One Movie a Week

I find most modern American horror films to be dispiriting rather than frightening, and while watching The Ruins, I had an epiphany. At its core, the genre has always had a close relationship with fairy tales, and in this way, it's always been moralistic, wagging its finger at the arrogance of those who would dare cross societal boundaries. Of course, the subject of its moralizing is ever-changing with the times--horror films of the 30s had, among other things, a fascinating ethnocentric dread (beware the swarthy Romanians!), the horror of the 80s punished those who indulged in the sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll lifestyle of the 60s (ladies, stay chaste!), and so on. In The Ruins, the decision to explore the ancient culture of Mexico, rather than remain shallow, uncultured tourists at a beach resort, is the decision that dooms its college kids. By itself, this is an anti-intellectual message (another staple attitude of the genre), but pair it with other recent films like Hostel where characters are punished for their exploitation of foreigners by remaining shallow, uncultured tourists, and you have the beginnings of what seems to be the modern horror movie's message: Don't do anything at all. Stay where you are.

Give it credit, even while indulging this sort of xenophobic terror, The Ruins manages to make flowers kind-of scary. Not "I'll never feel safe at the florist's again!" scary, but, at least, "Hey, Main Character, look out behind you, there're flowers there!" scary. The Ruins is about a group of college kids who, while vacationing in Mexico, take a trip to an ancient Mayan pyramid that lies unexplored and uncharted. It's not, we're told, on any maps, so the knowledge of its existence is passed along like a bootleg concert recording, with rudimentary maps passed down to the curious from insiders. When the youngsters get there, they're forced to the top of the pyramid by some gun-toting Mayans who then set up camp at the pyramid's base, killing all who come back down. Thus trapped and with no cell phone signal (this lack of a cell phone signal has become as trite as the invader cutting the phone lines... can we find something else to do with cell phones, please?), the collegiates must fend for their survival, find water and food, and wait for rescue. Meanwhile, the local foliage seems to be trying to eat them.

These carnivorous plants are, by far, the best part of the film. The flowering vines delight in blood, and they move, indifferent and innocuous, toward each freshly-spilled pool. Their casual, reliable reaction to the suffering of the humans is (I'd wager) intentionally funny; the film is aware of the silliness of a group of vines slithering toward a freshly severed limb, so what could have been a laughable attempt to scare instead becomes darkly comic and even endearing. Goofier still is the narrative invention that the flowers of these vines have gained the ability to mimic the sounds around them, but this too emerges as more creepshow fun than implausible stupidity. The reveal of this trait happens in a nifty bit of sound design--each flower, by itself, seems to sound off just a fragment of the noise being mimicked, so, the full sound is achieved when all the flowers noise in unison. It's not all laughs, though; they're creepy little creepers. They're ubiquitious and unceasing. After spending a night on the pyramid, one of the college kids wakes up to find that some of the vines have crept upon her overnight and inserted their stalks into some recently-sustained wounds. Worse, the plants are thriving, reproducing within her bloodstream itself. The inexorable threat of the plants is about the only thing that pops up above an otherwise formulaic survival horror story. It's certainly a much better eco-threat than the one in The Happening, anyway.

Nevertheless, the film is suffused with the sense that nothing matters, that the characters have no agency. Each idea they employ to deal with their predicament is about equal in terms of whether or not it's a good or bad idea, and the success or failure of their ideas seems entirely up to the dictates of chance or, as it were, the screenwriter. In this case, the screenwriter is a punishing fellow, and none of their ideas have any degree of success (up until the last one), and so the movie just hops from one kind of hopelessness to another. There's no sense of building action or increasing horror, just a steady drone of people screaming as each fresh, random horror is visited upon them. This is getting increasingly typical--The Strangers, for all its craft, had the same problem--and it's why the net effect of modern horror films seems to be saying, "Give up. Stop trying. Whatever you do, it's going to result in the same thing." That there is, eventually, a plan that works seems as much an accident as anything else in the film (it's also a betrayal of what we've been told about the Mayan force at the base of the pyramid), and, so, The Ruins falls flat on even providing a catharsis.

What we're left with is another film that sees the very act of doing things and going about your business as a punishable act of hubris. Rather than being frightening, these films just leave me numb--as in the rancid, unforgivable ending of The Mist, the twists of fate are often as absurd as an old Warner Brothers Cartoon. Characters are punished not for any transgressions, but for lacking omniscience. They turn left instead of right and, so, get eaten by goblins. Someone bites into a cracker and an anvil falls on their foot. If only they'd have known! Bad, arbitrary things happen to people all the time, it's true, but most modern horror films seem to be content to simply state this and then nod knowingly. "Whaddya gonna do?" they say, shrugging. They don't provide us with stakes through the heart or "shoot them in the head!" There's nothing to be done. The bad guys are out there, and they will get us no matter who we are or what we might learn. In a world in which the earth that once nourished us turns noxious and the government unapologetically tortures in our name, it's pointless--these films show us--to do anything. The Ruins and its ilk offer us a justification for surrender to the perils of living, a way to excuse one's apathy in the face of violation. Ok, now I'm scared.
Originally posted on:One Movie a Day/Week

Batman Begins, the reboot of the Batman franchise that precedes The Dark Knight, was a novel take on the whole Batman mythos. It spent most of its running time justifying the wackiness of a dude putting on a costume and fighting crime in real-world terms. It was also the first Batman movie that (finally) correctly identified that Batman does, in fact, have a super power, after all--he's rich. Playing with themes of noblesse oblige and grounding the action in the landscape of an urban crime drama, it found a new, welcome spin on the character and justified its re-telling of the Batman origin story. It also barreled past a perfect ending about an hour or so into the film and went on and on through some ho-hum plot about supervillains poisoning the water supply or something. Now, on the heels of that film's success and amidst a huge cultural footprint comes The Dark Knight, a film even more overstuffed and overplotted than its predecessor. It goes even further in the attempt to remove Batman from the arch, exaggerated comic book universe and place him in the middle of a modern American city, and also outwears its welcome by going on far longer than its plot deserves. The film is two and a half hours of superbly produced scenes of dour, sweaty machismo, but features little-to-no dramatic tension for most of this time. It's weird, because the script has the air of a well-structured and nuanced procedural with motifs and themes that bounce off of one another, reflecting the ultimate larger purpose of the film, and the chief villain is a wondrous, relevant rendition of modern day anxieties. But the film is, ultimately, a dreary experience puffed up with unearned self-importance, and, while there's a lot of chaotic movement and things blow up real good, it's monotonous. Everything is always happening at the same level; each scene and each gesture is as grand as the last one. As a result, The Dark Knight congeals into a puddle of pretty goodness, its ambitions encased in the ceaseless drone of the execution.

That said, it's still often a mesmerizing film. When it's working and everything is clicking (which is about half of the time), it's a magnificent crime drama about a desperate, rotting city. A large part of this success is due to Heath Ledger's Joker. The late actor's performance is crazy-good or good-crazy; like Johnny Depp in the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, his performance elevates the entire film. As written, this Joker is an anarchic terrorist, a self-described agent of chaos (...calling Maxwell Smart...). He may have a purpose, but whatever it is, his methods eclipse his politics and render them irrelevant. It's a perfect villain for the times, an exaggerated version of America's terrorist bogeymen whose methods and beliefs can seem so utterly foreign and impenetrable. Ledger's clearly having a good time with this; he employs a bunch of crazy tics and grimaces, and intones most of his lines with a chilling deadpan. A less capable actor would have gone too crazy, but Ledger imbues the craziness of the character with a palpable sense of masochism and self-loathing. It's soon clear that Batman's use of force and technology is no match for the sheer psychological guile that this villain possesses. All of this informs the best scene in the film (and Ledger's in most of the movie's best scenes), an interrogation scene where Batman is free to pummel and torture the Joker, but finds himself powerless nonetheless. It's the first and only time in any Batman film that the villain and the hero seem completely equal, flip sides of the same coin, and the only moment in this film that truly embraces the scarred, freakshow nature of its characters.

What a shame, then, that Ledger's buried amidst the movie's rambling, listless plot. The movie has a lot going on, enough to fill a few episodes of a weekly TV series, but it doesn't find any traction until around the halfway mark, when things begin to get a bit personal for the characters. As mentioned, it's all very smartly written with its themes of scarring and despair and loss and so-forth. And I liked the way it cared enough about characters on the periphery to give them their own mini-stories within the main plot, but a lot of the film's subplots don't work and just wind up as padding to the runtime. Early in the film, Batman goes to Hong Kong to capture a money launderer, but the whole thing just rings of a pretty diversion, an excuse to shoot some cool exteriors and throw in some exposition about a pivotal piece of technology. And, for all of the work the screenwriters did to foreshadow the eventual corruption of Aaron Eckhart's District Attorney, Harvey Dent, his transformation is rushed and sloppy. This is doubly disappointing because Eckhart is also crazy-good in his role, but he's hampered in his most interesting moments by a makeup job that looks like it belongs in the Halloween display at Spencer's gifts. There are buried hints of greatness in the script, but the movie spreads itself too thin and the plot becomes so convoluted that it distorts anything resembling a coherent or intelligible or relatable story.

The most troubling aspect of the film is its use of Batman himself. For one thing, someone chose to give this hero an unintentionally hilarious vocal effect, like someone accidentally pressed a reverb button on the sound board when mixing in his dialogue. His unnaturally deep and echoy vocal presence is just silly. He sounds like an incompetent lead singer of a Goth band who covers up the inadequacies of his voice with audio effects. This would be easily overlooked but for the fact that Batman is quite chatty in the film--he seems ready to invite characters over for tea at times. Anyway, Christian Bale isn't exactly the most commanding of presences here, and his life as Bruce Wayne is all but ignored in favor of the corruption of Eckhart and the Joker's preening. Batman is forced to make several choices throughout the film, choices with dire consequences for his character, but it makes no difference, no impact because it's not clear who Batman is anymore. Frankly, the character seems to be about as confused and random in his own morality as the Joker. He sees killing as the ultimate taboo, the one thing he won't do, but when he's perfectly content to smack people around, violate civil rights, and wantonly destroy property with barely a second thought, it just comes off as an arbitrary rule. The movie tries to exploit this by having the Joker force Batman to confront the futility of ideals in the rotting, festering world of Gotham City, but, while the confrontation is fun, the filmmakers do very little with it. They basically turn Batman into a square, like Kevin Costner's boy scout Elliot Ness from The Untouchables, lamenting his impotence under the threat of the sexier bad boy. But, really, the character is just ignored. You could quite easily remove Batman from this movie completely and have a much tighter and probably better film about a valiant District Attorney facing the perilous evil in himself while trying to stop a sadistic madman. This is bad news for a film that ends with Gary Oldman's Commissioner Gordon monologuing about Batman's mythic importance to Gotham City.

But, look, all of this complaining about the shortcomings of The Dark Knight is really a bit of scolding. The movie isn't bad, really, just disappointing. I find myself wanting to wag my finger at it to set it on the right path. There's quite a bit of good, grim fun in the film, and while the overbearing sameness of the execution is wearying, the film is nevertheless commanding. If you're willing to ignore the awfulness of the film's climactic showdown which features Batman utilizing a really stupid-looking (and, after a time, unnecessary) SONAR technology to fight the Joker and a drama on two cruise ships that plays out like the worst disaster movie from the 70s ever made, the film moves from scene to scene with an appealing confidence, indifferent to the muddled script. It's easy to get swept away by its briskness. The cinematography and the use of Chicago locations are grand; Gotham is not a cartoon here, but a stand-in for all modern urbanity. It renders the despair and hopelessness that marks city life rather beautifully, though it, of course, ignores any positive aspects of living there... you know, things like a symphony or good bookstores. It's frustrating because, with all of its strengths, the film has assembled many of the right ingredients, but just drops them into a pile onscreen. Despite the magnificent, handsome production and Heath Ledger's classic performance, the movie only works in fits and starts. Besides, there's a limit, I think, to how much real-world verisimilitude you can employ in a film about Batman before the arch, crazed nature of its main character starts to feel out of place, and the movie pushes right past it to the point that the whole thing unravels, becoming nearly as absurd and cheesy as the 60s TV series.

Would be a good double feature with: Thief
Originally posted on:One Movie a Day/Week

When writing film reviews, it's inevitable that at some point you'll hear someone say to you, "Can't you just watch a movie and enjoy it?" The implicit question here is, "Can't you stop thinking so much?" The reason I bring this up is twofold: 1) it annoys me (and I think people should be ashamed of themselves for even thinking such things, much less voicing them) and 2) because I feel Bill Maher's pain. Religulous features Maher talking to various religious figures, asking them questions about their beliefs, and expressing his skepticism, his outrage, and his disappointment at the lack of critical thinking that people apply to their faith. The film is predominently focused on Christian thought in the United States, but makes a cursory stab at discussing similar problems and absurdities in the Jewish and Muslim worlds as well. This is not a film that is likely to convert anyone in any direction, but for fans of thinking, it's an amusing, and even important document of how people deal with matters of belief.

From all evidence, Maher is a bruised cynic of a comedian, the kind of jokester who cares deeply about the "rightness" of the world while despairing that things will ever work out to his satisfaction. He pulls few punches with those he speaks to; he often scoffs and mocks the ridiculousness of their claims as they defend, say, the existence of a talking snake. He's a funny man, and his quick wit and observations are satisfying. But underlying his mirth is a clear desire to understand, to have a reasoned, intelligent discourse on the topic. When talking to Ken Ham, who represents the risible and dangerous Creation Museum in Kentucky, Maher's sense of disappointment at not being able to have an intelligent debate on the topic of "Creation Science" is palpable. He looks positively crestfallen as Ham refuses to engage and evades Maher's questions. In the early portions of the film, I began to fear that the deck was stacked too much in Maher's favor, that he was choosing to debate lightweights so he could emerge victorious. But after his interview with Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the Human Genome Project, exposed this respected, notable scientist's bizarre standard of evidence for a historical Jesus, I realized that any interviewee would suffer. It's not Maher's fault that there are no rational discussions in this film--when it comes to religion, there can be none. For good or bad (and, in case it's not obvious, I'm with Maher that it's bad), religion and faith exist in a realm beyond rationality's reach.

This, of course, is the film's point. It's interesting, and perhaps appropriate, that the the film doesn't develop an argument, doesn't develop point-by-point to its conclusion. Rather, Religulous is an emotional appeal, a screed decrying the laziness of thought demonstrated by religious proponents and the danger inherent in this type of thinking. It's strange, and I doubt it's intentional, but Religulous is almost like a religious experience in and of itself--it stacks up subjective, personal experience after subjective, personal experience until it reaches its fiery, impassioned, and evangelical conclusion. I guess this may be called hypocritical, but I found it exhilarating--if appealing to reason is fruitless for Maher (and it most evidently is), what else does he have left?

The film is unfocused and scattershot, full of wacky, digressive edits to film clips and stock footage that underscore a point Maher's making or reveal the subtext of a particular scene. I passionately hated the cutting at first, but after a time, I got into the film's aggressive editing style. I came to an awareness that more than anything, this is a goof-off film, a comedian's comedy movie. At times it felt like a naive avant-garde film school project, laced with non-diagetic sound effects and smart-aleck subtitles exposing the vacuousness of the subject being interviewed. The kitchen-sink mentality of the film was alarming at first, but as I began to understand the tone of the film, was incredibly satisfying. In Religulous, laughs are valued over fairness, but honesty is valued above everything.

Those of weak faith who feel threatened by having their beliefs challenged would be wise to storm out like the burly trucker at the beginning of the film. Those who cannot see the absurdity in deism will no doubt chafe at the lack of any semblance of balance. But this is an important movie, one whose shelf-life is probably very small, but vital. In this time and place, it is increasingly more important that our leaders have more religion than intelligence, and the standards for basic scientific education are continually undermined by those who would supplant their own mythologies for sound methodology. For good or bad, it is important that these beliefs be questioned, be loudly interrogated in public discourse, if only for the sake of caution. Religulous fulfills this need, and it makes its point in a single shot. During a Las Vegas-style Passion Play at a Florida Bible Amusement Park, an actor portraying Jesus writhes on a cross, casting his eyes toward heaven. The camera tilts up and there, crossing the sky, is not God, but a commercial airplane. The shot successfully argues, all by itself, that the coexistence of these two things is monumentally absurd. It's as momentous in implicit meaning as when the bone becomes a space station in 2001.

Would Be a Good Double Feature With: The Passion of the Christ
Originally posted on:One Movie a Day/Week