the 40s or 50s. There are around a half-dozen "featured" deaths.

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: THE POWER OF A CAPELLA

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: Pitch Perfect 2 is the sequel to one of the most beautiful and rare creatures in this heavily market-researched days, an honest-to-God word of mouth hit. Which makes it the perfect excuse for me to finally catch up with said hit.

The question of how Pitch Perfect managed to become a generational touchstone is one I really shouldn't try to answer, not being a member of the generation in question, but let's spitball anyway. Personally, I think it's the film's universality, at least among the audience sector it has largely succeed in seducing. Not the romantic comedy elements, which are frankly unpersuasive, and not the evergreen girl-power overtones and the celebration of female friendships, which are absolutely persuasive and even elegant. I am referring strictly to the film's subject matter: I'd be willing to believe that there's not a single human being who attended a four-year university in the United States at any point in the 21st Century who didn't attend an a capella concert, or know somebody involved in the a capella scene, or at least know how to avoid the a capella culture on campus like a deadly plague.

And this is the world that Pitch Perfect leaps into, feet first, and with a perfect balance of praise and mockery that is certainly its most distinctive strength and its calling card. This is a movie for everybody who admires the showmanship and dedication of a capella performers, and who considers it one of the highlights of their own life that they are or were part of that same tradition. It's also a movie for everybody who finds a capella tacky and ridiculous, and looks down upon the singers as social misfits clinging to their in-group because nobody else will have them. Impressively, it's not merely both of these things at the same time; it's sometimes both of these things in the span of an individual gag that can be interpreted as either lovingly self-aware or wickedly sarcastic, depending on how generous the viewer is, or how generous they want to credit the filmmakers with being.

It's a pretty remarkable piece of alchemy that gives Pitch Perfect a vivid personality even when it's flopping about at its most miserable and derivative. Honestly, even the teen target audience of the film must be experienced enough to recognise a largely uninterrupted parade of stock tropes when it struts and frets its way across the stage. And particularly when the film curiously inserts an entire scene that finds the main character, Beca Mitchell (Anna Kendrick), curtly dismissing the entire medium of motion pictures as being derivative and maddeningly predictable, either as a tongue-in-cheek way of acknowledging its own scene-for-scene predictability, or hypocritically trying to forestall the audience's criticism of the same.

Still, familiarity is appealing in its way, and as I've already suggested, Pitch Perfect is a movie that's insistent on being as familiar as possible. So it doesn't really matter that only the most innocent will fail to get way out in front of the story of freshman Beca, arriving at Barden University four months after a disastrous case of projectile vomiting ended the championship run of the all-female Barden Bellas a capella group. Trying to avoid her overly-present father (John Benjamin Hickey), a professor at the university, Beca - who seriously needs to think about changing the spelling of her fucking name, because I've gotten it wrong every time I've typed it out so far - ends up crossing paths with Chloe (Brittany Snow) and Aubrey (Anna Camp), the current leaders of the Bellas, trying to whip up enthusiasm among the incoming class. This doesn't appeal much to Beca, even with her naturally clean and tuneful alto voice, but her father manages to push into agreeing to join any club, and the Bellas are as good as any. And thus does Beca, with her passion for producing mash-ups and tweaking sound, run smack into Aubrey's fascistic devotion to the corny traditions of a capella past. Surely there will be no chance for the radical Beca to prove the superiority of her forward-looking attitude, especially not one that involves a competitive championship berth against their archrivals.

Meanwhile, the cute boy Beca works with at the school radio station, Jesse (Skylar Astin), joins those same archrivals, the Treblemakers, the only population of boys at Barden that the Bella members are specific forbidden by club rules from dating. And Beca's rather tetchy disinterest in Jesse would seem to mean that's not a problem at all, and given how acutely the film deflates when it shifts its focus from the dynamics running in all directions between the Bellas, over to its lukewarm romantic plot with its generically meaty looking male lead, it would be better not just for her singing career but for Pitch Perfect itself if she'd just stop speaking to him. But then we'd be out a B-plot.

The film imagines, and I think that a substantial portion of its fanbase agrees, that the star of the show is the music, presented in a copious quantity of performance numbers, choreographed by Aakomon Jones and framed by director Jason Moore with a slick efficiency that undoubtedly resembles a high-end a capella stage performance of the sort that really would win all the a capella awards, but doesn't really stand out in the annals of musical cinema. The singing performances are generally strong-to-great; this was the film where Kendrick redefined herself as a specialist in musicals, and while the demands of this role and these songs don't meaningfully compare to those she essayed in The Last Five Years or Into the Woods, it's very difficult to imagine her landing those movies without the unimpeachable work she showcased her as a singing actress clearing the path. Still, it's hard not to wish for some more energetic staging to go along with the impressive singing; I can't vouch that watching the numbers provides much that simply listening to the soundtrack wouldn't.

No indeed, the real strength of Pitch Perfect lies in its characters, an outlandishly appealing lot even when they're a collection of awkward stereotypes - Aubrey the shrill neurotic control freak; when we alight on Cynthia-Rose the butch African-American lesbian (Ester Dean) and Lilly the inaudible shy and quiet Asian-American (Hana Mae Lee), we've arrived at a place that filmmakers as self-conscious about their progressive representations as Moore and screenwriter Kay Cannon probably should have noticed long before it got to post-production. The actors make it work, though, and so does the film's unflagging generosity, loving its protagonists even when it gets why they're ridiculous. All this culminates in the immediate break-out character Fat Amy, a breezily self-confident Tasmanian immigrant played with unflappable authority by Rebel Wilson in her break-out role. It's the kind of comic performance that you can tell even without having to be told involved a lot of improvisation and spontaneity, providing just enough sharpness at acute angles to the rest of the film that Wilson provides exactly the counterbalance to the overdetermined plotting that the film needs. But this is an ensemble affair; it takes the combined efforts of every Bella, no matter how small the role, to create the film's winning sense of acceptance and community.

It's winning enough that I can even overlook the degree to which, in truth, huge swatches of Pitch Perfect are pretty lousy comedy. It's certainly never fresh: the jokes are almost as easy to predict as the plot beats. John Michael Higgins and Elizabeth Banks, a pair of cast-iron comic troupers who can't help but be fun to watch, are stranded as a pair of despicable color commentators hurling passive-aggressive insults at the Bellas, a steal from Best in Show that would be obvious even without Higgins right there reminding us that the earlier film exists; they get laughs out of many of their lines (how could they not, those two?), but the film would certainly be stronger without them. There's a whole elaborate vomiting sequence late in the movie that includes several jokes which would feel indecently crass in a genuine gross-out movie, let alone a sweet-natured character comedy. And so on, and so forth.

Still, there's a lanky, casual attitude going on that makes certain the film is good-humored even when it doesn't have particularly good humor, if you'll forgive an awful turn of phrase. Pitch Perfect manages to be both acerbic and friendly in a way that gives it bite without giving it too much edge - it's a very pleasurable movie, even if those pleasures are on the simple side. And even if they're frequently secondhand. I'm not quite convinced that it comes by its admiring cult fairly, but it's hard to complain when a feel-good movie actually ends up feeling genuinely good, or is so unfussy about celebrating the kinds of friendships that don't show up in movies nearly as often as they should.

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BULLY PULPIT

All due respect to the recent spate of high-profile horror movies to be critically fêted on account of being actually good, but one of the things that The Babadook and It Follows have in common is that they're both immensely well-made versions of something that's already been done. Now, quite unexpectedly, we have the opposite, in the form of Unfriended (which premiered under the name Cybernatural, which simply doesn't do for something made later than 1997, and not a soft-core cable porno). Legitimately, it's as formally radical as any American film in years, and that despite being a genre picture; despite sounding like a slightly tarted-up first-person camera movie, and especially like 2013's The Den, it's only superficially the same thing. It is the rarest of the rare: it has created a totally new set of storytelling tools, laying out the rules for a new kind movie that, a year or two from now, I am hopeful might be used in a really aggressive, challenging way, the first great work of quintessentially Millennial art.

The problem is that Unfriended, aside from inventing a new language, is shit.

But I would like to accentuate the positive for starters, since the things that are bad about Unfriended are common to a great many poor horror films, and the things that are good are almost totally unique. The notion is that high school student Blaire Lily (Shelley Hennig) and her boyfriend Mitch Roussel (Moses Jacob Storm) are all ready to have a fun night of sexually taunting each other on Skype, when their friends Jess Felton (Renee Olstead), Adam Sewell (Will Peltz), and Ken "Kennington" Smith (Jacob Wysocki) jump into the fray, somehow, using computer trickery best described as "the screenwriter wanted it". The five of them banter a bit, getting increasingly annoyed at the sixth individual apparently listening in on their call, trying to figure it out, accusing snotty frenemy Val Rommel (Courtney Halverson) of being the hacker and dragging her into their chat, and only eventually figuring out that what might be going, and since this is a horror film, "might be" = "surely is", is that the dead Laura Barns (Heather Sossaman), who committed suicide one year ago tonight, could be haunting everybody she thinks is responsible for bullying her into killing herself following a humiliating YouTube video that showed her drunk and covered in her own filth. Which does in fact mean that she wants revenge on, basically, the whole school, and I imagine that's to be the sequel hook.

Now, there's nothing special about any of that, except that the whole film is shown as a shot of of Blaire's MacBook desktop. And here's where we must be very specific about what we mean: it's not the footage being shown on Skype, a gimmick that dates at least back to the segment "The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger" from 2012's V/H/S, and it's not the Skype window with instant messages popping up in front of it, as in The Den. It is, literally, the whole of the desktop, with .jpgs and folders visible around the edges of windows that include Chrome, Skype, Apple iMessage, and Spotify, at least. Which is one important thing already: Unfriended uses name brand programs, and that adds immeasurably to its sense of realism compared to movies that have people using InstaChat and searching on Snoople, or whatever drippy pseudonyms the copyright-dodging screenwriter came up with that week.

That's lovely, but the really exciting thing, what makes Unfriended totally new in my experience, is that it's showing us the unfiltered version of what happens on Blaire's computer: we see the entire record of her life online, with all the various traces of abandoned thoughts on the titles of browser tabs and in her Facebook history, the programs she had open when she started to flirt with Mitch. And other than the appearance of the mouse arrow as she selects what she's focusing on, there's nothing in the movie to guide our eye; we simply get to decide whether it's the actual video of Laura's death we want to stare at, or the sidebar of "also suggested" videos, we can spy on her song playlist. What Unfriended has done is lay out the rules for how a movie can depict and move through that digital space; it has given the foundation to a filmmaker who wants to go for broke and really experiment by making all of that unfocused side detail where the actual storytelling happens, using scraps and errata that we can look at but don't have to, leaving swaths of important character detail spread out across a screen such that we can't see everything and have to prioritise what to look at. Unfriended even starts to be aware of that possibility, as it leaves sometimes up to six different video chat screens playing at once, and not always having the most prominent ones include the most interesting information.

That being said, while I have no doubt that a truly radical experimental narrative shall be made using this aesthetic, Unfriended is absolutely not it - all that wonderful space it leaves itself for squirreling away important bits of information in little side details is wasted on in-jokes and generic filler, the functional equivalent of "lorem ipsum" paragraphs. And it can't even be bothered to keep continuity straight: the action is clarified to take place in April, and we see certain Facebook well-wishes that are time-stamped to "January" and "X hours ago" at different points, all in story that takes place in real time over 80 minutes. There's also a countdown that skips from 10 to 5. So much for hiding interesting details in plain sight.

The plot, meanwhile, is generic "revenge against the obnoxious teenagers" boilerplate, interesting solely in that the exposition is given out of order and throughout the entire movie, so it all seems a bit more mysterious than in your average slasher, where we understand the point of the revenge more or less from the beginning. But a slasher is exactly what it boils down to, including both the regressive sexual morality (we discover that one character isn't a virgin at exactly the point that the movie begins to turn against that character) and the one-word personality types: the Druggie, the Horndog, the Bitch, the Geek, the Bitch (2), and the Hypocrite. Screenwriter Nelson Greaves's desire to structure this as a mystery and give the film a sucker punch twist ending turn into a tawdry trick, thereby trivialising the only thing about the story that had any prayer of being interesting: the film thinks that it's telling a complex tale of how bullying works in the age of social media, pointing out that bullies can be bullied themselves, and that dogpiling is a horrible fucking thing to do to people, no matter how distasteful they are. But its reliance on cheap horror tropes and shabby shocks devalues that theme significantly.

It's painfully unscary - I suspect that watching it on a television or, preferably, a computer might give it more oomph than seeing it in a movie theater possibly could - and includes one of the most contrived death scenes in recent horror cinema (assuming one would, for whatever reason, keep a blender in their bedroom, would it even so be possible to commit suicide with it?). And the filmmakers' enthusiasm for the Kids and their Ways leads ultimately to a deeply misguided climax built around a high-stakes game of "Never Have I Ever" that is bafflingly silly. So, let's be clear, I emphatically do not recommend this film. It's like someone invented the English language by writing The Da Vinci Code. But I do look forward to recommending its most successful knock-offs a few years down the road.

5/10

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WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE

On paper, everything about The DUFF seems calculated to make it seem like the most dire of slogs, beginning with its capitalisationally overdetermined, visually ugly title. And it only gets worse upon learning that said title is a slang term (which feels like it probably doesn’t actually exist in the wild) meaning Designated Ugly Fat Friend, and that it is in reference to a character played by Mae Whitman, who could only conceivably be accused of being ugly or fat accordingly to the dysfunctionally narrow range of acceptable female body types allowed by Hollywood.

Surprisingly, if not out-and-out miraculously, The DUFF is not at all the ungainly miscarriage it seems like it not merely could have been, but that, in fact, it absolutely had to be. It is, in fact, a rather intelligent high school comedy, not entirely flawless, and clearly the work of grown-up filmmakers trying to fake it like they know more than they actually do about how The Kids These Days use the Twitter and the Snapchat and the iPad (and then, to cheat even more, they build a totally helpless and out-of-touch school principal into the plot, played by the always-excellent but under-used Romany Malco). But it’s got strong bones and snappy dialogue, and it feels more aware of how people behave (if not specifically teenagers, necessarily) than most of its genre. It’s the best such film I’ve personally seen since Easy A, a film it copies in several particulars: it’s neither squeamish nor prurient in its acknowledgement that teenagers have sex, it relies on well-positioned adult character actors - Malco, Allison Janney, even the usually insufferable Ken Jeong in an unexpectedly grounded career peak - to help build a frame around its game but green young cast, and it’s ultimately built on the bedrock of a magnificent, perfectly-timed comic performance by a woman who almost entirely by herself makes the entire film more sophisticated than it xis, if you follow me. And if The DUFF can do for Whitman’s career what Easy A did for Emma Stone’s then it is a valuable motion picture, indeed.

The basic concept at the heart of the film is that Bianca Piper (Whitman) is disgusted by the thought, presented by her asshole jock neighbor Wesley Rush (Robbie Amell) that she is the “DUFF” of her trio - not, herself, ugly nor fat, but far less attractive than her BFFs Casey (Bianca A. Santos) and Jess (Skyler Samuels), and thus the one who acts as gatekeeper to all the boys who really want to ask one of them out. And this disgust turns into a passionate desire to reinvent herself, and in so doing gin up the confidence to finally approach her crush, Toby (Nick Eversman). Thus she makes a deal with Wes: if he helps her to be less of a doormat, she’ll help him to not flunk out of chemistry. And so they become constant companions and friends, earning Bianca the wrath of Wes’s on-again, off-again girlfriend Madison (Bella Thorne), the most popular but also the cruelest girl in school.

It doesn’t take too long to figure out the overall shape of the thing if not every specific detail it takes to get there, but originality is not generally the goal of romcoms. And whatever lack of suspense enters the proceedings the instant we realise that Wes is transparently crushing on Bianca, the film survives it without too much strain, partially because the actors have the right kind of chemistry in the right directions, and because screenwriter Josh A. Cagan, adapting Kody Keplinger’s novel, wisely takes the more Hitchcockian tack of making the tension within the plot about the characters figuring out what we already know, instead of trying to pretend that we haven’t already heard this one and have no idea what’s going on.

The result is a likable, unchallenging, but largely satisfying number about people who work well together figuring that fact out, while also making the important (if resoundingly clichéd) discovery that being yourself matter more than wedding yourself into a role that society has decreed. The path by which this is navigated has perils, and film struggles through some of them: the whole third act keeps tripping over gooey, film-killing pauses to re-word the final speech from The Breakfast Club around the basic idea that everyone is somebody else’s DUFF. And we know that the film is aware of The Breakfast Club, which was referenced and re-worked to much better effect in the opening sequence, which attempts to ironically grapple with the way that 2010s teenagers filter their identity through the pithy, sound-bitey culture of social media (which, again, feels like adults are responsible for it, not anyone who actually knows a teen; though there’s an extended riff on the word “amassable” that’s pretty delightful). So the film begins and middles far better than it ends: the comedy is spritelier, the visuals and use of graphic elements far more inventive, and the pace breezier. Director Ari Sandel is good at comedy and snark, and not so good at heart. But if we were to throw out every movie that had a rocky ending, we’d hardly have any left.

And for the most part, The DUFF is a top-notch midwinter treat: visually creative in the way it literalises social network technology, given a comfortable assortment of good lines, just twisty enough in its predetermined romcom march that it doesn't feel lazy. And Whitman is a treasure: able to make wretched self-pity seem funny, and self-confident enough in her carriage and expressions - not a trace of Ann Veal to be seen - that she manages to put an ironic spin on being thought ugly or fat, and thus saves the movie from any feeling of toxicity on that front. She's absolutely terrific, giving a wry, knowing attitude to her character and the film, and turning The DUFF from a modestly amusing comedy to a genuine success. It's not perfect, but it's goddamn close for February.

7/10

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1999: In which very old stories are given a very contemporary coat of paint, to the benefit of all

How does one try to summarise 1999 with one review of one movie? It was arguably (by which I mean "almost certainly, but let's not be smug know-it-all dicks about it") the single most transformative year of American filmmaking after the collapse of the New Hollywood Cinema. A stunning number of major filmmakers made some of their most important films that year: Stanley Kubrick, Paul Thomas Anderson, Michael Mann, David Fincher leap to mind, while Spike Jonze, Sam Mendes, the Wachowskis, Kimberly Peirce, Alexander Payne and M. Night Shyamalan all made their debuts or had their big breakthrough. Technology advanced by leaps and bounds, starting with the Wachowskis' The Matrix and continuing through the year's highest-grossing film, Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace, with its groundbreaking use of all-CGI characters and CGI-augmented sets. Animation had a banner year, as did horror. American Pie brought back sex comedy in a big way, and we've had a golden age of raunchy humor ever since.

It's simply not possible to grab all of those threads and collect them in one essay, so I didn't bother trying. Instead, I elect to focus on just one of the many cinematic trends that passed through the bottleneck of 1999, the fad that dominated the second half of the decade of adapting classic works of literature into the high-stakes world of American high school. I confess that my choice was aided by the years and years I've been told that I absolutely needed, just needed right the fuck now, to finally see 10 Things I Hate About You. This was serendipitous: while I can't swear to its timeless important in the development of cinema the way the way I might about Fight Club or The Sixth Sense or even something totally disreputable like The Mummy, I don't think I could have consciously come up with anything that more perfectly captured what the late '90s felt like if that had been my sole intention. Also, everyone who told me was right: I did, in fact, needed to see it right the fuck now, because on top of everything else, it's one of the absolute best teen-driven romantic comedies that I have ever seen.

So, about that perfect embodiment of 1999: herewith, a motion picture that stars Julia Stiles, whose name is featured drawn in bold, sketchy style in magic marker colors during the opening credits, while the Barenaked Ladies' "One Week" bounces its way across the soundtrack. The film at least has the forward-thinking wisdom to make this last detail a joke: the undying Ladies dominate the soundtrack until until we see Stiles herself pull up to a red light next to a bunch of giddy, pop-loving girls, blasting Joan Jett's "Bad Reputation" loud enough to drown them out. I cannot say whether the filmmakers planned for this to be a sign that her character, Kat Stratford, is completely awesome or a bitch; but it made me like her a lot, anyway.

The awesome/bitch divide is, in many ways, the heart and soul of 10 Things I Hate About You. For the film is a dressed-up retelling of The Taming of the Shrew, a late entry in the great explosion of William Shakespeare adaptations that flourished in the 1990s, on top of the "put it in high school" trend that had been purring along steadily since Clueless in 1995 (the Venn diagram combining these two trends also contains William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet and O, and I believe nothing else; though it wouldn't do to not at least mention the modern dress Hamlet with Ethan Hawke). And The Taming of the Shrew brings with it an amount of baggage like no other Shakespeare play outside of The Merchant of Venice. To wit, the play's sexual politics, which may or may not be as straightforward as they seem (the amount of irony to be read into the last scene is not, that I am aware, a settled matter), but they seem pretty damn toxic. And this makes any modern treatment of the play a project that needs to be handled with delicacy, especially a modern treatment set among teenagers.

So while we are surely meant to recognise in Kat a certain stiffness and problematic standoffishness - there couldn't be a plot if she didn't have to be redeemed in some way - Karen McCullah & Kirsten Smith's screenplay also has to allow plenty of room for us to like her just the way she is, a blunt, tough-talking punk kid with an appealingly sharp tongue. To a certain degree, the writers game things by surrounding Kat with transparently unacceptable people: her sister, Bianca (Larisa Oleynik) is a shrill, bubble-headed twit (established early and firmly in a beautiful line of character-establishing dialogue: "I like my Skechers, but I love my Prada backpack"), and her father Walter (Larry Miller) is a deranged anti-sex lunatic, owing to his work with pregnant teens. It's impossible not to like the "bad girl" when the people she's being contrasted with are so immensely vacuous. And so we end up not with Kate the Shrew, but with something more complicated and ambivalent: Kat the Riot Grrrl but also Kat with the Self-Negating Priorities. The character is a bit artless, and Stiles's clipped performance in the film's early going doesn't do much to flesh out the humanity in a distinctly artificial part, but it's perhaps the best that could be done.

Anyway, the film mostly follows the story play quite closely, doing a decent job of finding analogues for things that need updating: the newcomer to Padua High is one Cameron James (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who falls hard for Bianca on day 1, only to find that her father has forbidden both of his daughters to date before college. Except that he's just changed the rule a little bit, in a bit of nasty-minded sophistry worthy of Cinderella's stepmother: Bianca can date only when older sister Kat has a boyfriend. And since Kat has decided that she's better than every other person attending Padua and would rather die than touch any of them, this is as good as a chastity belt. Except, that Cameron and his friend/co-conspiracist Michael (David Krumholtz) come up with a plan: hint that his his rival for Bianca's hand, Joey (Andrew Keegan), should pay to hire somebody to ask Kat out. And the target is the sullen, alienated bad boy Patrick Verona (Heath Ledger), one of the only people at Padua who can go toe-to-toe with Kat on her snarling antisocial nastiness.

If 10 Things I Hate About You ends up falling into a lot of the narrative rhythms of any old romcom, this is at least partially because Shakespeare's plays did a lot to invent those rhythms: not the grimly de rigueur bit where the third act needs to be ushered in by the discovery of a terrible secret taken somewhat out of context, and the lovers have a fake fight (something that wasn't as ossified in 1999 as it is now; I think 2003's How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days is what carved it into stone). I expect that nobody could be genuinely surprised by the direction the plot headed, even if they hadn't read the play, but formulas do not need to aplogise for themselves when they're executed well; this is a lesson that the works of Shakespeare teach us if they can teach us anything (after all, all but three of his plays were remakes). And in 10 Things I Hate About You, the formulas work splendidly, thanks largely to the energy with which McCullah & Smith draw their characters, and the way Gil Junger directs his awfully solid cast into a breezy, bantery register of dancing at each other with salty quips. It proves once again something that should have been obvious since the 1930s, but never seems to stick for very long these days: romantic comedies are best when they play as a series of verbal battles of bright, staccato dialogue, and then that dialogue is as filthy as the circumstances will allow. In the screwball era, that meant high-concept innuendo. In the case of the PG-13 10 Things I Hate About You, that means a lot of surprisingly bold chatter about sex that avoids feeling raunchy solely because the actors always speak their lines like they're trying to score points against a debate opponent, rather than because they actually seem to be thinking much about sex. Which I mean as a compliment.

There's too much naturalism in the film, particularly in the form of Ledger's bracingly caustic performance (it was the film that put him on the map, and while it's not at all one of his best performances, it's obvious throughout that he's got some real acting chops, far beyond the usual teenybopper pretty guy), for it to feel like a long-lost '30s film made about '90s teens, though honestly, the pacing of it is much closer to that than to the logy romcoms of the modern era. For all that the hook and the soundtrack make it sound like a generic teen-audience cash-in, the film is shockingly committed to functioning as a character-driven comedy, and when Stiles starts to loosen up as her character gets more flexible, it turns out to be a pretty delightful one.

Genre will be what it will be, and there's nothing surprising in 10 Things I Hate About You at the level of writing, and nothing remotely inspired or memorable at the level of film craftsmanship: it has the stolidity of the modern romcom, cleanly lit and squarely focused. But it's got good bones: a sturdy structure on which well-built jokes are arrayed, delivered with in-character nuance by a relaxed, enjoyable cast (also appearing: a delightfully curt Allison Janney and a frightfully fresh-faced Gabrielle Union). Nothing world-changing, and in 1999, films that were content to be the best piece of finely-tuned entertainment they could be seemed about as unambitious as at any other time in history. But for all its period trappings in slang, in style, and in tone, the film has aged well: good meat-and-potatoes filmmaking is never easy, and it's certainly never disposable. 10 Things I Hate About You is low-key and has small goals, but the way in which it meets those goals is in line with the best tradition of audience-pleasing Hollywood craftsmanship all through the years.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1999
-South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut becomes the highest-grossing adults-only animated film of all time
-Samuel L. Jackson makes a memorable exit from Deep Blue Sea
-Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me is one of the largest hits ever greenlit on the basis of its predecessor's cult success on home video

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1999
-Filthy-minded Spanish melodramatist Pedro Almodóvar suddenly has an enormous critical smash with the sublime All About My Mother
-Kang Je-gyu's Shiri is the first homegrown megablockbuster made in the rejuvenating South Korean film industry
-French madman Leos Carax makes certainly his hardest, and maybe his best film, Pola X

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NONNEIN

Feature-length toy commercials may not get much more crass than Ouija: "You can buy one of these at your local toy store", one character literally snorts at one point, and that's after the infomercial-like exchange during which two other characters speculate about how nice it would be if there were some sort of... anything... that let you communicate with the dead people you've known... some sort of easily obtainable board, perhaps. But points for burying that advertisement underneath a hilariously self-negating film whose overriding surface-level message is much closer to "If you don't use our product exactly the way we tell you to, you will die. And even if you do use it exactly the way we tell you to, you'll kill a solid 60% of your friends in the process". Truth in advertising!

That kind of giddy idiot writing is very much the thing that keeps Ouija surprisingly entertaining for a very long stretch of its 89 minutes, though the entertainment is never intentional. Or hell, maybe it is. If you are special effects artist-turned-first-time-director Stiles White (co-writing with Juliet Snowden; they last teamed up to script the absurd Jewish exorcism movie The Possession), and you are stuck making a motion pictured based on a Hasbro board game so non-specific in its application that a non-branded variant of it shows up in three or four haunted house movies every year, maybe you do just throw your hands up and start making fun of yourself. At least that would go some way towards explaining why Ouija is maybe the funniest bad horror movie of this year, and the last couple of years as well; maybe it's just the accumulated rank incompetence. I vigorously approve of it either way.

It's barbarically clichéd in every regard: there's this girl, see, Debbie (Shelley Hennig), who has been acting all weird, and nobody can tell why, not even her best friend Laine (Olivia Cooke). Still, it's a shock when she kills herself by hanging herself from the chandelier in her parents' foyer with a string of bright white Christmas lights. A shock to everybody but us, that is: we saw her playing with a Ouija™ game - the characters are fucking fanatical about calling it a "game", which makes sense from a corporate standpoint, but reflects the casual usage of no human being in existence - and we saw her playing it alone, in strict defiance of the rules. And that is how she called up the angry spirit that made her go all hollow inside and then kill herself as the punchline to a shot set-up that holds so long on the "her body is totally about to drop from the top of the frame" tension that you could wander out of the theater to have a nice dinner and come back before it finally plays out.

Laine is horribly distressed, more than anybody else, and after a couple of days of moping - days during which her father leaves on business, while Debbie's parents leave her the keys to their house while they decompress for a few weeks, leaving the film conveniently devoid of authority figures besides Laine's mystic old Hispanic grandma (Vivis Colombetti), which I am extrapolating from the way she's always referred to as "nona", and not because Laine or her dad (Matthew Settle) appear to have an ounce of Latino blood between them. But by Christ, we could not have a movie like this without a mystical ethnic.

So anyway, Laine strong-arms her boyfriend Trevor (Daren Kagasoff), hers and Debbie's other best friend Isabelle (Bianca Santos), Debbie's boyfriend Pete (Douglas Smith), and most reluctantly of all, her own little sister Sarah (Ana Coto), into having a séance in Debbie's house, using the very same Ouija™ board. Naturally enough, they kick up an evil spirit; naturally enough, it takes them an inordinately long time to figure this out, despite the spirit's overtly menacing behavior and refusal to actually identify itself as Debbie. Many deaths happen, while nobody figures out what the hell is going on, and Laine, who had earlier blamed herself for Debbie's "suicide", because she went to a party without her friend, seems totally unruffled by the actual deaths that she actually is at fault for.

It's as thunderously predictable in every moment and as an overarching plot as any PG-13 horror movie could ever daydream about being; anyone who has even heard of, let alone seen Insidious: Chapter 2 ought to be able to get pretty far ahead of the movie without hardly any issue, and that's even without the cameo by that film's Lin Shaye, as the Lin Shaye Character (kind of - there's actually a bit of misdirection around her, but the reason for the casting is obvious enough). And White telegraphs each and every scare with enough chance to brace yourself and cover your eyes and have a scream cued up that only the most generous and giving viewer could actually manage to be frightened by it.

But Ouija is not meant to be a good movie: it is meant to lever money away from bored teenagers, and if along the way it manages to be so idiotic and half-formed as to be laugh-out-loud hilarious, so much the better. Much of this is because of the dialogue, which includes some delectably impossible words that nobody would ever speak - like when reference is made to ordering pancakes "with the works", which may be some regionalism, but only served to conjure up for me the appealing image of pancakes topped with onions, relish, and tomatoes. Or when Douglas Smith enunciates the word "article" with what sounds for all the world like an additional "c". Or when the characters stop their conversations dead to have lengthy readings from the Ouija™ rulebook, which everyone in this universe appears to have committed to memory.

Much more is simply from how laughably ill-made Ouija is: the tense setpiece staged in a tunnel so dark that we can actually see quite clearly down its entire length, even though the characters cannot; the ripped-from-J-horror ghost designs. Even the fucking production design is laughable: Debbie and Laine's rooms are both covered in magazine ads and posters that suggest less that the art crew was aware of what these "hu-man teen-agers" did with their private spaces, and more that the art crew was sozzled on wine and grabbed a bunch of fliers from community theater Shakespeare productions.

It is, basically, a wonderfully bad movie, filled with lapses in story logic and erratic characters written like ciphers and played like aliens. I do not recommend seeing it in theaters: I almost popped from trying to hold in all the obnoxious remarks I wanted to make to the friend I saw it with. But oh, Lord, when the DVD comes out, the beer-and-pizza parties this outrageous piece of shit is going to fuel...

2/10

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CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL '14: IT FOLLOWS (DAVID ROBERT MITCHELL, USA)

Screens at CIFF: 10/18 & 10/22
World premiere: 17 May, 2014, Cannes International Film Festival

The business of being a fan of horror movies is a frustrating and thankless one, since they are so especially prone to being bad, but ever so often one comes along that you can stand up and cheer and point at and say "that one. That is what I have been waiting for". And oh my God, there were two of them this year at the Chicago Film Festival. I’ve already done my cooing and slavering over The Babadook, so let me now turn to a film that is almost as good, and arguably more creative: writer-director David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows.

The creativity starts right with away, with the film’s very theme: It Follows is, get this, a horror film about sexual morality. Wait, I think I got that backwards. My point being, it’s a small miracle that It Follows is able to make so much that feels so fresh and damn near unprecedented out some pretty musty ingredients: a bunch of young people right on the gradient between teenagers and adults, in the All-American Suburbs, trying to fight against an implacable enemy that kills you for having sex. But this is no knife-wielding psychopath; whatever it is, there’s not an ounce of evidence that we get to see.

After an elaborate, 360° and back somewhat pan that shows some anonymous girl running from her anonymous house, trying to escape from something we never see, we get our sense of what it can do when we see her dead, her legs gruesomely broken, on the beach. And after this opening gambit (which, honestly, I didn’t care for much at all, thinking it too glamorously cryptic and generic: I indeed spent the first several minutes of the film supposing that its wave of hype, unabated ever since its Cannes premiere, would turn out to be so much overinflated bullshit), we move onto the actual characters. First among these is Jay (Maika Monroe), who is reaching the point with her current boyfriend Hugh (Jake Weary) that the time has come to think about having sex; her other friends include Paul (Keir Gilchrist), who nurses a poorly-hidden crush on her, as well as Yara (Olivia Luccardi) and Kelly (Lili Sepe), who have some distinguishing characteristics but mostly just function as “we needed a couple more girls in the cast”, and represent the film’s most obvious shortcoming.

After what doesn’t seem to have been terribly exciting car-sex, Hugh attacks Jay with a rag soaked in ether; she wakes up to find herself tied to a chair, with Hugh taking a weirdly protective stance towards her, considering the circumstances. This is, you see, a demonstration: he wants her to see the thing that will be stalking her now, until it kills her, and then it will resume stalking him, until it kills him, and on back to the beginning of whatever. The only way to make it go away is to have sex and thus pass it forward like some hideous paranormal chlamydia. And try as hard as possible to have sex with somebody you’ll never see again, perhaps by adopting a fake name and address and ginning up a relationship with a girl from some other town. Exit Hugh the impossible asshole.

Having been convinced of its existence (it first shows up as a nude woman - it often shows up as a nude or partially clothed woman, which would maybe be a violation of the idea that it tries to be inconspicuous in its stalking, but is not at all a violation of the fact that this movie which otherwise does a great job of treating its female lead with support and respect, for a horror picture about metaphorical STDs, was after all made by a man), Jay has to work a bit to convince her friends, shortly to include across-the-street neighbor Greg (Daniel Zovatto), that she’s not going crazy, and that there really is a stalker that always changes its appearance, but nobody else besides her can see it. Once she’s successfully done that, the film becomes a glorious exercise in watching people in a horror movie apply logic and planning to their situation.

It’s blessedly intelligent, human-acting characters are one of the film’s biggest strengths, and it’s the foundation for everything else that works. For as is usually the case, it’s easier to be invested in the fates of horror movie characters when we have a reason to like them, instead of rooting for them to die violently because they are irritating generic placeholders. It’s also easier to laugh with them and feel a part of their well-worn group dynamic; and this is perhaps the most shocking thing of all about It Follows, how laugh-out-loud funny it frequently is. And not in the sense where you have a solid joke to release some of the pressure of a tense moment, but actually robust character-based humor, as though the film was secretly a comedy all along and just wasn’t telling anybody.

Above and beyond its crackerjack script, It Follows is just really damn cunningly made. It’s not scary according to the normal rules - other than the first scene where it appears as a crazy naked lady, there are no decrepit buildings, very few underlit, shadowy spaces, and nothing that looks acutely terrifying. Only one scene absolutely leans on our old friend the jump scare - though it is an exquisite jump scare, the most visceral “oh my CHRIST” scary moment in the film. Most of the film’s scariest, or at least tensest moments come from a far subtler place. The marvelous thing about It Follows is that it completely trusts us in the audience: we know the rules, that Jay is being stalked by a shape-changing human figure walking towards her at a steady gait, and it expects us to be just as keyed up about that as she is, and just as attentive to all the human figures in the background of every shot. It doesn’t need to smash cut to a figure as the score rages out on the strings. Just a nice, static wide shot, with someone walking towards Jay that she doesn’t notice. That’s all it takes for It Follows to kick off scene upon scene of the screaming heebie-jeebies.

Speaking of the score, it’s a fascinating one. Composed by Disasterpiece, it’s wildly erratic: sometimes staying low in the rumbling base, sometimes jangling along tunefully in a fairly obvious attempt to copy John Carpenter’s scores (Halloween especially, though not exclusively). And sometimes it’s outright lousy, though this is rare: but in the moments where the music decides “okay, this bit it meant to be scary”, rather than contributing to a sustained background, it goes generic and trite fast.

This isn’t the only flaw: the relative poverty of all the characters besides Jay I’ve mentioned, and there’s also a certain thinness to the films intellectual content: despite its welcome treatment of teenage female sexuality as a normal, sane, healthy thing, it’s still ultimately telling a story about how sex’ll kill ya. Worst of all, to my mind, is the ratty sound recording: in all its minimalist staging of its low-key horror, It Follows wears its low-budget production values like a medal of honor, but there’s no getting around cheap sound, and there’s shaggy, fuzzy, peaking audio all throughout the movie. It’s a dismaying and distracting limitation from a film that otherwise works as a showcase for using less to do more.

But whatever, horror movies this smart, this fun, and this actually horrifying come along far too rarely, and I have no desire to nitpick this one to death. The insights into young adulthood, coupled with the terrific thriller craftsmanship combine to make of the very best American horror films in years, and it’s as close to essential viewing for even the most horror-averse viewer as horror gets.

8/10

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CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL '14: THE WAY HE LOOKS (DANIEL RIBEIRO, BRAZIL)

Screens at CIFF: 10/11 & 10/13
World premiere: 10 February, 2014, Berlin International Film Festival

I will concede up front that to a certain type of viewer, and it is the type that I am, there's no way to describe Brazilian director Daniel Ribeiro's feature debut The Way He Looks that makes it sound tolerable. Or even to complete one sentence of plot description. "A blind, gay teen..." - nope. "In this study of the passive-aggressive awkwardness of high school courtship..." - nope. "Amid dappled shots of the afternoon sun, middle-class Brazilians..."- fuck, fuck, fuck, no.

Lucky for me, then, that The Way He Looks was as much an obligation to watch as a choice,* and I didn't get to just gloss over what turns out to be an exceptionally pleasant and beguiling film about adolescence. It makes no claims whatsoever to complexity or real creativity, but the execution of enormously predicable stock scenarios is so confident and beautiful, with such care and wisdom going into the creation of the characters, that artistic radicalism is hardly missed. There are some films that are completely worth seeing because they push against the edges of what the medium can do; there are some films that are worth seeing just because they're really well-made and emotionally resonant versions of a thing we've seen a hundred times, and will see a hundred more, just because they're pleasant and rewarding to watch. The Way He Looks may fall in the second category, but let's not miss the forest for the trees: the point of it is that it's still worth seeing.

Our blind, gay protagonist is Leo (Ghilherme Lobo), though it takes a little while before the film reveals to us (in an unforced, inductive way) that he can't see, and a great deal longer before it reveals that he likes boys. And this is because The Way He Looks is very eager, to its absolute credit, not interested in essentialising Leo in terms of his adjectives. It's also not even a little bit "boy realises he's gay, re-evaluates his personality, personal trauma ensues", which I also think is to its credit; finding out about his sexuality is about as complicated and traumatising as finding out by accident that he likes Thai food, and I admire how not-a-big-deal-ish the film, and its teenage characters, treat the topic, rather like their generation in reality has done compared to us older people. That kind of casual attitude towards sexuality is rare in movies still, and it's a heartening step forward to see a film that could be A Sociopolitical Statement play things so coolly.

But anyway, back to the plot: the key aspects of Leo's life are not his physical condition or his sexual appetite, but his shyness and withdrawn social life, fed by overly protective parents who are reluctant to let him do anything at all. His only friend to speak of is Giovana (Tess Amorim), a classmate he's known for years, and who has adopted the position of supportive big sister, urging him towards the openness and expression that he's been tamping down his whole life. And then, one day a new kid shows up in class: Gabriel (Fabio Audi, who is kind and a touch awkward himself, and who clings to Leo and Giovana as the nicest people around to help him find his footing. It turns out that he lives closer to Leo than Giovana does, and so it makes more sense for him to help Leo walk home; around the same time, a class project is assigned that the teacher demands must be carried out in same-sex teams. And thus it is that Leo and Gabriel spend almost all their out-of-school time together, while Leo and Giovana's relationship is strained like it never has been before, and that's even without the bit where Leo feels a connection to Gabriel of an entirely new sort. It's not clear if this is because he never realised he was gay, or because he never felt romantic attachment to someone, or if it's simply that, for the first time, he has a pleasurable secret that he can use as a mental release on the frustration of living with his hovering parents. What matters is that he has the sense of something wonderful and freeing lying in front of him for the first time.

The film is incredibly nice and gentle, and Lobo makes for an eminently likable protagonist whose gradual shift out of being painfully closed-in and shy is remarkably played and written: unlike most characters of the sort, whose arc involves becoming gregarious and dazzling free spirits, Leo is still a shy and quiet, just no so pained by it any more. Without any Big Gestures to play or Broad Arcs to tap into in the most obvious ways possible, Lobo's performance is far more internal and small: private smiles, a tendency to shrink himself down as he sits, and all little physical details that are subdued and quiet and intimate. It makes him more likable than an obviously Played and Scripted character could be; we have to quiet down with him to get to know him, rather than have the film splat things out, and it's far more rewarding.

All around Lobo's performance is a film that's entirely fine without being noticeably exciting. The other performances are good, but not revelatory in any real way, and while some of the compositions are striking in their geometry or their relationship with other images in the film, I got awfully tired of cinematographer Pierre de Kerchove's compulsion for romanticising the hell out of everything with soft golden sunlight. But it is nice to look at - oh, there's that word "nice" again. Well, "nice" is an okay thing for movies to be, and if they are going to be as nice as The Way He Looks, I am happy that they are also as honest and psychologically compelling.

7/10

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1983: In which the New Hollywood kids, reeling from the unexpected arrival of the 1980s, pay for their alleged sins

Whatever sequence of events, marketing pressures, shifting audiences preferences, and directorial indulgences contributed to the death of the New Hollywood Cinema at the dawn of the 1980s, it's satisfyingly easy to point out when the corpse stopped twitching. In February, 1982, New Hollywood idol and godfather, if you will,* Francis Ford Coppola released what is almost incontestably the most ill-advised, jaw-dropping insular, willfully alienating and implausible film made by any of his generation of filmmakers after their respective rises to prominence, the glowingly colored Las Vegas drama about a collapsing marriage, One from the Heart. I will contentedly declare that I enjoy, sort of, and admire, in a way, this fucked-up little geyser of Coppola's most weirdly personal aesthetic fascinations; but holy crap, there's just no way it should exist.

The film was conceived as the pilot, essentially for Coppola's passion project, American Zoetrope Studios. Tucked away in Los Angeles, right underneath the major studios' noses, Coppola hoped to make a haven for the creative, visionary filmmakers who'd suddenly found the ground shifting under their feet. Looking to make a quick, cheap film to get American Zoetrope's feet solidly underneath it, Coppola's simply little domestic musical quickly exploded from a $2 million quickie to a $27 million monster of fussy sets and sniper-precise manipulation of objects and actors within those sets, of startling, gorgeous colors, of Tom Waits and Crystal Gayle glumly wail about the basic disconnect between humans as set out in the vivid and grotesque imagery of Waits's lyrics for the wall-to-wall songs. Instead of declaring American Zoetrope open for business, One from the Heart shot it point-blank in the forehead: as could be predicted by pretty much every human being who watched the film besides Coppola himself, One from the Heart was an enormous flop, earning less than $700,000 in its humiliating U.S. theatrical run, and plunging Coppola - whose personal fortune had formed the backbone of the film and American Zoetrope's financial portfolio - into crushing debt.

This is not, however, a review of One from the Heart.

After the positively murderous failure of his grand folly, Coppola - an Oscar-winning filmmaker who went 4-for-4 in the 1970s in directing movies that would be almost instantaneously regarded as essential modern masterpieces - found himself plunged straight into Director Jail. I am not sure when to say he was released; I am not honestly sure that he ever was released, unless we assume that cobbling together defiantly oddball little curios like Youth Without Youth on European shoestring budgets represents the obvious career path for the man behind The Godfather.

Coppola was obliged to become a singularly financially-driven filmmaker in short order - exactly the opposite of what the American Zoetrope experiment was hoping for. But becoming a commercial sell-out does not necessarily require one to forget all about how to make movies, and it is very much the case that most of Coppola's blatantly pandering cash-grabs are also, to some degree, concerned with artistry and creativity as well, they just have to hide it a little. And this brings us to the very first of those cash-grabs, 1983's The Outsiders, something that we'd now call a YA adaptation (the screenplay was by Kathleen Rowell, the first she ever saw produced), but at the time of its creation was simply an example of a filmmaker discovering, somewhat by accident, that here was a property which would almost certainly make a nice chunk of money and also provide a crutch for him to do interesting things that had very little to do with the actual task of adapting S.E. Hinton's 1967 novel (published when she was just 18!), which came to his attention when a Fresno, CA middle school class voted him the filmmaker they most wanted to see tackle the book that was held in dear esteem by all of them. A fun exercise is to glance over Coppola's filmography to that point, take out all the titles that are spectacularly inappropriate for middle-schoolers, and determine that the class apparently rallied behind Coppola on the strength of his 1968 adaptation of Finian's Rainbow, every kid's favorite musical.

The Outsiders - about which I know nothing at all save that it is the basis for this film, and my apologies to its apparently strong, multi-generational audience of passionate followers for my ignorance - is a pretty basic JD story set in a vaguely defined Oklahoma in a vaguely specified 1960s. It takes place in a small town where teen culture is apparently divided between two gangs: the lower-glass Greasers, and the rich Socs. Our main points of entry in to this world are the two youngest, least-qualified members of the Greasers: 14-year-olds Ponyboy Curtis (C. Thomas Howell) and Johnny Cade (Ralph Macchio). They are chiefly in thrall to Dallas Winston (Matt Dillon), the sort of low-key cad who reads as "charismatic" almost exclusively to younger, impressionable males, but for Ponyboy, at least, the Greasers are a family tradition: among its members are his elder brothers Sodapop (Rob Lowe) and Darrel (Patrick Swayze), who seems to be the oldest and most leaderly of the gang. The boys end up accidentally killing one of the Socs, and go into hiding under the dubious guidance of Dallas; during their exile in the wilds of the Plain states, they manage to heroically and selflessly save some children from a burning church, and return home, to find that heroism hasn't quite wiped the legal slate clean, and also the Socs are plotting a rumble to get back at the Greasers.

Straightforward enough (and about a quarter shorter than the "full" version Coppola presented to Warner Bros., which apparently kept more of the resonance of the book intact - it has since been released to DVD), but there's absolutely no sense at any point that The Outsiders is to any meaningful extent a story of life among the gangs, no matter how much it keeps tapping you on the shoulder to ask, "By the way, did you say something about West Side Story? No, huh? I could have sworn you did. What about Rebel Without a Cause?" It is, instead, an attempt to capture penetrating, iconic imagery of the American West in a way that reflects the particular soulfulness and questioning of these young, tragically dislocated hoodlums. More specifically, it's an overt nod to Gone with the Wind, which is specifically mentioned at multiple points in the dialogue and obviously referenced, especially in the middle of the film, in sequences that crib from that film's famous "silhouettes against an orange-red sky" motif.

It's unapologetic Romanticism, in a film that looks at its teenage characters, with their overheated passions and intense feelings; and then looks at its prospective teenage audience, with its proprietary, emotionally invested ownership of the book; and then decides "well, let's go ahead and be sincere about all this, then". Which is kind of refreshing and bold: a movie about heightened teen melodrama that firmly embraces that melodrama with both arms, trying to find cinematic equivalences to to the heady, potent certitude that this feeling we are feeling is the absolute most important thing ever. The Outsiders is gorgeous, shamelessly so: Coppola and cinematographer Stephen H. Burum invest heavily in draping the perfectly attractive scrublands of Oklahoma, the picture-postcard nostalgic locations, and the slightly-too-clean but soft and peaceable interiors, in dappled lighting and slow movements, and Coppola and editor Anne Goursaud then combine those images in emotionally intuitive rather than narratively driven cuts. Unexpectedly, it turns out to be something like Malick's Badlands for '80s teen audiences (this is, again, most true of the film's middle, which I find to be easily its most compelling sequence: the beginning is over-invested in period signifiers that don't really matter, the end suddenly starts to double down on the plot and climaxes in an impressionistically lovely, but otherwise imprecise gang rumble), right down to the way that the dusky dryness of the setting is both enormously specific in every detail of every building, while also feeling like a dream-soaked Neverland. The textures and sounds of the physical setting are enormously important, that is, while the notion of Oklahoma, 1965, is almost completely besides the point.

Coppola and company do an outstanding job of creating and sustaining a mood through their visuals, and occasional shifts into Expressionism (Ponyboy, recalling his parents' death, has a car apparently drive over his face during a dissolve, with a cut to that car wrecking in a visually and audibly garish shift that's almost funny in its shocking violence), making a film about the idea of being an isolated teenager trying to find love, family, and a place as a series of dense and empty images, with Coppola's father Carmine providing an absolutely terrific score that unsentimentally provides a sense of placelessness, and Howell, excellent in only his second credited film role, seems to absorb all the internal confusion, yearning need, fearful self-doubt, and anger of every movie about juvenile delinquents ever and turn them into an excellent vessel for the film's concepts.

What I'm not as convinced about is that Coppola and company do as good a job, or even a good job, period, at telling the basic story of characters that Hinton set out. In between all the deliberately, self-consciously iconic imagery, the character moments feel a little straightforward and disinvested, and though the film is impressively stocked with young people who would go on to have important and highly visible careers - besides Howell, Dillon, Macchio, Swayze, and Lowe, Diane Lane has a big role, and Tom Cruise and Emilio Estevez both show up - Coppola only really seems to take an interest in Howell, and Macchio and Dillon as the people Howell interacts with the most, leaving the rest of the cast as attractive faces to fill out the frame with business that seems more about creating a sense of movement than doing anything to build character or stress the reality of the world being depicted. And Howell himself is, as I said, more effective at channeling concepts than really clarifying who Ponyboy is: in fact, The Outsiders in this form is largely predicated on Ponyboy not being anyone specific, but being an abstracted concept about "being a lonely teenager". The result is that The Outsiders works entirely as an explication of a mindset rather than as a depiction of individual minds, and while its target audience has, apparently, found this gratifying and legitimising for some 30 years now, the film strikes me as being stubbornly remote, for all its undeniable beauty and talent.

It made its money, anyway: no blockbuster, but enough to ease Coppola back from the nightmare of One from the Heart-induced destitution. It worked well enough that his very next film, released the same year, was another Hinton adaptation about troubled teen gangbangers, Rumble Fish, confirming him as a reliable maker of solid, artistically interesting, but also artistically unambitious movies. It's such a perfect metaphor for '70s cinema transitioning to '80s cinema that I'm almost embarrassed to make it the punchline of a whole review: the artistic madman, tamed and docile, but still making movies he at least can believe in, and all to give the audience exactly what it was asking for and nothing more. It's a lovely film in a lot of ways, for all that it's a little too safe, and it's at any rate a more satisfying example of the artist-as-talented-hack exercise than The Godfather, Part III would prove to be, for starters.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1983
-Moms watching their daughters die of cancer prove shockingly popular in Terms of Endearment
-Tom Cruise in his underwear is popular, but it's not really shocking, in Risky Business
-A Christmas Story is not especially popular at first, but over the years, this will change

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1983
-It's Bond vs. Bond, as the "official" movie Octopussy outperforms the return of Sean Connery to his most iconic role in Never Say Never Again
-Robert Bresson ends his career with the pseudo-Marxist thriller L'argent
-Bizarre Japanese filmmaker Oshima Nagisa and bizarre British pop star David Bowie collaborate in Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence

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