nixsight

Two peculiar ones, this week:

As always, half-arsed opinions on these movies below. Also, a comments space, for your comments, if you have any comments to make about my comments. Please feel free to make comments!

Mirrors

“Mirrors” is a horror movie that I hadn’t heard anything about at all, but that, in lieu of any new “24″, was going to have to do for our Kiefer Sutherland fix.

Young Sutherland stars as Ben Carson, a beaten down detective who finds himself desperate enough to take a nightwatchman job at a burnt out old department store, while he waits to be reinstated – an event that we are given the strong impression will never occur.

Missing his estranged wife and kids, and on medication to get over a drinking problem, he finds that from the first night on the job, strange things start to happen – the mirrors at the store, of which there are many, seem to be showing him things that aren’t there. Horrible things, that he feels the effects of even though they aren’t really happening.

Although there might have been some mileage in playing on the idea that Carson may have cracked, and only be imagining the things that we are seeing, this isn’t that sort of movie. In actuality the film opens on an atmospheric and effective sequence that shows the viewer exactly how real the supernatural things that Carson will experience are, by showing us the ultimate and grisly fate of his predeccessor.

The fact is that this isn’t a subtle or well-plotted movie, but then, it doesn’t look like it’s supposed to be. Although the atmospherically filmed settings and some fairly cool special effects play on the more existential elements of Carson’s particular plight – and Sutherland does a pretty good job of playing those scenes – what we’re ultimately in for is a graphic and intense ride, rather than a thought-provoking thriller.

The writing is actually the film’s biggest weakness, because it tries to tease some more intricate elements or motivation out of the premise than it looks like the director was aiming for, and the flourishes are obviously beyond it. It’s nice for Sutherland fans to see him frustrated and shouting “Goddamit” or “Son of a bitch” when suddenly having to swerve his car off the road, because it’s as if he’s Jack Bauer all over again, but those scenes, as with many of the other “detection” ones, require a little more script cohesion than there is here, and come off as unconvincing. 

Though as a writer, I got a kick out of a piece of really quite unforgiveable shortcut scripting, when Carson tells his wife, who happens to be a coroner, that the mirrors are telling him things. In response, she asks him what pills he is taking to stop him drinking, and he grudgingly shows her the pill jar. She glances at it, and says something along the lines of “This is a really strong drug – there are lots of serious side-effects!”. No effort to put a name to the drug, or elaborate on what those side effects are. Because of course, that would mean research!

I love that shit, because doing Elephant Words I’ve found myself more than once having to come up with cack-handed prose trickery to avoid having to do research that the deadline didn’t leave time for. The difference, of course, is that I don’t have Kiefer Sutherland speaking the words that I’m writing.

Like I said, though, that isn’t really what this film is all about. What it is about is quite unflinching horror, and on that score, it delivers and then some. The mirrors allow for some creepy as hell sequences in which Aja, the director, plays some nice tricks with space, even if his characters aren’t nearly as smart about learning the rules as they could be. What we weren’t expecting, however, was the quite impressively done gore.

I’m not easily shocked by graphic violence or nastiness, and the aesthetic here is only really a slightly adapted version of the super-real visual motifs that Hollywood has adopted from Asian horror in recent years – both the girl from “Ringu” and the jawless monstrosity of “The Grudge” are reflected (no pun intended) here, and the final act features an extended homage or lift from “Dark Water”. But it’s done really, really well, to the extent that you feel sometimes like you’re watching a much harder and nastier film, and feel disoriented that someone like Sutherland – or even Amy Smart – would turn up in something so grotesque.

Which is just as well, because it gives you something other than the utter silliness of the script, or the slightly peculiar “Twilight Zone”-esque ending, to carry with you. There’s a scene with one of Carson’s family, for example, that I may never unsee, and will probably remember for quite some time!

The Forbidden Kingdom

I’ll start right off the bat by saying that I really liked this movie, and that this wouldn’t be a surprise if you knew the following about me:

I love Jet Lee unconditionally.
I really, really like Jackie Chan. I mean, I find him more likeable as an actor than I do talented, although his martial arts and athelticism can’t be faulted.
I’m a sucker for Woo-Ping Yuen fight coreography.
… And I have a deep love of anything featuring the Monkey King.

So really, objectivity obviously isn’t going to be in my power when dealing with a movie that features all of those things.

Add to that the archetypal fantasy-adventure conceit of the bullied or marginalised kid who finds himself transported to an alien place utterly fraught with danger and populated by colourful characters, only to find himself sent on a quest, and Girl One and I were sold from the off.

I appreciate that this isn’t the case for everyone. In fact, the childhood fantasy adventure is one of the only areas that Girl One came to me pre-geeked in - that and board games. In fact, in both areas, she’s probably more of a wally than me, so I’ve got into both more so that we can enjoy them together.

Which heartening tale of cohabiting bliss really isn’t interesting to anyone else, so I should move on.

This is a fantastic film in the truest sense of the word, beautifully presenting the mythical world of the Monkey King in truly stunning fashion, and making these characters, their traits and their powers seem utterly magical. The story even does an okay job of the slightly clunky contrast between present day America and the ancient mystical Middle Kingdom – a hard sell in the less than stellar but memorable to a certain age group “Never Ending Story”, which this evokes more than once.

It’s odd – I guess most of the major classic stories that have that particular idea of a person out of their own world and into another tend to not be contemporary – like “Alice In Wonderland” or the Narnia books – and are easier to swallow, because their protagonist already occupies a world slightly peculiar to us.

Even the young lad in “Time Bandits” isn’t exactly in the same world as us, any more than Harry Potter is – the former is from a Gilliam-tinted universe, and the latter occupies a world that is less like anywhere that ever really existed, and more like an Enid Blyton England already marred by text-speak sensibilities – the kid-England of a woman who seems to have learnt about the hardships of the proper English downtrodden adolescent from “Grange Hill”.

Whatever the case, the teen American Jason Tripitikas – played by Michael Angarano – in this movie is somehow inexplicably not as annoying as he should be – and in fact, even the inevitable montage – because this is a Kung Fu coming-of-age movie after all, isn’t terrible.

We dimly recognised Angarano from somewhere – I put it down to the fact that he vaguely reminded me of a much more sympathetic car-crash between Coreys Feldman and Haim in their younger days, but actually it was from a half-decent performance in a few episodes of “24″. He isn’t good-looking enough to draw the otherwise obligatory comparisons to Shia LaBeouf, which is cool, because that would have been just annoying and his awkwardness would have been unconvincing. Though he does look a little like Ethan Embry.

Jackie Chan has loads of fun playing what is essentially an only slightly disguised version of his own mentor in the “Drunken Master”, another film on which he worked with Woo-Ping.

Jet Lee, who also co-wrote the film, is comfortable in the role of the stoic monk, but has much more fun, and kinda dominates, in his short stints as the Monkey King.

And the fights are all just superb.

There are only three real flaws in the movie, but each is enough of a thing that they will probably ruin it for a lot of people.

First, it’s that the film loses a little cohesion in some of the transitions between sections, and this can give it the feeling of being a series of chapters cut awkwardly into the shape that it is now.

B) Even after all these years, asking Jackie Chan, and to a slightly lesser extent Jet Lee, to act in English is just asking that little bit too much – other Asian cast members do okay, but those others were probably a bit younger when they first had to learn the language. For a casual viewer, it may make parts of the film too demanding as you try hard to listen and simultaneously interpret what is being said. As well as that, for a fan of either chap it’s almost distressing – like watching someone you care about audition on X-Factor. Certainly, it’s the most ambitious script I’ve seen, in terms of getting either chap to talk in English, and I don’t think it always works.

And third, the film both makes the viewer realise how incredibly awesome a nicely done “Journey To The West” or Monkey film would be, but at the same time shows you exactly why Hollywood isn’t geared to make it happen. Although it works okay here, the mashing-up of modern-day sensibility and ancient myth speaks more of demographic-whoring than of narrative inventiveness, and no matter how many outsider hits there are, the system just doesn’t know any other way of making movies.