Stars Trapped in their Vehicles

Robin Williams, Brad Pitt, Tilda Swinton and Nicholas Cage are no slouches but these releases fall short despite their best efforts, usually due to over-indulgent writers/directors. I’m giving all of these two shakers each.

A pre-heart attack Robin Williams shot “The Worlds’ Greatest Dad” in Seattle and although that’s good for our local economy I wish this black comedy worked for me. Written and directed by fellow frantic comedian Bobcat Goldthwait, both the comedy and Williams are surprisingly understated. In fact Williams is so quiet that he almost disappears performance-wise and that doesn’t help. As a high school teacher, aspiring novelist and single parent, his character Lance Clayton seems to do all badly. Lance’s teenage son is a pervy arrogant fool (well-played by Daryl Sabara) who meets an early death which earns both he and his father the fame that eluded them both while he lived. The reverence and whitewashing we give to the dead is a great topic for satire and this film almost works; however, even a black comedy must have laughs. Caught up in its own dour plot machinations it wastes not only Williams but the great supporting cast. Too many music montages, an over-reliance on cutting to the goth girl and what feels like a tacked on Hollywood ending eventually bring it down. It’s a shame because I think if Bobcat played it less safe we might have a comedy in the “Heathers” vein instead of a film as repressed as Lance is.

I’m not going to lie; I am not a fan of Quentin Tarantino. I find his movies over-hyped and ridiculous. Long b-movie speeches interrupted by sensationalized hyper-violence and not a touch of reality. His fan base eats them up though and I was curious how he’d take on a period drama in his latest: “Inglorious Basterds”. Weighing in at two and a half hours it’s a long haul but for a war film it had surprisingly less torture than I suspected, unless you count the twenty minute scene set in a basement pub to be audience torture. I feel if someone had been allowed to edit Tarantino the film would have worked better but perhaps not. When all the top brass for the Third Reich are attending an event it’s a bit surprising to see that only two guards are posted. We also are supposed to believe that the “Basterds” are a super squad of Nazi hunters but we see very little of their tracking and hunting, only Eli Roth (the fellow torture-porn director of “Hostel”) happily beating a Nazi to death with a baseball bat. Pitt’s portrayal is complete caricature, kind of like Foghorn Leghorn in a uniform. However the two female stars, (Diane Kruger as a German film actress/spy and Mélanie Laurent as a Jewish survivor who is living covertly as a local theater owner) outshine their material. But the breakout performance here and probable Oscar nom is Christoph Waltz portraying a nefarious “Jew hunter” SS Officer. Acting well and in four languages he represents the quiet evil of the Nazis better than most war movie heavies outshining even the Hitler in this one. If only the film lived up to his performance with a little less conversation a little more action. (Thanks Elvis!)

Another Oscar worthy performance trapped in a bad film is Tilda Swinton as the title character in “Julia”. It begins as a naturalistic character-driven story where Julia is shown as a hopeless alcoholic who sleeps around and finds it hard to hold down a job or to attend her AA meetings. However soon she meets her neurotic Mexican neighbor who wants to kidnap her son from his wealthy grandfather and the film begins to turn into a marathon of the improbable. This time director Erick Zonca steers the two and half hour ship as Julia makes one bad decision after another, abusing the ten year old in question endlessly before the film literally transforms into a Mexican soap opera where evil-looking gangsters scream “Puta!” a lot with drawn weapons. One twist too many for me and an unbelievable ending to boot, which is a shame since Swinton really shined through this overlong story.

Finally we have the newest trend in action films- full-out apocalypse! We know Nicholas Cage can act from “Leaving Las Vegas” but since then he has chosen films more for their paychecks which is a shame. In “Knowing” we have numerology, crazy psychic kids, Matrix-like aliens with shiny mouths and a shitload of CGI! Cage is a single parent whose son loses out when a fifty-year old time capsule is opened at his school; while the other kids in his class get drawings from the past students (kind of an expensive and wasteful school project no?) he gets a page filled with numbers written by a creepy girl in the film’s prologue. Cage cracks the code which turns out to be a listing of the time, locations and casualties of all the major disasters in the world. Frantically he races off to witness elaborately staged plane and subway crashes but seems only slightly perturbed. The biggest disaster is this film itself. You’ve been warned! Here’s to better DVDs in 10!!

Demonic Ambitions

Fall is upon us and Halloween approaches! I rented the Blu-Ray of the original “Halloween” and several other scary flicks to get in the mood and will cap off the month seeing the original “Psycho” accompanied by the Seattle Symphony Orchestra- good times!

In ‘Audience of One ‘ director Mike Jacobs shows us something pretty scary- real-life religious fanaticism which is growing by leaps and bounds in this country. In uncertain times it’s comforting to have religion, however when it stops being a personal expression of spirituality and goes all cultish it is downright dangerous. Folks who believe that they are on a “mission from God” ala the “Blues Brothers” will have no problem causing all sorts of mayhem since anyone against them must be “the devil”. Working Jim Jones’ old hood, Pastor Richard Gazowsky is introduced to us as a charismatic leader who seems harmless at first as he preaches the word to his San Francisco congregation. We are told that he didn’t see his first film “The Lion King” until he was 40, but that God then told him to make a film (“Star Wars meets The Ten Commandments”) and lo the misadventures begin!

A delusional man pressing his family and parishioners to make a film that he says has 200 million in financing for is fascinating but also a little sad. Church collections don’t go to help the unfortunate but instead fund massive film expenses such as creating unnecessarily elaborate costumes. Volunteers are pressed into crew and talent positions putting in long workdays where safety precautions are non-existent. This is kind of like the doc “Burden of Dreams” about the madness of director Werner Herzog while making “Fitzcarraldo'” with the important exception that Herzog is a great filmmaker, Gazowksy is just a fool. Even late in the film as we see that his fiasco has no funding and he is forcing his studio landlord (the city of San Franciso) to sue him for his back rent, he attends a filmmakers trade show promising vendors that he is planning on buying their high end equipment. In short he has no conscience. Why should he? God talks directly to him. Kind of like “Bowfinger” meets “Jesus Camp”.

As I’ve said before here, I hate the cinema of sadism that passes as horror. Splatter and gore has hardcore followers but I can’t help to think that it’s just not a good thing to get such pleasure watching people get tortured and killed. It reminds me too much of how Rome fell with its residents using death as entertainment in the Coliseum (Though I did like “Gladiator” which makes me a bit of a hypocrite).

Sam Raimi on the other hand, gave us the “Evil Dead” trilogy back in the eighties and early nineties, films that mixed the spookiness of folklore with rollercoaster thrills shot like great slapstick ala “An American Werewolf in London”. These films were scary fun and became better as the budgets went up. Raimi went on to do a respectable indie, “A Simple Plan” before moving on up to the big budget “Spiderman” series. Obviously his brother and he had an old spooky script that they never made and Raimi decided to dust it off and give his fans a little bit of retro horror. I’m glad he did.

In “Drag Me to Hell” he shows his ability to take all of the scariness of that original haunted wooded cabin and bring it to a normal suburban home in Southern California transforming ordinary objects into instruments of fear: a stapler, a handkerchief, a coin, a button, a ruler even a piece of cake. Yes a piece of cake – did you ever eye up a delicious pastry when dieting? Raimi and the demons at his disposal know of these inner conflicts.

Our heroine, bank loan officer Christine (Alison Lohman), is a former obese farm girl from a broken home who wrestles these inner demons as she reinvents herself in LA. When her relationship and career seem troubled, the evil spirits channel her fear of eating; the arm of a demonic woman, a fly, embalming liquid, maggots and blood all make their way into her mouth at some point in this flick. It all begins with her fixation on an old gypsy womans’ dirty dentures that she observes as she is trying to decide whether to give her another extension on her home loan. Being exploited by her boss (David Paymer) as she vies for a promotion (he has her bring him and her rival food of course) she is forced into deciding to evict this old woman, Mrs. Ganush (Lorna Raver), which sets off the action as she is then attacked, cursed and terrorized.

Raimi gives us plenty of shout-outs to the ‘Evil Dead’ films including using his trademark 1973 Oldsmobile Delta 88, a visual reference to the original poster art, cartoon violence in an old shed and Christine’s boyfriend (Justin Long, the Mac pitchman seen using Mac products) making a passing reference that he has a cabin in the woods. The film even opens with an 80’s era logo for Universal. A drawback is the flat acting by the young actors in the leads; old-timers Raver and Paymer fare much better. Lohman, Long and Dileep Rao (as the worlds' most knowledgeable spiritualist) all seem to play the film straight rather than give it the subtle twist of camp that it needed. Lohman especially seems more of a dullard than an ambitious and then horrified woman. A Bruce Campbell cameo also would have rocked it. This is nitpicky of course – this film as I witnessed makes men swear in disbelief and women scream in fright and that’s a lot of fun in the serious world of mass marketed torture porn. A definition of Irish blarney is when you can tell someone to go to hell and have them anticipate the trip. Raimi still has the charm.

Past Lives

I like scary movies but not torture porn. For example I was spooked by “The Blair Witch Project” because it was so inventive for its’ budget and it went for the root of what scares us: “There’s something out there in the dark trying to get us!” I also enjoyed the original Japanese versions of “The Ring” and “The Grudge”. Yet American horror movies of today are a dime a dozen, full of soundtrack jolts and cheap scares. To confess a guilty pleasure, I do TiVo all of the paranormal stuff for easy entertainment. I especially love ridiculous shows like “Ghost Adventures” where Scooby Doo is recreated and ghost teams startle each other on night vision camera.

One ghostly documentary “A Haunting in Connecticut” was made in 2002 but still airs frequently. It was genuinely spooky following a family who move into a large house which is offered at a surprisingly cheap asking price so that their son, who suffers from cancer, can be closer to his treatment hospital. The house which is next to a cemetery is actually an old funeral home and the sick boy who sleeps in the basement discovers that this is where the mortician did his thing. Needless to say as someone whose childhood home was also nearby a cemetery, I found this show scary. The main ghost even wore those black contacts which on its own freaks me out. So hoping for the best I rented the Hollywood film version which was recently released on DVD. My worst fears were realized as even the credits were filled with the quick cuts and soundtrack blasts that earmark the worst horror films of today. Virginia Madsen and Elias Koteas are two actors who try to ground all the unnecessary CGI vainly. Lifetime movie vet, Martin Donovan is featured as always playing the well meaning dad. (Spoiler) When the house burns the end titles tell us it was rebuilt and stands there to this day. Well the house does stand because it was never burned and therefore never needed to be rebuilt. Since “based on a true story” means nothing to Hollywood versions of ghost stories they obviously feel no shame in rewriting history like this, kind of like Fox News. It’s a shame though since as I say the original story was spooky before they rewrote. See the original version if you can.

Past glory is also what haunts the title character of “The Great Buck Howard’ played by the great John Malkovich. The story here however is not Howard himself but that of his assistant played by Colin Hanks. Based on the real life experiences of a former assistant to “The Amazing Kreskin”, Howard is a mentalist who performs mind reading, hypnosis and the like before finishing up with a few cornball songs. His act is dated, his audience dwindling and Howard is constantly repeating stories of his salad days, especially his appearances on “The Tonight show with Johnny Carson”. (I do love it when Buck calls Leno Satan!) The film wants to be quaint old-fashioned fun but is actually kind of predictable and dull. Hanks is likable enough but doesn’t seem to have the charisma of his dad Tom to pull off this one-dimensional character. (Hanks Sr. appears here briefly playing, of course, his father) The Howard role seems custom made for Malkovich but yet it is too cartoony and underwritten. Involving has-beens do make for interesting stories (“Sunset Boulevard”, “Raging Bull”, “All about Eve”, “My Favorite Year”. “The Wrestler” etc) but here the magic just isn’t there.

In the film version of Dickens’ “Great Expectations” there are haunting scenes of the crazy Miss Havisham still in her wedding dress trapped in the past, living in her rotting mansion. In 1975 the Maysles brothers made a bizarre documentary about a mother and daughter living in similar conditions. Edith Bouvier Beale was nearly eighty and her daughter “Little Edie” was in her fifties at the time of filming, both living in the squalor of their rotting East Hampton mansion. Both women were obviously mentally ill with “Little Edie” being absolutely manic doing dances with her head constantly wrapped in a makeshift scarf. It was a sad film to watch and yet the subjects seemed perfectly happy in their little world, delusional as they were. Their home and the film was perfectly named “Grey Gardens”

This year HBO returned to these subjects making a dramatic film that attempts to fill in the blanks on the plight of these women. Also titled “Grey Gardens” the filmmakers do a great job at recreating scenes of the original doc between flashbacks of the characters affluent earlier years. Drew Barrymore who has made some bad films really shines here playing little Edie from her teenage years into her fifties. She totally nails this character and has a great time doing so. Jessica Lange playing the elder Edie also brings to life the desperation and increasing madness of her character. Both women, along with Ken Howard who plays Mr. Beale and Jeanne Tripplehorn as a shell-shocked Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (the womens’ famous cousin) have been nominated for well deserved Emmys. I think this film is best viewed after seeing the original documentary but in any case it is as haunting as the original. See it and then clean your home.