Funny Picture

I've recently seen two well-made films that are sort of in the horror genre. I say "sort of," because one is essentially a science fiction drama with some emotionally horrific scenes, and a big creep factor; the other attempted to tell a story that could be interpreted as a horror fantasy, or as a metaphor for a descent into despair.

Both had opaque heroes. In both, for a good deal of the movie, we don't know what the hero wants. In one case, the hero has a monstrous secret that he keeps from everyone, including us, until the very end. In the other, the hero may or may not have done something awful to someone he loves; he has only flashes of a horrific memory that may have happened or not, and the viewer is at a loss to figure out what Actually Happened.

I hate to say categorically that This Doesn't Work. I think both films are getting buzz at genre festivals. But the genre festival crowds are seriously hardcore. They love having their expectations tweaked, because they have seen every horror movie ever made. I think the regular genre audience wants films to deliver the emotional goods.

It is very hard to deliver the emotional goods when the hero is opaque. A hero does not have to be likable; but he has to be relatable. How can you relate to someone when you don't know what he wants? How can you relate to a character when you don't know what his story actually is -- what he's done and why he thinks he did it.

In the science fiction movie, we found out the secret only at the end -- too late to do anything with it. In the horror fantasy, I was not clear exactly what happened, and we definitely never knew why.

In both movies, I found myself latching onto the female love interests. In the science fiction drama, she is in love with the hero, but she doesn't know his terrible secret. I found myself wondering if the movie wouldn't have been more effective if it had been shown from her point of view. In the horror fantasy, I did know what the girl wanted, and her story was a relatively clear case of searching too hard for enlightenment, to the point where you destroy yourself.

Oddly, I am currently rewriting a script where the main character has a Big Secret that she keeps from the audience until halfway through. However, we learn very quickly that she is Not Who She Says She Is; so the audience knows right away that it is going to be that sort of movie. More importantly, we are very clear on what she wants in her current situation. And we know what sort of a human being she is. We can like her as a person and root for her to escape her current predicament; her secret is only how she got in the scrape she's in.

If you want to keep a secret from the audience, I think you have to be very up front with them that you are keeping a secret from them, so it doesn't feel like a cheat. You have to make clear they know that they will find out the secret; otherwise they won't dare invest in it. And the secret better be a good one. If you do that, I think the audience can still leave the movie satisfied at the story you told.

Of course, some great movies violate these rules. I would venture to say they are not actually about the secret. The classic is L'AVVENTURA, a very strange New Wave film from Antonioni. Halfway through, a main character disappears. She's never found and there is never an explanation for what happened to her.

But the movie isn't really about her disappearance. It's about the anomie of the main character. By the end of the movie, you know how he has turned out. And that makes for an effective ending.

I saw RESOLUTION at the Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal. It's an effective little slow-build movie that does nearly everything right for a low budget suspense horror movie.

The core of the movie is a relationship: an everyman, Michael, tries to get his meth-head best friend from grade school, Chris, straightened out by handcuffing him to the wall of his cabin in the woods. The biggest part of the movie is just the two of them talking: Michael trying to talk his friend into coming out of his addiction, Chris trying to convince Michael to let him "die on my own terms."

It's no accident the two are so good together. Writer-director Justin Benson wrote the parts for them. Then he and his co-director, Aaron Moorhead, rehearsed them for three solid months.

The result, as Stanislavski could tell you, of months of rehearsals, is a performance that feels like no one's acting, they're just real people going through stuff.

Of course it wouldn't be a cabin in the woods if they weren't going to scare you. Some of the scares are human. But then Michael starts finding all sorts of recordings in various media suggesting terrible things that may have happened in the environs.

Complications ensue.

I spent much of the movie really tense and worried, waiting for the monster to jump out and scare me. The co-directors neatly make their world intently creepy without hammering you with music or obvious creepshow moments; I don't think there even.was a score. (No one seems to be credited with one.) There was always just enough to give me a sense of dread.

For my taste, the ending was a bit post-modern and clever; less emotionally satisfying than I would have preferred. It felt a bit shaggy-dog at the end. But the two guys who made this movie with their savings have come out with a very impressive debut.

Lisa and I watched THE IDES OF MARCH. We were a bit puzzled. Fromt the trailer, I thought it was the story of a brilliant political operative who discovers that his boss has done something bad and needs to confront him.

/* not actual spoilers but some discussion of the plot */

To us, it seemed like the story of someone who had an almost total lack of political awareness, such as the need for loyalty, or the possibility that people might be willing to do backhanded things to win elections. It seemed like the story of a self-righteous guy who leaves a path of destruction in his wake, while feeling terribly wronged by everyone. To us, it seemed like almost every step he took was a misstep; that a political wunderkind wouldn't do any of those things.

What was odd about it was that we had a feeling we were supposed to root for the guy; that his victory was supposed to be some kind of victory for righteousness. By the end of it, I was rooting for him to get assassinated.

Did anyone see the movie and feel he was a legitimate hero?

Lisa and I watched EASY RIDER, which I hadn't seen in, well, a long time.

I remembered the basic idea: a couple of longhairs on motorcycles ride through the South. They get a lot of flak from the inhabitants of Nixonland, who treat them like they're a couple of dope dealers out to corrupt America.

Oddly, I'd forgotten the very beginning of the movie, where they make a bunch of money smuggling cocaine into the US. So, I realize, they are a couple of dope dealers. Which puts a different spin on the reaction of all the buzz cuts to these bikers that I remember so well. Yes, the buzz cuts are leaping to assumptions, sometimes with inhumane violence and prejudice. On the other hand, their assumptions are correct.

I looked up Vincent Canby's review:

Nicholson is so good, in fact, that "Easy Rider" never quite recovers from his loss, even though he has had the rather thankless job of spelling out what I take to be the film's statement (upper case). This has to do with the threat that people like the nonconforming Wyatt and Billy represent to the ordinary, self-righteous, inhibited folk that are the Real America. Wyatt and Billy, says the lawyer, represent freedom; ergo, says the film, they must be destroyed.

We watched Richard Curtis's 2003 directorial debut LOVE, ACTUALLY again. It is really a lovely movie. There are quite a bunch of things that are incredible about the movie. It feels like an indie ensemble piece, but it has a cast of stars not just in the big roles -- Liam Neeson, Hugh Grant, Colin Firth, Emma Thompson, Laura Linney, Alan Rickman, Rowan Atkinson -- but all the way down to the cameos -- Billy Bob Thornton has about 5 minutes, and Denise Richards about 15 seconds of screen time, while Claudia Schiffer shows up in two scenes, once just in the background. And the music budget must have been killer. So it is sort of a big movie masquerading as a small movie.

So it's partly a lesson in how you make your first movie: you pull in a million favors. Curtis wrote Hugh Grant's big break, FOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL. He wrote much of the Mr. Bean movies and TV, and there's Rowan Atkinson. The roles are all crisply written, a joy for an actor... and no doubt written for the actors in question.

It's also a lesson in what you can get away with as a screenwriter. Look at some of the little plotholes. Colin Firth writes his novel on a typewriter, and doesn't have a copy. Half of it blows into a pond. Just about when you're thinking, "Who still writes on a typewriter? And doesn't make copies?" Colin Firth's Portuguese housekeeper is saying, "What kind of idiot doesn't make a copy?" And when, later, he proposes, although he's never even had a conversation with her -- well, Lisa was saying, "He's going to marry her? He barely knows her." And the first words out of his mouth are, "I know it's kind of crazy to propose but..." And then he explains why.

Both of these are classic cases of "hanging a lantern" on a plothole. If you play up a plothole big enough, it becomes a character point. So long as it is the character and not the plot that is irrational, you're okay.

Likewise, the movie is a good example of how elastic time can be when you're cutting between multiple stories. This is the first time I noticed that Liam Neeson's kid learns how to play drums in less than two weeks. But you see him play drums (actually you only hear him), and then you go see three or four other stories move forward, and then you come back and he's playing better. It feels like enough time has elapsed for a kid to learn to play drums -- so long as you don't think about it.

Of course, it's mostly just a lovely movie, that always makes me happy when I watch it. But look at it closely, and you'll see quite a crafty screenwriter at work.

We recently watched THE COLLECTOR and ROSEMARY'S BABY, two movies in which women are victimized, and do a really horrible job of protecting themselves. They're gullible and passive, and panicky, and stupid. They do as they're told, even when they have every reason to suppose the people ordering them around are homicidal maniacs. I don't want to see them hurt, but I have a lot of trouble sympathizing with them.

I wonder, when these movies came out, in 1965 and 1968, were the female characters perceived as normal? Did women watch these movies and think, yes, that's what we're like? Or were the filmmakers making a point? I can't imagine any woman being this passive in a movie from the 1930's or 1940's.

On another note, it is remarkable how long it takes for ROSEMARY'S BABY to get off the ground. I literally fell asleep watching the first 20 minutes. (And then slept for 12 hours, so maybe it was the flu, not the movie.) It is not until about 40 minutes in that we have any reason to worry about poor Rosemary or her baby. The movie has a reputation as a classic, but it's because of the very alarming ending.

You couldn't do that these days. No one has that kind of patience any more.

We just saw Le Noël de Walter et Tandoori, a 3D animated kids' movie Lisa and I co-wrote. Weirdly they are releasing it first in French, mais c'est ça le marché Québecois.

Anyway, we loved it! What fun seeing our words turned into goofy moving pictures. Especially the Bollywood number. Catch it ce weekend in theatres in Québec.

We really, really liked BRIDESMAIDS. We were prepared to hate it, actually. All we knew was it's supposed to be the male HANGOVER, and there's a scene where one of the girls takes a crap in the middle of the street. The only reason we watched it is because the director of one of my scripts asked me to.

It is actually a keenly observed comedy with heart, about how women deal with each other (and, occasionally, with men).

(It is also a very good advertisement for being born a man. No wonder orthodox Jewish men thank God every day that they were born male.)

I wrote earlier about director Paul Feig's Master Class and the "Bucket Brigade". YouTube's got an example of how Feig used improv in shooting the movie: it's a ten-minute bitchfest between Kirsten Wiig and thirteen-year-old Mia Rose Frampton (yes, that Frampton). Only half a minute made it into the movie, but what did was loose and convincing because it was impromptu. Feig and his colleagues (Steve Carell, Judd Apatow, Seth Rogen, etc.) do a lot of "plussing" on each other's scripts. Maybe that's why they're all on top of the charts.

Note to self: do not be afraid of improv. And leave enough time in the schedule for it.

(If this YouTube disappears, check it out on the Blu-Ray disc, or Google "longest argument Bridesmaids".)

What a strange movie RANGO is. The animation is for kids (and a lovely job, too). But the plot is a strange combination of an internal existential dilemma ("Who am I?" asks the chameleon) and a CHINATOWN-esque parable of water rights in the West. A lot of the dialog has gotta be way over kids' heads ("I once found a spinal column in my fecal material"). And yet it's made about $250 million, half domestic, half overseas. I think you have to call that a win.

If I had to draw a moral, I'd say, "Enough spectacle and it really doesn't matter what your story is," which explains the STAR WARS prequels and the over-one-billion box office take of the latest TRANSFORMERS movie. But maybe I'm just coming down with a cold.

I went to Toronto for, among other things, the Toronto After Dark Film Festival, run by the ebullient Adam Lopez. They were kind enough to screen You Are So Undead Saturday night. It was Zombie Appreciation Night -- two bucks off if you're a zombie! -- so a sizable chunk of the audience were duded up in the their dead best. And their best was very good indeed. A fair number of them wouldn't have looked out of a place in a zombie movie.

So our sexy little vamps were sandwiched between two zombie movies.

DEADHEADS is a goofy, fun zombie romantic comedy. Mike Kellerman returns to consciousness in a freezer three years after dying. There's a zombie outbreak going on, so it takes him a little time to realize that he, too, is dead. Just, he's a walking and talking zombie.

And he wants to get back to the girl he loves. He's just unsure how it will go, him being dead and all. Fortunately, he quickly attracts a wingman, also talking-dead Brent Guthrie, who won't let him let himself down. Soon they're driving across the country, with badass government agents in hot pursuit.

What makes this movie work is the characters. Sure, there's action and slapstick and snappy banter. But this movie has heart. Mike and Brent are a great odd couple. The government agents are all fun, from the convict who's trying to win his freedom, to the obnoxious macho killer with the most ridiculous sideburns anyone's seen since 1895, to the huge moaning zombie, "Cheese," that the guys have decided to bring along as a pet.


WAR OF THE DEAD is an exuberant mess. It's a World War Ii zombie war movie. There's a bunker where the Nazis did secret experiments on Russian soldiers, and now there are Nazi zombies running around. There's enough zombie shooting for any Call of Duty: Black Ops fan. It's impressive how much production value you can get for a million euros in Lithuania. Nice camera work, nice set design.

What there isn't is much of a story. There's a plot all right. It's 1941. Inexplicably, an American platoon (I thought we weren't at war till December 7?) is fighting alongside Finns (I thought they were German allies?) against Russians (I thought they were our allies?) to find and destroy a secret Nazi bunker in Karelia (Russian territory till September 1941). There's some sort of German scientist who's made these odd little mechanisms with gears, that ultimately turn out to be nothing more than odd little keys. There's a girl who may or may not have been involved with the experiments. There's a young Russian soldier, an American captain and a Finnish lieutenant who's not telling everything he knows, and never does.

And there are lots and lots of Nazis, especially undead ones.

It would have been nice to have a theme. Or a main character to root for. Maybe then I would have cared how it came out.

I'm not sure about the point of doing a zombie war movie. Zombies are among the least impressive of the undead. (Like, 2d6, tops.) They're scary if you're armed with a cricket bat. If you've got a tommygun and enough ammo, they're not nearly as dangerous as actual German soldiers, who were pretty deadly.

Nice music, though. And nice production values. And the audience seemed to enjoy it.

Our plan was to go into New York tonight, grab the kid and head North, but now it seems unrealistic to drive into New York, and it looks like we wouldn't be able to grab the kid until too late.



So, we're riding it out in East Hampton, in a house made of wood and huge glass windows. Fortunately, we're on one of the few bits of really high ground in town.



At least, we hope we're riding it out; there may be mandatory evacuations. In which case we're riding it out in the high school. Which doesn't seem much fun at all.



However, "an adventure is an inconvenience properly considered."



We did watch L'AVVENTURA, Antonioni's 1960 masterpiece. It is a strange movie. Almost nothing happens. Some rich people go to an island. A girl disappears. They search for her, but then give up. Her boyfriend and her best friend hook up. Yet somehow, it holds your interest.



How does Antonioni do it? I don't know. And that's why the movie bears watching over and over.

I saw Paul Campion's DEVIL'S ROCK at Fantasia. Nazi occultist, brave Kiwi soldier, sexy demon, lotsa gore.

Now you've seen it, too.

To be fair, this was a cheapie that Roger Corman would have appreciated. One exterior location, one big interior location (abandoned bunker with tunnels). Three principals, one bit part, a lotta corpses. One creature design. Lotta talking and chain rattling. Decent music. It did not outreach itself -- it never felt cheesy because it never tried to do anything too big for its budget. And it was moderately scary with pretty good performances. So, a success if it was made for $100,000, a base hit if it was made for $500,000. Watch it yourself if you want to know what kind of feature can be made for almost nothing.

Watched COWBOYS AND ALIENS last night with my friend Doug. I was surprised how good it was because the critics have generally disliked it for being cliche-ridden: badmen, a sheriff, wise Indians, tough cattle rancher, etc.

That's not really a fair criticism because C & A is a mash-up. It is intended to have all that cheesy Western goodness ... and aliens! Of course it has Indians. What kind of Western would it be if it had aliens and no Indians.

But actually, it's much better than that. It has a story that holds up well. It has surprises and twists, some of which are nicely foreshadowed.

The complaints, I think, come out of not understanding what the movie is. It is a horse opera with aliens.

By "horse opera," I mean it is not intended to be a realistic portrayal of anything. It is bigger than life, just as STAR WARS, a space opera, was bigger than life. Daniel Craig's Jake Lonergan is a capital B Badman with a heart. The opening scene is as good an opening for a Western as I've ever seen. Jake wakes up in the dust; can't remember how he got there; finds out he's wounded; finds out he's got an alien doodad on his wrist; is surrounded by bounty hunters; takes care of the bounty hunters; and rides off with their dog.

Sure, the "I can't remember who I am or how I got here" opening is not realistic, but that's not the point. Jake is the kind of hero we go to the movies to see. There is a point to seeing him 40 feet tall.

And it has really good characters. I draw your attention to Harrison Ford's character, Col. Woodrow Dolarhyde.

/* mild spoilers */

We first meet Dolarhyde through his awful son, a drunk who's shooting up the town. No one dares stop him because he's the son of Col. Dolarhyde, the rich local rancher. Then when Jake Lonergan (Daniel Craig) has a (very satisfactory) run-in with the punk, Dolarhyde comes to rescue his son and lynch Lonergan, who's stolen his gold.

We quickly get that Dolarhyde is dangerous. He's willing to torture his own people if he thinks they've betrayed him.

But Dolarhyde then embarks on a deftly scripted revelation of character. He is a badass. And he's mean. But we start to learn where he's coming from. He's seen towns slaughtered by Apache raids. He was an officer at Antietam where he lost 328 men in a day. He's mean because his world is mean. He takes care of an orphan in his own way -- giving the kid his own buck knife and giving him advice on how to use it. And later on we discover that his Indian scout, who he's so mean to, is in fact a boy he adopted after the boy's family was slaughtered.

It's not a transformation of character. He doesn't change as a person. But we discover that he has virtues. We realize that he's a man you don't want as an enemy, but who you do want next to you in a fight.

Harrison Ford does really a beautiful job with the role. Nobody's going to give him an Oscar for this part, because nobody gets an Oscar for a movie called Cowboys and Aliens. But this is the best acting I've ever seen him do.

I could go on about Ella Swenson (Olivia Wilde) and the nifty way the movie hints to us what her secret is (the minute she said "they took my people too," I knew). I could go on about the wide-eyed kid. I could mention the clever way the screenwriters get us over the bump of why aliens would come here looking for what they're looking for -- they hang a lantern on it and address it. But darn it, go see the damn movie. And to hell with the critics.

I've reviewed a couple of the films at Fantasia on my Other Blog.

The Wicker Tree

Ironclad

At Fantasia I got to see the new Norwegian film TROLL HUNTER, a Blair Witch-style faux-documentary about some college kids who go trying to get an interview with a bear poacher and wind up chasing around with a government troll management specialist.

It's very funny. My Norwegian friends claim there are all sorts of Norwegian in-jokes (e.g. there's a saying, "Trolls have been here" when everything is screwed up), but it's very funny just with the subtitles.

My only objection is, like BLAIR WITCH, it's filmed in RetardoCam™ -- the handheld camera goes all over the place. I had to get up from my seat and move to the back of the theater and watch only a few seconds here or there during the running-from-trolls sequences, otherwise I would have lost my dinner.

I just watched I AM LEGEND (2008). It's a smart, dark, dark, movie about the last man to survive a viral apocalypse which has killed almost everyone and turned the rest into sort-of vampires.

In the end -- well, the movie doesn't do much with what it's set up about the characters and the situation and the history and the vampires.

But there was an original ending, more in keeping with the novel, and the title. Test audiences didn't like it, I guess. What do you mean, Will Smith isn't exactly a hero? So they reshot it. Here's the original ending from the two-disc DVD.

We watched THE CAINE MUTINY after the Zip disc had been sitting around the house for more than a week. It took a while before Lisa and Hunter were willing to give it a shot.

I had entirely forgotten the tedious and irrelevant love story -- a subplot so irrelevant I think you could easily cut every last scene involving Ensign Keith ashore, with the possible exception of the dock scenes, and you'd have a tighter and stronger movie with nothing missing.

If I didn't know the movie was based on a Herman Wouk novel, I would have assumed that the Mae Wynn romance had been shoehorned into the movie because "women won't see a Navy movie if there isn't a love story" or something like that. In fact Lisa was just as itchy throughout those scenes as I was.

In the future, when everything is downloadable content, maybe we'll have options to watch re-edits of our movies. We can watch the Phantom Edit of THE PHANTOM MENACE, and THE CAINE MUTINY as a clean Navy story with no jaunts to Yosemite, and the full length cut of 10 THINGS I HATE ABOUT COMMANDMENTS.

The movie's worth watching really for two performances: Bogart as Philip Francis Queeg, especially on the witness stand, and José Ferrer's explosion after the trial. Fred MacMurray turns in a crafty performance as the ship's comms officer. At first when you find out he's a novelist, you think, Oh, great, another stand-in for the author. Then it turns out that's not what he is.

I watched Indigènes (Days of Glory), a feature about three Berbers who join the Free French to fight for their "fatherland," France. Although they fight very hard for the French, and die for the French, it soon becomes clear that the French don't regard them as equals. They are mistreated in all sorts of ways, making them question whether France really stands for "Liberté, Egalité et surtout Fraternité". Racist French officers didn't promote them (there was a quota), their letters to French girls were censored, they weren't given leave to go home or the same food as the white guys.

This is a beautifully made, well-written and well-acted movie. Oh, and it won Cannes, no doubt because it told the French some uncomfortable truths about themselves.

But its story starts to become not all that surprising, unless one is laboring under the delusion that the French live up to their own rhetoric. And the movie becomes a bit tiresome to watch.

Lord knows I'm not against bashing the French for being colonialists. But I think if I were trying to tell people how France abused its territorial troops, I think I'd make the story about something else. Maybe about a sergeant and a soldier who don't get along. Maybe about class differences among the recruits. Two guys in love with the same girl back home. And the guy who actually has the girl is screwing every French girl he can, while the guy who doesn't have the girl is faithful to her. Whatever. Make that racism the background to a story whose resolution isn't predictable from the beginning.

Sometimes you can reveal a truth better by letting the audience uncover it, rather than waving it in their faces. It's sometimes hard to remember that when you're stoked up about an issue. But unless the audience is already stoked up, you're going to push them away.

So, they want to remake BUFFY: THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, without input from Joss Whedon.

I think I know what they're thinking. "Let's dumb this idea down, so that more people can enjoy it." Joss is not really a mainstream taste. The original movie, which he wrote, was a niche success. The series went on for seven seasons but it was never a monster hit. Screw the hardcore fans, how many of them are there? Let's get rid of the creator, with all his difficult, complex ideas. They make the audience's brain hurt. Oh, and we have to hire a good-looking chick writer. Someone who can really reintroduce us to Buffy. Make her more approachable. Less dark. More like CHARMED.

And when I say, "hire a chick writer," let me clarify that I'm not against them hiring a woman. They could have hired Marti Noxon. But reading failed actress/professional hottie-turned-unproduced-screenwriter Whit Anderson going on about how she's going to do what Chris Nolan did for the Batman reboot, my gut tells me that they were looking for a chick writer to "bring something new to the franchise."

I tend to think it will flop badly. Thas all the earmarks of a cheesy, misconceived notion. Just for starters, how do you nail Buffyspeak fifteen years later, make it seem contemporary, and not sound like you're a bad mimic?

Joss's response is priceless:

This is a sad, sad reflection on our times, when people must feed off the carcasses of beloved stories from their youths — just because they can’t think of an original idea of their own, like I did with my Avengers idea that I made up myself.

Obviously I have strong, mixed emotions about something like this. My first reaction upon hearing who was writing it was, “Whit Stillman AND Wes Anderson? This is gonna be the most sardonically adorable movie EVER.” Apparently I was misinformed. Then I thought, “I’ll make a mint! This is worth more than all my Toy Story residuals combined!” Apparently I am seldom informed of anything. And possibly a little slow. But seriously, are vampires even popular any more?

I always hoped that Buffy would live on even after my death. But, you know, AFTER…

If you happen to be in Fredericton, NB tonight, my short film, YOU ARE SO UNDEAD is playing at the midnight (well, 11:45 pm) screening of shorts -- "B Movies, Bad Behavior and Blood" at Tilley Hall on the UNB campus.