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TETRO Film Review

by Brian Holcomb

On the DVD commentary, Francis Ford Coppola describes his latest works as examples of "personal filmmaking." He uses this label because all of the others have been demonized about as much as the words "socialist," "conservative," or "liberal" in our current political climate. What would've been proudly presented as an "art film" or "experimental film" in the 1960s, or as an "independent film" in the 1990s, would be seen as something much more obscure if labeled as such today. "Personal filmmaking" best describes what Coppola is doing now. At age 70, the writer-director is making modestly budgeted films on his own terms, financed by his successful wine business. The "personal" label separates his last two films from his previous career as one of the key figures of what he refers to as "industrialized film." Both Youth Without Youth and his latest film, the wonderful Tetro, are not so much experimental or arty as they are personal. Tetro in particular seems to be about as personal a film he could make without producing a documentary called "Coppola".

That said, this isn't the story of a wildly ambitious filmmaking family, but it is a film about art and how the art is often inseparable from the artist. Beautifully shot in crisp black and white by cinematographer Mihai Malaimare Jr., Tetro seems to be a product of another era. While the visuals echo the work of filmmakers as diverse as Fellini and Elia Kazan (and at times the Coppola of Rumble Fish), the screenplay is very much in the tradition of '50s poetic drama as defined by writers like Tennessee Williams and Clifford Odets. 

To read more of this review at Cinemablend.com click HERE.

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FRINGE S2E20 TV REVIEW: "BROWN BETTY"

 by Brian Holcomb

This week's "pulp-sci-fi-musical-noir" Fringe could've been a 12 car pile-up on the interstate freeway. Lets be honest, most viewers don't come back to this show week after week for some meta-fiction a'la Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective or William Goldman's The Princess Bride. So who knows if writers and showrunnners Jeff Pinkner and J.H. Wyman were smoking the same "Brown Betty" that Walter indulges in at the beginning of this episode or if they just wanted to prove that they have more to offer than machines and monsters.

In either case, they were just the right amount of clever to pull it off without drowning in pretension. Like I assumed last week, there's almost no advance in terms of plotting: Peter is missing in the beginning of the episode and he is still missing at the end. In the middle however, he is involved in some wonderful noir intrigue involving glass hearts and an evil wheelchair bound Willy Wonka.

The excuse for this narrative exercise begins with a heartbroken Walter Bishop (John Noble) who has taken refuge in a particularly strong hydroponic weed he affectionately calls "Brown Betty". Olivia arrives with Ella (Lily Pilblad) and asks he and Astrid (Jasika Nicole) to watch her while she searches for Peter. When Ella insists on hearing a story, Walter delivers a meta-fantasy that blends the fantasy world of the series with one inspired by his mother's love for the novels of Chandler and Hammett. So what we get is not classic noir so much as yet another parallel dimension version of the characters, themes, and plotlines. What's particularly clever about it is that it takes place in a timeless "story world" in which odd looking cellphones co-exist with period cars and clothing and where laptop computers present web pages that look like old time newspapers. Basically, the story fulfills whatever idea pops into Walter's head and since he's clearly been thinking about Peter, the story within the story echoes this in the form of a private eye adventure. TO READ THE REST OF THIS GO TO  SHADOWLOCKED.COM

 

 

 

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WELCOME HOME-THE JAY RANDALL STORY Film Review

KINETOFILM SCORE: 3.5/5

by Brian Holcomb

While the rest of the world complains about the sad state of indie film, Baltimore's Jimmy Traynor just gets on with it, making film after film in his own inimitable style. I'm not even sure if Traynor himself could boil his filmmaking down to any specific craft. But there is something almost intangible about the man's work that speaks clearly to that most mysterious and incalculable trait: talent.

Upon cursory examination, his films seem to be the product of carelessness. Scenes are loosely constructed from random shots that pan and zoom around for a subject lost at sea. Sound recording becomes more audible the closer the actor is to the camera. This is the camcorder aesthetic of birthday parties and bar mitvahs and would be easy to write off as nothing more than amateurishness were it not for the strangely arresting content. All of the "flaws" above are quickly forgotten as the action being covered proves to be so intriguing it could be filmed upside down from hundreds of feet away and still hold the attention. It soon becomes obvious that form is merely following function and that any surface slickness would prove detrimental to the whole.

Low or NO budget films are often given an energetic kick in the pants by simply having to be made on the run. There is no time to react intellectually and so something much more honest often results. Traynor has taken this model and made it his working method. Most of his films are done in a matter of two or three days. The films are shot so quickly that deliberation must give way to immediate decision. His latest film however, WELCOME HOME-THE JAY RANDALL STORY, was made in a somewhat different manner, with a script completed long before production and a shoot that lasted on and off over several years. The thing is that it doesn't appear to be that different from any of his other, more matter of fact work. This is rather amazing since filmmakers who are so improvisational often fall prey to pretentiousness when committing to a larger more conventionally designed project. Not so with Traynor whose latest film has as much crazy energy and just plain weirdness as any of his earlier work. In fact, WELCOME HOME may be his best film period.

Working with his co-writer/director Peechee Neric, Traynor stars in the film as Jay, a Baltimore actor with bigger dreams than talent who heads out to Hollywood to be a star. His delusions are his own since his friends and family are quite bitingly honest about his chances out there. Even his sister taunts him with a less than supportive, "You'll be back." The naive Jay gets schooled in the down and dirty ways of Hollywood and soon finds himself with no money, no friends and with no other option but to return home as the loser everyone predicted. Having to put up with his father's constant barrage of insults and the feeling that everyone is laughing behind his back, Jay loses his sanity and goes on a bloody rampage murdering all his critics the way many a filmmaker or actor has wanted to in theory.

Traynor is quite good as the slightly dim witted Jay and the film can be seen as either a comedy or tragedy depending on your point of view. It seems that Traynor and Neric find Jay both the butt of their cinematic joke as well as the focus of some real sadness and anger. It's this dark undercurrent that gives the film an added kick. Once the murder spree starts the film shifts gears from the sly, Hollywood satire of the early scenes into some surprisingly well staged schlock horror. But this is very self aware schlock with Jay indulging himself in the role of a lifetime, that of the vengeful madman in a classic late night horror picture. Logic is completely suspended as we experience the film the way Jay sees it. While the ending of the film wasn't anything groundbreaking, it was oddly shocking. The film suddenly reveals that it's smarter than you thought it was and it leaves you feeling quite sad actually, shifting to a third tone at the end far removed from the playful grand guignol that made up most of the running time.

In some ways the film belongs in that surreal Hollywood Babylon subgenre that David Lynch has defined recently with both Mulholland Drive and INLAND EMPIRE. It presents Tinseltown as a monstrous machine which grinds up the innocent attracted to it's bright lights like moths to the flame.

WELCOME HOME-THE JAY RANDALL STORY is available on DVD from Traynor and Neric's own website JPNT FILMS and is also currently on YouTube at this link: JPNT CHANNEL

THE GHOST WRITER Film Review

by Brian Holcomb

I am consistently amazed at Roman Polanski's seemingly effortless mastery of cinematic craft. I say "seemingly" because such effortlessness is rarely achieved without hard work. But onscreen, there is no wasted energy and no indulgence. Polanski is without doubt an "auteur" but he feels no need to remind us of this. He simply has a story to tell and applies the precise tools to the job at hand. His wisdom comes from the realization that great films are made by really telling the story. For most filmmakers cinematic storytelling means nothing more than getting all the beats of the plot in the proper order and recording the events on camera. For Polanski, a film story is much more than just "Following the mysterious drowning of his predecessor, a gifted author hired to ghostwrite the memoirs of a controversial former British Prime Minister becomes a hunted man when he uncovers explosive secrets about the past." That's Robert Harris' novel The Ghost in a nutshell. Any number of filmmakers could film the mechanics of this narrative in a vaguely competent manner. Vaguely competent craft did nothing to hurt the box office of a really awful film like The Da Vinci Code for example.

To "really" tell the story, Polanski does everything in his power to feed the audience's imagination. As they say, the devil is in the details and for Polanski it seems that he takes this literally. For example, The Ghost Writer is largely set at a rainswept beach house that the former Prime Minister keeps in Martha's Vineyard. Polanski knows that in telling the story everything depends on the specifics. Exactly what kind of house would a man in his position own? What would it say about his personality or his existence? He then probes the atmospherics of the environment itself. People do not exist in a vacuum. They must live within nature itself whether it's a comfortably warm spring or the coldest day of winter. This also has an effect on the story. In this film, we find ourselves trapped in a claustrophobic fortress of a beach house that sits by a raging sea during the winter. Everything is so cold and soaking wet that the characters feel the pressure within and without.

What results is not something that can be pulled apart easily but a complex totality that equals the sum of all the careful choices made throughout. Even a "throwaway" scene of the ghost writer (Ewan McGregor) sitting in his London flat has the complete authenticity of a lived in space. The details root the characters in a coherent world. The sharply motivated characters root the plot in a coherent series of actions. Even the most mundane of dialogue scenes in the film has a certain wit due to the fact that every character in the scene seems poised with his or her own clear agenda. Everyone is up to something and their actions are all in some way, manipulative. The first meeting between Prime Minister Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan) and his new ghost writer has him sweating from a morning run and sitting on the couch with his legs wide open as though he was waiting for the young man to "service" him. The dialogue is accompanied by smiles but what lies beneath is an expression of power. A brief chat late in the film between the ghost writer and a quiet, seemingly unassuming man named Paul Emmett(Tom Wilkinson)has so much tension you almost expect the room to explode.

The Ghost Writer is the kind of story that often does not work because the filmmaker fails to find the proper balance between ambiguity and outright incomprehension. It's important to keep the audience watching exactly what needs to be watched in order to follow the narrative. Many filmmakers cannot separate the wheat from the chaff and the result is a muddle. What Polanski has done here is to focus the attention on the primary mysteries in the narrative and leave much of the follow-up questions and details simply suggested onscreen. He does this in a very sly manner as always with images that create impressions in the mind that you play back later when there is more context. A statement about flashlights on the beach witnessed on the night the former ghost writer drowned is echoed by an image of the Prime Minister's wife Ruth (Olivia Williams) going for a night walk followed by her bodyguard armed with a flashlight.

Polanski's eye for casting has lost none of its edge, particularly among the supporting roles. A shockingly bald James Belushi registers immediately as a no nonsense book publisher, Kim Cattrall reminds you that she once played other roles besides Samantha, Eli Wallach still seems as vibrant as he was in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Tom Wilkinson nearly takes over the movie in his 5 minutes onscreen. As for the main cast, Brosnan's slightly detached air is used very well in the role of a Prime Minister who was a former actor and Olivia Williams gives a very complex performance in what could've been a completely lame femme fatale role. But the real surprise is Ewan McGregor who finally fulfills the promise he displayed a decade ago as a bona fide leading man. McGregor carries the film very well and with great charm and humor.

Humor is one of the film's real surprises too. Though The Ghost Writer is a conspiracy thriller, it's not what Stephen King once referred to as a "thudding humorless tract". It is actually a very funny film with some wonderfully cynical dialogue delivered with deadpan skill by McGregor and cast. Polanski has plenty of time to include his characteristic absurdist touches as well. A strange running gag about sandwiches may not register with some but a great visual joke involving the beach house caretaker's futile attempts to sweep up the deck amid howling winds presents the entire film in a single image. As Mcgregor says near the end of the film, "None of this will fucking matter." Polanski says just as much in the film's witty final shot. It's cruel, tragic, shocking, clever and absolutely hilarious at the same time. Most of all, it seemed completely effortless.



Dir. Roman Polanski. 2010. PG-13. 128mins. Ewan McGregor, Pierce Brosnan, Olivia Williams, Kim Cattrall, Tom Wilkinson, James Belushi, Timothy Hutton, Eli Wallach

KINETOFILM SCORE: 5/5

SHUTTER ISLAND Film Review

by Brian Holcomb

KINETOFILM SCORE: 4/5

NOTE: While I have done my best to avoid "Spoilers" in this review it is very difficult to discuss Shutter Island without making allusions which MAY spoil the story for you. If this is a problem for you, then read this review AFTER you see the movie.

Dennis Lehane's novel is one of those tricky narratives that can be a booby trap for unseasoned filmmakers. At first glance it seems like prime B movie material: a puzzling mystery set in an old, dark island asylum during a terrible storm. With violent waves crashing the rocks and an old lighthouse, you can imagine it in flickering black and white on the late show. Had it been written in his lifetime, Alfred Hitchcock himself may have been inspired to adapt it. It's clear Scorsese saw it that way. He's crafted a movie that could act as a film school essay on Hitch's methods of subjective POV, geography shots, and shell game deception. Or as the director said himself in the elaborate ad he created for Freixenet wine The Key to Reserva, "It has to be the way he (Hitchcock) would've made the picture then only making it now. If he were alive making it now, he would make it now as if he made it back then." Seen this way, it appears to be nothing more than an exercise in style. But Scorsese has more up his sleeve than a dead director's trademarked bag of tricks and with the unique challenges presented by the material he needed them.

Leonardo DiCaprio makes his fourth film with Scorsese in the role of U.S. Marshall Teddy Daniels, a man who appears to be very much on edge as he meets his new partner Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) on a ferry riding rough seas towards the sinister looking Shutter Island. The island is located in Boston harbor and is the location of the high security Ashcliffe Asylum "for the criminally insane". The year is 1954 and they have been called in to investigate the case of Rachel Solondo, a dangerous patient who drowned her own children and has somehow, inexplicably disappeared from her cell.

Strangely, Daniels seems less interested in the specific case of Solondo so much as confirming certain suspicions he has of those running the loony bin. These would be the pipe smoking Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley) and the particularly sinister Dr. Naehring (Max Von Sydow). Both seem shifty to him. Daniels seems shifty to us.

The story is set in a nervous 1954 with one foot in nuclear and communist paranoia and the other in the horrors of Nazi atrocities in WW2. Teddy Daniels knows those firsthand having been part of the liberation forces at Dachau. These memories haunt him almost as much as those of his dead wife (Michelle Williams) and children. He tells Aule that they died in a fire started by a man named Andrew Laeddis. He believes Laeddis is now a patient at the asylum. When Aule asks him if this is his personal reason for coming to the island, Daniels claims he's after something bigger.

So is Scorsese. Shutter Island is the kind of material that Hollywood loves. A twisty thriller with what M. Night Shyamalan would promote as a mind blowing ending. Of course, this is the very booby trap I mentioned earlier. Making a film that is dependent on some last minute "switcheroo" is a recipe for disaster. Particularly if it involves invalidating what we've been watching for nearly the entire running time. This is about as close to an "it's all just a dream" ending as they come. The challenge is in how to handle this twist so that it does not come completely out of left field and yet still remains surprising in its specifics. As David Mamet once said about endings, a good one should be both surprising and inevitable.

Hitchcock "back then" may have toyed with the material to see if it could be redesigned for better cinematic suspense. He had done this with the Pierre Boulle-Thomas Narcejac novel that was the basis for Vertigo. By shifting the structure slightly, he let the audience know important information about the surprise ending BEFORE James Stewart, the protagonist, did in order to trade shock for tension. But even he may have been dumbfounded by this novel. Most likely it would've been sent straight to his TV unit at Revue Studios instead.The material is really best suited for a half hour Alfred Hitchcock Presents because at that length audiences would not feel cheated by the duplicitous plotting and narrative illogic. Not to mention that the story comes ready made with one of the show's trademark ironic fade outs designed to haunt the audience afterwards. Only here we get some extra emotional wallop due to DiCaprio's fine performance (quite possibly the best work he's ever done) and from the film's references to the real life horrors carried out by mental health institution in the 1950s.


Scorsese seems to have been keenly aware of these challenges himself. But his solution is remarkable in its simplicity. He directs a single movie that tells the story of Teddy Daniels instead of one that pretends to be about a mysterious disappearance on Shutter Island that suddenly becomes about Teddy Daniels. He lays the trick virtually bare and lets the audience suspect that things aren't what they appear to be from the start.

It's an approach that is risky and one that won't work for everyone. There is always the danger that the audience will get too "into" the Rachel Solondo disappearance plot. Those audiences will most likely hate this movie with a passion. But most viewers should find much to enjoy in Shutter Island. A good deal of it is an exercise in style and few filmmakers are as accomplished in this department as Scorsese. The film drowns you immediately into a paranoid and physically threatening atmosphere that never lets up for most of its 138 minutes. The island itself is a triumph of production design and digital fx work. It's exactly the frightening place you would imagine a gothic madhouse to be located. The feeling of the cold and wet is all over the film due to a setting surrounded by water below and from the tumultuous skies above. All of it is expressed as being seen from Teddy's POV and Scorsese encourages cinematographer Robert Richardson to let the lens go wide, the shots to shift speeds, and to play in subtle reverse motion. The film is in color but that color is grey. You have to go back to Kubrick's The Shining to find a film as extreme in its attempt to envelope the viewer in a singular isolated mood. Scorsese was clearly thinking about the Kubrick film as several shots reference it directly and he has his old buddy and music supervisor Robbie Robertson select intense atonal music from Kubrick favorites like Ligeti. So we get a movie that looks very much like Hitchcock but sounds like Kubrick.

The casting is impeccable. Every second of the film features some of the finest actors working today. Some are only in one scene but they make so much out of their small moments that the characters linger long after. Besides the fine work by Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley, Michelle Williams and Max Von Sydow in larger roles, you get amazing turns by Jackie Earle Haley, Ted Levine, Emily Mortimer, Elias Koteas and Patricia Clarkson. But even with that amazing cast, this is really DiCaprio's show and the actor creates a sense of desperation and human frailty that overpowers the film's narrative chicanery. Because of his fine work, the movie ends up being a whole lot more emotionally moving than you'd imagine it would be.


Besides, it's a Scorsese movie and this is a filmmaker who is still possessed by passion-he seems very, very excited by the Hitchcockian images, the chance to do some Red Shoes type expressionism and to dig into a mood filled with massive guilt. Beyond plot and character, Shutter Island is a visual poem about the loss of self, the loss of humanity and the overwhelming tidal wave of grief that is sometimes locked within.



Shutter Island
Director: Martin Scorsese
Writer: Laeta Kalogridis from the novel by Dennis Lehane
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley, Michelle Williams, Max Von Sydow, Emily Mortimer, Patricia Clarkson, Jackie Earle Haley, Elias Koteas, Ted Levine
Running Time: 138 minutes

ENCOUNTER WITH THE UNKNOWN (1973) Film Review

by Brian Holcomb

This is an early entry in a genre often called "Speculation". Though some of it is narrated by the inimitable Rod Serling, it has its roots not in his Twilight Zone but rather in John Newland's series One Step Beyond. As opposed to the openly fictional format of Zone,Beyond dramatized supposedly true stories of the paranormal. This film states that its trio of weird tales are based on the paranormal case studies of a "Dr. Jonathan Rankin" -

"Dr. Rankin had researched, between 1949 and 1970, hundreds of cases of psychic phenomena, and discovered that 453 cases of strange phenomena had occurred to people who were buried in only 23 cemeteries in the US."

My advice is: Don't believe the hype. These are three not-very-scary stories, one of which, "The Girl on the Bridge" is a well known urban legend more commonly known as "The Vanishing Hitchhiker". The stories are very predictable and thin but I must admit to being quite spooked out by the movie's form when I first saw it as a kid. It's shot on 16mm film so badly processed that it appears to be Super-8mm and the soundtrack is dubbed worse than a Kung-Fu movie. The sound recording appears to have been done with one of those cheap cassette recorders with the warbling speakers. A mono track that is completely hollow sounding and stranger yet, many of the voices do not seem to be those of the actors onscreen. But there is something in the slipshod style that begins to get under the skin. The blurry images and stiff line readings create a sense of dislocation and mystery, a separate reality. The film also keeps recycling images and dialogue over and over to pad out the running time and this too has an unnerving effect. In the first story, the grieving mother of a teenage boy killed during a prank gone wrong casts a spell on the three kids who were responsible.



“Listen you well to my word. One by land, two by sky...look to the heptagon for it is there, seven times around go the three of you, and may your reward by just and true.”

The film is too amateurishly made to give any real credit too but if this were the work of someone like Kubrick or Polanski, one would argue that the repetition of her warning throughout the segment was done to evoke a feeling of the cyclical nature of the curse-that "seven times around go the three of you". The thing about this creepy form is that if someone were to study this film and use it's strengths with a purpose we may really have something.

In any case, the film is entirely unique and once seen can never be forgotten. This is more than I can say about many films I have seen with much better production values and craft.

KINETOFILM SCORE: 2/5

THE SHOOTING Film Review

by Brian Holcomb

This nearly abstract existential western by Monte Hellman was made at the same time as the somewhat more conventional Ride in the Whirlwind. It was the usual Corman plan in which two similar films with interchangeable casts were shot back to back. Both films have their qualities, though I personally lean more towards this one simply because the film is so damn enigmatic. It's a film which finds a corner of your mind and stays there for a long time.

Warren Oates plays Will Gashade who, along with his simple minded sidekick Coley (Will Hutchins), agrees to guide a mysterious and cruel young woman (Millie Perkins) through some rough desert territory. Throughout their tension filled journey Gashade gets the feeling that they are being followed by a third party, someone the woman is aware of and is signaling from time to time. This turns out to be the brutal thug Billy Spear (Jack Nicholson). What these people want from Gashade and Coley is not known. They seem to have very clear objectives of where they want to go and how they want to get there. As their journey wears on, several of the horses die, the water supply runs out, Coley is left behind, and Gashade, aware that Billy intends to kill them, begins to execute a plan to get out of the situation.

This is about all the literal plot that exists onscreen. It's suggested that the events have something to do with Gashade's brother Coin, who may have been involved in the death of some "little person" in a nearby town. Whether this is a reference to a child is never made clear. At the end of the film the mysterious young woman seems to have reached her goal, firing her gun at a strange figure she clearly recognizes hiding up in the rocks. Gashade tries to stop her but she and the other man kill each other before he can do anything. The man on the rock is played by Warren Oates as well and when Oates as Gashade sees him, he calls out his brother's name over and over as the film ends, "Coin!".

Now whether this woman was out to kill Coin for revenge is open to much speculation. Perhaps Coin was involved in the death of the "little person" mentioned by Gashade in the beginning of the film. What is most intriguing about The Shooting is the constant sense of undefined menace throughout. The film has an otherwordly feel as though the action were taking place on the surface of the moon. Three lone people surrounded by vast areas of open space-it's an agoraphobic's nightmare. Like a Harold Pinter play, the excellent screenplay by Carole Eastman plays on ambiguity from all sides. The tension comes from each character trying to gain advantage over the other in some way.


Visually, Hellman shoots the film in a very clean, spare manner. He makes excellent use of very short but quick tracking shots and fills the screen with open spaces which seem to be drowning his characters.

The climax is as puzzling as the weird freeze frame that ends Walter Hill's Southern Comfort but it doesn't come off as some kind of arty addendum since the whole film was designed around this mystery. We may not know the exact details of what went on among these 5 characters but it doesn't really matter. Just like a news story in which we are told what happened to who, where, when and how, the WHY is often something no one can understand. It's the mystery of human nature itself.

KINETOFILM SCORE: 5/5

THE FOG (1980) Film Review

by Brian Holcomb

John Carpenter follows up his tremendously successful Halloween with what was intended to be a throwback to the classic, suggestive horrors of Val Lewton. He half achieves this but because of last minute reshoots designed to make the film scarier for a modern audience, we are left with a film that's a bit schizophrenic in it's approach.

The story is a simple and very old fashioned campfire tale. In fact, it's all laid out for us by cranky John Houseman scaring the shit out of some kids around an actual campfire in the film's prologue. I'll let him sum it up:

"Almost midnight. Enough time for one more story. One more story before midnight, just to keep us warm. In five minutes, it'll be the 21rst of April. One hundred years ago on the 21rst of April, out in the waters around Spivey Point, a small clipper ship drew toward land. Suddenly, out of the night, the fog rolled in. For a moment, they could see nothing, not a foot ahead of them. And then, they saw a light. My God, it was a fire burning on the shore. Strong enough to penetrate the swirling mist. They steered a course toward the light. But it was a campfire, like this one. The ship crashed against the rocks. The hull sheared in two. The mast snapped like a twig.And the wreckage sank with all the men aboard. At the bottom of the sea lay the Elizabeth Dane with her crew, their lungs filled with saltwater, their eyes open and staring
into the darkness."

And of course they will rise from the dead on this night, the night that the community of Antonio Bay celebrates its centennial, to get their revenge. It's a little more complicated than that what with Father Malone (Hal Holbrook) mumbling about how the founding fathers stole the land from those doomed sailors. But it's a simple tale at heart, what Stephen King called a "Tale of the Hook" in his fine book on the horror genre, Danse Macabre, stories which bypassed the intellect for true, primal fears.

What Carpenter and his fine collaborator the late Debra Hill were so good at during this time was in crafting suspenseful, slow burn horror stories with multiple storylines. Halloween used the Dr. Loomis storyline to create real suspense and dread as the Shape stalked Laurie Strode and her friends. Loomis' pursuit elevated Michael Meyers into an abstraction of evil that the stalk and slash scenes could not by themselves. In The Fog they attempt to do something similar but perhaps influenced by Stephen King's very skillful manipulation of story and character in Salem's Lot, they take it to another level. Instead of running two main storylines, The Fog juggles quite a few more and attempts to create a real sense of community within its fictional Antonio Bay. This is all held together with an almost Altman-esque device: the local DJ Stevie Wayne (Adrienne Barbeau) whose sultry voice spins late night jazz records from her dream of a radio station atop the Bay's spooky lighthouse.

Starting with Assault on Precinct 13, Carpenter had been perfecting what I would term a "NIGHT OF THE DAY BEFORE THE NIGHT" structure which worked like gangbusters for tension building stories. It's a classically 24 hour three part structure which allowed for a suggestive beginning that hinted at the dangers to come in the NIGHT. Followed by some slow building exposition and establishment of character and setting in the DAY BEFORE. This eventually gives way to a long final sequence which blows the lid off the tension in a series of intense set pieces. This is the third act or THE NIGHT. It's a structure normally used for classical Greek tragedy as laid out by Aristotle in his Poetics. An integration of all the dramatic unities-time, place and action.

The Fog follows this structure to a "T " and much of the film's overall effect is the result of this form. However the film fails to achieve the sense of completeness that Halloween did because its goals are so much more ambitious. Although the film is very slickly made, it was still produced on a very low budget. The slick look is the result of not only Carpenter's own grasp of craft and widescreen composition but also the beautiful night photography of Dean Cundey, a cinematographer who was known to be both skilled and fast.

However, the budget required a more restrained approach that goes against the massive buildup of the film's first two acts. The film's STORY promises that there will be a large celebration in town for it's centennial, including the unveiling of a memorial to the film's murderous founding fathers. It promises that the fog will roll in during these celebrations and much like the beach attack in Jaws would result in apocalyptic mayhem. Ghostly sailors emerging from the fog to shed blood as our main characters flee for safety. As staged in the final film, the ending feels unfinished and underproduced. There IS a town celebration but it seems that only about 10 people could make it that night and the memorial itself is underwhelming, reminding one of the tiny STONEHENGE from This is Spinal Tap.

But this is a small complaint. The Fog is a movie I've seen hundreds of times and will watch anytime it's on TV. It has so much wonderful atmosphere and that amazing, inimitable music that can only be John Carpenter even when it's Ennio Morricone (See or rather listen to THE THING). A flawed gem.

KINETOFILM SCORE 3.5/5

PIRANHA Film Review

by Brian Holcomb

Look at that poster. If there was ever a poster that came closer to capturing the tone of a movie it's this one by artist John Solie. A sly parody of the Jaws poster, it has a look that evokes MAD Magazine with the goofy looking oversize Piranha and the odd margin jokes all over the image. The 1978 film was the solo debut of the very underrated director Joe Dante and was written by none other than John Sayles. On the surface, it was a familiar product for Roger Corman's New World Pictures-a knockoff of a big budget hit. But in actuality it was more of a mischievous poker faced parody of its bigger budgeted progenitor.

Opening just like Jaws with hiking teenagers going skinny dipping and getting skinned, the story establishes its "mad scientist" plot by having them sneak into a swimming pool at a private research facility. Turns out that the US government had a program called OPERATION RAZORTEETH which involved genetic engineering of "normal" Piranha in order for them to be able to survive in fresh water and be used in the rivers of Vietnam. Of course, these razorteethed fish are released into the local rivers and it becomes a race of time before kids at a summer camp and a lake resort get placed on the menu.

Featuring a great cast of B movie icons and Corman regulars, the film is an early example of using the conventions of casting in order to make a satirical point. Actors like Dick Miller, Kevin McCarthy, and Barbara Steele are really only there to remind you of the famous films they are known for and how the characters in those films connect to this one. Dante and Sayles have a great deal of fun with the fact that their story of government created killer fish is completely ridiculous. In jokes are everywhere but without any reduction of violence or horror. This is the completely unique genre that Dante and Sayles established here and perfected in their next collaboration, The Howling. Films which operate as parodies of both a specific film and genre as well as film conventions themselves but which also play as effective examples of those genres as well. It's a post modern way of having your cake and eating it too.

DEMENTIA 13 Film Review

By Brian Holcomb

One of the many low budget shockers produced in the wake of Alfred Hitchcock's pop culture phenomenon Psycho, Dementia 13 is a surprisingly effective knockoff with unique qualities of its own. The oft told story is that Francis Ford Coppola saw an opportunity to make his first official feature film while recording sound for Roger Corman's The Young Racers on location in Ireland. He knew that Corman could never resist shooting a second film once on location since the major costs of shipping actors, crew and equipment had already been spent. So, Coppola sat up late for three nights and banged out a script with just enough exploitation elements to receive Corman 's financial blessing. With cash in hand, Coppola dove headfirst into his first "major" production, a film which has as much to do with Psycho as it presages the work of Italian filmmakers in the giallo genre.

People always marvel at the fact that Coppola wrote the screenplay in three nights. Well, this is a focused man who once wrote a script ("Pilma, Pilma") in a SINGLE night. Trying to get out of the draft by flunking his physical, Coppola fueled himself with cup after cup of black coffee and wrote a script that went on to win UCLA's prestigious Samuel Goldwyn Award. Now, THAT may have been a good script but Dementia 13 is clearly the work of a writer feverishly banging out pages over three days.Instead of Billy Wilder's goal of a screenplay that was a "clockwork mechanism", this script was a "patchwork mechanism". It's contrived, convoluted, and highly inconsistent in quality. It's also breathlessly spontaneous and desperately brilliant at times, erupting out of the mundane as though the man's mind was gasping for air trying to push the story along.

The thing is, the script didn't have to be very good at all. What had to be good were the set pieces and the filmmaking and luckily both are of very high quality. Coppola is in total command of the filmmaking from the very first scene, a rowboat ride on a lake in the blackest of nights (one of the benefits of low budget shooting was the lack of lights for many of the film's night scenes-all of which aid the film's atmosphere tremendously for appearing to be solid BLACK.) The touches of an inventive filmmaker are already present: When a man's dead body is tossed overboard, so is his transistor radio which continues to gargle rock and roll on its way to the bottom.

The central murder sequence, basically the film's "shower scene" is still one of the most atmospheric, poetic, and nightmarish horror set pieces ever photographed. It's derivative, but honestly scarier than anything in Psycho. When the conniving Louise (Luana Anders) strips down to her underwear to dive into a lake at night, Coppola designs the sequence for eroticism, poetic atmosphere, classic gothic creepiness and the revelation of a "double scare". Coppola's handling of the "double scare" is timed perfectly, shifting gears from the spooky to the shocking in just a few seconds. From the eerie image of a perfectly preserved dead little girl in an underwater grave memorial to Louise meeting a violent and painful death by ax on the shore above, the moments go off like firecrackers.

It must be added that Ronald Stein's very effective score and the photography of Charles Hannawalt contribute greatly to the film's overall effect. In fact, the film is so well made that it has withstood a public domain status which has condemned it to be seen in only the worst prints imaginable. I have never seen the film in any version that wasn't hit by a truck and it STILL works effectively.



KINETOFILM SCORE: 4/5

"W" Film Review

KINETOFILM RATING: 4/10

by Brian Holcomb

Why this film was made while Dubya was still in office is a mystery. The film is reductionary on all counts falling back upon the standard linear arc that all biopics do in the end. I think it's a genre that never really works because the very idea that the life of a human being can be contained in two, even three hours is absurd. The worst of them fall victim to using lame dimestore Freud to create a narrative arc-i.e. If only his father loved him, blah blah blah-Personally, I think the question "WHY?" could be removed from the narrative of most films and would significantly increase their quality. Who can say WHY anyone does anything you know? It's presumptuous. That said, it can work if the film focuses on one side of a person's life for a short period and uses specific episodes to examine the subject in action, observing them making decisions and mistakes that reveal something about their possible flaws. Using the micro to illuminate the macro. THE AVIATOR was pretty effective in that respect giving us hints of the man Hughes would become through the extraordinary achievements of youth. But even there the impulse to editorialize couldn't be avoided: Mom cleaning the boy, keeping him CLEAN.

A movie like CHE with Del Toro is the worst example of how to do it right. 4 Hours of merely watching the back of Che's head, observing him thinking about God knows what doesn't work either. Now a film like THE HOURS AND THE TIMES got it right-it's about what may have happened on the weekend John Lennon spent with Brian Epstein. A weekend that may have had them share a more intimate encounter. The film doesn't dramatize a series of facts-Lennon being born, going to school, hooking up with Paul, George and Ringo in a series of "meet cutes". No, it's really just about these two guys on one weekend. The film just lets the audience hang out with Lennon and to let our own imaginations fill in the details of where he came from and the tragic end we all know will come. I think this approach is smart-for example the great Bob Dylan Documentary DON'T LOOK BACK gives me a clearer image of who the young Bob Dylan was than any 4 hour biopic could.

You might expect a harsh attack on President Bush from the director of JFK. But this is more like an affectionate kick in the groin of a good old boy you'd like to have a beer with, or with W today, a near Beer. Josh Brolin does fine work as the title letter but leaves you with the sneaking suspicion that Will Ferrell could've done it just as well. The film's satirical tone is not far removed from an SNL skit to begin with. All in all Stone is almost too fair to Bush throughout. He saves his bile for Dick Cheney (Richard Dreyfus) and Condelezza Rice (Thandie Newton), portraying Cheney as a conniving rat and Rice as a smiling harpy. Dreyfus does a good job of creating a real character out of his cariacatured material but Newton goes straight over the top and onto the White House lawn.

SHERLOCK HOLMES Film Review

KINETOFILM SCORE: 5/10

Like James Bond and Batman, Sherlock Holmes is the latest character to get the fashionable reboot. This has proven to be a successful approach both financially and critically as the 2.0 versions of those classic characters have retained their core essence while allowing for changes that appeal to modern audiences who have seen it all. Even when they haven't. I'm sure many have little more than second hand knowledge of the Sherlock Holmes character and some may even think he was an actual person. Unfortunately he was not. But he and his world were so powerfully conceived by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle that what was nothing more than ink on the page began to take root in the human imagination as flesh. Holmes, like Dracula or Tarzan, could not be bound within the pages of a story but rather became the property of the world, of popular culture, and what many take to be the very essence of Holmes is not so much Doyle but the the work of his adapters-Sidney Paget who drew the original illustrations featuring the deerstalker cap and Inverness cape, William Gillette who brought Holmes to the stage, and Universal Studios whose series of films with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce even pitted the great detective against the Nazis.

I am a huge fan of the Holmes stories but I don't cry foul when I see him changed for the screen. I really like many of the films in the Rathbone series and certainly enjoyed his take on the character. I liked what Peter Cushing did with the part in the Hammer films version of The Hound of the Baskervilles and even enjoyed Christopher Plummer's slightly more emotional Holmes in Bob Clark's underrated Murder By Decree. Besides, as far as I am concerned the definitive version of the stories has already been produced. No one is likely to better the Granada TV productions starring the late Jeremy Brett with their intense fidelity to the character and letter of Doyle's stories. But that was a TV show and this current offering is meant to be a motion picture franchise. So, I fully expected a great many changes. In other words, I went in with an open mind.

It shut pretty quickly.

But not because Holmes was now a two fisted action hero who spends his spare time in cage matches. And not because Watson was a master of stick fighting. And surely not because Guy Ritchie applied all his Lock, Stock techniques to introduce the Victorian Era to some Rocknrolla. In all honesty this is some of Ritchie's most effective visual filmmaking ever. Besides, it's clear that he was nothing more than the hired help here.

No, the problem really wasn't with Holmes, Watson, Ritchie, Downey Jr, Jude Law or even Madonna. And the concept of this "Sherlock Holmes 2.0" wasn't the problem. The actual movie itself was the problem. See, there was none. The film called Sherlock Holmes that has been raking in the money at the box office this Christmas season does not really exist at all. It's an illusion. A Jedi Mind Trick. The film fades in...well, no...it explodes in... and immediately plunges you into all this crazy action involving cloaked occultists, women strapped to altars, and Holmes and Watson as a Victorian dynamic duo rescuing the damsel in distress at the last second.

And that's about it for the next 2 hours.

It's a movie with all the fine side dishes you would ever want for a Thanksgiving dinner only someone forgot the turkey. Somewhere in the middle of the 110th chase scene you start to realize that you really have no idea why Holmes is chasing these people or if he's running away from them. Or why Holmes is even there. Watson you are less sure of since he's supposed to be getting married or something. But on the movie goes, Hans Zimmer tap dancing his jaunty Morricone-influenced score over all the cracks in the structure, Ritchie flying his camera all around a CG London, and Downey Jr trying to distract you from everything through sheer performance. He almost achieves it too the way he did with Tony Stark in Iron Man, making you forget you were watching nothing more than a CG robot flying around for almost the entire running time. But in this Sherlock he was defeated by both the weight of nothingness and the unwillingness to allow the film to coast on nothingness.

If the film just dropped all pretense of the supposed story about evil Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong) and his resurrection from the grave and just gave the film a simpler mystery to follow then the audience could relax and enjoy the banter and shenanigans of Holmes and Watson going around London conducting a boy's adventure. It could allow the actors to drive the movie the way Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo and Hatari did. Both films were designed as a kind of feature length sitcom-focusing entirely on "fun and games" between characters loosely tied to a central plot. It was a lesson that Hawks learned from making The Big Sleep, realizing that all that damn Chandler plotting was getting in the way of his good movie. "Who the hell cares who killed Owen Taylor?"

Much of this film reminds me of the way several of the '70s Bond films were supposedly made-random action scenes shot with stuntmen to capitalize on snow for ski chases or whatever would later be stitched into the story via closeups of Roger Moore. The screenwriter's challenge was to figure out how to tie them together. Here, screenwriters Michael Robert Johnson and Anthony Peckham shovel the largest pile of BS they could find to tie up the loose ends of their stream of consciousness narrative and just put it into Sherlock's mouth in the "big ol' mystery reveal" climax. Objects randomly chosen throughout the film are connected by Holmes like the worst game ever played of Clue-

"It was Lord Blackwood in the graveyard with the raven's beak and Col. Mustard's revolver. See. I'm such a brilliant detective I spent a few hours in the editing room watching the whole movie over again and this is the only reasonable explanation I can offer. Remember once you've eliminated the impossible whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. Even this total bullshit."

SHERLOCK HOLMES(2009)
Directed by Guy Ritchie
Screenplay by Michael Robert Johnson and Anthony Peckham
Cast: Robert Downey, Jr, Jude Law, Rachel McAdams, Mark Strong, Kelly Reilly
Distributor: Warner Bros.
Running Time: 128 minutes
Rating: PG-13

SOMETHING EVIL Film Review

By Brian Holcomb

"Spielberg" is about as definitive a brand as there is in modern cinema. Both in content and cinematic style, the director has exhibited an effortless consistency throughout his large body of work. Perhaps only Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock have ever come near to this filmmaker's personal connection to mass audiences and immediate brand name recognition. Spielberg's position today as a kind of three headed dragon-technically proficient filmmaker, entrepreneur/businessman, and sometime studio executive- is secure. But his role as personal artist and "auteur", remains controversial. His tremendous box office success is partly responsible for this since elitist folklore suggests that high profit must equal low art. But it's also due to a certain shift in the contemporary definition of "auteur". What was once a theory that proposed that a director could express himself personally through random studio assignments came to be a label for the singular writer-director-genius and the cult of personality. Spielberg is clearly the last auteur standing from the original "Hitchcock-o-Hawksians" that championed everyone from Anthony Mann to Edgar G Ulmer. Because of this, his days as a television director for hire are very informative, as they illustrate the classic conflict between Hollywood's industrial production methods, committed to generating popular genre material for mass consumption, and the expressions of auteurism between the frames.

So much of Spielberg's early career as a contract director at Universal is mired by legend(much of that trumped up by the director himself) and by the very unavailability of the films themselves. Duel is a known quantity, but his follow-up to that film, Something Evil remains largely unseen. This is a great shame as it's a fascinating film both in terms of Spielberg's own development as a filmmaker and for how it anticipates many of the motifs of later films in the horror genre.

The film originally aired on the CBS network on January 21, 1972. In terms of it's status as a genre product, the film was produced to fill a slot in the CBS schedule and to capture an audience who, by 1972, had become gripped by tales of the occult. The early '70s was a fertile period for the TV movie, particularly of the suspense, horror and mystery genres and Something Evil was typical of the style, quite similar on paper to Crowhaven Farm(1970) for example. The story by Robert Clouse, who would later become best known as a specialist in martial arts films such as Enter the Dragon(1973) and Black Belt Jones(1974), is quite derivative and formulaic. Clouse's final teleplay is better than the story, however, but it's Spielberg's direction that really holds it together.

Set in the rural farmlands of Bucks County, Pennsylvania with its old country houses and barns adorned with Hex symbols, Something Evil tells the story of artist Marjorie Worden(Sandy Dennis) who moves into a new home with her Advertising Exec husband Paul(Darren McGavin), and their children Stevie(Johnny Whitaker) and Laurie (Debbie and Sandy Lempert). Tired of life in the hustle bustle of the big city, the open spaces of the country seem to be the perfect place to settle down and raise their family. Marjorie soon begins to experience strange events and comes to believe that their home and the land around it is the devil's playground. Being left alone with the children day in and day out, Marjorie slowly begins to lose her sanity. It appears that a demon may be trying to possess her. The isolation and atmosphere around the house take their toll on her and soon she fears what she might do to her children, that her will is not her own. Paul becomes concerned as she seems to be abusing the children. A friendly neighbor, Harry Lincoln (Ralph Bellamy), tries to help her confront the evil and save her family from spiritual corruption.

The horror genre is about as cannibalistic as they come, so there's less mileage to be gained from discussing the derivative elements than there is in examing how those elements are finally used. Granted, the story is a tossed salad of early '70s occult motifs crafted under the notion that the viewing audience simply wants more of the same. The rural setting is probably lifted from Thomas Tryon's "The Other" while the demonic possession theme is clearly influenced by "Rosemary's Baby", "The Mephisto Waltz" and, of course, William Peter Blatty's novel "The Exorcist". But it's important to remember that this was 1972, and though far from perfect, Clouse's script is a strong example of how something derivative can also push the genre into new directions. As a haunted house thriller of sorts, the script has less in common with earlier films such as The Uninvited or The Haunting than it does with films that followed it like Burnt Offerings, The Shining, The Amityville Horror, Mario Bava's Shock and Spielberg's own Poltergeist. In fact, much of Poltergeist's plot is so similar to Something Evil that it could be argued that the one was the pencil sketch for the other. Both films revolve around children who are threatened by supernatural forces in their homes and feature mothers who have to find the inner strength in order to face the evil and save them. But in this case, the sketch version is actually the more adult of the two. Where Poltergeist was designed to be a summer roller coaster ride of shocks and special effects, Something Evil deals very seriously with the subject of evil. Not only as an abstraction in terms of devils and demons, but of the kind of evil that exists in the everyday. Near the end of the film, Marjorie locks her children in their bedroom. Talking to them through the door, she confesses that she cannot trust herself anymore, that they need to stay away from her because she isn't sure she can keep from hurting them. As great as it is, this is the horror that Stanley Kubrick failed to achieve in The Shining. The horror of a loving parent who has become a monster and that of the parent themselves who are losing their grip on reality.

The most inspired element of Clouse's script is that it doesn't play the horror directly but rather takes a cue from Henry James' "The Turn of the Screw" and presents the story in a more ambiguous fashion. It's not quite as ambiguous as the James story but there is an attempt to suggest that much of the supernatural could be the imaginings of the lonely and isolated Marjorie Worden. This characterization of Marjorie can be traced back to Rosemary Woodhouse herself and the heroine of John Hancock's Lets Scare Jessica to Death released just a year earlier. All of these women are presented as feeling somewhat inadequate in the face of their responsibilities and fear that what they might be seeing is not so much supernatural as a telltale sign of paranoia and madness.

No matter its strengths, it's not the script that makes Something Evil memorable but rather the energy and vibrance of Spielberg's direction. In 1972, Spielberg was coming off of the success of Duel and the flurry of offers from other studios to direct a theatrical feature film. But he was still bound by the original 7 year contract he signed with Universal. Forced to sit around with nothing to do, he jumped at the chance to direct Something Evil if only as a technical exercise. As opposed to Duel , whose quality a humble Spielberg claims today to be about 99 per cent the work of writer Richard Matheson, Something Evil was random, episodic, and actionless with characters that weren't very well drawn. The same script handled by a more journeyman director would've resulted in nothing more than an extended Night Gallery episode with long stretches of padding. What Spielberg does to solve this problem is to expand on the ideas in the script, to try and find visual means to express the more abstract themes of the story. Unlike Duel or even Jaws, the story had no clear antagonist, no devil with horns who jumps out of the closet. His solutions were startlingly effective and very simple.

The first thing Spielberg does is to cast the film in a very Hitchcockian manner, using typecasting to fill in the sketchy characters. The three main players are cast not only for their skills as actors but for the on-screen history they carry with them. Sandy Dennis won an Academy Award in 1966 for her role in Mike Nichols' Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. By 1972, Dennis had been typecast as an eccentric and neurotic woman and this played right into the characterization of Marjorie Worden. Darren McGavin was already Carl Kolchak in The Night Stalker and brought with him a down to earth, rational and dependable quality that would carry him through countless roles in film and TV including the holiday classic A Christmas Story where he plays yet another All-American father. Ralph Bellamy, of course, brings a long history of character performances with him and allows for a sly wink to Polanski's film version of Rosemary's Baby in which he played the sinister Dr. Sapirstein. Spielberg gets strong performances out of them all, particularly Dennis who remains sympathetic even as she becomes violent and irrational.

Spielberg stages everything in an understated manner, allowing the supernatural to emerge from the natural, whether seen as a change in the intensity or direction of the wind, the swinging of a hanging barn light, or the subtle overexposure of the windows making the inside of the Worden home look like a hellish inferno . The effect created is that of the uncanny-not of shock horror, but of something not-quite-right. Most of the visual approach to the film is classic Spielberg. Scenes are played in long takes with careful blocking of actor and camera to create a kind of ballet between foreground and background action just as you would see in all of his subsequent films. The early Spielberg was highly influenced by the cinematic techniques of John Frankenheimer and the influence can be seen here, with a very energetic editing rhythm and the use of extreme telephoto and wide angle lenses for dramatic effect. Frankenheimer's 1966 film Seconds is very interesting in this regard as much of it looks like an early Spielberg textbook.The use of the long lens in the opening teaser coupled with slow motion creates a dream-like effect. Narratively, the former owner of the Worden home is seen running from the house to the second level of the barn and sensing a presence approaching him, falls to his death. Spielberg stages it in extreme slow motion and alternates between the compression of telephoto lenses and the extreme distortion of the wide angle lens to create a sense of mystery out of the ordinary.

But the most effective sequence in the film is the night walk taken by Marjorie when she is awakened by the sound of a child crying somewhere on the property. The choice of the child's cry is particularly specific, not the wailing that might be imagined but rather a plaintive series of cries and half-heard words from a child of about two or three years old who is being teased or abused. It always sounds farther away from Marjorie and causes her to look all about the house, checking the children's room and finding them sound asleep and finally outside to the old barn. Marjorie finds no child in here but rather a very startling and oddly disturbing abstraction. Opening an old woodburning stove, she discovers what appears to be a mason jar filled with some kind of pulsating and illuminated red goo. This one visual is one of Spielberg's most effective in the film as the object returns several times later in different places in the house, each time accompanied by the cries of the child as though the two things were somehow connected. The effect is quite surreal and unlike anything Spielberg has done in his later career. It's more like something you'd find in a David Lynch or Stanley Kubrick film.

Something Evil is an unfairly forgotten film in the career of Steven Spielberg and the early 70s horror genre.As an early work by an important filmmaker, there is an honest, unjaded enthusiasm in the film that comes from youth and which Spielberg cannot compete with today. His younger self, immensely talented and armed for the first time with the facilities of a major studio, is a torrential force behind the camera. As Orson Welles once noted, the movie studio was "the biggest electric train set any boy ever had." That is, any boy obsessed with movies and with the unlimited possibilities of filmmaking.


Something Evil(Jan. 21, 1972 on CBS)
73 minutes

Production Companies Belford Productions, CBS Productions. Director Steven Spielberg. Producer Alan Jay Factor. Teleplay by Robert Clouse. Photography Bill Butler. Music Wladimir Selinsky. Editor Allan Jacobs. Art Director Albert Heschong.

Cast Sandy Dennis (Marjorie Worden), Darren McGavin (Paul Worden), Jeff Corey (Gehrmann), Ralph Bellamy (Harry Lincoln), John Rubinstein (Ernest Lincoln), Johnny Whitaker (Stevie Worden), Laurie Hagan (Beth), David Knapp (John), Debbie and Sandy Lempert (Laurie Worden), Herb Armstrong (Schiller), Margaret Avery (Irene), Norman Bartold (Hackett), Sheila Bartold (Mrs. Hackett), Lois Battle (Mrs. Faraday), Bella Bruck (Mrs. Gehrmann), Lynn Cartwright (Secretary), John J. Fox (Soundman), Alan Frost, Carl Gottlieb, John Hudkins, Crane Jackson, Michael Macready, Paul Micale, Margaret Muse, John Nolan, Bruno VeSota, Connie Hunter Ragaway, Elizabeth Rogers.

BEAT THE BASTARD DOWN Film Review

by Brian Holcomb

Jimmy Duke Traynor makes some bold claims on his website, including having made 114 movies in 12 years in all genres. If true, this would place him in the running for the Rainer Werner Fassbinder Marathon. He states that his filmmaking style is most often compared to Alfred Hitchcock and James Cameron, two directors whose exacting compositions and editing seem to have had no influence on Mr. Traynor. In the case of this “Bastard”, Traynor also claims to have made the movie in 32 hours without a script. It goes without saying that these two elements do not often result in watchable movies, so to say my expectations were low would be an understatement. That said, “Beat the Bastard Down” was more than watchable, and it appears that Jimmy Traynor may actually be able to stand behind his bold claims.

In “Beat the Bastard Down”, Steve Kovalic plays Phil, a fast-talking, womanizing real estate agent who appears to use his day job as a front for his sexual conquests. He is introduced teaching his friends all about the art of the pick-up, exuding great confidence about his seductive skills. Things take a turn for our hero when he makes the mistake of playing with the wrong lady, Vivian (played with an intense psycho-sexuality by Teddi Florence). She’s the boss at his real estate agency and has her own ideas of how to handle his rejection. After reading a book called, “Beat the Bastard Down” by the author of the bestseller, “Shove It up His Ass”, Vivian decides to put Phil through the ringer.

As you watch the movie, you quickly realize that not only are the production values low, they are virtually non-existent. The settings are everyday living rooms, bedrooms, and offices. The technical quality is like an entry on America’s Funniest Home Videos. Hand-held and lit with mostly available light, the digital camcorder visuals never pretend to be anything but digital video. The sound, while quite clear, is filled with ambience much like a children’s birthday party. You also quickly realize that none of these deficiencies actually matter. They are all swept up by the charm and wit of Jimmy Traynor’s storytelling and sheer enthusiasm that must be the drug that drives a man to make 114 movies in 12 years.

There is something intangible about Traynor’s direction which involves you in the plot and characters in a way most indie filmmakers fail to achieve. Traynor has a certain clarity of thought that may stem from the fast shooting schedule and loose approach. As for the boldness he displays on his website, this is also very much present onscreen. As a filmmaker, he has no fear in going from a battle of the sexes black comedy to a very intense voyeuristic thriller when Vivian’s fianc’e shows up looking to physically beat the bastard Phil down. The movie takes a turn like Jonathan Demme’s suddenly tense “Something Wild”, and does not lose its footing for a second. You get the impression that this young man knows exactly what he wants and is headed right for it.

As for the claim that the movie was improvised in 32 hours, I am sure that was true. The movie has all the marks of a swift production. But while the dialogue may have been improvised, the content of the dialogue and the construction of the plot must have been carefully thought out by the director prior to shooting. It’s way too well constructed to have been made up on the set. This is actually what impressed me most about the movie, the fact that it actually told a story and told it convincingly. Most movies, indie or otherwise fail at this miserably.

The cast is either just like these people in real life or talented actors under the hand of a strong director, because every single character is well served. Kovalic, in particular, is perfect in the lead role, talking in a rhythmic patter that sounds like David Mamet at the Improv. Fabrice Uzan and Ben Schyan are also excellent as Phil’s womanizing buddies, as are Molly Bruno and Kevin Tan, who both take out their frustrations on Phil with hilarious results.

In the end, however, the credit goes to Jimmy Traynor. The man is as bold as his word, and as a filmmaker seems to be ready to reach out to a bigger audience. Or perhaps it’s the other way around, since most of us have yet to catch up on his other 113 films.

Jimmy Traynor (director) / Jimmy Traynor (screenplay)
CAST: Steve Kovalic … Phil Samms
Teddi Florence … Vivian
Fabrice Uzan … Gerard
Ben Schyan … Dean
Sheri Cohen … Patty “Pat”
Leroy Taylor … Daryl

THE HURT LOCKER Film Review

by Brian Holcomb

A tough war picture in the tabloid journalist tradition of Samuel Fuller, The Hurt Locker avoids most of the sentimentalizing and editorializing of other recent films about Iraq. It focuses instead on the human drama of a trio of characters living under the sword of Damocles. Members of a bomb disposal unit, these men live moment to moment counting the days before their tour is up. Well, at least two of them. Their new Team Leader, Sgt. First Class William James (Jeremy Renner) is a guy with that thousand yard stare. He's the "man in the suit", the one who is sent into harm's way to actually diffuse the IEDs. While Sgt. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Specialist Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) sweat the days out, James seems like he's right in his element. If war is a drug, then William James is an addict.

While most films about war either glorify it or more often than not attempt to make a statement as banal as "war is hell", The Hurt Locker avoids that by just getting on with it. It simply takes place in a hellish, harsh environment full of paranoia and where the action is both exciting and terrifying at the same time. This isn't a film with designer violence but it doesn't avoid the ugly beauty of that violence either.

What really makes the film work is that Kathryn Bigelow directs it as a nail biting suspense picture rather than a war film. Like Clouzot's The Wages of Fear we watch breathlessly as James looks through wires as tangled as a plate of spaghetti. Bigelow cuts to random locals watching or walking by who may be the enemy waiting for the right moment to pull the trigger. No one can be trusted and the environment is just as threatening-landmines could be anywhere but the sand and heat do their best to make man extinct by itself.

William James is the film's central mystery. What exactly makes this man tick? Smartly, screenwriter Mark Boal and Bigelow do not answer this or even allow James to explain himself at all. We can see it in his face when he goes home for a short break. The way he looks at his wife and the dislocation he feels standing in the frozen foods section of the local supermarket. He's going cold turkey and needs a fix.

KINETOFILM SCORE: 5/5

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.

CRUISING Film Review

by Brian Holcomb

This is a film that has been obscured by controversy. A cause celeb when released in 1980, the film was rarely discussed on its own terms. Looking at it now, almost 30 years later, it boggles the mind how a film like Cruising could even get made especially with the backing of a major studio and starring one of the '70s biggest stars. It's about as dark a depiction of mankind as any you will ever see.

New York City circa 1980 as presented by director William Friedkin is completely sick. At it's best it is cruel and corrupt. At its worst, deviant and deranged. No matter how much anyone complains of the modern anti-septic NYC with its commercialized Times Square(aka "Mickey's Asshole"), it is an improvement over the conditions seen in this movie. Perhaps the city was more inviting in real life, but as seen through Friedkin's scum smeared lens, the NYC of CRUISING is a nightmare world, a contemporary Sodom or Gomorra where the cops Protect and Serve themselves amid an orgy of sex, drugs and murder.

Al Pacino plays a straight cop named Steve Burns who is sent into the pre-AIDS gay "underworld" of New York's leather bars and sex clubs to act as bait for a Jack the Ripper-like murderer preying on gay men. It seems that all of the victims resemble his physical type. Which must mean that they all had nice perms.


Burns lives with his girlfriend Nancy (Karen Allen) whom he keeps in the dark while he goes out at night and literally "cruises" the club scene. Burns is the classic voyeur, window shopping without buying. This is one of the central tensions of the film-will he or won't he? Friedkin keeps us in the dark-setting up tantalizing situations and focusing on Burns' enigmatic reactions to very blunt sexual advances before fading the scenes to black. The film unfolds in an elliptical, suggestive manner that keeps the narrative ambiguous. In fact, everything that happens in the film remains ambiguous throughout. There may be more than one killer, he may be gay or homophobic or both, Burns may have engaged in homosexual sex-or not, and finally, Burns may have committed a murder.Or not.

Friedkin makes no attempt to clear these matters up. Indeed the film is meant to be as blurry as possible. Even our ostensible protagonist-Steve Burns-is a mystery. Ambition is one thing, but a promotion in the NYPD is just not worth being sodomized in a hotel room.


At the very least, Burns seems "Bi-Curious" throughout and personally disturbed by it. His heterosexual relationship with Nancy is strained as much by his secretive work as his sexual confusion. The film's one heterosexual lovemaking scene depicts Burns violently "making love" to Nancy as though he had something to prove.

Even stranger is the film's odd shifting of POV. It begins as an omniscient narrative chronicling the activities of the killer, his victims, and the police. It then shifts into a more conventional single protagonist structure. Specifically it makes use of the "undercover cop" subgenre of crime films which hinge upon the cop identifying with his prey to the point of becoming a doppelganger to him. Burns stares into a lot of mirrors in the film, gazing at himself gazing back. But slowly, and slyly, Friedkin pulls away from him. This is a masterstroke. Burns becomes enigmatic-and even sinister in the final third of the film. He is seen as a stalker from the POV of the most likely suspect who suddenly becomes the focal character. This final shift pulls the rug out from under the viewer's feet. Burns may have been mysterious but this guy is clearly deranged, hallucinating conversations with his dead father. From this point on, we don't identify with anyone since our identification figure-Burns-has been removed. But the feeling isn't the same as it was when Janet Leigh was murdered in Psycho for example. In that film, the original protagonist was murdered not transformed. Here, Burns remains onscreen and yet he seems inexplicable. We are as uncertain about him as we are about the killer. Friedkin uses the soundtrack subliminally to keep the audience in a state of uncertainty. Music and sounds from Burns' experiences in the clubs start to bleed into his life during the day, often under other music and sounds creating a very avant garde aural collision. This feeling of uncertainty builds throughout culminating with a tense confrontation in a well lit but very threatening Central Park. At this point we are not sure about anything. By the time the end credits roll, you'll feel as though you missed something-a shapeshifting story that remains tantalizingly out of reach.

Much of the criticism of Cruising has centered on it's supposedly negative portrayal of homosexuality. The scenes in the sex clubs present open drug use, sexual promiscuity and acts such as "fisting" which are not often seen on the classical silver screen. At least not the one of Tracy and Hepburn or Astaire and Rogers. But since Friedkin is so ambiguous, the film could be saying anything. An argument could be made ( as it has been made) that it endorses the idea that homosexuality leads to psychosis and murder but one could also be made that it presents the NYPD as Nazis. Several scenes show the police using violent interrogation techniques that go way beyond water-boarding-including the positively surreal image of a large black officer wearing nothing but a cowboy hat, boots and underwear and who is brought in to pound on suspects.

Part of the problem lies in Friedkin's approach to filmmaking. He is unique among his contemporaries for exhibiting an almost complete lack of humanity in his work. Even De Palma at his most mechanical seems to care for his characters. Friedkin makes the kind of films that a pod from Invasion of the Body Snatchers might make given the chance. But this is not really a liability. It remains the reason why a film like The Exorcist is still frightening. There is something in the blankness of the author's voice that makes Friedkin's films positively chilly experiences. Cruising is a kind of apotheosis in this direction. It takes all the experimentation with form that the director was toying with in earlier films and uses them all for a single goal: the creation of an almost blank narrative where anything is possible and all things could be inferred. Cruising remains fascinating because it doesn't just ask but rather demands that the viewer fill in the blanks themselves. It is the complete opposite of the goal of most Hollywood films: the creation of as much synthesis as possible and expressions of mass emotion. Cruising intends only to get a reaction out of its audience. What that reaction is says as much about Cruising as it does about you.