Species (1995)

Some years before the start of the movie, SETI actually did get an answer from an alien source. Following some goodwill plans for a clean, inexhaustible energy source (still waiting on that one here), the aliens sent genetic information to be implanted in human egg cells to grow, well, who knows?

The government decided creating a human alien hybrid was worth a crack, so scientists under the leadership of one Fitch (Ben Kingsley) created a girl from the alien DNA plans – because women are more docile, donchaknow. Sil (as a young girl played by Michelle Williams), as they call her, grows up at a rapid tempo and appears to be exceptionally strong and agile. She does seem pleasant enough for someone growing up in a cage, however. Yet when she also develops the disturbing habit of growing H.R. Giger-style mutations under her skin, the decision is made to kill her and end the perhaps ill-advised experiment. Because who could have expected alien DNA to be alien! Obviously, the girl makes a dramatic escape.

On the run, while committing the occasional murder, Sil turns into a rather attractive young woman (Natasha Henstridge), who, as is tradition in certain cultures, goes to Los Angeles to procreate and thereby create who knows how many more aliens.

The government throws together a team consisting of Fitch, assassin style fixer Press (Michael Madsen), molecular biologist Laura (Marg Helgenberger), computer guy Arden (Alfred Molina) and empath Dan (Forest Whitaker) to catch and kill Sil before it is too late for humanity.

Leave it to the 90s to cross the genes of the erotic thriller with gigeresque alien ickiness on a mainstream budget, give it to not always inspired yet highly competent journeyman Roger Donaldson to direct, and make a commercial success out of it.

On the plot level, this is of course pulpy nonsense, but it’s the kind of pulpy nonsense that moves from one hormonal high and one great set piece to the next, has – apart from the badly aged CGI – absolutely great effects and sells every awesome bit of nonsense that comes to its mind with complete seriousness.

Of course, you can read the whole thing as a misogynist tractate about male fear of being seduced into fatherhood but occasionally murderous women (or something of that manner). You can also, if you want to, put a very different reading on the whole thing, and read it as the story of a young woman crushed by forces she has no control over whatsoever – one of them her own biology, the other parents whose only answer to her awakening sexuality and/or difference is to hunt and kill her when she steps out of line.

In any case, on this re-watch, years after I last saw the film, I’ve also realized how good Henstridge’s performance is, quite apart from her willingness to undress. The way she shifts from Sil’s childish naivety into ruthless predator mode, the little notes of regret and desperation – it’s probably more than the film’s script asked of her. Otherwise, the impressive cast doesn’t care they are in a pretty silly kind of science fiction/horror/action exploitation flick, and though there’s little substance to the characters, everyone offers presence, the small actorly notes that bring these kinds of roles to life and a sense of taking their craft seriously.

The older I get – and, perhaps ironically, the less important a generous heaping of nudity becomes to me – the more I’ve learned to appreciate Species. Make of that what you will.

Photographing Fairies (1997)

The 1910s. Charles Castle (Toby Stephens) loses his wife Anne-Marie (Rachel Shelley) on the day after their wedding in a traumatic accident in the Swiss Alps. This leaves him suffering from the kind of grief that looks pretty much the same as a case of PTSD. Consequently, he spends his time as a battle photographer in the Great War with what looks a lot like a death wish to anyone not him, not directly trying to commit suicide but taking needless risks that are bound to get him killed eventually.

Somehow, he does survive. When the main part of the film takes place, Charles has established himself as a photographer in London after the war, together with his war photographer’s assistant Roy (Phil Davis). Roy’s also the man he uses as a stand-in when he’s making family photos of the war dead and their living families, the faces to be retouched in later. He’s pretty abrasive in his manner, so I wouldn’t bet on too long a career. One day, Charles wanders into the Theosophical Society for some cynical sneering as well as publicity, publicly verbally taking apart a faked photo of a fairy so vigorously, even Arthur Conan Doyle (Edward Hardwicke in what must have been a sly “Watson to Doyle” joke from the casting department, as well as a decent idea) doesn’t believe in it anymore. Charles is also acting like an asshole about it, obviously.

For some reason, this performance has impressed audience member Beatrice Templeton (Frances Barber) mightily, and she visits Charles with a photograph she made of her daughter and a fairy only her daughter could see at the time in the woods near her home. There’s certainly a strange shape visible on the photo, but nothing anyone, most certainly not Charles, would find conclusive, so he brushes Beatrice off. Later on, though, he discovers that the fairy-shape is also reflected in the eyes of the child in a way he as a professional wouldn’t know how to fake.

He becomes increasingly obsessed with the photo and the whole fairy idea, a state of mind that will only intensify once he goes to Beatrice’s home and has rather a lot of peculiar experiences.

Directed by Nick Willing, Photographing Fairies is one of two films from 1997 concerning fairy photography. The other one’s a children’s movie, so at least they are very different kinds of movies about the same thing, as is only right and proper. At the beginning and through the middle act, this is a pretty interesting film, centred on Charles’s intense (and nicely portrayed by Stephens) struggle through the kind of intense grief that leaves the survivor with something close to PTSD, and a rational man’s wrestling with the beauties and terrors of faith and scepticism in a much more interesting manner than the usual “faith is awesome” kind of way movies prefer. In fact, in this film, faith is a thing that might kill you, even if the things you do believe are indeed true. Though the film never really decides on the truth or untruth of Charles’s experiences, keeping things a bit too ambiguous for my tastes.

If you’re into this sort of thing – as I obviously am - you will find some of the scenes surrounding the fairy experiences here suggest at least a basic working knowledge of the Edwardian Weird Tale, particular Machen and Blackwood and these authors’ treatment of the numinous and its often destructive influence on the human, a destruction not necessarily wrought from malevolence but humanity’s basic incompatibility with certain aspects of the universe surrounding us.

All of this is at the very least intensely interesting, often more, throughout the first two acts, though someone less fascinated with Edwardian weird fiction, Spiritualism, and the psychological toll of World War I than I am might not get quite as much out of it as I did. In any case, things break down nearly completely in the third act, when the film feels the sudden need to employ a series of increasingly stupid plot developments to get its main character where it wants him to be, losing all plausibility for no visible gain. The last act is further weakened by the decision not to take an actual position on Charles’s new beliefs; I am usually all for ambiguity, but the kind employed here seems wilfully self-destructive more than anything else, not so much occluding the reality of things that may or may not happen but occluding what the film is actually trying to say, which is never a good thing. Also less than helpful is that these late plot developments are based around the behaviour of the husband of Beatrice, one Reverend Templeton, as given by Ben Kingsley in his “I AM BEN KINGSLEY AND I AM GIVING A VERY PHYSICAL AND MUSCULAR PERFORMANCE HERE” mode (all caps clearly his), turning an underwritten character who is probably meant to somehow mirror Charles’s experience of grief in a darker way into a panto caricature of the highest degree, and making all the silly developments surrounding him doubly silly by the sheer ridiculousness of the performance.

Still, Photographing Fairies is an interesting film up to that third act, and afterwards, it’s so puzzlingly ridiculous, it may very well be worth watching for its mind-boggling effect.

Security (2017)

PTSD-stricken army vet Eddie Deacon (Antonio Banderas) finally manages to land himself a job after a year or so of being out of work. On the negative side, he’s working for minimum wage as one of five security guards in a crappy shopping mall somewhere in Bulgaria the middle of nowhere USA; oh, and the shift boss (Liam McIntyre) is in idiot with a perversely absurd haircut who could be Eddie’s son – though fortunately isn’t.

His first night on the job turns out even worse than this sounds, though, for a kid (Katherine de la Rocha) stumbles into the mall looking for help. Jamie, as she is called, is the only witness to the murder of her father, connected to crimes that could land some rather nasty people in prison for a very long time. She’s just escaped an attack by mercenaries on the convoy of “USA Marshals” (that’s what’s stitched on their jackets at least) supposed to bring her to a safe place. These mercenaries are led by a guy calling himself Charlie (Ben Kingsley), and when you hire an Academy Award winner who has also been titled by the gosh-darned queen for that kind of role, you’ll sure as hell let him appear right in front of the mall a few minutes later, so that Eddie and his colleagues can play a bit of group Die Hard.

So yeah, Antonio Banderas has now reached a point in his career where he can be an elderly action hero too in a cheap direct to home video flick produced by – among others – Avi Lerner, and shot in Bulgaria, as is tradition. For Academy Award Winner Sir Ben Kingsley, this sort of thing is of course a step up. He was, after all, already in Uwe Boll movies, and unlike the stuff Boll craps out, director Alain Desrochers clearly tries his hardest to actually make a decent action flick.

Of the two mainstream actors involved, it’s Banderas whose coming out looking the best, because he’s neither phoning things in nor presenting himself as ironically above the film he is in, but really puts effort into the at heart silly little action hero role, Cuba Gooding Jr. style. Not surprisingly, Banderas’s willingness to go along does do Security a world of good, what with him being in nearly every scene. There’s obviously not a lot of depth to his character, but Banderas provides Eddie with presence and a feeling of personality, and that’s really all I want from the hero of an action movie. He looks also surprisingly fit in the action scenes.

Kingsley, on the other hand, is phoning his role in so badly my protestant work ethic (you can imagine it as a little guy in Victorian worker’s clothing sitting on my shoulder, throwing coal at people it disapproves of) became rather annoyed with him. Weirdly enough, it thinks if a movie’s good enough for an actor to get paid for it, it should be good enough for him to actually do his job. At least there’s good old Cung Le by Kingsley’s side to look threatening and glower.

The rest of the cast is pretty decent too. Of course, without Academy Awards and the approval of the Queen, you actually gotta put the work in and not just put your face in front of the camera, read your lines from a prompter, cash your check and go home. Sorry, I’m ranting. Anyway, the lack of a proper main villain doesn’t hurt the film as much as it could, mostly because Desrochers films around Kingsley rather well, and does manage to stage some decent, somewhat creative action scenes in which the not exactly fighting fit security people fight off the bad guys with various mall-made traps and improvised weapons. And later on, Banderas is even allowed to do a bit of gun fu.

Of course, all this won’t make you happy if you don’t have a degree of tolerance for some of the film’s problems – mostly caused by budgetary constraints, I believe. Obviously, the plot is not terribly plausible, but I have to admit, I’m not terribly phased by that in US low budget action cinema. I wouldn’t exactly complain about fewer clichés and more logic, but what can you do? Then there are the rather inauthentic ideas about America that come through again and again: there’s the whole “USA Marshals” thing (which somebody would have caught in a production with a higher budget and then simply redone), the fact that the mall is about as American as I am, strategically placed stars and stripes and americana notwithstanding, and quite a few other things of this sort. At least, these kinds of goofs have charm and are generally amusing, so they are not exactly terrible flaws.


As a matter of fact, there’s little wrong at all with Security when you look at it in the context of US low budget action cinema shot in Bulgaria, and if you’re going in keeping in mind what it is, you should be more than decently entertained. I’m certainly looking forward to more adventures of Banderas in Bulgaria.

Three Films Make A Post: There's a new police force on the streets... and they only come out at night.

I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (2016): There’s the old chestnut that says not every film is for everyone, and that some films are definitely less for everyone than others. This pretty much describes Oz Perkins’s Netflix arthouse horror movie about a live in nurse (Ruth Wilson) moving into the house of elderly writer Iris Blum (Paula Prentiss) and the haunting she experiences. Which sounds rather easily consumable, but in Perkins’s telling, it is a film of shifting realities and meanings, where there’s never a clear dividing line between the real and the unreal, the psychological or the supernatural, and where that line only ever dissolves further. It’s a very slow and subtle film, with a brilliant lead performance by Wilson, yet it is also a film that needs patience, thought, and viewers absolutely willing to follow where it goes. For me, the film is beautiful and intense, but I can definitely see why someone might watch it and just get bored. Some films just either resonate with you, or they don’t.

Rollercoaster (1977): In comparison, James Goldstone’s thriller with disaster movie elements about an amusement park ride safety inspector (George Segal) finding himself drawn into the hunt for a mentally not terribly healthy blackmailer (Timothy Bottoms) threatening to sabotage rollercoasters around the USA is downright fast. In actuality, it’s a bit of a slow starter, spending too much time dithering before Segal’s Harry Calder is drawn into the plot. Once it gets going, though, this turns into an exciting little film that makes highly atmospheric – and often clever - use of the amusement park surroundings, plays fair with its audience and comes by its best set pieces as organic parts of the plot. There’s a fine cast too, with people like Richard Widmark and Susan Strasberg in various supporting roles.

Goldstone’s – who was mostly a TV guy - direction isn’t spectacular, but he’s effortlessly effective when it comes to the suspense sequences, and by now the style has taken on the enjoyable patina typical of well made but not spectacular 70s films.


The Wackness (2008): Looks like I’m not escaping the coming of age films these days. Jonathan Levine’s genre entry recommends itself through an off-handed but efficient portrayal of mid-90s New York – with hip hop as the logical soundtrack – solid acting by coming of ager Josh Peck, mandatory The Girl Olivia Thirlby, and Famke Janssen as her mother, and one of his showy yet intelligent and typically enjoyable performances by Ben Kingsley as the psychologist of our dope dealing hero – also his best customer, friend, and the stepfather of his love interest. The best parts of the film really concern the relationship between the two male characters, with Kingsley’s Dr. Squires despite the age difference still not having life figured out much better than the kid has. The relationships between the men and their respective women alas don’t really work too well because this is one of these male-centric coming of age films that never does spend any time alone with its female characters, and so never develops much motivation and personality for them not connected to the guys, turning their actions into plot conveniences more than choices made by human beings. Which to me always seems like a rather childish approach for films supposedly all about growing up.

Three Films Make A Post: One Cop. One Vigilante. Alone, they're unstoppable. Together, they're invincible!

Hugo (2011): Now, it would be quite easy to put on my cynical hat here and treat this as your typical Oscar bait movie, seeing as it contains children, is a heart-warming hymn on the art of film making, and has a very self-conscious happy end where everyone and everything wins. However, that’s not at all how Hugo feels to me. Instead, I see a heart-felt film made with all the love Scorsese so obviously feels for the history of movies and specifically Georges Méliès, created with a loving hand primarily for the eyes of his daughter. It’s a film whose happy end incorporates the sides of life that aren’t happy at all, a film that implies one of the things that makes us love art is its ability to fix the wrongs and injustices of life in it, seeing cinema’s happy ends as a way to push us into making happy ends in the world too.

Out of the Dark (2014): Director Lluís Quílez’s attempt to crack the US market is certainly a technically accomplished film but for a movie featuring the basic creepy menace of ghost children with rags on their faces, it feels surprisingly harmless, with little content that could actually disturb. That might be on account of the highly basic nature of its characterizations (seriously, could Julia Stiles and Scott Speedman be any blander?), and the obvious and predictable nature of every little thing that happens in it.

While I don’t exactly need everything grim and gritty (as my appreciation of Hugo shows), I’d also have wished for the film’s resolution to have felt less like an afternoon special and more like something with actual emotional impact, but then, that would – again – have needed some actual character work or depth, and that’s not something this particular film seems comfortable with.

The ABCs of Death 2 (2014): As a concept, this anthology movie series really is difficult to beat, because while you won’t like everything in here, the shortness of each single piece makes it difficult to become too annoyed by the ones you don’t like. Among the 26 short films here, there’s the stupid, the silly, the misanthropic, the clever, the disquieting and the gosh-darn bizarre, mixed via the awesome powers of the alphabet, and created by directors from all over the globe. To my tastes, there’s a lot more to like than to dislike here. At least, I found myself in turn laughing, shaking my head, looking puzzled and feeling mildly disgusted, and what more could I ask from a project like this?

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,colombian movies,drama,fantasy,comedy,horror,martin scorsese,ben kingsley,lluís quílez,julia stiles,scott speedman

In short: Stonehearst Asylum (2014)

aka Eliza Graves

Following the incredible Session 9, Brad Anderson’s directing career has a series of ups and downs in film as well as on TV, with nothing I’ve seen quite up to the level of a film that might feel like a bit of a millstone around the neck of anyone who made it. It has always been obvious, though, that Anderson is a director very much in control of his material, with a sense of style and mood, just not always provided with the right scripts - and one can’t help but speculate the right circumstances – to make the most of his talents.

Stonehearst Asylum again isn’t quite up to the level of Session 9 but is still quite a delightful experience. Now, it might be possible my huge enjoyment of the film is based on it hitting so many of my pleasure buttons, what with it being freely “based on” (which means, taking a basic idea and doing something completely different with it) a Poe story, exploring the realm between “madness” and “mental health” in a way that is at once conscious of the constructedness of these descriptors as of the actual pains of suffering from a mental illness. I’m also quite fond of the way it uses sensationalized ideas of mental illness and psychiatry in a playful manner that always makes clear scriptwriter Joe Gangemi and Anderson do know they are using the popular ideas of psychiatry and mental illness rather than the things themselves, sometimes letting very different interpretations of what they mean collide, which probably will offend someone somewhere, but so will everything.

And because that’s clearly not enough for one film, it also makes merry use of all kinds of gothic romance elements – often twisted in fun and clever ways and always used with just the right tone and in just the right mood - and (slightly ironic) Romantic nonsense about the curative powers of love, thinks about the troubles of building a utopia when you’re surrounded by fallible human beings who need to eat and be warm and when you yourself are a rather hurt human being too, even carries some mildly feminist elements (if you want to read them that way, that is), and, finally, reaches an improbable but perfectly likeable and deserved kind of happy end. And, thanks to the film’s Gothic structure and Anderson’s general brilliance, Stonehearst Asylum does makes this overload of ideas and concepts work, more often than not dance, with one another, as if it were the easiest thing in the world.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,gothic,thriller,brad anderson,kate beckinsale,michael caine,ben kingsley,jim sturgess

Fear Is The Key (1973)

A man named John Talbot (Barry Newman) provokes a fight with some cops in a small town in Louisiana by violently insisting on drink on the Holy Sunday - the fiend. Turns out beating up a cop is a crime in Louisiana, too, and so Talbot finds himself in front of a judge. Not surprisingly, Talbot - a professional diver and man of violence, it seems - is being sought for some heavier crimes too. Alas/fortunately (depending on one's perspective), courtroom security is very lax, so Talbot manages to steal the gun of a guard, shoots another one, and takes a woman we will later learn is Sarah Ruthven (Suzy Kendall), the daughter of an oil millionaire, hostage.

This being an action thriller from the 70s, it's time for an epic car chase. Not that the chase'll do Talbot much good in the long run - he may manage to evade the cops, but soon enough finds himself and his hostage in the hands of the shady ex-cop Jablonsky (Dolph Sweet). Jablonsky is planning to sell the pair to Sarah's father.

His plan goes well enough. There is, however something strange going on in Ruthven's (Ray McAnally) place. Oil millionaire or not, he seems to be taking orders from two men he calls his "guests" - a guy named Vyland (John Vernon) and his partner/bodyguard Royale (Ben Kingsley in pre-Uwe-Boll days when he was still in the possession of a certain amount of hair). Vyland and Royale don't want to deliver Talbot to the police, but have plans of their own for the man. They'd be surprised if they knew what plans Talbot has for them.

Sometimes, I do understand the feeling of those frequently annoying "movies were better in the past, when the grass was greener and I had to climb Mount Everest on my way to school" people. At least, I have a hard time imagining a contemporary action-heavy thriller to not end in a wild shoot-out with about three dozen explosions, but instead a tight and claustrophobic scene of people talking under pressure, and that's a shame for contemporary cinema.

It's not as if Fear is the Key didn't already have more than its share of outward action before its tight talking finale. In fact, the film's series of car chases, fist fights and a bit of silent infiltration is as generous as it is varied, and I would not at all be surprised to hear that scriptwriter Robert Carrington (who didn't write many movies, but counts Wait Until Dark among the number he did write) was going into writing the script with the idea of packing in as much of the sort of action and excitement this kind of pot-boiler asks for, but never once to repeat the same kind of action scene, a technique that turns what could be a very formulaic film into one that feels inventive and sometimes even surprising, even though the actual plot is rather preposterously over-cooked and silly.

Fear's director Michael (J.) Tuchner is an interesting case: he began his career with a handful of very good to very interesting films in various genres during the first half of the 70s (Villain with Richard Burton being an especially remarkable one), only to fall into the TV directing hole, never to climb out of it again. In the film at hand, the Brit Tuchner shows himself as more than adept at the type of 70s action thriller with elements of the conspiracy thriller I've always seen as a particularly American genre, giving his film a relentless pace while still finding time and room to build up a sense of place and time, and let characterization happen through small gestures of his actors as well as (alas) one or two a bit too tellingly symbolic shots.

Barry Newman is a perfect choice for the lead role. The actor projects the appropriate mixture of everyman-like attitude and a tense energy that teeters on the edge of something very dark and violent; he also manages to project physical menace without having a physique that reads as physically menacing.

So it's a fine film all-around, and if you're in the market for a bit of 70s style action thriller without wanting to go the grindhouse way, Fear Is The Key should not disappoint.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,reviews,action,thriller,michael tuchner,barry newman,suzy kendall,john vernon,ben kingsley