Star Trek Into Darkness (2013)

May 20, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Star Trek Into Darkness (2013) movie poster

director J.J. Abrams
viewed: 05/18/2013 at AMC Metreon 16, SF,  CA

In 2009 (really four years ago?), J.J. Abrams delivered a re-boot to the Star Trek franchise as reinvigorating and cleverly promising as any could really have hoped for.  In re-casting a younger version of the original television show’s Enterprise crew, the new versions of Kirk, Spock, Bones, Uhura, Scotty, Sulu and gang manage just the right amount of recognition, while casting a group of actors that have their own elan, verve, and presence.  It’s hard enough to cast a franchise set of actors for anything, much less ones who are bearing the weight of “being” a prior cast of pop media icons.  But Abrams and co. did it and also put together one of the better big summer movies of that year.

So it was with some reasonable amount of anticipation that accompanied the release of Abrams first sequel to the film, one which was rumored to feature Star Trek‘s villain of villains, Khan, no doubt also re-imagined for the times.  For some reason, this was meant to be some state secret, perhaps to hold at bay the many wagging tongues of internet bloggers who would dissect the casting and creation before the film had actually been seen by anyone.  In doing a modicum or research, I noted that The New York Times‘ writer A.O. Scott vowed to Paramount that he wouldn’t offer up “spoilers” around such a key component of the film’s plot and really, primary talking point.

Well, whatever.  It’s often too hard to talk seriously about a film while dancing around such obvious points.  No one will be too surprised to learn that Benedict Cumberbatch (try saying that five times fast) is the film’s key villain and is human superman Khan Noonien Singh, or simply Khan as friends and fans know him.  Khan was introduced in the original television series in an episode called “Space Seed”, which according to this new Star Trek‘s timeline wouldn’t have even happened yet (you’ll have to refer to the 2009 Star Trek for the whys and wherefores regarding this alternate universe/time travel possibility because it’s been four years and I only vaguely recall the details.) And of course Khan was made most indelibly known as getting his name into the title of the first series of film in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, the 1982 high point of the Star Trek franchise and major cultural foil for Star Trek Into Darkness.  And of course, in those cases, Khan was played by the inimitable Ricardo Montalbán, a Mexican actor playing a supposedly Indian superhuman.

In 2009, the kids I think were a bit young for Star Trek, and while we’ve watched Star Wars (1977) and its sequels, I have not introduced them at all to the Star Trek universe.  So, imagine, if you can, what it’s like going into a movie like Star Trek Into Darkness, a re-booted franchise, playing off a pop cultural touchpoints from the 1960′s and 1980′s that have infused themselves evermore into our continuum…unless you just didn’t know about all that.  Let’s just say that there are a lot of jokes and Vulcan mindmelds and Vulcan nerve pinches that aren’t nearly so obvious as you might think.  Even explaining what a Vulcan is and why he’s got pointy ears and doesn’t know what “happy” is…it’s a lot of explaining.

The real question that will get asked, has been asked by people that I told that I went to see this new Star Trek film is simply: is it any good?  Frankly, I found it a bit less good than its predecessor, though maybe not by a lot.  It’s an entertaining summer action film, with tidbits of cleverness and mystery, and a good cast and a good villain (which I would argue is often the real need in these “comic book”-ish movies.   I mean to say that every superhero needs a good bad guy to fight, and perhaps part of my case in point for Star Trek would be Khan.  He is the most interesting and be him Montalbán or Cumberbatch, he’s quite well embodied.

This film is no doubt already getting pulled apart, questioned, ranted about throughout the internets and beyond, but some with good reason.  I have no prediction where this all will fall in the long run, but I will say that the very odd inversion of the ending of The Wrath or Khan, what with this time Kirk is on the other side of the window, laying down his life to nuclear radiation, restarting the warp drive to save the Enterprise, and it’s Spock who yells the manic “Khhaaaaaaannn!!!” as opposed to William Shatner.  It’s such a bizarre spin on the other film and so massively self-aware that it’s the most meta of meta moments in this post-modern summer film.  You see, Leonard Nimoy does show up onscreen to tutor Zachary Quinto (the new Spock) regarding Khan, and though he doesn’t want to effect the path of the present (he came from the future), the camera cuts away as he advises him.  Maybe he tipped him off on the ending of the 1982 film, which would have happened some much longer time in the future of the current day Enterprise.  In reality it doesn’t make sense.

It’s a pretty heavy-handed in joke.

Felix thought the film was okay.  Clara enjoyed it, though was confused by a lot of things.  I liked it.  I thought it was pretty good myself.  It will surely be interesting to see who takes the helm of the next Star Trek film and where they end up taking it.  Abrams has left them in good standing, paths cleared for more adventures with a good cast and a pretty open universe to explore.

All while he jumps universes over to Star Wars.  And given what he’s done, the anticipation for that will be most fervent.

Filed under Theatrical, With the kids

Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1988)

May 20, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1988) movie poster

director Stephen Chiodo
viewed: 05/17/2013

Coulrophobia, as it is called, is the fear of clowns.  Not something that I suffer from personally, mind you, but does seem to be an increasingly common fear of people, or at least one that people like to own up to.  It does seem to be a more modern phenomenon, stemming from things like Stephen King’s It and that scene in Poltergeist (1982), which was pretty scary, I’ll admit.

Killer Klowns from Outer Space no doubt taps into these qualities, featuring a race of human-eating aliens who look like big, ugly circus clowns.  It is also very self-aware of the absurdity of the concept.  The clowns wrap their prey in cotton candy-like cocoons, shot guns of flying popcorn, and fly in a space ship shaped like a big top circus tent.  What this does for clown fear, I can only guess.

What’s interesting and quite fun is the way that director Stephen Chiodo (and his collaborating brothers) get the film to ride this odd line between earnest scares and comic absurdity.  The actors, the human cast, plays the film straight, as if this truly was a horrible, frightening reality, though they are a most B-movie cast, so some level of tongue in cheek seems entirely embedded throughout.  And since I watched this with the kids (at Clara’s choosing), I got to see first-hand that some of the scares work despite the fact that I found it entirely comedic.

Even the kids, however, picked up on the homage to The Blob (1958).  The film is yet another oddball example of the kind of wackiness of film-making in the 1980′s, especially featuring the Chiodo Brothers’ physical analog special effects, these lovingly-rendered goofy, gruesome clowns.  Some of the design work reminded me of similar period Tim Burton, especially the scene that I thought the most amusing, when one of the clowns entertains people with shadow puppets, which of course eventually kill them.

As the film came to an end, Felix noted that he didn’t think it was a very good movie.  Yes, an obvious thing, especially if you aren’t clued into enjoying B-movies or movies that are a combination of badness and goodness, ironic or not in their charms.  It’s made me realize that we may need to watch Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959) at some point soon, which may actually deliver the concept of “so bad, it’s good” and the sometimes more subtle flavors of such cinematic joys.

Filed under Aliens, DVD, With the kids

Black Christmas (1974)

May 14, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Black Christmas (1974) movie poster

director Bob Clark
viewed: 05/11/2013

Bob Clark directed the modern Christmas classic A Christmas Story in 1983, a film that has gone on to play 24 hours back-to-back on cable television and to have cracked the canon of best loved films of the Yuletide holidays.  Clark made a lot of films in his career, including such titles as Porky’s (1982) and Baby Geniuses (1999), but little do probably most people know but that Clark made another Christmas classic of another kind nearly a decade before.

Clark’s Black Christmas is one of the original “slasher” films, a genre of masked or unkillable menaces murdering young adults in brutal but creative ways.  Clark’s film is frequently cited as the first of the genre, though the film has many antecedents including Psycho (1960) and Peeping Tom (1960).  It was after happening upon watching My Bloody Valentine (1981) that my interest was piqued for the genre and I decided to queue up some of the films of the period in somewhat chronological order.

What’s particularly interesting about Black Christmas is that while it’s a genre film, it also sort of isn’t adherent to genre because so many of what would become standard expressions, sequences, and elements had yet to be codified.  In a lot of ways, it’s very inventive as far as the concept of a sorority house full of nubile soon to be corpses could be.  The killer is never actually unmasked, nor seen even directly (is he even wearing a mask?)  At the end of the film he remains undetected and at large, and while this would be a common aspect of the genre, set up to beget sequels, here it is just an eerie comment on the failure of society to discover him.

We see through the killers eyes, hearing his breathing, accompanied by some musical motif (albeit a dissonant one), ideas that would be picked up and reused ad nauseum in the genre.  The nudity (doesn’t exist) and the gore (somewhat minimal) belie the film’s entrenchment in the genre it would ignite.  The film, if anything, plays on the edge of the mystery of who is killing the women, harassing them in dirty phone calls, and whether it is someone they know or not.  It’s a mystery, sort of.  A who’s doing it.

There are a number of familiar faces here including Olivia Hussey, Keir Dullea, Margot Kidder, and John Saxon to name a few.  There is an amusing amount of boozing going on.  Both Kidder’s character and the house mother are pronounced sots.  And like many films, it’s a bit of a time capsule back to the mid 1970′s.

Because the killer is never named, no backstory, except his maniacal rantings about “It’s me, Billy” and some probably tragic home life, we never really “know” the why of this happening.  In that sense, it’s much more grounded in reality.  Part of the eventual cult of personality around the slasher killer anti-heroes is the often elaborate and eventually fantastical qualities of their origins, which make for more in depth grist for fans in sequel after sequel, but move these deathless beings further and further from the horrors of actual spree or serial killers who essentially they depict.

The slasher film eventually disinterested me over time, though I came of age during its heyday and had a reasonable relationship with it throughout my younger years.  But as “horror” it’s come to be less of a “thing” for me, so I haven’t wound up watching many in the last decade or so.

This is something that I will change shortly.  I’ve got a number of films queued up.  We’ll see where it takes me.

 

Filed under Canada, DVD, The Slasher Film

Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990)

May 13, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990) movie poster

director Joe Dante
viewed: 05/10/2013

Clara and I did a Gremlins (1984) double feature, starting with the original and right after with the much later Gremlins 2: The New Batch which I am pretty sure that I never saw before.

I did have a friend who considered Gremlins 2 one of his favorite all-time movies.  He had a goofy, perverse sense of humor that, now that I have seen it, seems quite well attuned to director Joe Dante’s manic, chaotic meta sequel.  Where the original Gremlins felt a bit at odds with itself over its personality and identity, Gremlins 2 seems much the more pure Dante product, raging around pop culture like an incessant demon, beyond self-referential, just further and further into comic permutations.

Clara told me afterwards that she agreed with my friend and thought that the second film was funnier and slightly better because of it.

Me, I think it’s a hot mess of sorts, but one that seems to have strove for such a state of affairs.  It certainly takes that tack from the very outset, featuring a Warner Bros. logo with Bugs Bunny atop that breaks the narrative of movie language much like Chuck Jones’ great Duck Amuck (1953).  And this is just the opening sequence with characters who aren’t even in the movie the rest of the way.  Dante breaks the “fourth wall” again, if you will, when the gremlins take over the movie projection and the film dissolves onscreen.  They then start making shadow puppets and are finally yelled down by Hulk Hogan himself getting the movie back on track.

Zach Galligan and Phoebe Cates are back on board, in New York now, in the employ of a Donald Trump type in a “smart” building.  Gizmo gets picked up by a genetic engineer for the company, but of course all the rules get broken again and the gremlins come out and multiply, evolve, do a little of this, a little of that, a little of anything they can think of.  It seems that the puppeteers and creative crew had a blast going off on every little thing they could.

It’s even more of a mess of a movie, but it’s chock full of film and cultural references, many right back to Gremlins itself.  It’s a chaotic ride and a sort of ridiculous one too.  It is kind of funny and pretty amusing.  It’s even got a rather comic performance from Christopher Lee.

I’d say that the end result is about as good as the original film.  It’s a more pure expression of the comic Id of Joe Dante, channeling his Tex Avery and Looney Tunes aesthetics ripping and riffing hardcore on the pop culture of the time.

Filed under 1970's-1980's NYC, DVD, With the kids

Gremlins (1984)

May 13, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Gremlins (1984) movie poster

director Joe Dante
viewed: 05/10/2013

For Friday night, we settled down for a Gremlins double feature, starting with the 1984 original to be followed by the 1990 Gremlins 2: The New Batch.  Felix was out on a sleep-over, so it was just Clara and I who decided to get nice and cozy with Gizmo and the Mogwai.

Weirdly enough, I think Gremlins, back in 1984, was my first “date.”  My mom took us there, her mom picked us up.  I think it was a one-off date, which I remembered for losing my wallet in her mother’s car and for not being overly enamored with the film.

Gremlins was part of the 1980′s when Spielberg seemed to be franchising himself with various productions much in his own vein and certainly produced by him, but with other directors taking helm of the films to varying degrees of success and failure.  Movies like Poltergeist (1982), Gremlins, Back to the Future (1985), Young Sherlock Holmes (1985), The Goonies (1985) and many more far beyond that all could have been Spielberg movies, maybe some bear his mark more than others.  But Gremlins turns out to be much more a Joe Dante movie, trying to be a Steven Spielberg movie.

Chris Columbus, who would go on to direct Adventures in Babysitting (1987), Home Alone (1990), Mrs. Doubtfire (1993), and the first two Harry Potter films, was screenwriter for Young Sherlock Holmes, The Goonies  and here for Gremlins as well.  It’s set in the small town of Kingston Falls, an Everytown, USA, home to the Peltzer family, Hoyt Axton as dad, the failed inventor, Frances Lee McCain as good-natured mom and Zach Galligan as Billy, who receives the Mogwai Gizmo as a Christmas gift from his roving father.  It’s Christmastime.  And the film heavily references many films, including It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) as if you didn’t get what they were going for.

It seems that all this cross-referencing, movie-citing, and parodying is pure Joe Dante.  By the time he gets around to Gremlins 2, small town America is history and the whole film is a meta-reel of gags, asides, and cultural references.  He was way ahead of Mr. Tarantino on that front.

But Dante’s Gremlins is also quite a bit dark.  These gremlins kill.  They don’t just wreak comic havoc.  The produce a body count.  And it’s doubtless this is why this film was partially influential in bringing about the PG-13 rating to the MPAA.  But it’s also one of the film’s weirdnesses and potential shortcomings.  Parts of it are supposed to be cute, parts of it sort of scary, but its darkness outweighs its lightness, though the film manically swerves back and forth between comedy, mayhem, and traditional American idealism.

Arguably, it’s best qualities are its madcap comedy and these darker elements.  But it sort of feels like a Spielbergian film that’s gone off the rails a bit too much.

I don’t know that I’d seen it since the 1980′s.  But I feel that I liked it about as much as I did back then.  It’s okay.  It’s a mess.  It’s pretty fun.  But also disappointing.

The incredibly cute Phoebe Cates and Galligan are so ineffectual as hero/protagonists, it’s possible that Dante made the film far more of a critique of American culture than a paean to it.  He does blow up a classic small town movie theater playing Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), or Galligan does for him.  Apparently, the pop culture infused Gremlins are ga-ga about Disney classics as well as the latest things like break-dancing and modern music.  The Gremlins might be humanity at its worst, but at least they are comical.  Galligan and Cates are humanity at its blandest.

Clara enjoyed it fairly well.  She was of course all over Gizmo the cutie.  But I had told her that I had a friend who preferred the sequel because it was funnier.  She was eager to watch it too.

Filed under DVD, With the kids

Scanners (1981)

May 12, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Scanners (1981) movie poster

director David Cronenberg
viewed: 05/08/2013

This is the one where the guy’s head blows up.  And it blows up real good.

There is this new race of humans, “scanners” they calls them.  See, they are psychic but generally don’t know it, so they run around society like schizophrenics, homeless, and troubled.  Except for one, one played by Michael Ironside with grotesque aplomb.  And then our hero, played by Stephen Lack, who is picked up by a scientist who is looking to help (a.k.a. “weaponize”) the scanners for a biomedical firm.  The doctor is played by Patrick McGoohan, and *spoilers alert* turns out to be their dad.

It’s all a rather convoluted plot in which a drug was administered to babies in utero to bring about these new skills, but which they then need to continue to take to keep the voices of the masses at bay.  But better than that, they have other psychic abilities including being able to connect to someone’s internal biochemical network and run it as their own.

And explode heads.  Of even other scanners.

Scanners is vintage Cronenberg and perhaps up until that point his most successful film.  It was another of the ones that I grew up with without having seen but knowing (or hearing) a lot about the exploding head.  So much so, you’d think that more than one head exploded in the movie, but it is just one.  And perhaps why it is so shocking and successful (besides the brilliant FX work) is timing it early in the film before much else has happened.  It sort of comes out of nowhere.  And boom.  Big bloody mess.

The finale between the brothers, a showdown of scanner skills, is the film’s other FX specialty.  It’s good too.  But the film lacks a bit which I think oddly enough falls mostly on star Stephen Lack who really is missing something in a movie star.  I much preferred Cronenberg’s Rabid (1977), an earlier “body horror” film from the Canadian horror maven turned intellectual auteur.

Filed under Canada, David Cronenberg, DVD

My Bloody Valentine (1981)

May 10, 2013 by Leave a Comment

My Bloody Valentine (1981) movie poster

director George Mihalka
viewed: 05/08/2013

A lot of Moosehead beer went into the making of this movie no doubt.  It’s a Canadian slasher film, one of the classics, if you will, of the period.  And if the Canadian accents didn’t give it away, all the Moosehead beer cans would.

I don’t think I’d ever seen My Blood Valentine.  The original, that is.  I did manage to see My Bloody Valentine (2009) the rather inauspicious 3-D re-make a few years back.

My mind flew back to 1981 because, though I don’t think I’d ever seen it, I was highly aware of the film.  I have the vaguest recollections of commercials for the film or seeing it reviewed on At the Movies with Siskel and Ebert.  And I remember talking about the movie with friends.

The slasher film became an established “thing” around this time, though the genre apparently reaches back to Black Christmas (1974).  I think, as a kid around this time, these films had some eerie power beyond their own existence.  I think we were all aware of them, even when we didn’t see them.  There was a sense, right or wrong or totally fictional, about what happened in a movie, what the most gruesome thing was, the literal gory details.  In the case of My Bloody Valentine it might well have been the human heart in a heart-shaped candy box or the woman flayed alive and thrown into a clothes dryer.  Oddly enough, maybe these weren’t fictional aspects of the films but their real elements, but they added to a sense of awe and fascination with films of this genre crafting an almost urban legend of the film itself.

It’s funny because today as an adult, I see My Bloody Valentine and I see it’s Canadian-ness above everything else.  I see a low-budget film, clearly produced outside of Hollywood, shot on location in a small mining town somewhere in the Great White North.  The actors, while being a lot of pretty unrecognizable faces, are not bad.  They reek of their era.  The reek so much of it that they actually reek of probably the 1970′s still more than the 1980′s.

The story is of this small town of Valentine Bluffs, preparing to throw the first Valentine’s party in 20 years following a horrible disaster on that date before.  Apparently on Valentine’s Day, back in the late 1950′s, a mine explosion occurred that trapped several miners for days, resulting in the lone miner to survive to cannibalize the others.  He becomes institutionalized but escapes to hunt down and kill his supervisors who left the mine unattended during the accident, gone off to a Valentine’s Day party.  So, he threatens that the town should never again have a Valentine’s Day party or he’ll come to kill them all.

As convoluted as it is, it actually reckons of the kinds of horror stories that kids tell one another, urban myths, campfire stories.  And it gives the killer a logical reason to wear a miner’s gas mask, helmet with a head lamp, and to swing a pick through willing flesh.

The film has some clever gruesomeness to it.  In fact, according to my readings, it was considered very gruesome in its day and led to a lot of cuts in the film to get it down to an R rating.  For the slasher genre, it has a pronounced lack of nudity.

It’s led me to want to revisit the slasher genre in more earnest.  I realize that I haven’t seen too many slasher films in the past 10 years that I’ve been keeping this film diary.  I would say that as far as it goes, the slasher genre isn’t overly titillating to me, the masked, deathless killer, punishing society ruthlessly.  It comes from a strange Id of the world of the late Cold War and signifies perhaps more than genuinely scares.

My Bloody Valentine is actually pretty good.  It’s a low-budget Canadian slasher from back in the day, and by it’s very existence has more going for it than any retreaded soulless remake ever could.

Filed under Canada, The Slasher Film, TV

John Dies at the End (2012)

May 9, 2013 by Leave a Comment

John Dies at the End (2013) movie poster

director Don Coacarelli
viewed: 05/05/2013

Mind-expanding drugs.  In this case, a black liquid known as “soy sauce” gives a user an expansion of reality that includes a variety of psychic powers and as a result a couple of guys gain an awareness of all kinds of nuttiness from this dimension and beyond.  Anti-logic, comic gruesome violence, and a high sense of the absurd rule the roost in director Don Coscarelli’s adaptation of David Wong’s novel of the same name.

It’s a manic mess of a thing, this film, but that sort of suits the material.  Coscarelli gets good comic performances from Paul Giamatti, Glynn Turman, and the rest of the cast.  He taps into some wonderfully analog throwback effects (true to his school, if you will, as Coscarelli is a film-maker from back in the day of analog effects), but he also delves into digital effects as the story gets more and more over-the-top, featuring more and more massive weirdnesses.  And frankly, the digital stuff lacks the charms of the animatronically writhing bizarre creatures.

Coscarelli made his name with the Phantasm films among others, but has made a couple of more out and out comic mashup types of films of late, the last of which I saw being Bubba Ho-Tep (2002), which was quite weird but not quite as satisfying as this new one.  The two films that John Dies at the End recalled for me was Alex Cox’s Repo Man (1984), though it lacks that film’s social critiques and seems much more bent on wackiness, and David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch (1991) which also delved into drug-induced realities, though again with perhaps more at stake.

I don’t say this necessarily as a criticism of John, but just a point.  It’s a pretty wacky, funny, entertaining oddball of a film.

Filed under DVD

Iron Man 3 (2013)

May 7, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Iron Man 3 (2013) movie poster

director Shane Black
viewed: at AMC Metreon 16, SF, CA

Most of the time, even with all the films that I take the kids to see, they aren’t necessarily asking in advance to see a movie like Iron Man 3.  We hadn’t watched the prior installments together, though last summer we did watch The Avengers (2012), which they did like.  But Iron Man has become the favorite character of some of Clara’s schoolmates and they play Avengers (which I found kind of surprising, don’t ask me why).  So, when Clara asked if we could go see Iron Man 3, I said sure.  I’d seen the others.  I like keeping up with the summer movies and superheroes.

Co-written and directed by Shane Black, Iron Man 3 is surprisingly funny, lively, violent, and fun.  Black had worked with star Robert Downey, Jr. in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005), one of Downey’s first successful films post-rehabs, and after Iron Man (2008) and Iron Man 2 (2010)  Jon Favreau stepped out of the directorial chair, Black seems to have been a choice selection as director to work with Downey again.  Black had made his name writing the first two Lethal Weapon films (as well as some lower lights like Last Action Hero (1993)), so his abilities at punchy dialogue is no surprise.  But as often is the case in filmmaking, putting the right person in charge of the ship is as good a hope as one has to likely success.

I actually think I liked Iron Man 3 perhaps the most of the three films.  There is some debate going on in entertainment media about whether or not Downey will return for any more films.  The denouement of this latest film gives him some available finality should he choose to take it.  Certainly Marvel Studios has proven out that all characters will be reinvented as long as properties seem to have future value, so whether Downey does reprise his role (outside of eventual Avengers 2), Iron Man will not likely be down for the count.

The movie has a massive bait and switch with its villain.  Ben Kingsley plays the much hyped and advertised terrorist baddy The Mandarin, a character extracted from the comic books (not one with which I had any familiarity).  But Guy Pearce shows up as Aldrich Killian, also of the comic books, with an Extremis drug that grows back ruined flesh and missing limbs, but also endows its takers with nuclear hot superstrength and a side effect that must be managed lest they blow up like a human bomb.  Spoiler Alert: The Mandarin is a sham, and Ben Kingsley winds up being very funny as the besotted English actor hired to play him.

It winds up being a kind of interesting point, though.  The Mandarin character as played by Kingsley and shown in advertisements was a weird, tone-deaf villain, pan-global-seeming.  Is he Asian? Middle Eastern? What kind of ideology is he meant to represent?  Terrorism and weapons technology are themes through the three films (perhaps through the comics as well), but pointedly so in the past five years that this movie franchise has been rolling.  This idea of a fictive terrorist seemed sort of problematic, such as what does he imply or signify in a world with real world terrorists who are human beings, not fictional super-criminals.

Black, by turning The Mandarin into a sham, a fiction of the film, a fiction of the real villain, the vengeful Killian, the amoral mad scientist who wants to have the government and the terrorists in his pocket so that he can rule by fear and rake in the dough for his technical weaponry.  It’s almost as if there is a criticism of this image-based villainy.  The image of the terrorist is not the real evil, but rather those behind the scenes who have crafted his image for their own purposes and manipulation.

Maybe, very likely, I am over-reading here.  But I do feel that what looked quite potentially lame and problematic turned out to be one of the film’s funnier gags and quite the twist on the whole “bad guy”/”supervillain” thing.  Those The Mandarin action figures are going to be interesting.

More than anything, the film is pretty fun, albeit very violent.  I don’t do body counts in movies, but I think if I did here it would have been disturbingly large.  The film also manages a story about Tony Stark befriending a kid in Tennessee that manages to feel reasonably valid and not too smarmy.

Both Felix and Clara enjoyed the film, by the way.  Both thought it was good.

And finally, I feel that I would be somewhat remiss if I did not mentioned Gwyneth Paltrow’s abs, glistening under her sports bra in her big finale.  Apparently that woman does have it all.  Abs and all.

Filed under Superheroes, Theatrical, With the kids

The Sixth Sense (1999)

May 6, 2013 by Leave a Comment

The Sixth Sense (1999) movie poster

director M. Night Shyamalan
viewed: 05/05/2013

The splash of 1999 (or one of them, at least) was M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense.  With craft and flair, the film was like a modern Twilight Zone episode, with the compelling story of a child psychiatrist, attempting to help a very troubled young boy, who sees dead people.  And of course, the surprise ending!  Which was a surprise if no one gave it away.  Right?  Both “I see dead people.” and the twist itself have moved on into cultural shorthand reference, while M. Night Shyamalan has become cultural shorthand for a one-hit wonder.

When The Sixth Sense came out, I, like many others at the time, were really impressed.  Bruce Willis was very good as the Philadelphia psychiatrist, whose failure comes back to haunt him. Toni Collette, as the single mother of the psychic boy, also was quite good.  And the other big talent besides Shyamalan that the film introduced us to was the boy himself, Haley Joel Osment, whose wise, vulnerable, amazing child not only delivered one of those great Hollywood movie lines, but totally compelled the audience of his character.

It’s actually Osment that brought me back to The Sixth Sense  for the first time since 1999.  In watching him in A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), the kids were totally blown away by him.  In fact, when he shows up in The Sixth Sense finally, Felix commented, “Hey, it’s my favorite kid!”  Both he and Clara were really, really impressed with his performance, and when I thought of what else I could show them that he had performed in, The Sixth Sense was sadly the only other film I thought probably worthwhile.

Osment appeared in other films, but not a whole lot.  He dropped out of the Hollywood limelight for some time so it seems, and is just now, at age 25, looking to get back in.  Whatever comes of his work henceforth it will not ever take away from his performances in The Sixth Sense and A.I. Artificial Intelligence.  I would argue that he’s even better in A.I., but they are both wonderful, amazing performances.  Child performers are such unique expressions, often some mixture of their own pure nature and a director’s ability to draw performance out of them.  But Osment clearly had something truly amazing within his own abilities as a child.  He is most remarkable.

I kept the twist a secret from the kids (though it sort of confused them), first asking if Willis was dead when he got shot and then “What? He is dead?!” when the “reveal” comes.  I realized that another film from the same period that I was thinking of showing them operated on the same twist aspect (The Others (2001)) and I wanted them to see it as organically as possible, to see how it played out.

The film has its scary moments, though really, they are just a few, and occasionally just quick jolts.  They found it frightening.

I found it pretty good.  Shyamalan’s style is straight out of film school.  Which is both critique and compliment.  He’s very effective in his shots and sequences, he frames moments for punch, and works his story well.  He also tries to layer in aspects of meaning in color palattes, shot styles, and other stuff that might inspire and engross hardcore fans.

At the time it came out, I liked how he used his native Philadelphia as his location, as he would go on to do in many films afterward.  The personalization of that seemed nice and still some of the images, such as the car accident toward the end on the tree-lined street, have stuck with me over the years since I’d seen the film.

Shyamalan has become a bit of a punching bag for me since I began this blog.  His films have gotten progressively worse (though I have managed to see them all, haven’t I?)  I’ve always recalled The Sixth Sense  most positively and, now I can say I still do.  While it’s not a masterpiece of cinema, it is a very good, very effective piece of horror/supernatural filmmaking, far more tonal and atmospheric in its frights than in pure shock or gore.  And he did get that amazing performance from the young Osment.

It is a fine film.  Shyamalan’s best.  The kids both liked it quite a bit, too.

Filed under DVD, Ghost films, M. Night Shyamalan

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