THE HUNT

Twelve...eleven people with remarkably similar backgrounds find themselves on an open grassy plain, and are picked off with startling alacrity by unseen hunters. The quarries quickly realize they have common politics, and their roles in this hunt seem to confirm their absolute worst conspiracy theories about the liberal elites.

It wants so, so badly to tweak and provoke you. And indeed the delayed release of THE HUNT plays right into its story, with pre-emptive outrage becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. But anyone who sees this has little to be outraged or fired up about. As a straight-up hunting humans thriller the movie delivers the goods: the pacing of the action is more than solid, with the opening salvos of the hunt keeping us off-kilter as our anchor characters wind up quickly dispatched. A well-placed flashback brings us up to speed with the impetus behind and reasons for the hunt, setting the table for a charged and well-staged final confrontation.

All of which would be just dandy if the movie didn't reduce so many of its characters, on either side of the political fence, to crass stereotypes. Its efforts to muddy the waters with some welcome ambiguity come too late to really resonate with the action comedy preceding, and the end rings hollow where it should soar. (An interview on the movie and its surrounding controversy with director Craig Zobel is somewhat helpful, as within it he cheekily declares himself an "equal opportunity offender," which relieves us of the burden of giving a shit about anything he says.) As striking and even engaging a thriller as it often is, its broad satire renders the thing too shallow to be anything more than a diverting thrill-ride. Which wouldn't be a problem if it weren't congratulating itself for being the most controversial movie of the year.

HELL FEST

It's not a novel premise, necessarily: a killer is stalking young people in a horror maze attraction in an amusement park during Halloween.

I don't remember seeing a slasher movie that felt so airy and carefree. It's a modest affair, but that's part of what makes it so special. It avoids quite a few slasher cliches - in particular, its young attractive cast aren't jammed into archetypes (The Jock, The Nerd, The Soulful Loner, etc.) but are instead given the freedom to simply be young people. And they're given space to breathe, quip, hang out, bullshit, and kvetch. They're a fun bunch to hang out with, to a point that it's genuinely alarming when they start getting killed off. Set inside amusement park haunted house thrill rides, the movie gives us the cinematic equivalent - cinematographer Jose David Montero catches a vibrant array of carnival colors, and the thing visually pops in ways few horror indies try to.

In a peculiar era where horror movies are making overt and strident gestures toward respectability it's easy to overlook a movie like Hell Fest. Though it doesn't punch up its more novel or political aspects those aspects are there. It manages to address toxic masculinity (via its antagonists stalking strategies) without gruesomely sexualizing its violence. In the end, it's as much a horror house ride as any of its settings, and though it doesn't overtly reinvent any wheels, it remains an engaging and worthwhile Halloween treat, right down to the truly unsettling coda.

SEVENTH SON

I mean god dammit, you try to go into each movie with open mind, open heart. You recall the universal scorn received by undeserving movies that obscured their virtues: the solid, old school fantasy adventure JOHN CARTER (OF MARS); the far-from-perfect but surprisingly smart and movingly revisionist THE LONE RANGER; hell, even an effervescent, fun, and sexy piece of pop cinema like DRAGONBALL: EVOLUTION. And so you go into something like Sergei Bodrov's SEVENTH SON, which disappeared quickly after a widely-lambasted theatrical run, expectations low but (previous examples in mind) hoping for at least a modest diversion.

All the elements are there: actors who've done good work elsewhere (including reuniting LEBOWSKIites Jeff Bridges and Juliette Lewis), a decent-enough story (from a YA fantasy novel by Joseph Delaney), an actual plot that expands a bit on the usual Chosen One tropes common to this kind of story, attractive effects and decently-conceived environments and creatures. But it all just seems to unfold uninvolvingly before your eyes, never taking hold of anything inside you, just existing lifelessly on screen before you. Everyone commits, but nothing catches fire. The three movies cited above, though they vary in quality, all possess something soulful that involves us, but that involvement is never felt in SEVENTH SON. Was it a language barrier (with Bodrov making his English language debut)? Was it tinkered with by unseen hands in the two years (TWO YEARS) between its completion and its release?

Even in as productized a landscape as contemporary Hollywood it is rare that a movie appears with no clear reason for its existence. Routine story elements can be viewed with fresh eyes and mined for small original tweaks (or at least invested with genuine emotion), but no one involved seems to have asked how to make this modest little fantasy something different, or special. (Indeed, it regurgitates some of the genre's more tiresome aspects, from its villainess turning to evil after being rejected by a lover to a group of villains cast with most of the movie's non-male, non-white actors.) There is no excuse for SEVENTH SON to be as lifeless as it is, and it's frustrating that the talented people assembled to make it couldn't (or wouldn't) elevate it to the level of even a modest pleasure. No one looking at the movie during its making could have thought that they had a complete movie on their hands - why should the audience feel any different?

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY

I really should just recuse myself from conversations about Guardians of the Galaxy - I'm in a frustrating position where Marvel is churning out movies I'd have adored as a kid, or even a youngish adult. But I can't bring myself to savor them, or even care much about them. And though I won't deny that I've had emotional experiences while watching many of those movies (including Guardians, it should be said), those emotions fly away as soon as I'm out of the theatre. But I went to see Guardians opening weekend, mainly because if I was going to find out what happened in it I wanted to go to the source, rather than have it spoiled for me on line. This outweighed any actual enthusiasm I had for the movie, which immediately put us at a disadvantage with each other.

In the act of watching it, I was engaged. After the earthbound, thriller-style heroics of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, the dropkicking of the Marvel franchise into colorful/boldly realized space opera is a smart decision. It's great to look at, but has a decent emotional core, with Chris Pratt likeable indeed as nominal team-core Star-Lord. His reconnection with his deceased mother toward the climax is one of Marvel's most bracing cinematic moments. There's plenty to enjoy there, and of course the thing has found a huge, probably record-breaking audience.

But dammit, all these little things kept nudging me out of it. Rocket Raccoon is an irresistible conceit, but the character himself, though resourceful and clever, is quippy without being funny, and comes across as merely bitchy. (This is a common trait to many live-action Marvel characters - it singlehandedly drove me away from the Agents of SHIELD TV show.) Michael Rooker is believably gruff as alien tough guy Yondu Udonta, but in his climactic action sequence outsources his badassery to the flying knife he whistles to. Villain Ronan the Accuser cuts a great visual figure, but rings hollow. The "outsiders find family with one another" trope was already hashed out in The Avengers, and I'm tired of the geek-stroking inherent in the subtext.

And the fucking 70s pop tunes all over the soundtrack - I like that Star-Lord's prized possession is a mixtape from his mother, but I kept wondering why a woman who had undergone the incredible experience of parenting a child with an alien would have such pedestrian taste in music. It's a commercially sound decision to go with more familiar, crowd-pleasing tunes here than, say, the progressive rock the story screams for, and many have mentioned the tunes as one of their favorite things about it. But the juxtaposition of Earth's pop music with high-flying space action is not new, and has worked better elsewhere. And I'll take Sammy Hagar's title track from the Heavy Metal soundtrack to anything from Guardians.

So why even write about it? I'm not going to convince anyone that they're wrong to love this movie (and wouldn't dream of trying). Maybe I'm just trying to figure out why these movies do so much for so many, yet find no purchase with me. Maybe I'm as irresistibly drawn to sounding off about it on line as I was to seeing it. Or maybe there's some subliminal illuminati shit in Marvel movies that I'm immune to. That scenario makes just as much sense as me willingly looking a gift horse in the mouth. Who knows? No conclusion here, just an aging comic book-loving cinephile talking to himself. You're a gem for reading this far. Thank you. Sincerely.

THE COUNSELOR

I can not dismiss the artistry of Cormac McCarthy as easily as his detractors. And I will not read any kind of depth into his nihilism, as would his defenders. I certainly agree that McCarthy is the guiding auteur of this thing more than director Ridley Scott, but what the hell do we get out of it?

Perhaps his detractors, finding his shallow worldview given such a clear and uncluttered depiction here, are realizing that they overpraised NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN back in the day, and trying to backtrack. McCarthy's "we're trapped by our bad decisions, everything and everyone is fucked" semi-philosophy always struck me as high school-level nihilism. Even given a high shine and executed by strong actors, as it is here, it's still high school nihilism. Such a worldview is better (or is at least more honestly) played for comedy, as the Coens did in their post-NO COUNTRY project BURN AFTER READING, or as Javier Bardem does in his fantastic monologue in this movie, recalling his girlfriend's sexual encounter with his car.

The movie moves with style and grace, and does find variations on its one-note message. McCarthy's style tends to give each member of the cast the same voice (much in the manner of Tarantino or Sorkin). Happily, there is poetry in that language, and the movie's greatest gift is letting its veteran cast go to town with fairly lengthy and eloquent passages (among the supporting players, Bruno Ganz finds fine purchase in his scene as an eternally wise diamond merchant; Ruben Blades offers a perfect sardonic world-weariness to his own summation near the end of the movie). But in the end its all lip service to the same petty, faux-deep nihilism, and no matter how eloquently it delivers its message, THE COUNSELOR can't hide the fact that it isn't saying a damn thing.

THE WORLD'S END

And some movies cut so damn close you almost want to recuse yourself from talking about them. And though they never made me uncomfortable, the similarities between me and Gary King, Simon Pegg's strung-out, hard-partying protagonist, made themselves keenly known: an occasionally overwhelming sense of nostalgia; the all-black uniform of your youth, slightly (but only slightly) modified here in our mid-40s; and a curiously abiding, nay unshakeable faith in the Sisters of Mercy's FLOODLAND. And though I'm more aware than Gary that "This Corrosion" is only half-serious (director Edgar Wright is definitely in on the joke), I suspect we both grow silent during "Driven Like The Snow."

Gary's so at odds with the modern world that he gets the lads back together to recreate an epic but incomplete pub crawl that, in retrospect, was their last real night of freedom. And though none of the lads (Nick Frost, Paddy Considine, Martin Freeman, and Eddie Marsan in uniformly well-observed turns) can seem to communicate to Gary that he's living too too much in the past, soon even Gary realizes that all is not right in Newton Haven.

It's a grand and funny conclusion to Pegg & Wright's Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy; the comedy lands and the fight scenes (built around the notion that our heroes become better fighters the drunker they get) match those of any purer action movie. Its portrait of a small town beset by unseen and sinister forces is social genre fiction in line with Wyndham. But more than any of its substantial gifts, I'm savoring its bittersweet taste of melancholy. Wright has commented that even when things are good one is always drawn home, driven by a strange need to go back. And as specifically as my life resonates with Gary's (though I like to think I'm not quite so addled, or pained), I suspect this aspect of the movie will resonate with many. It's a clever and thrilling movie, to be sure, but one with much to say about our world and those who live discontentedly within it, whether they acknowledge this discontent or not.

FLOODLAND begins righteously with meticulously produced Eldritch/Steinman epics, and ends in Never Land (fragments); epic but incomplete. THE WORLD'S END also ends in a kind of Never Land (fragments). Like FLOODLAND, it bestows a certain energy, a righteous rock & roll thrill. You leave it with a new perspective on the world, and its goofily apocalyptic pop playing in your head. Like FLOODLAND, I can't wait to see it again.

THE HUNT

Perversely, perhaps, I find myself longing for an American remake of this thing. Thomas Vinterberg's moving, harrowing tale concerns a kindly schoolteacher (Mads Mikkelsen, worthy of every award he's won) facing alienation and worse when a misunderstanding leads to accusations of pedophilia. The story's remarkably free of one-dimensional villains (or villains of any kind, really), but generates powerful tension as rumors escalate beyond the point of no return. Though a universal story to be sure, it could easily happen in the American heartland. Yet I wonder if American producers and audients would shun the movie for capturing their reflections all too well, if anyone seeing it would fess up to being capable of the kind of hysteria the movie so beautifully portrays. In the end it asks us how well any of us really know or trust our children, or those tasked with their care. Serling would have admired it.

TRANCE

A good friend once commented that THE DA VINCI CODE existed for the sole purpose of making stupid people feel smart. "Well, it's got Da Vinci, and he's smart, and it's about a code, and I figured it all out, so I'm smart! Wa-hey!" I can not speak to the accuracy of this assessment of THE DA VINCI CODE, and yet I feel, having seen Danny Boyle's TRANCE, that I have experienced the exact movie my friend was describing.



The movie is as empty as the frame held above by Vincent Cassel. For all its games of dress-up in the complexities of the human psyche and entry-level art history, TRANCE has nothing to offer us. No credible, dimensional characters (the leads are revealed to be as shallow and duplicitous as the multi-ethnic but otherwise interchangeable thugs that make up the cast); no reason to give a damn about the fate of the missing painting that serves as the movie's MacGuffin; no real plot on offer that isn't driven by the schemes of these shallowly drawn and uninvolving characters. The truly lovely cinematography by Anthony Dod Mantle and brisk filmmaking do their damnedest to make something look like it's going on, but it very carefully explains every stray image, sealing everything so neatly that even the most dense viewer is sure to not be left behind. If after seeing this you have a desire to go again to catch the details you've missed, then you've been conned, and are a suitable target for the anti-human disdain this smug motion picture oozes from every scene.

WARM BODIES

Eight years after an unknown event brings the dead back to life to feast on the flesh of the living, one young zombie (call him R) shuffles through an aimless existence; though vocally reduced to monosyllables, R is able to take startlingly clear perspective on his life with a robust inner monologue. Protracted circumstances find him feeling oddly protective toward Julie, a young survivor suspicious of her undead savior. But R's growing feelings for Julie begin to have startling effects on both of them, and the shattered world around them.

WARM BODIES is certain to be deemed not-hardcore-enough by the zombie faithful. But though clearly pitched mainly at a young adult audience, its orientation is pitched toward fantasy rather than pig-guts-and-fake-blood. As such, it's absolutely charming, and disarmingly earnest. Nicholas Hoult is as adept at R's zombie meanderings as his glib, smart voice-over; Teresa Palmer offers a solid and believable young heroine in Julie. (Rob Corddry brings a nice energy to a solid supporting arc R's zombie peer M.) Jonathan Levine keeps the whole thing balanced, mixing some overt Shakespeare references, a nice wrinkle on zombie-unlife-as-contemporary-metaphor, and, most crucially of all, an unflinchingly sincere sense of romance. Whether or not the hardcore zombie crowd are open-hearted enough to accept it is open to question; the rest of us get to enjoy the spectacle of unabashed romantics injecting new life into the dead genre.

KILLING THEM SOFTLY

We can blame it on RESERVOIR DOGS, I think, the spate of self-aware indie gangster movies with glib, pop culture savvy criminals double- and triple-crossing each other in a comfortably shady milieu. These things are as thick on the ground as low-budget zombie movies, all trying to capture the same lightning that Tarantino did with his startling (and, it should be said, still effective) debut. But the problem with all of these fan-made films is that they're too mired in other movies - set in a world made up of established types rather than people, all of these gangster movies fail to ultimately be about anything more substantive than other gangster movies.

Andrew Dominik is just as aware of these formulae as we are, and his gangland opus KILLING THEM SOFTLY, from a novel by THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE scribe George Higgins, is a bracing change of pace. It's by no means a perfect film; though of course all films should be About Something, Domink's sledgehammer insistence on underscoring the economic desperation of his milieu in every scene is somewhat tiresome (every dive bar in Boston seems to have their TV tuned to CNN). And yet Dominik's not above juicing his action with forays into high style: the ironic juxtaposition of a romantic ballad with an extreme-slo-mo gangland execution, pretty as it is, is nothing we haven't seen before. (The scoring of a drug trip scene with the Velvet Underground's "Heroin" is a particularly lazy choice.)

In the end these are quibbles. For all of the film's strident symbolism, Domink's characters all live in something recognizably close to our world. They deal with tangible concerns, their dialogue refreshingly real with a noticeable and welcome absence of cod-Tarantino glibness. Some of our finest characters actors (many of whom I suspect worked for scale simply to be involved) step up to the plate and run with the fine, literary dialogue. And its glorious final scene, in which the nigh-unstoppable, status-quo-enforcing hitman played by Brad Pitt is finally rendered vulnerable (in lovely counterpoint to the message of solidarity and hope that's been blaring from all screens everywhere) is a perfect capper.

HOLY MOTORS

The movie's a wonder - following Monsieur Oscar (Denis Lavant, one of cinema's greatest special effects) across Paris for nine different and increasingly abstract performance assignments, HOLY MOTORS registers both as pure cinematic thrills and a more personal, dialectic look at how digital forces are increasingly shaping our world. Director Leos Carax happily isn't a polemicist; indeed, in a film rife with references to the work of his countrymen (the episodes and interludes recall Feuillade, Renoir, Demy, Truffaut, Franju, and probably others - hell, Carax even references himself with a short sequel to Merde!, his segment of the omnibus film TOKYO!), the strident political diatribes of Godard are mercifully absent. What remains is a celebration of the possibilities of cinema, a potentiality undimmed (though certain, Carax reminds us, to be changed) by the prospects of a digital future. Like all great films, its surface pleasures are more than enough to hold our interest, but it contains multitudes and myriad deeper meanings that unfold and intensify as it lingers in the mind. Even the movie's melancholic moments seem to juice the exhilaration of it. It's one of the most gripping statements of total cinema I've ever experienced, and after seeing it twice I doubt I've exhausted it.

And fuck me if it doesn't look better in digital projection than 35mm.

THE FRIGHTENED WOMAN

A journalist travels to a faraway house, expecting to pick up some documents for an article on male sterilization. She finds that the lord of the house has a yen for imprisoning women, and many means of tortures (psychological and otherwise) at his disposal. But he soon finds that she's not quite all she seems, either.

If there's a finer, crazier, deeper film on the ongoing battle between men and women than this one, I need to see it. Balancing frank discourse with gorgeous visuals and mounting suspense (and more than a dash of knowing comedy - the final reckoning in a swimming pool is scored and shot like the showdown in a Western), director Piero Schivazappa (aided immeasurably by the confident performances of Philippe Leroy and Dagmar Lassander) turns a psychedelic and lurid genre piece into something smarter than anyone probably wanted it to be. The movie is rife with the gloriously bold sleaziness that makes late 60s/early 70s erotic cinema so refreshing. And yet there's intelligence at work here, as the film unpacks the baggage of the male id and ego (and the toll they take on women), counterbalancing it with soft (but ultimately dangerous) femininity.

It's braver and deeper (and a lot less predictable) than its contemporary counterparts - the basic storyline and themes manifest these days in tepid psycho-sleaze like CAPTIVITY and P2 or dreary work like the oeuvre of Neil LaBute. The accumulated years are evident in THE FRIGHTENED WOMAN, but its remarkable how much intelligence it credits us with, even as it titillates our darker sides. Would that those intent on crafting another cinematic unpacking of the male id take a cue from this film instead of shallowly aping Cassavetes yet again.

(I'm grateful to the San Francisco Cult and Psychotronic Film Society for giving this thing another airing in 35mm. Yeoman's work, ladies & gentlemen.)

Election Night in Silent Hill

I was going to go third party, I really was. California was always going to be solidly in Obama's corner, so I felt it would be useful to throw my presidential vote toward the Green Party. But then Donald Trump had to double down on his bullshit, offering a $5mil donation to charity if the President would release his college transcripts or somesuch, even going as far as to petulantly suggest that the President didn't want to support charity by ignoring the offer. (Obama was, of course, busy with other matters at the time.) Since I couldn't will, say, a giant spider to shit in Trump's mouth, I gave Obama my vote out of spite Tuesday morning.

But the day was tense. Though I had some reservations about Obama, I felt that a Romney presidency could hold some truly dire consequences, given his willingness to ascribe personhood to corporations (and deny it to gays and lesbians), his interest in privatizing disaster relief, his ever-shifting positions on just about any topic put in front of him, his brazen ability to lie in front of millions of people. I couldn't bear the prospect of sitting in front of the television listening to pundits blather as the decision drew near. So I headed to a suitably off-the-beaten-path destination.

I'm a soft touch for the Silent Hill games, though hardly a veteran. (In fact even now I'm stuck on the second nightmare sequence in Shattered Memories, which has been kicking my ass for days - no combat option? Really, Konami? Shit.) And though I only caught it on video, I found the first Silent Hill film an evocative translation of the games' story and aesthetics. And so Silent Hill: Revelation
, a 3D adaptation of the third (many say the best) in the video game series, was a film I couldn't miss.

The story follows Heather Mason, a young woman plagued by visions of her barely-remembered past, as she is drawn to the mysterious town of Silent Hill. Her search for her missing father draws her deep into the town's dark heart, where she's beset by ghoulish creatures and terrifying events that may well offer clues to her real identity.

The film (much like its predecessor, it must be said) is a wildly disjointed affair. It offers but rushes through exposition, too faithful to its source, perhaps, to make it truly cinematic. So heavily does it rely on knowledge of the previous film (or at least a basic familiarity with the series of games) that I imagine newcomers will be lost, and the action will be abstract at best to these viewers. And yet the abstraction does turn into a dreamlike labyrinth, with much of the beautiful/grotesque imagery and music of the series rendered lovingly, from the freakish modern dance gestures of the blind nurses to the ashen transformation from reality to Silent Hill's underworld (and a quiet transition back that's simply lovely). A willingness to lose oneself in such headlong, even clumsy, grotesquerie is a must, but it is rewarded by the film (which culminates in a weirdly moving about-face for one of the series' major menaces that took at least this casual but knowledgeable fan by pleasant surprise).

After the film I couldn't not check my messages. My girlfriend was elated. My fellow San Franciscans were overjoyed by Obama's imminent victory. My Twitter feed was exploding with some funny motherfuckers reporting a spectacular meltdown on FoxNews. Just as Heather Mason leaves Silent Hill to stride more confidently into the real world, so did I emerge into a joyous, warmly embracing night.

October, Day 14

Breaking ranks within the post-a-day celebration to bring good news. And a lovely short film.

Goodbuddy and occasional collaborator Bryan Enk is every bit the Dracula-fanatic as your proprietor, if not moreso. He began his filmmaking career in earnest with DRACULA and DRACULA RETURNS, a pair of shot-on-video student features that address and explode teh Dracula story (and its various iterations) with intelligence and verve.

Bryan has since stormed the festival circuit with collaborative partner Jessi Gotta - their work together has won awards at festivals across the country. They're in the midst of fundraising for META/STASIS, an ambitious sci-fi horror film that I hope you’ll join me in supporting. In the meantime, though, Bryan has resurrected his own Third Lows production banner and completed work on yet-another Dracula-related film, THE FINAL VOYAGE OF THE GOOD SHIP DEMETER, in collaboration with Steve Bishop (who acts the hell out of it) and Christiaan Koop. It’s well worth eight minutes of your time; please enjoy.

The Final Voyage of the Good Ship Demeter from Third Lows Productions on Vimeo.

THE MOTH DIARIES

Rebecca, a student at an exclusive boarding school, finds her life thrown into tumult by the arrival of Ernessa, a mysterious girl who insinuates herself in Rebecca's life. As her friends begin suffering a number of bizarre fates, Rebecca suspects that Ernessa's striking face conceals an evil straight out of the Gothic fiction she's studying. No one believes her. It sucks being sixteen.

They used to make movies like this all the time! Strong & smart performances all around, with effective use made of Lily Cole's fashion model poise and slightly otherworldly physiognomy as the secretive Ernessa. Sarah Bolger is as effective as Rebecca, a young woman traversing more dangerous territory as she comes of age. Happily she (and the viewer) have quite a number of signposts for her journey, courtesy some too-spot-on lectures on Gothic fiction and vampires courtesy professor Scott Speedman. But writer/director Mary Harron builds on and transcends these sleeve-worn influences, and shows a gift for atmosphere and suspense as strong as her grasp on the tribulations of young womanhood. It's spooky without being shocking, erotic without being explotative, and a genre film from people who know that horror is ABOUT something.

At the very least it's an effective 85-minute Gothic. In a better world, under the eyes of a Val Lewton, Mary Harron would make one of these every year.

(Programming note: this film is playing [in glorious 35mm] at the San Fransicso Film Society cinema, sharing a bill, like a good programmer, with Kinji Fukasaku's Battle Royale. I imagine these films, both blood-soaked coming-of-age tales, have much to say to each other, and recommend taking them both in together. Bring a teenager - these films speak directly and compassionately to the life of the teenager, no matter what they're rated.)

MANIAC

DARK SHADOWS (2012)

Cursed to become a vampire by a jilted lover, nobleman Barnabas Collins is unearthed two centuries later (in 1972) to find the world almost completely changed. His beloved home, Collinwood Manor, remains barely standing, presided over by the remnants of his family. Barnabas moves to restore his family to its former glory, even as he is haunted by the spectre of at least one lost love...

I lamented previously about the foul taste left by the trailer for this, the latest Tim Burton/Johnny Depp collaboration. I couldn't understand how a film by two avowed fans of the original series could be as off-puttingly goofy as the trailer suggested it would be. Reviews of critics and reports from friends suggested that my fears were well-founded. And yet even weeks after the thing opened I remained curious about it, and figured I'd have to see it for myself. I went with my girlfriend, a woman who's picked up my DARK SHADOWS habit, who held out hope that there was something of substance within the film. I harbored my doubts even after the solid prologue, bracing myself for the film to go off the rails.

But it never did. The credits roll as Victoria Winters travels to Collinsport to take her new job as governess to Collinwood Manor (the event that opened the original series - indeed, it was a dream of this image that led Dan Curtis to conceive the show). The Moody Blues' "Nights in White Satin" is an obvious choice to score this, but it works. The choices Burton (and writers John August and Seth Grahame-Smith) makes in introducing the Collins clan, from the still-proud elegance Michelle Pfeiffer brings to Elizabeth Collins Stoddard to young David Collins' startling resemblance to the young Damien Thorn, also work, demonstrating an understanding of what makes the characters compelling but necessarily going beyond simple rehash.

There is humor in the film, yes. And some if it is so gaudy that it seems to have been tacked on after the fact (and yes, I refer to the scenes that figure in the trailer). My girlfriend was convinced that these scenes were shot at studio insistence, and though one cannot ignore Burton's previous lapses into mood-breaking cutesiness (and there have been several), the gothic tone is so lovingly realized throughout the film that these scenes are hard to explain any other way. Especially alongside moments of sly humor that are realized more solidly, and are genuinely funny. One such moment finds Barnabas cursing a bright (and prominently framed) McDonald's sign. "Mephistopheles!" he hisses, a clever subversion of such direct product placement that showcases a wit absent in the film's goofier moments.

It is as compromised as Orson Welles' MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS, which is not to say that it is as brilliant as that film remains. Some choices can not be laid down to studio interference. Eva Green holds all of the physical characteristics of Tim Burton's favorite leading ladies, but she doesn't bring to Angelique the knowingly freaky grace and eldritch power that would have made her a formidable villain (Burton's former muse Lisa Marie MUST have had the role at some point in their history). Still other characters are clumsily misplaced - Jonny Lee Miller's Roger Collins is too one-dimensional to ever be effective and is quickly written out; Victoria's backstory is rushed through; and there are a couple of character 360s that exist solely to provide the final conflict some oomph.

But even through all of these setbacks, these mistakes, these interferences, there is plenty to latch onto. Johnny Depp's haunted, irreverent grace. More crucially, the dedication of Barnabas to his family, which here, as always, keeps him from being the monster he fundamentally is (fan confession: the first extended scene between Barnabas and Elizabeth was exactly what I wanted/needed from this movie, and Depp and Pfeiffer just nail it). Pfeiffer's wounded strength, and the way Burton films her on Collinwood's main staircase. The lone tree on Widow's Hill, and the watery tragedy beneath. The curious, but keenly felt, kinship between Barnabas and David. The gentle lapse of familial duty into unconditional love. These and many other moments are realized with reverence, and eagerly shared by Burton, Depp, and company. As challenging as it is to see through all of the haze and meddling, there is real love for the source material here. The suits signed off on it, but generous eyes and heart reveal that they didn't quite kill it. Collinwood remains. This fan cried. And the Collinses endure.

THE CABIN IN THE WOODS

Friend: So is CABIN IN THE WOODS good?
You: It's great!
Friend: So what happens in it?
You: I'm not going to spoil it, wouldn't dream of it. You should see it.
Friend: Just tell me what happens, I'm never going to see it.
You: Dude, if you're interested to know what happens, you really should just see it.
Friend: Seriously, I don't think I'm ever going to see it, you can go ahead and tell me.
You: Really, you should see it.
Friend: I'm not going to, all right? Just tell me what happens!

(pause)

You: (reluctantly) Well, it's about...(gives a four or five sentence summary, including some of the crazy shit that goes down in the second half)
Friend: Oh. Wow. (slight pause) I kinda wish you hadn't told me about it.
You: PUNCHPUNCHPUNCHPUNCHPUNCHPUNCHPUNCH....

Goodbuddy Jon Sung posits that THE CABIN IN THE WOODS is a movie that should not be spoiled, no matter how much time has elapsed, and your proprietor must wholeheartedly agree. The archetypal tale of teens at the mercy of a nameless horror in a murky forest (which is, itself, under control of a much larger entity) is a multi-varied, clever, often hilarious, and occasionally terrifying piece of meta-horror. Co-written by Joss Whedon (a creator whose work has inspired both love and frustration from me), CABIN happily sidesteps Whedon's lapses into cutesiness, delivering what he calls a "love hate letter" to contemporary film horror. As such, it is very much the act of criticism that Ebert suggests. Yet it never disappears inside itself, nor does it, even as it renders us complicit in its plot, deny us the visceral pleasures of filmgoing (as a bonus, it gives great roles and lines to a number of actors, including Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford). Though the prospect of a sequel is highly unlikely, I'm keen to see where film horror goes from here.

a year of Ruiz

This time last year I was braced for a difficult beginning to the San Francisco film fest. My selections were kicking off with MYSTERIES OF LISBON, a four-hour film from Raúl Ruiz, a filmmaker with whom I'd grappled in the past but never fully grasped. But LISBON blew me away - an epic tale of an orphan's rise from poverty into riches, with each encounter coloring, distorting, and sometimes completely changing his perceptions of events in his life. It turned out to be my favorite film of the year, leaving me eager for more.

The announcement of his death several months later left me strangely despondent, sad that the labyrinth of his work would, in fact, be finite. But there's still this huge body of work left to explore, to interpret, to get totally lost in. I'm still totally baffled by his work, but I don't feel like Ruiz is on my shoulder chiding me for not getting his references, for not being grounded in his history (his whimsical mazes are far more appealing to me than Godard's strident revolution). He's not randomly remaking film history and looking down on us for not Getting It - he's coming at cinema from a completely new place, challenging us to see the world as he sees it.


After sampling part of a reverent but by no means comprehensive series at PFA these last few weeks, I feel like Ruiz has become a favorite filmmaker. I didn't love, or even like, everything I saw in the series (The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting was a standout, with its sensuous art mystery and stellar Sacha Vierny photography) and, optimistically, I didn't make an effort to devour the whole thing. Because even though Ruiz' oeuvre is vast (and I suspect more than twice the 120-odd titles that Wiki and IMDB list), I want to take my time through this labyrinth, and savor each step. Because it's already showed me so much, and expanded my cinematic consciousness in a way that feels like it enriches everything. Because when I do make a connection in Ruiz' oeuvre, it's like a light shining through a freshly opened window, through which Ruiz is still smiling back at us.

Attached here is a neatly concise (and suitably contrarian) documentary on his work, followed by a fifteen-minute short. I hope you'll give it half an hour: Though picked at random, it captures so much of what I love about his work.

the DARK SHADOWS trailer

I'm less than pleased with the clip above, which is shattering since I've been looking forward to this film for a couple of years. I'm quite surprised that this gaudy comic mishmash is the movie that Burton and Depp chose to make from the series, considering the decades each has spent nursing their affection for it. A friend quite reasonably reminds me that a trailer can't be counted on as a concrete indicator of what a film will be like, and one does wonder if the studio marketing department (who surely cut this trailer) were put off by stranger moments in the film and settled on the cutesier, more saleable stuff.

And yet the fact that so much of the latter seems so evident in the trailer is cause for concern. I'm not blind to the camp value that many ascribe to DARK SHADOWS (indeed, I've reveled in some of the show's more enthusiastic outbursts myself). And yet the craziness of the show was an outgrowth of its ambitious creative process, not a deliberately winking wackiness, and to play the story of Barnabas Collins and family mainly for yuks is an easy out that I'm disappointed to see Burton and Depp taking.

But even if they are going for something more interesting and varied, this trailer sets us up for a campy laff riot. Which is so much less than what the series offered, even amid the technical screw-ups and blown lines. I stand by my definition of the show as "the craziest community theatre in your town doing a short Gothic horror play EVERY SINGLE DAY" - the result of this approach is, just as often as camp, an atmospheric shudder delivered creatively on the cheap, and occasionally inspired romance (not to mention time travel and parallel worlds). The Burton/Depp film may yet provide these, and though the trailer gives me no hope, I admit I'll be heading out the second weekend of May to see for myself.