Directed by: Rick Rosenthal Written by: John Carpenter & Debra Hill Full credits at IMDb
...Halloween, in terms of historical stature, is in a class by itself, and comparing the sequel to it—as critics and audiences often do, dismissively—is unfair. Sure, Halloween II lacks the freshness of its predecessor. But compared to films its own size—such as the sluggish Prom Night (1980) [or Rob Zombie's remake]—it's a goddamn masterpiece.
Though Carpenter handed off directing duties to Rick Rosenthal this time around, he and frequent collaborator Debra Hill lent legitimacy to the affair by penning the screenplay, which—in the tradition of The Bride of Frankenstein (1935)—opens immediately where the first film ended: Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) is taken to a hospital after her climactic battle with boogeyman Michael Myers, who eventually follows, killing nursing staff and EMTs before chasing Ms. Strode through the building's (absurdly abandoned) corridors.
Rosenthal deserves more credit here than he usually gets...
Directed by: Steve Miner Written by: Ron Kurz Full credits at IMDb
The Friday the 13th series...[is] the sort of imitator that can tarnish the legacy of a true original. The first film in this neverending series was a crude cash-in on the Halloween phenomenon, with a little Carrie (1976) poaching for good measure. I haven't seen the original in many years, but it seems by now most of us agree it's weak, and that the big twist is a big disappointment. (The recent reboot was a mess, as well.)
Part II, on the other hand, has a soft spot in my heart: it's the quintessential 80s slasher, complete with promiscuous, plastered, post-Carter pueriles getting their reactionary deserts. Sure, it's a bit dopey (how is Jason so big if he was a boy in the last film, set five years earlier?) and sloppy (why do half the characters disappear from the film after the midway point?), but it also maintains an anchoring sense of driving logic—something that can't be said for so many of the horror movies that would follow as the decade progressed.
Directed by: Steve Miner Written by: Martin Kitrosser & Carol Watson Full credits from IMDb
Steve Miner, who produced the first film, helmed this entry as well as its franchise predecessor. Yet Part III is so inferior to Part II that we can probably blame the precipitous decline in quality largely on the screenwriters. Ron Kurz, an uncredited writer on the first film and the sole writer of the second, had bid the franchise ado by Part III, and was replaced by Martin Kitrosser and Carol Watson. (The former would go on to become Quentin Tarantino's regular script girl, er, guy.) They bring none of the second film's sensible motivation to this entry's killings: Jason's murders here are illogical and indiscriminate, heralding what we would later be able to diagnose as Rob Zombie Syndrome. In the first scene, Voorhees stalks and then murders a Lockhorns-esque couple because... well, for no reason at all. If the writers had thought to include a dog, Jason surely would have killed it, too.
Directed by: Seth Holt Written by: Jimmy Sangster Full credits from IMDb
Despite its histrionic title and a handful of unsettling sequences, Scream of Fear is less a horror movie than a mystery: not Carnival of Souls so much as an episode of Scooby Doo. Its alternate title, Taste of Fear, might be more accurate: just a nibble, not much more. Susan Strasberg, daughter of acting-coach legend Lee, stars as Penny, a young woman in a wheelchair who leaves Italy, after the death of her beloved nurse, to live in the South of France (rough life, kid!) with the father she hasn't spoken to in ten years. Holt begins by setting a mood of deceptive tranquility, meant to lull viewers into a calm out of which he can then unloose them: snowcapped peaks; a lakeside idyll; the swaying palms of Nice; the cricket-chirping solitude of Penny's father's baroque mountaintop manor.
That house, with its gilded moldings and ornate candelabras—all the trappings for a Victorian ghost story!—becomes the setting for Penny's unfolding and unlikely madness...
Directed by: Douglas Hickox Written by: Anthony Greville-Bell Full credits at IMDb
One hesitates to write a bad word about Theater of Blood, a goofily highbrow splatterfest, given that it's a movie in which critics who file negative notices get murdered in manners most clever and classical. Vincent Price stars as Lionheart, a thespian who only played Shakespeare and never got a good review; he fakes his own death and then picks off, one by one, the circle of London critics who disparaged his star turns. Lionheart and his merry band of feral followers, mostly backalley drunks, kill each in the manner of a death scene from the Bard's folio: one is stabbed multiple times on the Ides of March, like Caesar; another by false friends, a la Hector in Troilus and Cressida; another beheaded in bed, as in Cymbeline. (A highlight: as Price saws off the critic's head, the decapitee's sedated wife moans, "You're snoring again!") This time, Shylock gets his pound of flesh! And so on.
Written & Directed by: Rob Zombie Full credits from IMDb
Halloween II opens with a thrilling, bravado sequence, a tip of the celluloid hat to its predecessor: Rick Rosenthal’s unfairly underrated 1981 follow-up to John Carpenter’s overlionized original. Like The Bride of Frankenstein, both sequels begin right where the last film left off: police and paramedics arrive to the aftermath of Laurie’s showdown with Michael Myers; they take her to the hospital, he follows, mayhem ensues. But soon enough, Zombie’s back to his usual bullshit: suffocating the horror with trite, perfunctory and insincere attempts at fleshing out the characters with complex psychologies or psychological complexes.
Trying to develop the heroes (and villain) isn’t an inherent misstep. The best horror movies derive their frights by making us sympathize with the victims-to-be: if we can relate to them as ordinary people, the terrible things that will soon befall them become all the more frightening—because then, more convincingly, they could happen to us, too. (One of the best recent examples of this is Wolf Creek, which spends half of its running time getting to know its young and out-of-control Aussies. Cloverfield wasn’t so bad at this, either.) But Zombie’s characters are caricatures, from the liberal vegetarians who only eat egg white omelets (gross!) and whole-wheat pizza crusts (double gross!) to the unwashed lowlives that occupy every random strip joint and wheat field in his America.
Whether their sensibilities are red-state or blue, Myers wants them dead; an indiscriminate marauder, he kills those who are kind to him, those who are cruel, and those who haven’t done anything to him at all. He kills a strip club owner and his mistress; he kills the guy who takes out the garbage. He kills nurses and security guards. He reduces a face to a pile of Spaghetti-O’s, he bashes another into a wall repeatedly. He even kills a dog. The violence is senseless, it’s unmotivated, and it doesn’t move the plot forward; it’s bloodletting for its own sake. “Bad taste,” one character says, “is the petrol that drives the American dream.” Whatever.
But wait! There might actually be something to this movie after all. Myers spends half the film tromping through fields, on his way back to Haddonfield—he is the repressed, literally returning. “Freaks will always find their way home,” Myers’ erstwhile doctor says (whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean). Myers, of course, is making the journey because his mother’s ghost—Zombie has repitched our blank-faced killer as a Jason Voorhees, a murder-monster with a major mommy mania—urges him to reunite with his long lost sister, Laurie. (Surprise!) That is, Myers’ mission is one rooted in family values—in the restoration of nuclear unity; as such, he represents the violence that underlies the suburban ethos. Family togetherness and the American Dream, Zombie posits, are only made possible by war. Myers is Operation Enduring Iraqi Freedom incarnate, which might answer why so many of his victims are working class: they’re just like those fighting men and women overseas. Grade: C-
Directed by: Alain Resnais Written by: Alex Reval & Laurent Herbiet Full credits at IMDb
The elderly behave like adolescents in Wild Grass (Le Herbes Folles)—that goes not just for the characters, but the director as well. Based on a novel by Christian Gailly—of which the film is so enamored that it relies a bit too heavily on voice-over—the movie revolves around Georges (Andre Dussollier), who recovers a stranger’s stolen wallet and becomes pre-occupied with the owner, Marguerite (Sabine Azéma), so much so that he starts acting like a 14-year-old boy: he panics over calling her; mails her a letter, changes his mind, and tries to get it back from her mailbox. But soon his puppy crush turns to malicious infatuation, and the film becomes A Comedy of Unhealthy Obsession: he’s leaving rambling messages on her answering machine, sending letters whose pages add up to small stacks. She eventually enlists the police (including Mathieu Amalric) to repel his attentions, after which she becomes interested in him and the obsession begins anew, from the opposite direction.
Renais, an elder statesman of the New Wave who attended a post-screening press conference dressed in an overcoat that recalled another Alain—Monsieur Delon—clearly thinks that’s a bad idea: as her curiosity develops, he fills the screen with red lights, flashing sirens and red-painted sets. Generally, he directs the film with a bubbly and flamboyant style, evoking a youthful Godard or, more contemporarily, Christophe Honore at his exuberant best. Fantasies play out in clouds on the side of the screen, like comic book thought-bubbles; a woman closes a sliding door and reopens it a moment later in a different outfit. The free-spiritedness reflects a love for the old-fashioned magic of moviemaking and filmgoing—as does the occasional use of Franz Waxman’s Twentieth Century Fox theme music. On the surface, Wild Grass is about obsessive romantic love; a bit deeper, it’s about an elderly cineaste’s obsession with the movies. Grade: B+
Directed by: Elia Kazan Written by: Tennessee Williams Full credits at IMDb
Elia Kazan, who was instrumental in adapting Stanislavsky's acting method for the American stage and screen, is among the greatest directors of actors the cinema has ever known. And, after obvious titans like A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront (the best-acted movie ever), case in point is 1956's Baby Doll. The film...has a lot going for it: Boris Kaufman's dreary gray-tone photography; the crumbling-plaster Southern Gothic setting; the face-weathered non-professionals—"some people of Benoit, Mississippi," according to the credits—who fill in the margins and enhance the sense of degraded place; and Tennessee Williams' caustic script, based on a one-act of his written a decade earlier. But above all this is an actor's piece, a supreme example of The Power of the Method.
Written & Directed by: Oren Peli Full credits at IMDb
Paranormal Activity is a trend-bucker: rather than trade in horror's presently fashionable buckets of blood, this low-budget, lo-fi debut from writer-director Peli returns horror to its purest essence: it provokes a Times Square theater's worth of "holy shit"s and "what the fuck"s through the simplest manipulations of form. Creaking doors, heavy footfalls, passing shadows and rustling sheets—all captured by a punishingly motionless camera—trigger the seat squirming here, the digging of the fingernails into the elbow rests, the tightened embraces of jolted couples.
Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat play a young couple, recently moved in together, that experiences eerie shit at night: the result, we soon find out, of a demon that has been haunting Katie since girlhood. (Unlike other haunted house movies, then, it doesn't matter whether the couple leaves or not: the demon will simply follow them. Neat narrative trick, that.) The film plays out, like The Blair Witch Project—to which it has been frequently compared—in grainy video: we're watching Micah's roughly month-long document of their lives. By day, he films snippets of he and his girlfriend's arguments and expository discussions; by night, he leaves the camera on a tripod, running in the corner of the bedroom, in order to capture anything weird that might happen. Lucky for us (not so much for she and him), a whole lot of weird stuff does occur.
Directed by: Jiang Wen, Mira Nair, Shunji Iwai, Yvan Attal, Brett Ratner, Allen Hughes, Shekhar Kapur, Natalie Portman, Fatih Akin, Joshua Marston and Randy Balsmeyer Written by: full list here Full credits from IMDb
New York ought to appear in quotes in the title of New York, I Love You, an omnibus film about the Big Apple from the producers of Paris, Je T'Aime, because so few of the interwoven segments that make up the film have a genuine New York sensibility. This isn't a film by and for New Yorkers, a series of love letters from hometowners and transplants; it's a shallow portrait sketched by casual admirers, outsiders looking in through cliché-tinted lenses. In the first segment, by director Jiang Wen, two characters enjoy a few cigarettes while sitting at a bar. Um, been to the city in the last eight years, Wen? Part of the problem is that so many of the directors who participated are foreigners and non-natives—the last time some producers wanted to make a collection of New York-based shorts, they hired Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen—whose portrayals of the city seem filtered through a tourist's sensibility; they're filmmakers who think that if they just get off Broadway or ride over the Manhattan Bridge, that they've discovered the Real New York. Yet half the film is set in taxis; the other half split between Central Park and West Village bars and cafes. New York is... foreigners who get along! Or, tormented artists! Or, brooding lovers on the subway! Or, any number of other tired stereotypes (an infinite playlist, perhaps?) gleaned mostly from other mediocre movies.
Written & Directed by: Pedro Almodóvar Full credits at IMDb
Thanks to an unnecessary framing device, Broken Embraces (Los Abrazos Rotos) is essentially two movies: one, the sort of brightly colored melodrama we've come to expect from Pedro Almodóvar; the other, a neo-homage to the Los Angeles noir. The film toggles between the telenovelic and the quasi-Lynchian; would that Almodóvar had dedicated himself solely to the latter. Lluís Homar, who could easily win a Kelsey Grammer lookalike contest, stars as a blind screenwriter and former film director; he recounts the tale of his tragico-torrid affair, 16 years earlier, with Lena (Penélope Cruz, magnificent as ever), a call girl turned magnate's moll turned actress when her elderly sugar daddy (José Luis Gómez), Ernesto Martel, turns movie-producer for her. These flashbacks, captivatingly foreboding, take far too long to emerge from the inert and dramatically muddled present-day scenes and are eventually cut way too short; they also evoke a wide range of other films.
Keep reading this dispatch from the 2009 New York Film Festival at The L Magazine
Directed by: Lone Scherfig Written by: Nick Hornby Full credits at IMDb
On paper, An Education is just another clich-soused bildungsscreenplay. So, that on screen it's anything other than an object of infuriation is a near-miracle, one that owes its success (or, its lack of utter failure) to its stellar cast and its extra-Hollywood pedigree. Up-and-comer Carey Mulligan stars as Jenny, a Mad Men-era high schooler stifled by the rigid, Oxford-or-bust academics imposed by her father (Alfred Molina, a hoot); she dreams of intellectual freedom—mostly, the liberty to see French films and listen to French records. She seems to find the happiness she seeks with David (Peter Sarsgaard), a suave and shady "art dealer" twice her age, who seduces her with the allure of adulthood elegance: nightclubs, classical music, art auctions, truancy, cigarettes, champagne, Audrey Hepburn hairdos and overnight trips. (Sarsgaard seduced Mulligan so well that she reportedly recommended him for a similar role in the Royal Court Theatre's production of The Seagull.) She's the Mariel Hemingway in his Manhattan mix.
Written & Directed by: Michael Haneke Full credits from IMDb
And that little boy grew up to be…Hermann Goering? The Teutonic, toe-headed tots, tykes and teens that occupy the edges of Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon (Das Weiße Band), a cold-eyed, cynical and misanthropic whodunit set in the run-up to W.W. I, presumably grow up to become Hitler-heiling adults; Haneke’s film, then, examines how capacities for cruelty, violence and antipathy (of National Socialist proportions!) are formed, as well as who, or what, is to blame for churning out such adorable lil’ monsters.
Filmed in a sharply focused black and white that suggests easy moral clarity, with vivid period details that extend down to the haircuts, the movie chronicles a series of malicious and mostly mysterious incidents that befall a German farming village between 1913 and 1914...
Keep reading this dispatch from the 2009 New York Film Festival at The L Magazine.
Written & Directed by: Hayao Miyazaki Full credits at IMDb
At its heart, Ponyo (Gake No Ue No Ponyo) is a typical, archetypal kids movie: it’s an allegory for puberty, sexual awakening, leaving the nest—for growing up. What sets it apart is the details. By Miyazaki standards, this film is rather basic in its design, brighter and more primary in its color—which means it’s only three times as visually imaginative as your average cartoon. While American studios are still making animals talk—imagine that!—the Japanese master animator is not only transforming goldfish into humans, he’s redefining natural space, opening up a conflict between the waking world and a psychedelic, numinous dreamspace of his own imagination. In the film’s world, the sea is not only home to living creatures; water itself is alive.
Ponyo is a small fish with a humanoid face who escapes the lair of her well-meaning father, a water wizard and Ocean Master (voiced by Liam Neeson, again taking the role of the overprotective father) and finds love on land, before she’s spirited away back to her seabottom bubble. Because she has tasted human blood (and, uh, ham), she’s able to will herself into a little girl, reunite with the little boy she loves, and through a anticlimactically rushed quest that tests their purity, live happily ever after. (Ponyo’s irreducible enthusiasm is quickly grating, as is her general preciousness. This might be a result of the English dubbing; that is, it might be Disney’s fault, not the director’s.) Throughout there are stunning set pieces, the most impressive of which features the humanoind Ponyo racing atop a turbulent ocean whose waves double as giant fish as she chases the little boy of her dreams up the side of a mountain. (He’s in a car.) It works not just because of the bold mythology and majestic imagery, but also thanks to the Wagner pastiche on the soundtrack.
That the ocean is literally alive speaks to a deeper concern; like Wall-E, but far trippier and more spiritual, Ponyo is an environmentalist parable. When a woman sees a man spraying what she thinks is weed killer, she is quick to criticize him for spreading plant poison. When Neeson’s water wizard leaves his ocean bottom home, so vividly imagined that (my) words would only do it injustice, he arrives to find a shoreline strewn with trash. “All this waste and filth,” he says contemptuously. “Humans are disgusting.” Such blatant cynicism would rarely be found in an American cartoon. But Miyazaki isn’t afraid of going past the limits with which his intended audience is accustomed: here, boys bleed, children weep, seaside rocks teem with gangs of spiders that send shivers up the arms. The little girl sitting behind me whined to her mother mid-way through the movie: “this is boring. It’s making me sleepy!” Despite the film’s superficial resemblances to a kid’s cartoon, I doubt children are Miyazaki’s intended audience after all. Grade: B+
Written & Directed by: Antonio Campos Full credits at IMDb
Afterschool, an exhaustingly self-serious and derivative treatise on Today's Youth, tackles two tired themes and is thus doubly tiresome. About, on the one hand, the trials of adolescence and contemporary studenthood and, on the other, the zeitgeist-y issue of cameras vis-à-vis the Internets, the film fails to engage either in a meaningful or original way. Instead, it creates something palely imitative: Haneke-esque in its finger-wagging and Van Santian in its aesthetic pretension, the watered-down movie hews close to the John Hughes playbook of high school movie stereotypes—which no amount of Bela Tarr pacing, no cloak of arthouse legitimacy, can hide. This shit is a sham.
Written & Directed by: Lars von Trier Full credits from IMDb
For a while Antichrist is wonderful, a mature and gripping film—at turns fanciful and literal, pitting the rabidly emotional against the coolly rational—that grapples with the contours of grief, the effects of toddler suicide, the limits of psychotherapy and the dynamics of marriage. And then Charlotte Gainsbourg has to spoil it all by doing something stupid like cutting off her clitoris. With a pair of scissors. In extreme close-up.
Oh, right, this is a Lars von Trier movie—the Danish provocateur's (gulp) "horror movie".
Keep reading this dispatch from the 2009 New York Film Festival at The L Magazine
Written & Directed by: Corneliu Porumboiu Full credits from IMDb
Many of the films associated with the Romanian New Wave, most notably 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, have been set during the 80s, during the crest of the tyrannical Ceausescu years; to understand what's happening now, those films suggest, we must look back to recent history. But Corneliu Porumboiu's movies go one reflective step farther: they are set in the present, looking back at the past, so we may understand the present. The marvelous 12:08 East of Bucharest examined, 16 years later, the circumstances of the revolution that brought down the Communist government, but it's real purpose was to bemoan the failure of Romania to build a better society from that opportunity. His latest, Police, Adjective (Politist, Adj.), another masterpiece, grapples with a similar idea. It's also about language.
Keep reading this dispatch from the 2009 New York Film Festival at The L Magazine.
...Halloween, in terms of historical stature, is in a class by itself, and comparing the sequel to it—as critics and audiences often do, dismissively—is unfair. Sure, Halloween II lacks the freshness of its predecessor. But compared to films its own size—such as the sluggish Prom Night (1980) [or Rob Zombie's remake]—it's a goddamn masterpiece.
