nixsight

Girl One and I forced us some horror movie watchin’ on Friday, what with it being the night that it was. Then we watched us some comedy action. Because we learnt nothing from “Pineapple Express”.

Also, you know, Bond.

As always, comments welcome in the comments section!

The Grudge 2

I’m all for retribution and teaching people that their action have consequences, but personally I prefer it when the lesson is taught in as direct a way as possible. I can’t be bothered with people giving each other the cold-shoulder, or poisoning a social group over some imagined slight.

The grudge, in “The Grudge” and “The Grudge 2″, is a bit bewildering for me, because of this. On the one hand, it’s pretty direct – when these spirits are pissed off at you, they tend to make it obvious. But on the other, it’s the most passive/aggressive campaign of terror there has ever been. At least in “Final Destination”, the malevolent intelligence is simply righting a cosmic wrong. Here, you can incur the horrific wrath just by walking in a room.

The first movie in this US franchise was a bit of a mixed bag, really – it came at a point when the Asian supernatural horror meme was still just filtering through into the mainstream – if I recall correctly it was only the second Hollywood remake to come down the conveyor belt, after the not terrible “The Ring”. As such, it both benefitted from the fact that the terror that western audiences felt at the spastic lurchings of pale skinned, lank haired, tiny asian ghosts was still fresh, and suffered from the fact that it was a glossy Hollywood remake at a time when the baseline audience for cult horror was already wary of such things.

Between Sam Raimi’s production and Takashi Shimizu’s direction, the first American outing in this series had some genuinely horrible moments of transgression, and some prickly segments of tension. This time out, though, it’s actually a surprise to see Shimizu’s name on the credits as director, because it feels almost like someone with no connection to the original movie, who has been told by the studio or decided on their own that what made the first movie scary was the jumpy bits with the “Ring” style lady and the spooky kid, and just filled the film with those scenes instead.

There’s no real tension, because sightings of the ghosts start early and happen every couple of minutes thereafter. The film does fulfill the horror sequel rule of having a higher body-count with more elaborate death sequences – this flamboyance is, of course, one of the things that kills the tension.

In the film’s favour, and luckily, there is still something pretty damn scary about the new archetype of ghost in these movies. There’s also a bit of nifty footwork in the non-linear storyline which isn’t telegraphed as much as you’d expect, although because it isn’t made clear that you’re watching at least two timelines, it does render the US-based scenes a little non-sequitiresque, and they end up being a little hurried, too.

This is, like, the third or fourth movie I’ve seen in a month or so that had an ambiguous but bleak “and they all died happily ever after” or “but then he looked in the mirror and it turned out that he was the devil-clown monster all along” ending. So I ask the question – how many times do we have to see a “shock” ending before the opposite of it becomes shocking? This is happening with a few different movie genres, actually – not just horror movies. I’m at the point now where if I see a film with a character narrating, and that character doesn’t die at the end, I’ll be more surprised.

Also, Jennifer Beals is tragically underused. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen her do a particularly worthy acting job, but I find her really easy to watch. I guess my life might have turned out differently if I’d seen “Footloose” at a formative age instead of “Flashdance”.

The Descent

I never really felt the need to watch “Dog Soldiers” again, for some reason. It was a perfectly enjoyable movie – lots of fun, actually – but there was something about the characters, or maybe the performances, that made me not really give a shit about them.

“The Descent” has a similar problem. The story of a potholing trip that goes terribly wrong, and then goes even more terribly wrong, has an almost all female cast that start making your skin crawl with how utterly smug and shrill they are from pretty much the second they come onscreen.

However, part of me thinks that this was always the intention with these characters, and that actually they’re pretty well written – from the first scene, Neil Marshall starts seeding information into the relationships between these characters with a really subtle touch that doesn’t feel like spoon-feeding, and the things they end up being put through later in the movie mean that if you had too much of a connection with them, you’d probably end up feeling sick. Folly and hubris seems the right way to go with them, and in that respect it’s not unlike “The Blair Witch Project” in making that choice.

Like that earlier – and frankly overrated – movie, “The Descent” could work just as well as a “death by misadventure” story.

The turning point from middle-class – albeit eccentric – adventure holiday to horror actually happens during a pivotal scene in which one of the women – the central character Sarah – gets stuck in a super narrow tunnel, and her best friend goes back for her. It’s a terrific scene, that brings to the foreground the steady tension and claustrophobia that’s been built up in the film up till that point, and just as the anxiety is getting to an almost unsustainable point, there’s the first crack of a cave-in, which becomes a nightmarish rockfall that the two only just escape.

At which point the pitch of the film changes dramatically – suddenly, the women go from thrillseekers in an extreme situation to people in genuine peril. And that’s the point where the subterranean monsters, who have only even gently been hinted at till this point, come for them.

So that scene is like the structure of the film in macrocosm.

It’s a smarter film than it pretends to be, too. The creatures are sufficiently horrific, and the scenes of violence as appropriately gory and sharply edited as the previous scenes underground were claustrophobic and tense, so it’s easy to forget that the film is really about an emotional journey for Sarah. There’s pretty much one birth or rebirth metaphor after another for her, and she’s the only character who is really given any sort of solid backstory or rationale for what she does. Although the audience starts to soften on a few of the women before the film’s close, Sarah – played with versatility by Shauna Macdonald – is the only one we’re really asked to invest in. There’s a double-bluff ending that gives her some emotional closure on the personal tragedy that frames the movie and gives it an emotional context, and she’s the only character I really found myself rooting for throughout the movie.

The more I think about this film, the less it has to be taken literally, and it’s not a surprise that the barmier quarters of movie fandom seem to have decided on analysing it to hell, and coming up with theories about what is actually going on.

My analysis? It’s a better than good movie…

Tropic Thunder

I loved the trailers for “Tropic Thunder”, but it was already clear from them that the film would probably end up dissapointing. The scope of the joke – that it was an action movie about actors making an action movie, that was spoofing actors and action movies – was too big – Stiller is always a suprisingly good film-maker, but his touch isn’t deft enough for such a meta-textual maelstrom.

So when we came to watch it, I was quietly, cautiously expecting the worst, despite loving some of the talent involved, and was rewarded … with a film that wasn’t awful.

It’s a film that’s more successful in it’s select moments than in the general view, because while there are a lot of laughs, and a lot of wry sideways glances at the audience that at least aren’t broadcast with a breaking of the fourth wall, tonally it seems to forget from time to time which spot it’s pitching at.

The action is sufficiently actioney, and some of the set-pieces are pretty cool, actually. I struggled a little with Downey Jr’s enunciation, but I suspect that that might have been intentional. As far as nuanced and outright funny dialogue goes, his method-acting African American impersonator Kirk Lazarus has the best, most telling exchanges – predominantly with Stiller’s Speedman that explore the farce of identity that Hollywood acting is, but also with Brandon T. Jackson’s Alpa Chino that make some good points about the condescension implicit in actors acting across cultural or racial boundaries.

But for a comedy, there probably aren’t enough jokes. For an action movie, the action doesn’t have enough of a sense of threat or consequence. And for a biting satire, it picks too many easy targets, and the general approach is too shallow.

Man of the match for me: Jay Baruchel, whose irony-free and consistently likeable rookie actor provides a keystone performance for the movie by which all others are anchored. Brandon T.Jackson plays his funny lines straight, as well, and makes them more poignant, so he gets runner up. Everyone else is great, but not really doing anything new for them.

Additional note:- Tom Cruise is funny, but only because he’s Tom Cruise. I’ve heard it said that his moments are the funniest in the film – it’s somewhat more than a cameo, by the way, and not particularly well disguised – but really, his character is mostly only funny in the context that he is played against type, and the genre of comedy he’s playing in is very much in a “Mike Myers playing dress-up” vein. If you didn’t know how seriously Tom Cruise seems to take himself these days, and how eccentric, that he lets himself look daft here would be a non-event.

Quantum Of Solace

Dear Mr guys-behind-us-in-the-cinema – you may have had some valid insights into the movie, but during the movie was hardly the venue.

Luckily, it wasn’t a difficult movie to follow. In fact, it’s pretty much half an hour of story spread over 106 minutes.

I was a big fan of “Casino Royale”, and I tried not to get my hopes up about this film. As it happens, I was right to do that, because “Quantum Of Solace” isn’t brilliant. Craig still does sterling work as Bond, and everyone else in the movie seems in it to play things straight, but there are problems with the direction and script.

The funny thing is, the elements of the story are all there to make this a more pure and direct movie than “Casino Royale”, but it doesn’t come across in the execution. Bond is much more invested in his mission this time out, and Craig sells his anger and conflict perfectly, but the plot unravels around him in a sequence of protracted and ultimately pointless action set-pieces.

I do love an action sequence, of course, and the ones in “Quantum Of Solace” are truly awesome – if uncertainly edited and clunky in some places. But there’s a problem here.

It feels a little like watching “Batman Forever” for the first time – that movie was still a lot of fun, but the signs were all there of what Schumacher might do with the franchise if he got another chance – what with the over-active campy throwbacks to the earlier Batman TV outing. “Forever” gave hints of it – that Schumacher got the wrong idea about why his first Batman worked out okay, and went nuts on the stuff that made him personally wow.

Here, Marc Forster – the director of “Quantum” – seems to have had a clear idea of what he thinks a Bond movie is supposed to be about, but he misses the point of why the franchise was struggling so badly before, and why “Casino Royale” was so great.

So although all of the actors here are playing it straight, the film itself makes lots of those knowing winks to camera that you know you always felt like Roger Moore was giving, even though he wasn’t. There’s a nice “Goldfinger” nod, but there’s also an over-emphasis on having every different sort of action sequence, like the dafter outings that we all grew up with. There’s a car chase, and a boat chase, and a plane chase – but now, thanks to the Bourne movies, we’ve got extended chases on foot – admittedly still my favourites.

But what this surplus of set-pieces does is sap the sequences of any real tonal contrast from each other, and in the end it’s just one big adrenaline rollercoaster. It swamps the emotional weight of Bond’s situation, and Craig’s performance. Luckily, there’s some terrible bits of dialogue put in place solely to clarify any questions we might have had about what his motivation and mental state is at any point.

And this smorgasboard of action sequences of course makes problems for any subsequent films in the franchise. Because if every action base is covered in such a tokenist manner this time out, all the next film can possibly do is the same again.

Apparently, Forster’s a bit of a dab hand at drama, but it feels like he doesn’t really know what he’s doing with an action thriller. The stronger moments in the film – the high-octane of the action, and the slickness of some of the cinematography and composition – are carried across from the earlier film. It’s a peculiar kind of dischord between style and substance – as if it’s the same awesome crew, but with a less certain hand on the steering wheel.

Hopefully, they’ll pare things back a little for the next movie – but I’m hoping that this is a blip, instead of the beginning of a slip back into the bland, blank emotional wasteland of the Bond franchise’s Moore years.

Oh, also, the Bond theme this time out – odd as it was – grew on me, as a contemporary take on the tiniest sub-genre of music in the world. Though the mandatory Bond-style title sequence seems amateurish and weak by comparison with the last one, and only has a couple of good bits of imagery in it.