Wednesday, October 31, 2012

More Scary Movies I Secretly Like Watching

Happy Halloween, my lovely haunted readers!  Tonight is Halloween, and in the spirit of the holiday I would like to both direct you to my Top Ten Horror Films I Secretly Kind Of Like, a list I made last year, and to also provide an addendum list (because, let's face it, I can talk all I want to about not liking horror movies - the truth is I am fascinated by them).

28 Days Later


That early scene, when Cillian Murphy stumbles out of the hospital and into the empty streets of London, is one of the eeriest things to be committed to film.  One of the brilliant things this movie does, that not many have tried to replicate, is change our expectations of the zombies: not only are they brutal, vicious, and hungry, but they're fast.  Zombies went from shambling horrors to rabid predators, more likely to dispense with the moaning and just rip into you with guttural shrieking.  Shivers.

(The use of red in the color palette of 28 Days Later is also interesting to note, for people who notice that kind of thing.  It borders on abrasive and gives me a headache, which was probably the point.)

Drag Me To Hell


Campy, over-the-top, and with a simplistic message (do unto others, and all that), Drag Me To Hell still manages some of the best jump scares in recent film.  Allison Lohman plays the loathsome Christine, a loan officer eager for a pay raise who declines to extend a loan to an old gypsy woman.  Christine apparently missed the memo on why it's a terrible idea to cross old gypsy women, because she finds herself the owner of a particularly nasty curse.  Thinking about the ending still makes me jump a little.  

Halloween


There are two classics on here, included because sometimes the originals are just better.  Halloween is scary because not only are there no ghosts, monsters or zombies, but because Michael Meyers doesn't have anything obviously wrong with him.  He's no Damien, no disciple of the devil, no possessed little boy - he's just a psychopath, enraged by young women who remind him of his slutty sister.  The blank white mask, which removes any trace of humanity, feels more like his face than any real one could.

Night Watch


I highly recommend watching this one with subtitles, because the cinematography actually incorporates them into the fabric of the film.  Watching a vampire lure a human through psychic calling is much creepier when the subtitles are red, and fade away like blood dissipating in water.  This movie, which is also the reason I get nervous around large flocks of crows, is about the supernatural forces that guard against each other and keep the world in balance...and what happens when a force too powerful to contain is released in Moscow.  It's beautiful and exciting, horror with a touch of class.  If you liked Let The Right One In you'll probably dig Night Watch.

Nightmare on Elm Street


The other classic I felt it was necessary to include.  A lot of horror deals with the invasion of so-called "safe" spaces, but none are as effective as the ghoul that can literally kill you in your dreams.  There's no hiding under the blankets here, and to know Freddy is to be killed by him.  Have fun trying to sleep tonight...

The Others


A shoestring budget and almost zero special effects give this one a lovely classic feel.  While not filmed in black and white, it may as well have been - the single location of the film is inside a great big house with all the windows boarded up to protect Nicole Kidman's children from their allergy to sunlight.  Shadows, light and darkness make up the special effects and create a mood so profoundly eerie that you'll find yourself jumping at nothing.  Very reminiscent of the original House on Haunted Hill.

[REC]


Another fun zombie movie that mixes them in with the found footage trope.  [REC] is kissing cousins with 28 Days Later, dealing with a virus and fast zombies, but adding an element of claustrophobia with the locked down building that the whole film takes place in.  In general, I think the found footage thing is a little played out, but this story of an apartment building dealing with a quarantine and horrifying monsters is exciting enough to get a pass.  

Red Dragon


Edward Norton makes almost as good of a foil for Anthony Hopkins as Jodie Foster.  Ralph Fiennes as the mumbling, wounded Francis Dolarhyde is a softer, though no less dangerous, villain than Buffalo Bill, which gives the whole film a different flavor when it could very easily have ended up being a rehash of Silence of the Lambs.  Also, as an English major, I can't resist the literary influence that Blake has on the film.  

Tucker and Dale vs. Evil


Making fun of every slasher film you've ever loved.  This wonderfully composed satire isn't light on the jump scares or the gore, and it's tempting to cover your eyes even while you're still laughing.  Alan Tudyk and Tyler Labine play rednecks up for some fishing in the woods who have the unfortunate luck to stumble across a group of college co-eds, who become convinced that the two hapless hillbillies are actually serial killers.  This is only reinforced when the kids start dying in hilariously accidental ways (a woodchipper may be involved).

The Wolfman


I refer here to the 2010 version, starring Benicio del Toro and Anthony Hopkins, which doesn't get enough credit as far as I'm concerned.  As a werewolf film it does some things quite well: it tells the story of the inner struggle between man and beast, and wonders if that struggle is universal and some are just better at suppressing it than others.  As any good monster film should, it has philosophical ideals framed in terms of literal monstrousness...but doesn't romanticize the monsters.  These werewolves are not your friends, and they will definitely eat you if given half the chance.

Tuesday, October 16, 2012

OscarWatch 2012: It Begins!

September is well over and we are deep into OscarWatch - something that was made QUITE clear to me on Sunday, when I went to see Argo.


Argo is a stunning film.  It is tense and claustrophobic, exciting and unbelievable - made even more so by the fact that it IS A TRUE STORY.  I repeat: the CIA inventing a fake Star Wars ripoff, press release and terrible poster included, in order to rescue six people from being publicly beheaded in Iran, ACTUALLY HAPPENED.  As with any film adaptation of historical events, I imagine things may have been spiced up a bit for the screen...although the way Ben Affleck presents it on screen feels very true to life, down to the terrible 70s mustaches and slightly grainy film quality.  It's harrowing, watching the six Americans get more and more convinced that they're going to die in the Canadian Embassy, and thrilling to watch the admittedly half-assed plan take shape.  At one point, Bryan Cranston as the CIA Chief refers to Plan: Argo as "The best, worst idea we've got."  That hopelessness, that desperation, drips off the film - which makes the payoff even more worth it.  Everything about this movie is brilliant and you should go see it, posthaste.

AwardWatch: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay (there's a book!  I wanna read it.).  Possibly a Best Actor nom for Affleck.  Best Visual Effects.  In my fantasies, John Goodman or Alan Arkin pulls a Best Supporting Actor nomination, but I don't think it's too likely.

Let's take a look at the other hardcore Oscar Bait movies I saw trailers for, and make some predictions over what awards these films will pull:

Life of Pi


Stunning, stunning trailer.  I haven't read the book yet (I KNOW), but if one was going to make a film adaptation about a boy in a boat with a tiger, I would want it to look like this.  And Ang Lee has serious philosophical chops (which worked for Brokeback Mountain, not so much for Hulk), so I think we can expect cerebral and gorgeous things from this one.  Plus, the word from the early release at the New York Film Festival has been largely positive.

AwardWatch: Best Cinematography for sure.  Best Adapted Screenplay is also a pretty safe bet.  Best Director and Best Picture, MAYBE, but it depends on how the Academy feels about another 3D feature by someone with less pull than James Cameron.

Cloud Atlas


This feels like the illegitimate lovechild of The Fountain and Tree of Life to me, which gives me conflicted feelings.  I want it to be more Fountain and less bullshit - but it looks potentially overwrought, over-complicated, and unintelligible.  I won't mind the skips around in time and place if the story stays streamlined, and I don't have a lot of hope for that.  Looks pretty beautiful, though.

(On a related note, a Google Image search of "Cloud Atlas" brings up what looks like pictures from seventeen different movies.  This is my concern: that it will not only be overly complicated, but disconnected and incomprehensible.)

AwardWatch: After last year's Tree of Life event, I don't think this one has a lot of hope for Best Picture.  Best Original Screenplay, Best Cinematography and Visual Effects and probably Art Direction, Best Costumes and Best Makeup nominations are assured, and it'll probably pull some other technical awards - I can see Best Film Editing and Sound Mixing, and Sound Track if the Cloud Atlas sonata score was written for the movie.

Lincoln


It is deeply ironic that this film is being released in the same year as Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.  Ironic and a little sad, because AL:VH might have had more pull as a summer action flick if it hadn't drawn the inevitable comparisons to Spielberg's historical beauty.  Ah well.  

AwardWatch: Possibly everything.  Best Actor for Daniel Day Lewis for sure, Best Picture, Best Director.  Best Original Screenplay?  Probably.  Best Costumes and Makeup, because duh, it's a historical.  Best Art Direction, Cinematography, probably a Best Supporting Actor nominee in there (my bet is on Tommy Lee Jones), and Best Supporting Actress for Sally Field.  

Thursday, October 4, 2012

Karl Urban is the Judge and Everything is Awesome

Dredd, Karl Urban's latest action gunfest, is currently holding steady on Rotten Tomatoes at a 77%.  For its genre, that's a solid score - more than I expected it to be garnering, before I saw it myself.  Resident Evil: Retribution, on the other hand, is maintaining a 26%.  It should also be noted that none of the flock of Resident Evil movies currently rates above 34% (the first one; the next highest is that whopping 26%).

Why is this significant?  Because I need you to know how utterly criminal it is that there will undoubtedly be another Resident Evil movie, but Dredd will never see the sequels it has so gloriously earned.


I saw both films.  Retribution was fun, and short, and so clearly a bridge to the next RE chapter that it was almost breathtaking; in terms of plot, you learn nothing new and maybe one important thing happens.  It reminded me very much of the fourth Terminator film that way, in that it exists solely to remind you that the franchise continues to chug along.  It has the requisite amount of action, lots of character death, and Mila Jovovich in a fairly ridiculous amount of leather and buckles.  Stuff blows up and blows up good.  I had fun watching it.

Stuff blows up and blows up good in Dredd, too.  Urban, stoically costumed in leather armor and that inscrutable helmet, shoots a lot of people with voice-activated ammunition.  People die in hilariously over the top ways.  Both films share a genetic component; the same dystopian, gun-slinging, face-kicking helix exists on both screens.

The difference is the core that helix wraps around, and maybe this is because we're looking at volume 5 of a franchise versus a new film (well, sort of, but this hardly counts as a sequel to Stallone's 1995 travesty).  Retribution feels no need to tell you a story, because you already know what's going on; whereas Dredd is a pretty impressive piece of tight storytelling wrapped up in some surprisingly beautiful cinematography.

One of the things that impressed me the most about Dredd was how much trust it places in its audience.  It is not heavily leaden with exposition; instead, you see a shot of barren countryside, a dense and dreary metropolis, and you hear maybe two lines about the state of the world.  That's it, but that's enough; at this point we have seen so many dystopian, post-apocalyptic settings that we know the drill.  Likewise, no time is wasted telling you how incredibly badass, capable, incorruptible, and the best at his job Dredd is - you know it from his manner and how the other characters around him treat him.  There's more showing than telling going on here.

It is also extremely well filmed.  Long, foreboding shots of empty, rusted corridors and sparkly drug-induced hazes against the standard post-apocalyptic gray and brown color palette make for some striking visuals, coupled with smart camera motion and well choreographed action (I could always see who was hitting who, and if you've been reading this blog enough you'll know that scrambled, jerky action sequences are a particular pet peeve of mine).  Dredd understands that there is a time and place for jerky filming, which is sparely and to make the audience uncomfortable (there's one haunting shot of Lena Headey as the crime lord gouging someone's eyes out that lasts maybe five seconds and gets two replays - I'm still cringing thinking about it, but the point is that it doesn't overstay its welcome).

The last thing I want to remark on is the pretty fantastic job that Karl Urban does in this role.  His acting is so Spartan, so economical, because he doesn't need to grandstand.  It's reminiscent of the way that Ryan Gosling played the Driver in Drive, in that Urban also lets the little things speak for him instead of actually saying anything.  It's all there in the creak of his armor, the set of his chin, the way he never uses three words when one will do.  His helmet, which covers most of his face and never comes off, contributes to rather than hinders his performance; it adds to the menace (in contrast is Olivia Thirlby as the Rookie, who never wears her helmet and trades on her empathy - it's also effective, but in a very different way).  He's all rock solid justice, being hurled against Lena Headey's mercurial ragemonster crime lord: the unstoppable force meeting the immovable object.  Watching them battle it out in the enclosed tower environment is not only incredibly fun, but a memorable experience.

Do the Resident Evil movies blend together in your head the same way they do in mine?