The Return of Capsule Reviews (Positive Edition)

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The Damned United (d. Tom Hooper) – Hooper’s new film The King’s Speech is currently angling its way towards some Oscars, or so people keep telling me, but his previous film, The Damned United, about the disastrous 44 days Brian Clough (Michael Sheen) spent as the manager of his one-time rival soccer team Leeds United, is sort of an Oscar-bait film in miniature. I don’t mean that as a knock, either, because The Damned United – based on a novel by David Peace, whose work also inspired the Red Riding Trilogy -- is hugely entertaining and satisfying. Sheen’s performance is one for the ages, all Yorkshire ego, brains and anger. In some interesting ways, this film is a sort of English version of The Social Network: smart fellow with a hidden store of arrogance gets snubbed and uses that experience to fuel not only his future success but also his disasters. Though I see I’ve already pretty much said this, Sheen’s work cannot be praised too highly, because while the film is a good one, and he’s surrounded by some prime supporting actors (Timothy Spall, Jim Broadbent, Stephen Graham, and so forth), it’s Sheen’s hysterical and fascinating Brian Clough that elevates this film to the realm of the Endlessly Rewatchable. Michael Sheen, über fucking alles!
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The Tingler (d. William Castle) – Please note the above image. Taken from Castle’s 1959 film The Tingler, it is one of the most striking images from horror movies from that era. The Tingler is probably nobody’s idea of the best of the genre, but almost any time it’s mentioned, the context is Castle’s ridiculous and ingenious gimmick of rigging the seats in the theaters that showed the film with little thingamajigs that would shock the viewer any time the titular creature made some sort of feeble gesture towards violence. But the film – about a scientist (Vincent Price) trying to isolate the tingle one feels in one’s spine when one is scared, ultimately discovering that it’s caused by a nasty-looking electric worm or whatever – is actually a good deal better than the gimmick (which, again, was awesome) would imply. Price gives a fine performance, seeming worldly and kind and natural throughout, but even better, or at least very different, is Philip Coolidge, who plays a movie theater manager whose deaf-mute wife you can see above. His entrance into the film, and ultimate motives, take on different meanings as you go along, but Coolidge never plays the guy as anything other than an aw-shucks, good neighbor sort. It’s kind of weird, actually. As is pretty much the whole film, and right smack in the middle is that bloody bathtub sequence, which is powerful, disturbing stuff created by Castle as a kind of sub-gimmick, a warm up to the literal shocks he had in store. You don’t see showmen like that anymore.
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Rampage (d. William Friedkin) – A film I’d very much like to see on DVD is this one, Friedkin’s low-budget 1987 adaptation of William P. Wood’s thriller about a Richard Chase-like serial killer (a quite unnerving Alex McArthur), whose murders are both horrifying and repulsive, and who is finally brought down by the police and put on trial. The film’s main character is the prosecutor, played by Michael Biehn, who makes the counter-intuitive journey (for Hollywood, anyway) from being anti-death penalty to pro. It’s been quite a while since I’ve seen Rampage, and it wouldn’t shock me to learn that Friedkin stacks the deck in favor of Biehn’s ultimate conversion, and in any case my own views on the subject are nowhere near as confident as they were when I first saw the film. However, there’s something very powerful about the direct, cheap-paperback way in which Friedkin approaches the material, not to mention bracing about an American film not walking the expected path on a controversial topic. Not that any of that matters so much, really, because the film also features, apart from the good work done by McArthur and Biehn, Royce D. Applegate as a man whose entire family, save his son, were slaughtered by the killer, and Friedkin actually follows this man and his boy in the aftermath as they try to get away from it, leave everything, including the horror and anger. This section of the film doesn’t take up a hell of a lot of screen time, but almost no other film would include it at all. Add to that a typically excellent, yet forgotten, score by Ennio Morricone, and yeah, like I said, I really wish this was on DVD.

Cap-Syool Reviews!! Enjoy Them Now!

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Here are some for you to read! Will you!?

Dragonwyck (d. Joseph L. Mankiewicz) - This is one of Vincent Price's very early Gothic thriller/melodrama roles (it's also the first film by Mankiewicz). The story is basically that a young woman (Gene Tierney) is overwhelmed by the wealth and smoothness of distant relative and wealthy landowner, Nicholas Van Ryn (Price). Then when she marries him, she finds out he's a crazy asshole. Price is wonderful, as always, and his final breakdown is terrific -- nobody did sweaty, arrogant psychic disintegration quite like Price -- but Mankiewicz seemed a bit too concerned with making his film important -- laying on the plight-of-the-worker stuff a bit too heavy -- and therefore, in his mind (I'm wildly speculating) better than your standard genre film, and the result is that the film sags. There's a terrific efficiency to the best genre films, especially from this era (the film was made in 1946), so that when a film like Dragonwyck makes a transparent attempt to rise above them, it's hard not to see why those other films are so very good.
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Summer Hours (d. Olivier Assayas) - This beautiful and beautifully acted French film, about a wealthy French family, whose matriarch passes away in an early scene, struggling to deal with her estate (consisting mainly of a gorgeous country home, and a sprawling collection of artwork), is not actually about family strife so much as it is about losing your past, and how much more meaningful art can be to the individual than it ever will be as art. Charles Berling, as the eldest son Frederic, gets the top marks, but as I said, everyone is superb. And for a movie with such a small, intimate story, there's an incredible pace to it, of the kind that would utterly confuse your run-of-the-mill contemporary thriller filmmaker. Carried along, no doubt, by those performances. Top shelf.

Johnny Guitar (d. Nicholas Ray) - A quite strange Western from the 1950s, featuring Joan Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge as the White Hat and the Black Hat, respectively. A lot has been made of this gender twist on the traditional Western, but the film itself doesn't hammer on any particular point: this is just the story, and these are just the characters. Mind you, its tone is less that of a Western than it is a melodrama, or "women's picture", of the kind that Douglas Sirk made at his most bombastic (which shouldn't be taken as a criticism of Sirk). But if it works, it works, so why complain about bombast, if that's the goal, and the goal is struck dead center? Besides which, any film that features Sterling Hayden and Ernest Borgnine can't be that bad. The fact that Hayden plays the title character who is also the Mysterious Stranger shouldn't confuse one into thinking that Joan Crawford isn't, in fact, the star (she's great, too, as is McCambridge). So what it is, in fact, is a genre mash-up; while that idea tends to yield horror-comedies, or horror-Westerns, or horror-SF, here we have Western-melodrama, which is actually a hybrid with a long history. All of which I suppose to say that I'm a bit curious why so many people think Johnny Guitar is so bizarre.

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Extract (d. Mike Judge) - Each of Mike Judge's live-action films (I'm excluding Beavis and Butthed Do America, because I remember that being a bit of a sensation at the time) has taken its own sweet time finding an audience. Office Space and Idiocracy were both dumped by their studios, and each has gained cult audiences of varying degrees of healthiness. His newest film, Extract, actually got a legitimate theatrical release, and still nobody went. Nobody who did go seemed overly taken with it, and my expectations were therefore low. But I really enjoyed it, as it turns out. It's not as near-perfect as Office Space, or as occasionally riotous as Idiocracy, but unlike that latter film it also doesn't run out of steam in the last third. It's consistently genial and entertaining, bolstered by a terrific cast of outstanding deadpan comic performers -- Jason Bateman, J. K. Simmons, Kristen Wiig, Ben Affleck, and the inhumanly attractive Mila Kunis, to name a few. Mike Judge knows ordinary people, and he knows what's so funny about them.

The Children (d. Tommy Shankland) - This horror film was primarily striking to me because it plunks a family down as the only possible victims, and then begins killing them. It's quite a bit more complicated, as well as better, than that sounds, but it's still the aspect of the film that stands out most strongly for me. The gist is, over Christmas an extended family gets together to celebrate, but one of the children has contracted some sort of virus, which only seems to be spread through the other children nearby, and which turns them into blank-eyed killers. This is brutal stuff, especially when the adults start fighting back, which you do sort of hope they'll do, but for God's sake look what they're doing! It's that sort of film, with, it would seem, some deeper implications having to do with abortion, but which I haven't quite parsed, and which may not be totally parse-able.

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Dead Snow (d. Tommy Wirkola) - This movie was fun enough, I suppose, but if you're going to make a movie that spoofs other zombie movies, don't get around to the spoofing eventually. Don't play it reasonably straight for half the movie, possibly longer, and then go all zany and madcap all of a sudden. I'd prefer a movie about zombie Nazis in the snow to be played as straight as possible, myself, but if I can't have that I'd at least like a filmmaker who can commit to a tone.

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You know, I think I want to withdraw that "fun enough" comment. It is, in a way, but it's also sort of incompetent, and cheap, and thinly imagined. I'd forgive it a bit more if it had ended with the stirring scene of zombie butchery cut to a Finnish folk spiritual song, but they didn't stop there, and all my goodwill drained off.

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Gamer (d. Neveldine/Taylor) - Well, it's happened. We now live in a world where you can watch a new film and not see the influence of Hitchcock, or Ford, or Welles, or Chaplin, but rather of Tony Scott. And not the Tony Scott of Crimson Tide, but the guy who made Domino and slapped those motherfucking English subtitles of lines already spoken in English by American actors all over Man on Fire. And all in service of what? A remake of The Running Man. And it's worse than the original.

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Take me, Lord. I'm ready. I cannot breathe air with the same people who allowed Gamer to be made. With the two unconscionable bastards who made it, and who joined their last names with a meaningless backslash, Face/Off style, creating in my mind the Hellish image of a bi-headed, quadri-limbed Nether-God, who would thunder its heavy legs across the planet, leaving blasted cities and fallow land in its wake as it tossed back its slavering heads and shrieked its murderous laughter into the cosmos. Such a world is more than my feeble mind can accredit.

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Day 37

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I awake in the middle of the night. A ghastly storm is assaulting my home, throwing back my shuttered windows, the latches all tinfoil and twine to these blustery and soaking hands! The window....the window is open, and inviting.

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Day 38

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The television flickers on, unbidden by my hand or mind. Gamer is on. Michael C. Hall is dancing to "I've Got You Under My Skin" while his henchmen, in time to the music, prepare to attack Gerard Butler.

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The open, flapping window is streaked with the chilled rains. As flaps the window, so flaps the pages of Al-Hazred's Necronomicon. A book I had destroyed. I know I did. I set it alight and flung its blazing, ashy pages into the sea's gaping throat!! How can it be here now!? And now that kid who plays Butler's controller is on the screen again...as through the window I hear the bleating of the dread Neveldine/Taylor rolling over the distant hills...

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The window! The window!!

A Very Vigorous Actor

It's amazing what we're willing to accept in a film if we know going in that the premise is absurd. Almost any amount of plot contrivance is acceptable as long as we know that they know that we know that we're only buying any of this for the sake of our own enjoyment. If the film gets enough stuff right and doesn't act as though its absurdities would somehow fly in any other kind of movie, we'll allow it.

Anyone who's seen Theater of Blood knows how ridiculous its plot is: an actor named Edward Lionheart is killing all the critics who ever gave him a bad review, and his methods for murder are taken from Shakespeare's plays. But those who've seen it should also know what a strange and compelling movie it is. While most horror movies use as their unstated theme our fear of mortality, and of the unknown in general, this film, which is occasionally genuinely disturbing, actually has the balls to be a horror film about acting and criticism.

Vincent Price plays Lionheart. I think Price's greatest performance is in Witchfinder General, but this might be just beneath that one. He's creepy, deranged, and in one brilliant scene, he's absolutely heartbreaking. The scene is a flashback to the moment where the seed of his plan to kill these critics was planted. The moment takes place following the critics' annual award ceremony, at which Lionheart was expecting to win their Actor of the Year award. He didn't, and is devastated. The critics, meanwhile all meet up at a private party, which Lionheart later crashes.

There, Lionheart rages at the critics for ruining his reputation, insulting him, and giving their award "to a twitching, mumbling boy, who can barely grunt his way through an incomprehensible performance!" Devlin, the lead critic, has stated earlier in the film that he gave Lionheart all those scathing reviews to help pull the actor into the present, because Lionheart would only do Shakespeare and refused to modernize his style. So suddenly we've found ourselves watching a movie that's about classical stage actors being unceremoniously pushed aside by the new wave of Method actors? Apparently!

Regardless, in this party scene, even after Lionheart has angrily and publicly spilled out his anguish, the critics continue to laugh at him. After stumbling out onto their balcony, clutching the award he believes should be his, he begins reciting Hamlet's "to be or not to be" soliloquy. The camera is still in the room with the critics, looking past them, through the window at Lionheart, who seems genuinely shocked that in his moment of despair these people are still mocking him.

There seems to be genuine rage in this film, directed at the critical profession. The idea that a single review can ruin careers and trash reputations might be overstated (and as presented in a movie like this, it would kind of have to be), but at the very least the standard critic's rebuke that their savage comments are meant constructively and shouldn't be seen as hurtful is now and always has been laughable. I like reading a good negative review, one that wittily shreds a particularly lousy film, but, as William Goldman always says, nobody sets out to make a bad movie, and to see people insulted for their efforts...I mean, we all have our limits, and I don't spend my nights wondering if Oliver Stone is still smarting over that whole U-Turn thing, or hoping that Ashton Kutcher will someday learn to not take these things to heart. No, I'm spending my Friday night writing about a 35 year-old Vincent Price movie for an audience of eight, tops. But in the broader view I do realize that years of hard work is often cruelly dismissed in a few paragraphs. Hickox and Greville-Bell know that, and you can bet your ass that Vincent Price knew it, too.

But, really, the film backs off from all that a little bit. As nasty as the film can be (that beheading scene! Holy Jesus!), it does lose its nerve a little bit towards the end (although that weird final exchange and glance between Milo O'Shea and Ian Hendry is worth thinking about), around the same time that the murders become simply too dumb to be effective either as horror or comedy. However, I don't care, because, boy, what an odd movie, a pissed-off horror film that has a sense of humor about itself. But only up to a point.