Find This Film a Home: Kevin Brownlow and David Gill's Hollywood

Getting the word out about films that have a spotty home video history

Directed by Kevin Brownlow and David Gill
Written by Kevin Brownlow and David Gill
Narrated by James Mason
Edited by Trevor Waite and Dan Carter
Music by Carl Davis

Common complaints lodged against contemporary culture are that we're too celebrity-obsessed, all media-drenched, searching for those fifteen minutes, and that our movies are silly, featherweight, and too focused on spectacle. Kevin Brown and David Gill's thirteen-part, television series, Hollywood, provides a longer view of history and reasserts how our current obsessions were just as rampant then (perhaps more so) as they are now. The evidence includes the enormous crowds that greeted Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford everywhere they went in the world, Charlie Chaplin's tramp character becoming an universally-recognized symbol, and the unsafe, often deadly, working conditions that sprung up around the wild plots pursued by filmmakers. Modern Hollywood can hardly compare. 

The directing duo attack the American movie industry of the teens and twenties from all angles. Their first move is to bury the misconceptions that surrounded silent film at the time of the series' release. It's less a problem now with proper restorations and home video releases, but silent film has long been plagued by technical issues. Improper showings on television and repertory theaters built-up its association with super-fast speeds and dinky, public domain piano music. Hollywood shows the world of difference that proper display makes. Brownlow and Gill then go on to interview a succession of actors, directors, and cameramen who eloquently make the case for the films of the time as worthy of serious artistic consideration. The bits about the elaborate palaces where movies were shown and the full orchestras that often accompanied their screenings will make you weep over the sad state of multiplexes. A movie was an event in a way it rarely is today. 

The sheer amount of historical detail present is miraculous. The background work for the series was started just in time to catch the main players of the era, snapping up informative interviews with Colleen Moore, King Vidor, and Karl Brown. It's a sad fact, but if the leaders of the project had waited even a decade later to begin, many of the principal subjects would have passed away. The beginnings of the film industry are shown to be wild, weird, and full of contradictions. The earliest studios weren't even set-up in California, but in New York and New Jersey. Gangsters were hired to star in front of the camera and bribed by rival outlets to break those cameras with bullets and beatings. The independents eventually moved to the west coast to escape the stranglehold of the big studios. 

Hollywood depicts an odd time in world history. Around the globe, monarchies and democracies existed within short distances from each other. World War I destroyed the European film industry, allowing American film to start its foreign domination that continues today. The Russian Revolution sowed the seeds of the conflict that would take up the latter half of the twentieth century. Within the movie capitol, cars, trains, and horses were all still in use. The west was dying, but given one last chance at immortality. Women and immigrants were given brief opportunities to ascend to the highest levels of artistic achievement despite living in a land that was still hugely racist and sexist (women wouldn't gain the right to vote until twenty years after cinema's start). 

My one complaint is that the series doesn't dig far enough below the glitz and glamour. The perilous positions camera operators and stuntmen often found themselves in are mentioned, but not fully questioned. The exploitation of masses of people for use as extras gets the same treatment. At one point, a star being interviewed compares the discrimination against "movie people" in the early days of the industry's settlement in California to that faced by African Americans.

Still, discussion of those matters, new broadcasts of Hollywood, and conversion of the program and its supporting materials into HD would help immensely in restoring interest in silent film. Brownlow and Gill's work would be a valuable tool in any film studies course, whether in high school or university. It's a shame it's been left to languish on VHS.


P.S.
The entire series is up on Youtube, but as with all copyrighted material that makes it way to the service, its status there is tenuous. Episode twelve has already been removed. If my description has made you keen to learn more, I'd start watching now.

Something Else: Sleeping Beauty

Random thoughts of random lengths on random films

Directed by Clyde Geronimi

Written by Erdman Penner adapting Charles Perrault's/The Brothers' Grimm/Tchaikovsky's "Sleeping Beauty"

Voice acting by Mary Costa (Princess Aurora), Bill Shirley (Prince Phillip), and Eleanor Audley (Maleficent)

Edited by Roy M. Brewer Jr. and Donald Halliday

Production Design by Ken Peterson

*Note: I don't know what the equivalent of "cinematographer" is in animation, so I just put down Ken Peterson. If I wanted to be fully accurate, I'd need to list every animator/visual effects artist.

Sleeping Beauty can be difficult to analyze. The characters are one-dimensional, there's barely anything going on thematically, and the plot is a wisp. Princess Aurora's only defining traits are that she's pretty and can sing. Her only desire is to get married. Prince Phillip is a drip, with the features of a Ken doll and the personality to match. Likewise, his one want is betrothal.

The title gives the wrong impression. The Beauty of note only appears for 18 minutes, long enough only to sing to some animals and prick her finger. If she is labeled the protagonist, the pacing seems lumpy. The majority of the action is jammed into the beginning and end, with a long, barren section in the middle. However, if our sympathies are re-centered on the three fairies, the structure makes more sense and the emotional arc becomes satisfactory.

Despite the aforementioned issues, Sleeping Beauty is an absolute pleasure for one simple reason: its animation and design are unique and astounding to behold. As a biochemist impersonating a cinephile with a limited vocabulary, the overuse of stunning, striking, amazing, and all their permutations in film writing is hugely frustrating. All of those words are accurate descriptors, but their "dead to language" nature doesn't properly communicate the experience of watching Sleeping Beauty, so I'll try to be more specific.

Next time you're perusing the film, stop on one of the scenes of Princess Aurora or Prince Phillip gallivanting about the woods. Notice that there is a clear distinction between the foreground (where the characters usually reside), the middle ground, and the background. The three look flat and separated from each other. This is different from the style developed in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, where fluid animation gives the impression of depth to the humans and the scenery is highly detailed.

The effect is like watching a stained glass window wrung through the Technicolor process or an illustrated medieval scroll that has gained autonomy. I began watching while eating dinner, and once the film opened with hordes of multicolored knights and villagers lined up at a castle, I had to stop just so I could gawk at what was onscreen. It's a cliché to say so, but nothing else looks like it, certainly nothing in the past or future of the Disney canon. If you venture outside of Walt's domain, Samurai Jack and The Secret of Kells come close, but they take the deliberately dimensionless aesthetic to further extremes. The style extends to the people. When in profile, they look cut-out and have multiple, discrete lines demarcating different parts of their bodies and clothing. When they move, this effect is slightly dampened and they appear fuller. Taken together, they twirl from 2-d to 3-d and back again in a mind-boggling manner.

Perhaps Sleeping Beauty's greatest asset is the malevolent Maleficent. She is a successful villain based not so much on what she does, but how she looks while doing it. Her scant few actions boil down to placing the famous curse and turning into a dragon after ineffectually detaining Phillip. And yet, she is awesome. Her garb of a black robe with purple lining and a horned headdress hides whatever human form might exist underneath, turning her into a shade or a wraith.

Walk? Ha! Walking is for mere mortals. Maleficent glides. Normal entrances are below her. A Maleficent entrance requires nothing less than transforming into an ominous green orb of energy and laughing maniacally. If you're inclined to approach Disney through its history of poor female representation, you could find your way to seeing her as the hero. She relishes the chance to disrupt a safe, hetero-normative relationship and attempts to bring down a monarchy by slowly torturing its boring heir. She even gets the film's most affecting scene, when she cries out in distress upon seeing her pet crow turned to stone. She is an ancient vamp and a middle ages femme fatale to Aurora’s straight-laced peasant/princess. How could you not love her?

Review: The Babadook

Directed by Jennifer Kent
Written by Jennifer Kent
Starring Essie Davis (Amelia) and Noah Wiseman (Samuel)
Cinematography by Radek Ladczuk
Edited by Simon Njoo
Released in 2014

I'm happy to report that Jennifer Kent's debut avoids all of the problems that tend to befall modern, low-budget horror. The cinematography dodges the trend of desaturation and shakiness, the supernatural conceit is used to explore a real fear, the ambiguity of the eponymous monster is still present at the end, the sound design is oppressive, and the film is focused on two magnificent performances by Essie Davis and Noah Wiseman. 

Befitting a story centered on a cursed kid's book, there's an appealing exaggeration to the costuming, sets, and sound. The most common colors are black, blue, and white. This leads to a light/dark contrast that I'm not sure has a set purpose or scheme behind it (someone more observant will have to figure that out). If nothing else, it's visually stimulating. Red shows up as well, but less frequently and with more impact. Near the beginning, the hue only appears on the cover of the main book. As the plot progresses, red pops into pillows and furniture. After a key development, Amelia prominently dons a scarlet dress. The pattern is clearer here. 

Common noises like a finger massaging a temple or a hand gripping a bar are amplified for maximum discomfort. Even if you close your eyes, The Babadook can still get you. The heightened approach extends to the casting. The secondary characters all look slightly animated, as if they were chosen based on an immediately-noticeable physical trait as much as their acting ability. 

Special credit needs to be given to the team of artists that created the Babadook. If little seeds of German Expressionism can be found elsewhere, then that style achieves full bloom through the creature. Like the robotic workers in Metropolis or the muddy marsh in Sunrise, the monster is the externalization of an emotion. In this case, Amelia's grief over the death of her husband, her frustration with her son, and the worries over her lagging career (you can all of these play out perfectly on Davis’s face as well). The Babadook is a triumph of design and execution. Armed with elaborate claws and a Cheshire Cat-wide grin and draped in shabby formal wear, he (it?) resembles a being out of a foggy daydream induced by a 30's Disney short or an old silent film. Such a comparison is explicitly courted in a sequence where Amelia pictures the Babadook skulking around a Méliès-like flick playing on T.V.

Amelia and Samuel’s bogeyman is the rarest of rare in current cinema, an effective and understated use of CGI. I am unsure how exactly the Babadook was created. It looks like some combination of stop-motion, traditional animation, and computer generation. However, I doubt it could exist without modern aid, and, since the technology allows anything to be depicted, Kent could have easily put all of her money on the screen. Instead, she employs the Jaws method of showing only pieces of the antagonist. Thankfully, the full beast is never revealed, only hinted at, leaving its final form to the audience’s imagination.

P.S.

I’ve seen grumblings that The Babadook isn’t scary enough, and that the movie is a failure for this reason. Setting aside how subjective that opinion is, the other elements work far too well for it to be true. I will warn you that if you go in expecting a 90 minute frightfest or showers of gore, you’re going to be disappointed. It would be better to approach The Babadook as a psychologically and emotionally intense drama with tinges of the paranormal.  

P.P.S.

How fun is it to say Babadook? Baah-Baah DOOK DOOK DOOK! 

Image Association: Seven Samurai's Circles, Triangles, Lines, and Squares

Word-free critiques 

P.S.
A tip of the hat to Jonathan Rosenbaum is necessary. His article, Lines and Circles, about 2001: A Space Odyssey and Playtime partly inspired this collection of screen captures.

New Horizons: Los Angeles Plays Itself

Unearthing the outré 

Directed by Thom Andersen

Written by Thom Andersen

Narrated by Encke King

Cinematography by Deborah Stratman 

Edited by Seung-Hyun Yoo

Released in 2003 (limited) and 2014 (wide)

Alejandro Jodorowsky’s acid western El Topo had its premiere in 1970 at the Museum of Modern Art. Present at that screening was The Elgin theater owner, Ben Barenholtz. Unafraid of the somewhat icy reception, he programmed it constantly in his own cinema. El Topo ran for around half a year, always late at night at The Elgin. Eventually, fans of the film John Lennon and Allen Klein helped distribute it across the United States, to (marginally) wider acclaim. The success of David Lynch’s Eraserhead followed a similar path. Once its years-long gestation was finished in 1977, it was shown at the Filmex film festival in Los Angeles, where the same Barenholtz recognized its peculiarly fascinating qualities and convinced a local theater to show it in the same way as El Topo. Eraserhead expanded from there.

As shown by the two aforementioned titles, a few of the key aspects to the development of a cult are backing by an influential individual, a period of limited availability that allows word-of-mouth to build, and, finally, a wider roll-out that builds off that hype. Due to the increasingly fractured, niche, and immediate way media is consumed, it has become far harder for cults to evolve in this fashion. Non-mainstream titles can show up for a single week in theaters, or not at all if you don’t live in a big city, and quickly move to home video/digital distribution from there, only to slip away into the vast ether of the internet. Since there are a multitude of voices online, all battling for attention, the people who champion these films can get lost as well.

At first impression, a three hour cine-essay about the history of L.A.’s representation in film may not sound like the stuff cult objects are made of. However, the hazy legality of the footage used created the exact right environment for Los Angeles Plays Itself to forge its reputation as El Topo and Eraserhead did before it. In order to avoid possible lawsuits, Andersen limited screenings to repertory houses and university theaters for a decade. Advanced praise came from critics and hardcore cinephiles determined enough to seek it out, or lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time. In the past few years, LAPI showed up on Pirate Bay and Youtube, was recently released on Blu-ray, and is currently streaming on Netflix. Its inch-by-inch rise is one of few such events to occur post-millennium.

Summarizing Andersen’s points outside of the full context of the work makes him sound cranky and irrational. If located in a regular written review, his critiques would be roundly dismissed. The original Gone in 60 Seconds is posited as a successor to Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera. Sylvester Stallone’s trashy Cobra is picked on, among other things, for its misrepresentation of the city’s geography. Consensus classics Chinatown, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, and L.A. Confidential draw Andersen’s ire for both their cynicism and their attempts to posit well-known historical events as secret conspiracies. Many more are attacked for associating specific architectural styles with villainy and decay.

It doesn’t always do so, but criticism, like movies in general, offers a chance to step outside ourselves and poke around someone else’s mind. Viewed this way, Andersen’s thoughts are fascinating and highly specific. His general perspective is one I would never come up with on my own and have never encountered while reading other critics. Encke King’s monotone narration diffuses some of the anger and bitterness directed at Los Angeles’ abuse at the hands of Hollywood. The voiceover adds flavors of irony, ambiguity, and humor that help make the contrarianism easier to swallow.

Lose Angeles Plays Itself is equally successful as an act of history. The real affairs that served as jumping-off-points for Chinatown and its descendants are revealed to have been publically voted-on. Mini-movements contained within the film show everyday places like grocery and gas stations morph and degrade through the decades. The arc of Bunker Hill and its short tramway is relayed leading to praise for its depiction in the noir Kiss Me Deadly and the neo-realist The Exiles. The racially driven Zoot Suit and Watts riots are given prominence, with Andersen then going on to chide popular cinema’s failure to tackle these subjects.

If the movie could be distilled down to one point it’s this: Hollywood’s obsession with glamour and spectacle has led to a gross misunderstanding of the city where it (only partially) resides. The most moving portions of LAPI include segments from movies that came out of the UCLA film school, such as Haile Gerima’s Bush Mama and Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep. In act of resistance to Tinseltown's dominance, Andersen states that these paeans to L.A.’s working class minorities should be help as the true depictions of the city of angels.  

Review: Interstellar

Directed by Christopher Nolan
Written by Jonathan and Christopher Nolan
Starring Matthew McConaughey (Cooper), Anne Hathaway (Brand), and Jessica Chastain (Murph)
Cinematography by Hoyte Van Hoytema
Edited by Lee Smith
Released in 2014

Kubrick’s interstellar opus has a modern reputation as challenging and difficult sci-fi. Despite that, it’s entirely possible, and okay, to enjoy the film on a base level as spectacle. Gawking at the special effects Douglas Trumbull and his crack team came up with is immensely enjoyable. They range from detailed costumes (the apes), elaborate sets and models (the futuristic vessels and bases), and the hallucinogenic (the disorientating slit-scan photography). The effects have such a great physical presence and look so detailed, that they surpass anything the CGI age has offered up so far. At times, 2001 feels less like a film and more like a vision of the future, sent backwards in time, and beamed directly into the brain. Another slight misconception about 2001 is its status as the premiere head movie. This is no doubt due to the murmurings that audience members regularly dropped acid during 2001’s first screenings. I’ve never been convinced that this was a regular occurrence. The drug use probably occurred a few times and was then magnified through gossip. The “Dawn of Man” and the “Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite” sections contain the right ingredients for “the ultimate trip” (to quote one of the film’s posters). However, the moon-base and Discovery One portions, which make up the majority of the runtime, are detail-oriented and process-driven. As soon as HAL begins to malfunction, the action changes to that of a basic survival story. Not exactly the most LSD-friendly material. 

All that being said, if 2001 were just a simple tale wedded to insane spectacle, I doubt its critical cache would have lasted this long. The advanced techniques are used to get across complex ideas related to humanity and technology.  Most famous is the match cut from an ape’s bone flying up in the air to a futuristic space station. In a single juxtaposition, Kubrick evocatively and immediately links the ape’s brand new knowledge of weaponry to all of scientific progress. Kubrick identifies the inherent possible danger of new tech and the sometimes sinister motivation behind its development. A kind of post-human point of view is revealed when spinning space stations, ironically scored to balletic classical music, are intercut with a stewardess stumbling down a hallway and a man snoozing in zero g. The message? In the future, glimmering titans of metal will be more graceful than us Homo sapiens. The incongruity between the banality of the space travelers and the grandeur of their surrounding vistas sneaks in a bit of visual humor. The stewardess looks she stepped off a Pan Am flight from the 60’s, Dr. Floyd has an everyday conversation with his daughter while the goddamn Earth is spinning right outside the window, and the chatter between him and his colleagues sounds like it was taken from a 50’s commercial.

HAL is the sun around which 2001’s planetary themes orbit. Commonly, the Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer is seen as more human than the astronauts that look over him (or are looked over by him). While Bowman and Poole’s demeanor is comically sedate, I can’t fully agree with this conclusion. HAL is nothing but a red dot, a monotone voice, and a small amount of flicker. So much of human communication involves reading facial cues, body language, and subtle vocal inflections that it is nigh impossible to determine HAL’s man-or-machine status. The duel that eventually develops between HAL and Bowman sparks all kinds of interesting moral quandaries. HAL does not start killing off the crew until Bowman and Poole make it clear they intend to shut him down (note that self-preservation is a universal signifier of life). On the other side, Bowman’s strongest emotional beat comes from responding to HAL’s murder attempts. Bowman doesn’t feel real until he’s in that red-tinted control room, wrenching out HAL’s intelligence core, and breathing and sweating like a madman. If you’re inclined towards pessimism, you could encapsulate two significant parts of the film, separated by millions of years of progress, as two entities trying to kill each other.

A Space Odyssey captures all of the complex attitudes people have about extraterrestrial flight, technological advancement, the vastness of the universe, and our tiny place within it. Plenty of films have explored different elements contained within its 2 ½ hours. Star Wars combined the excitement of old serials and pulp stories to a sci-fi setting and perfectly captured the wonder of a gigantic universe. Alien, with its terrifying bio-mechanical sexual imagery, made visceral the sheer terror of encountering the unknown. Blade Runner explored the hazy line between man and machine using a messy, ambiguous narrative. The Terminator followed common thriller rules to spin a tale of mankind being wiped out by its own creations. All of these have their merits, and I enjoy all of them, but none surpass 2001. Simultaneously grand and steeped in minutiae, it is one of the few pieces of cinema whose world seems to exist beyond the frame of the camera. It is so awesome in scope and brimming with ideas that turning off your brain and picking apart every second of footage are equally satisfying.

The Comfort and Mundanity of Eraserhead

Directed by David Lynch
Written by David Lynch
Starring Jack Nance (Henry Spencer), Charlotte Stewart (Mary X), Judith Roberts (Girl Across the Hall), Laurel Near (Lady in the Radiator), and Jack Fisk (Man in the Planet)
Cinematography by Herbert Cardwell and Frederick Elmes
Edited by David Lynch
Sound Design by Alan Splet*
Released in 1977

Discussion of David Lynch's debut tends to focus on the nightmarish imagery, the gross-out effects, or its relation to Lynch's daughter, then newborn Jennifer Lynch. My first viewing had similar results. Watching Eraserhead was like being plucked from reality and dropped into a bizarre, logic-free dream world with no grounding or explanation as a safety net. Expletives of disbelief were released  upon the first glimpse of Henry Spencer and Mary X's baby? animal? mutant? horrifying combination of all three? The sudden appearance of boils on Henry's tiny amalgam of creature and human caused screams, jumps, and tightly-shut eyes. His disaffected "You are sick!" was the perfect unsettling spice to the already freaky base scene. As reproductive, fetal, and lunar images and symbols piled-up in the latter half of the film, a sickening, uncomfortable sensation developed in the pit of my stomach. Afterwards, I had to attempt sleep, worried that some of Eraserhead's surreal essence had leaked out into the real world.

Upon a second watch, the disturbing elements of Eraserhead were still present, but moments of surprising comfort, mundanity, and humor wormed their way in as well. Is it odd that I experienced a small amount of happiness during such an immediately strange film? I should clarify that it is Eraserhead's existence and continued success that I took pleasure in, not quite the movie itself. Eraserhead is an uncompromised vision, straight from the mind of Lynch, and without outside interference. That such a dark, twisted world found an audience, albeit a small one, due to a few adventurous distributors and theater owners placing it on the midnight circuit is an inspiration. The tiny amount of wider cultural cache it has gained over the decades allows me to use phrases like "Man in the Planet" and "Lady in the Radiator" without people thinking I'm crazy, for which I am eternally grateful.

The extra-textual materials on the Criterion release reveal that Lynch and co. faced overwhelming obstacles during the film's making. Funding ran out multiple times, forcing production to halt only to continue years later. Virtually everyone on the team had to work an additional job. Lynch himself ran a paper route (sadly he did not deliver newspapers on a bike, a too-perfect image). The project survived the loss of its initial DP, Herbert Caldwell, nine months in. The story of the making of Eraserhead is triumphant. The stuff of treacly biopics.

Lynch litters his film with traces of the mundane. The opening consists mainly of Henry just walking back to his apartment, lone grocery bag in hand. The environs he passes through look wild due to the lighting, but there's a recognizable quality to the industrial maze of tanks, pipes, tunnels, and abandoned buildings that block his path. Henry's dinner at the X household follows the same track. The camera just sits back and watches as the group attempts to make awkward small talk and Mr. and Mrs. X cook dinner. Sure there's a litter puppies noisily sucking away in the corner, Grandma X is catatonic, and the cooked "chickens" jump back to life for a few seconds, but the core of the scene is oddly relatable. The hard faces of the X's, the deserted spaces, and the desperate sequence that gives the film its name are reminiscent of Great Depression era photographs. Anyone who spent a night at their grandparents' home as a child will appreciate the steel bed frame, tattered blankets, and worn-out wood furniture that make up Henry's apartment.





















These contrasting components (the common and the uncommon, the earthly and the otherworldly, and the real and the surreal) collide with each other and create the curious friction that gives Eraserhead its terrifying pull.


*Not a title I usually include, but half of the film's success is due to Mr. Splet. Also, his last name works as an onomatopoeia for many of the noises in the movie.


P.S.
A few weeks ago, I attempted to clarify why Eraserhead's special effects were so memorable. By coincidence, I read Maitland McDonagh's Criterion essay for Kuroneko. She used the word unheimlich, which I was not familiar with. I rushed off to Wikipedia and discovered that it's a Freudian phrase which translates to uncanny in English. Here is the definition per Wikipedia:

The uncanny is a Freudian concept of an instance where something can be both familiar yet alien at the same time, resulting in a feeling of its being uncomfortably strange. Because the uncanny is familiar, yet incongruous, it often creates cognitive dissonance within the experiencing subject, due to the paradoxical nature of being simultaneously attracted to yet repulsed by an object. This cognitive dissonance often leads to an outright rejection of the object, as one would rather reject than rationalize

I smiled to myself when I realized how perfectly that describes the creatures populating Lynch's universe. There's something human buried underneath all the paint, goo, and make-up of Man in the Planet and Lady in the Radiator, but they simultaneously look so off, that the mind rejects them and classifies them as unsettling. The cocktail of different animal and infant characteristics that form the baby works in much the same way.

Review: Birdman

Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu

Written by Alejandro González Iñárritu, Nicolás Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris, and Armando Bo

Starring Michael Keaton (Riggan), Emma Stone (Sam), and Edward Norton (Mike)

Cinematography by Emmanuel Lubezki

Edited by Douglas Crise and Stephen Mirrione

Released in 2014

Birdman alternates between fun and frustration. The short time span and theater setting allow the gifted actors to riff, yell, pontificate, emote, and explode in dizzying succession, making for engaging, sometimes too melodramatic, showcases. While the single long take conceit eventually becomes a little grating, it works well in creating a claustrophobic feel, and Lubezki playfully messes around with shifting color and lighting. Keaton plays his character's at first simmering, then boiling, insanity well. His split personality inner voice, a riff on Christian Bale's Batman growl, is a particular treat.

The problems come when Birdman attempts to criticize modern culture at large. By the end, I felt like I could make a list of things González Iñárritu doesn't like: cell phones, instant messaging, social media, celebrity obsession, superhero movies, and critics. Multiple characters rail against the stupidity of the current state of the world. Judging by Birdman, I'm probably in agreement with González Iñárritu on most of those topics. I've said much the same either online or out loud several times. However, hearing those complaints from established actors in the context of an actual movie comes off as terribly awkward and childish.

Furthermore, Birdman fails to offer an alternative to the loud, empty entertainment it holds in contempt. The film is constantly surging forward. Antonio Sánchez's all-drum score is consant, Lubezki's cinematography barely allows for moments of quiet or reflection, and the acting is pitched so high that the moments of pathos fall flat. It never stops and never grants room for ambiguity or analysis. While it's scope is smaller, in some ways, Birdman is just as superficial as Iron Man 3 and its ilk.

The counter-argument is that everything I just mentioned is meant satirically. That the picture is poking fun at the self-seriousness of theater-types and ego-filled actors. While my opinion on this may change after another viewing, the fact that almost every character has a big, profound speech pushes me to disagree. In addition, there's a moment where Keaton's alter-ego looks directly into the camera, at the audience, and indicts everyone for enjoying big, dumb action flicks. That moment is Birdman in minature: immediately bracing and sometimes funny, but shallow after even a small amount of deliberation.

Something Else: Seven Samurai

Random thoughts, of random lengths, on random films

Directed by Akira Kurosawa 
Written by Akira Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto, and Hideo Oguni
Starring Toshirô Mifune (Kikuchiyo) and Takashi Shimura (Kambei Shimada)
Cinematography by Asakazu Nakai
Edited by Akira Kurosawa 
Released in 1954 (Japan) and 1956 (USA)

Kurosawa's Warring States Period epic has been copied since the moment it was first released. The "ragtag group of heroes takes on impossible odds" scenario has been used in everything from westerns (The Magnificent Seven), war films (The Dirty Dozen), comedies (Three Amigos), and cartoons (A Bug’s Life). The  characters created by Kurosawa and co. and imbued with life by the film's actors have been appropriated innumerable times. An overreaching lawyer could sue Star Wars for plagiarism as many of its central cast has an one-to-one correlations in Seven Samurai. Obi-Wan Kenobi as the wizened leader = Kambei, Luke Skywalker as the naïve hero = Katsushiro, Han Solo as the reluctant hero full of bravado = Kikuchiyo, and Boba Fett as the silent assassin = Kyuzo. 

Seven Samurai is the wellspring from which all of modern action cinema flows out of, and, despite the endless imitators, it remains sweeping, thrilling, moving, and utterly human (as if I needed to tell you that). As epic as the film eventually becomes, it never forgets the full-bodied people who populate it or the time it takes place in. From the outside, Seven Samurai may seem like an uncomplicated, white hats vs. black hats story, but every character has intriguing moral wrinkles and the situation always remains frighteningly desperate. 

The titular septuplet of warriors all have complicated, sometimes never-defined reasons for agreeing to the peasants' insane mission. A sense of altruism seems to drive Kambei, along with a possible desire to go out with one last good deed. Katsushiro is the most simplistic, agreeing mostly out of youthful idealism. The other samurai join up because they're attracted Kambei's character, want to test their skill, or need a few bowls of rice. Kikuchiyo is fueled by a combustible mix of pride, a need to prove his samurai bona fides, and sympathy for the farmers' situation. Both parties make tough, sometimes distancing, choices. Kambei forces a few breakaway villagers back into line by sword edge, and some secret food and liquor stores mysteriously show up before the ultimate confrontation. 

The violence is never cathartic or enjoyable. Even the bandits, who are ostensibly the villains, die messy deaths. Most of them are dispatched by bamboo spear (which really looks like an awful way to die), shot in the back, or burned to death. The way the bandits are treated gives the film a little extra heft, and instead of being a standard action picture it becomes a commentary on the brutal nature of ancient Japan.

After the final battle scene, Seven Samurai ends on a downbeat note. Half of the heroes have been slain, and Katsushiro, driven mad by battle-lust, collapses into tears once he realizes it's all over. Following a quick scene showing the farmers happily planting and singing, the three remaining swordsmen realize they're no longer needed, accept their peripatetic nature, and ruminate on what their victory truly means. All while the graves of their comrades loom over them.

Shocktober Reflections

Final rankings:

     The Best: Tie between Kuroneko and The Innocents

     The Great: Audition, Carnival of Souls, The Descent, Kwaidan, Night of the Living                                                Dead, Rosemary's Baby, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me

     The Good: Cat People, The Exorcist, The House of the Devil, Poltergeist, The Ring 

     The Mixed: The Bride of Frankenstein, Inland Empire, Jigoku, Santa Sangre

     The Okay: Candyman, The Brood, Kill List, The Masque of Read Death, The Nightmare Before                            Christmas, Re-Animator, Sisters, Vampyr

     

     The Bad: The Blair Witch Project, The Blob, Resolution, Scream, Suspiria

Random people, places, and objects I'm now afraid of:

• Men with one syllable names
• Dead leaves rustling quietly along sidewalks
• Misplaced tongues
• Doorbells with impeccably sound-designed rings
• The preventable, total breakdown of society due to an easily dealt with supernatural element
• Autonomous trees
• Cat demons, snow-based she-devils, and seemingly innocent, but secretly unstable dancers
• Ear removal
• Children cursing 
• Tannis root-based drinks
• Video tapes, TV static, and VCR's

General thoughts on marathons, specific films, and horror in general:

Well, I had to extend the marathon into the first week of November to finish, but I finally watched 31 scary movies, which I consider quite a feat for a self-proclaimed horror novice. Astute readers will notice that my final list up there is different from my original. Netflix disc ended being quicker in their deliveries than I expected, so I was able to add some other films based on that. 

A year ago I tasked myself with watching every film on the BFI Top 50, so I had gone through an ordered list of films before, but I didn't have a set schedule and made my way through each film in a leisurely manner. This was my first time doing a film-a-day marathon. I have to say, such a method is a bad way of absorbing movies. As exciting as some of the movies I watched were, I couldn't help but feel resentful about having to watch a movie every day regardless of my mood or what else I had going on. If I were to do it all over again, I would pick a few films to watch on weekends, or view a handful on Halloween night. 

Even the best horror films tend to work within certain limits and hit similar beats. My regular viewing habits involve jumping around a lot between different directors, styles, genres, and decades to avoid burnout in areas I would otherwise enjoy. Therefore, a general annoyance seeped in once I got a third of the way through the list. Most of the films in the "okay" section probably would have been bumped up to "good" if I had seen them under typical conditions. Quickly picking up on specific tropes and formulas definitely hurt the fright factor of these films as well. 

My main takeaway was noticing that, after a certain point, horror switched from a genre that studios regularly dabbled in (employing expert craftsmen and established actors in the process), to low-budget affairs directed by outsiders or B-movie mavens and starring unknowns. If I had to pinpoint one film that caused this schism, it would be Night of the Living Dead. I don't mean to denigrate either side. Working outside of the studio system provides freedom to explore taboo subjects, push boundaries, and experiment with form. When someone who knows what they're doing is pushed by constraints, or when a crazy visionary somehow scrapes together just enough funding, the results can be stupendous, begetting films like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Audition, Eraserhead, and Tetsuo: The Iron Man. 

On the other hand, I wish that studio horror would return to a pre-'68 mindset and that multi-talented directors would work within the field. Rosemary's Baby and The Innocents were both made by people more known for drama than straight horror. The outside perspective makes both well-rounded, fully-satisfying, and resonant on a human level. Smart application of studio resources can also result in moody eye-candy, as evidenced by the trio of Japanese films on my list (Jigoku, Kuroneko, and Kwaidan). 

Finally, I can't stress enough how critical good sound design and memorable music is to establishing mood, generating tension, and providing jolts. The Innocents serves as a masterclass on how to weave a singular musical theme in and out of multiple contexts, giving it a different meaning each time it's replayed. The use of a biwa in the third story of Kwaidan gives a hypnotic power and distinct flavor to a tale of warrior-ghosts, haunted ships, and frightened monks, and is a major reason why that section is the best in the film. The Descent and The House of the Devil focus intensely on the small sounds made by footsteps, shallow breathing, and creeky/claustrophobic man-made and natural architecture in a way that makes the loud moments all the more terrifying. 

Shocktober: Halloween

Directed by John Carpenter
Written by John Carpenter and Debra Hill
Starring Jamie Lee Curtis (Laurie Strode), Donald Pleasance (Dr. Sam Loomis), and Tony Moran (Michael Myers)
Cinematography by Dean Cundey
Edited by Charles Bornstein and Tommy Lee Wallace
Released in 1978

There are two simple techniques Carpenter employs to add an unsettling edge to every shot in Halloween. The opening shot famously takes place from the Myers' point of view and sets up the long, fluid takes that make up most of the film's visual language. Once the plot moves to Laurie and her friends, Myers either randomly pops up in Laurie's field of view or is revealed to be watching the unfolding scene by a slow pan backwards. As a result, every scene is called into question, and those two tricks show why cinema is perfect for horror.

Like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, there's a sick joke at the center of Halloween. I don't know if Halloween was the first horror movie to be explicitly set in the suburbs, but that location is used to great effect. And Carpenter's film uses the "dark doings in a small town" trope years before Blue Velvet and American Beauty. Once the adults go out for the night, the entire town of Haddonfield becomes a wasteland, with only one, ineffectual cop to protect it. "Nothing bad could happen here right? This is a suburb!" is a thought that must have gone through every parent's head. It's one of the reasons why Myers' rampage is accomplished so easily, and it makes for a tense, painful scene where Laurie runs around yelling for someone to help her to no avail.

There's also a fun, anthropological quality to Halloween. I didn't know what $100 would buy you at JC Penny's in the 70's, but I do now! While elements of the slasher were set in place before Halloween (mainly by Psycho and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre), the sub-genre that would engulf horror for the next 15 years basically begins here. It's interesting to consider the differences between Halloween and its successors. The most notable being that Halloween relies very little on shock, blood, or gore. Almost all of the dread and scares come from good-old-fashioned suspense filmmaking. Even the trick of Myers doing nothing but staring at Laurie has its roots in classier fare. Mainly, Jack Clayton's Gothic ghost tale, The Innocents.

When the kills do come, they're terrifying and brutal, but they never wallow in violence and they never dip into "enjoy watching assholes get their comeuppance" territory. It's true that many of the problematic elements of slashers are found in Halloween. The characters who smoke marijuana, drink, and enjoy sex end up dead and the character who abstains from those activities is left alive. However, I don't think Halloween is anti-sex or anti-drug or that it's trying to impart regressive, puritan values. I'm not going to say that the dialogue between the three main female characters is realistic, but their dynamic is believable and the scenes of them just bullshitting help make their deaths more impactful. On the subject of these problematic elements Carpenter had this to say: "The one girl who is the most sexually uptight just keeps stabbing this guy with a long knife. She's the most sexually frustrated. She's the one that's killed him. Not because she's a virgin but because all that sexually repressed energy starts coming out. She uses all those phallic symbols on the guy."

If Halloween has any problems, it is with Donald Pleasance's Dr. Loomis. He doesn't do anything important until the end (a role that could have easily been filled by Annie's cop father. The random cutaways to the good doctor during Myers' rampage detract from the rising tension and, near the beginning, Pleasance is forced to sell some awkward dialogue setting up Myers as an ultimate evil.

Review: Nightcrawler

Directed by Dan Gilroy
Written by Dan Gilroy 
Starring Jake Gyllenhaal (Louis Bloom), Rene Russo (Nina Romina), and Riz Ahmed (Rick)
Cinematography by Robert Elswit 
Edited by John Gilroy
Released in 2014

Jake Gyllenhaal has played dangerously obsessive before (Zodiac, Prisoners, Enemy), but his performance as Lou Bloom takes that thread and runs rampant with it. It's one of those rare, totally transformative roles that doesn't involve huge amounts of weight gain/loss or other radical changes in physical appearance. Gyllenhaal creates Bloom through tiny changes in posture, facial patterns, and tone of voice (think Joaquin Phoenix in The Master). He's squirm-inducing from the first frame to the last. I kept trying to worm my way through the back of my seat just to escape his distressingly blank gaze.

Gilroy's film gets all of its bite from it lead. Bloom is an ambulatory collection of self-help books, American Dream platitudes, and business seminar buzzwords. There's not a single time where the facade drops. No humanity or self-reflections is allowed to shine through. We never even learn why he's so driven. Money is the obvious answer, and he's shown buying an expensive care once he has established himself as a guerrilla cameraman. However, he never takes pleasure in showing it off, and he's still stuck in his one-room apartment at the end. Maybe status? Again though, there doesn't seem to be any genuine want for relationships or a higher position. It's all just a means to an end, then another end, and another, and another, and so one and so forth. The true answer is because these are things that capitalist society has deemed important. Bloom has no personality of his own. His desires are a mash-up of what he's heard from other people.

Where Nightcrawler falters is that nothing else is able to match Bloom's crazy ambition. The cinematographer, Robert Elswit, is a frequent collaborator of Paul Thomas Anderson, and I wish some of the formal daring of the likes of Punch-Drunk Love and There Will Be Bloodi had filtered over to here. The only sequence that truly sings is a shootout/car chase near the end that dance neatly between the protagonists' points of view. and that of their cameras. For a story involving amateur directors, Nightcrawler makes surprisingly little use of the possibilities of multiple screens. Similarly, James Newton Howard's score is a bit confused. The music is meant to be satirical, playing Lou's descent as moments of crowd-pleasing triumph, but it comes off as too generic to generate the intended effect.

Review: Boyhood

Directed by Richard Linklater
Written by Richard Linklater
Starring Ellar Coltrane (Mason), Patricia Arquette (Olivia), Ethan Hawke (Mason Sr.), and Lorelei Linklater (Samantha)
Cinematography by Lee Daniel and Shane F. Kelly
Edited by Sandra Adair
Released in 2014

Knowing that Boyhood would end with Mason starting college, I expected to be hugely moved by the latter portions of the film as making that same transition was an emotionally fraught time for me. Oddly enough, I enjoyed the sections probing Mason's childhood the most. Dozens of kids films are released every year, but very few recreate the actual experience of being a child (the only one I can name off the top of my head is My Neighbor Totoro). The greatest achievement of Boyhood is that it offers a rare chance to see through fresh eyes. Moments like Mason quizzically processing a dead bird he's uncovered or erasing his past by painting over a height chart most clearly evoke the film's obsession with the passage of time. Similarly, through careful framing, Linklater does an excellent job of pricking Mason's innocent view of the world. He confusedly watches his mother and father argue through a window, only half-hearing them. Later, an everyday walk home suddenly becomes dark when Mason stumbles upon a fight between his mother and step-father. At these points, Linklater effectively uses the langue of cinema to put the viewer in the mind of young boy.

It's unfortunate that Boyhood gets less and less interesting as it goes along. Part of this is unavoidable. In it's later half it becomes a coming-of-age tale which have been beyond numerous throughout film history. The familiarity problem could be avoided, but Boyhood isn't a particularly unique, specific, or revelatory version of this type of story. Basically everyone has put forward Boyhood's shooting schedule as an argument against that previous assertion. While I think Linklater should be given all the credit in the world for creating a functional movie out of such an abnormal situation, I don't find that part of the film makes up for its flaws. Many critics have mentioned Truffaut's Antione Doinel films, the 7-Up series, the Harry Potter movies, and various television shows as antecedents for Linklater's vision.

The main reason I don't find Boyhood's central conceit memorable is that Linklater himself has already created a similar event in the three Before films. Watching Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and Before Midnight all at once is an amazing experience. You can see two people mature eighteen years and go through the major stages of life in the span of five hours. The fact that I did such a marathon shortly before watching Boyhood is one reason I'm not as high on the film as everyone else. Comparing the two also elucidates Boyhood's flaws. The Before films are laser-focused on investigating very specific characters and honestly exploring a romantic relationship. Jesse and Celine are Jesse and Celine, there's no one else quite like them. In addition, the "one day or less" limitation helps immensely in providing immediacy, conflict, and tension (if you asked me what my favorite thriller is, I'd answer Before Sunset only half-jokingly). Furthermore, that restriction turns intellectual ideas like the fleeting nature of time and the problems and pleasures that come with age into emotional gut-punches.

In contrast, the second half of Boyhood is a vague drift through random parts of a poorly-defined person's life. Mason goes through important events, relationships, and hobbies to no impact, because no one thing is given enough time to develop. He's into graphiti, then photography, now he has girlfriend, now he doesn't, now he's over her, now he's alone at college, and then immediately has friends. The movie fails at showing why Mason is attracted to such pursuits, how those interests developed  over his life, and why his teenage relationships turned out the way they did. I know the counter to my argument is "That's the point, it's just like real life." Fair enough I suppose, but it's not dramatically satisfying in any way.

Finally, I'll bring in another comparison. Surprisingly, I have yet to see a review of Boyhood that mentions Jane Campion's 1990 film, An Angel at My Table. Angel concerns New Zealand author Janet Frame, and, like Boyhood, it covers a huge swath of her life. The film is broken up into three parts, roughly corresponding to Frame's childhood, her development as a teacher and misdiagnosis as schizophrenic (which leads to horrific shock therapy), and her travels around Europe and later development as an author. Campion carefully seeds why Frame is drawn to literature early on. A remarkable continuity is kept between the three actors who play Frame, showing that you don't have to follow the same kid for twelve years for the same effect if you have an eye for casting. It helps immensely that Frame's life is packed with far more incidence than Mason's and that her New Zealand homeland allows for some truly gorgeous cinematography (another area I found Boyhood lacking).

As the details surrounding Boyhood came to light over the past year, it sounded like a one-of-the-kind cinematic event. However, after my first viewing, I couldn't help but feel Boyhood was an okay copy of ideas and techniques I had seen before.

Shocktober: Night of the Living Dead

Directed by George Romero

Written by John Russo and George Romero

Starring Duane Jones (Ben) and Judith O’Dea (Barbra)

Cinematography by George Romero

Edited by George Romero

Released in 1968

While reading about Carnival of Souls, I'd heard that it was an influence on Romero's debut. I'd somehow never seen Night of the Living Dead up to that point, so I couldn't agree or disagree. Having rectified that, I wholeheartedly concur. Herk Harvey's lo-fi, cult favorite is an undeniable progenitor of many of the stylistic choices found in Romero’s shocker.

The design of the zombies is kept simple. They're basically unkempt extras with smeary white face-paint and large amounts of eye shadow. It's spartan, but looks effective in black and white. Romero keeps things loose and rough in terms of camerawork and cinematography and that, combined with the worn-out look of the non-professional actors, gives the film that outsider art, small-town nightmare vibe that Carnival of Souls also captured.

Romero has maintained race did not factor into the casting of Duane Jones in the role of Ben. So, the extra dimension he brings to the proceedings is either a stroke of luck or of genius depending on how much stock you put in the director’s statement. It’s rare for an African-American to lead a horror (really any) film even today, and basically unheard of in 1968. That daring casting choice causes many fascinating undercurrents to flow through the film. Ben is shown to be highly capable in fortifying the house, beating down zombies with blunt objects, and crafting Molotov cocktails. It’s never outright stated, but it’s easy to see his actions and extrapolate that these are tasks he had to learn due to the racism and social upheaval of the sixties. Similarly, epithets are never thrown at Ben, but racial conflict heightens the struggle between him and Harry. Harry’s indigence about taking orders from Ben makes all too much sense considering the political climate at the time.

Even today, it’s easy to see why Night of the Living Dead was so controversial. For one, all of the pre-release material had the whiff of a cheap, silly fifties sci-fi spookfest (see the goofy photos and green font of the poster and the cheesy trailer). I’m not sure at what point the audience who showed up expecting such things realized what they were was far more disturbing. My guess would be when the zombies suddenly start dining on the recently deceased Tom and Judy, or when Ben fatally shoots Harry. If neither of those moments did it, then it had to be when Karen disembowels her mother. That scene, by the way, retains all of its shocking power forty-six years later. It’s a terrifying, chiaroscuro fantasia that branded my brain the second it came onto screen.

I’d like to think that the first people to see Night of the Living Dead stepped out of the theater dazed; worried they’d wandered into a new world of nightmares and chaos. At the very least, horror was never the same again. 

Shocktober: Kuroneko

Directed by Kaneto Shindo
Written by Kaneto Shindo
Starring Kichiemon Nakamura (Gintoki), Nobuko Otowa (Yone), and Kiwako Taichi (Shige)
Cinematography by Norimichi Igawa and Kiyomi Kuroda
Edited by Hisao Enoki

Released in 1968

I'd seen Kaneto Shindo's other major film in the Criterion Collection, Onibaba, before watching Kuroneko. I found it enjoyably lurid and frightening, but overall I thought it was more of a minor cult object than an underrated great. So color me surprised when I sat down to watch Kuroneko and was immediately entranced by it.

I dislike using "beautiful" as a descriptor, mainly because any film that's in focus and clearly-lit gets the word tossed at it, but there's no better way to describe Kuroneko's cinematography. It's beautiful, gorgeous, pretty, radiant, and stunning. It's also haunting, spooky, atmospheric, and moody. I'd rather post stills from the film than write about it. Phew, alright, now that I've exhausted my thesaurus, I'll try to get more concrete.

I've seen plenty of striking, black and white films at this point (8 1/2, Wings of Desire, Beauty and The Beast, Eraserhead, and Citizen Kane just to name a few), but none of them have quite the same look as Kuroneko. The whites are blindingly so, like the characters are moons, reflecting the sun's intense rays back at the viewer. And the blacks are either subsumed as light gray, or pitch as the darkest void of space. The contrast results in unbelievable moments. Like when spotlights shine on the characters and they dance around as the only light source in pools of total darkness.

Shindo's willingness to go for pure style produces unbelievable results (literally, in some moments). Due to the dense fog, double exposures, and trippy dancing used to establish the mood of Yone and Shige's haunted abode, I could never quite process the exact dimensions of the place. Which is great, and, I assume, totally intentional. The space occupies a strange nether-realm between the world of men and the plane of ghosts, and Shindo's technique goes a long way towards creating that effect.

Other moments made me smile solely from their outré craft, which might not be the best way to respond to a film, but, whatever, I couldn't help myself. Gintoki riding home, with a huge sun in the background, almost elicited a cheer from me. A sequence quickly transforming Gintoki from a dirty, matted-hair savage to a clean-cut samurai (there were a few scenes where I didn't recognize him), uses montage to great effect. There's even a shot that reminded me of Eraserhead. 

Aside from all that, Kuroneko is surprisingly emotional for a film about cat demons. Kuroneko opens with its two main characters being senselessly murdered by a roving band of warriors. Through sheer force of will, and the help of a black feline, they come back as avenging spirits. The potential for supernatural silliness is there, but the resurrected duo's situation is taken seriously. They retain a tiny sliver of their humanity and struggle with amnesia and the unending demands of their curse. Eventually, Gintoki recognizes the ghost Yone and Shige as his mother and wife respectively. Again, setting up tragic situations where the dark-world demands of the two wraiths conflicts with their human desires. Shige sacrifices herself for one last week of bliss with Gintoki, and, in the haunting, melancholic crescendo, Gintoki yells in frustration for his mother's recognition.  

If you couldn't tell from the previous six paragraphs of gushing, I unabashedly love this movie. Both because it was such a surprise, and just generally high-quality. It's a film I'm compelled to evangelize for. Kuroneko demands a sizable cult, scratch that, it deserves a huge audience and reappraisal as a classic. Horror-buff, cinephile, or film-newbie, all could find something to enjoy in Shindo's phantasmal tale.

Shocktober: The Innocents

Directed by Jack Clayton

Written by John Mortimer, William Archibald, and Truman Capote adapting The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

Starring Deborah Kerr (Miss Giddens), Megs Jenkins (Mrs. Grose), Martin Stephens (Miles), and Pamela Franklin (Flora)

Cinematography by Freddie Francis

Edited by Jim Clark

Released in 1961

A British manor during the turn of the century is the perfect setting for a horror film.

1. It's isolated, so any help that could possibly come will take a long time to get there.
2. It provides plenty of opportunities for doors to creak open, wind to blow ominously through curtains, and people to walk through darkened corridors lit only by candlelight.
3. It's huge and empty. There's only four main characters in The Innocents and they occupy a monumental house. That leaves plenty of space for them to be creeped out and go crazy from cabin fever.
4. The stereotypical British politeness and repression sets up a great conflict where highly rational people desperately try to deal with a supernatural, irrational situation.

Aside from its location, The Innocents makes some great choices in telling its story and building its mood. The first is that the film is very, very careful in maintaining its ambiguity. Is Giddens actually seeing ghosts or is her buttoned-down personality causing her to hallucinate? Are the children possessed or just creepily precocious? The Innocents never answers these questions. Kerr is in every scene of the film and every time something supernatural happens it's either within frame of Giddens or from her viewpoint. Other films that attempt "is it all real or not?", such as The Descent or Audition, ruin that tension by having revelations occur in frame with side characters or in more objective real shots (not to say those films are bad).

The Innocents has been justly praised for its cinematography (watch the Criterion supplements for an excellent technical overview). It's got that great Citizen Kane, deep focus look with Kerr in the foreground and foreboding things going on in the background. There's striking clashes between the manor's grand surface and the little bits of decay that are buried just underneath. And dissolves are used to marvelous effect to create a floaty, dreamy mood (a sequence near the middle where different dissolves and superimpositions pile-up is a true stand-out).

However, I found the soundscape more interesting. As the story progresses, it gets densely layered. Ominous woodwinds and brass set the tone. Distinct background noises like clocks, winds, and birds are always hovering nearby.  Various screams, laughs, mutterings, and whispers fade in and out of each other. Piercing shrieks and high-pitch noises flare-up whenever Giddens gets frightened. The manor amplifies every sound with a haunting echo. Combined, it wraps Giddens, and the viewer, in a sonic cocoon of slowly-building insanity. Like Eraserhead, The Innocents proves that sound is just as important in creating horror as image.

Video Game Corner: Fusion between mechanics and theme.

Ramblings about video games. 

Note: the following was a part of a conservation I was having about the Legend of Zelda series. It's in response to someone else praising Twilight Princess. My comment was a bit rough, but it elucidates an aspect of games I frequently mull over.

I don't know. The dark tone Nintendo went for feels very slapped-on. My brother played through the game for the first time recently and I watched a little. The look of the dark world does not hold up. It looks very messy and oversaturated. Like they didn't have a clear art direction for that part of the game.

As for the story... I'll have to explain my thoughts on what differentiates video games from other art forms to illustrate my point. Warning: this will get long and rambly.

I'm very against cut scenes and long, scrolly text boxes in games. They ape other art forms and pull you out of whatever state the game had been working to get you in. Whatever ideas, themes, or feelings you get from a game should come from its mechanics (i.e. how you play it). In Twilight Princess the majority of what you're doing is puzzle-solving and fighting creatures in a way that feels like a rehash of Ocarina of Time and A Link To The Past. I barely remember the story because it amounts to such a tiny percentage of the overall game and it's conveyed in a lazy (cutscene-heavy) way.

Contrast that with Majora's Mask. Every element of that game goes toward getting across this messed-up, dark-fairytale world, including the mechanics. The time-manipulation results in tragic situations where nothing you do is permanent and no one remembers the heroic, arduous tasks you've accomplished. The mask-system delves into disturbing body-horror where Link is transforms into other races. And the masks are typically acquired by helping other characters work through depressing situations, like accepting their own death. Those are all core mechanics and they all work toward expressing the vision I described earlier.

Twilight Princess lacks that synergy between mechanics and theme.

Shocktober: Scream

Directed by Wes Craven
Written by Kevin Williamson
Starring Neve Campbell (Sidney), Skeet Ulrich (Billy), and Rose McGowan (Tatum)
Cinematography by Mark Irwin
Edited by Patrick Lussier
Released in 1996

I was riding high off the one-two of Rosemary's Baby and The Descent. Each embody two different styles of horror, but both are equally successful, enjoyable for horror neophytes, and at least adequate in acting and dialogue. Unfortunately, Scream has knocked me off my figurative horse and back into grouch mode.

Let me get to the good first. The best part about Scream is that it makes it's protagonists feel capable of actually defeating the villains. Similarly, the killers don't feel unstoppable and their attacks are just the right amount of messy, which makes sense considering their ultimate reveal. The film gives Neve Campbell's Sidney the proper dosage of self-referential material. She's smart, competent, and aware, but not to the point where her character is sacrificed on the altar of meta. Scream's opening sequence could serve as it's own terrifying short film. It has both the film's scariest moment (Barrymore trying to scream, but being unable to), and its best reference (the killer's gotcha Friday The 13th trivia). Of course, the problem is that the rest of Scream fails to match those moments.

Now to the bad. Throughout film history, movies have investigated what makes their own genre tick, the act of film making and film watching itself, and celebrated the wild and crazy world that is cinema. Among them are some of the greatest films of all time such as Man With A Movie Camera, Singin' In The Rain, and Vertigo. Then there are the films that use referential and meta elements as sprinkles, to distract the viewer from noticing that the core of a film isn't all that different from it's attempting to pick apart.

Scream falls firmly into the latter camp. Its script is choked with references to other, better horror movies (Psycho, Halloween, The Exorcist). Almost every character seems to have infinite knowledge regarding the genre, despite there being only one character designated as a horror-junkie, to the point where otherwise decent performances are ruined. Williamson also constantly reminds you how he is aware of the genre's tropes and how this film will be totally different! However, you would be hard-pressed to distinguish the basics of Scream from every other slasher. There are still masked killers, superfluous characters being offed to no impact, a final girl sequence, and a lame exposition dump detailing the motivations of the murderers.

This is an odd place to say the following, but it's something that's been on my mind for a while that I've never actually written down. And Scream is as good a film as any to use as a jumping off point. I don't like the way most 80's and 90's films look. Compared to previous decades, there are changes in the way films were lit and people looked and dressed that make the physical act of watching movies less pleasurable for me. It's an opinion I've seen nowhere else, so I chalk this annoyance up more to being harmfully nostalgic for past styles than anything else.

Anyway, that's not a knock against Scream's form, which is fine for the most part with a few stand out sequences. However, there are a few tricks that Craven overuses. One is the combination of scary moment + loud music + dutch angle that becomes laughable by the end. The other is the music in general. I can't say for sure that the suspenseful parts of Scream would work better in silence, but that's the general sense I got. It doesn't help that Scream's music feels terribly generic, which is odd considering Craven's horror knowledge. Surely he's reflected on the incredible, inseparable music of Psycho and The Shining, right?

If any genre needs to have the piss taken out of it, it's horror. I imagine part of the reason that Scream was so well-received on its initial release is that it finally ended the endless stream of creatively-bankrupt slashers that had dominated the genre ever since Mrs. Voorhees starting killing nubile teens at Crystal Lake. Scream revealed that sub-genre as silly at best and regressive at worst. For that reason I suppose, I'm glad the movie exists. However, today, it's difficult to see the death blow that Scream apparently dealt.