Cynical Cinema

The Flock is the first American effort from Hong Kong film maker Andrew Lau, who is famous for his excellent Infernal Affairs triolgy, the movies which were made into the Scorcese masterpiece The Departed.  However, with The Flock he falls a little short.  The movie is about Richard Gere, who is basically a parole officer for sex offenders.  When we meet him, he is being forcibly retired from his job, since he seems to have lost his mind a little bit.  He is going to be replaced by Claire Danes, and he’ll be teaching her the ropes before he’s done.  But he’s so over the edge that she is not only afraid of the sexual deviants with which they deal every day, she’s also afraid of Gere because he’s clearly a maniac.

When a girl goes missing, the two of them attempt to solve the crime, even though they are not the police, based on the sex offender registry and interviews of Gere’s “flock”, which is how he describes his group of criminals.  The people who took the girl appear to be targeting Gere himself, based on a clue they left just for him at the table where he always sits at the diner where he always goes.  They are sending HIM a message - but why him, why that message, what the abductors hope to gain from it - we never find out.  Why?  Who cares.  Here are some people doing awful things to other people.  Isn’t that awful?  Now let’s get to the end of the film.

Andrew Lau’s previous movies have been brilliant in their depiction of cops and cop culture, as action and drama intersect with double crosses and informants, and complex stories are made to seem much simpler.  However, in The Flock, he makes a fairly simple, straightfoward story seem much more complex than it has to be.  In the end, we get Gere being a tough-guy lunatic, Claire Danes crying a lot, and weird sexually deviant behaviour in rooms in the background.  And that’s about it.  The final scene with the abducted girl is tawdry and contrived, although it does convey an appropriate level of creepiness.

Oh, and one more thing - when you have the credits at the beginning of the movie, with the five main actors who are going to be in the film, and one of those actors is a name people will recognize (in this case Avril Lavigne), you have to understand that you are setting them up already.  Say you’re watching a film, and the first six names that flash at you include, say for the sake of argument, Christopher Walken.  And he appears for about four seconds, ten minutes into the movie.  And then you don’t see him again at all.  But at the end, when the mystery is unraveling, you kind of think to yourself - Christopher Walken got third billing in this movie…I bet he’s the killer…and of course you’d be right.  In this film, it doesn’t happen exactly that way, and it’s a little better done than that.  But still, the end came as absolutely no shock to me based on the opening credits and the rest of the movie.

Nightmare Detective opens with a scene of a man sitting at a table. Behind him, on the wall, is some super-long, disembodied hair, hanging from a hook like a hat. It takes a while to notice the hair, but when you do, and you realize what it is, you become instantly creeped right out. And that feeling will not leave you until this film is over. It’s the latest offering from Japanese director Shinya Tsukamoto, who has been called Japan’s answer to David Lynch or David Cronenberg. And that description is certainly apt. This man knows how to create a mood so creepy that even if nothing at all happens, the sense of foreboding resonates within the viewer. In Nightmare Detective, two things are constantly sources of fear and malice. Bridges and bicycles. They don’t sound so creepy thinking of them now, but these are the scariest bikes and bridges I’ve ever seen in a movie. And that includes that brilliant Emilio Estevez classic, Maximum Overdrive.

We are introduced to the Nightmare Detective almost immediately. You see, the guy with the hair on his wall is having a nightmare. And the Nightmare Detective is able to enter peoples’ dreams in order to explain them to those people, and perhaps they will not be so frightened. However, this man having this dream decides he would rather remain in the dream than wake up, and he chooses to die. This screws up Kyoichi Kagenuma, the Nightmare Detective. He has lost the will to live, after seeing so many scary and creepy things in his life. In fact, we are not sure he has ever had the will to live. And this ties in nicely with the theme of suicides. A series of incredibly brutal suicides have been taking place in the city. Each of the victims have stabbed themselves to death, in bloody and gory fashion, while having nightmares. And just before they do, they have all called the phone number “0″. Which I assume in Japan does not connect you with an operator.

Japanese horror movies love this kind of stuff. Something anyone could do - like playing a VHS tape in Ringu, or dialing 0 on a cell phone. Simple things that are accessible to regular people are scary when all of a sudden they become supernatural. It turns out that the guy at the other end of the phone sucks the people who call into suicide pacts with them, and has the supernatural ability to enter their dreams and go after them. Which is always creepy, scary and gory. The cops go after him, but anyone who calls him ends up committing suicide in their sleep. So they enlist the help of the Nightmare Detective, who is legitimately suicidal himself. The hot-chick cop who convinces him to help is played by Reiko Hitomi, one of the sexiest Japanese actresses in the world, but a relative newcomer to movies with international distribution. She eventually sets up the obvious Nightmare On Elm Street style showdown where she confronts the killer in her sleep, with help from the Nightmare Detective.

The final showdown, while it is obvious from the beginning, is bonkers and difficult to understand, and it goes on for a very long time. But somehow it works. After all, it is a nightmare, and all kinds of strange things can happen in a nightmare that don’t have to make sense. The fact that Tsukamoto is able to sustain terror and tense creepiness for a solid half-hour without making it tedious is a testament to his skill. Nightmare Detective is a solid, frightening horror film that is worth seeking out. It arrives in stores tomorrow, May 27th, from Alliance Films.

Guillermo Del Toro has made some of the best films of recent years.  Dark, brooding, beautifully filmed movies like Blade II, Hellboy and Pan’s Labyrinth.  And he must have an eye for other great directores, because as a producer he has achieved a great succes with The Orphanage.  Directed by Juan Antonio Bayona, The Orphanage is not really a horror movie, although it was marketed as such.  There are definitely some creepy scenes and scary moments, but it’s the atmosphere that tells the story as much as the scares and the characters themselves.  Belen Rueda plays the main character, Laura, a woman who returns to the orphanage where she was raised in order to build it up again, and take in some more kids.  She lives there with her husband and her own son, seven-year-old Simon.  But when Simon begins to talk to a series of imaginary friends, and soon goes missing, Laura tears her life apart to find him, and that means unearthing some long-dormant secrets and spirits in the orphanage.

The movie may be reminiscent of several others.  Hallowe’en, Poltergeist, Final Destination, any number of Peter Pan movies, and Del Toro’s own The Devil’s Backbone.  But it’s the Peter Pan theme that holds the key to The Orphanage.  Suppose the Peter Pan story was, instead of being a kids’ tale, the work of some deviously evil murderous freak show?  I know, I know, I’m describing the Neverland Ranch.  But Michael Jackson aside, only Bayona has managed to make the Peter Pan story this creepy.  Rueda, as Laura, undergoes a transformation that is part obsession and part a growing belief in the spirits that surround her in the house, and it is a remarkable acting performance.  There are red herrings, but not too many.  There are many characters that come in and out of the movie with varying degrees of effectiveness.  The best is the old lady who gets dispatched in a fairly memorable and gory fashion.

 The Orphanage is a good, creepy, evocative flim, with terrific camera work and a genuinely gothic sense of foreboding.  The direction is first-rate, the acting is for the most part excellent, and the film is very much worth watching.  A few quibbles prevent it from being a truly great movie, like the pacing and the length, which I think is a little unnecessary.  But all in all, a quality movie experience.  Oh, but it has subtitles.  So it isn’t for those who hate to read.

When I was a kid, I was convinced that the most dangerous person on Earth was Angela Lansbury. Not because I had seen her crazy-scary performance in The Machurian Candidate, but because everywhere she went, a murder was committed. Usually someone close to her. Don’t go on that cruise, Jessica Fletcher! People will DIE. That role has now been taken up by Jodie Foster in The Brave One. This movie almost definitely has the worst movie title of all time. The Brave One? Who would ever watch something called that? Unless it’s a bunch of kids, and The Brave One is the title of a Nickelodeon after-school special where a young man finally learns to stand up to bullies. But the title here is meant to be slightly ironic, which would be fine if it wasn’t so lousy. Jodie Foster plays a radio DJ who has gone her entire life never finding any trouble, about to get married to her boyfriend, until the couple is mugged and her boyfriend is killed. Then, all of a sudden, she becomes an absolute magnet for trouble. Murders are committed in front of her, tough guys harass and attack her. I guess violence is much like breaking the seal when you drink. Once it happens once, it will happen every six minutes for the rest of your life until you stop.

Of course, with all this fear, she purchases a gun. And when violence finds her now, she is ready to respond with more violence of her own. Which escalates into vigilante justice, Charles Bronson with a pretty face and an awful haircut. She kills muggers, murderers, you name it. Terrence Howard plays a cop who is on the trail of the vigilante killer and who is also sort-of involved with Foster. He is one of those amazing movie cops who can make enormous leaps in logic to come to the exact right conclusion with no help from the other officers or from actual reasoning. He is also one of those amazing movie cops who are completely oblivious of the most obvious things that are right under his nose. Example: He spends the whole movie hanging out with the killer he is pursuing. She says weird things, knows too much about some stuff, seems jumpy at the mention of other stuff. But only when he hears an elevator door bing while he’s talking to her on the phone, and then hours later finds a dead body that’s merely a few thousand yards from some elevators, does he maybe start to clue in. EVERY dead body will be within a few thousand yards of some elevators. It’s a CITY.

The end makes no sense. I know real police work is not like CSI, but I know enough about powder burns and gunshot residue and the analysis of ballistics to know that the scenario that plays out would never work in a million years. Nor should it. The ethical dilemma faced by Howard at the end is akin to the one at the end of the Charles Bronson classic Death Wish. And, basically this is the same movie. But it tries so hard to be something more, and sadly this ruins Jodie Foster. Jodie Foster is one of the top five actresses in the world in terms of talent, and yet, shockingly, she is the worst part of this movie! She looks so sketchy and freaky that anyone would immediately think “killer” when looking at her, the emotions she is called upon to produce never once ring true, and her connection with Howard feels so forced and unnatural that we really don’t care about either of them in the end. This movie really wants to have a message, and deliver that message they have. Here it is: “Don’t rent me”.

I have long said that Roy Dupuis is the French Canadian version of Colm Feore. When you have a big Canadian icon that you want to immortalize on film or TV, you pick one or the other. Anglophone icon? Feore. (Pierre Trudeau, Glenn Gould.) A Francophone icon? Dupuis. (Maurice Richard, Romeo Dallaire.) And so there was no question in my mind when I heard that Shake Hands With The Devil was going to be made into a feature film as to who would play Dallaire. It was Dupuis, or the film would not have been made. By the way, in order to avoid those “do your research” and “get your facts straight” emails, I would like to state right now that I am indeed aware that Pierre Trudeau was a Francophone. But that movie was mostly English.

Dallaire’s book was a sensation in Canada when it came out. A tragic and devastating look at the genocide in Rwanda. It was later made into a documentary film, which helped make people aware of the horror a little more, and now this movie, which might help even a little more. The thing that made me saddest in watching this film was the fact that it came out so many years after the genocide was over. Same for the documentary and the book. Now, it’s not like Dallaire could have written his book while things were going on. But it’s sad to think that so many people pay attention now, and watch other films like Hotel Rwanda, and feel sad and mourn the tragedy and get enraged over things like “why didn’t somebody do something”. And yet, when we see those things on TV, on the news, in the papers, and we are aware it is taking place RIGHT NOW, we don’t do much. As Joaquin Phoenix says in Hotel Rwanda, we go back to our TV dinners and turn on the hockey game when the news is over.

Part of this, I feel, is because of the nature of the media. When genocide is taking place in Darfur, in Africa, way across the sea, it is treated as simply a news story. A two-minute piece on the horrors in Darfur gets as much importance as a two-minute piece on the possibility of the defeat of the budget in the House of Commons. Very often, it gets less. A school shooting is big news, front page on every paper, lead story in every newscast. That is a tragedy that hits close to home. But more people died in thirty seconds during the genocide in Rwanda than have died in all school shootings in North America combined. It doesn’t affect us. It is reported as “here’s what’s going on in a country that isn’t ours”, and is followed up with “a small town in France has outlawed public toilets!” and we forget all about it. Toilets! That’s hilarious! I think it’s safe to say that most of us know (myself included) know more about Columbine and Dawson College and Virginia Tech than we do about Darfur. Really, this isn’t exactly the fault of the media. This is really the way we want to be fed our news, and they are just complying with the wishes of the general population - you wouldn’t get many ratings if you showed machete massacres every night.

And so we get Shake Hands With the Devil, a movie that has been made only when it could be made, many years after the fact. And hopefully, it makes people aware that such things are still going on, or curious enough to find out. (Steven Spielberg has just pulled out of the Olympics in Beijing to protest China, feeling that they haven’t done enough to stop the genocide in Darfur.) And the movie is pretty good, as a movie. Dupuis is steely and tough as Dallaire, a man who carries himself with the utmost dignity and commands respect as a lifelong soldier. His supporting cast is for the most part excellent. Having just finished the book, I recognized most of the characters being protrayed just as I had imagined them. Especially James Gallanders as Major Brent Beardsley, who has a few tough scenes. This is a fascinating story, and that alone makes the movie worth watching.

But there is a little problem with the movie, looking at it solely in the context of a movie. It is a dramatization of real events, but somehow, it doesn’t feel dramatized enough. There are scenes taken directly from the book - a scene where Beardsley is confronted by a mob of machete-weilding Interahmwe, as he tries to get a wounded woman to safety, and he punches the man who stands in his way. In the book, the scene is tense, dramatic and poignant. In the film, it’s tough to tell what you’re seeing. Is that guy standing in his way…or not…or OK it’s over. Another scene where Dallaire and Beardsley are blockaded from a portion of the city and must get out of the car and walk through the barricade, as weapons are cocked and the bad guys say they will shoot. Again, in the book, this scene made me pretty nervous. In the movie, it is treated as a matter of course.

Doc hated Gone Baby Gone because he had read the book first, and he couldn’t reconcile what he saw on the screen with what he had imagined in his head when reading. I had the same problem with Shake Hands With the Devil, seeing scenes that were so familiar to me and yet not feeling their poignancy as much as I had while reading. But at the same time, I’m not sure anyone would understand this movie without having read the book first. There are so many factions and institutions - the RPF, the RGF, the Interahmwe, the president, prime minister, interim government, and countless others. Each with their own politics, their own attitudes, their own enemies and their own clandestine secrets. It is such a complicated picture that the movie can’t hope for a moment to make sense of it all in less than two hours. In the end, this film should be watched, and is certainly good, but if you had to make a choice, read the book.

Johnny Depp is amazing. On paper, some ideas seem idiotic. Edward Scissorhands. So…there’s a guy who has scissors, where his hands should be. And…he loves a girl, and clips some hedges. Sound good? Or as moronic as Pirates of the Caribbean. We’d like to make a movie out of a Disney theme park ride. After all, you can only do so many remakes of movies and TV shows, right? And Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. So, there’s this barber, who murders people. Violently, with lots of blood and gore. Oh, and he will sing first. And it will star Johnny Depp. What? But Depp has proved that he can turn even the most half-baked bad idea into something great if he has something to work with. And that something, in Sweeney Todd, is Tim Burton. Ever since the two collaborated on Edward Scissorhands, they have been the greatest actor-director tandem of the past two decades. The Scorcese-DeNiro team of the new millenium.

Sweeny Todd is not their best film together. (That would be Ed Wood.) By the way, did anyone out there know that Tim Burton directed “Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure”? Watch it again. Knowing that now, it’s easy to see. OK. I’m endorsing Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure. On with the Sweeney Todd review. This movie is dark. But then, it’s Burton. The sets that represent London at it’s grimiest and most malevolent could have been lifted from The Corpse Bride or even Batman. And they are strikingly bleak and gothic, as is Depp himself. His Sweeney Todd is as bizarre looking a character as there is in a movie. So too is Helena Bonham Carter, who plays the woman who helps Depp murder dozens of London residents. Speaking of Carter - the cast of Sweeney Todd, apart from Depp and Sacha Baron Cohen (Borat) is almost entirely taken from the Harry Potter movies. Carter, Alan Rickman, Timothy Spall…my familiarity with them as Harry Potter regulars gave an even creepier edge to this film.

And Sweeney Todd is certainly creepy. Based on the gigantic hit Broadway musical by Stephen Sondheim, it’s the story of a barber named Benjamin Barker whose wife is taken from him by an evil judge. The judge then throws this barber into prison and makes off with his wife and daughter. Benjamin Barker, released from prison, makes his way back to London where he has now re-invented himself as Sweeney Todd, a maniacal killer who will stop at nothing to avenge his family. Helena Bonham Carter is Mrs. Lovett, a baker who makes the worst meat pies in all of London. She tells Todd about the fate of his family, and helps him plan his murderous revenge. However, that revenge is, to borrow another movie phrase, a dish best served cold. Sweeney Todd will have to bide his time before he can have his satisfaction. But his murderous psyche can’t be contained, and before long he is killing just about anybody. Anyone who sits down in his barber chair who won’t be missed gets the ol’ slice and dice from the straight razor.

The slaughter of these people is absolutely brutal and bloody in a horror movie sort of way. And if Sweeney Todd were not a musical, and this murder was taking place without the singing, it just wouldn’t work. But for some reason, here it does. As a by-product of these killings and the mounting bodies, Carter, in her meat pie downstairs, discovers a terrific way to kill two birds with one stone. The delightful idea that she can both find a way to dispose of the bodies AND stop buying meat to make her pies at the same time. Everybody wins! In an interesting sub-plot, we learn that Todd’s daughter is being held prisoner by the evil judge in London’s version of Rapunzel’s tower. The young man who helped Todd return to London is in love with her, and they conspire to break her out and run off together. There is also a creepy old woman who keeps showing up and cackling. Perhaps the best supporting turn in the film comes courtesy of Sacha Baron Cohen, Borat himself, who plays a rival barber and quite the sinister character himself. His demise, while untimely, is perhaps deserved and certainly unpleasant. But in a weird way, kind of funny.

When watching Sweeney Todd, one is constantly aware that it is a Broadway musical. But that is not a bad thing. The songs are terrific, the staging is precise and fantastic, and the movement of the characters in the individual scenes is magnificent. The main reason this works is that there is what seems to be an intentional disconnect between the audience and the subject matter. We can’t really identify with any of the characters, but we are not really supposed to. Just like watching a musical on the stage, where the singing itself creates that separation, so too does the movie keep us at arm’s length. Which is ideal. We don’t want to become too invested in these characters. With whom would we side? With Depp, who is murdering dozens of innocents, with Carter, who is serving them as pies to other innocents, with Rickman, who is evil and malicious as the judge? The only characters who are in the least sympathetic in the film are Todd’s daughter and her would-be lover. And in the violent, bloody climax, they are the lone gleam of hope for happiness in the entire film. But Sweeney Todd is not supposed to be a happy movie. It is supposed to be a good movie. And it certainly is that.