RED ROCK WEST (1993)

I just caught Red Rock West on TV and was very pleasantly surprised. The presence of Nicolas Cage and Dennis Hopper sometimes gives one flashbacks to their earlier David Lynch films, but there is  more in common with his daughter’s recent film, Surveillance. While not quite as daring as Jennifer Lynch in his storytelling, John Dahl’s talent is his ability to deftly blend influences from seemingly incongruous sources into a new recipe that is perfectly balanced in its ingredients.

It begins like an update of A Fistful of Dollars and ends a lot like The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, but despite the anonymous Southwestern locale and William Olvis’s guitar score, the final concoction less Western than Noir.

Suspense is effectively sustained by Cage’s continued inability, despite his best efforts, to escape the small town of Red Rock. Like Griffin Dunne trying to get out of Soho in After Hours, Cage’s every attempt to get out of Dodge—at least four opportunities—is somehow thwarted. Unlike Scorsese’s dark comedy, however, there is little to laugh at in this nightmarish predicament. Imagine entering Chinatown at the beginning of the movie (or dream), instead of the end, and not being able to find your way out of it for the duration. Cage is not just a victim, however. In every instance it is his nagging sense of duty that drives him back to Red Rock.

It is a rare subdued performance from Cage, whose lack of eccentricities here serves him well as the everyman protagonist you identify with at every step of the way. His character and circumstances are so well defined that his every decision, even those of dubious judgement, cannot be faulted. At every crossroads you find yourself thinking, ‘I might have done the same in that situation.’

It never occurred to me until now, but the protagonists of film noir are endlessly fun to watch (and listen to) but almost impossible to invest in emotionally because they are too cool, too unphased by every incident, too stoic even while getting beat up. Those providing voice-over narration further distance themselves from both their experiences and the audience by appearing to be in control even when they’re not. In other words, their attitude and formal conventions are anathema to suspense.

Red Rock West is the first time I’ve ever seen a Noir plot infused with genuine suspense, thanks to Hitchcockian identification with a wrong-man-at-the-wrong-time protagonist. The result is 90 minutes of tension. That the whole shebang is held together by just four actors—Cage, Hopper, Lara Flynn Boyle, and the late J.T. Walsh—with only a few nameless extras is all the more impressive.

DRAG ME TO HELL

Just saw Raimi’s Drag Me to Hell last night and had a blast. Raimi serves generous helpings of gross-out horror without any gore — no chopped limbs or anything like that. It’s also hilarious and the most fun I’ve had in a theatre in a long time. I haven’t seen any of the Evil Dead movies so this was my introduction to Raimi’s brand of horror, but his return to the genre has definitely encouraged me to look up his originals.

The tone is consistent but hard to capture with one adjective. None of the characters act like they are in a horror comedy such as Scream — they are perfectly earnest — but the film is very much intentionally funny. The humor always comes from the situations and the fact that, from frame one, you know exactly what Alison Lohman is thinking at all times without her needing to say it.

On the basis of the plot, Drag Me to Hell is absolutely a remake of Jacques Tourneur’s 52-year-old classic Night of the Demon, from premise-establishing introduction to train-station conclusion. But Raimi’s version resists comparison at all points because it is 180-degrees different in terms of style, tone, and everything. Tourneur’s black-but-mostly-white photography of brightly lit interiors gives way to ornately detailed interiors in lurid color.

Even the method of frightening is different, exchanging psychological dread for a steady diet of jump-scares. Subtlety of either the video or audio varieties is anathema to this film but Raimi does a great job of making you truly enjoy how gratuitous it all is, in a celebration of classic horror movie gimmicks that are polished up to look their best.

Because of this approach, I expected Raimi to improve on the original’s risible depiction of the demon with recourse to superior special effects, but he goes one better by restoring Tourneur’s own desire never to reveal the demon, which had been filmed by producer Hal Chester against the director’s wishes. Though it is a wise improvement, it is strangely out of character with the rest of Raimi’s film which favors visual grotesqueries over the original’s preference for the suggestion of hidden terrors. The most obvious example is the replacement of Tourneur’s warlock played by Niall MacGinnis, a soft-spoken and friendly mannered gentleman who harmlessly entertains children as a birthday party clown, with a hideous gypsy hag who looks every bit as malevolent as she is.

One thing which struck me in particular, which I had never noticed in any of his Spider-Man movies, is how effective Raimi is with traditional filmmaking techniques. The editorial highlight of the film is a knock-out, drag-(me)-out fight in close quarters which is brilliantly constructed using pure montage to show you what’s happening instead of attempting to communicate the supposed confusion of a fight with shaky camera techniques. I think Raimi’s classical approach is actually much more faithful to the experience of an intense fight in which one’s senses are heightened and adrenaline produces a kind of clarity rather than confusion.

In terms of shot-by-shot montage I think Raimi is the peer of De Palma and the Coens, the two (I mean three) filmmakers I thought of while watching the movie. During the film I thought it was odd that I should be reminded of them, but now that I think about it, A Simple Plan is a very Coenesque morality tale so perhaps the comparison is not so off the wall.

At any rate, I think Drag Me to Hell is the first movie in 2009 I’ve wanted to see a second time. The best one-line evaluation is the last sentence of David Edelstein’s review in New York magazine: “Truly, this is manna from hell.”

Terminator Salvation

In 2003, Terminator was the first of the 1980s action franchises to be resurrected in the twenty-first century, soon followed by revivals of Alien and Predator (twice), Rocky, Die Hard, and Rambo in quick succession. Yet with intervals of seven, twelve, and six years between installments, Terminator has actually been the most reluctant to exploit its commercial potential over the years.

The only one yet to have re-established a foothold in this decade is Robocop, but its dubious franchise history lives on in this Terminator movie in the form of the useless little girl from Robocop III. It would be a small consolation that her character is at least unable to speak, but this only contributes further to her contrived nature and highlights her narrative superfluity.

Franchise mash-up specialists Dark Horse Comics, who were responsible for the original Aliens vs. Predator comic book in 1990, parlayed the success of Robocop II and T2 into a four-issue miniseries written by Frank Miller with delicious art by Walt Simonson: Robocop vs. the Terminator. In Terminator Salvation, the predicament of death row inmate Marcus Wright is so similar to that of Detroit cop Alex Murphy that the film could be called Robocop vs. John Conner, but if the new Terminator model has a cinematic opposite, it is undoubtedly Iron Man. While Tony Stark is all human with a mechanical heart, Marcus Wright is his photographic negative, all machine with a human heart.

As for the third John Conner in three movies, the Hoarse Whisperer is locked into his hoarsest and whisperest. If I didn’t know any better I’d say Conner was a better actor at ten years old (Edward Furlong), but I suppose Christian Bale himself was better at that age too. Anyway, I guess we should be thankful Bale was a pacifist in Reign on Fire who never tried to fly any helicopters because in this movie he seems incapable of piloting one without crashing it. The first time he does so is the visual highpoint of the film, in which the camera seems to board the craft, crash with it, and disembark the wreck in a single, continuous shot reminiscent, if not imitative, of Children of Men. Unfortunately this leaves no further cinematic treats to savor in the second helicopter crash, or indeed the rest of the movie.

Other quotations of cinema include Steve McQueen’s iconic motorcycle jump from The Great Escape, a reference so obvious it is kind of refreshing to see a director actually do it. A quotation of a slightly less iconic scene is an aerial attack on a bridge that reminded me not so much of True Lies or Mission Impossible III, as of the opening action set piece from Charlie Angels 2 (i.e., Full Throttle).

Michael Ironside reprises his character from Starship Troopers and a hundred other movies (literally), but this less an allusion to the actor’s body of work than unimaginative typecasting. A better casting decision was Bryce Dallas Howard (The Village, Lady in the Water, Spider-Man 3), taking up the role Claire Danes created in the last movie. Although it’s true that she is criminally underused with so few lines, she does fine without because all she really needs to remind Conner what he’s fighting for are her big doe eyes. With her maternity bump it’s a wonder there are no Terminators targeting her but apparently the children of messiahs do not really register on the Skynet radar like the parents of messiahs do.

One of them, Kyle Reese, gets to shotgun a T-101 (fresh off the production line) through a window-equivalent, just like he did/will do upon first meeting another one in 1984. As for verbal franchise quotations, unlike Bale’s ‘I’ll be back’, which I don’t think Conner ever heard Schwarzenegger say to anyone in the movies, the younger Reese’s ‘Come with me if you want to live’ is a restoration of the phrase to its original character after Arnie had co-opted from him in T2.

It should be kept in mind, therefore, that these visual and verbal cannibalizations of the franchise’s memorable moments are only following the precedent established by Cameron’s own sequel, a convention now as essential to the franchise as. . . time travel? Evidently not. As Reese, Anton ‘Chekov’ Yeltin was probably surprised to find a Terminator movie to be the only one he’s in this year that does NOT include time traveling.

Other franchise themes put in the ejector seat are the dread specter of technology. In the first Terminator film, every frivolous use of a hairdryer or Walkman is an ominous portent of where our dependence on technology might lead. But in the latest film, any trace of a double-edged depiction of technology as used by the Resistance has all but evaporated, as John Conner repeatedly uses a conspicuously labeled Sony device without a micron of irony.

SPOILER

But perhaps the biggest surprise is that the act of salvation promised by the title is usurped from the franchise’s longstanding J.C. figure by another character who, within five minutes of the beginning, is executed in blatant cruciform position and then, after being resurrected, saves the ostensible savior of the world with another sacrificial act (this time voluntary).

I suppose salvation by Terminator would be a great revisionist take on the franchise were it not played to maximum effect in the last two movies. John Conner must feel a little humiliated that instead of finally realizing his destiny, he’s just been saved by the enemy for a third time.

Fanciful Reports of Films Unseen

A friend of mine has just started a blog devoted to reviewing films he hasn’t seen at The Agoraphobic Reviewer.

Instead of researching them or repeating hearsay, the Agoraphobe relies more on free association and stream-of-whimsy to concoct surreal alternative-universe fantasias that are in every case more captivating than the actual films he purports to describe.

Who knows if he’ll one day grow weary of this diversion, but in the first week he has already posted a dozen reviews (in both prose and verse) covering The Big Sleep, Vertigo, American Graffiti, Videodrome, Baron Munchausen, Before Sunset, The Other Boleyn Girl, Mamma Mia, and Terminator Salvation (SPOILERS INCLUDED).

No pressure on him, but I’m hoping he keeps this up until his death, because even a Bradburian/Truffautesque future dystopia in which moviegoing is outlawed still couldn’t stop him because he doesn’t need to see a film in order to describe it more awesomely.

NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM: BATTLE OF THE SMITHSONIAN

After a too-affectionate titles sequence reminding the audience of the charms of the first movie, and a very slow start to induct newcomers into the premise of the franchise without actually explaining it very well, the movie wisely trades Central Park for the Washington Mall so the canvas can expand to the multi-museum institution of the Smithsonian. Unfortunately this excess of riches multiplies the missed opportunities. I felt the Air and Space Museum was underexploited but there’s only so much you can pack into 105 minutes.

It’s made up for by other well seized opportunities, however, such as the National Gallery of Art where Ben Stiller discovers that paintings and photographs can not only come to life, but also be jumped into. The film’s most creative shot, all too fleeting, is a glimpse from inside a photograph looking back through the frame into the real world. I would have been more than content if the film had spent the rest of its time jumping in and out of famous paintings, but I can’t blame anyone for not making a completely different movie.

Written by Reno 911! partners Thomas Lennon (recently getting more mainstream screen time in I Love You, Man and 17 Again) and Robert Ben Garant, both of whom cameo as the Wright brothers, the Night at the Museum films are successful versions of the mash-up genre to which the Scary/Date/Disaster Movies have given such a bad rep. To their credit, NATM2 succumbs only once to the easy bait of mocking recent films, with a miniature parody of a 300-style fight scene, but it is funny because Owen Wilson and Steve Coogan are so earnest yet ineffectual. In other words, it works because there are characters behind the superficial film reference.

Part of the first movie’s success was that Ben Stiller is always best as a straight man for others to play off of (There’s Something About Mary, Meet the Parents) instead of as a zany cartoon (Dodgeball, Tropic Thunder). The lone exception to this, Zoolander, works so well because he is the epitome of the straight man at whose expense the joke always is (to paraphrase Winston Churchill).

Likewise here, what keeps NATM2 fun are the characters brought to life (har har) by three excellent newcomers: Hank Azaria as a megalomaniacal Pharaoh who sounds suspiciously like Stewie Griffin (I suppose it’s logical that the only voices the Simpsons regular hasn’t done before must be those on The Family Guy); Bill Hader (Seth Rogan’s patrol partner in Superbad) as the strategically incompetent General Custer with a chance for personal if not public redemption; and Amy Adams as Amelia Earhart, enthusiastically channelling Katherine Hepburn undiluted and direct from Bringing Up Baby. To say she is radiant or luminescent would be redundant since Adams seems incapable of playing a role any other way, but this one is unique for her insofar as her jodhpurs deserve a co-starring credit.

Robert Downey Jr.’s nomination this year for a comedy like Tropic Thunder makes me hopeful that Adams could be nominated for Best Supporting Actress in 2010. I can understand why some have tired of her alleged shtick, but she makes it seem so genuine that I can’t help but buy it hook, line, and sinker. As Sally Hawkins demonstrated last year in Happy-Go-Lucky, if making a perky, irrepressibly optimistic character likeable isn’t an acting achievement, I don’t know what is.

STAR TREK

J.J. Abrams’ second attempt to revive a film franchise based on a television series did give me a perma-grin from the first shot to last, but I’m afraid it is not the classic of film that Batman Begins and Casino Royale both are. As soon as the Jiggle-Cam (that can’t stay still even on close-ups!) goes out of style, people will wake up and realise that a clever script was let down by the visual fads of television which have no business on the cinema screen. I suppose that’s what Paramount deserves for sending a TV man to do a filmmakers job, but it might be excused in this case because the franchise is itself of televisual origin.

That, and also because the last couple Trek movies are so visually static, itself the result of an inability to escape TV grammar, that the fad of the opposite extreme is an improvement by virtue of its difference. Ultimately, however, the seemingly opposite stylistic faults of the ninth and tenth Trek films are both the result of TV styles inappropriately transferred to the big screen without accommodation to the medium’s different demands.

Apart from the camera issues, Star Trek can be called the first post-Sunshine sci-fi picture, as so many of the outer space shots are influenced by Boyle’s vision of space. Abrams has also taken studious notes from previous reboots, following Casino Royale in withholding the theme song until the beginning of the end credits!

But I think Star Trek’s most clever innovation is its ability — out of reach for both Batman and Bond — to exploit conventional sci-fi tropes to fold a new-continuity reboot right into the continuity of previous instalments! It is such a clever metafictional device that it threatens to overshadow all else in the film, but in a movie whose primary pleasures are found in seeing how closely the actors playing Kirk, Spock, and Bones hew to the templates of Shatner, Nimoy, and Kelley (answer: quite), such self-consciousness is a guilty virtue.

In terms of acting, it surprises me to say that Chris Pine deserves the biggest recognition for his subtle evocation of Shatner’s unique persona in more than one scene without impersonating him outright, as Karl Urban does of Kelley with the unlikely result that as an anglophone Australasian doing an American accent he sounds more often like Hugh Jackman playing Wolverine. Zachary Quinto does the complete opposite, relying exclusively on his physical similarity to Nimoy to portray Spock without making the slightest effort to lower his high, soft voice, nor even stiffen his neck!

In terms of character (SPOILER), making Spock a member of an endangered species is a credible catalyst for his desire to favor his Vulcan side over his Human, although as we know the trajectory of his character need not now meet up with its counterpart in the original series.

In all honesty, despite its faults I’m sure I’ll see it again. And if it came on TV I would easily watch it instead of turn it off like I did to Nemesis this weekend.

PUSH

The most refreshing thing about Push is its recognition that, after a decade of comic book movies (not to mention three seasons of Heroes), the public is now so familiar with superheroes that they no longer need origin stories to make superhuman abilities seem credible or scientifically plausible.

Now that everyone knows what a “mutant” is there’s no need to waste half a movie introducing them or their powers, so Push drops us into the middle of its world and trusts its audience to get it without being patronized by jargon about genetics or evolution. Admittedly some of the Marvel characters are so well-known that their origin stories are themselves classics which require rehearsal when brought to the screen for the first time. But since Push’s characters have no cultural baggage they are free to slough off some of the prescriptive conventions of the comic adaptation genre, and the film is the better for it.

Push’s informal visual style is also much less ponderous than the typical comic book movie which sometimes confuses taking its material seriously with treating it solemnly. In many ways, Push is the Slumdog Millionaire of superhero movies, an English language story in an Asian city that favors handheld camera gestures and the cacophony of local color to deliberate camera movements and a reserved pallettte.

As for the story and the action scenes, it is basically Heroes with a big budget. Chris Evans’ easy charisma is perfect for these types of movies, being the only good thing about the Fantastic Four movies (besides the Silver Surfer himself) and Dakota Fanning impressed me with the way she is defining her persona at the peak of the awkward phase (of any girl, not just a child actress trying to transition to adult actress).

Going in without any preconceptions, I quite liked Push and was really surprised when I discovered what bad press it got (21% on Rotten Tomatoes)! Push shares some similarities with Jumper but I think it is much more successful, especially in the way the evil conspiracy is handled. I would look forward to seeing Push Harder, but Jump Higher not so much.

I [HEART] HUCKABEES (2004)

This modern classic is even better than I remembered it being five years ago. It was one of my top five picks of 2004 but now I think it deserves a place in my Top 20 of all time. So, so good. So, so funny.

I was worried the movie might have been spoiled for me by the well publicized video of director David Russell’s verbal abuse of his actors. At the least, I thought the film might reveal a dark undercurrent to viewers aware of the tension behind the scenes, but all of the actors are such pros that there are absolutely no cracks in their performances. Whenever a particular set reminded me of the leaked video, the distraction quickly evaporated because the proceedings are just so good-natured.

Yes, Dustin Hoffman, Lily Tomlin, Jason Schwartzman, Jude Law, Naomi Watts, Isabelle Huppert, and early appearances by Jonah Hill and Isla Fisher are all pitch-perfect. But it is Mark Wahlberg who deserves the most recognition for the sincerity of his comedy.

I <3 Huckabees belongs to that slim genre of serious comedy that Wes Anderson seems to have cornered the market on, but unlike Anderson’s hermetically sealed constructs, Huckabees is free to breath because it does not labor under his visual idiosyncracies and mannered acting preferences.

Unencumbered by Anderson’s formalism, Russell’s ability to make such a wordy script feel positively breezy is already an impressive accomplishment, but the fact that it all looks so effortlessly done is a tribute to the fortitude and professionalism of the entire cast.

Web-Line on the Horizon

Their twelfth studio album is all well and good, but the most exciting U2 news this weekend is their Broadway debut in twelve months’ time:

I never thought I’d say I’m eager to see a musical production of Spider-Man, but I admit this interview with Mary Jane (Evan Rachel Wood, from Julie Taymor’s own Across the Universe) has me quite intrigued.

So far the only successful attempt at the superhero lament in pop rock form is Chad Kroeger’s “Hero” which played during the credits of the first Spider-Man movie, so I’m looking forward to hearing what Bono and Edge have come up with. I have a hunch their style is going translate well to the theatre.

GRAN TORINO

Clint Eastwood’s latest is full of simply atrocious acting from everyone other than Eastwood. In particular, the priest played by Christopher Carley is stupefyingly monotone while reading his lines (and he only reads them, worse than Michael Madsen in Sin City), which makes me think Eastwood’s legendary effeciency as a filmmaker has reached the point of diminishing returns. These performances could only have benefited from a few more takes, right?

But it is almost worth it all just for the ending which is a revisionist take on the ending of Unforgiven. Where Unforgiven ultimately fulfills genre convention after two hours of debunking it, Gran Torino seems to be Eastwood’s attempt to finally revise the ending of Unforgiven in a redemptive direction.

I suppose Gran Torino is of a piece with The Dark Knight and Man on Fire — how the man of violence realises that the success of his true goal is possible only by self-effacement rather than by projection of will.