THE LOVELY BONES Film Review

by Brian Holcomb

"The book was better."

This is the challenge for any filmmaker who dares to adapt a popular novel for the big screen. Well, of course the book was better. The book was perfect since it was yours. The novelist provides the spark but the fire rages in the reader's mind, colored by their own life experiences and imagination. In the end, the book belongs to the reader on a personal level. But a FILM belongs to the director who has no idea what you were thinking and can only color it with his own life experiences and imagination. Though much of the narrative is the same, this is clearly Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones and that is a mixed blessing.

Alice Sebold's novel would be a challenge for any filmmaker to adapt. The story is told from the POV of a 14 year old girl who was raped, murdered and dismembered as she watches from the afterlife the years that follow in the lives of her family and her murderer. That story is actually the catalyst for several others. That of the disintegration of a family overcome with grief, a suspense thriller about the investigation into the girl's death and a coming of age story for the dead girl herself, Susie Salmon, who finally accepts her death and all that it requires her to give up. That's just the body of the story. The engine behind it is the mournful tone which channels Thornton Wilder's Our Town for its expression of the fragility of life and the temporary nature of all things. This is a story about loss-the loss of life, a parent's loss of their child, but most of all the loss of human experience. Susie is killed just as she begins to experience her first love. At its most basic level, murder is a form of theft. Susie's murderer steals this precious experience from her and the whole story is haunted by the sadness of a life unlived.

Adaptations are all about making choices and sometimes drastic ones in order to capture the spirit of the book rather than the letter. The Lovely Bones requires a kind of high wire act in order to pull this off successfully so it's no surprise that Jackson along with his usual collaborators Phillipa Boyens and Fran Walsh seem overwhelmed by the task. This is the kind of material that requires a complete overhaul in order to work as a movie but it is also a popular novel which seems to beg for absolute fidelity or else face the wrath of its fans. Something has to give and if you are making a film you must fight for the film. It is the ideas and emotions in Sebold's story that have to make it to the screen not her character list. But instead of reshaping it into something more cinematic, they make the "safe" decision to tell the story as fast as they can including as much of the book as possible. Having to tell a thriller, a family drama, and a ghost story all at once and within a reasonable running time is ultimately self defeating. Especially when all three never seem to integrate effectively. Even at 135 minutes, the film leaves characters such as Susie's mother Abigail(Rachel Weisz, wasted)woefully underdeveloped while others are virtually props (Susan Sarandon). Sarandon is cast as the Salmon family's crazy grandmother and basically exists within one long, tonally flat and absurdly comic montage sequence which seems like an outtake from Stepmom. The core of the story would've been better served by dropping her character altogether. Imagine the film without her presence and you will find that nothing is lost.

Peter Jackson is a fine filmmaker but he may not have been the right fit for this material. Jackson seems to see the story as a kind of bookend to his earlier film, Heavenly Creatures and uses much of the same mix of blatant fantasy and stylized reality here. What worked in that film is a liability in this one and the Candyland visions of heavenly worlds break the tenuous threads that hold the story together. It is Susie who must hold the film together. It is her presence as witness to the events following her death that gives the story meaning. Visually placing her in a goofy CG landscape for much of the running time separates her too much from the rest of the film. She seems stranded in that "Palm Pre" commercial . What was needed was the matter of fact surrealism of Luis Bunuel so that the veils between worlds would feel more uncanny and human than some digital Magritte. In fact, the more one thinks about it David Cronenberg would've been the best choice for this film. His work during the psychic vision sequences of The Dead Zone are very effective in mixing the real with the unknown.

What Jackson does get right and pulls off superbly is the evocation of 1970s suburbia. The street that the Salmon family lives on seems not so much a realistic depiction of time and place as a slightly hyper-real memory of it. In the film, Susie is a budding photographer chronicling the world around her with a tiny Kodak Instamatic. This idea seems to have inspired Jackson and cinematographer Andrew Leslie to visualize the real world as one of those vibrant and slightly unreal Kodachrome snapshots. Particularly interesting is the home of George Harvey (Stanley Tucci) with its pastel green exterior contrasted by an alarming red curtained window.

Jackson has also cast the film perfectly. No matter what the flaws may be, the film holds great power in its central role. Saoirse Ronan is absolutely perfect and heartbreaking as Susie Salmon and it is her performance that makes the film work in spite of its flaws. Giving her fine support is Mark Walhberg as Susie's father Jack. Wahlberg underplays the role very effectively and not the way he "underplayed" in The Happening. The sooner we can forget that performance the better. This is easily one of his best dramatic performances. Stanley Tucci's George Harvey is a kind of archetypal serial killer. We learn nothing about him except that he has a mania for making dollhouses (without dolls) and appears to live in one. But this is OK since he is not really supposed to be a psychologically credible character. He is the story's "big bad wolf" and Tucci is very good at reminding you of every weaselly murderer from our cultural history. You look at George Harvey and can see right through him to the BTK killer. Rachel Weisz is fine as always but her character seems to have been left on the cutting room floor.

The strangest thing about Jackson's approach is how chaste it is. The whole film is just a bit too tasteful to achieve real catharsis. Jackson seems to be a prisoner of his PG-13 rating and because of this, the darkness of the crime is left a bit anti-septic. This was the story of a teenage girl who was raped and murdered. She is now only murdered. There is a difference especially with its themes of awakening sexuality. Jackson's film is filled with the sentimentality of innocence lost but it remains empty since that sentiment has to be earned through pain that the audience needs to share. The ending is another false step though one it shares with the book. It's just too tidy for a story that wants to express the chaos of the world.


2009
Directed by: Peter Jackson.
Written by: Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens and Peter Jackson, based on the novel by Alice Sebold.
With: Saoirse Ronan, Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz, Stanley Tucci, Susan Sarandon, Michael Imperioli, Rose McIver and Christian Thomas Ashdale.

INVICTUS Film Review

by Brian Holcomb

The Presidency of Barack Obama supposedly ushered in an era of post-racialism. Of course, this is nonsense but it does set up an interesting parallel with the Presidency of fellow Nobel Peace Prize winner Nelson Mandela. Mandela's goal was to create a post-racial South Africa or at the very least a racially cohabitable South Africa and this becomes the core of the new film by Clint Eastwood. Attempting to unify rather than divide, Mandela creates his own "team of rivals" by forcing his black security officers to work side by side with white ones. The fact that these very men may have been their oppressors a few years earlier is not lost on anyone. But Mandela believes in the power of forgiveness and rejects all objections. He intends to prove that the fear Afrikaners have of a South Africa run by blacks is unfounded and that South Africa is for South Africans, white and black. His tool in doing this is a down on their luck rugby club known as the Springboks. Many view this team with their green and gold colors as a symbol of Apartheid and want to change their colors and name. Mandela doesn't agree. He sees the Springboks, much loved by white South Africa, as a way of uniting his country through a shared national pride. When he asks their team captain Francois Pienaar (Matt Damon) to afternoon tea, Mandela has a simple goal: to inspire the Springboks to win the 1995 World Cup. Not surprisingly, Pienaar is speechless.

INVICTUS is based on a true story and never has a true story seemed more like a bag of movie cliches. This must be an example of life imitating art and B movie art at that. Basically the film is your garden variety underdog sports flick placed within an historical context. You've seen this before in films like Rocky, Rudy, The Bad News Bears, and Hoosiers. All the bases of that genre are covered-the seemingly "impossible" goal of winning, the initial lack of teamwork, and believe it or not, the "star" player is even injured before the big game. Anyone care to guess if he shows up to play before the final quarter?

The intersecting of these sports story cliches with history is what distinguishes the movie. Working from John Carlin's book "Playing the Enemy", screenwriter Anthony Peckham gives Eastwood a real spine to bring it all together: William Ernest Henley's poem, "Invictus". Latin for "Unconquered", it was a source of inspiration for Mandela during his time in Robben Island prison, a mantra that kept him from giving up. He gives these words to Pienaar to inspire him and the spiritual words of human courage and dignity allow him to walk a short distance in Mandela's shoes giving him the drive to unite and motivate his team. Two stories about politics and sport become one story about the power of the human spirit.

Clint Eastwood has gone from the most underrated filmmaker in America to the most overrated in less than a decade. A concious shift from thrillers and action movies to Stanley Kramer type Oscar bait subjects has created an illusion about him. INVICTUS is no different in aesthetic than SUDDEN IMPACT or BLOOD WORK and yet those films didn't garner him BEST DIRECTOR accolades. Eastwood just does what he has always done and that is to tell the story in the simplest, most unaffected way possible. There are no dazzling shots here, no slight of hand montage or startling transitions. He has mastered the form of classical Hollywood studio filmmaking. A form that prided itself on making the gears as invisible as possible. This could be construed as old fashioned and right from the start there is something very quaint about the way Eastwood tells this story. Everything seems stripped down to the most basic of elements. It seems as if he were retelling some ancient myth about heroes and not a realistic story at all. There is virtually no characterization in the film that goes beyond the archetypal. Both star roles are defined as much by the real life figures as by the star persona playing them. The Mandela presented in the film is the one most of us hold in our imaginations-a man of near indomitable will and courage. Morgan Freeman plays the role with all the gravitas and dignity he carries with him in even the smallest of roles. Any suggestion of complexity such as his divorce or his estrangement from his daughter is used merely to create a sense of isolation around the man. He is meant to be a kind of Gandolf figure in the story, a dead "father" whose spirit inspires a nation.

Matt Damon's Francois Pienaar is even more abstract. He isn't a person so much as an idea-white South Africa coming to terms with it's past. To go a bit further with this Joseph Campbell reading, the "Invictus" poem is used like the Force from STAR WARS. When Pienaar meets Mandela, he is visibly shaken by the experience as though he were touched by God. The voice of Mandela reading the stirring final lines of the poem, "I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul" play out repeatedly in Pienaar's mind until its ghostly power finds a context when he visits Mandela's 6 foot square cell on Robben Island. Pienaar and Mandela, white and black, politics and sport all come together there.

You might think from the above description that the movie is actually "good". In one respect you would be right. INVICTUS sometimes works better than it deserves to as an old fashioned,predictable entertainment. In another filmmaker's hands the Capra-corn would just be too much. Eastwood's poker faced style keeps the film grounded-not in reality but in some old movie world of myth. But in the end the film is just too obvious and simplistic to have any lasting effect. Everything is a slave to three act storytelling taking us from racial divide on both sides to forced equality and finally racial unity symbolized by hugs. The Springboks at first refuse to sing the new National Anthem but of course at the World Cup they do and with great pride; Pienaar's father spews racial venom throughout but relents when his son has an extra ticket for their black housekeeper-a woman seen previously as an employee at best; Mandela's rainbow guard begin full of suspicion and anger but end up as real colleagues and friends-even playing Rugby themselves on the Presidential lawn. Not only does Mandela proudly watch this from his window with an approving smile but he is then made to say, "See. Do you still think it's just a sport now?" The director even includes a kind of Greek chorus of songs co-written by himself that are awfully unsubtle as in the appropriately titled "Colorblind". That one actually made me cringe a bit.

Regardless of the fact that INVICTUS is based on a true story, the film is exactly the kind of film Eastwood has always made. A genre film not some deep and moving treatise on the human condition. It's a popular entertainment in which the "good guys" in green and gold beat the bad New Zealanders in BLACK. Believe it or not, they are even known as the "ALL BLACK". Mandela gets his moment for South Africa on the international stage and gives the cup to Pienaar who thanks him for being so awesome. All that was forgotten once again was a medal for Chewbacca.

OFCS HEARTS THANKSGIVING

Happy Thanksgiving All! As a card carrying member of the Online Film Critics Society(OFCS), we sometimes like to get together in the virtual Moose Lodge and vote on our favorite films. This POLL was based on the question: "What is your favorite Thanksgiving themed movie?" Runner ups were Hannah and Her Sisters, Pieces of April, Home for the Holidays and The Ice Storm. But as you may be able to guess, there was little doubt about the top slot. If you can't guess, you may need to go to the OFCS BLOGto find out. Or you can read my dazzling review of it HERE.In any event, have a wonderful holiday!

ANGELS & DEMONS Review

by Brian Holcomb

It's easy to look at the work of novelist Dan Brown and think that virtually anyone could be just as successful by using Wikipedia and the cut-and-paste function on their computer. Look up some arcane trivia about the Catholic Church, make a few references to the Illuminati or the Knights Templar, and mix it all up in some kind of treasure-hunt mystery based on clues found in ancient documents. That gets you more than halfway there. Establish some symbologist or semiotician as the hero, add a smart European heroine who is basically the modern-day version of the "kidnapped scientist's daughter," and in just a few weeks you could create something like "The Michelangelo Connection."

These external trappings obscure Brown's real skill as a writer, which lies in plot construction. It might be easy to concoct the framework of an exciting thriller, but it's quite another thing to keep the reader in suspense for 500-odd pages. While Brown's novels have cerebral subjects, they remain old-fashioned pulp adventures at heart, featuring the hero surviving cliffhangers while trying to save the world from literal or figurative ticking bombs. Brown is very good at keeping the action moving in a very linear, scene-by-scene manner. Which is exactly why they are perfect source material for movies.

How director Ron Howard failed to make an entertaining movie out of Brown's fourth novel, The Da Vinci Code, remains a mystery more puzzling than the story itself. As a filmmaker, Howard is an anonymous but dependable craftsman. Da Vinci, however, was inept. Paced like a Sunday visit to the Louvre, the film was talky in the extreme, dramatically neutral, and featured a hero who was more of a bystander than an active participant. Tom Hanks' weird experimental hairstyle didn't exactly help matters either. In terms of cinematic craft, Howard's flat and ludicrously self-important film was like a handbook on how not to craft a suspense thriller.

Which is why I was pleasantly surprised by Angels & Demons. It appears that Howard knew that he had to change the way everything was done in the previous film, and sending Tom Hanks to the barber was a very good start.(Read the rest of the review at CINEMABLEND.COM )

PARANORMAL ACTIVITY Review

by Brian Holcomb

This is a movie positively buried in hype and William Castle-styled promotion. All that's missing are flying skeletons and insurance policies for "death by fright". Somewhere under all the exclamation exists the movie itself simple and unadorned. It's a home video shot in the director's actual home with a pair of unknown but enthusiastic actors. So, expect less and you will appreciate it more. The film isn't particularly unique or even very well made. But first time writer-director Oren Peli has just enough skill to keep the movie grounded in a faux reality. Like many previous indie film successes, it makes strengths out of its limitations. Bad sound, low res images, and zero production values are the right aesthetics if the goal is "realism". After all, "real" is as much a convention of cinema as any other. The audience "reads" bad lighting, shaky camerawork and muffled sound as signifiers of cinema verite.

Of course in the subgenre of "Docu-Horror", the desired effect of this aesthetic is the illusion of "unscripted reality". The idea is to place the supernatural right next to the natural in order to get you to believe the impossible. An open acknowledgement of the recording device is part of the ploy. The fourth wall is broken; someone is shooting this right now so it must be real. Done reasonably well, this format can make the most cliched stories seem new. Cloverfield demonstrated that even Godzilla could learn new tricks. The trouble with Paranormal Activity is that it doesn't even have the old ones mastered.

The "story" is both too much and too little at the same time, with no awareness of how classic ghost stories play with shifting realities. The basic situation has day trader Micah (Micah Sloat)videotaping he and his fiancee' Katie (Katie Featherston)in an attempt to catch a ghost on tape. A ghost that has been haunting Katie since she was a child. When they consult a psychic (Mark Friedrichs) things begin to get a lot worse. He tells them that the spirit isn't a ghost per se but rather a demon. The film then chronicles a series of increasingly violent attacks on them while they sleep at night.

At first Paranormal Activity seemed like it was going to be more like Cloverfield and less like its obvious model, The Blair Witch Project. Cloverfield took the "found footage" concept and gave a few seconds of thought as to how that form could be used to its best advantage. Drew Goddard (Alias, Buffy) and company came up with several clever storytelling devices most notably the idea that the footage being watched was TAPED OVER a previous recording of the protagonists' first date at Coney Island. This allowed for a poignant epilogue showing the lovers alive in better times and with the added bonus of J.J. Abrams' trademarked touch of mystery through the final frames depicting something unknown falling into the water behind them.


Next to the wit and sophistication of form in the monster flick, Paranormal Activity seems positively juvenile. The low budget is simply not an excuse for bad design. The film is like a crayon drawing made by a talented child. The instincts are right but the execution is completely naive.

The film is presented as an edited assembly of "found footage" given to the producers by the San Diego police. Right off the bat the film wastes the opportunity to playfully exploit its form. Acknowledging that the movie is an edited version of reality potentially allows for some very interesting ambiguity between what transpires onscreen and the "story" that the editor has decided to construct from it. Peli acknowledges this through the use of judicious fade outs, dates added in post production, and several moments when the recording is played back in fastforward. But all of this is merely functional and the concept is never used for storytelling or for creating dread and fear. Just imagine the possibilities a more creative filmmaker would've explored. If Peli was OK with fastforwarding the recording, he could also have rewound it as well and allowed us a second look at certain mysterious images. Like those creepy ghost photos and videos we've all seen, these images could also be freeze framed and blown up to show frightening entities "hidden" within mundane moments. Clearly if you have ever seen the famous Three Men and a Baby ghost you know exactly what I am talking about. I can still remember the chill that ran up my spine the first time my friends and I freezed that frame on the VCR.



The following is one you've probably seen:

There are also missed opportunities involving the turning on and off of the camera. The film's best opportunity for this is during the "time out" Micah takes to have sex with Katie. The camera is turned off and when it comes back on Peli doesn't exploit the fact that something could've happened that we did not see, something that could create a stronger sense of ambiguity in our minds about Katie's mental state perhaps. Most interestingly it could be something very important that we finally understand during the climax.

Dramatically the film is badly damaged from the beginning. Starting the story in "Act Two" is clearly the work of a neophyte screenwriter. When the film begins there is already an understanding between the two of them that there is some kind of presence haunting Katie. This isn't set up at all. Within minutes a psychic arrives to listen to Katie turn into Captain Exposition and tell us the story of her past in the most boring manner possible. Even Dan Brown has more skill than this. The correct way to do this is to change the story so that it begins in a more mundane reality with Micah perhaps annoying the hell out of her through his obsession with taping everything. Slowly, we are presented with strange incidents which seem to defy rational explanation (but, importantly, could still be explained). Micah sees that Katie seems to be more frightened than she should be by these incidents, that they seem to have a special meaning to her. This forces him to confront her about her "secret" and a much better scene for the actors to play so that she has to confess her strange past to him. THEN we can bring in the psychic and the idea that it's a demon that is plaguing them. Micah would then be the audience surrogate throughout and his conversion from skeptic to terrified believer would be the structure.

The traditional ghost story is a form that has stood the test of time and there is no doubt that Peli studied this to some extent. He does a good enough job with the later stages of it so the film comes to a reasonably satisfying conclusion. What he misses is several beats in the first half that would get the audience worked up into a much more frightened state and make the ending really work. Creating an ambiguity about Katie's mental health would give the middle of the film more tension and it's the middle of this film that truly drags. Having Katie walk out of the room and not return for hours on end would create tension as to what she is doing at night. Things that are discovered the following morning but seem increasingly impossible for a young woman to do by herself. So the film can begin to create tension with ambiguity. Is there a demon? Is she insane, or is she possesed?

Basically, Peli only seems able to come up with HALF of a good idea throughout the film. He very smartly creates a widescreen frame of them sleeping at night and leaves it running for quite a while until the audience begins to scan every corner and pixel of that image. But he then leaves it at that. Any horror filmmaker worth his salt would know that the following image is a perfect Volleyball set for a spike.


Drawing the attention to the door at the left and letting the audience hang in silent apprehension would easily allow for a huge SCARE by having the lamp at the far RIGHT next to Micah either come on, fall over, or blow out. Any one of those choices would be a textbook way of having the scene still be realistic in terms of the surveillance framing and yet accomplish the main goal of a film called Paranormal Activity which I must assume is to frighten.

The performances by the two leads are decent. The problem lies in the use of improvisation to create the "reality" so needed for this to work. The failure in many of these "docu-horrors" is in allowing the actors to be interesting when all they need to be is believable. We don't need Second City alums here. Actors want to be seen as clever and witty at all times and this kind of improv leaves the door open for phoniness. The scenes between Katie and Micah often seem like acting exercises played directly for the camera instead of conversations overheard or caught on tape. The right approach would be to force them to talk about the most mundane subjects. "What's for dinner?" "Are we going to your parents this year for Thanksgiving" etc.

The fear factor is, of course, all that matters. But here Your Mileage May Vary. Depends on how scared you get looking at people sleeping and shadows creeping. I found it all mildly suspenseful. I also do not think that demons have footprints. But that is a whole different argument.

CAST:Katie Featherston, Micah Sloat, Mark Friedrichs, Amber Armstrong
DIRECTOR: Oren Peli

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.