DRAG ME TO HELL

by Brian Holcomb

The poster says "From The Director of SPIDER-MAN" but this is really from the director of EVIL DEAD 2: DEAD BY DAWN, a filmmaker who has been MIA for a long time. Since the mid '90s, Sam Raimi has spent his career auditioning for and then reaching the "A" list of Hollywood directors. This is how the very quirky, handmade style of films such as The Evil Dead, DARKMAN and even The Quick and the Dead suddenly gave way to the incredibly impersonal style of both A Simple Plan and the maudlin sports opera For Love of the Game. Those were films which could've been directed by virtually anyone-put James Mangold (Copland, Kate and Leopold) behind the camera on either of them and not much would be different. Perhaps they would even be better since Mangold wouldn't be faking it. While A Simple Plan still had its moments of dark humor and well crafted tension, For Love of the Game expressed little but directorial boredom. For a man who invented a rig called the "Shaki-cam" in order to best depict the POV of a demon, over the shoulder shots and close-ups of talking heads were definitely a step back. They were what Alfred Hitchcock called "photographs of people talking".

Both films are examples of the "well-made play" crafted as invisibly as possible. In providing unchallenging, easy entertainment, these films proved to the Hollywood industry that Raimi could make 'em as dull as anyone else. That he could be controlled. Raimi had become just the man that an expensive franchise like the Spider-Man films needed. The studio could count on his visual imagination to give the action some punch secure in the knowledge that he would play ball with the front office. That said, the Spider-Man films were mostly great fun. Especially the first sequel which seemed to express much more of Raimi's mischievous personality. The less said about the third film in the series the better except that its best scene has Bruce Campbell stopping the movie dead as a surreal waiter-a scene that looks like something out of Raimi's early Super-8mm work.

While that was merely a throwaway return to an earlier style, it may have been an indication of Raimi's mindset at the time of production-perhaps stirring his desire to return to something smaller and more personal. For most filmmakers, "smaller and personal" means a character drama or indie talkfest but for Raimi this meant FILMMAKING. A return to a genre which requires more cinematic skill than any other and inspires a full expression of style and playfulness. Digging up a script written with his brother Ivan around the time of Army of Darkness, Raimi has made what must be his best film in years, the surprisingly smart and exciting DRAG ME TO HELL.


The Universal Studios logo that opens the film is a real tip-off to the film's personal meaning. It isn't the current logo but one that dates from the time Raimi got his start as a filmmaker. I remember growing up in the '70s and '80s and dreaming of making a film that would open with the classic MCA-Universal globe that preceeded the films of so many of my favorite filmmakers from Hitchcock to Spielberg and Landis. It was a corporate signature to be sure-the world spinning on the tip of Lew Wassermann's finger-but it usually meant GENRE as this was Universal's specialty and seeing it instantly sparks my imagination with thoughts of the exciting film to follow-The Birds, Duel, Animal House, The Sting, Back to the Future, or An American Werewolf in London. MOVIES.

This is what DRAG ME TO HELL is all about and you can feel Raimi's excitement coming through the screen to grab your throat. But the best thing is that the film is not just a throwback but a realization. This isn't some attempt to merely recapture a retro feel and in fact I don't think Raimi could've made this film so well in the '80s. While it has the energy and the endless cinematic invention of his early work, the film's command of economical storytelling is something that once eluded him. There is a command over the ENTIRE film from story to character to effect that makes the whole thing integrated which is a culmination of all the work Raimi has done over the years. It is a work of maturity that can still express itself childishly. Which is what an old fashioned scary movie needs to do and this film is gloriously old fashioned as it feels like something William Castle would've made in the mid 60s or some alternate reality remake of NIGHT OF THE DEMON starring Vincent Price. In fact, NIGHT OF THE DEMON haunts the whole film from the three day "death sentence" and the "woodcut demon" design of the "Lamia" to the film's train station climax.

Former "Pork Queen Fair" farmgirl Christine Brown (Alison Lohman) has come a long way from her roots. She practices her speech and diction while driving to her bank job each morning and struggles to establish herself among her male colleagues. Both her boss (David Paymer) and her rival for the much wanted assistant manager's position (Reggie Lee) seem to exclude her from their boy's club. To prove her grit, she decides to turn down nasty old Mrs. Ganush (Lorna Raver) for an extension on her mortgage payment which, of course, means that she will lose her house. Unfortunately, Mrs. Ganush doesn't only look like Bela Lugosi, she is also some kind of old witch and Christine soon finds herself on the other end of a terrible curse that will literally "drag her to hell" in three days time. Neither the help of a fortune teller (Dileep Rao) who accepts American Express nor the truly unending support of her boyfriend Clay (Justin Long) can save her.

The script by the Raimis does an effective job of establishing a strong lead character and Alison Lohman is excellent in the role, finally playing a character close to her actual age. The film's production design has the clean studio backlot feel of Henry Bumstead's work on films like To Kill A Mockingbird while Christopher Young's score channels Bernard Herrman as well as the very particular violin riffs of Jerry Goldsmith's work for '60s TV programs like Thriller and The Twilight Zone. In jokes abound from the cameo by Raimi's classic EVIL DEAD Oldsmobile, having Justin Long surrounded by MAC products to the name of David Paymer's character "James Jacks", a well known Universal Studios producer and friend of Sam Raimi. Altogether there is an air of comfort and control throughout. The feeling that the director has nothing to prove and is just having fun.

Raimi teaches an entire generation how to make full use of the PG-13 rating-the film is released to DVD with both the theatrical and Unrated cuts included but as another example of his growth as a filmmaker the difference between the two are mere seconds and not of gore but rather character. The Unrated version is actually SHORTER-cutting a few frames away that show Christine looking remorseful for killing her cat. In the Unrated version, Christine just wants to survive and has reached a point where her furry friend has to go. Raimi seems to go a bit "off the rails" during the train station climax with some Tales from the Crypt obligation for a grim twist. After investing 2 hours of time with Christine it seemed rather cynical to drag her off to hell. Especially in a film that is mostly jokey. But then again, the film IS called DRAG ME TO HELL.

CAST: Alison Lohman, Justin Long, Lorna Raver, Dileep Rao, David Paymer, Adriana Barraza, Chelcie Ross, Reggie Lee, Molly Cheek, Bojana Novakovic, Kevin Foster, Alexis Cruz, Ruth Livier, Shiloh Selassie, Flor de Maria Chahua
DIRECTOR: Sam Raimi
RUNNING TIME:(Unrated version) 99 minutes

FILM REVIEW:TRICK BABY

by Brian Holcomb

I caught this on one of the many Encore Cable channels last night and since it was a Blaxploitation film shot in Philadelphia in the year I was born I thought I would look at it for a few minutes. Well, a few minutes turned into 89 and as the end credits rolled I must say I was quite impressed. This wasn't the standard "pimp and ho show" but rather a smart, character based crime flick about two hustlers just trying to survive in the City of Brotherly Love.

Based on the novel by Iceberg Slim, Trick Baby is the story of veteran black conman "Blue" Howard (Mel Stewart) and his young white protégé "Folks" O'Brien (Kiel Martin). Folks is the "trick baby" of the title, the son of a black hooker and a white John who passes convincingly as white. "Blue" took the young man in at an early age and they have a strong father-son bond that insures a strong trust while scamming the short money day in and day out. Just as "Folks" decides to retire from the risky grind, he seizes an opportunity to lure $90,000 out of a group of racist bigwigs. But this last "sting" becomes increasingly perilous as they have to keep one step ahead of a crooked cop (Dallas Edward Hayes) they shortchanged and the local mobster who has placed a price on their heads for their involvement in the death of his uncle following a con.


"Iceberg Slim" was the pseudonym for Robert Beck. Under that playful name, Beck quickly became one of the most successful African-American authors of the '70s. His acclaimed 1969 debut novel, "Pimp: The Story of My Life", an autobiographical account of his days as a hustler on the streets of Chicago in the 1930s and 40s was first optioned by Universal for a motion picture adaptation but concerns regarding the raw subject matter made them switch to TRICK BABY instead.

This film is not really "blaxsploitation" at all though it shares some of the same concerns and conventions of that genre. The film's focus on the relationship between Folks and Blue is what distinguishes it. The pair make a very conscious use of their skin color and the inherent racism of their "marks" in order to pull off their scams. Like a game of good cop/bad cop, Folks gets the trust of the white community and uses their desire to rip off the black man against them.

The performances are uniformly excellent but the late Kiel Martin really steals the picture as Folks. There's something charismatic about him that makes Folks likable even when he first appears onscreen pretending to be a villainous racist while pulling a con with Blue.

Visually, the film makes great use of its rundown Philly setting, staging scenes in street corners, alleys, and elevated train stations during the grey days of winter. It also features some very inventive editing that places dialogue in counterpoint to the image and an incredibly tense foot chase that works not so much because it's so well staged but rather because the stakes are so high for the characters. This is the key to why the film really works-the personal stakes are raised so high and yet the film keeps reminding the audience that death is imminent. Folks can sense it and keeps trying to convince Blue to forget the big score and just walk away. This is Standard Plotting Procedure for most crime films but here there is an underlying sense of mortality much like Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde. A seemingly random attempt to pull a pigeon drop on a "naive" black businessman becomes quite dangerous as the man tells Blue that he's going to kill Folks for the hell of it. They make it out of that jam but the scene leaves a mark on the scenes to follow and make it clear that the ending will not be anything but tragic.

If that's not enough to recommend it, Trick Baby also comes complete with Ted Lange (a.k.a Isaac the Bartender from The Love Boat) as Melvin the Pimp.

FILM REVIEW: A HAUNTING IN CONNECTICUT

by Brian Holcomb

On a cold winter night a few years ago, I was channel surfing when I came across what seemed to be a documentary on the Discovery Network about a real life haunting. I say "seemed to be" because it had fairly high production values and a great deal of cinematic flair in its dramatization of the infamous Snedecker case. This was "A Haunting in Connecticut" which would later lead to a series on the same channel depicting "A Haunting" in many other parts of the country. None of those, however, came close to the feeling of dread and wintry death as this one, however. Part of the effect was due to the story itself which was, of course, supposedly "true". Or at least as true as anything self proclaimed "demonologists" Ed and Lorraine Warren were involved with before (The Amityville Horror).


This material has been adapted again into a feature film starring Virginia Madsen and it desperately wants to scare you to death. Armed with elaborate makeup effects and a whole bag of visual and auditory fireworks the movie works hard for your money and should theoretically be scarier than the cut rate television production. But it's not. Not by a mile.


So, the question is: Why not?


The story of the Snedecker haunting first came to the public's awareness via the book "In a Dark Place" written by horror novelist Ray Garton along with the Warrens themselves. Garton would later say that the book was a pile of BS and that many of the Snedeckers stories were contradictory. After relaying his concerns to Ed Warren, Garton supposedly received this sage advice:

"Oh, they’re crazy. Everybody who comes to us is crazy. Otherwise why would they come to us? You’ve got some of the story – just use what works and make the rest up. And make it scary. You write scary books, right? That’s why we hired you. So just make it up and make it scary."

Now I bring this up not to attack the Warrens or Ray Garton for taking your money. I bring this up because the intent was not journalistic, but rather narrative. "Just make it up and make it scary." But what does that really mean? "Make it scary"? At its core, the story as laid down by Garton and dramatized on the Discovery Channel program is nothing more than the usual blood and thunder ghost story. It could be broken down in the usual beats:

1.Unsuspecting Family moves into strange and strangely inexpensive old house.
2. They slowly become aware that they are not alone there.
3. Tensions rise as the supernatural phenomena begins to tear apart the family unit.
4. Someone goes to the library instead of looking on the internet to find out about the house's murderous past.
5. Ed and Lorraine Warren are called in to fight the evil within. If the family is Catholic replace "Ed and Lorraine Warren" with a Priest.

I suspect that amid the piles of scripts sitting on Ari Gold's desk in Entourage, there would be at least one or two with this exact structure. And not one of them would be even remotely scary.

OK. So, how did Garton take this formula and "Make it scary"?

He didn't-You did-the moment you saw the words, "Based On A True Story". The suspension of disbelief which is so important to all fiction but of primary importance in a tale of terror is automatically engaged with those 5 words. And with this engagement comes the sudden loss of critical functions. Something that would sound contrived in a work of fiction is not even given a second's thought once it is believed to be "what really happened" because we all know that there are many things that are "Strange, but true".

Now, it IS true that Garton was also working with a pretty creepy situation from which all kinds of deep seated fears could be milked. You see, this wasn't just your regular "Amityville" house with a creepy attic. This house was once a funeral home complete with all the old dissecting tools and a crematorium in the basement. Now, few of us would want to spend more than a few minutes in one of these places-let alone spending the night-let alone LIVING there. Along with this situation is the central figure of the story's haunting, the Snedeckers teenage son who was stricken with cancer and receiving intense experimental treatments at a local hospital in a last ditch effort to save his life. There is something about the young man being so close to death that gives the story an added sense of personal drama and makes the supernatural aspects more harrowing. This is very well captured in the Discovery Channel program which makes great use of aerial shots of snow capped Connecticut trees and icy roads to envelop you in a cold and deathly universe. But the program does something else which makes it quite frightening and it's not narrative but formal. Since someone was good enough to put the whole program up on YouTube you can watch the entire thing there-but for our purposes take a look at THIS portion of the program-it's not the scariest part or the most interesting but it serves to demonstrate the peculiar effect of the form.



Now, the events depicted in the clip are all present in the film version. Yet, they carry none of the dread that is in virtually every second of this clip. The TV version is even more subtly and effectively directed than the feature version. It makes use of a quiet gliding camera and very specific and quiet sound effects to play on the viewer's imagination. This is all more successful than the elaborately constructed explosions of shock cuts and screaming in the film.

But there's something else.

And it's been used in programs of this sort since the days of In Search Of and Unsolved Mysteries. The story is not only relayed visually through re-enacted dramatization but also orally through a "voice of doom" narrator and personal testimony of those involved. Ghost stories have a long tradition of oral storytelling and it could be that this is the form that has the most power. The thing is that is a form that doesn't agree with the commonly accepted notion of narration in the cinema. In motion pictures, narration that simply states what the visuals make obvious is considered to be artless. But here, we see the young boy go into the basement and are told by the narrator that "Paul made his way down to the basement." But this narration sets us on edge. The same scene in a standard horror picture accompanied by "scary music" would only be slightly effective. In a standard horror movie, the boy would go into the basement and hear strange sounds from the shadows. But in the TV version the narrator tells us that the boy "could hear strange sounds from the next room and began to feel as though something was watching him." Now THIS really begins to chill the spine in a way a movie could never achieve. The shots that follow of the boy walking into the dark room have a dread that wouldn't exist without the voiceover.

The question is whether the commercial cinema can actually learn from this and achieve the same effect within the confines of cinematic storytelling. You don't go to the movies to watch an extended Unsolved Mysteries episode after all, the expectation is for a psychologically credible narrative that isn't interrupted by omniscient narrators or personal testimony. How could a filmmaker blend the forms without alienating the audience?

I don't know if he could do worse than the trite and obvious manner in which the film version was made. The film isn't BAD, and actually the acting is quite good by Madsen, Kyle Gallner, and Martin Donovan. What fails to work is the film's insistence on being in your face. The desire to prevent the teen audience from texting in the dark rather than following the story leaves a movie that has no grace notes, no sense of real atmosphere or control of pacing. I think it should be remembered that the much subtler TV version was MADE FOR TV where there is a very real fear that someone would just flip the channel. For a theatrical film, you have a captive audience who has paid for a ticket and is not so ready to jump ship. But for me, an hour of annoying flash cuts and random screams made me want to do that very thing. At least there was this tribute to a truly great horror film:

THE BARON OF ARIZONA Review

by Brian Holcomb

Director Sam Fuller is like that crazy uncle your family is afraid of having over for Thanksgiving. He says exactly what's on his mind and what's on his mind is so one sided that any mild dissent is likely to descend immediately into a shouting match over the cranberry sauce.


The thing is the man is right. He's even right when he's wrong because he tries so hard to speak the truth straight from his heart . You have to admire a man of such conviction.

This film, The Baron of Arizona (1950) is about the craziest true story I've never heard of that turned out to be pretty damn true. Even with Fuller shouting his own melodramatic version of the truth at the top of his lungs. It's really a great flick.

Who ever heard of this James Addison Reavis guy ? A guy who almost swindled the United States out of Arizona. I mean, he actually claimed ownership of the territory around and including the state of Arizona and moved there with his wife to lord over the unwilling locals as their "Baron". The US government apparently was dumbfounded by the incredible authenticity of his claim and unable to prove it a fraud for over a year. I know what you're thinking, "What? This really happened?" Well, a few clicks on the google device gets us a nice wikipedia entry that seems to hold up most of Fuller's claim that this is a "true story".

Vincent Price plays the Baron and his performance is right in line with the neurotic cads that he had been known for since his classic performance in Otto Preminger's Laura. This road would eventually lead him to the mostly great Corman Poe adaptations which would eventually lead him into becoming a parody of himself. But this is an early performance and it's one of his best, right up there with Matthew Hopkins in The Witchfinder General. The difference here is that Price's Baron is a great anti-hero rather than villain. You know the whole time that he's using people, lying to everyone and yet you can't help but admire him. Any man who is willing to invest years forging papers and deeds to create a fictional history of a family claim has to be admired on a purely mercenary level.

In the film James Reavis is shown joining an order of monks in California and living among them for what seems like months in order to earn their trust . All to get his hands on one of the original copies of the local land records and to use the very specific ink they make in their monastery to make a few important changes. The fact that this ends in failure and does not stop him is amazing. He just pushes on, finding another way to get at the original records and even marrying into the Peralta family to seal the illusion.


The film has an unusual effect. As you watch Reavis weave his web, you are on his side. As he achieves his goal and takes control of Arizona from an absurd James Bond styled headquarters (complete with a giant map of his kingdom on the wall), you still hope that the government fools won't find a flaw in his brilliant forgeries. Even the "good" people of Arizona start looking like monsters, turning into a mad lynch mob out for blood. But it's his treatment of his innocent wife that makes you question his actions. And since this is grand melodrama, Reavis questions his own actions as well and like the Grinch, his heart grows three sizes overnight. Fuller rushes this a bit and seems somewhat dispassionate about the man's redemption. He's much more excited by the fact that the locals couldn't care less about his change of heart and intend on burning down his evil lair and hanging the Baron and Baroness from a noose.

There is a happy ending of sorts but Reavis seems less redeemed than disappointed as he is released from Prison and surrounded by his family. After all this was a man with massive ambitions for personal power and glory. All he has to look forward to now is a nice dinner with some poor relatives. Too bad he couldn't craft a new plan to steal New York City.

"INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS" Review

by Brian Holcomb

This is a FILM with blood in its veins, a heart in its body and a red hot engine in its chassis. It is alive with ideas and a geniune belief in the power of FILM to express them. As with all great films, Words will fail from the beginning to explain why this is such an amazing piece of cinematic art but we will try to use them.

Alfred Hitchcock used to love to give journalists a characteristically deadpan lesson in suspense filmmaking through an anecdote about "THE TICKING BOMB". The gist of it was that three men sitting around a table talking about baseball or the weather was by the very nature of MOTION pictures-boring. But any scene involving mundane dialogue or exposition becomes instantly suspenseful to the audience once they've been tipped off that a ticking bomb has been placed under the table. The audience would watch AND LISTEN helplessly while the unsuspecting characters went on talking about batting averages or whatever. The audience would think, "Don't talk about baseball you fools, there's a bomb under that table!"


Now, if you're Quentin Tarantino and you love to write dialogue that goes on for pages and pages then this device becomes your secret weapon. How can a filmmaker get an easily distracted audience to sit still while characters ramble on-well, you get the point. Put a bomb under the table and get the audience worked up into a lather. The skill is in coming up with these ticking bombs so that they aren't always LITERAL ticking bombs. In his latest movie, the spelling challenged INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS, Tarantino becomes so skilled at it that he can even make a glass of milk function as a ticking bomb.



Now this isn't to say some kind of reductionary nonsense that Tarantino is the new Hitchcock. God knows there have been plenty of fools who have come forth over the years and tried to take that mantle. The thing is: No One Can. Hitchcock is almost above criticism since his ideas about film form and content have been so influential it is impossible to separate almost ANY filmmaker from his influence. Even if it came second hand.

Tarantino is a filmmaker who deals with art in the second or third hand. He is a post modernist in the tradition of Brian DePalma who plays with film the way Marcel Duchamp may have once played with found objects in a junkyard. The pieces may have come from this old war picture or that old drive-in flick but once they are appropriated they are owned and operated in a whole new way; transformed into something New charged by the power of something Old.

In the brash confidence of his playful surfaces and the complexity of his pop art games, Tarantino along with DePalma have gone farther than Hitchcock could ever go in playing with form and content. Shackled by the commercial cinema he worked within, Hitchcock could only dream of doing the things that Tarantino does without pause. For a brief moment in the late '60s, Hitchcock shot tests for a film called Kaleidoscope which he wanted to photograph on real locations, with more open sexuality and nudity and using handheld cameras and even perhaps 16mm. Basically it was Hitchcock's idea to take what the French New Wave were doing and to bring those techniques under his more seasoned control the way he took TV production techniques and polished them for Psycho.

IMAGES FROM KALEIDOSCOPE TEST FOOTAGE

Of course MCA-Universal to whom Hitchcock had become a prisoner in a gilded cage wanted nothing of the sort from the master of glossy suspense and the project was shelved cutting off what could've been an exciting final phase of creativity from the director. But these techniques are easily used by Tarantino in a much more complex and almost disposable modern manner-thanks to Godard who showed that a filmmaker could basically do ANYTHING-he can shoot intense closeups in widescreen and invoke the cinema of Sergio Leone in one breath-

Robert Aldrich and THE DIRTY DOZEN in the next-

while framing actors in groups with an eye-level camera the way Howard Hawks would-


Every scene is shot for maximum effect from a cinematic standpoint. With Tarantino you get to watch the whole damn history of cinema explode in front of your eyes at 24fps. And in the fiery inferno that engulfs the cinema at the film's climax, the FILM itself literally does explode.



So, what the hell are these INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS? Well, first of all it's not a remake of the correctly spelled Enzo G. Castellari film INGLORIOUS BASTARDS from 1978 though it makes use of the same "men on a mission" plot device as that film did.



This subgenre spins off of classic 60s movies like The Dirty Dozen, Where Eagles Dare and really from Roger Corman's relatively unknown film The Secret Invasion. But sometime between his initial drafts and what finally hit the screen, Tarantino sorta-kinda-abandoned this plot device as the driving force in his film. Certainly there are MEN in the film and they ARE on a MISSION. But they no longer hold the focus of the film which is quite evenly distributed among several characters some of whom never meet throughout the entire 149 minute running time.



These basterds are a mixed crew of Jewish American soldiers led by Col. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) whose mission is to kill and scalp as many Nazis as possible and put fear into their hearts. This is what they do in most of their scenes in the film which account for perhaps 40 percent of the running time. The rest is focused on the story of Shoshanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent) whose family is wiped out by the infamous "Jew Hunter" Hans Landa (the incredible Christoph Waltz) in the film's powerful opening sequence. Shoshanna ends up in Paris running a cinema during the Nazi occupation. When a dashing young German soldier (Daniel Bruhl) who is a hero to the Reich for killing hundreds of Allied soldiers falls for her he uses his influence to have her theatre hold the premiere of the propaganda film starring himself and about himself called Nation's Pride. The premiere becomes the center of all the action at the end as Shoshanna sees her chance to avenge her family while the Basterds arrive with their own plan to end the war in one fell swoop: it turns out that not only is the producer of the film, Joseph Goebbels, going to be in attendance but Adolf Hitler himself.

Tarantino doesn't shackle himself to anything with this film. It expresses itself in whatever cinematic vernacular neccessary even indulging in omnscient narration at times through the familiar pipes of Samuel L. Jackson. The score ranges from classic Ennio Morricone pieces and Elmer Bernstein's ZULU theme to David Bowie's title song for Paul Schrader's Cat People "Putting Out Fire". Saving Private Ryan this isn't and thank God. Brad Pitt is in full tonque-in-cheek mode here and he breezes through the movie with his winking wit and hillbilly accent. The real acting kudos go to Mélanie Laurent who looks like a young Denueve but has the fiery intensity of a young Jeanne Moreau and Christoph Waltz whose performance as Hans Landa deservedly earned him the Best Acor prize at the Cannes Film Festival. There are a few minor flaws in the film-Eli Roth's less than convincing performance, Mike Myers overly familiar schtick and the cartoon Adolf Hitler who seems less real than Darth Vader. But not having met the man personally, maybe this was how he carried himself...

There are those who are claiming that this film is some kind of "alternate history" linking it with that peculiar subgenre of generally stiff books in which the South often wins the Civil War or the United States never enters WW2 allowing Hitler to rule Europe to this day. While it's true that Tarantino rewrites history, it's not to wonder about the results of such changes in any fictitious future so much as to revel in the glory of how things could've been if they played out in the wildest fantasy of a pulp writer caught up in his most feverish melodrama. Any resemblance to the real Second World War is purely cosmetic and coincidental. This is a fable played out in broad colours and splashed onscreen from every corner of that storehouse of old movies, Tarantino's mind. Now this doesn't mean that the ideas and consequences of the real world do not affect the film. There is genuine human drama and pain in the film that comes from knowing that the Nazis were real and that many paid the price of their madness. So when Tarantino decides to create his own end to World War 2, he wields this power to create a hallucinatory fantasy of bloodthirsty vengeance. How many would've liked to have seen hundreds of Nazis mowed down in showers of blood or to see the ultimate revenge fantasy, the face of Adolf Hitler shot through again and again by bullets, hot metal tearing at the human flesh and bone and killing the monster over and over ad infinitum.

This climax is a doozy, channeling the works of DePalma (Carrie's fiery prom destruction), Spielberg (Raiders of the Lost Ark's melting Nazis) as well as the slow motion gun ballets of Woo and Peckinpah's entire filmography. But there is a giddyness about the scene that is pure Tarantino, a child-like cruelty expressed in cinematic wish fulfilment fantasies of Nazis trapped like rats, taunted by the face of Shoshanna Dreyfus projected onto the giant screen taunting and laughing at their helplessness; Running for their lives like cowards while the heroic Jews with their weapons blazing settle scores never settled in our own history. And to cap all this off is a single unforgettable and almost throwaway image, one of such power I almost thought I was imagining it: The beams from the projector hitting a wall of rising smoke and creating a ghostly vision of the dead Shoshanna as an Avenging Angel, the very idea of cinematic immortality allowing her to have a posthumous retribution. For Tarantino this is a literal truth, FILM itself brings down the Third Reich.

PUBLIC ENEMIES REVIEW

by Brian Holcomb

Director: Michael Mann
Screenplay: Michael Mann, Ronan Bennett Ann Biderman based on the book by Bryan Burroughs "Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-1934"
Cast: Johnny Depp, Christian Bale, Marion Cotillard, Stephen Lang, Stephen Dorff, Giovani Ribisi, Leelee Sobieski, Billy Crudup

"Dead as Dillinger"

If you've ever seen the famous newsreel footage of John Dillinger under arrest but acting like a guest at an Awards ceremony, one arm resting on the shoulder of the DA, then you know that this was a unique man-one of the few with that cult of personality that makes a man likable even when his actions are dispicable.

What in the world was going on in that man's mind? Can a man about to be locked up and put on trial for robbery and murder be THAT confident and at ease among his captors?

Well, unfortunately we have to keep wondering since that man is not depicted in this film, the latest cops and robbers saga from director Michael Mann.

At first this seems to be a perfect meeting of raw material and filmmaker. The classic true story of Depression era bank robber and media celebrity John Dillinger (Johnny Depp) being pursued doggedly by straight arrowed G-man Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale) sounds like a piece of ready-made art for the director of HEAT and MIAMI VICE.

The trouble is that just adding water to the mix does not a masterpiece make. Not even good entertainment. Mann has consistently warred with his artistic instincts onscreen and this war has made for some great films. His sensibility is informed partly by the French existential crime melodrama as defined by the work of Jean-Pierre Melville but shadowed by the more direct and efficient crime films of classic American cinema, the lean and muscular films of directors like Don Siegel and Robert Aldrich. When he makes sure that his chocolate is not taking over his peanut butter or vice-versa you get a pop entertainment that seems deep and conjures up feelings and moods way outside of the confines of mere genre. Cop and criminal are both abstracted into wider symbols of mankind lost in a world beyond their comprehension. But don't worry there's gonna be a cool shootout soon.

Now, Mann has had a tendency to lose the plot at times. And I don't just mean the actual plot. In films like THE KEEP, the director seems to forget that he is making a film for popular consumption and completely vaporizes the audience under an avalanche of images pregnant with meaning. He also commits the unpardonable sin of avoiding obligatory scenes-those obvious scenes in drama which everyone can predict will be in the film and yet feel cheated without. This is the first mark of a filmmaker unable to control himself. If the film were purely an art construct then this would not be a problem, but PUBLIC ENEMIES clearly wants to engage the audience as much as it alienates them. So we get a script for an '80s HBO cable movie being directed by a filmmaker who detests its triteness. Something's got to give and here it's the characterization and narrative which fails to convince and fails to entrance.

What Mann gets right about the film has everything to do with its surface since that is where he is most comfortable as a filmmaker. If you ever wanted a Magical Mystery Tour through a 30s gangster fantasia, here it is. PUBLIC ENEMIES has tommy guns and they do rat-tat-tat. The costumes are so cool you know immediately what to do this Halloween. Mann shoots all this with a mix of big HD cameras and a few more akin to your own handycam to create an in your face, "COPS" styled journey through old timey clothes, weapons, cars, and architecture. You are THERE shooting it out with the police only inches away from Dillinger's gun.

This is all very effective. Mann also succeeds at presenting the pioneering methods of the FBI demonstrating early wire tapping and telephone book beatings without fanfare or comment. As always in a Mann film, there are powerful images that sear into your brain upon contact with your eyes. It's hard to forget the dying breath of a gangster seen as vapor in the night air.



These are the primary tools within Mann's filmmaking toolbox. The characters and performances are another story. Outside of Stephen Lang's truly effective performance as Texas Ranger Charles Winstead, the acting is workmanlike. Lang finds a way of suggesting ideas and hidden emotions miles deep between his largely rhetorical dialogue in a way lost upon the rest of the cast. Christian Bale plays his stock character again-the ice cold and obsessed male struggling to hold onto what's left of his humanity. He plays it well and his Melvin Purvis works funtionally in the film. But nothing more.

Depp is all wrong for Dillinger and he should've been perfect. Depp is an actor capable of great onscreen charisma along with his skills for mimicry and movement. But the script does not portray the lively and bigger than life face that Dillinger displayed for the public but rather the dour and sphinx-like blank of the sociopath he probably was when alone. This would've been the best route-to display the movie star behavior in public contrasted with the emptiness in his privacy. But the film wants nothing to do with the legend of Dillinger and leaves us alone with his mannequin. We don't learn more about him through this choice and end up with a dead center in the middle of a bland procedural narrative.

What he finds so alluring in Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard) is also up for argument. She's certainly pretty enough. But there's nothing about her that inspires as a character, nothing to define why someone like John Dillinger would risk everything to be near her.

Dillinger in real life was known to be a man who didn't like to plan far into the future. He lived for today, for now. Mann leaps upon this as some kind of "Rosebud" key and has Depp utter the philosophy onscreen. But he just utters it-doesn't express it as something important to his nature and is not given scenes in which to dramatize his carpe diem nature at all. He just seems reckless at times, overconfident rather than driven to live life to its fullest. Who was John Dillinger and why should we care about him enough to spend 2 plus hours watching this film?

This is the question that Mann and his co-writers should've been asking not me.

"Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown."

Chinatown is one of my favorite movies from one of my favorite directors, Roman Polanski. It's one of the greatest examples of a Hollywood factory project in which a powerful producer commisions a great screenplay written for a big star and then hires a genius auteur to direct. But at the same time it's a Hollywood product, it's also a great work of personal art in which Polanski's most important themes are present throughout along with his trademark sense of paranoia and dislocation.



I think that the two images above say almost everything about the film and Polanski's very personal view on man's inability to control the chaotic universe around him. Not to mention that it's one of Jack Nicholson's greatest moments onscreen, the intensity of his desire to finally stand up and do the right thing, to try and make a difference in the first image followed by the shattered emptiness, the blank nothingness of the second image which follows the death of Evelyn Mulwray(Faye Dunaway)and the secret victory of her vile father, Noah Cross(John Huston).

In an matter of seconds, Nicholson as private eye J.J. Gittes is shown how small his place in the world really is and how ineffectual his actions are in controlling the course of events even on a minor scale.

"Forget Jake. It's Chinatown."

Chinatown has just been released in a special edition DVD. Click here to read my review of it for CinemaBlend.com.

S. DARKO review

by Brian Holcomb

Richard Kelly, the creator of the cult classic Donnie Darko has nothing to do with this Direct to DVD sequel. All I can say is "THANK GOD". I liked the original Donnie released back in 2001 quite a bit though perhaps not as much as some college freshmen who thought it was some kind of religious experience they had between tokes. But I did think that Richard Kelly discovered an interesting hook to make David Lynch styled movies for a larger pop audience by focusing on the subtext of teen angst. The film was a clever amalgamation of John Hughes, J.D. Salinger and Phillip K. Dick all wrapped up in an everyday surrealism very reminiscent of Lynch's work in Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks.

Now, why Kelly couldn't just leave well enough alone is another mystery wrapped inside an enigma. He did the unfortunate thing of going back to his well received first film to create one of those horrific "Director's Cuts" that have plagued mankind since the dawn of the DVD extra (Damn you Ridley Scott and your 9,000 versions of Blade Runner!). Donnie Darko: The Director's Cut released in 2004 was supposedly the film Kelly wanted to make all along. Going for a 2010: The Year We Make Contact approach rather than sticking with the glorious ambiguity of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kelly went ahead and tried to provide explanations for every damn thing in his movie. Replacing my own interesting possibilities of what might've happened to poor young Donnie with his own awful and very specific sci-fi mumbo jumbo about Tangent Universes, Living Receivers, and the Manipulated Dead. Bad enough on its own, it was just a precursor for the epic dystopian mumbo jumbo to come in his dead on arrival Southland Tales a few years later. Kelly's first film now seems to have been a accident of sorts, one of the few times where studio imposed cuts actually made the film better.

Unfortunately even though Richard Kelly isn't involved, S. Darko is the kind of film that limps right out of the gate since it really has no reason to exist in the first place. Donnie told a very self contained story and any attempt to come up with new ideas would seem to defy the mythology created in the original. In other words, this film should be as awful as expected. But while it isn't exactly good-it's a lot better than you might imagine, though that may seem like nothing but heresy to the converted.

You can read the rest of my review for CINEMABLEND.COM HERE

STAR TREK:THE REVIEW

STAR TREK
Written by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman
Based on the TV Series created by Gene Roddenberry
Directed by J.J. Abrams
CAST: Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Karl Urban, John Cho, Zoe Saldana, Eric Bana, Anton Yelchin, Simon Pegg, Leonard Nimoy, Bruce Greenwood, Winona Ryder, Clifton Collins, Jr., Ben Cross, Tyler Perry, Jennifer Morrison

by Brian Holcomb

Somehow pulling off the magic trick of appealing to the wider mass audience with one foot in Star WARS, this STAR TREK is at once as mythic as Lucas' Joseph Campbell inspired saga and as situationally gripping as any episode of the 60s TV series. There are two major storylines in this reboot, but director J.J. Abrams and writers Orci and Kurtzman are smart enough to just make it play as one. So, evil Romulan Nero (Eric Bana) doesn't do random things-when he kills a Starship captain-it's Kirk's father-when he destroys an entire planet-it is Spock's homeworld of Vulcan. This allows the narrative to focus on its more important story: the developing friendship of two very different beings, the hot blooded and very human James Tiberious Kirk and the mostly logical and half-human-half-Vulcan Spock . Unable to agree on the color of the sky, these two at least have a common enemy.

Kirk's story is of how THIS rebellious punk becomes THAT Starship Captain. It's Campbell's Hero's Journey once again and the biggest flaw could've been it's sheer unimaginability. Kirk has always seemed to be a self righteous space cowboy, a smirking two fisted George W. Bush knocking about the universe in his brash way and indulging in his preference for women of color-especially shades of green and blue-whenever possible.


Having walked onto TV screens fully formed, it seems impossible to imagine Kirk ever not being Kirk-that is, being a kid. But Abrams goes ahead and shows us some infant from General Casting and what appears to be another Culkin-bot as younger versions of Kirk. These aren't very convincing but this is where Abrams is getting better as a filmmaker. If you go fast enough, a good filmmaker can make you forget things like Indiana Jones being dragged underwater for miles lashed to a U-Boat. (See Raiders of the Lost Ark). As Hitchcock once said to a crew member looking for logic in the directionally illogical North By Northwest, "Don't be droll, dear boy."


Droll is the last thing Abrams ever wants to be and as a self sworn student of Movie Brats like Spielberg and Lucas he knows the power that mythic stories can hold over audiences. After Kirk gets into a barroom brawl with some Starfleet goons, he meets Captain Pike (Bruce Greenwood) who lectures him on making something of his life. Pike encourages him to join the Starfleet Academy and challenges him to do better than his father who once was Captain for 13 minutes and died saving the lives of 800 men and women including Kirk's mother and Kirk himself. This is a moment out of John Ford or Howard Hawks, a classic moment of mythic storytelling in which the young man, having refused the call to heroism his whole life, is made to confront his own destiny. Abrams follows this scene with one featuring Kirk riding his motorcycle alone into a field as the sun rises at dawn. A young man contemplating his future in much the same way as Luke Skywalker in that other Star film that Abrams obviously loves. Abrams knows well that if audiences can buy this moment, then they will go along willingly with this young man on his adventure which will also be their adventure as his choices reflect their own choices.

The most startling thing about this new TREK is how it avoids being incredibly AWFUL. If you think about it, there is no reason that this should ever be good or even great as it is. Trek has long entered the realm of parody and since the characters are so identified with the actors who played them, any attempt to step into those roles should seem like the worst of high school theater.


So, the real trick here is perhaps not pulled off by the writers or the director per se but by the cast. Somehow Chris Pine, the son of CHIPS actor Robert Pine and future winner of a Matt Damon look-a-like contest, is able to invoke the character of Kirk without EVER reminding you of the actor who made the role his own-William Shatner. There's not one iota of mimicry from Pine but at the same time you have no doubt that this man will become the Captain we know and love. Pine is good at looking smart when he behaves recklessly and maybe this is where his Damon-ness is most helpful. Jason Bourne operates as much from instinct as intellect and this is one of the strengths Pine brings to the role.

Zachary Quinto also makes the role of Spock his own and he has the uneviable task of having to actually share screen time with the real Spock-Leonard Nimoy. Quinto's Spock is still dealing with his emotions in a more raw way and the actor seems to channel as much of the classic Spock as the slightly unfamiliar one from the original pilot The Cage in which Spock was somewhat more emotional. Here Spock seems quite open to the shows of affection from Uhura (Zoe Saldana) and inclined to lose his temper when baited by Kirk.

The rest of the cast works extraordinarilly well in their respective roles, each taking a slightly different tactic in making the roles their own. Karl Urban steals many scenes with his near pitch perfect mimicry of DeForest Kelly's very particular voice and speech patterns. Along with Anton Yelchin's "V" challenged Chekhov, Bones is a character almost completely defined by the way he speaks-Urban's achievement is to do this without resorting to cariacature. Yelchin is primarily comic relief but the actor captures Chekhov's youth and is able to display his quirky intelligence in several scenes. One of the strengths of Orci and Kurtzman's script is the way they give each character a turn onscreen in the middle of the action to contribute something of their own. Sulu is known for his fencing so here he gets to best some Romulans with his saber and even save Kirk. Simon Pegg as Scotty is Simon Pegg with a Scottish accent but this is exactly right. He gets to beam his shipmates all over the place with the kind of professionalism James Doohan would approve of. Zoe Saldana is able to take the 60s Uhura and take away the issue of color. This Uhura is simply a valued member of the team, strong in her convictions but without losing her sensitivity to feelings, particularly those of Mr. Spock.


A note must be made of Bruce Greenwood's very strong performance as Captain Christopher Pike and of Eric Bana's choices as Nero. Greenwood's role may seem throwaway but it's of great importance to the story in actuality. Pike HAS to immediately evoke the honor and courage that that command requires. It is Pike whose prescence onscreen is the example set for Kirk and for us to understand what defines this duty and responsibility. Without an actor of quiet strength in this role, these ideas would merely be abstract instead of immediate.

Bana is a really good actor himself. Watch five seconds of Chopper followed by Munich and most would be instantly convinced. But his performance as Nero is perhaps too psychologically credible for a Star Trek film. The script doesn't help him here as Nero isn't given any more dimensions outside of his thirst for revenge. Bana gets the intensity just right but not the size. It's certainly good enough for the film and never hurts the storytelling but there is little of the Shakespearian quality needed for these Trek villains. Bana needed to keep the intensity but broaden the range of his performance a bit. Maybe this is where Shatner could've come in to participate. He could've easily coached Bana in how to get big without losing the plot.

Production wise, the film is damn near faultless. We've reached the zenith of special effects now where the painted and the photographed have lost their dividing lines. The sound mix is simply stunning. It's the work of Ben Burtt whose work on the Star Wars films defined the modern space epic. There are moments where the mix achieves poetry-as when Kirk and Sulu "spacedive" into the atmosphere of Planet Vulcan and the sound is cut off-leaving the dead silence of space and just the faint sound of breathing.

The sets and costumes are a wonderful evocation of the original '60s look but just tweaked enough to lose the camp value and become believable. Abrams then does something very smart with the excellent effects, sets and costumes-He ignores them. Never does the camera dwell on anything for its own good-every shot is there to further the story, nothing more. The result of this is a kind of space realism-we see things that look complex in the background and this helps us believe in the world of the story.

The biggest letdown is the score by the usually fantastic Michael Giacchino. There's nothing wrong with the scoring of the action pieces in the film, these are superbly done. What the film lacks is a strong and thrilling theme to get the film off to a big start when the STAR TREK title fills the screen. What we get is most underwhelming and remains underwhelming in other "big" moments in the film such as the reveal of the Starship Enterprise for the first time. It's a serviceable score but perhaps a bit too cerebral for its own good. What's missing is the guts of it. The big, powerful sound that Jerry Goldsmith used to bring to these films or James Horner's driving war themes in The Wrath of Khan. That said, there is great wit with which Alexander Courage's original theme is brought in at the end and Giacchino adapts it wonderfully with some very nice percussion.


Where Abrams still has a way to go to match his idols is in his staging. There is a lack of economy in some of his visual storytelling that would be effortless for Spielberg, for example. Where Spielberg can make a scene "sing" with a single tracking shot and downward tilt, Abrams still resorts to the scissors and breaks the action down into tiny pieces. A cut from one close-up to another close-up is a lot easier to shoot than to create more complex blocking with actor and camera and with the foreground and background. Still, this is only Abrams' second feature film not counting his work on the pilots of Alias and Lost. I'm sure he'll learn fast and soon his work will go where no man has gone before. Or something like that.

FRINGE: "Bad Dreams"

An Idiot Box Review by Brian Holcomb

So last night's episode "Bad Dreams" was the work of writer and debuting director Akiva Goldsman. This is the man behind the worst Batman script ever written, Batman and Robin. He also won an Academy Award for the worst script ever to be nominated for an Academy Award, A Beautiful Mind. So, one can say that expectations were quite low, lower in fact than those for many of the episodes of this still wet behind the ears series. But this turned out to be a pleasant surprise, probably the best episode yet.


Olivia ( Anna Torv) is having terrible nightmares in which she sees herself killing people. At least that's what she thinks she's doing when she dreams of pushing a young mother off a subway platform to be crushed by the incoming train. Of course, the dream has occurred in real life-in Grand Central Station in NYC-but the woman is seen on the security cam to just jump off the platform by herself, leaving her child in her stroller to witness the horrible event.

The Fringe team gets together to help Olivia solve her problem which turns out to be more complex than the usual "seeing through the eyes of the killer" trope expected. It turns out to be more of a "feeling what the killer is feeling" experience and is directly connected to the series' developing mytharc involving the US government's secret drug testing on children. Like much of Abrams' other work, the central concept may be derivative (in this case a twist on Cronenberg's Scanners) but the end product swallows up ideas at such a prodigious rate that it becomes less about what idea came from where than in how many of these ideas can be consumed in one sitting as one twist gives way to the next. Where Chris Carter cherry picked one classic horror-sci-fi movie idea at a time for each episode of The X-files, Fringe has no problem starting with a scene that looks to be an homage to Brian DePalma's homage to Battleship Potemkin in The Untouchables and ending with a final act that's a much more effective version of M. Night Shyamalan's endless and lame The Happening.

It's a tightly crafted little story that weaves its "monster of the week" very well within its bigger serial story. We learn more about Olivia's past and the secret that Walter (John Noble) is holding from her. We get some more foreshadowing of a romance between Olivia and Peter (Joshua Jackson). As in all the episodes thus far, there's always some eruption of strangeness or quirkiness that suggests a madman hiding among the writing staff. This week we get a surprising moment of Torv kissing a female stripper while in a hypnotic trance and her "experiencing" the male killer's orgasm following intercourse. The show ends with an old videotape that Walter digs up featuring a young girl in what appears to be a cruel experiment. Offscreen a sinister and gravelly voiced scientist can be heard giving Walter instructions. I wonder who this could be...