Three Films Make A Post: The Legend You Know. The Story You Don’t.

Mary Poppins Returns (2018): This musical is a terribly charming throwback to 50s Hollywood entries into the genre, updated with light but sure hand by its director Rob Marshall. There are a plethora of adorable little moments, scenes that understand to milk magic out of the very artificiality of the musical as a form, and lovely performances by Emily Blunt and Lin-Manuel Miranda (as a cockney lamplighter, obviously).

Despite all these charms, it never comes quite together as anything but a series of deeply charming and fun vignettes. The thematic throughline is weak (even for a musical), and there’s really not enough substance to justify the running time of 130 minutes. Of course, I do understand why Marshall didn’t cut two or three musical numbers – they are all so very lovely, and would have been darlings particularly difficult to kill. But then, that’s what directors are sometimes supposed to do.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018): This perfectly deserved Academy Award winner by Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman, on the other hand, demonstrates how to make a film full of wonderful little moments and details and more ideas than your typical Hollywood director will have in a lifetime, and still let it come out as a perfect whole, full of life, intelligence and love, carried by what feels like love for and excitement about all things Spider-Man. There are so many little nods to artists and writers that worked on these characters and version of these characters before, so many different animations styles and ideas but they are all perfectly weighed parts of the whole, important to the film’s understanding of the kind of heroism the webslinger is supposed to be about (something the Andrew Garfield Spidey movies generally missed by a mile).

That the film is also perfectly joyful (even in its sad and knowing moments), and inclusive in that way that embraces everybody who wants to be embraced, just make the whole thing more wonderful and more fun.


Aquaman (2018): Also very fun (though not on the level of Into the Spider-Verse), is watching DC finally stumbling onto the insight that superhero films are indeed allowed to be goofy, silly, and imaginative. That James Wan of all people is the guy who gets this is a bit of a surprise if you’re me and basically hated everything he made in horror movies, but get it, he clearly does, so his film – after the mandatory bad first twenty minutes even Wonder Woman and this are apparently mandated to have by the gods of DC themselves – turns into a series of four-colour incidents permanently fluctuating between the silly, the absurd, the semi-operatic, and the colourfully strange. Which is so much better than another attempt at making superheroes so grimdark the whole hero bit falls by the wayside (which is not a problem Marvel Studios ever had, even when their films get dark).

3 Days to Kill (2014)

Retired by the CIA – with cheap watch and pension and little else -because of his terminal cancer, killer Ethan Renner (Kevin Costner) goes to Paris to attempt to reconnect with his wife Christine (Connie Nielsen) and his teenage daughter Zooey (Hailee Steinfeld) before he dies; a purple bicycle will be involved.

As luck will have it, oversexed CIA gal Vivi Delay (Amber Heard) decides that Ethan might have seen the mysterious evil international arms dealer only known as The Wolf (Richard Sammel) in his final mission, and now wants Ethan to find and eliminate said The Wolf (his main henchman is a guy called The Albino who doesn’t actually seem to be an Albino, by the way, and rather looks more as if he were called The Hairless Guy). Ethan’s prize would be an experimental drug that just might cure his cancer if it doesn’t kill him. Consequently, Ethan is back killing and torturing people again, while at the same time trying to juggle fatherly responsibilities and an attempt to get back in his wife’s good graces.

As frequent readers know, I have a conflicted relationship with the films made by Luc Besson’s EuropaCorp. As much as I like their project of making European-based mid-budget genre movies with as many international actors in a career low as they can hire, as little do I enjoy many of Besson’s scripting tendencies, particularly the often needless stupidity, and the unhappy feeling Besson is proud of the general dumbness of what he writes.

It doesn’t help that some of EuropaCorp’s directors are guys like Olivier Megaton, who never saw an action sequence he wanted to film in a comprehensible way, and never encountered an annoying editing tic he didn’t want to repeat again and again. As luck will have it, somebody involved in EuropaCorp seems to have realized that there are quite a few Hollywood directors in a career low too, so they can actually hire someone who knows how to direct a movie instead of Megaton. In a curious turn of events, that special someone in this friendlier variation on Taken is McG, not a director I usually connect with things like “competence” or movies I actually want to see.

McG does good work here, though, connecting the script’s curious mixture of broad comedy (there are torture jokes), kitschy family drama, the slightly more down to Earth version of EuropaCorp action that leaves Besson’s oldest enemy – gravity – untouched, and Besson’s infatuation with bizarre and puzzling ideas (not that I blame him for that), in a way that results in a highly entertaining film, if one with a script that only tenuously, and for the most part without seeming to try very hard, connects its disparate part. The script even needs to use pure chance to throw together the film’s grand finale.

Fortunately, when taken separately, the film’s single parts are done with professionalism and often charm, and while they only make a successful whole if you’re willing to suspend quite a few more things than mere disbelief, 3 Days to Kill works hard to convince a viewer to like it enough to suspend whatever the film asks her to. I, at least, found myself disarmed early on (perhaps only by the shock of actually getting to see what happens in the action sequences instead of guessing at it), laughing about my share of the film’s jokes, raising my eyebrow happily at the film’s more outré or just unexplained ideas, raising my other eyebrow less happily about stuff like the squatters from Mali who have moved into Ethan’s apartment and teach him a valuable lesson by virtue of their “authenticity”, and not feeling too offended by the family drama stuff. The last is made a bit easier by the happy fact that Ethan’s teenage daughter is actually played by a teenager, isn’t annoying, doesn’t get kidnapped, and is even allowed to have sex without getting punished for it (spoiler), which makes the whole “bringing the family back together” thing less unpleasantly reactionary as it could be, particularly since Ethan’s fathering style – while still pretty violent – doesn’t seem as outright insane as is par for the course in these films.

It also helps the film that the cast is pretty fun to watch too. Costner (of whom I’ve never been much of a fan) seems to have slightly puzzled fun with the film’s weirder aspects and is generally really funny when he’s supposed to, teary when he’s supposed to, and off-handedly violent when it’s time for that, while Steinfeld and Nielsen have the family drama down pat, and Heard works her modern low budget movie queen magic with just the right degree of self-irony and some interesting costuming decisions.

So, as the man (right, me) said more than once about other films already goes here too: what’s not to like?

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The Ward (2010)

(Warning: there will be light spoilers you might want to avoid if you're planning on watching this one).

1966. Kristen (Amber Heard) burns down a farm house for reasons she can't or won't remember. She ends up in a rather peculiar ward of a mental institution under the supervision of one Dr. Stringer (Jared Harris). Since his style of treatment is somewhat experimental in its strange combination of the modern and the barbaric (good old electro shocks), Stringer only has a handful of patients beside Kristen, every single one of them a textbook archetype of a different construction of female identity - there's the "helpless little girl" Zoey (Laura-Leigh), the overtly sexual rich man's daughter Sarah (Danielle Panabaker), etc.

But something's not right at all in the ward - patients before Kristen have shown a tendency to disappear, never to be heard from again. Kristen gets her first hint at an explanation for the girls' disappearances in her first night in the institution. A rather dead looking girl enters her cell despite a locked door and plays grabs with her blanket.

The longer Kristen is inside the institution, the more aggressive the ghostly attacks become, and it doesn't take too long until the ghost makes a play for her life.

Kristen's reaction to the ghost is quite practical - it's existence is just another reason for her to try and break out of the ward as soon as possible, taking her co-patients with her. But all attempts at escape seem to end up making things worse. The ghostly enemy becomes stronger, more aggressive, and begins to kill the girls off one by one. Eventually, Kristen will have to learn the truth about who the ghost is and why it want to kill her and everyone else from her co-patients who might not be as innocent about what's happening to them as they seem. And even then, our heroine still has to understand what's happening to herself now has to do with her own burning down of the farm house, before things can turn out for the better.

A lot of people online seem to be pretty down on John Carpenter's return to long form film The Ward, but I don't think I agree. Admittedly, the film at hand is not as great as Carpenter's best films, but expecting the guy to produce a Halloween, a The Thing or a In the Mouth of Madness every time he steps behind the camera seems patently unfair to me - I'm perfectly fine with a movie like this that knows what it is, knows what it wants, and works well, but not spectacularly well, in its confines. And really, compared to the stuff other old heroes like Tobe Hooper and Dario Argento crap out now, this is an earth-shattering masterpiece just by virtue of being good.

Argento seems like a rather interesting point of comparison to me in this case, because I think there are a nods to the giallo and giallo style of storytelling in The Ward, reaching from the obvious in form of Mark Kilian's (and what's up with Carpenter not doing his own score?) extremely Goblin-esque soundtrack to the less obvious in the way Carpenter treats sensationalized psychiatry, or the general plot construction that not always makes practical sense, but seems ever conscious of the demands of mood and metaphor. Some of the elements of the film that seem particularly unreal or illogical will be explained quite nicely through the semi-twist in the end, but - as is traditional in the more complicated giallos too - the explanation of what's really going on does not fit the facts so snugly it is convincing as "real" and not a construction inside of a movie; emotionally and conceptually, however, the twist seems quite fitting to me. Of course, Carpenter's idea of what makes a twist is quite superior compared to the twist ending style of contemporary horror, where you throw any old nonsense at your viewer, disregarding that it neither works as part of what came before nor has any connection to themes or mood of your movie.

Visually, The Ward is as much a John Carpenter movie as one could hope for. Carpenter is neither the type of experienced director who feels the need to suddenly use stupid jump cuts and other horrible trappings of bad direction to look hip, nor is he going for any sort of retro aesthetic. The film is the work of a man obviously pretty comfortable with his own talents as a director, not unwilling to change elements of his style up a little, but mostly interested in using his style to tell the story of his film properly. Though there are quite a few typical Carpenter moments on screen, there's no pointing at his own brilliance, yet also not a single moment that's actually brilliant. If Carpenter's style as a director in The Ward were a shoe, it were a well-loved, well-treated pair of sneakers, comfortable, probably even a near perfect fit, yet also a bit unexciting.

That "a bit unexciting" really seems to point at The Ward's major problem. There's a certain feeling of distance about the film, a lack of urgency even in the small handful of murder set pieces that made it impossible for me to really get excited about anything that was happening. The Ward never hit me on the more visceral or emotional level a horror movie should hit me on. This is not to say that The Ward is not enjoyable, rather, it's me complaining that it's not more than enjoyable and pretty interesting.

I'm not going to complain about the performance of Amber Heard, though. In the last few years, Heard has played in quite a few genre and semi-exploitation movies, and she's always convincing, likeable, sexy and believably competent without going the scream queen route of only selling the sex but not the acting, nor the superior "I'm a real actress" route. There's a dignity to an actress (or an actor) doing her best in whichever film she's in (even if it's that boring remake of And Soon the Darkness), the kind of dignity a mainstream Hollywood star doesn't have and doesn't need, but that's closer to what I'm looking for in actors than an aura of stardom.

 

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Three Films Make A Post: Monsters walk the Earth in a ravishing rampage of clawing fury!

Watchmen (Ultimate Cut) (2009): I know, as a good little nerd I'm bound by law to hate Zack Snyder and everything he has ever done with an intensity sane people reserve for guys who eat babies, or are Hitler, but I just don't. In fact, I think Snyder's highly artificial and operatic version of Alan Moore's and Dave Gibbon's Watchmen ain't half bad. Often, the film nearly manages to reach the heights its aiming for with its choice of source, at other times, it gets bogged down in slight bloat or is trying to stay so close to surface elements of the comic that it's veering into the territory of the unintentionally comical, but the latter does come with a territory as inherently ridiculous as the superhero genre (that I love just as much as Snyder seems to do).

In other words, I think Watchmen is a perfectly fine film.

 

I.K.U. (2000): Taiwanese-American arthouse director Shu Lea Cheang made this hard softcore low budget movie in Japan with a predominantly Japanese cast and crew, and it's pretty much like an outsider's dream of what a Japanese cyber-porn movie would look like. There is some sort of story about a sex-data collecting android called Reiko in there, but Cheang seems more interested in burying it under every cheap visual trick you can afford when you're producing your movie digitally. The whole film works inside of the stylistic parameters of Japanese low-budget cyberpunk films like Tetsuo, just with sex taking the place of the violence, and gender- and sexual fluidity that of less precisely located bodily transformations. Like its predecessors, it'll either give you a headache from exposure to too much visual and audial information in too little time, or make you quite happy in its own psychedelic way.

 

Drive Angry (2011): Well, depending on your preferences, this charming little ditty about Nic Cage crawling from hell to save his baby granddaughter and driving, angry, is either the End of Western Civilization made film or an adorable attempt at making a movie that is exactly like an old grindhouse film without even a hint of the intelligence other lovers of the form like Rodriguez and Tarantino apply to it.

Being who I am, I'm obviously pretty alright with both interpretations. What's not to love about a film featuring Nicolas Cage grimacing and mumbling, Amber Heard perfectly emulating all the sexy good-naturedness of 70s exploitation heroines who deserved better than their filmic surroundings gave them, William Fichtner doing his best Christopher Walken impression, random nudity, horrible jokes, and a bit of the old ultra violence set to generic rock music?

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All the Boys Love Mandy Lane (2006)

Mandy Lane (Amber Hearst) is the walking dream of all boys in her high school. Just about every single one of them finds her angelic virginity (hey, I didn't write the script!) irresistible. She tends to keep her distance from them, though. When she finally agrees to visit a jock party, she takes her slightly nerdy friend Emmet (Michael Welch) with her, who promptly convinces one of her admirers that the best and easiest way to impress Mandy would be to jump to one's death. Which the guy promptly does.

Nine months later, Emmet and Mandy aren't on speaking terms anymore, instead she runs with a somewhat wilder clique of rich idiots, although she still is as pure as the white winter snow.

When the clique goes on a druggy weekend in the country, they are stalked by a shadowy figure who murders them one by one. Oh, who might the killer be?

Mandy Lane is a film that has some problems finding a distributor outside of Germany, a somewhat curious state for an American film made with American money that is really quite nice.

Sure, it is a teen slasher, but a very well-made one. Since the budget didn't allow to cast the typical modern horror movie TV teen idols many mainstream horror titles are plagued with, the script is able to at least touch on a few things modern slashers ignore: the teenage years as wilderness, teenagers are taking drugs (oh noes!) and so on. All of this isn't explored all that deeply, but treated realistically enough to make the (more than solidly acted) characters a lot more deep than one is used in the sub-genre.

Plot and twists should be surprise to no one, I think, but most of it is handled in such a way that knowing what will happen doesn't take away from watching it.

Mandy herself is a very interesting character in her being used so heavily as projection surface for the demands and wishes of other people I have my doubts there is anything like a "real her" there. In this, the film stands very much in the tradition of classic exploitation movies, who never had a problem with treating their female protagonists as objects while at the same time criticizing the objectification of women.

So, subversion is still alive.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,horror,slasher,amber heard,jonathan levine,reviews