Here are Three Short Reviews

I'm going to very quickly review three movies I saw recently. There's no time to explain why!

The Messengers - d. the Pang Brothers - I can understand why, in horror films, babies are frequently the only people who can see the ghosts. Babies are innocent, and ghosts feed on innocence, and babies believe in wonder and magic and so forth. That all makes perfect sense to me. But why is it the babies are never scared? In this movie, the family getting haunted find themselves in that particular mess because, like so many troubled people before them, they chose to deal with a family trauma by buying an abandoned farm, and Ben, their baby, sees dessiccated, corpse-like people crawling along the ceiling like spiders. What does Ben do? He smiles and points. Yeah, okay the Pang Brothers, I got news for you: babies and other young children scare really easily. My niece became terrified one time when I took her into a corn maze and she saw a teenager dressed in a gorilla suit. So why does this Ben kid have such superhuman courage? Anyway, there was more to the movie, but I didn't like any of that stuff, either.

Paranoid Park - d. Gus Van Sant - I've written elsewhere about my admiration for Van Sant's Elephant, so I had reasonably high hopes for this film, about a teenage skateboard punk who accidentally kills a railroad security guard, and has to weather the guilt and panic that follows. Paranoid Park shares many of the same stylistic and thematic interests as Elephant, and also has much of the earlier film's power to spellbind with minimalist acting and the treatment of the mundane in classical terms. But I have a hard time with a film that deals with a young man who has killed another human being, which then ends up being about that young man ridding himself of guilt, as opposed to owning up to what he's done. Oh, so you purged your soul by writing down your feelings, did you? Perhaps the family of the man you killed would like to read them. Oh, you burned the pages? Well, never mind! Can't be helped!

Gomorra - d. Matteo Garrone - Described simply, this film comes across as a mix of Rome, Open City and City of God -- and I'll bet that's just how they pitched it, too! -- but in truth Gomorra is too well-observed, too quietly disturbing and moving to be quickly tossed off like that. It tells three stories about people within or on the fringes of Italy's Camorra criminal organization: two young, idiotic scumbags who want to take a piece of Camorra's slum turf for themselves; an old-time bagman used to the peaceful aspects of his job who finds himself in the middle of the violence when everything becomes unhinged; and a tailor and entrepeneur, one of whom tries to make too much of himself outside of Camorra's control. Violent, shocking, often beautifully acted, and featuring some of the most striking photography of slums and tenements I've seen -- the buildings where these characters live look like state prisons that have been opened to the public -- this is an excellent film, made by Garrone at great personal risk. If you can catch this in theaters, do it. Otherwise, it's currently On Demand as well, so check it out. This is mesmerizing stuff.