"THE HILLS HAVE EYES"

The ultimate criteria for bad horror films should be the inclusion of the POV shot of the attacker/inflictor of horror, as he/she/it breathes heavily. When has this shot ever worked effectively? Agreed, suggesting the presence of the mysterious, malignant element might be necessary, but what’s the point of using the POV if the audience hasn’t been introduced to that character/entity yet? It probably goes back to the difference between startling the viewer and actually scaring him/her, a difference that modern horror directors seem not to understand whatsoever. The POV, deep breathing shot says: “You’re about to be startled by something creepy, and you don’t know what it is.” However, if you watch enough horror movies, you will recognize what is truly scary is what you as a viewer know going into a suspenseful scene, not what you don’t know.
This movie gives a French director the chance to examine, torture, judge, then prod and reshape the American family in a post-9/11 world, upon being faced with a similarly incomprehensible attack by a similarly foreign force. He presents us with a tough, mustached, gun-toting father, his apparently once-hippie wife, their characterless son, iPod and sunblock-bearing daughter, other older married daughter, and her inadequate, tech-savvy but spineless husband, in the eyes of his disapproving father-in-law. Following the horror film dictum that those killed off first are those most deserving of death, the French director immediately punishes by literally crucifying the self-assured, revolver-brandishing American patriarch. Next the sultry blonde younger daughter is promptly reprimanded for a previous scene in which she sunbathed in her bra by being raped by one of the nuclear test-affected mutant villains. The political killings end with the father though, because the mother and older daughter die next in line with the traditional horror film logic: we don’t care or know about their characters enough. Odd then that the son lives, though the director flirts with the idea of him dying first by having him go missing for a long time (probably so we don’t have to spend more time with a character we’re indifferent about).
As always, it is of interest to look at the make-up of the unit that the film deems worthy of life at the end. As determined as the film is to disturb the viewer, it keeps the baby alive. This is just to stay within the rules of the genre, though. Basically, the unit is the blonde daughter, the son, and the son-in-law. Naturally, you need a male and a female so that the human race can survive. This can’t be the married daughter and her husband, because horror never spares married couples. Can’t be the mom, cause she doesn’t have enough of a character. So, the director chooses to keep the blonde, sexpot daughter alive—punished but not wholly damned for her open sexuality. One might interpret this as a shift in values from the horror films of the 80’s, in which the morals of the time dictated that the virgin dies last (or not at all), while the slut (read: sexually liberated) goes first. But this is nothing new; one only need watch the films of Eli Roth to see that these days, the sexually innocent are just as doomed as the promiscuous. Thus, the son survives only to diffuse the sexual connection between the daughter and the other daughter’s husband—a connection nonetheless emphasized previously in a single shot in which the son-in-law gazes lazily at Brenda the blonde sunbathing.
Most interesting is that the director mocks the son-in-law’s cautious finnickiness (to the point where he is clearly the most obnoxious character at the outset) but allows him to live, after he mans up, uses his tech smarts to outthink the mutants, and is moved to brandish a weapon (first a bat, then an axe, then a pump-action shotgun) against the evildoers. Previously jeered by the blonde daughter for being a Democrat and thereby “not believing in guns,” the arc of the character of Doug articulates the director’s oh-so-articulate thesis, which is basically “No American is prepared for attacks perpetrated by groups that have suffered at the hands of the U.S. government…except maybe the Democrat, if he gets over his fear of guns.” Simplistic this is, but so is the subtext of the shot where Doug rams a pole donning the American flag into the head of one of the mutant, flesh-eating zombies.
That’s another thing—I can’t be scared of chemical-influenced mutants if they look like a cross between Sloth from The Goonies and Gary Busey. Especially when it goes unexplained that these mutants would (naturally) want to feast on human flesh. Make them human or wholly inhuman, but don’t leave them somewhere in between or I feel like I’m on the Haunted Hayride, where poorly paid teenagers don cross-eyed masks and jump out at you and say things like “Get out of here!” or “You’re going to die!” in silly, raspy voices.
To the credit of Aja (the director), he fills the climax with images of styrofoam mannequins posing as family members in a house that sat on a nuclear testing site in the 1950’s—a house now run by victims of that same testing. It’s a potent image, unfortunately ruined by the whole Sloth/Gary Busey thing.

"CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF"

It seems to me that the key to any Tennessee Williams’ melodrama, and probably an essential element to most melodrama, is a firm control of the flow of information. Things are gradually and meticulously revealed, and it helps if there is one especially closed off character who opens up emotionally as everything comes to the fore. It is essential for the audience to have burning questions about characters.
For example, here, the audience likes Paul Newman but has no idea why he is so cold to his wife. It’s Elizabeth Taylor! Is it just that she wants the family estate? So she wants a home, that doesn’t seem like a crime. It KILLS us: why, Paul, why? When it all comes out, the film packs an emotional whallop on par with Streetcar.
However, there certainly was a bit more art to the film production of Streetcar. The light and shadows on Blanche’s face, the smoky texture of Stanley and Stella’s apartment…This production, in color, feels more like a filmed play. Naturally, melodrama is enhanced by close-ups—they focus our attention on the emotional state of a certain character. This story also benefits by the filmic possibilities of sound: privacy is a key theme here, and the constant noise of Big Daddy’s grandchildren parading around the green of the manor is effectively grating.
While acting-wise, nearly everyone is good here, one is particularly struck by Paul Newman and the actress who plays Big Mama. Newman gives Brick certain ways of standing, looking at people, and talking; he truly gives the character his own habits and mannerisms—an excellent element of acting that is not practiced as much as it should be.

"CLERKS"

At first it’s hard to tell how this shit became such a phenomenon. It’s on really grainy film, a lot of the scenes are done from one camera angle, and in some of the outdoor scenes you can’t even tell what’s going on. But then they start talking.
It’s charming, basically. The movie has a kind of charm that must have seemed a lot fresher in 1993, before color stock and Ben Affleck made Kevin Smith go overboard such that there was no more charm, only irritation. But this is him doing what he does best. What does that consist of? What was it about this film?
There could be many answers. One—if you do it right, the “humble duo encountering bizarre situations” thing can totally endear an audience to your film (see: Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle). And that’s definitely here—the anti-smoking guy, the egg inspecting guy, the creepy old guy who asks to use the toilet. Two—people seem to sometimes define this movie by the slacker attitude the two leads adopt. I think one of the taglines was “Just cause they serve you, doesn’t mean they like you,” or some shit. It’s true, the way they treat their customers is shocking and funny, and inviting--how much they just don’t care. Sure, that’s appealing, but by no means do I find it to be the “freshest” or “hippest” thing about the movie. Three—the dialogue. The fact that these kids are almost poets about their shitty station in life endears us to them even more; it’s like they’re smart enough to analyze their dead-end lives but not do something about them, and the same could probably be said for a lot of kids too. Four—there’s just something more honest here than in other Smith movies. Both in the characters and the ethic endorsed. The slackerness can not exist in half-assed form. What I mean is that Dante is apathetic but still has glimmers of allegiance to his responsibilities as a clerk. In turn, nearly everything goes wrong for him. Randall, on the other hand, could not care less, and no harm ever comes to him. But this means more than just comedy at Dante’s expense. The tension between Dante’s oppositional impulses to care and not care extend to his love life, and that’s where there’s a real honesty that you won’t find in Mallrats and certainly not Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. He is split between staying with the girl who adores him, out of comfort, and getting with the one who did him wrong, cause she’s the one he really loves. The lecture that Randall gives to him illuminating this fact is at the heart of a scene that has more emotional depth than maybe anything else Smith has ever made.
But there are a lot of episodes revolving around dicks and dead people that you have to wade through to get there. That’s not a bad thing; it just means that the movie never takes itself too seriously.
On second viewing, what sticks out is just how dark this film is; how much Smith needs to punish his less ethically ambivalent character. Perhaps we need Dante to pay for both his and Randall’s sins. As a character that the audience might not like if he was content, he must go through hell. It strikes me now that perhaps the name “Dante” wasn’t an accidental choice on Smith’s part. I’m probably one of the last people to pick up on that.

"THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA"

A classic Hollywood movie in that it appeals to its audience by offering visual thrills that it later denounces. Or does it? An action film blows a lot of shit up and kills a lot of people, usually to restore peace. A horror film gets its jollies from the different ways that the killer kills his victims, but all the time ostracizing him as a psycho or deviant. The cowboy has to kick ass before he settles down with the redemptive woman (although, in the best westerns, he never does). Here, a lowly assistant suffers the injustices and shallowness of the fashion world, which serves as a way for us to ooh and ahh at all the glitz and the glamour of that fashion world.
But is that really what’s going on here? The film never actually tries to tell us that “inner beauty is what matters,” or that high fashion is frivolous. In fact, it implicitly tells us that what we wear does matter. Such a moral is a bit disturbing, but at least it’s new. However, it doesn’t exactly fit the protagonist selected—which may be a sign of the discrepancy between the novel and the movie. Andy Sachs is presented to us as a hard-working girl who doesn’t care about Runway or the fashion world—she just wants an in in the journalism industry. That’s the whole point of her character—through her we can all see with big eyes how crazy the realm of Runway is. Given her apathy to fashion, we then find it silly when she raids Runway’s closet to impress the boss with new threads. Sure, she’s ambitious, but when she parades around for the rest of the movie with these ridiculous clothes on, we can’t help but think she looks foolish. If she cared about fashion before but was just misguided, we’d care. If she was horribly unattractive before, in desperate need of a makeover, we’d care. But she’s Anne Hathaway.
And so it seems a more accurate moral for the movie is “leave time in your life for people you love.”……..and “Don’t be an asshole.” This moral is not completely incompatible with the high-profile fashion world, but the film still forsakes it for the drooling mouths of its fashion-interested viewers. For example, Andy reaches a point where she can either stay with her boyfriend or go to Paris with her boss Miranda for Runway’s biggest two weeks. Now, it’s been established that they love each other, she’s already missed his birthday because she was at a Runway event, and so she’s very conscious of what her career is doing to people she loves. Presumably, she could also care less about fashion. For all intents and purposes, she doesn’t need to go to Paris. It’s implausible to think that she wouldn’t have already realized the film’s moral imperative at this point. BUT….she MUST go to Paris, so that we get to see her in more outfits, and see her sleep with the other attractive romantic possibility in her life, and see the glitz and glamour of a runway show…she must have her epiphany there, after it’s all done.
This really just underscores the fact that the fashion world is divorced from the emotional conflict that Andy has. This movie is really about ambition, and as such her epiphany is that while she is ambitious like Miranda, she doesn’t want to be Miranda. Fashion is just the background. My inkling is that in the book, fashion was a more integral part of Miranda, part of her satanic nature. But the Miranda here is played by Meryl Streep, so she is no caricatured devil figure. The emotional turmoil under the surface of her make-up foundation comes to the fore, which fits the aforementioned dynamic sought between Miranda and Andy.
The downside is that she’s not evil! We want her to do awful things, truly terrible things, and she never quite reaches her potential. It’s not Streep’s fault—she’s great, delivering her lines with wonderfully hushed calculation.
Despite Miranda’s less-than-devilish nature, the shortcoming with Andy’s character is, ironically, that she doesn’t seem to struggle enough. A boss doesn’t need to be Satan for the job to take a horrible toll on his or her assistant, especially when working 16 hour days in the office. But Andy seems to breeze through all the requisites of such a job, plus the ridiculous errands that Miranda requires of her. There is real individual pain—besides the pain of distancing yourself from friends and family—in that kind of job, which is hardly even hinted at in the film. Where are the anti-depressants? The bad sex? The addiction to adderoll, or at least caffeine?

"WEST SIDE STORY"

A big, visual feast of a musical. This is musicals done right. The film presents an obvious problem to be overcome: how do you make murderous gang members sing and dance?
First, you use New York City as a go-between. These gangs, this story could only happen in New York. So then immediately characterize New York as inherently musical, and you’ve got a way in. How do you characterize New York as musical? You start with a graphic that’s an indecipherable diagram of the city’s outlines—each building composed of little bars, it looks more like some sort of sheet music than a cityscape. Appropriately, then, the orchestra plays the various musical pieces over this graphic, as its background changes color with the change in tune. Then, with the music still booming, the graphic morphs into an actual aerial shot of what it was tracing—downtown New York. The music fades into the sounds of the city as various helicopter shots (all moving west) follow the streets and their tributaries. Then, a high shot of a playground as the music begins with a blast of brass.
And so begins the next essential step. The film, having already established that music pulsates rhythmically through New York’s streets, begins its introduction to the neighborhood “toughs” by having them snap. This is not singing or dancing yet, but it is undeniably musical, in the most basic sense. As each new gang member is introduced to the beat of the snapping, the camera moves left, also to the beat. The cinema and the musical are fused! Anyway, the gang, as they terrorize a stray Puerto Rican who’s wandered onto their turf, gradually move in more and more balletic movements—but it’s subtle. It starts when one of them toys around with a basketball, and the group assumes different basketball positions, but in sync. Thus the ballet is introduced through other physical, semi-choreographed activities. This scene is great because it establishes the “rules” of the film almost immediately (in that this is the opening scene), but gives the audience time and a way to get used to it. By the time they are running all over, jumping and stretching out their arms, we buy it.
What one forgets is this film doesn’t just give a treatment of racial dynamics as cursory as you’d expect from a musical. The number “America,” specifically, references the myriad problems facing immigrants in the States at the time, as well as many of the benefits of being in New York. The men are identified with the old way; the women seem more content with leaving San Juan behind in the dust. The movie also realizes what is really at stake between the white guys and the Puerto Ricans is not “turf,” but protecting the sexual-racial borderlines. Inevitably the hypocrisy of this way of thinking is also portrayed, as the Jets terrorize and nearly quasi-rape Anita when she comes into the store. While it is realistic, the film is not without its problematic aspects in terms of stereotypes, as the pacifist storeowner is played with a thick Jewish accent. His role as mediator also implies that he is somewhere between white and Puerto Rican. Also, the fact that the leads do not look racially distinct at all (Tony is dark-haired and Maria is of significantly lighter hair and skin tone than her Puerto Rican amigas), and are each given ethnically ambiguous names is enough to make your eyes roll.
The film thrives in nearly every area; each gang is given a specific costume design, and when Tony and Maria start to transcend the cultural borders, each starts to mix and match the colors of each side. The film also pushes what you can do with musicals in cinema—one of the best scenes has to be the one at the dance hall where Tony and Maria first see each other and, oblivious to everyone else, share a dance as the backdrop morphs into the skyline of a starry fantasy world.
What the movie proves is that at its most rudimentary level, film can give musicals more rhythm. For example, in many dance sequences, we have a shot of one side of the group, then a shot of the group opposite them, imitating them or doing something different. You can create this division on stage, but by cutting it into two shots and cutting from one to another, you give the scene a beat.
As wonderfully as the director and choreographer convince us that it’s normal for knife-wielding thugs to sing and dance, the mix between harsh realism and musical fantasy isn’t always a convincing one. For example, after their leader Griff dies, it’s hard to believe that one of the Jets would want to break out into song about how they have to keep it cool, and then dance about it. Sometimes it works, though. Like when Tony has died in Maria’s arms and she starts crooning—here it feels like an opera. Generally, the film is dark for a musical, but never quite seems like it reaches the darkness of what it’s actually portraying. Three people die! Two in knife-fights. Only the storekeeper seems to understand the weight of what’s going on around him. The ultimate cop-out is the betrayal of the Shakespeare ending by not having Natalie Wood’s character die at the end. What, just ‘cause she’s Natalie Wood? If you’re going to go for tragedy, then go all out.
Finally, perhaps the least best thing about this movie musical romance is the romance. Whoever plays Tony is a doofus, and Natalie Wood certainly isn’t at her best. But it doesn’t matter, because what goes on around them is so fun to watch and so beautifully mounted that we forget about them.

"NETWORK"

Good lord. This film is huge. HUGE. The scale of it blows the mind. It manages to be both a fairy tale and a compelling study of realistic characters. It is both an outlandish satire and a searing expose. But then again that’s the point: in this day and age of television, fiction (and its forms and narrative structures) has fully fused with reality, such that the two are indistinguishable. In the post-modern world, nothing is “real” and nothing is “fake.” TV fiction feeds off of real people, who feed off of TV fiction.
One doesn’t really realize how deep-rooted this theme is in the film until the very end. The movie’s scale seems small at first. Its slow burn pace might not work for everyone. The beginning-- we take the serious voice of the narrator to be merely a way to introduce us to the characters. We notice nothing shocking about the workings of the network, and think Peter Finch’s character really is nuts. Enter Faye Dunaway, her scheme for a terrorist sitcom, and the high ratings that Finch’s character gets after Billy Holden lets him stay on the air, and the scope widens a bit. It’s now a satire. Then Dunaway’s takeover of Finch’s show, dressing the production up with a soothsayer, some stain-glass windows, and an audience that cheers with gusto as Finch faints at the end of every show, and the movie now becomes absurdist. Cue the romance between Dunaway and Holden, borne of his fear of death and her need for some attachment to someone who isn’t as lifeless as she is, and the film grounds itself to a certain extent. The overarching metaphor becomes clear. Media needs real people need media. Humanoids need humans. But the film doesn’t stop there. Finch meets the head of the corporate conglomerate, and his booming rhetoric and the way he’s shot convince us as well as Finch that he more or less is God. And so Finch’s character doesn’t seem quite so crazy. The film circles back on itself once again; it strays from the real pathos of the scenes between Holden and Dunaway for the sake of the ultimate in surreal—a corporate God and his news anchor messiah.
Here we notice how far the film can push irony. Finch previously ranted and raved against modern media’s dehumanization, as the men at the network gleefully reaped the benefits of his sky-high ratings. Then, touched by Ned Beatty’s God figure, he flips and preaches strictly the corporate agenda of dehumanization, to be met with piss-poor ratings.
The mad genius figure of Beatty’s character, which stretches satire so far that it stops mocking something real and becomes its own fictional form, brings enlightenment to the viewer. That narrator, heard at the beginning and occasionally throughout, is not just a narrator. He is meant to be reading the story of the film to you as if it was a fairy tale. Because it is. It transcends satire by not pretending like it is smarter than what it is satirizing. In fact it is what it is satirizing; it is another fictional form through which we are absorbing “reality.” But the difference is that Paddy Chayefsky’s characters, due to their profession, are always self-conscious that they are equal parts human and media, always conscious of their roles in the script they’re playing out. “I’m supposed to be the romantic; you’re supposed to be the hard-bitten realist!” Holden yells at Dunaway at one point. In this film, lines like that oddly don’t put you off; in fact you laugh at them.
One can probably guess from my description of the plot that the aforementioned gradual widening of scope, the oscillating ways that the movie works, don’t always come off as neatly as hoped. As the viewer is constantly reevaluating what the movie is, the pace can feel start and stop. But Lumet deserves credit for packing scenes with more dramatic and relevant punches to the stomach than many a film. And sometime in the last 30 years, the fairy tale became even more true, such that the brilliance of the film will be appreciated now more than before.
But make no mistake; this is Paddy Chayefsky’s movie all the way. He nails it. This film isn’t about TV or the news. It’s about his characters, and how they got to be the way they are. But you don’t need me to tell you that. They’ll tell you themselves. That that actually works here is a credit both to Chayefsky and Lumet. The film is titanic.

"SUPERMAN RETURNS"

Hard to imagine why a man as smart and as talented as Bryan Singer would let the burden of the world that Richard Donner created with the first Superman, a film that many can call classic but none could call a fine piece of cinema, weigh him down in his new entry for the series. It is an unironic world, which of course is certainly welcome these days—one with an unapologetically bright palette of primaries, with reds, blues, and yellows streaking across the screen. However, while its visual backdrop can still function three decades later, other elements of that film’s world could not. For example, the almost childish “golly gee” acting of Christopher Reeve. He comes across as an action figure come to life—and, with all due respect, I mean that in the worst way possible. Superman Returns runs into trouble when its lead, Brandon Routh, takes the same acting cue as Reeve, an approach that not only doesn’t work these days, but makes him come off like he’s trying a bit too hard to imitate Christopher Reeve. But Singer deserves some of the blame as well—Donner’s visual scheme may work, but why attempt to imitate it so closely?
The film’s devotion to being a sequel and not a film in its own right is what really gets it down. An astounding problem—you’d think that Singer would take the cue from Christopher Nolan and use the 19 years since the last Superman installment as an opportunity to retell the story in his own voice, in his own world. This does not mean it must be dark and extremely brooding, like Nolan’s Batman, nor ironic. Neither X-Men nor X2 were either of these things. But when you see the scenes in the newspaper office of The Daily Planet, the production design of which is caught between the bowtie and suspenders Art Deco aesthetic of the 1930’s and that of the information age, with its multiple flatscreen TV’s and CNN crawl headlines, you see that Singer is a man whose style is torn in two.
Also, when the film readily accepts its status as sequel and not reinvention, the pitfalls extend beyond matters of stylistic originality. Singer takes for granted answers to questions that the plot inherently poses. Superman has returned from Krypton, where he went looking for his origins. All he found was a graveyard, he says. Question #1 then becomes so why the hell was he gone for 5 years? Does it take that long to get to Krypton and back? Did he stop for a few years at the Molly Pitcher rest area? These questions could be dismissed as trivial; undoubtedly all that a viewer is supposed to understand is that the Man of Steel was gone for a long time. Thus, it would be interesting to explore his difficulties readapting to the world around him; it would almost be like discovering that he’s Superman all over again. In fact, it would be the perfect way for Singer to do an origin story—tailoring the caped hero to his own vision--without doing an origin story. A sequel, sure, but as fresh as the original. Instead, Singer’s Superman goes through the first half of the film (and here, that means an hour and a quarter) without any sort of struggle whatsoever. The people at The Daily Planet seem to think nothing of the fact that Clark Kent was mysteriously “traveling” for five years. Sure, Clark still lusts after Lois Lane, but Routh doesn’t give us much to go on as far as his reaction to Lois having a son and fiancé, except a little “ho-hum” disappointment. In terms of going back to the old grindstone of saving the world after a five year vacation, Routh’s Superman plays it off like he never took a day off work. One second he’s in The Daily Planet office, the next he’s singlehandedly wrangling a crashing airplane.
One must give Singer credit—misled as he is here, his talent can’t help but shine through. A few scenes—for example, when Lois’ son plays “Heart and Soul” on the piano with one of Lex Luthor’s more menacing henchmen—and shots—like that of the glare of passing hospital lights on Superman’s “S” emblem as he is wheeled through ER hallways on a stretcher after being knocked into a coma—exhibit a directorial intelligence that the rest of the film would never lead you to believe is there. And, fortunately, Lex Luthor concocts an evil plan that keeps us entertained for the half of the film when Superman isn’t doing much. But alas, at the end of the day, the film has only accomplished what the most basic of superhero sequels must accomplish—the main villain has been defeated but not killed, a stunning piece of narrative information has been revealed but not developed, and the romance has been inflamed but not consummated.