Carnival of Souls

A group of girls is run off the road on a crumbling bridge. The car is lost to the mud in the river, and as the townspeople surround the accident site, one of the girls rises up out of the water and onto the banks. Not much time is given for the girl, Mary (Candace Hilligoss) to gain her bearings, as she flees the whole traumatic event for Utah, working as the church's organist. But not long after she settles in, she starts to see the face of a man, unnamed with a pale face, maniacal smile, and black eyes. He follows her everywhere she goes: in her new apartment, in the window of her car, and prominently at a derelict carnival on the edge of town, to which she's strongly drawn. A few other creepy things start to happen, and Mary occasionally falls into bouts of ghostliness: unknown and unseen to the rest of the world, yet still walking among them. There's a cheap quality to CARNIVAL OF SOULS: it's too jumpily edited, and drowned in its obviousness and an incessantly playing score. But there's a redeeming quality to CARNIVAL OF SOULS in its atmospheric tension, and what's effective given the small budget. This is supported by the suspense created by the what the hell is happening to this girl in the earlier part of the film, but talents are all on exhibit in the final scenes, which all culminate to a wonderfully creepy climax in the carnival, complete with a great scene of the laughter of the dead irrespective of the pacing and chasing that's on screen.

★★★/5

Land of the Dead

In George A. Romero’s LAND OF THE DEAD, the zombies of his previous films have conquered most of the Earth, save for a few outposts, colonized by rich men who’ve converted old shopping malls and apartment towers into societies. The vision is fantastic: bars run by midgets pit zombie against zombie in a caged set, and teenagers get their pictures taken with the zombies on neck-chains in the background. A few border patrol men with the mentalities of the ones we have today jaunt into zombie-infested areas to kill them off, using fireworks to distract them as they plow them down with machine guns. The honcho of the apartment building, Kaufman (Dennis Hopper), deceives and betrays his men, but one of them, Cholo, revolts against him, stealing a militarized truck and threatening to blow Kaufman sky high unless he pays a ransom. Desperate, Kaufman enlists the help of a soldier who just wants to get away named Riley, and Riley commandeers a few friends and a hooker played by Asia Argento in order to stop Cholo. But at the same time of this goings on, the zombies have begun to gain the capacity to think, like apes they discover tools, then strategy, then even satire. They are led by an old zombified black convenience store man. He’s been frozen in the routine of adhering to his old habits: taking out the gas pump and inserting in into cars for eternity. But then he discovers tools, and is driven mad by Kaufman’s patrol raids. Romero’s satire here is simplistic, but the film’s a lot of fun, and the satire’s exemplified by that, and the dramatic stakes that are established.

★★★★/5

Rebecca

When you’re watching a Hitchcock movie, it’s a sublime experience as you let yourself go to a grand master. Hitchcock moves the film along perfectly. It’s a simplistic story, but his flairs are at once apparent and riveting. Beginning with a young, nameless girl who acts as a lowly servant to a pudgy mistress vacationing by the sea, we see an innocent and beautifully photographed Joan Fontaine as she is swept away by Maxim de Winter. She’s brought to a vast, cultured castle and is expected to adopt all of the habits of her predecessor, Rebecca de Winter. Through trickery and deception, she occasionally makes a fool of herself, breaking things and sitting at the end of a long table filling the seat of a woman supposedly better than her. Everything she does is contrasted against Rebecca, and Hitchcock illustrates this in one stunning shot that backs up from a close-up on Fontaine’s fidgety face to the massive room she solitarily inhabits. The plot grows more complicated, and there are hidden truths about the former Mrs. de Winter that are inevitably revealed, but what’s at the center of Hitchcock’s first American film is an exclusively American girl (Fontaine), who’s swept up by all the style and secrets of a grand castle, burned down by her innocence and novelty in a world that expects something different, but, from the inside, burns down into modernity.

★★★★★/5 

Tyrannosaur

Paddy Considine’s TYRANNOSAUR is a slog, an actor’s directorial debut that tells a simplistic story, but, because of the “gravity” of a debut, is overwrought and repetitive, every scene re-establishing the “thesis” in a scholarly but not very fun manner. Other than the title, which takes a brief and not very interesting story into exaggerated account, the film is one-note. It tells of the pathetic life of Joseph (Peter Mullen) who’s just been laid off and spends his days drinking and calling everyone a cunt. In fact he swears and curses so much that he loses his shock value. He gets in bar fights, and he yells at everyone, showing them their worst values. However, he runs into Hannah (Olivia Coleman), who runs a religious charity store although there’s not a fucking vestige of anything religious in her except that we’re supposed to believe that she is. Joseph thinks she’s a fool (she is…) and the two develop a rapport despite incessant fighting. Every scene Joseph proves he’s just the kind of mean guy we knew him to be, and every time Olivia talks she proves herself to be a ditz. Later though, it is revealed that Hannah is a battered wife, although things escalate quickly and suddenly as if they’d never happened before despite the fact that we’re supposed to believe this is a regular occurrence. But the one-note story is stretched right into the one-note lighting. TYRANNOSAUR is one big nothing, an obvious and weirdly dramatized bore.

★/5

The Sleeping Beauty

An evil witch sets a curse upon a newborn, appearing like a specter, unseen but powerful. The curse condemns the baby girl to death. Three fairies appear and adapt the spell, so that the girl will prick herself with a thorn at six, and sleep and dream for a hundred years. She will wake in a modern world though, confused and unable to cope with the new world. She has many adventures though, living at first on a farm with a boy who is devolves from her friend to a teenaged, annoyed older brother. Then, a snow-covered landscape, and tent in the middle of it. She wakes at sixteen and is penetrated literally and figuratively by a world she doesn’t understand. Catherine Breillat’s fittingly dreamy, weird, and melancholy story is festooned with great color and contained settings, an it shows the destruction of a tale as well as the destruction of a girl who was doomed from the start. The film has many problems with pacing, but it makes up for that with its sad sensibility that pervades through each story.

★★★/5

Goldfinger

Despite all of its blatant sexism and exaggerated set-ups, GOLDFINGER is one of the best of the James Bond films, portraying him as a playful but fallible agent. At the beginning of the film he’s skirting between walls and bars, among foreign agents and floozies, arriving nonchalantly (if ever that word was to be used… it’s to describe James Bond) as a bomb he set up earlier explodes. Next scene, he’s spying on Goldfinger, a fat greasy villain at a resort, leading up to the iconic image of the woman painted gold, lying face down dead on his bed. But what is refreshing about this Bond film is the grandiose and crazy plans of the villain Goldfinger, revealed in a lengthy, and, if analyzed, wanton presentation, and the ease with which Bond is defeated in physical battle. What’s offputting and weird about modern Bond films is the insane abilites of Bond, who, then, eventually loses a fight. How does such a guy then lose? But because Connery’s Bond is illustrated as immediately fragile, his struggles are believable. But there’s fun to be had in great shots in color, crazy car chases, and the smoothness of Bond’s charm.

★★★★★/5

Deep Red

Dario Argento’s DEEP RED establishes horror through truths that are slowly uncovered by a normal man. This man, a pianist and music teacher named Marcus Daly, becomes entrenched in the horror. His neighbor, a psychic who has enough credence to speak at public events with scientists, is brutally stabbed to death. Hearing her screams from the street, Marcus rushes upstairs to save her, but is only able to pry her body from the glass of the window. He sees a painting though, which later disappears, and is immediately drawn to the case, acting detective even though he really just knows how to play the piano. But Marcus is thrown deeply into a horrific world, his perceptions of everything changing, from an old house he would have considered quaint containing dead bodies and weird pictures, and his friend Carlo being unmasked as gay, and a little crazy. Argento’s storytelling is perfect though, with little mysteries being unveiled as an ultra-regular man tries to make sense of it all: unfairness following his every move, artily rendered under the deep red of flowing blood or a boiled face.

★★★★/5

Rampart

Woody Harrelson is a pretty good actor, and in his previous film with director Oren Moverman, the two made a pretty good film, THE MESSENGER. RAMPART could almost be called an actor’s movie, giving almost all of the screentime to Harrelson, and allowing him to dominate the film as a crooked, Rampart-division, 90’s era, L.A. cop named Dave. Dave’s a real tough son-of-a-bitch, beating up suspects, and maintaining a tough-as-nails authority figure in both his job and at home with a convoluted family situation, basically having two daughters and a wife whose sister he had also had a fling with. One day regularly acting like a crazy asshole, Dave gets hit in his car, jolts out to arrest the driver of the other car, and is hit in the face by the door as the man flees. Understandably, he pursues him, but after tackling him to the ground, beats him an inch from death. The whole thing is caught on tape, and Dave becomes the poster boy for corruption in the L.A. police department. He resists, attempting to maintain the position he has the most power in, but quickly descends as fast as the movie’s quality does. Dave is basically shown to be mentally ill, but the way that Moverman establishes this is shoddy, losing any of the regularity that was earlier established. The routine of Dave’s life is completely deteriorated, and the film becomes a series of vignette-like situations in which Dave shows us that he’s a fucking asshole. But such an obvious “revelation” is drilled into our heads with annoying, faux-arty over-saturated shots, and even Harrelson’s performance becomes rooted in the badness of the film overall. Essentially, Moverman tries to prove to us that Dave is a crazy person, but that’s so clear from the start that the film becomes boring.

★★/5

The Avengers

A few years ago, there was a stream of awful films coming out in summer, turning audiences away to the lack of originality in Hollywood’s summer movie output. Times haven’t really changed in terms of originality, THE AVENGERS being the result of around four quasi-prequels which themselves are, of course, based off of the ideas of the people at Marvel. But what has changed is the quality of our summer films, and most of them have been handed over to competent directors and writers, to the point where almost every summer film is acclaimed and singled out for being above the usual standard. In some cases, this acclaim is false, as it was for RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES. Filmic continuity and good pacing doesn’t always equal a good film, but the overrated Joss Whedon’s THE AVENGERS is deserved of the acclaim it has been met with. Whedon has been catapulted, weirdly, seeing as the only other film he’s directed was SERENITY, which few people have ever even heard of. But despite the weirdness of Whedon’s ascent, THE AVENGERS is actually a pretty damn good film, giving equal screen time to each of the superheroes and arranging villains who are equal parts smart, ridiculous, and comical. But what Whedon successfully accomplishes is a good dynamic between each of the heroes, each of them having special or funny moments, and the focus concentrated on each of their (admittedly small) arcs. Scarlett Johansson, a continually underrated actress, brings kinetic power to Black Widow, performing her own stunts and consistently tricking the audience into believing her to be a weak woman, and then turning the tables. Mark Ruffalo as a new character, the Hulk, is also effective in the sense that he gives us exactly what we want: smashing shit. That’s what’s at the heart of Whedon’s genius, for he does nothing less than give us what we want. Big explosions, fun dialogue, batshit effects.

★★★★/5