Happy November

A quick update for those of you not amongst the 100s of people who end up here looking for the Zombieland poster.

• Terry Rogers from Menda City Press — who I’ve always maintained is a lovely chap — has nominated The Spirit of Shackleton for inclusion in Dzanc Book’s Best of the Net 2010 anthology, which is nice.
• Vanilla Press have taken The Air Is Getting Thinner for their inaugural edition, which is due to go live in the next few days and shall be re-announced separately with links and everything. This is also nice.
• This year’s attempt at NaNoWriMo has stalled at a feeble one word. That word is Kebab. Kebabs are nice.

Now that’s out of the way, I’ll let you scroll down to that poster, shall I?

 

Paranormal Activity

So recently, I’ve been bitching about horror movies masquerading as other things and then up pops Paranormal Activity which more or less delivers exactly what a viewer expects. It doesn’t set out to make you laugh. It doesn’t set out to bend your mind as you try to compute the continuity and implications of multiple time jumps. It sets out to scare the bejesus out of everyone who watches it.

The frights borrow heavily from chapter one of Alfred Hitchcock’s Scary Movie Making For Dummies and follow the master’s advice that the man with the axe is far scarier if you don’t see him.

The format comes from Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield, et al. And yes, that means shaky handicam shots, a half-assed explanation of discovered footage, a seemingly improvised script and a time stamp in the bottom right hand corner.

The result, despite the rather hackneyed set-up and devices, is a film that made me jump several times in the first half and would’ve continued to do so right to the end if it hadn’t been for a couple of major problems that I’ll get to in a minute.

Paranormal Activity, according to its own website, is the film that everyone is talking about and judging by some of the soundbite reviews, I could be forgiven for thinking it was going to scare me to death, or maybe turn some of my grey hair back to black. It tells the story of Micha and Katie who’ve just moved in together, into a strangely large house in suburban San Diego. Micha brings his guitar and PC, Katie brings her CDs, a sizable collection of pyjamas and the notion that she’s been tormented by an evil spirit since she was eight-years-old. For reasons never fully explained, Micha reacts to this latter discovery by investing in some home video equipment and becomes determined to capture evidence of the spooks and spectres who’ve been scaring his girlfriend. For equal reasons, Katie lets him.

Actually, this all works rather well. The two leads, like the other five characters featured in the 99 minutes, are unknowns, but they convincingly bounce off each other, have a good chemistry and authentic relationship and manage to give rather understated performances which makes the opening premise a fairly easy sell. Katie talks about this possession like it was an old teddy bear that’s just been with her forever and has really become part of her. I warmed to her and her story and wanted to believe, which is half the battle.

So. What’s the problem with the other half of the battle? Well, part of the problem is that the scares become so clearly signposted that some of the suspense just evaporates. When, for the fifth time, Micha sets up the camera in the bedroom and they go to bed, we know that something is going to happen and something always does. At the start, this amounts to nothing more than distant footsteps, whispers, shadows and a moving door. This builds as the movie progresses, and that door becomes something of a focal point, but because it’s all framed in exactly the same way, some truly shocking and terrifying moments are diluted. Katie standing motionless over Micha as he sleeps while the clock in the bottom right hand corner fast forwards through the early hours of the morning is a very effective and eerie tool the first time we see it, less so the second time. Add to that, Micha’s nonsensical discovery of internet footage of a similarly possessed woman’s exorcism and my right eyebrow is moving north.

Still, all that I could just about overlook if it wasn’t for The Main Problem. As the scares increase and lives are in danger, the reaction from the two protagonists becomes utterly unbelievable and the continued filming of both the spooky events and the daytime tension and arguments is simply baffling. By the time we get to the denouement, the main question isn’t, “What’s going to happen?” It’s, “Why are they still there, still filming?” Of course, no filming equals no film, but first-time writer and director Oren Peli needs to come up with better reasons for these things to happen and these reactions to play out. The film put down some great work in the first hour and this decision to abandon logic and hope no one notices just strives to undo all that.

None of this should detract from the fact that in places this is a scary, atmospheric film and despite the repetative nature, the bedroom scenes, more often than not, delivered a sense of dread. The fact that everything is filmed within the house on a hand-held does give the sense that there is no escape either for the couple or the viewer. Did it make me check under the bed at night? No. But it did make me realise that if I ever secretly film a ouija board’s cursor moving on its own before board bursts into flames, the least I’m going to do is check the Yellow Pages and if Bill Murray’s number turns out to be unlisted, maybe I’ll settle for an estate agent.

 

Triangle

One of these days, I’m going to go to see a horror movie and what I’ll actually sit down and watch will be a horror movie. Zombieland was a comedy and Triangle is a thiller and at this rate, Saw VI will be a western.

What ultimately makes this review a bit of a bugger to write is that Triangle is one of those films where saying too much about what it’s about would spoil the experience and what is safe to say doesn’t make it sound particularly rivetting.

Melissa George stars as Jess, a single-mother of an autistic child who goes on a sailing trip with some buddies. They go through a freak storm, their boat is overturned and they’re eventually picked up by a passing cruise ship that appears to be deserted until things go a little crazy. They stay that way until the end.

It’s the “things go a little crazy” bit that makes this such a challenging, absorbing and initially confusing film. Up until the storm, the pace is quite relaxed — pedestrian, almost — but all the way through, there’s a sense that something’s not quite right.

Apart from the remake of Amityville Horror, my only frame of reference for Melissa George was God knows how long ago when she was Angel in Home & Away so I was pleasantly surprised by how good she is here. She’s the centre of proceedings and it’s the convincing way she plays Jess as tired, edgy and distant that shepherds the movie successfully through the tentative scene-setting of the opening act and she really excels once “things go a little crazy.”

Director and writer Christopher Smith keeps the anticipation palpable and, somewhat tiring if my nerves are to be believed , never really presents the jump he promises until near the end. The result is uncomfortable, claustrophobic and unsettling for all the right reasons.

Couple of gripes. Some of the CGI is terrible. When things fall into the ocean, you’re never really in any danger of believing that something has fallen into the ocean. It happens a couple of times and only serves as a reminder that you’re in a cinema watching a movie. The second gripe, well, I can’t really mention without giving too much away, but there’s a fourth instance of something that never explained … and it needs to be explained because instances two and three are more than adequately covered.

It took Smith two years to write the movie, such were the demands of the structure and continuity. It’s been time well spent and he’s created a conversation piece. While I can live with possible plot-holes and without concrete explanations of why that ship and why the thing is called Triangle in the first place, I did feel he could’ve been more explicit in how the film should be interpreted. Was it all real? Was a Faustian bargain at its heart? Well, yes, no, both, neither, maybe. I dunno and perhaps I should.

 

Zombieland

Within the first minute, I knew I was going to like Zombieland. Five minutes later, during the Metallica accompanied opening credits, I suspected I was going to love it. I so enjoy being right.

Quite naturally, the storyline of most zombie flicks tend to fall into seige and survival territory and, of course, there are large aspects of that here. The last fifteen minutes are pretty much exclusively that. But while, Shaun of the Dead managed to introduce a buddy angle to the formula and arguably invent the hybrid genre of zom-rom-com, Zombieland introduces the notion of a zombie road trip movie, so in amongst all the stock baggage of the genre, it still manages to feel new.

Incidentally, it’s a horror-comedy with the strong emphasis on comedy. Don’t go expecting your stomach to be churned or your skin to provide a platform for jumping. It’s sorta nasty in places and kinda gory in others, but it’s far, far funnier than it is either of those things. A stoned Bill Murray reinacting a scene from Ghostbusters with a vacuum cleaner had me laughing so hard, I might have farted a little bit.

The storyline is thankfully kept free of complication. Two mismatched survivors of the zombie apocalypse team up to travel cross-country in search of something they can call home, preferably sans-zombie. Jesse Eisenburg plays Columbus (because he’s heading for Columbus, Ohio) and Woody Harrelson plays Tallahassee (for similar reasons). Columbus has survived thus far by living his life according to some strict rules: cardio, fasten seatbelts, don’t be a hero, check bathrooms etc. Tallahassee basically just really, really enjoys killing zombies. It isn’t long into proceedings before our little band are joined by a sister con team of Emma “Wichita” Stone and Abigail “Little Rock” Breslin, two becomes four and we’re heading for fun and games in an amusement park in LA.

The zombies, in this outing, are of the running / jumping / climbing trees variety a la the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead, with a notable difference being that here, they aren’t strictly speaking undead, but rather the victims of a 28 Days Later style virus that originated with an infected burger. There’s an unexplored nod to The Stand here that’s only cough-and-you’ll-miss-it mentioned, and while it’s no great loss as the movie is far happier focussing on the effect rather than the cause, the fact that it’s been thought about and considered is very welcome.

Performances all round are excellent. Woody Harrelson reprises his redneck role from Natural Born Killers and he hasn’t been funnier since Kingpin. His character is simply about killing zombies but his little subplot of tracking down some Twinkie bars (“Twinkies have expiry dates, you know”) and those loved-ones he misses from his old life adds substance and flesh to the character. The greatest compliment I can pay is that I missed him when he wasn’t on screen.

His co-star Eisenberg is new to me, but he has instant likeable, geek charm that seems strangely familiar for ten seconds before you realise why. He looks like Michael Cera. He talks like Michael Cera. His lines sounded like they were written for Michael Cera. All this made me wonder, that while the Columbus role is filled very comfortably indeed, why the makers didn’t russle up another few thousand bucks and hire Cera. All this is further confused by Emma Stone’s involvement, given they were both in Superbad.

Without giving too much away, though, a sizable chunk of the middle act belongs to a cameo from Bill Murray, who plays himself. Bill Murray, in my humble opinion, operates on genius level in everything I’ve seen him in (although, in Zombieland, he questions the merit of his role in Garfield) and it was during the section filmed in his supposed mansion that I realised how much I was enjoying these characters and the world they inhabited.

And it’s a world that’s shot and framed very well and interspersed with post modern captions reminding us of Columbus’s all-important rules, in a font that looks straight out of the videogame TOCA Race Driver. Net effect is the somewhat stock, grey, washed out atmosphere of the early parts of the film still manage to feel very 2009 and fresh. Sprinkle in some inobtrusive CGI and super-slo-mo here and there, and it’s something of a treat to look at, particularly with all the mood pieces like the broken up jumbo jet lying derelict in the middle of a freeway.

A downside? Well, at eighty-eight minutes, perhaps ten of which are credits, my arse had barely warmed my leather VIP seat before it was over, even with that cheeky fart thrown in. Call me odd and hypocritical after decrying Hollywood’s seeming inability to tell a story in under two hours, but I’d have happily sat through another twenty minutes, no problem at all.

You should see it. I want to go see it again. Right now, in fact. Pick you up in an hour?

 

The Invention of Lying

In the spirit of the movie, The Invention of Lying is a reasonably funny, reasonably entertaining film whose hi-concept idea, while original and inventive, ultimately fails to deliver on its promise and doesn’t quite manage to be the lynchpin to hold together 100 minutes of cinema. And it really, really, has far too many montages.

In more colourful terms, Ricky Gervais plays Mark Bellison, a screenwriter in a world where there is no lying and, hence, no creativity, so is charged with writing non-fiction narratives of events from the 13th century, a century where nothing much happened except for the plague. His movies aren’t popular, he gets the sack and as he’s about to be evicted and die homeless and unloved, a synapse reaction allows him to tell a lie. Because no one has any concept of lying, everyone believes him. And hilarity ensues, right? Well, kinda.

The good news is that the movie is better than the trailer makes it out to be. It isn’t just a reverse of Liar, Liar and it isn’t just a movie about a guy using his unique talent to get laid and rob casinos. While I’d probably still quite like to see that movie, there’s more substance here and, dare I say, it’s a more intelligent movie and we’re left with more discussion points because of it.

In a world where no one lies, there is no fiction, there is no flattery, there is no creativity, no one smiles if they don’t have a reason to, no one says your bum doesn’t look to big in that dress … but also, it seems that no one is able to hold their counsel, which came as a surprise. This meant that for the first twenty minutes, people basically insulted Ricky Gervais and it all became a little grating and samey. Someone tells Ricky he’s fat / ugly / untalented. Ricky says, “Aw …” and shakes his head a bit. You get the picture.

It also provides my first problem with the continuity and it’s a problem that rears its head from the outset. If no one is able to have an unexpressed thought because to do so is a lie (and I’m fifty/fifty on whether I’m buying that or not), Mark Bellison seems able to do so from the off. When his secretary is giving a long list of reasons why she’ll be happy when he gets fired, he takes a breath to retort … and then doesn’t. Why not? The rules suggest he should let rip in a full and frank manner.

Thankfully, this attention to detail is nowhere near as lacking in the world these characters inhabit. Everything has a sort of drained 60s hue to it. Most things are grey or brown or grey-ish brown. Cars are dull boxes. Furniture, fixtures and fittings are all about functionality and adequacy. On the wall of Mark’s apartment, he has a dartboard and a painting of a dartboard. A particular delight is the brilliant signage and advertisements used. Coke is a brown, sugary drink. Pepsi is for when there’s no Coke. An old folks’ home entrance has the welcoming phrase: A Sad Place For Hopeless Old People.

Ricky, himself, turns in a strong, warm, believable performance. Fans of The Office or Extras won’t find much new — the role is hardly a stretch — but he does know how to portray an character that people can empathise with and a couple of scenes really gave me goosebumps. As co-writer and co-director, he should be less satisfied. For a movie where the premis is so good, there should be endless opportunities for gags while still allowing room for the emotion and intelligence that comes through so well in his TV work. Instead, the plot never really gels, too many characters are inconsequential (although Rob Lowe is great) and we uncomfortably jerk from one act to the next with an implausible love story serving as a backbone. Welcome along, Problem #2 with the continuity. The problem is, we never really get a handle on why Ricky’s character covets Jennifer Garner so much. He goes from dating her to falling in love with her with no encouragement from her and no sign that she’s ever going to love him back. At best, she’s a little pleasant to him once or twice. She treats him as badly as everyone else. She’s not even the best of a bad lot.

The religious turmoil that seems to be riding in this movie’s wake strikes me as a little baffling as there’s no real anti-religious message here, just as there’s no pro-religious message. The message I came out of the theatre with was, with our without religion, people have the capacity to be horrible, bitchy, kind, beautiful and apathetic to each other. It’s no more insulting to religious types than Jesus of Nazareth was to atheists. It’s a fictional movie and people should be strong enough in whatever belief system they hold dear to survive any perceived roasting from a motion picture. Plus, Mark delivering his sermon from the back of a two Pizza Hut boxes is my favourite part of the film.

So. An honest summary. The film just about gets pass marks. It was funny enough to make me laugh out loud a few times and smile many more times. Ricky’s good. Jennifer isn’t. It’s a film I’ll probably enjoy again on DVD. It’s a film I wouldn’t recommend going to the cinema to see unless you can’t bear waiting six months to see it. I’m disappointed I didn’t love it but then, honesty is often not the best policy.

 

Acceptances and Rejections and Apologies

Let’s go in reverse order:

Apologies — sorry for not updating the blog for a couple of weeks. It’s been an odd few days but you haven’t missed much. Honest.

Rejections — I’ve had a few.

Acceptances — but the good news is that my story — Everything Binary — has been bought by Neon Literary Magazine. More info as and when.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, True Romance is on Channel 5. Nuff said.

 

District 9

District 9 isn’t the movie of the year but it still has a lot going for it. The premise, for one, is captivating and the opening act that covers the set-up and backstory is arguably the best bit of the movie.

It seems in 1985 or so, an alien spaceship arrived in Johannesburg and hovered about for a bit. After three months of exclusive hovering and with not an alien to be seen, the South African authorities lose their patience and cut their way in. What they find inside is a severly malnourished and diseased population of aliens that they bring down to earth to treat, housing them in a refugee camp (the District 9 of the title) that quickly descends into a slum. The South Africans don’t really like the aliens too much, grow to hate them and then twenty years after the big disc arrived in their skies, they eventually hatch a plan to shift them out of Johnnaesburg into what would essentially be a concentration camp.

The nods to apartheid and nazism aren’t even vaguely concealed but it remains an intriguing what-if scenario, told in mock documentary style in a very convincing manner that made me come to the conclusion that real-life would probably be played out in such a depressing manner.

During the intro, we meet the main character — Wikus Van Der Merwe — who, through nepotism, lands the plum job of evicting the aliens from District 9. Wilkus talks to the camera, still in mockumentary mode — as he serves eviction notices to the extraterrestial refugees, with a huge military presence behind him. This is a very claustrophobic phase of the film. The mothership constantly hovers over the city in hazy blue sky. It suppresses the people below it and it’s everywhere … there’s no escape … and that feel is powerfully done aided no doubt by some nauseating shaky hand held camera work, that while nothing new, still increases the unease.

All too soon, though, director and screenwriter Neill Blomkamp abandons the documentary style and, in a rather confused transition, it becomes a more usual narrative driven story. It becomes a fugitive movie for a while and then when  it seems there’s nowhere for it to go other than into buddy action movie territory, that’s precisely where it goes. The last fifteen minutes feel like they belong more in Rambo than in the intelligent movie this seemed to be at the start and by the time it attempts to close back in documentary style, it’s all too late. I’m erasing the Wall-E moment at the very end from my memory.

Although largely entertaining, I was distracted a number of times at the nods to other movies. Oh, that’s the something out of something, I’d often think. For example, Oh, that’s the ED-209 out of Robocop. Or, Oh, that’s the camerawork out of Cloverfield. And I’m starting to think that people have forgotten how to tell a story in an hour-and-a-half. As an aside, Funny People, which I was contemplating going to see tonight, tips the scales at a bewildering 146 minutes. Do they think it’s The Deer Hunter?

So, overall, District 9 is a decent sci-fi movie that would probably have been better if it hadn’t tried to be clever and aragorical and get my hopes up. Or it could’ve kept to its initial ideals, abandoned the My Buddy’s An Alien nonsense and been awesome.

 

John Hughes, You’ve Got A Lot To Answer For

John Hughes, the movie guy, passed away this month. I was doing some reading on him and came up with a few points that I felt worth saving as I think he’s probably going to be responsible for more mid-life crises than Harley Davidson can possibly recitify.

Hughes was an exceptional director. Surprisingly, though, he directed all his films in a seven year window from 1984 to 1991. In those seven years, he was ultimately responsible for such seminal movies as Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Weird Science, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Planes, Trains & Automobiles and Uncle Buck. Six great movies. In sevcn years. Plus a couple of duffers we won’t mention. Plus he wrote all those. Over and above that, he had a hand in Pretty In Pink, National Lampoon’s Vacation and Class Reunion. The guy was an absolute genius and if he doesn’t pick up some posthemous awards at next year’s Oscars, I’ll be hugely disappointed.

But I’m kinda disappointed anyway. Because I grew up with the characters in The Breakfast Club. It’s one of my favourite movies of all time and I know the script inside out. I was those kids (which, believe it or not, is grammatically correct) and being born in ‘73, it’s my era. I was 12 when I thought I was watching 16 year olds.

So imagine my surprise when I discovered the ages of those who starred in this defining movie:

Molly Ringwald — she’s 41 now. I can just about live with that.

Anthony Michael Hall — he’s also 41. He always seemed the youngest of the group, which I guess he was, but even so. 5 year start on me. Not so bad, consider I was 12 when he was supposed to be 16 or 17.

Emilio Estevez — he’s 47. 47.

Ally Sheedy — she was my favourite. She’s 47, too. My God. Suddenly feel much older.

but get this:

Judd Nelson — the bad boy in the bunch. Judd Nelson, aka John Bender, will be fifty this November. I feel kinda sick. Fuck knows how he feels about it.

Urgh. Thanks John Hughes. The one thing missing from my day was appreciation of my own mortality. Nice one.

 

Inglourious Basterds

As much as I enjoyed Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds — and I enjoyed it a lot — when I was driving home from the preview in Stirling this evening, I wondered how much more I would’ve enjoyed it, had it been two movies.

Tarantino likes breaking up the linear narrative and bolting it back together into a more alluring package. Would Pulp Fiction have been so entertaining had it obeyed a natural chronological flow? Probably not. Part of the joy was seeing how stuff you already knew fell into place in the grander work. Anyway, in Inglourious, there are two very obvious threads that make up the story: there’s the Jewish cinema owner, played quite exquisitely by Mélanie Laurent (no, I haven’t heard of her either but I think her entire back catalogue is in her native French) and then there are the titular Basterds, led by a particularly square-jawed Brad Pitt (who I have heard of — I think he’s quite famous).

The first thread is a moving, psychological character study, which probably only covers a small handful of scenes that feel longer than they actual are simply because of the power of the mind games being played in them. Pivotal to this is the role of the SS’s star Jew Hunter and a performance by Christoph Waltz (no, I haven’t heard of him either but I think his entire back catalogue is in his native German) which, in my opinion, is so strong, it steals the movie until the threads converge and he gets his one on one time with Brad Pitt and then it was mneh, not so much.

The second thread is less strong in a cerebral way but no less tense and powerful. The Basterds are a team of American Jews who cut about war-torn France collecting scalps of Nazis. Literally. Historical accuracy, I should point out, takes a back seat and is eventually gagged during the denouement when it won’t stop muttering about how everything’s wrong. In this thread, Mike Myers of Austin Powers fame does absolutely nothing to convince us he has any depth in the roles he’s capable of playing, but is amusing nonetheless.

Both these threads could easily work alone in separate 90 minute movies that shared a common ending. So while Kill Bill Vols 1 & 2 were continuations of the same story, the Vols 1 & 2 here would be largely concurrent efforts, told from differing viewpoints. What Tarantino might have been able to add to these separate volumes might have made very interesting viewing … but who am I to question the great man? Especially as what he has given us is two-and-a-half hour work that is visceral enough in places to be described as a romp and as intimate and personal to be called a study.

The trademarked Tarantino dialogue that we all expect is there, tout force, and works here just as well as any of his other offerings. In Inglourious Basterds, though, I think the movie excels its stablemates because a huge percentage of this sparkling dialogue is delivered via subtitle. And yet it still works.

Special mention goes to Diane Kruger, who I remember from National Treasure (don’t ask), but here she has a couple of close-ups moments that I felt were mesmerising and pitched beautifully. Actually, as a whole, the acting talent is pretty much faultless and even QT’s continued habit of interfering with the occasional shot (Uma Thurman’s square in Pulp Fiction for example) is forgivable — here he has arrows pointing the high ranking Nazis and a couple of cartoony interludes.

There’s a slight theme of masterpiece that runs through the film so the obvious question to ask is, Is this Quentin Tarantino’s materpiece? For me, that accolade still belongs to Pulp Fiction but I felt on first viewing, this was a more satisfying experience than Reservoir Dogs or at least on a par. Controversial.

 

And While We’re Talking About Kill It Kid …

… I’ve been scouring the Information Super B Road for more info and came across this cover of Katy Perry’s Hot N Cold, which couldn’t fail but remind me of Nickel Creek’s Toxic cover (see? told you there were similarities!). Here’s both for those unconvinced: