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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.
Make no mistake: this is an unflinchingly grim film, and I’m still not sure it’s a good one. But it’s certainly compelling and wrenching to watch.
The Machinist is perhaps best know for the grueling physical transformation Christian Bale underwent to take on the part of Trevor Reznik, the chronically insomniac and obviously troubled lead character. From the first close-up, it’s brutally obvious that there’s no trickery at play here: Trevor’s cadaverous skull wavers unsteadily on the fragile stem of his throat. He’s not just skeletal but snake-like, all sinew and skin and horribly visible bone. Trim little gamine Jennifer Jason Leigh (as Stevie, friendly neighborhood call girl) looks positively lush next to him.
The harsh lighting emphasizes his dreadful emaciation early on, while it still has the power to shock. More shocking still, perhaps, is how quickly we grow accustomed to it. (Bale’s wasted frame, unsettling though it is to see, is not the most gruesome or triggering sight in this bleak, gray world. As the title suggests, Trevor works in a machine shop, and you know what that means. Uh-oh.)
But paradoxically, the realism of Bale’s emaciation, the brutal fact of it, kept pulling me out of the film… and more than that, it spurred me to question: is this movie worth the suffering Bale inflicted upon himself? Is this a piece of art worthy of that deprivation and damage, that self-immolating level of artistic and physical devotion? I suppose only Christian Bale is entitled to make that judgment, but from my place in the audience, I think that Bale’s sacrifice suggests a disproportionate, maybe even a penitential, commitment to craft… or maybe just a misplaced sense of the project’s artistic value.
That’s not to say it’s a bad film — not at all. The Machinist is a well-crafted, uneasy psychological thriller with a deeply unsettling tone. Bale brings his usual intensity and restrained energy to this role, and he manages a remarkable trick: in his scenes with amiable waitress/possible love interest Marie (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón), Trevor’s seemingly relaxed, suave banter is loaded with nervy, murky significance for the audience. Like director Brad Anderson’s gritty no-budget thriller Session 9, The Machinist is suffused with an eerie, uneasy sense of looking through another person’s eyes, suffering their anxieties, afflicted by their blind spots.
[This review is cross-posted to The VideoReport.]
In the mood for a Hitchcock classic? Treat yourself to Alfred Hitchcock’s favorite Hitchcock movie. It’s at right angles to most of Hitch’s later work: no elegant blonde heroine, no ritzy locales for the audience to “ooooooh” over, no patina of glamour buffing the suspense to a high gloss, just a bright screen of mundane comforts barely covering up a cesspool of human horrors.
In this B&W 1943 thriller, young Charlotte “Charlie” Newton (Theresa Wright) is at loose ends, waiting around her doddering parents’ sprawling Victorian home, waiting waiting waiting for anything to lend some excitement to her life. Struck by inspiration, she decides to invite her dashing Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten) to come liven up their dull lives. Through coincidence or telepathy, the very same day, Uncle Charlie telegraphs the Newtons to invite himself for a nice long stay.
Shadow of a Doubt pulls a tidy trick, passing itself off as a pleasant portrait of sunny small-town life, then shading every corner into darkness. Cotten masters his role with aplomb: Uncle Charlie is a mercurial fellow, at turns avuncular, charming, distant, smarmy, and glacial, and Cotten makes him devastatingly believable.
This seemingly innocuous film plumbs the depths of psychology and stirs up some hints of emotional connection between young Charlie and Uncle Charlie that may make you squirm. To give yourself goosebumps, watch the film all the way through, then review two scenes: Uncle Charlie’s monologue at the dinner table, and young Charlie’s introductory ramble. The parallels are harrowing.
Perhaps more unsettling, the supposed sanctuary of family life is itself called into question: even before Uncle Charlie brings his corruption into Santa Rose, two of the sweetest and most ineffectual characters incessantly spin hypothetical murderous plots, a harmless little hobby to pass the time. Shadow of a Doubt is a delicious, decadent tangle of contrasts: it’s emotional and cerebral, it’s cozy and comforting, it’s chilling and repugnant. It’s a masterpiece.
If you’ve heard only one thing about writer-director Andrzej Zulawski’s 1981 cult film Possession, it is almost certainly one of these two: either A) it features a rather untidy scene of Isabelle Adjani flipping out in a subway underpass, or B) it is completely banana-cakes insane. Both of these are understatements.
Possession is often labeled a cult horror film, and it qualifies on both fronts, but it’s also something weirder, something odder, something more self-aggrandizing than just cult or horror… something that might best be summed up as existential nutjobbery, or maybe domestic drama as eschatological disaster.
In the first few scenes, Mark (Sam Neill) returns from a long business trip to his home in cold-war-era Berlin and to his family. But his wife Anna (Adjani at her most luminous) isn’t sure she wants him to stay… and isn’t sure she wants him to leave… and that’s the most certainty we’ll see from either of them for the next two hours.
We know, as Anna might not, that Mark is some sort of shady governmental agent, that he wants to quit, that he’s being shadowed and that their home is under surveillance. Mark’s work means that a pall of nuclear-holocaust anxiety hangs over the first act of the film, but our writer-director downplays it until, rather suddenly and with a jarring comic note, he cashes in on it in the last act.
Though Mark and Anna insist repeatedly on the necessity of maintaining normalcy for their only-occasionally-appearing young son, Bob, both parents disintegrate almost immediately. Indeed, it happens at such a frantic pace as to be almost entirely uncinematic in its nature; it’s hard to develop empathy for characters who start out screaming and never stop, or to be anxious about their state of mind when they both go insane in the film’s first act.
The story itself is pretty coherent, surprisingly enough, if completely mad; Zulawski himself cheerfully recounts his elevator pitch for Possession: “it’s about a woman who [redacted] with an octopus.” And, uh, it is, if by “octopus,” he meant some tentacled… thing… that is either a mind-controlling monster, a gestating doppelganger, or a lump of abstract guilt and fury made carnal. Or all three.
But even this uneasy coherence develops despite the best efforts of Neill and Adjani as Mark and Anna. I can’t blame either actor; they are swinging for the fences in these roles, reeling around in an unremitting wallow of screaming marital discord, spitting blood and keening with agony and smashing cartons of yogurt again walls and trashing their homes and WHAT THE HECK. They’re clearly doing everything in their power — and I do mean everything — to present a harrowing portrait of a marriage in turmoil.
No, it’s the director who should be taken to task: he simply eschews moderation, ignoring the narrative and aesthetic forms that allow us to engage thoughtfully with a work: how quiet allows tension to develop, how calm lows allow us to see fervid highs and vice versa, how repetition robs even the most shocking displays of their power. Possession consists almost exclusively of climactic scenes, highly pitched scenes, vivid disorienting scenes that would be staggering if they were set against a backdrop of daily life, or if they capped a slowly climbing rise in activity.
Instead, these scenes spit out like the rambling of a madman, no punctuation or pause or respite. The whole movie passes like a fever dream, howling its fury and anxiety… up until the last few minutes, which are quieter. Here, the film’s most haunting moments unspool in relative calm, with no blood or beatings or tentacle-thingies, with none of the hysterically overwrought agony of the previous two hours, just the simple pleading of a child and an unforgettable sound in the background. It’s almost worth seeing for those few minutes. Almost.
Allow me to leave you with one last word: BANANACAKES.
[This review is cross-posted to The VideoReport.]
It’s hard to sum up why I found Gone Baby Gone so effective and affecting, because a lot of its virtue is quiet, ambiguous, hard to pin down… much like the film itself.
The story in a nutshell: A pair of unglamorous PIs (Casey Affleck and Michelle Monaghan) go looking for a four-year-old girl, hoping their unofficial questioning will dig up a trail the police can’t find. This is a story we’ve seen before, and it’s usually better suited to movies of the week. But Gone Baby Gone (from the novel by Dennis Lehane) has a rare sense of subtlety and gravity, crucial when handling such potentially exploitative material.
It doesn’t fall back on any of the usual cinematic clichés: no perfect home life in the background, no slaveringly obvious pervert hanging around the playground, and — most strikingly — no attempt to inflate our innate anxiety over the child’s fate. First-time director Ben Affleck respects his audience enough to know that our own fears on her behalf are more dreadful, more harrowing, and more indelible than any frantic speculation the characters might spout.
Famously Boston-native, Affleck paints a grubbily accurate picture of a hard-scrabble Southie neighborhood, and of a family life that is anything but heartwarming. Amy Ryan (“The Wire,” “The Office”) really gets to show her acting chops as Amanda’s sullen, slatternly, drug-addicted mother; Ryan delivers a searingly unsympathetic portrait devoid of the cheap villainy or bathetic mush of so many bad movie mothers. Casey Affleck and Michelle Monaghan are similarly well-used; they’re not heroes, just a couple of work-a-day investigators floundering around way out of their depth. Gone Baby Gone manages to combine a wry, tense crime thriller with a depressingly realistic look at negligence and poverty, and it raises some troubling and nuanced moral questions.
[This review is cross-posted at The VideoReport.
It’s the late 1970s, before cell phones, before GPS, and before safety, certainty, and rescue seemed well within reach wherever we went. Back then, when you went deep into the woods, you were alone in the woods… or, more eerily, perhaps you were not alone.
In the Spanish-English period film BackWoods (2006, a.k.a Bosque de Sombras), two British couples take a much-needed vacation in the Basque backwoods of northern Spain. The older couple, Paul (the extraordinary Gary Oldman in a classic 1970s droopy ‘stache) and Isabel (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón, The Machinist, I’m Not Scared), are weary, patient, and a bit wiser than their more fragile, fractious companions Norman (Paddy Considine: 24 Hour Party People, Dead Man’s Shoes, Hot Fuzz) and Lucy (Virginie Ledoyen, L’eau Froide). The outing seethes with tension even before the two men go out for a hunting stroll through the woods and stumble onto a terrible secret — a revelation that the locals don’t want to discuss.
From that point on, the synopsis sounds like the plot of a ’70s backwoods exploitation flick, and the film tips its cap to Straw Dogs, Deliverance, and their ilk. But, like the best of its predecessors, BackWoods strives for more than action-exploitation. The pacing helps here: the story unfolds slowly, lingering dreadfully in the tension it creates and exploring the moral quandaries that the story raises. It’s a flawed film, but a thoughtful one.
Don’t expect catharsis or clarity from BackWoods. Don’t even expect a neat resolution. This is a wandering, sorrowful story, a film that knows the harsh truth: there are no true heroes, no moral certainties, and no absolutes of good or evil, though there are all too many ways to do wrong. It’s a murky, muddy world we live in, where we can only muddle along and do our best. Our best may not be good enough, but it’s our only hope. BackWoods knows that.
[This review is cross-posted to The VideoReport.]
Do you remember the breathtaking moment in 1984′s This Is Spınal Tap when the founding members perform a lovely a cappela version of “All the Way Home,” a skiffle song from their early days? A Mighty Wind captures that sweetness and wraps it up in satire.
This 2003 mockumentary from Christopher Guest purports to tell the story of three once-prominent folk groups now gathering to memorialize their late mentor and producer. The characterizations and songs are eerily well-drawn. Michael McKean, Harry Shearer, and Guest himself (the trio made famous as Spinal Tap) appear as The Folksmen, a fictional fusion of folk groups like The Kingston Trio and Peter, Paul, and Mary. Jane Lynch and John Michael Higgins head the New Main Street Singers, a second-generation pop-folk neuf-tette that make their bread & butter playing to bored crowds at amusement parks. Mitch and Mickie (Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara) are the sweethearts of the folk world, once madly in love but now face to face for the first time in decades.
Here, Guest manages the delicate balance that characterizes the finest satire: he knows his subject inside-out and understands what makes it great as well as what makes it absurd. We’re treated to a loving send-up of folk excesses, all swaddled sweetly in the lovely music (much of it written by the cast). Mitch & Mickey’ beautiful theme “A Kiss At the End of the Rainbow” received an Academy nomination for Best Song — and deservedly so — but I’d argue that there are even finer songs in this film.
A particularly fine example is The Folksmen’s “Never Did No Wanderin’.” At first listen, it’s a perfect piece of folk music: haunting, mournful, potent, stirring. But then the lyrics sink in and it reveals itself as a deliciously witty indictment of folk’s cozy niche in the hearts of comfortable well-heeled suburbanites. It’s a wicked bite of parody and a fantastic song all rolled up together, indivisible.
Last night as we settled down to watch a movie, I waggled the DVDs and asked The Fella the greatest movie-night question ever: “So, French zombies or Shatner in Esperanto?”
(Les Revenants isn’t a proper zombie movie: it’s mournful and elegiac and beautifully crafted. Incubus is exactly what you’d expect when a sub-Corman director decides he’s Bergman. In Esperanto. So. Um. Y’know.)
I’ve heard people complain that the Coen Brothers specialize in caricatures, making a career of mocking ordinary honest doggone downhome folk. This accusation especially dogged the heels of Fargo, their heartrending tale of the petty, sorry aftermath of crime gone horribly wrong. I disagree: I say Fargo is both observational and proverbial, a mediation on the tragedy of lives shaped by greed, with a resonant moral showing the significance of modest accomplishments.
Some viewers react strongly to the film’s depictions of violence, perhaps because we’re accustomed to seeing violence as something stylized, glamorized, fetishized — not brutally simple and sad as it is here. In the world of Fargo, violence is wincingly realistic. It happens suddenly, nastily.
The Coens don’t mock their characters; they simply refuse to glamorize them. William H. Macy’s performance is achingly eloquent; he is a simple man, a seemingly honest man, a family man who allows his greed and ambition to outreach his feeble moral scope, and he pays for it terribly. Frances McDormand (as Chief Marge Gunderson) is the heart of the film, radiating calm intelligence and solid, earnest kindness — a sane center in a sad, mad little world.
Oh, boy! Who doesn’t love overstated dystopian paranoia? Nobody doesn’t love overstated dystopian paranoia!
In the wake of the Third World War, the surviving government of the future (and the pointedly very near future, at that) outlaw “the true source of man’s inhumanity to man: his ability to feel.” That’s a direct quote from Equilibrium’s opening moments, which gives the proceedings a faint whiff of the middle-school English class.
In an effort to eradicate emotion, the surviving populace is tightly controlled and dosed regularly with mood-suppressing drugs. Special tactical teams circulate solely to round up and destroy artifacts and practitioners of emotional content. In other words, they burn all the artwork they can find, starting with the Mona Lisa, and execute “Sense Offenders.” Judging by the largest trove we see, “art” includes not only Leonardo and Beethoven and Yeats, but anything kitschy or old-tyme-y, but evidently not the super-sleek Modernist regalia and equipage of the regime itself.
Our hero is the blank-faced stormtrooper John Preston (Christian Bale, doing blank-faced rigor as no one else can), who accidentally commits the capital crime of, y’know, feeling emotions. Equilibrium feels almost like a very dry satire of the tidy-future post-apocalyptic genre (for example, Gattaca and 1984 and, uh, Gattaca again) mixed with a somewhat sloppy send-up of The Matrix.
But it’s not all poorly executed lightning-fast fights! The director wants you to know he’s all philosophical, too, so he serves up a mish-mash of societal indictments. By my count, Equilibrium takes a stand against: war, totalitarian governments, personal betrayal, anti-depressants and mood stabilizers, organized religion, and puppy-killing. (This is not a joke.)
What is Equilibrium in favor of? Uh… freedom! And art! And, like, emotions, which manifest themselves largely through Beethoven and puppies and blowing stuff up with lots and lots of bullets. AWESOME.
Elli
Elsa
