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Procedural thrillers tend to have a few things in common: they have a well-defined stable of characters, they take place over a reasonably brief stretch of time, and they… y’know, resolve. If a procedural presents a whodunnit, the end will reveal who, in fact, dunnit, and usually why.
David Fincher’s Zodiac necessarily throws these rules out. The Zodiac case covered many, many years of active police inquiry — and so does the film, showing us fourteen years of investigation, both by the police detectives (Mark Ruffalo and Anthony Edwards) and by a journalist (Robert Downey, Jr.)
But the film really centers around Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhall), a cartoonist who became engrossed by the coded messages that the Zodiac Killer’s sent in to San Francisco’s newspapers. Zodiac follows Graysmith through the years as he studies, decodes, and researches the messages, trying to tie them to any of the suspects — and there are plenty of suspects.
Zodiac is a sprawling endeavor, trying to make sense out of a tangled mass of evidence. “Sprawling” isn’t usually something I look for in a movie, but Fincher makes it work with one simple, demanding choice: every single role is written and cast thoughtfully, intelligently, carefully, with the sense that these people are real, not vehicles for moving the plot along.
This is also true of the very difficult scenes of the Zodiac attacks. In the most vivid and disturbing depiction, which takes place during a picnic, Fincher uses close-ups and POV shots to narrow our focus: the entire outdoor scene shrinks down to a frantic, tight few feet. He forces us to identify in the most heartbreaking way with the terror and tension of the victims.
The A.V. Club recently inducted David Fincher’s Zodiac into their New Cult Canon, and with good reason. It’s a modern classic, a resonant story of obsession and uncertainty circling endlessly around a series of senseless tragedies.
[This review was cross-posted to The Video RePort.]
After the smash success of Talking Heads’ legendary performance film Stop Making Sense, the studio gave David Byrne a huge measure of control over his next film project, True Stories. What an odd movie they got.
Written by Byrne, Beth Henley (Crimes of the Heart), and Stephen Tobolowsky (Now don’t tell me you don’t remember him because he sure as heckfire remembers you! Needle-nose Ned? Ned the Head? He dated your sister Mary Pat a coupla times until you told him not to? Bing!), True Stories takes us on a tour of a fictional town — Virgil, Texas — gearing up for its sesquicentennial celebration by staging “A Celebration of Specialness.”
It’s as gee-whiz as a 1960s picture postcard: bright, dated, and absolutely flat. The establishing shots are carefully square-on, keeping the focal point dead-center, never oblique or slanted. And the film’s attitude is just as surprisingly direct. Where we might cynically expect glancing sarcasm or viciousness, Byrne instead gives us refreshing sweetness.
This is a small-town character study — Our Town by way of Weekly World News. We meet a spinner of endless tall tales, a man who claims he can grab your nose and read your mind, a lady who never gets out of bed (our narrator enthuses: “She has enough money, she doesn’t need to. Wouldn’t you?”), a husband and wife who lead the community but haven’t spoken directly to each other in years, and a preacher who sermonizes about vast conspiracies controlling everything from our political structure to the rate at which we run out of toilet paper.
As the name implies, True Stories is more a collection of tales than a single story. The musical numbers help to tie the whole series together, but movie’s real heart is Louis Fyne (John Goodman, incredibly winning in his first major role), a big bear of a man unabashedly and doggedly looking for love. We first meet him at work (in the computer assembly’s clean room, where the world can’t touch him), then follow him on a series of unsuccessful dates and outings. In less kind hands, Louis could be a joke or a figure of fun, but Goodman’s earnestness and humor make him a remarkable character, a simple man with a complex soul.
The strength of the film comes from the same place. It doesn’t shy from the absurdities of everyday life, and in fact it exaggerates them to the point of hyperbole… but it never, ever diminishes them. Rather than jeering at the mundanities of Americana, True Stories amplifies them with equal parts affection and irony.
About half-way through the movie, our guide takes us on a driving tour through a new (and mostly uninhabited) suburban development, a banal expanse of tract housing against the barren backdrop of the Texas plains. And in this flat, blank landscape, he says — with startling sincerity — what might well be the film’s motto: “Look at this. Who can say it isn’t beautiful?”
[cross-posted to The Video RePort]
The early 80s blockbuster Risky Business is often remembered through a haze of nostalgia, painted as a seminal coming-of-age tale, a cheerful sexual romp, the bawdy tale of a bright-eyed boy (Tom Cruise) who shakes off the shackles of upper-middle-class repression and learns to stop and smell the roses.
At the movie’s beginning, even Joel’s most innocent sexual fantasies devolve into nightmares of being persecuted by his parents, neighbors, and the police. When sexual liberation finally does arrive (in the form of Rebecca De Mornay’s hooker with a heart of gold), it looks like a dream sequence — because in Joel’s tightly inhibited little world, this might as well be a dream.
At first, it’s hard not to sympathize with the kid; he’s not very bright, not at all funny, and frankly sort of charmless, but his parents and friends expect him to perform far beyond his abilities. Surrounded by these unmeetable pressures, Joel is unable to cut loose and be himself.
But here’s the dark truth at the heart of Risky Business: Joel never learns to be himself, he just learns to be a sneakier, more exploitative version of the soulless entrepreneur his parents want him to be. This movie is about learning to embrace the deepest, most avid appetites of the id… and about avoiding the consequences of indulging those appetites.
It’s not biting or clever enough to read as a witty satire; instead, Risky Business plays as a cynical reflection of the grabby, selfish Eighties ethos, the belief that you really can have it all, at any cost to others. Drive the forbidden Porsche — wreck it, even. Just don’t get caught.
In the trailer for Perfect Blue, Roger Corman is quoted: “If Alfred Hitchcock partnered with Walt Disney they’d make a picture like this.” I say Corman misses the mark a little. Perfect Blue feels more like a collaboration between Hayao Miyazaki* (Princess Mononoke, Kiki’s Delivery Service) and Brian DePalma (Body Double, Sisters) — but only at first.
The introduction sets up a silly if juicy plot: a pert and innocent young pop idol named Mima leaves her musical career to pursue acting. Soon after, Mima starts receiving messages by fax and by internet (jarringly described in this 1997 film as “that thing that’s really popular lately”) from an obsessed fan or, um, someone… someone who knows every detail of her daily life, someone who witnesses the small humiliations of her new career, someone who describes the darkest aspects of her thoughts in the first person. And then some, um, stuff starts to happen.
If the first act of Perfect Blue feels like a partnership between Miyazaki and DePalma, the second act veers into the territory of David Lynch or Roman Polanski, tangling up the seemingly straightforward stalker-thriller with an interplay of reality and fantasy, muddling the timelines and narrative flow, and toying with our expectations about identity and agency.
Fittingly, Perfect Blue gained new fame recently as a possible inspiration for Black Swan. There are some glancing similarities, but that’s all they are — similarities of theme and story including the pressures of fame, deteriorating self-image, and the difficulty of discerning reality from desire. (Arguably, Black Swan contains a few momentary homages: the subway window, the bathtub scene.) You could put together a fun-but-harrowing Black & Blue double feature, but Perfect Blue would pair equally well with Polanski’s The Tenant or Repulsion or with Lynch’s Inland Empire.
* By namechecking Hayao Miyazaki, I’m not implying that Perfect Blue is suitable for children — oh, my goodness, NO. Yikes.
The opening of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me serves as a warning to the audience. Credits play over a staticky TV, promising us appearances by a host of names familiar from “Twin Peaks”… then that TV is smashed in a shower of sparks as a woman’s voice screams in the background. This nasty little vignette frames the ensuing story. The film relies upon the viewer’s familiarity with the cozy-quirky world of the TV series, but even as it employs the mythology and grammar of the show’s world, the movie viciously rejects the comforts we found in the drowsy little town of Twin Peaks.
Then comes the most damning scene, an example of the kind of over-the-top quirkiness that sank the movie. FBI Bureau Chief Gordon Cole (David Lynch reprising his role from the series) meets with his field agents (Chris Isaak and Keifer Sutherland) to give them notes on their upcoming case. But rather than simply speaking or writing, Cole transmits his “notes” via Lil (Kimberly Ann Cole), a red-clad orange-bewigged woman who performs a coded dance of exaggerated movements and expressions. For a lot of viewers, this chapter points out everything that’s wrong with the movie, and I ain’t arguing. Lil’s dance feels like an asinine self-parody, a ham-fisted caricature of the show’s whimsy.
This moment is an affront; it’s garish and silly and clumsy, but it serves a purpose. Like the smashed TV, Lil’s dance gives us a flash of warning: forget what you think you know about this story. The message you’re about to receive is not what you expect.
We’re about to enter Deer Meadow, the shadowy opposite of Twin Peaks. Deer Meadow boasts no pleasant Double R Diner, no outstanding cherry pie, no quietly competent and welcoming sheriff, no damn fine coffee, no Special Agent Dale Cooper, and no beloved Homecoming Queen with a mysterious secret. The victim here is Teresa Banks, whom you may remember from the TV series: she was evidently murdered by the same killer who claimed Laura Palmer’s life.
But Teresa is no golden girl: she’s a short-time night-shift waitress in a seedy diner, her home is a shabby trailer, and no one seems to know much about her — or to care. As dim and dismal as this is and as sorry as we are to dig into Teresa Banks’ squalid life and death, it’s only priming us for the deeper sorrow of witnessing — of becoming complicit in — the last days of Laura Palmer’s short life.
In the TV series, Laura is a distant dream, a lovely portrait gazing out passively from the school’s trophy case or from her parents’ mantel, a brief snip of footage innocently cavorting with Donna on a mountaintop. She’s safely contained in memories and images. In Fire Walk with Me, Laura is unsettlingly tangible and willful. Her actuality and her agency undermine all the romanticized memories and projections that the series fueled. We’re forced to confront Laura’s despair and to face the sordid grotesqueries of her young life, the denial and culpability of her loved ones, and the terrible choices her trauma has led her to make.
That’s not to say that Fire Walk with Me is a great film; it’s deeply flawed, marred by terrible diversions into the absurd and the surreal, and by Lynch’s stubborn insistence upon his own inventions and argot. But it has its moments and they’re terrifically effective, in part thanks to Sheryl Lee’s bravura acting. Her Laura is dizzyingly mercurial, one moment passionate and the next cold and numb. Lee also gives Laura a subtle and unnerving trait: she never maintains eye contact. Laura always seems to look slightly askance, gazing at her companion’s chest or above his head even when she’s proclaiming her devotion. The gives her scenes a strangely potent aura of deep disconnection from her friends and family.
But those laughable diversions of Lynch’s have their own ineluctable power. Just between you and me and the whole internet, after watching FWWM, I spent a night shuddering awake from creeping nightmares, clutching the blankets to me and shrinking from noises in the dark. Even as I scorned and derided them, the images of this ridiculous movie got under my skin like few films can… maybe because it wrought such violent changes upon familiar characters and places, just as a dream does. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me divorces itself from the cozy comforts of “Twin Peaks” the series even as it exploits our familiarity with it. It’s as if “Twin Peaks” itself has entered The Black Lodge and transformed to its dark, dismal alter-ego, taking us with it on a ghastly adventure.
Take home David Lynch’s neo-noir mindbender and you’ll get:
- a murderous modern fable on the dangerous slide from love to violence;
- a twisted meditation on postmodern anxiety over the individual’s inability to retain ownership over their own memories and internalized identity in the face of modern narrative and media;
- an adolescent abstract of Woman As Inscrutable Object;
- a messy muddle of a story turned inside-out around itself;
- the languorous Patricia Arquette cast as the femme fatale, complete with Barbara Stanwyck’s hairstyle from Double Indemnity;
- a disheveled brunet Bill Pullman doing his very best Kyle MacLachlan impression as the suspicious husband;
- a weirdly intimate glimpse of David Lynch’s own furniture, which was used on the interior set;
- a soundtrack featuring David Bowie, Brian Eno, Lou Reed, Trent Reznor, and a Screamin’ Jay Hawkins song performed by Marilyn Manson;
- a sneaking suspicion that Michael Haneke’s Caché got a flash of inspiration from a scene in Lost Highway;
- a serious case of the creeps from Robert Blake’s indelibly disturbing cameo as The Mystery Man;
- really, really mad at me for suggesting you watch this, whether you love it or hate it.
Let me be frank: I expected to enjoy this film, but not to find it breathtaking or obsession-worthy despite the accolades of many, many respected critics. (I was prepared — even hopeful — that I’d be surprised. I wasn’t.) Is it still worth watching? Absolutely.
Black Swan has a core of intelligence and wit, but the finished product is — perhaps intentionally — a bit crude, both psychologically and narratively. Natalie Portman plays Nina, a tightly controlled, deeply repressed soloist in a prominent ballet company who longs to play the dual leads in “Swan Lake”… but to do so, she must transcend mere technical perfection and open herself to passion and, perhaps, to an inner darkness.
For experienced viewers of psychological suspense films, the surprises in this film are momentary: jumps and startles rather than character-driven revelations. The biggest difference between Black Swan and more generic films of its ilk springs from director Darren Aronofsky’s gift for portraying jarring physicality. The images of Natalie Portman’s too-delicate ballerina wincing and smothering her pain brought little gasps of dismay to my throat, and I jumped at the little reveals even when they felt obviously manipulative.
Unlike so much of Aronofsky’s transgressive work (Pi, Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler), Black Swan walks us step-by-step through some pretty familiar psychological-suspense themes: maternal oppression and conflict, professional rivalry turning into personal vendettas, identity crisis, repressed sexuality bursting out unbidden, the shifting lines between reality and fantasy.
Aronofsky even gives us a little metatextual goose suggesting that his coloring-inside-the-lines approach may be intentional. Early in the film, the ballet director, Thomas, gives a speech about the upcoming production of "Swan Lake" that foreshadows the events we're about to see played out, starting with "“We all know the story… Virginal girl, pure and sweet, trapped in the body of a swan" and ending with "Done to death I know, but not like this. We strip it down, make it visceral and real."
Over the next few weeks, Thomas creates a "Swan Lake" with some edgy elements that nonetheless looks strikingly familiar and traditional, as much a comfortable genre piece as Aronofsky's Black Swan turns out to be. It plays with longstanding melodramatic tropes of female competition and artistic hysteria and also toys knowingly with allusions, direct or oblique, to previous films covering similar territory, most strikingly The Red Shoes, Repulsion, Persona, Perfect Blue, and a whole handful of De Palma flicks. It’s a big splashy B-movie, half melodrama, half horror, all crafted with Aronofsky’s lavish attention and intention.
(Note: I watched AntiChrist knowing almost nothing about the story, and this review will not mention specifics of the story so you may view it in the same unspoiled state.)
Despite Lars von Trier’s pedigree as crafter of upscale arty horrors, it feels odd to call AntiChrist a horror film… but it is truly horrific, and you should know that before you decide to rent it.
In the prologue, we learn that AntiChrist is predicated on the simplest, most brutally realistic horror: the horror of grief, of abysmal guilt, of mistrusting those we love best. But rarely is true horror so intensely wedded to wrenching drama. It’s engrossing and sorrowful and terrible… and deeply, truly scary. AntiChrist shatteringly portrays the crushing physicality of grief: no soft-focus gentle weeping and hankie-dabbing here, but the raw, biting panic and despair that could all too easily escalate into something still more horrible.
Be warned: as we’ve come to expect from von Trier, this film is stomach-churningly graphic (no, really. Really really really. REALLY), uncompromisingly bleak, and some critics decried AntiChrist as offensively misogynistic. I disagree, but that’s beside the point: the message to take away is that AntiChrist will not leave you munching the last of your popcorn as you hum a happy song. It’s grotesque, bleak, revolting, yet it has moments of real beauty.
It’s a polarizing and genuinely shocking work, and its brutal interplay of grace and gracelessness reminds me of nothing so much as a particularly nasty piece of Northern Renaissance religious art — though the religious symbols here are not so easily decoded, with good reason.
Say what you will about Lars von Trier, this is the first film in a long time to really scare me. Knowing his reputation, I was scared before I even hit “play.”
From indie director Bruce McDonald (The Tracey Fragments, Hard Core Logo) comes Pontypool, a deliciously taut, intelligently told thriller that breaks all the rules of zombie outbreak films, starting with the most important one: there are no zombies.
What do I mean? If a zombie film has no zombies, what the heck does the word even mean? Well, exactly.
Grizzled veteran actor Stephen McHattie exercises his gruff charm and silky-rough voice as washed-up radio host Grant Mazzy, who starts the morning with announcements of missing cats and snow day rosters, and ends it as the lone broadcaster detailing a mysterious outbreak of violence and illness. The tale is a masterpiece of mediated storytelling: Mazzy and his crew are glued to their helm in the radio station, receiving updates from reporters and civilians in the field, which means that the tension is built by voices and words, not gruesome action scenes.
And it works. Not only does it work; the tension becomes a self-feeding cycle as it gradually dawns on the radio troopers that their reports may be compounding the disaster. This is a lean, elegantly economical piece of storytelling that builds to a horrific crest by allowing us to invest in the players, to piece together their relationships and characters and to imagine for ourselves the horrors offstage… and then the action starts to spill over.
[This review is cross=posted to The VideoReport.]
Most low-budget vanity projects end up unseen, unknown, unparodied. But not Tommy Wiseau’s The Room. For some reason, this talentless lump of movie rose to prominence as a terrible example, a failure of epic proportions, a perfect example of how to do everything, but everything, wrong. The Room became a cult film, spawning screenings around the country and attracting the attention of such media-savvy critics as The A.V. Club and Patton Oswalt, and has brought crowds of renters and theater-goers to their knees with laughter.
[Soak this is: this unpromising trailer actually makes the film look much more competent and well-crafted than it is. Yup.]
I have to admit: The Room had an unexpected effect on me. It’s almost impossible to describe how odd this film is. It’s not just hopelessly inept (though it is certainly that), but deeply uncanny, as if a group of non-Earthlings decided to make a Lifetime channel movie (but inexplicably decided to make it from the perspective of a misogynist) using signifiers that they thought actual humans would recognize: red roses and pillowfights are romantic; saying hi to doggies and supporting young persons of indeterminate age means you’re a Good Person; pictures and portraits of spoons depict, I dunno, domestic comfort.
In The Room, all the conventions of film language (and indeed, of normal life) are a little askew, and it fills the whole movie with a pervasive sense of wrongness. At first it’s pretty funny to see just how wrong it is, how utterly incompetent Wiseau is as a writer, a director, an actor — how completely he fails to convey even the most mundane of daily life to the screen.
After a while, my laughter wore off and a deep despair took hold. I still have not entirely shaken it. (Wiseau’s appearance didn’t help: he looks like Fabio after a week in the grave, and even the way his grayish skin clings to his golem-like frame is pretty unsettling.) Listen, I LOVE bad movies. But The Room is a different creature than, say, Road House or even Bloodrayne. I can understand how and why those films got made, and how and why Boxing Helena got made, and how and why most of absolutely terrible movies get made.
But I don’t understand how and especially why someone spent giant sacks of money to make The Room*, and viewing it made me wonder why anyone tries to do anything. Seeing the film plunged me into a pit of existential angst, and it took days to climb back out. The Room is the abyss, and I have looked into it.
*Unless it’s a money-laundering project, which doesn’t brighten my world-view much.
Elli
Elsa
