01-05-2020

3/4

01-05-2020

Fermin (Ricardo Darín) and his loving wife Lidia (Verónica Llinás) have an idea. In order to revive their financially struggling rural town, they decide to create a co-operative which everyone in town would invest in and benefit from. All they have to do is convince the rest of the residents it is a good idea. "You want to re-open a business that failed in 1984? Tell me, how's that a good idea?" is the response they get from their old friend Antonio (Luis Brandoni), but Antonio is an old-school communist and simply unable to pass up on the possibility to help out the working class. Next, they try to convince the Gomez brothers, the local pair of wanna-be entrepreneurs whose biggest dream is to own flip phones. "Well that sounds great," they say, "But what is a co-operative?" Fermin is stumped so Antonio steps in, "Imagine a... chocolate cake," he explains in one of cinema's most misguided attempts to allegory. Eventually, the rest of the investors are talked into the notion. These include the stingy local shopkeeper Safa (Ramiro Vayo), Antonio's fascist best-friend Rolo (Daniel Aráoz), a local businesswoman (Rita Cortese), and the mentally challenged former bombs expert Medina (Carlos Belloso). Together, they amass enough money to start a co-operative and put that money in the bank for safekeeping. What could possibly go wrong now, right? Then an on-screen caption informs us that this film is set in Argentina in 2001.

The financial crisis hits hard and the co-operative loses all of their money. The investors are depressed and some even blame Fermin. Then, through a fluke of luck, they find out they've been conned. Manzi, a crooked lawyer (Andrés Parra) who was in cahoots with their bank manager has taken off with their hard-earned cash and locked it up in a safe buried in an empty field. Now, the wannabe members of the co-operative decide to get their own back. Like a bunch of modern Robin Hoods they decide to take the law into their own hands and steal their money back from Manzi.

"Heroic Losers", the latest in a string of successful cooky Argentinian comedies runs the predictable heist-film cliche gamut with all the planning scenes, unsuccessful attempts, setbacks, and the moment in which the heist is seemingly abandoned only for our protagonists to band together once more. But it does it in such a charming, positive, and witty manner that it is hard not to enjoy it all. The cast, led by Argentina's everyman Ricardo Darín, is uniformly hilarious and likeable but most importantly of all the filmmakers find a way to make our protagonist's plight relatable and allow us to root for them.

It is often difficult to truly get behind robbers in heist movies. "Reservoir Dogs" is an excellent example of a film in which even though we find the characters entertaining we never truly approve of their actions. However, some heist films manage to get over that problem by making the target of the heist the bigger evil than the robbers like for instance "Ocean's Eleven" who are pitted against the ultimate capitalist evil, a casino. Another way to make us sympathise with the robbers is to make the target a faceless corporation or simply a bank. This was done very successfully in Peter Collinson's "The Italian Job" and countless other films in which there are no direct victims of the heist. "Heroic Losers", however, takes another approach in which our characters are simply taking back that which is theirs and are delivering justice rather than committing a crime. It also helps that the lawyer Manzi is an excellent comedic villain. Both disgustingly slimy and cartoonishly inept.

"Heroic Losers" is a people-pleaser. A positive and entertaining film for the widest possible audience. It takes all the tropes from films such as "Ocean's Eleven" and "The Italian Job" and applies them to a Robin Hood type story. However, the result is a surprisingly warm and funny movie even though it deftly avoids truly dealing with the subject of the financial crisis and its often tragic fallout which caused many people to become homeless overnight. With a superbly funny and quirky ensemble cast, confident directing from Sebastián Borensztein, and a clever screenplay based on a novel by Eduardo Sacheri, "Heroic Losers" may be mainstream fluff, but it is entertaining mainstream fluff well worth seeing and enjoying.

3/4

01-05-2020

The Japanese sensation "One Cut of the Dead" has been successfully advertised as a one-take zombie movie. This is only partially true and very ironic when you know the full plot of the film which first shows us an intentionally hammy 37-minute zombie one-take film before taking us behind the scenes for the next 60 minutes to show us all the disasters that led a professional film crew to make such an inept movie. Its format was inspired by Michael Frayn's classic stage farce "Noises Off" and while "One Cut of the Dead" doesn't succeed in emulating the lightning-fast comedic pace of "Noises Off" it does stand on its own amongst other filmmaking comedies such as "Living in Oblivion" and "State and Main" even if never reaching the satiric heights of films like "The Player" and "Bowfinger".

The film's lead character is Higurashi (Takayuki Hamatsu), a spineless TV director whose motto is "I'm cheap, I'm fast, I'm average". When we first meet him, he's being pitched a crazy idea by a pair of producers. They intend to make a one-take zombie movie and broadcast it live on their new Zombie Channel. Higurashi takes on the task not because he finds it a challenge but because, as his wife later on puts it, "he doesn't have the guts to say no". Higurashi has a complicated relationship with his small family. His wife Nao (Harumi Shuham), a former method actress, was forced to quit acting because she tended to get too lost in her characters. Now, she spends her days practising self-defence and reading her husband's scripts. She is clearly not pleased with his lack of ambition and his wasting of his talent. His daughter Mao (Mao) has much the same attitude towards him but this bothers Higurashi a lot more. His once warm and loving relationship with his daughter has been replaced by cold disinterest and, at worst, utter lack of respect.

If you're wondering where the comedy is and where the zombies are... Well, so was I honestly. I appreciated director/writer Shin'ichirô Ueda's desire to give us well rounded and emotionally invested characters but this section of the film is frankly quite depressing mostly due to the excellent and utterly believable performance from Takayuki Hamatsu, a very talented comedic actor who easily switches between being a lovable bungler and relatable dad trying so hard to impress his family. The comedy begins, however, when the live broadcast does and the final 30 minutes of "One Cut of the Dead" are indeed hilarious. Everything that could possibly go wrong does including a sound-man with diarrhoea, a drunk zombie, and a pretentious leading man. The mess culminates when two of the actors get into a car crash minutes before the broadcast forcing their roles to be filled by Higurashi and his wife who more than shows why she had to quit acting.

The big question of "One Cut of the Dead" is whether this final half-hour was worth an hour's wait. The opening 37-minutes which we in retrospect realise was the unfortunate live broadcast are somewhat of a chore to get through. The camera work is terrible, the acting hammy, and most of the scenes awkwardly drag on. We later see what caused all of these goofs and, again in retrospect, they become quite funny, but upon first viewing, this opening is nothing more than a badly made zombie film. Sure, some of its excesses are laughable but perhaps this intentional failure would have been a better DVD bonus feature than the film's opening as it almost turned me off from watching the rest of this film more than once.

The second half-hour is well-acted and fairly dramatic but baffling and jarringly out-of-place in what is supposed to be a zombie comedy. Higurashi's family drama would have made an engaging film on its own but here it feels kinda shoehorned. It is only after about 60 minutes worth of patience do we get to the film we all came to see. And these final 30-minutes are truly well-made and memorably funny. But again, the question is: was it worth the wait? Well, I think that's something that everyone has to answer on an individual level. If you have the patience to sit through a terrible zombie film and a touching family drama in order to get to your comedy, then "One Cut of the Dead" is a movie you'll enjoy. If, on the other hand, you find this prospect somewhat bothersome, maybe just skip ahead.

For a debut film, "One Cut of the Dead" is an impressive attempt, but for me, it took more patience than it was worth especially when unavoidably compared to Peter Bogdanovich's film adaptation of "Noises Off" which is a masterclass in comedic pacing. Not a second is wasted and the jokes come at such a frantic pace you're bound to miss at least half of them on first viewing. "One Cut of the Dead's" overly-complicated plot construction ultimately proves its undoing. The middle part should have been funnier, the final part longer, and the first 37-minutes should have been relegated to the bonus features. In other words, skip the first 60-minutes and watch the final 30.

2.5/4

01-05-2020

What would you say if I told you there's a film about a killer phone call? If your answer was "hell's bells" then you'd be partly right because that is one of the several titles under which this film was released, the other's being simply "Bells" or my personal favourite, "Murder by Phone". "Murder by Phone", as I'll continue calling it, is one of the more competent if not the most interesting of the Canuxploitation films made to cash in on Canada's generous tax incentives and the success of David Cronenberg's horror films. Fully in that spirit, this 1982 thriller is a cheap but atmospheric exercise pitched somewhere between the clinical creepiness of "Rabid" and the sci-fi paranoia of "Scanners" with touches of technophobia that would later be much more memorably explored by Cronenberg in "Videodrome".

The film begins with a phone ringing on a curiously empty underground station. A female student (Jo-Anne Hannah) who just happens to be walking past answers it. Why she does this, I have no idea. Probably just so the film could open with a bang. And a bang there is. A weird hissing/beeping sound is heard from the other end of the phone which makes the woman freeze and blood come out of her eyes. Then an almighty explosion occurs and she is thrown back several feet onto an escalator with her head blown up. Finding a melted phone on the scene and a victim with her head in tatters, the police, of course, deduce this to be a heart attack. But her family is not convinced, so they task the student's former college professor Nat Bridger (Richard Chamberlain) to look into the matter for them. With the help of a beautiful sculptor (Sara Botsford) and a tough-as-nails cop (Gary Reineke) he exposes a mysterious conspiracy involving strange experiments being conducted by the phone company into signals which when passed through the phone line kill anyone who hears them.

To call this premise science fiction would be an insult both to science and fiction. It is not merely improbable but downright unbelievable. A film with a premise as silly as this is difficult to ever take seriously and "Murder by Phone" doesn't do itself many favours especially when the improbable gives way to ridiculous. For instance, the idea that the police would believe a woman with blood coming out of her eyes has had a heart attack. Or the sequence in which Bridger is able to infiltrate a supposedly top-secret lab by simply donning a white coat and mumbling something about calculations. Moments such as these put "Murder by Phone" squarely into the sphere of the laughably illogical. And yet it is hard to deny the film has certain qualities.

First of all, it is directed with surprising competence by none other than Michael Anderson, the Oscar-nominated director of the wonderfully entertaining David Niven version of "Around the World in 80 Days" and the sci-fi cult classic "Logan's Run". Although he had very little luck in the projects he chose (leading to him helming such flops as "Orca" and "Dominique") no one could deny he was a capable and occasionally inventive director. Consequently, "Murder by Phone" is a very well put-together film with several quite suspenseful scenes and a nicely realised atmosphere of clinical dread helped by all those wires and machinery in the ominously photographed phone company HQ and the overbearing whiteness of the Canadian underground system. He manages to make every instance of a phone ringing and every shot of a telephone in a room threatening.

Another positive aspect of "Murder by Phone" is the involvement of Richard Chamberlaine who makes for a likeable and charismatic hero. Nat Bridger is not a well-written character with his stereotypical can-do attitude and countless variations on that famous phrase "I'll get to the bottom of this", but Chamberlaine possesses a kind of natural appeal and easiness before the camera that makes even a flat character such as Nat Bridger engaging. The same, sadly, can't be said of his co-stars Sara Botsford and John Houseman. Botsford is given the thankless task of playing as the love interest a character who holds no interest whatsoever. Introduced as an opinionated artist, her every subsequent appearance sees her lose more clothes and more character until she's eventually just the girl who shows up in a towel once in a while to give us lads something to look at. The screenwriters didn't even have the decency to put this damsel in distress. She is literally just eye candy. Houseman, similarly, is introduced as seemingly a very important character, Bridger's old friend with ties in the government who may or may not know more than he is telling about this phone business, but even his importance in the film slowly peters out until he is first relegated to the role of comic relief and then gotten rid off midway through the film.

Finally, I have to commend John Barry's unusual and effective electronic score which takes the notion of phone signals as a kind of Hitchcockian threat and runs with it. It is arguably the film's greatest asset. The fact that it is not commercially available is a travesty.

But even all these qualities don't make "Murder by Phone" a good film and eventually, its campy charm began to wear on me especially when I realised that the plot isn't going to be explained in a sensible manner. With its three credited screenwriters, the film often feels like each of them wrote in whatever they wanted leaving the others to tie up the loose ends except no one did. The film not-so-subtly hints and nudges towards some kind of great conspiracy going on behind these killings only for that plotline to be either dropped completely or handwaved depending on your interpretation of the meaning of the word conspiracy. Its many failures in logic, plot inconsistencies, and the sheer lunacy of its plot and the idea of having the phone company of all companies as the villain make it hard to completely enjoy "Murder by Phone". It is one of those films that is too well-made to be laughed at and too ridiculous to be taken seriously. I'm not denying there's fun to be had watching it nor that some of its sequences are quite effective and menacing, but the overall result is too unbelievable and uneven to be recommended.

2/4

05-05-2020

One of my biggest pet peeves in thrillers is quirky characters. For some reason, it seems to have become a rule that all detectives have to have some kind of eccentricity whether it be something major such as suffering from OCD or something as minor as having an unusually pronounced accent (think of Daniel Craig in "Knives Out", for instance). I suppose this stems from the so-called Golden Age of Mystery in which distinctive characters such as Hercule Poirot and Charlie Chan ruled the roost, but both Poirot and Chan had other distinguishing features and actually fairly rounded (if not necessarily complex) characters. They had their human flaws, obsessions, prides... Nowadays, however, it seems that quirks have all but replaced (or more probably been mistaken for) character and instead our characters being adorned with believable human features all they're given is an unusual moustache or a strange hobby. How annoying.

Helena (Malgorzata Kozuchowska), our lead in "The Plagues of Breslau" is just such a character. A cypher, someone we can only pick out of a crowd based on a few character quirks she's been given by the filmmakers. She's brash, she's good with animals, and she's always sleepy. She also speaks in that awfully annoying raspy monotone whisper which all cops in bad thrillers speak with. I wonder if filmmakers really think all cops speak like that. I hope not... Her partner is an even worse example of the "quirky detective". Iwona (Daria Widawska) is overweight, moody, and rude to just about anyone she meets. She also tends to physically assault journalists. Such fun! They're essentially the same character except one looks like Holly Hunter and the other like Rosie O'Donnell. Besides these quirks, they have no other characteristics and after spending almost two hours in their company I don't feel like I know them at all. I don't know what they love, what they hate. What their hopes are, what their fears are. I have no idea even what kind of coffee they drink. If they didn't look so different, I doubt I could tell them apart.

Just like its characters, the plot is also a rehash of familiar thriller cliches. In fact, it is an almost beat-for-beat remake of David Fincher's "Seven" even with several similar twists ("What's in the box?"). There's a serial killer on the loose in the historic town of Wrocław (formerly Breslau) who's recreating an ancient tradition of executing known criminals at 6 p.m. Every day, at that time, a body shows up, killed in a gruesome and spectacular manner with their sin branded in hot iron somewhere on their body. Sound familiar yet? I'm not up to speed on Polish thriller cinema, but I think even that Australian tribe from "God's Must Be Crazy" would groan with recognition at this plot. To be fair, it trots along at a neat pace and there are very few plot inconsistencies once you get past the fact that the killer seems to be omnipresent and omnipotent (which is almost a given in these kinds of films). But its cliche-ridden nature means you'll probably be several steps ahead of our characters. I, for one, guessed who the killer was the moment they were introduced as it was so obvious I'm not even bragging.

On the technical side of things, everything is adequate. No more and no less than that. With its dour and glossy look, "The Plague of Bresslau" looks and feels like an average TV thriller. The directing from Patryk Vega is dynamic but not inventive, the editing by Tomasz Widarski is pacy without being confusing, and the music by Lukasz Targosz serves the plot but is instantly forgettable. The cinematography by Miroslaw Brozek is a step above of a Hallmark movie but below something like "CSI" or "Criminal Minds". Everything is well lit and serviceable but the shots are never atmospheric or evocative.

"The Plagues of Breslau" is fine and that's about all there is to be said of it. With its predictable plot, passable acting, and technical adequacy it would feel right at home in a late-night NBC slot or as a rerun on the Alibi channel. As a movie, however, it is neither ambitious enough nor inventive enough to be recommended.

2/4

05-05-2020

Sebastian (Ricardo Darín) is a very busy man. He's a hotshot criminal lawyer involved in the biggest case of the year and is also going through a messy divorce from his wife Delia (Belén Rueda) who caught him in bed with her best friend. This is all part and parcel of a film centred around a lawyer, but what is unusual, however, is that Sebastian is actually a good dad to his two children. He loves playing games with them, spending time with them, and is genuinely happy to be around them. Delia, however, doesn't seem to think so and wants to take the kids to live with her family in Spain where she claims "they'll want for nothing". Nothing, of course, except for their father and their father for them. This is why, much to her chagrin, Sebastian refuses to allow her to take the children even under the threat of a lawsuit.

The film begins with a very typical morning for Sebastian, rushing to get the kids to school and then himself to court, arguing with Delia over this point for the thousandth time, and then having to indulge his children in one more game before they leave. This game involves a little race between the kids and Sebastian. He takes the lift and they take the stairs. Whoever reaches the lobby first - wins. Simple enough. However, when Sebastian reaches the lobby, the kids aren't there. At first, he thinks they're playing some kind of a game and plays along searching for them all 'round the building. Then he realises they've been taken. Unfortunately, Sebastian is a man with many enemies and they're all looking like possible culprits in his eyes. Was it the opposing lawyer who took the kids in an effort to distract Sebastian from the case he's working on. Or maybe it was someone closer to home. One of the tenants in the apartment building. Maybe the overly helpful police inspector, or the slightly awkward porter who claims he never saw the kids leave the building, or was it Delia who took them.

As paranoia in Sebastian's head builds so does the tension and "7th Floor" is indeed a tense thriller. Reminiscent in the best way of Hitchcock's "The Man Who Knew Too Much", it unfolds in nail-biting real-time and mainly inside the apartment building, two limitations which bring out the best in both the film's talented cast and director Patxi Amezcua. There is little room in this film for grandiose action sequences or exciting chase scenes. Its focus is wisely and effectively on one man's anguish and one man's frantic search for his children. Ricardo Darín is as always an engaging and dynamic lead and makes Sebastian unusually likeable for a movie lawyer. He also gets a lot more room to show off his considerable acting skills than he usually does in the kind of dime-a-dozen thrillers he's recently been doing. Sebastian is not an awfully original or rounded character but he runs a wide gamut of emotions throughout this film and Darín does a convincing and memorable job portraying each one. Also terrific is Belén Rueda as the worried mother who begins the film as a likely suspect but soon develops into an emotionally interesting character herself.

The plot, as I said, unfolds largely in real-time (with a few unremarkable time compressions) and Amezcua gets a lot of mileage out of Sebastian's sense of paranoia. He deftly builds up potential suspects only then to clear them until we're no longer sure whether we can trust anyone including our own eyes. The plot develops at a tightly-wound pace and the tension never lets up. The conclusion, even though somewhat predictable, is unexpectedly emotional and memorable. Also notable is Roque Baños' excellent score and Lucio Bonelli's atmospheric cinematography. All in all, "7th Floor" is a generic but very well executed thriller which every genre-aficionado will surely enjoy. It is tense, emotional, and features two terrific performances at its core.

3/4

06-05-2020

"Casablanca", "Psycho", "Jules and Jim", "The King of Comedy", "Crimes and Misdemeanors"... They all run around the same time as "88 Minutes" and are films I'll get to rewatch one time fewer because I wasted those precious one hour and 40+ minutes on Jon Avnet's garbage thriller. I could have spent those 108-minutes in any variety of ways. I could have read 100 pages of a good book, I could have had a long phone conversation with my mother or a friend, I could have gotten to know a pretty lady... Even being stuck in traffic for 108-minutes would constitute time better spent.

Why is "88 Minutes" so awful? Well, movies work by a kind of exchange. We, the audience, give them the benefit of our time and in return we receive something. Be it deeper insight into the human condition or a couple of hours of mindless fun. In other words, watching a movie is akin to a conversation. "88 Minutes" offers nothing in return for your time. It is a completely hollow, worthless picture with nothing to say, a dull retread of overly-familiar thriller cliches which fails to entertain, excite, or even amuse. In other words, watching "88 Minutes" is akin to asking a stranger for the time and the stranger giving you the middle finger.

Its mindless plot revolves around a forensic psychologist (Al Pacino) who receives a phone call on the day a serial killer he helped put away is to be executed. The morphed voice on the other side tells him "You have 88 minutes to live". The psychologist now has to race against the clock in order to find out if the person who wants him dead is the serial killer, a copycat, or a person in his life bearing some kind of a twisted grudge. Most cheap thrillers would use this thin premise as an excuse for a series of silly set-pieces and ineffective suspense scenes. "88 Minutes" doesn't even have that much courtesy. It plods along through its uninvolving plot with the seriousness of "Silence of the Lambs". Al Pacino grumbles and dours through urban landscapes photographed in monotone grayscale by Denis Lenoir while Edward Shearmur's booming score underlines every character's minor revelation as if they're telling us who shot Kennedy. Jon Avnet has made the mistake of taking Gary Scott Thompson's amateurish script overly seriously and the result is a gloomy film devoid of any sense of fun or excitement.

Even more egregiously, it is presented in real-time. Some movies have indeed used this gimmick to effective lengths. The pondersome pacing of Sidney Lumet's "12 Angry Men" made the audience feel like they were stuck in that infernal room with the jurors, whilst more recently Patxi Amezcua's "7th Floor" used it to build up an intense feeling of paranoia. But in "88 Minutes" all it means is that we're forced to sit through scene after scene of terribly written and unbearably languorous dialogue scenes of flat, forgettable characters explaining the plot to one another. Occasionally, just for kicks, the writer throws in an absurd non-sequitur such as the scene in which Al Pacino insists everyone in a meeting have milk and biscuits. These scenes are so misguided and awkwardly executed I'm not entirely sure if they were meant to be comedic or not.

I could now discuss the characters but let's not fool ourselves. There are no characters here to be discussed. Every single actor in "88 Minutes" is playing either a stereotype or a plot device. On the stereotype side, we get the tough-as-nails cop (William Forsythe), the devoted secretary (Amy Brenneman), and the teacher's assistant in love with her teacher (Alicia Witt). They're completely one-dimensional and uninteresting, but at least we can recognise them. On the plot device side, however, we get the serial killer (Neal McDonough), the dean (Deborah Kara Unger), and the T.A.'s abusive ex (Stephen Moyer) who have absolutely no personalities whatsoever. They only serve to move the plot along in various ways. For instance, the ex is there as a red herring and to provide a reason for a very brief and messily filmed shoot-out. He barely gets any lines and I have no idea what kind of a person he is. The dean only exists to get kidnapped. She too has no personality or distinguishing character traits. Were she not played by Deborah Kara Unger, I doubt I would have remembered who she was all the way until the end. The serial killer is there to occasionally make a creepy phone call. At the centre of this hollow circus is Al Pacino playing the role Al Pacino plays when he needs a paycheck. He's gruff, angry, and unexplainable appealing to girls. He can also fight like Harrison Ford and solve crimes like Sherlock Holmes. We've seen him in "Righteous Kill", we've seen him in "The Son of No One", and we've seen him in "Hangman", but he first appeared in "88 Minutes". I have nothing kind to say about Pacino's performance here. I hope he's ashamed of it. It's shallow, listless, and unconvincing. He sleepwalks through this film. For one of the great American actors, this is simply unacceptable.

I have absolutely nothing positive to say about "88 Minutes". It is dull in its predictability. It drags due to its lack of impetus and endless dialogue scenes. It fails to engage the audience because it has no compelling characters. And in the end, provides you with no reward for sitting through it. It is the worst kind of movie. It's an empty movie. You can't laugh at it, you can't be thrilled by it, you can't enjoy it in any way at all. It's a colossal waste of time and one of those awful things our brains are trained to forget. Avoid it like the plague and let it be swept over by the mists of oblivion.

0.5/4

06-05-2020

Deep in the restricted area of BioTek, a top-secret US laboratory located in a sleepy small town in Utah, a final experiment is being conducted. Dr Nielsen (Richard Dysart), a kindly old man, is intently looking down a microscope. His colleagues are milling around the lab busily in something akin to pious silence. Nielsen slowly raises his head and all eyes turn to him. He smiles. The experiment was a success. Suddenly, laughter breaks out and the spacesuits come off. The jolly lab administrator (G.W. Bailey) comes in with a camera. Photo time. Everyone in the lab smiles triumphantly into the lens. All is fine. That is until a significant zoom followed by a scare chord reveals only to us a broken vial on the lab floor.

Minutes later, biohazard warnings ring out through the lab and the judicious security guard, Joanie (Kathleen Quinlan) institutes a containment protocol. All doors and windows are locked and an immediate alarm is given to a mysterious government figure known only as Major Connolly (Yaphet Kotto) who shows up almost immediately with a barrage of trucks and hazmat-suit-wearing-soldiers in tow. "It is only a yeast spill," he reassures the gathered locals worried for their loved ones. "Nothing to worry about. We're only containing the area so your crops aren't affected." They believe him. For the moment. But Connolly is lying. As we soon find out, what's escaped is a dangerous bioweapon. A germ with an 80% death rate and a 100% infection rate. No one's safe, no one's getting out. But the trouble is only beginning. As is only human, panic soon sets in with those trapped inside the lab. Some quarantine themselves in a cantine and Dr Nielsen's team is soon lying dead in their lab, but there is a significant amount of people led by the lab administrator trapped in between, and they're not happy.

So far so good. "Warning Sign" begins as a not too profound but eerily effective and lean containment thriller. Hal Barwood's no-nonsense direction and Dean Cundey's cool, distant cinematography lend the film a sense of realism that makes the film very creepy indeed. The despair that slowly sets in amongst those trapped in the lab is very believable and uncomfortably identifiable. When faced with bleak chances for survival, the animal instincts kick in in humans and the charade of civilisation ends. It is always very interesting to observe how quickly friendships deteriorate and masks come off in trying times.

But, sadly, existentialism won't sell any tickets and a midpoint twist comes in unexpectedly and disappointingly. Suddenly, all those who'd died of the virus start reanimating and turning into rage-consumed, bloodthirsty zombies. This is when "Warning Sign" begins breaking at its seems. Quickly and surely, it begins falling into every zombie-movie trap imaginable. Jump scares abound as does over-the-top violence and stock shots of zombies banging on glass windows. With its cool cinematography and madcap villains, "Warning Sign" begins looking suspiciously like Cronenberg's "Shivers" just without the social commentary. This is where our heroes come in. The local sheriff Cal (Sam Waterston) and a former employee of BioTek, the alcoholic Dr Dan (Jeffrey DeMunn) break into the lab to save Cal's wife Joanie, who somehow seems to be immune to the virus. The zombies also seem to know this and begin hunting her down the futuristic corridors of the lab. Yawn once if you've seen it all before.

"Warning Sign" is an unusual film in that it pulls off all of its higher aspirations but fails in basic genre cliches. First of all, its characters are unusually relatable and rounded for what is essentially a B-grade zombie movie. Cal, the sheriff, comes in like some Clint Eastwood wannabe but is soon revealed to really be a softie with a childhood fear of germs, the drunken doctor is more helpful than he seems and the oppressive bureaucrat isn't so oppressive after all. He's doing his job and is willing to help but not to endanger others. He actually makes several good points. Meanwhile, inside the lab, the administrator gets a very well executed (if somewhat predictable) redemption arc. There's no doubt, "Warning Sign" is one of the best written B-grade zombie movies out there.

Genre-wise, however, "Warning Sign" is downright laughable. Oh, the first half is quite effective with its claustrophobic environment and chilling atmosphere, but once the zombies show up it all goes out the window. Covered in some of the worst boil make-up I've ever seen, the zombies run around, growling and yelling insults at their victims, all whilst being led by the once-kindly now-rabid Dr Nielson. Richard Dysart, for some reason, seizes the opportunity to ham it up with both hands and gives a performance so misguided and over-the-top that it is downright parodic. Speaking in a comical falsetto, he runs around, flailing his hands, doing his best King Kong impression, and is about as terrifying as a grandpa rushing to give his granddaughter a bear hug.

Also troubling is the sequence of events that leads to the vial breaking on the floor. We see it unfold in the opening sequence and it is entirely implausible largely because, in order for it to work, these highly trained geneticists would have to be both blind and stupid. For some reason, they never notice a blue-capped vial rolling around the floor, right underneath their noses, and what's more, don't seem to follow their own basic procedure. Even I would know better than to take off my protective gear in a biohazard lab.

So what we have is an unusual case of an entertaining movie with good characters and some well-built atmosphere that is entirely undercut by its more over-the-top genre elements. "Warning Sign" seems to want to be both "The Andromeda Strain" and "Day of the Dead" but by mixing the two fails to be either. It doesn't manage to follow-up on its creepy low-key first half and never pays-off the frantic promise of its second-half twist. But this can't be denied: it is a fun movie. It moves at a steadily increasing pace, the leads give likeable performances, and its first half is memorably creepy.

2/4

07-05-2020

Based on a classic sci-fi short story by Armin Deutsch, "Moebius" deftly transcends its ultra-low-budget to become a genuinely interesting and haunting film. Shot by the students of the Argentinian Universidad del Cine and directed by their professor Gustavo Mosquera R., the film begins at the moment when a crowded subway train simply disappears into thin air while going through a tunnel. In a very witty sequence, a number of phones ring through the Buenos Aires subway system but no one has seen the missing train. The baffled subway director (Roberto Carnaghi) calls for one of the head architects of the system (Jean Pierre Reguerraz) but the man is tired of the project and can't be bothered to get involved so he sends his young friend, the mathematician Daniel Pratt (Guillermo Angelelli) instead. Pratt quickly figures out what's going on, but no one will listen to him. Namely, the increasingly complex and vast Buenos Aires subway system has connected into a single spot and thus become infinite. Like a Moebius band, it is now possible for an object to travel through it for all eternity, and that is indeed what the missing train is doing. Facing disbelief from the officials, Pratt heads off to find the train himself with the help of a precocious child (Annabella Levy) and some mysterious calculations left behind by his disappeared mentor (Jorge Petraglia).

"Moebius'" greatest assets is its eery atmosphere. It is set almost entirely in the seemingly never-ending labyrinthine corridors of the Buenos Aires subway system, and the film's cinematographer Abel Peñalba and director make full use of their location. These filthy, empty corridors and stations which are both futuristic and decaying, give off an otherworldly vibe similar to the infected building in Cronenberg's "Shivers". Coupled with the eery echoes of the rattle of distant trains passing, it is suddenly not so improbable that infinity has been reached in this enormous complex. The world surrounding the subway system is similarly dystopic. The streets are seemingly always empty and a sense of brooding despair seems to be always present as if a horrible event has decimated the population, a horrible event no one wishes to talk about. A lot of this emptiness doubtlessly comes from the film's significant budget restrictions but works in its favour.

On the downside, "Moebius'" script has definite flaws. It continually balances between a sort of Borgesesque magic realism and hard sci-fi but because it never makes up its mind if it wants to make sense or not, its balancing act comes across as awkward and its basic premise as shaky at best. All the mathematical talk about Moebius strips and parallel dimensions sounds improvised and badly understood, and the open-ended conclusion ends up looking like a cheap cop-out. Like the filmmakers didn't understand their basic premise well enough to think up a sensible resolution. Another flaw is that all the characters in the film display very little defining characteristics and simply act out their parts in the plot. I have no problem with mysteriousness, especially in a film like "Moebius", but these characters aren't enigmatic, just underwritten. Our lead, in particular, remains one-dimensional. The actor Guillermo Angelelli photographs well but he fails to expose any of Daniel Pratt's inner depth. The relationship with his child sidekick remains vague and his reaction to the finale questionable. Other than that, he barely ever responds to anything going on around him giving an impression of a man on heavy sedatives.

But I don't hold "Moebius'" flaws too much against it. When viewed in the context of its student origins, its originality and effective atmosphere become enough to praise it with caution. It is an admirable effort and an enjoyable sci-fi thriller which ends up raising more questions than answering. The elusive nature of its mysterious premise conceals some but not all of its flaws.

3/4

08-05-2020

"Thesis" begins with an announcement delivered to a train full of people by a stern, officious voice. "Attention, ladies and gentlemen. This train stops here due to an accident We're halfway into the station The doors will now be opened to let you out. Please do as you're told! Leave the platform as fast as you can and on't look at the track... He's been cut in half." Like one of those of warnings on TV about upcoming images of extreme violence, this warning has the opposite effect of the desired one. It piques the interest of the passengers. As they file out of the train, in a so-so orderly line, they can't be helped but to look, some secretly, some openly, at the body of the suicide victim lying bloodied on the tracks. We suspect, through personal experience, that even those who dramatically avert their eyes, really want to peek, but are simply too ashamed to. One of the passengers on the train is Angela (Ana Torrent), a young film student whose thesis is on violence in film and TV. She professes her distaste towards violence to her professor. "I am concerned," she says of what she perceives to be an oversaturation of violence in media. "Why," he asks. "Because I don't like violence". "Do you reject it?". "Of course". And yet she too can't help but be drawn towards the corpse on the tracks. In fact, she is so drawn that she, almost hypnotised, steps out of the orderly line and walks towards the corpse. When she sees it, she can't but stare. Amenabar's camera, however, lingers not on the gore but Angela's mesmerised and shocked eyes. Her reaction is what counts here because Amenabar is concerned primarily with consumption of violence rather than violence itself. "The director needs to be aware of what he is doing," Angela tells her professor in reference to putting violence on screen. "The director's only duty is to give the audience what they want," he responds. Amenabar shows us that what the audience wants is to see that which they avert their eyes at. Like Angela, we openly reject violence and are abhorred by it, but equally, we are drawn towards any program that begins with a warning and whenever someone tells us not to look, we peek anyway. "Violence is something that is innate in us," says the professor, pretty much exposing the thesis of "Thesis".

In her exploration of violence, Angela sheepishly looks for the most violent videos can she find. In her quest, she runs into Chema (Fele Martínez), a peculiar young man, equally as fascinated by violence as Angela but the difference is that he's open about it. He collects gore videos and porn and one day Angela invites herself to view his collection. He shows her a video of a mass execution. "God," she averts her eyes. "That's what you wanted, so don't get squeamish." She turns to him and asks: "Do people really watch these films". The answer Chema gives her goes right to the heart of the film: "You do, for a start". But Angela doesn't see it that way, her interest is purely academic, she defends herself, and, of course, seeing violence on TV isn't like seeing it for real. But her defence is feeble, especially when Chema rightly says that the video they're watching is real. She continues to protest not so much to prove her case against violence but to hide her fascination with it.

The scenes in which Amenabar tackles the appeal of violence and our shameless consumption of it are fascinating, especially in the way he cleverly contrasts Angela's conscious rejection of violence with her subconscious interest in it. But "Thesis" is packaged in a mainstream envelope and often cuts from its truly interesting psychological/sociological material to focus on an increasingly silly thriller plot. Namely, in her quest for the most violent video in existence, Angela stumbles onto a dangerous snuff film ring which has somehow killed several hundred women and yet remains undetected. Chema and she begin an inquiry into this organisation and find, to their horror, that they are based in the very university they attend. Soon, they begin suspecting that Bosco (Eduardo Noriega), a handsome but snobbish film student, is the one behind it.

This thriller motor which drives most of the film is riddled with problems. First of all, we are supposed to believe that a good student like Angela, doing a research paper on violence in film has no idea what a snuff film is. Secondly, a major character in the film is continually revealed to know things which make his actions earlier in the film seem not only stupid but entirely unbelievable. Also, his reasons for lying are at best laughable and it soon becomes obvious that the only reason Amenabar and his co-writer Mateo Gill have him hide so many secrets is so he can pose as a red herring. But this fish simply doesn't bite, mainly because the true villains of the film are obvious from the very first scenes in which they appear.

Somewhere halfway through the film, as the thriller plot becomes more and more dominant, it becomes obvious Amenabar has little interest in the thriller genre. His mind is on more thoughtful aspects of "Thesis" and it shows, mainly because the film begins dragging every time it deals with this snuff-ring mystery plot. This is perhaps "Thesis'" biggest problem. At 125 minutes, it is simply too long and Amenabar has great difficulty keeping up interest in a mystery whose solution is painfully obvious. He is saved, but only partly, by excellent performances from Ana Torrent and Fele Martínez, as well as the moody and often gorgeous cinematography by Hans Burmann. "Thesis" is one of the best looking thrillers of all time and in that sense, it reminded me of Italian Giallo films.

Even though "Thesis'" main plot falls apart under the weight of its inconsistencies and plodding pace, the film is (barely) held together by its fascinating psycho-sociological premise and likeable characters. I also enjoyed the relationship between Angela and Chema which continually oscillates between disgust and attraction. Much like towards violence, Angela is drawn to Chema but can't admit to herself that she is mainly because he is not what society has thought her an appealing man looks like. Amenabar subtly introduces societal norms as one of the film's main villains and the way they prevent us from living out our fantasies and indulging in our fascinations should have been "Thesis'" main plot, not the rather listless and dull snuff-ring.

3/4

08-05-2020

Even though its opening, in which the chanting of "Hail Mary" is suddenly replaced with a booming techno track, suggests something modern and daring, "Stigmata" is actually a remarkably old-fashioned retread of "Exorcist" cliches. It revolves around a young woman named Frankie Paige (Patricia Arquette) who comes to own a cursed rosary and begins displaying stigmata (the wounds of Christ) on her body and signs of demonic possession. She speaks ancient languages in a raspy "demonic" voice, she levitates, acquires superhuman strength and water drips upwards around her. Make the sign of the cross if you've seen all of these before. Father Andrew Kiernan (Gabriel Byrne), once a scientist and now a Vatican miracle-investigator is sent to Pittsburgh to examine Miss Paige. Here the film falls into a routine of revolving scenes of Andrew and Frankie becoming friends and scenes of Frankie displaying new (and painful) stigmata. This goes on for about 40 minutes or so before a Dan Brownish plotline involving a gospel made up of Jesus' own words suppressed by the Vatican is introduced. Supposedly, this gospel was discovered decades ago but when translated it revealed something that would destroy the modern church (it's a McGuffin, so don't hold your breath that you'll ever be told exactly what that something is). Thus, the loyal and (we suspect) power-hungry Cardinal Houseman (Jonathan Pryce) had it suppressed and its translators excommunicated. But wouldn't you know it, one of them escaped with a copy of the Gospel. All this and more is explained by Rade Serbedzija, a stable of middling 90s blockbusters, in a droning exposition scene which seems like it belongs in a low-budget TV show rather than a cinematic release. After that, the film strangely peters out and ends without any resolution or climax as if bored of its own existence. Most of the characters it introduces disappear without a word, its villains are forgotten, and its hero rides off into the sunset. If I didn't know better, I'd expect a "To Be Continued" caption.

"Stigmata" is an odd film in that it seems to constantly switch between different genres. It is alternatively a clerical drama about father Kiernan's doubts in the institution of the church, a gory horror film about a woman possessed by demons, and a conspiracy thriller. None of these plotlines works on its own so naturally, they never gel into a coherent film. The horror scenes are cliched and badly filmed, the conspiracy thriller preposterous and downright silly in its artificiality, and the drama scenes feel misplaced among all the genre stereotypes. Following the general unevenness of the film, its style is likewise all over the place. Most of the film is shot in a style resembling a neo-noir comic book, with dour-looking characters walking around dilapidated city streets as discarded newspapers fly around their feet. Cinematographer Jeffrey L. Kimball underexposes the entire film to get a murky, bleak image which I suppose is in line with the general depressive tone of the film but to my eyes looked like an ugly imitation of Tim Burton's "Batman". Then, out of nowhere, whenever horror kicks in, director Rupert Wainwright shoots the scenes like a 90s music video. Wide-angle lenses, superimposition, and quick cuts abound. To call the effect jarring would be an understatement. It feels a lot like being awoken from a nap by someone turning on MTV too loud. The soundtrack follows much the same pattern and switches awkwardly between a derivative orchestral score by Elia Cmiral and annoyingly loud techno songs by Billy Corgan which feel distinctly out of place in a film written to be a theological horror meditating on the issues of organised religion.

"Stigmata" is thus a mess. A film that seems unable to focus on a single plot or style and instead meanders between all things its director and writer can think of. This, sadly, doesn't produce an entertaining film as in all of its dourness and predictability, "Stigmata" is a fairly boring picture. It takes itself very seriously but its plot is paper-thin resulting in a film that seems pretentious but has nothing to be pretentious about. It is also not in the least bit scary. The idea of the stigmata, wounds of Christ which appear as if by magic on a person's body, does have a certain creepiness to it and could be quite effective if done right, but Wainwright shies away from portraying any true gore or suffering on the part of our lead character. Oh sure, she bleeds and screams, but it is all very unconvincing and distinctly unmemorable. Patricia Arquette is also no Linda Blair. Both of her performances as Frankie and the demon possessing her are equally dull and listless. Frankie is, at best, a cardboardy character, and, at worst, an annoying one. Her bubbly personality and life philosophy seem torn right out of a 90s girlie magazine. Meanwhile, her demon acting consists of wearing contact lenses and being badly dubbed over by a man. Truly not the stuff of nightmares. The demon also never harms anyone else but Frankie so even if we were to muster up some sympathy for this cypher of a character, we would have nothing to be afraid of since the demon never actually harms anyone else in any way and seems only concerned with teaching Frankie Aramaic as besides that, he never actually accomplishes anything else in the whole film. The plot, when eventually verbosely explained by Rade Serbedzija, makes no logical sense for two reasons. First, the cursed rosary is stolen from a grave by a child at the beginning of the film. If it weren't, there would be no demonic possession. In other words, if this fluke of luck hadn't happened, the demon's masterplan wouldn't have happened either. The second problem, however, comes if we assume that the demon somehow orchestrated the theft of the rosary. Alright, let's assume that. But in that case, why on Earth did he choose to possess a sassy hairdresser from Pittsburgh to do his bidding when his bidding needs to be done in the Vatican? But it would be impossible to call "Stigmata" a sensible film in any way. Its conspiracy plot is likewise fraught with problems. The Vatican is supposedly so concerned about this Gospel of Jesus that they decide to suppress it and, as characters continually remind us in this film, the Vatican is almighty. So why did they allow the priest who was translating the Gospel to escape with a copy of it? What nonsense.

IMDb trivia tells us that although the Gospel in the film is supposed to be written in Aramaic Rupert Wainwright had it written out in Hebrew simply because he thought it looked nicer. This fact, easily verifiable through some Googling, shows us exactly the depth of thought that went into making "Stigmata". It is a film which shifts between numerous equally mindless plotlines and equally ugly styles and eventually doesn't successfully resolve or utilise any of them. It is a needlessly dour and depressing rip-off of "The Exorcist" which squanders some potentially interesting plot elements on a screenplay which appears to have been hastily put together as the sets were being built. The only ones who leave "Stigmata" unstigmatised by its incompetence are the cast. None of them gives a memorable performance here but they all seem to be genuinely trying to make something of their roles. Gabriel Byrne gives brings his witty but commanding presence, Enrico Colantoni is delightfully slimy as a Vatican spy, and I'm always happy to see Jonathan Pryce in any movie, no matter how bad it might be. His turn as the viciously "loyal" cardinal is the most successful in the whole film.

1.5/4

09-05-2020

It is always disheartening to see directors you admire stumble but to have them stumble with a film as misguided and awkward as "The Oxford Murders" is particularly tough to watch. Álex de la Iglesia has made some of the smartest, sharpest, and funniest cinematic satires of the last decades including the savagely hilarious "Common Wealth", the surrealist horror/comedy "The Day of the Beast", and "Ferpect Crime", possibly the brittlest takedown of male ego ever committed to celluloid. Here he directs a tonally uneven and confusingly illogical "intellectual" mystery movie which seems unable to decide if it wants to be parodic or deadly serious. The film follows an American foreign exchange student Martin (Elijah Wood) who is involved in solving a series of mysterious murders in Oxford with his academic idol, the egotistical mathematics professor Arthur Seldom (John Hurt). Thank God they're mathematicians, though, since the serial killer leaves a clue, in the form of a geometric shape doodled on a piece of paper, before each of his victims, always someone with a terminal illness, is killed.

The first, and the most alienating, problem with "The Oxford Murders" is that none of its characters is convincing as a human being. They seem to converse exclusively through mathematical riddles and philosophical quotations, they exhibit no recognisably human emotions and seem to be perpetually involved in some kind of a petty rivalry. Elijah Wood is ghastly miscast as the mathematical prodigy as he fails to find any complexity or interest in his character. In any given scene he seems like he's struggling to hold onto his dialogue which is so heady and flighty that it continually escapes his and our understanding. He is about as flat and emotionally distant as a protagonist can be. John Hurt, on the other hand, does seem to be having some fun playing the arrogant know-it-all academic cliche, and any scene he's in is bound to be at least dynamic if not entertaining, but Arthur Seldom is such an unlikeable and mean character that following him throughout the movie is something of a chore. He seems to take great pleasure in mentally torturing people around him and most of the runtime I spent wanting to smack him on the nose rather than listen to what he has to say. A dynamic duo these two are not. Similarly, the characters that surround them are either complete cliches or so unbelievable that they seem out-of-place in what is, at least nominally, supposed to be a serious movie. Julie Cox, for instance, plays her role of a woman with a massive crush on Martin which such over-the-top histrionics that she sooner resembles a cartoon character than a human being. Similarly, Burn Gorman shows up as a Russian mathematician and overacts so badly that he literally jumps on tables and dramatically falls to the floor in every scene he's in. On the other side, we have Jim Carter as the police inspector and Leonor Watling as Martin's girlfriend who play their roles with utmost seriousness.

Here-in lies the tonal issue with "The Oxford Murders". The material is clearly meant to be played straight but Álex de la Iglesia's comedic instincts seem to be colouring the film with a kind of campy humour that feels completely out of place. Take, for instance, a brief and ultimately inconsequential part played by Alex Cox. He shows up as a mathematical genius who lobotomized himself in order to achieve pure thought. A lengthy flashback montage sequence is dedicated to his story and plays more like a Jean-Pierre Jeunet film than an Agatha Christie whodunnit with its wide-angled aesthetics and grotesque humour. Occasionally, I couldn't tell if Iglesia was intentionally being funny or not, such as in the case of the awful dubbing job done on Burn Gorman. Not only do the lip movements not sync up, but the actor dubbing him also plays the part with a clearly phoney radio-voice. Furthermore, no effects have been added on the voice recording such as atmosphere or echo leading to it having a clearly different quality than the rest of the actors' voices. The dubbing job is so obvious and horrendous that I can't, in all honesty, say whether it is just bad work on the part of the ADR people or whether it was meant as some kind of an in-joke. All I can say is that I had disturbing flashbacks to terrible 70s kung-fu movies every time Gorman showed up on-screen.

As if all of this wasn't enough, the film is continually plagued by awful dialogue which is all the more noticeable due to the fact that every single scene in it is as verbose as a college lecture. Every single plot point, character introduction, and action is delivered through dialogue. This might as well have been broadcast on the radio. The exposition, in particular, is painful. The opening scene, in which Martin first meets his kooky landlady (Anna Massey) consists entirely out of Martin and her telling each other things they both already know. For instance, Martin sees a photo of Alan Turing on his landlady's wall. "That's Turing, Alan Turing, the man who deciphered the Enigma code," he says as if she doesn't know whose photo is on her wall. "Thanks to him, we won the war," she says as if he hasn't just recognised the man based only on his photo. "Poor man died such a strange death. A poisoned apple, like Snow White," she educates the audience. Later on, a line so bad is delivered it made laugh out loud. Martin finds out his landlady was once married to a mathematical genius named Eagleton and is good friends with his idol Arthur Seldom. He then tells her, "Eagleton tutored Seldom's doctoral thesis on the logical series in 1960". As if she doesn't know how her husband and her good friend know each other and as if she wasn't already married to him in 1960. Screenwriter Jorge Guerricaechevarría should be ashamed of himself for writing that line alone.

"The Oxford Murders" exists in a kind of whimsical world which Agatha Christie adaptations are often set in (even though Christie's novels definitely weren't). All the characters are quirky, all the locations historically significant and beautiful to look at, and every scene ends in some brainy joke. This saccharine quality of the film wore on me pretty quickly. Also annoying is its wildly inaccurate portrayal of science. It gets many of its facts wrong and pretends mathematics is some kind of a drug to be weened off. Martin's girlfriend even gives him one of those ultimatums, mathematics or me, which is completely preposterous. For a movie pretending to be an intellectual murder mystery, this is unforgivable. The final nail in the coffin of this film, however, is the solution to its central mystery which I won't spoil but suffice to say it relies so much on coincidence that it is impossible to believe in.

That is not to say there is no fun to be had with "The Oxford Murders", but it is entirely on the level of a middling ITV drama. I enjoyed some of the inventive camerawork on show and I liked Roque Baños' predictable but rousing soundtrack. I also found that with its insane tonal shifts and awful dialogue I had a lot of fun laughing at the sheer preposterousness of it all. It is a sad blotch on the career of Álex de la Iglesia and misguided in its execution and casting, but I suspect there is a lot of potential in its premise if only someone with a deeper understanding of academia had approached it seriously it could have been an interesting movie.

1.5/4

10-05-2020

At one point in "The Ninth Gate", a pretty woman wanting to have sex with him, asks Dean Corso (Johnny Depp) what his job is. "Authenticating rare books and tracking them down," he responds. "You're a book detective!" she deduces. This is indeed a neat description of what Corso does and how he does it, but not what he is. Later on, when Corso describes himself as a professional, a person who's no friend of his retorts "a professional mercenary". While he indeed does track down and deal in rare books, he does so for the highest bidder and often through dubious methods. One of his most "loyal" clients, Boris Balkan (Frank Langella) described him as "one of those lean, hungry, restless types that put the wind up Julius Caesar". That is not to say Corso has no scruples but rather that they can be bought. "Do you believe in the supernatural," Balkan asks him. "I believe in my percentage," Corso responds. Unlike Corso, Balkan is indeed unscrupulous, especially when it comes to his passion: books on the Devil. He has been known to restlessly pursue his goals, pester and bargain with those who possess that which he wants to buy, and if they don't want to sell, he has been known to employ... illegal methods. Corso has been runner boy before and that is what he needs him for this time too. They meet in Balkan's own glass-and-iron tower in the heart of Manhattan - a sort of embodiment of "show of force". Balkan wants to send Corso to Europe. Portugal and France, to be precise, where he knows two of the three known copies of the illustrious and rare Satanic book called "The Nine Gates" are located. This book is said to contain illustrations drawn by the Devil himself and that when put together can summon the Dark Lord himself. The third copy of "The Nine Gates" is in Balkan's possession, but something's wrong with it. "You mean the Devil won't show up," Corso wittily asks. He doesn't even suspect yet how right he is. But for now, all Corso knows is that he is to go to Europe and compare those other two copies to Balkan's.

Corso approaches this job much like a hardboiled detective would approach one of his investigations. With lots of cigarette smoke, booze, and pretty women. Soon, Corso is being tailed by heavies and pursued by two separate women. One of them is the ultra-rich member of an ancient coven who wants Balkan's book for herself (Lena Olin) and the other a nameless woman (Emmanuelle Seigner) who seems to show up whenever Corso needs help. She acts as a kind of guardian angel if the meaning of the word angel was up for debate. She has superhuman power, can levitate, and has eyes that glow a hypnotic green. As Corso pushes through with his inquiry leaving a trail of dead bodies and supernatural occurrences in his wake, he finds himself becoming as fascinated by "The Nine Gates" as Balkan himself and beginning to suspect his employer has darker intentions in mind than book collecting.

"The Ninth Gate" is a film aimed at thriller lovers with interests in historical mystery, long-buried secrets, and old books and this Umberto Eco fan found it a blast. Roman Polanski, one of the most skilful directors of his generation, wonderfully meshes a film noir formula with horror elements and an Indiana Jones-type adventure movie mood. Corso's quest is distinctly Chandlerian as he follows the book-trail from one collector to the other and as each of his visits uncovers an increasingly complex plot under the surface. However, Polanski doesn't indulge in a dour atmosphere one would expect of neo-noir but rather sprinkles the film with lively instances of humour mostly emanating from our likeable mercenary himself. Johnny Depp is terrific in the lead role, low-key but charming and endowing Corso with a kind of comfortable, lived-in clumsiness. Polanski also includes terrific instances of irony such as a marvellously clever parody of the cliche horror movie black mass (cowled figures in spacious red rooms etc.). He also sets the film in a comically over-the-top world in which bookshops are owned by walrus-like identical twins, rich countesses are guarded by manly Soviet secretaries and hotel concierges can always be bought for bills of certain denominations. Unlike Polanski's previous horror effort, "Rosemary's Baby", "The Ninth Gate" doesn't endeavour to comment on the real world with its irony but rather to revel in the peculiarities of its artificial one. It is a film which celebrates the oddness and coolness of common film imagery.

Where the film does stumble are its horror elements which Polanski seems to have been largely uninterested in. He seems to ignore many potentially scary set-pieces in favour of humour and noir pastiches which does give the film an unusual flavour but it also robs it of a greater potential impact it could have had. It is strange to say of a film in which the Devil is the chief antagonist, but "The Ninth Gate" isn't in the least bit scary or even atmospheric. Polanski does such a good job of emulating noir movies and adventure films that you'd sooner believe Corso's being pursued by gangsters or Nazis then the Devil himself. What horror could have provided "The Ninth Gate" was a greater sense of threat and a strong plot motor to carry us over some of the film's talkier and slower portions. As it stands, "The Ninth Gate" often loses its urgency and sense of imminent threat leading to many entertaining but essentially unexciting sequences. Also, due to a lack of horror atmosphere, most of the film's deaths pass without much emotional involvement and are quickly forgotten in favour of Corso's humorous antics. This is why the ending, in which the supernatural elements kick in at full force, seems to have confused many viewers. Because the film doesn't prepare them for such an overt genre switch, the finale, although a logical conclusion to the plot, seems to belong in a different movie.

But other than that, I enjoyed pretty much everything about "The Ninth Gate". Johnny Depp is a likeable lead, Frank Langella a commanding sleazeball, and Emmanuelle Seigner sufficiently mysterious and alluring. They are aided by strong supporting turns from Lena Olin who seems to be having a lot of fun hamming it up as the ultra-rich widow, Barbara Jefford in a sinister turn as a one-armed baroness, and José López Rodero who is memorably hilarious as the aforementioned identical twins. On the technical side, I very much enjoyed the photography by Darius Khondji and the production design by Dean Tavoularis who understand that literary thrillers can only take place in wood-panelled rooms. And on top of the pyramid sits Roman Polanski who directs the film in his usual witty and intelligent style with tempered but effective camera movements and refreshing lack of reliance on special effects or grandstanding.

A special mention must be given to Wojciech Kilar's spectacular score which when listened to on its own sounds less like a movie soundtrack and more like a symphony. With a powerfully dynamic central beat reminiscent of the train-like pulse present in Jerry Goldsmith's magnificent "Omen II" score, and an entrancing soprano vocalisation by Sumi Jo it encapsulates musically all the major themes of the film. Furthermore, it gives some of the film's slower portions the dynamic push they need and gives the film closure with the marvellous final soprano piece which plays over the closing credits. Emulating the siren-like call of adventure and the enchanting nature of evil, it is one of the most unforgettable pieces of movie music I have ever heard.

3/4

10-05-2020

Tom Witzky (Kevin Bacon) is an ordinary man, working an ordinary job, living in an ordinary neighbourhood with his ordinary little family. Nothing unusual has ever happened to him and the most transgressions activity he takes part in is playing in a rock band with a group of friends. He works hard, harder than perhaps he should, and seems unable (or unwilling) to notice anything farther than his nose. His wife Maggie (Kathryn Erbe) has also been working hard and their joint efforts have afforded them a nice house on a friendly blue-collar street where they live with their son Jake (Zachary David Cope). As everyone on their street works just as hard as the Witzkys they organise little house parties every so often and it is at one of these parties that our plot begins when Maggie brings her sister Lisa (Illeana Douglas) along. It is immediately obvious Lisa does not belong among these working-class people. Her interests lie beyond sheer day-to-day survival and she spends her days not working to support a family but indulging her interests in hypnosis. Tom, being such a dirt-under-the-fingernails kind of guy, doesn't believe in such nonsense. Or as he puts it, "what I don't understand is how a person that spent most of her adult life in college can believe all that superstitious crap". Something in this line provokes Lisa. Maybe the "superstitious crap" or the way Tom sneers at the word "college". Whatever it is, it provokes her enough to snap at Tom with "this may come as a surprise to you, Tom, but just because you kicked around the same six blocks for your whole life doesn't mean that there isn't a whole larger world out there". Unbeknownst to Lisa, however, she has just hit right at the heart of Tom's troubles. He's been working so hard not in order to support his family but so he doesn't have to face just how uneventful and boring his life truly is. I never wanted to be famous," he tells his wife. "I just never expected to be so ordinary."

Hurt by Lisa's words, Tom decides to step into the unknown and for once in his life have something interesting happen to him. He challenges Lisa to hypnotise him. Although reticent at first, Lisa is unable to deny the challenge, especially with such a captive audience and she hypnotises Tom with surprising ease. At first, it seems like nothing major has happened. Tom cried a bit, told them some secrets, and Lisa stuck a pin through his hand. But then, slowly, changes in Tom begin showing through. At first, he experiences just minor visions, images really. Then he begins seeing dead people. One dead person, to be precise, a young girl named Samantha (Jennifer Morrison) who disappeared six months earlier. Why is she in their house? Why is she asking for Tom's help? And why can their son see her too? More importantly, however, why is Tom enjoying this haunting so much? Perhaps, because, as he tells his wife, "this is the most important thing that's happened to me in my whole stupid life".

The idea of a bored working-class man, disappointed in what his life has turned out to be finding an escape from this life in the after-life is very interesting to me and as a character study "Stir of Echoes" had potential. Director/writer David Koepp does a great job of basing his film in hard reality. Coaxing complex and believable performances from his cast, giving them well-rounded characters with joys, disappointments, and desires to play, and putting them in a blue-collar world, a world so rarely visited by ghosts. It is a shame then that he drowns this genuinely interesting premise in a mire of ghost-movie cliches. We get the spooky clairvoyant child, the rotting ghost that moves jerkily towards our protagonists and appears, unseen, in bathroom mirrors. Jump scares punctuated by scare chords, dreary atmosphere, and an ominous warning from a magical black man (Eddie Bo Smith Jr.), an obvious rip-off of Halloran from "The Shining". Coupled with such realistic and believable characters, these tired old cliches end up seeming goofy and dull. I yawned at every ghostly appearance, was annoyed by the jump scares, and found all the ominous warnings tiring. All of this is even more egregious and noticeable because Koepp has the audacity to give the character of Lisa several lines which outright mock horror movie cliches. A move undoubtedly inspired by the success of Wes Craven's genre-savvy "Scream".

Now, it's been a long time since I read Richard Matheson's original novel which this film was based on, but I do remember enjoying it and that it focused a lot more on the psychological struggles of a man whose life is overtaken by ESP. It also had a neat satiric edge showing that the friendly neighbourhood the protagonists live in is actually yet another dump filled with sin, evil, and petty human passions. Koepp's film packs all these elements in somewhere but puts the scares and ectoplasmic chills front and centre thus pretty much bastardizing Matheson's clever and engaging psychological horror.

Released the same year as "The Sixth Sense", M. Night Shyamalan's cult classic overshadowed "Stir of Echoes" both at the box office and in pop culture consciousness. This happened not because "The Sixth Sense" is a more original movie (because it's not), but because it executed its cliches with more style and conviction. With all its jump scares, ghostly apparitions, and rotting corpses, "Stir of Echoes" is not particularly scary. It is merely predictable and comes across as cheap with its fairground-level thrills. This is not to say there's no good work in "Stir of Echoes". Quite to the contrary. I was impressed by the cast (especially Illeana Douglas who gets some of the best lines in the film) and Fred Murphy's cinematography. I also enjoyed James Newton Howard's score which, when it isn't busy scaring us, gives the film a poetic note which its screenplay lacks. There is something distinctly Bergmanesque in this film's basic premise of a man's psychological make-up being changed by a ghostly haunting, but sadly its execution is pure schlock.

2/4

10-05-2020

The lives of the Spencers (Michelle Pfeiffer and Harrison Ford) look like the archetypal American success story. He's a rich and respected geneticist, she a devoted housewife who gave up a promising musical career to be the perfect wife. Their daughter Caitlin (Katharine Towne) has just gone off to a prestigious college and Norman & Claire are now free to indulge in their "sexual Olympics" all day long which, considering they can't take their hands off of each other, won't be difficult for them. They live outside of the city, in one of those white-wood houses with a wooden dock leading to the most picturesque lake you've ever seen. On the weekends, they meet with their friends in exclusive restaurants to eat and fawn over each other's successes. They've got it made, and they've got it, in a word, perfect. Or does it just seem so? Because as we all know, perfect lives are built on perfect crimes and quiet suburban neighbourhoods hide sins that would make the Devil blush as Claire slowly becomes aware throughout the movie. At first, it is the neighbours she's suspicious about. After a tense run-in with Mrs Feur (Miranda Otto) who seems scared out of her mind of her husband (James Remar), Claire begins noticing Mr Feur acting weird. He leaves his house late at night, acts nervous when she comes calling, and Mrs Feur is nowhere to be seen. Norman dismisses her suspicions as delusions. She's only taking Caitlin leaving the nest hard. Right? Claire, however, doesn't appreciate his dismissal. Cracks in their perfect lives begin showing. But it is not their neighbour's secrets that will shatter their happiness, but their own. As Claire investigates Mr Feur's activities, she begins noticing strange things going on at her house. Doors open and close on their own, the bathtub fills up without anyone making it, and writing shows up on the bathroom mirror. She suspects that the ghost of Mrs Feur is haunting the house, but this ghost seems to be hinting at a different crime. One that will indeed reveal the Spencers' perfect life to be nothing but a sham.

"What Lies Beneath" is less of a horror movie and more a suspenseful psychological drama. Its focus is not on scares and tricks but on Claire's slow realisation that dark secrets are what lies beneath. The first half of the film is really terrific as the filmmakers allow us (and Claire) to slowly realise the horrors that surround her. There are several genuinely tense scenes which don't rely on scare tactics at all, such as a superbly passive-aggressive dinner scene involving a subtle argument between Norman and Claire in front of their friends. When asked why she stopped playing, Claire says she met Norman. "Our house is haunted. Claire's hearing things." He embarrasses Claire in return. At the surface, nothing at all happens, but the tension is downright palpable. Robert Zemeckis' direction allows for the characters and the plot to slowly unfold and is one of the strongest aspects of the film. He allows dialogue scenes to run on in single continuous takes. His camera snakes around the actors until we get the feeling we're voyeurs, intruding on their private moments. He indulges in no fancy camera tricks, no jump scares, no fast cuts to impose a false sense of dynamics. His work on this film is absolutely Hitchcockian, elegant, tense, and beautiful. And this film truly is beautiful. Don Burgess' cinematography makes the lakeside location glow and Michelle Pfeiffer look like Kim Novak in "Vertigo". It is old-fashioned in the best sense of the word. The film pops from the screen.

Another strong suit of the film are the well-rounded and complex characters. Screenwriter Clark Gregg imbues them with their own personal complexes and resentments which they themselves may not be aware of. Claire, for instance, is regretting leaving her music career behind. She did it for the sake of Norman and to take care of her daughter, but now the daughter's left home, she feels her life is suddenly empty. As the cracks begin to show in her perfect marriage, she begins resenting Norman more and more for making her leave the cello and for giving her so little in return. Norman, on the other side, is still haunted by the shadow of his dead father. Wherever he goes, his father (a respected geneticist in his own right) is mentioned and whenever he is mentioned, Norman's face darkens. He hides an anger deep inside him, a hatred for his father's success, and still feels pressured by his father to be perfect, to be the spitting image of him, to prove himself. And yet, they do love each other, there is a tenderness between them, a childish love, and a strong sexual attraction. Their marriage could have been a subject of a Bergman movie.

What eventually trips the film up, however, is its pacing, mainly due to the repetitious nature of the horror scenes. There's very little difference between the first scene in which Claire finds the bathtub mysteriously filled and the second scene. There are also so many times we can find a door open and close interesting. Most of these scenes build well only to be let down by either a false scare (oh my god, it's the dog!) or a simple anti-climax (the ghost has disappeared, gee whiz!). In the end, one gets the feeling all of this is leading nowhere and slowly, which makes the film at times difficult to watch. The second half, which sees Claire look deeper into the mystery of the ghost is quite weak. First of all, as soon as the identity of the ghost is revealed, it becomes very obvious what is going on and yet we still have half the movie to go. Also as the horror scenes become more and more prevalent, their weaknesses start becoming clearer. Zemeckis does a good job at building up suspense and a sense of threat but he never pays it off, something Hitchcock was a master of, and the issue that ultimately makes "What Lies Beneath" drag. It is a 130-minute long movie that simply can't support its own weight. It keeps building up to something grand and revealing, but it never seems to get there. Eventually, the lack of resolution and the repetitiousness of its scenes wore on me and made me lose the excitement I had when the film began. A sad finale for such a promising and intriguing first half. By the time the film had degenerated into a madcap slasher movie in its last 30 minutes, all my investment was gone and I was just hoping it would end already.

Had the second half of the film paid off the emotional tension that the first half has, "What Lies Beneath" could have been an unusually smart and powerful movie. Its character building is great as are its actors. Michelle Pfeiffer and Harrison Ford give strong, likeable, interesting performances, and are great on-screen together. They ooze charm and sexual tension. I also greatly enjoyed Alan Silvestri's score which effectively emulates Bernard Herrmann's strings-heavy style. It is a dynamic, suspenseful soundtrack which does drum up some excitement in the film's otherwise listless finale. Maybe someday, some kind soul decides to re-edit "What Lies Beneath", cut some 30 minutes from its runtime, and accentuate the emotional finale over the slasher one. This wouldn't save the film entirely but it would surely make it at least worth watching. As it stands, I doubt this film could satisfy anyone but it is a fascinating example of a movie which starts like a profound auteur piece and slowly (and I mean SLOWLY) degenerates into a dime-a-dozen madcap horror flick.

2.5/4

16-05-2020

It's 1991 in Yugoslavia and the Croatian War is raging mere kilometres from Novi Sad. Every day, sickening images of charred corpses and jeering drunken soldiers fill the TV screens. Booming voices of boisterous radio hosts transmit patriotic messages. The thundering cannon fire across the border has become so commonplace that people have learned to just turn the volumes up on their TVs. But it has become unsafe even in the "aggressor country" of Serbia. Military policemen traverse the streets picking up young men seemingly at random and sending them to the front lines. The constant threat of forceful mobilisation has turned them into fugitives, shivering at the sound of military trucks, afraid to leave their bedrooms, without any hope for the future. It is in this bleak atmosphere that our protagonists decide to throw a party in a remote cabin in the woods. The nominal reason is the birthday of one of their mutual friends (Nada Šargin) but the truth is, this is their last hiding place, their last escape, their last chance to live as if the world around them isn't collapsing. And live they do. Overpowering the distant gunfire with loud music and opiates, by the end of this wild weekend they'll all have switched partners, two of them will be engaged, and one of them dead (maybe).

The film's central premise is potent if somewhat overused. The idea of a group of people escaping into hedonism from the troubles of the world has been around since at least "The Decameron", but it still offers a good breeding ground for character development, powerful conflicts, and eventually a tragic resolution. However, Aleksandar Davić's "Party" is too messy and uneven for its crops to succeed. First of all, for a character-driven film, its characters are remarkably flat and interchangeable. I suspect that the idea was for us to recognise them rather than have them revealed to us on screen probably in order to allow us to imprint our own friends or even ourselves onto them, but I honestly had trouble following the film because, for the most part, I couldn't tell them apart. Even the usually colourful Sonja Savić fails to make an impression because she is playing someone with seemingly no distinguishing characteristics. Her character, Đina, is more a type than a rounded personality. We're never told who she is, where she's coming from, nor where does she want to go. She seems to exist only within the timeframe of the film. She was born when first she appeared on screen and was last seen just before the credits rolled. This lack of life outside of the film's confines is not reserved solely for Đina. In fact, it seems to be a rule. Characters turn up at the party, spout occasionally witty dialogue, play their parts in the film's plot and disappear without us ever really learning who they are. The cast, made up mostly of debutants, seems hampered by this and they mostly turn in fairly flat, lifeless performances. The only ones who manage to transcend the thin screenplay are Goran Šušljik who like a magician seems to generate some genuine emotion from thin air and Nenad Jezdić who wisely hams his role up for all its worth.

Seemingly aware his plot lacks depth, Davić occasionally inserts off-beat, parodic, and downright hallucinatory fantasy sequences such as a dream in which everyone at the party turns into a zombie, a dying hallucination in which Jesus himself shows up, and a very witty spoof of an epic historical drama, the kind that was very popular in 90s Serbia. These non-sequiturs are the most entertaining and imaginative part of the film which considering Davić's rich background in experimental filmmaking isn't that surprising. Sadly, they play no significant role in the film itself and serve either as padding or as comic relief. They do, however, contain some of the film's best imagery such as the witty cut in which Jesus' wounds are counterpointed by the injection scars on the arms of a heroin addict.

Due to the frequent switching between realism and fantasy and its meandering dialogue scenes, the film's pace is wildly uneven and its listless cast fails to generate any energy to keep us hooked which is not to say "Party" doesn't have its memorable, witty moments but its lack of three-dimensional characters and a coherent plotline hinder it from making an impact. In the end, the film seems too small, too personal, and too focused on a group of uninteresting characters. In the grander scheme of things, it seems insignificant and a little naive.

2/4

17-05-2020

As the title implies, "Drew: The Man Behind the Poster" is a talking-heads hagiography of Drew Struzan, one of the world's best known and best-regarded poster artists of all time and there-in lies its merit and its downfall. The merit is that I am genuinely interested in Drew Struzan. Like pretty much everyone else, his film posters are ingrained in my subconscious. When you think of the "Indiana Jones" films, "Back to the Future" films, and even the "Star Wars" films, nine times out of ten you'll first think of their striking posters and only then of their plots, characters, or even their iconic scores. Besides these pop-culture icons (as if they aren't enough), Drew Struzan's legendary work encompasses the mysterious "The Thing" poster, one of my all-time favourites, as well as most of the "Muppet" movie posters, some of the most joyous film artworks of all time, and even some posters I (and probably no one else) remember fondly such as the one for Robert Benton's "Nadine" or the George Segal vehicle "The Black Bird". His distinctive, whimsical, striking style and the unmistakable talent to capture the spirit of the film have made him a Hollywood legend en par with his more celebrated collaborators such as Steven Spielberg, George Lucas or Guillermo del Toro.

The downside of "Drew: The Man Behind the Poster" is that everyone from the director Erik Sharkey to the numerous celebrity interviewees, absolutely idolise Struzan. Thus this documentary becomes less of an informative discussion of his work and more a fan-convention, 90-minutes of a group of people fawning over Struzan's works. Now I'm not suggesting Sharkey should have made some kind of a smear-piece or dug up the skeletons from Struzan's closet, but his film is instinctively one-note and this becomes boring quite quickly. Add to that the fact we actually don't get to learn much about Drew Struzan at all from this film. At times, it actually feels more like a promotional video than a perceptive biography because most of it consists of people listing off all the movies he's worked on to montages of his artwork. Now, I'm sure this would be fascinating to someone who doesn't know Mr Struzan's name, but since I doubt any of them would pick up a film about a man they don't know about, this move is ultimately shortsighted. Had Erik Sharkey consulted better documentaries on artists such as Clouzot's "The Mystery of Picasso" or Terry Zwigoff's "Crumb", he would have been inspired to focus more on Struzan's process and serious analytical discussions of his work rather than fans gushing about how great it is.

Finally, I have to say that Drew Struzan himself doesn't make for such an interesting biographical topic. He's a very nice man, mild-mannered and quiet, but he doesn't possess (or at least Sharkey doesn't portray) any of those wonderful contradictions that make movie characters so magnetic. He doesn't have a dark side, there's no counterpoint to the wonderful art he creates, nor is he a particularly energetic, charismatic man like Picasso was to make us want to listen to him for 90 minutes or more. Thus, ultimately, "Drew: The Man Behind the Poster" is a disappointment because it chooses not to analyse his art or probe the man but rather on clip after clip of Struzan's famous fans gushing about how much they love his work. This hagiography is not particularly arresting.

2/4

19-05-2020

They don't call 'em luvvies for nothing. Only the theatre people are capable of fawning each other one minute and screaming at each other the next. Only they can praise and insult each other in the same breath, only to have each other's backs the next day. But who can blame them? Show business is a tense business and nothing in it is more nerve-wracking than struggling to fix a bad play weeks before opening night. This is when all the insecurities, fears, petty prides, genius and nonsense that go into a theatre production bubble to the surface. Tensions are high and masks fall and rise depending on how well the preview goes and "Moon Over Broadway", an insightful documentary from Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker chronicles exactly such a situation as a wonderful team of creatives wrangle to get a play ready for Broadway.

Now, "Moon Over Buffalo", the play they're releasing, isn't exactly bad. In fact, every so often, it seems just a step away from being brilliant, but that makes the tensions even higher and the failures even harder. To have greatness within reach and yet never quite be able to get there. Like a leaky pipe, whenever the creative team fix one problem another one springs up, and "Moon Over Buffalo" never quite seems able to fulfil its promise which is damn high. Directed by Tony nominee Tom Moore, written by "Lend Me a Tenor"'s Ken Ludwig, and starring the dream team of Carol Burnett and Phillip Bosco, the show at first seems, as one of the producers puts it, to be "money in the bank". And that's exactly how the rehearsals process begins. In old-fashioned luvvie style, an all-smiles cast & crew hold a newspaper conference. Tom Moore is "thrilled to be returning to the theatre with a new Ken Ludwig play". Ken Ludwig thinks he has the "dream team" behind it. The producer does his regular spiel of "if you need anything, call me". And Carol Burnett and Philip Bosco are beaming, all-smiles, itching to get to work of being funny. Not 20 minutes later into the film, Bosco is screaming at Moore. "Do you not want our input? Do you not want our experience?"

Not all is fine in Broadway land and Ken Ludwig is exasperated and very, very sorry. I have never seen a man so deferential and nervous. He seems to apologise for everything that goes wrong and for everything he does to fix it. When the reviews come in, he sends an apology letter. But the previews aren't doing very well. Carol Burnett is having trouble memorising her lines with the exactness required by Ludwig and Moore. "We used to do much more paraphrasing," she says referring to her time doing the legendary "Carol Burnett Show". But Tom Moore is insistent that "this play won't be improvised". He declares that "90% of it works", but with rewrite after rewrite being required, we're not so sure anyone believes him anymore. After a few lukewarm previews, the producers debate bringing in a joke writer. "Ken is a great structuralist but one-liners don't come easily to him". This is a far cry from the love-fest that began the process with Ludwig being declared "this generation's Feydoux". As if to underline the utter insanity of theatre, the joke writer they debate bringing in is not an author, he's a dentist. Ludwig looks (as he often does in this film) as if he's just sucked on three lemons at once.

The most upbeat person in the team is Carol Burnett but even she seems to trip up on clunky lines. There's a very heated debate about the phrasing of "she was making love to Laurence Olivier" which she thinks should be "she was bonking Laurence Olivier" much to the chagrin of Tom Moore who seems unwilling or unable to make even the slightest changes to Ludwig's script. Ludwig is less reverential to his work and continually proposes and submits hefty rewrites. "Are you writing a new play," Burnett asks at once point. "I seem to be," Ludwig replies in one of those jokes that just scream of the pain underneath. During one preview, a winch breaks and the play has to be stopped midway until the repairs are finished. Moore begs Carol to go out there and entertain the audience. She does to the great delight of the general public. The laughs are uproarious, the applause immense. When the winch is repaired, they sound disappointed that the play will continue. She was funnier than the written material.

Pennebaker & Hegedus have chronicled many show business disasters and successes and know how to bring the best out of the fly-on-the-wall style they utilise. They focus less on the big fights and more on details, reaction shots, and brief but telling exchanges. There's a wonderful moment in which Kate Miller complains about the photo at the front of the theatre. "I think I'm prettier than that". Another brilliant slice-of-life moment sees an assistant telling the producer what the reviews are like. "They're crazy about Carol and Philip." "And the play?" "They're less crazy about the play." My favourite moment, however, is when Carol is leaving the theatre and someone off-screen whispers "It's Mary Tyler Moore". Pennebaker & Hegedus seem to revel in these little moments of craziness in between all the drama and tension and they really enrich this already insightful and wildly entertaining documentary. I am a big fan of the 'fly-on-the-wall' style as I happen to find peeking into rooms where something I'd never otherwise be able to see happen is happening. "Moon Over Broadway" really delivers on that front and bares for us all the inner-wranglings, struggles, and joys of putting on a Broadway play. It really manages to expose all the pettiness, feuds, and rivalries without ever seeming ugly or sensationalist. It also does a great job of portraying the artistic energy and genius at work behind "Moon Over Buffalo". All the exposing little moments don't serve to undermine the artists at work but rather to humanise them, make them seem less like stars and more like real people trying to create something truly wonderful.

3.5/4

24-05-2020

"Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired" is a difficult film to take in not so must because of what it asks of us to believe as much because of the unexpected complexities of the story it covers. What could be more straightforward than the Roman Polanski rape trial? He sodomized a 13-year old girl and then fled the country. Lynch him! Well, as Marina Zenovich's documentary shows, there's more to the case than you may think. Polanski, despised for being a foreigner and a successful one at that (over here taking our jobs and all that jazz), after his arrest found himself in a Kafkaesque inferno trapped between the press demonising his every statement and action and the power-hungry Judge Laurence J. Rittenband, who loving the publicity surrounding the case, seemed to make his decisions more based on gossip columns than law books. Polanski confessed to the crime and was even forgiven by his victim but Rittenband, despite numerous advice and findings otherwise, was decided on making Polanski pay, not because he believed it was the right thing to do but because he didn't want to look bad in the press which was baying for Polanski's head.

Zenovich never claims Polanski was innocent but it is clear where her sympathies lie. Underscoring the film with Krzysztof Komeda's creepy lullaby from "Rosemary's Baby" and intercutting various moody shots from Polanski's films, she tries very hard to make us too sympathise with the supposedly victimised director. While I have no problem separating the man from his art, in fact, I believe Polanski to be one of the greatest directors of all time, I do have a problem separating a man from his actions and found it hard to feel sorry for a man who drugged and sodomized a 13-year old girl especially when it seems Polanski doesn't feel much remorse for his actions. Because of this, constant attempts by Zenovich to muster up sympathy for him felt to me at best distracting and at worst downright manipulative. I don't feel for Polanski and I don't think anyone else should either. Never-the-less, there is something in the debate as to whether he was treated fairly. On the one hand, every expert and lawyer involved in the case said that Polanski should be put on probation. On the other hand, I very much doubt that someone who was not a famous movie director would be let off so lightly. However, it must be said that Judge Rittenband acted inappropriately during the trial and that his at times downright absurd behaviour speaks of a man blinded by the possibility of fame and adoration. He was not the right man to preside over anyone's trial let alone one as sensitive as this one. Ultimately, my opinions on the Polanski matter mirror those of Polanski's victim's lawyer: "I clearly hold no grief for Mr Polanski and obviously what he did was wrong and outrageous, but nevertheless, he was supposed to be treated fairly in court and he clearly was not."

There are many wonderfully absurd moments in this film, mostly revolving around Rittenband's thirst for fame, and as a true-crime documentary, it undoubtedly works well. However, I do have a large problem with Zenovich's expectation of us to feel Polanski was somehow wronged. He wasn't treated fairly, that's true, but neither was the girl he sodomized and in a sense, while I was shocked and appalled by Rittenband's behaviour I cried no tears for Polanski. Rather than try to convince us Polanski was right to flee the country (which seems to be this documentary's ultimate goal), Zenovich should have created a more ambiguous and debate-filled movie which would expose and explore all the complexities of this vastly sensitive case. Like in the best Polanski films, every character in this documentary has his own, equally justified motivations which nevertheless clash with the goals of others. Who's right? Perhaps no one. But that is not the agenda Zenovich is pushing and for that reason, her documentary at times seems dishonest as much as it would have seemed as if she'd pushed the other way and tried to argue Polanski got what he deserved. As a stylish overview of the case, "Wanted and Desired" does a splendid job but its idolatry of the conflicting person at its centre makes it fail in unexpected ways.

2.5/4

24-05-2020

Sometimes movie sequels make themselves as was the case with "Roman Polanski: Odd Man Out" Marina Zenovich's sequel to her 2008 documentary "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired". What happened was (or at least what Zenovich claims happened was) that the 2008 documentary covering the Roman Polanski rape trial and all the downright Kafkaesque misconduct committed by Judge Rittenband caused such a stir in the Los Angeles District Attorney's office who felt embarrassed by the claims made in the film that they decided to finally act on the warrant for Polanski's arrest after some 30+ years of doing nothing. What followed was an international kafuffle the absurdity of which could only match the utter lunacy of the original Polanski trial. Namely, the (in)famous director was arrested at Zurich airport after entering Switzerland in order to receive a lifetime achievement award at the local film festival after which Polanski was held first in prison and then under house arrest for almost a year waiting for the Swiss government to decide whether they'll extradite him to the US or not. Meanwhile, the international art community rose to their feet in defence of Polanski with the phrases "it was 30 years ago" and "he's in his 70s now" becoming something of a refrain for them. Under this immense pressure, just like in the original trial, the judicial system found themselves having to make a decision based less on what is right or what is lawful and more on what is in line with the popular opinion.

I found "Wanted and Desired", the original Zenovich documentary, to be a handsome, well-made overview of the original case which was sadly hampered by its obvious bias towards Polanski. Instead of giving us an impartial look at the facts, Zenovich tried very hard indeed to make the controversial director look like the real victim. This, to me, was manipulative and dishonest. "Odd Man Out" sadly suffers from much the same bias. Just take a look at how the two opposing sides (those trying to get Polanski extradited and those trying to get him freed) are portrayed in the film. On the one side, we get the organisers of the Zurich film festival who talk about how they cried upon hearing Polanski was arrested. Then there's his trusty editor who talks about Roman's incredible energy and his bravery during his time in prison. He too cried. Finally, we get a heart-tugging little story told by Polanski's lawyer about a letter written to Polanski by his daughter which was so emotional and loving he too was brought to tears. Repeatedly, there are talks about how brave Polanski is, how stoic, how he's a father and husband, and how beloved he is by everyone. Meanwhile, the other side, when they're even allowed to speak, are almost demonised. An irrelevant clip in which some random idiot interviewed by a TV crew talks about how Polanski should be sent to prison so that he can "reconnect with his old pal Charles Manson" is played. There's a lot of talk about how the D.A. who is leading the case is running for office and how all of this must be a political ploy for him to get elected - a claim which goes utterly unsubstantiated. There's even a montage in which Zenovich by putting various anti-Polanski statements over each other creates a kind of evil buzzing noise signifying, I suppose, that anyone who speaks against Polanski is just one of a swarm of mindless haters. The only interviewee in this film whose statement really means anything is Samantha Geimer, Polanski's original victim, who speaks in this film about having forgiven him. While this is indeed an important and pertinent fact it is no less important to note that Polanski wasn't arrested in order to please Geimer but to please the law according to which Polanski is a fugitive and should be brought to trial. At some point in this film, Henri Bernard Levy who seems to have something to say about everything whines that "every French and American citizen has become a little tribunal unto themselves" without realising the irony that that is exactly what Zenovich and her interviewees have become by reinterpreting the law, deciding what is just and what isn't, and trying to tell us who the real victim in the case is.

Finally, it must be said that while "Wanted and Desired" was a fascinating documentary because it exposed the shady and ridiculous misconduct on behalf of Judge Rittenband, "Odd Man Out" delivers no such insight. It plays instead much like a running pro-Polanski commentary over a montage of news footage. I remember the events this film describes relatively poorly and though I didn't follow them regularly it still failed to tell me anything I didn't already know. Besides telling us what a great guy Polanski is and trying to convince us to just give him a break, "Odd Man Out" doesn't have much to reveal. It merely gives us an overview, about as detailed as the Wikipedia entry on the case. Manipulative, shallow, and lacking in interest, "Odd Man Out", thus, isn't a film worth watching.

1.5/4

29-05-2020

There is something laughably old-fashioned about "The Sonata", a stodgy yet stylish horror mystery debut of writer/director Andrew Desmond. The story begins with the violent suicide of Richard Marlowe (Rutger Hauer), an eccentric and reclusive master composer once hailed as the "saviour of British classical music", shot intriguingly from his point of view, a move reminiscent of the opening shot of Rouben Mamoulian's classic "Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde". His estranged daughter and up-and-coming violinist Rose (Freya Tingley) inherits all his earthly possessions including the creepy old mansion in France where he lived and died. When she arrives in the house she finds a plethora of cliches there, leather-bound volumes with titles such as "Mastering the Dark Arts" and "The Devil's Dictionary", mysterious symbols drawn on the walls, creepy statues you keep expecting to blink, and an old housekeeper (Catherine Schaub-Abkarian) who seems to know more than she's telling. More intriguingly, however, Rose discovers that her father has been working on a sonata, his final masterpiece, one that will "change the way we conceive classical music", as one character puts it. However, the piece doesn't make sense. The notes seem to be coded, the music sounds weird and each page begins with a strange symbol. Soon enough, Rose, with the help of her manager Charles (Simon Abkarian) who looks and behaves like the love child of Tom Conti and Alfred Molina, realises it is up to her to decode her father's final work and expose the masterpiece hiding behind the riddles. But whenever the piece is played something strange seems to occur. Are her father's obsessions with the Devil just a coincidence? I doubt it. Was he involved in the mysterious disappearances of young boys from the nearby village? You bet he was. Will the Devil be summoned? Wait and see.

"The Sonata" feels through and through like the kind of a film J. Lee Thompson or Paul Wendkos might have made to capitalise on the success of "Rosemary's Baby". Filled to the brim with satan-rising horror cliches (mysterious nightmares, spooky basements, and blond kids with glowing eyes abound) it feels as familiar and comfortable as an old school friend you never thought you'd see again. Director Andrew Desmond in cahoots with cinematographer Janis Eglitis does a splendid job of conjuring up the creepy, slow-burn atmosphere of those 60s satanic panic movies with their gothic feel, stylish shots, and overreliance on melodrama, but then proceeds to bury it in poorly-executed cliches and heaps of clumsy dialogue. I spent as much of "The Sonata" laughing at its stodginess as I did being intrigued by its mysteries. Especially laughable are some tropes I think I last saw in "Scary Movie 2" such as creaking doorknobs, screaming portraits, and moving cherub figures. Desmond then proceeds to counterpoint these with some ludicrously over-dramatic moments and lines such as when Rose, realising the "evil nature" of her father's sonata screams "It's evil! We must destroy it!". Another silly moment occurs midway through the picture when Rose dreams of a burning Rutger Hauer grinning evilly and pointing to a ruined church. With these in mind, I think "The Sonata" would have played much better were it marketed as some kind of a dead-pan spoof or a black-and-white pastiche a la "Young Frankenstein".

However, "The Sonata" does occasionally rise up above its pale imitations and those moments are worth a look. As I said, the atmosphere is very well executed and some of the scenes of Rose wandering alone through her father's massive, gothic house do evoke an eery sense of imminent danger. Alexis Maingaud's haunting violin score helps this a lot. Also interesting is how the film couches its mysteries into musical terms and history. While this aspect of "The Sonata" should have been played up even more, this unusual mystery kept me engaged and interested. I was also reminded of other films I enjoy such as Roman Polanski's "The Ninth Gate". Thus, "The Sonata" is worth a look. I'm not sorry I saw it. It does occasionally stumble due to its overreliance on movie cliches that went out of style with Charlton Heston but when it works it is a very entertaining and occasionally quite creepy horror mystery that made me want to keep an eye out for Andrew Desmond's next film. I just wish he'll take a more engaging and likeable lead actress than the attractive but cold and distant Freya Tingley who generates a sense of unapproachability rather than likeability.

2/4

31-05-2020

Nothing quite shows up blood like snow. The virgin whiteness contrasts red like it was made solely for that purpose. And yet, that blinding whiteness is deceptive in itself. Though we perceive it as pure, undisturbed, clean, it is also nature's best concealer, perfect for burying secrets, sins, and crimes. It is a dichotomy that has fascinated filmmakers since the dawn of cinema and many thrillers have been set in snowy landscapes, some greatly memorable such as the Coen Brothers' "Fargo" and some instantly forgettable such as "D-Tox", Jim Gillespie's crime against cinema. "Black Snow" is Argentina's offering in this icy subgenre which generates much atmosphere and tension out of hooded figures moving across chilly terrains. And director Martín Hodara does a great job of capitalising on the inherent moodiness of snowy landscapes by employing Hitchockian low-key techniques such as slow zooms, chiaroscuro lighting, and long takes. By wrapping his family melodrama in this glacial atmosphere, he neatly averts it seeming torrid or over-the-top. It also gives him a good motive to emphasise the film's central mystery and give what is essentially not a thriller, a thriller motor.

The film begins with the death of a ruthless patriarch (Andrés Herrera) who lived in a cottage on top of a mountain with his small, hopeless family comprised of two sons and a daughter. Over the years the family dissipated. First, the youngest son Juan (Iván Luengo) was killed in a hunting accident. Then the daughter Sabrina (Dolores Fonzi) went mad from the terror imposed on the family by the father. Finally, the middle son Marcos (Leonardo Sbaraglia) escaped to the big city and made something of himself. This left the oldest brother Salvador (Ricardo Darín) alone with his father in a cottage in the middle of nowhere. Now, Marcos is back, on the request of his father to bury him next to Juan. He arrives to Salvador's house with his pregnant wife Laura (Laia Costa) and despite some obvious tension things seem to be going fine. Salvador and Laura hit it off immediately and even though Salvador is moody and distant, his relationship with his brother seems to be improving. But as we know, secrets buried tend to burst out like geysers and hunting accidents are never what they seem. How did Juan die and what is it that's keeping the two brothers apart from each other? Is it Salvador's anger at being left alone with his father or is it something far more disturbing?

For a film about family secrets and feuds, "Black Snow" is a decidedly subdued affair. There is very little grandstanding and most of the tension and mystery comes from the gradually increasing sense of something not being said. Like an elephant in the room, Juan's death looms over the two brothers constantly and after revealing flashbacks start filling in the story, we realise this can't end well. This is a risky style to employ but Hodara's direction is confident and effective. He manages to be stylish without being flashy which is a rare feat indeed. Aided by Arnau Valls Colomer's picturesque cinematography, he manages to make an intimate film that still smartly utilises the grand landscapes it is set in. The performances are also highly commendable. Ricardo Darín, one of the most consistently reliable actors around, manages to make a surly and quiet character likeable and relatable. Leonardo Sbaraglia is suitably neurotic and haunted as the prodigal son and Laia Costa manages to suggest a darker side to her otherwise fairly "virginal" character. Like the white snow, she seems pure but there's more to her than meets the eye.

Annoyingly, though the set-up works well the plot mechanics don't quite pass muster. A lot of the film relies on revealing pictures falling on the exact spots in order to reveal secret hiding places and there is a kind of old-fashioned hokiness in the way "Black Snow" handles exposition as the screenplay is not written with the same kind of meticulous attention to detail that the direction possesses. Also problematic is the fact that I saw the final twist coming from the first few minutes of the film. In fact, I defy anyone who's sat through a few episodes of "Morse" or "Midsommer Murders" not to figure out who killed Juan before Laura does. But it is not even that that undermines the fine effort on display here. It is the fact that Hodara fails to transcend his fairly intimate story and turn it into something relevant to the viewer. His film lacks the layered character development of Fabián Bielinsky's "Aura", the strong emotionality of Juan José Campanella's "The Secret in Their Eyes", or the fascinating philosophical insanity of Gustavo Mosquera R.'s "Moebius". In the end, his little family drama concerns only the little family at its heart and I felt like a disappointed voyeur watching it. What does their catharsis mean for me? Absolutely nothing. In other words, "Black Snow" is a well-made film which generates a nicely chilling atmosphere and a lot of tension. It also contains some fine performances and is an entertaining watch. But in the end, I didn't come out of the experience with any real insight which is disappointing to say about a film which had so much promise.

2.5/4