Author: BRWC

The Pact – DVD Review

When it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year The Pact was apparently met with praise by the majority of festival goers and critics alike. A low-budget, American horror featuring Casper Van Dien that’s supposed to be good? They had my interest (to paraphrase DiCaprio from the trailer where he has a moustache and cigarette holder). Then the trailer popped up. It kind of looked like a generic spook film with a attractive twenty something running around screaming. Ah, maybe that’s just lazy marketing I thought, after all a hundred festival goers can’t be wrong.

The story begins with Nicole (Agnes Bruckner) staying in her dead mother’s house where she is finalising her estate and funeral. Speaking on the phone to her sister Annie, it is revealed that they had a troubled history with their dead mum. After the conversation Nicole sees an open door leading and dark room.

Annie arrives having been told that Nicole has disappeared. What begins is a surprisingly long plot description that you involves mysterious photos, hidden family secrets, odd-psychic high school chum, an angry poltergeist and Caper Van Dien eating ice cream.

At under ninety minutes writer/director Nicholas McCarthy crams a lot of plot in. Characters are introduced and seemingly tossed aside with abandon. Revelations that explain the why events are happening inspire “meh” reactions. The plot unfolds not so much like a rug being unfurled but more like a slinky going upstairs.

The film starts promisingly. It’s implied that we’re about to watch Nicole’s story, we meet her, her daughter, establish her relationships to her sister and mother – so her disappearance so early on is a nice rug pull. We then have Annie as our heroine. Catty Lotz does a fantastic job of appearing genuinely confused by the events that are happening around her but lacks something that makes you want to invest in her as a character. Rather than ever being worried for Annie I found myself passively watching the screen as she runs screaming from one scene into the next. Casper Van Dien’s (relatively short) appearance as a kindly police detective is one of his better performances. He and his jaw get to do a bit more than stand looking imposing and acts as a calm counterbalance to Lotz’s raging.

As The Pact begins McCarthy seeps the film in dark, black tones reminiscent of Lost Highway. The film does look very slick and competently directed. Darkened rooms are pitch black leading to a sense of unease. However as the film progresses the darkens never lets up. Even scenes set in the middle of the day are swamped in oppressive dark tones and shadowy corridors. This should give the film a great sense of claustrophobia and mystery but aims up becoming annoying as it becomes hard to decipher what is sometimes happening on the screen. A couple of jump scares as ghostly figures appear from the darkness, the horror in The Pact is kept relatively low key. It feels as though it was written as a paranormal mystery that has had moments of spookiness inserted for easier marketing. Moments like Annie being tossed around a room by an invisible spectre never feel horrific as they should. In these moments the films slickness takes all the urgency from these scenes, appearing as well framed chase sequences rather than moments of pure horror.

By the end of the film I didn’t really care what was happening which was a shame because I wanted to really invest in a good old fashioned spook story. McCarthy’s desire to weave a well-formed mystery bloats the film with too many plot revelations and inconsequential characters. If the story had been trimmed and filmed less like a commercial it could have made for an atmospheric descent a terrifying family tragedy. As it is The Pact is another good-looking, dull American horror that I’m frankly surprised made it to cinemas.

1st October 2012
Accounts From The Video Store Front Lines (No. 3)

“I know a hawk from a handsaw”

Accounts from the Video Store Frontlines (no. 3)

By Pablo D’Stair

Of course there were many types of customer recommendation situations the serious clerk would have to field on a daily basis, each happening hard upon the other, some of them happening simultaneously and spoken over shelf-tops and down aisles, dealt with while balancing stacks of movies being reshelved, dealt with when accosted on the way to the door for a well-deserved cigarette break, dealt with even when just popping in on a day off and being recognized by a regular.

There was the general “I’m looking for something good/funny/scary/etc” which had a kind of freeform hilarity bordering on slapstick at times. There was the “Between these five, which two?” and other more complex set-ups requiring not only cinema knowledge but a keen ability to Agent Hochner a customer’s psyche, cold. But of all the situations that could come up, a Hamlet Situation was the most important to handle with erudition, aplomb, and intellectual dexterity.

A Hamlet Situation presented in various ways. Sometimes it was sudden—already in the checkout line, a customer was holding Version X (the wrong choice) and immediate administrations would be needed, consent forms to be filled out later. Sometimes it was general—the customer would be spotted holding the box to Version Y (the wrong choice, also) in a way that suggested they weren’t particularly “after Hamlet” but still needed treatment. And sometimes it was the customer specifically “needing Hamlet” for some reason and so seeking out counsel on “which Hamlet was the best Hamlet.”

No matter what, the situation was imperative-bordering-on-mortal. And for some reason there was the built in obstruction that the best Hamlet (directed by Franco Zeffirelli, Mel Gibson in the lead)—which to those in-the-know could just be labeled “the only Hamlet”—was the one that was always, with peculiar energy, argued against by customers, often in favor of the worst Hamlet (directed by Kenneth Branagh, with Branagh in the lead).

***

While there were sticking points with customers for any version, it can easily be said that the customer holding the Branagh was the roughest animal and showcased the most tenacity in trying to waste their own time.

“But this one is the whole thing, right?” the customer would ask, meaning—and it was correct—that Branagh, in fact, committed every line from the written text to film.

I’d point out that another version, starring Campbell Scott, was certainly more or less “the whole thing” but was not an absolute insult to the soul of Shakespeare’s text— unable to keep from offering my take that Branagh puts in, subtly and grossly, as much to his version (through unwarranted visual additions) as most others take away by trimming text.

While it had to be admitted that the Scott version was somewhat flat and not filmed with anything that could remotely be called “cinematic sensitiveness” it at least carried a lead performance that was not odiously mugged and caterwauled. Scott’s interpretation of Prince Hamlet seemed to have a lot to do with exploring a quiet, interiorly ravaged man, as opposed to Branagh’s seemingly central desire to go out of his way to shout as many words with staccato pop as he could while at the same time trying to blink as few times as possible.

If the customer was still standing there, they were probably smiling by this point but not quite convinced to put down the Branagh. So I would quickly note that the reason I pick on the central performance moreso than the rest of the cast in that version (while their performances are almost uniformly ludicrous) is that it is Branagh’s fault they perform as they do—how could they, as artists, be expected to depict actual facets of humanity in response to a lead performance that had all the nuance and insight of a blitz-attacking Dalek?

And to put Branagh out to pasture, I would say that his film had purposely taken a grandiose filmic aspect—sweeping score, wide-filmed scenes, opulent scenery and costuming—which truly served to distance audience from the necessary intimacy the script requires. It seemed that, with Branagh, cinema was utilized to create distance from the humanistic, inward aspects of Hamlet, not to take advantage of the fact that there were no “front and rear seats” necessitating old-school vocal projections. The film was more “stagey” than were it legitimately being “staged.”

To put the fine point on this, I’d introduce the fact that there was a perfectly wonderful version of Hamlet starring Richard Burton, a version that (one) contained “the whole thing” and (two) was genuinely a filmed version of a dress rehearsal of a stage performance. In the case of Burton’s, the excessively theatric nature of his vocals, his gestures etc. was because it was a theatric rendering. This version, though, I’d say was more for someone already familiar with Hamlet and specifically thinking to watch it as a play rather than a piece of cinema.

A kind of middle ground was the version starring Kevin Kline—a stage performance, for the most part, but less like Burton’s, more in the style of the Schlöndorff film of Death of a Salesman—a kind of mix of cinema and stage with nothing leaps-and-bounds impressive about it. Either way, I’d say, push-come-to-shove Scott does the better and more interesting rendition of the gloomy Dane if the choice were between two overall lackluster renderings of Hamlet as a whole.

The customer would notice and—out of morbid curiosity if nothing else—pick up the box of the version starring Ethan Hawke. The point I’d have to allow in favor of that version was that while (like Branagh’s but more drastically) it took pride in its “changing the time and place” of the story, it at least had the decency to know it was an abysmal waste of time, not in the least bit interested in Hamlet, but only in its own postmodern contempo-faux-avant slant. It has the additional bonus of not only being a freeform hack job of the basic play script, but gleefully made the artistic decision to not only “leave out lines” but to one-up that with having actors speak the lines that do remain incorrectly, showboating (I surmise) a self-conscious hipster philosophy that “people don’t understand Shakespeare anyway, so no need to even have our actors say the words he actually wrote” and to, in fact (as in key moments like the “to be or not to be” soliloquy) literally say the opposite of them, at times.

***

At this point, I would begin extolling the virtues of Zeffirelli’s film, starting with the fact that the director and screenwriter decided, yes, to trim the script, but to do so in a way that would consciously reshape it as a pinpointed exploration of single thread of Hamlet’s interior strife without need to counterpoint or juxtapose. I’d say a flaw it did have was not utilizing the Laertes balance to the effect it could have, even considering this reduction, but I’d further that the director did seem to be conscientiously treating the piece as more pointedly existential than Shakespeare’s theatre treatment would readily have allowed—all the deletions, slight reshuffles etc. served one exact purpose, none of them willy-nilly. I’d add in to this the fact that the camera is utilized to make words meant to be private be actually whispered (naturalistically) and (again, naturalistically) to let subtleties in facial expression convey and carry bare emotion, to have moments between characters that had words on stage but could be reduced to slight posture changes on film do just that, to have moments that would naturally be simultaneous be so rather than split between two self-standing moments of dialogue etc. And I’d finish with just a general expression of my lusty enthusiasm for every performers rendition of their character—each an individual revelation, as though the film is, indeed, about them all (perhaps calling out as especially spectacular Alan Bates as Claudius and expressing my own ugly desires toward Glenn Close).

The customer would more or less be nodding through all of this and would around now interrupt me as they turned over the box and noted “This is over two hours long?”

“Yeah,” I’d say, taking the win I knew was coming, though wishing it were based on something more meritorious, “it’s about two hours shorter than the Branagh.”

And the customer would ask a few other questions such as “So Ethan Hawke isn’t even worth it?” or “But Billy Crystal is probably good in Branagh’s though, right?” and then would pause, then nod solidly and decisive, saying that “Well, if you say the Gibson version is the best, the Gibson version is what I’ll take.”

Technically, I’d said the ‘Zeffirelli version,’ but I’d not point that out to the customer, instead just give a power handshake or a high-five and walk them to the register. No need to be a dick about things, after all.

***

NOTE: I admit I never had the option of addressing the David Tenant version, but were I to have I could only in good conscience have recommended it, if at all, on the strength that Patrick Stewart delivers such a thoughtful, fresh, and human interpretation of his character—so much so I honestly would have preferred the film be called Claudius. As to the Lawrence Olivier version, no store I worked in carried it, but even if they had I’d (somewhat blasphemously) have to had recommend against it for its egregious use of voiceover and its very thoughtless rendition of Ophelia.

***

Pablo D’Stair is a novelist, essayist, and interviewer. Co-founder of the art house press KUBOA, he is also a regular contributor to the Montage: Cultural Paradigm (Sri Lanka). His book Four Self-Interviews About Cinema: the short films of director Norman Reedus will be re-releasing October, 2012 through Serenity House Publishing, International.

1st October 2012
Experiencing Directors Jo Won-hee-I & Kim Sang-hwa’s Desire To Kill

“Fox on clocks on bricks and blocks

Bricks and blocks on Knox on box”

Experiencing directors Jo Won-hee-I and Kim Sang-hwa’s Desire To Kill

by Pablo D’Stair

These days, it is a rarity for me to encounter a film without having heard or seen something about it—either who is starring, directing, some synopsis, still image, blurb, peripheral mention—which to whatever degree colors the experience of my first viewing. I purposefully say ‘colors’, because it is not usually a bad thing at all and certainly in no way serves to ‘inform’ or ‘control’ the direction of my response, one way or the other.

In the case of Desire To Kill (aka Enemy at the Dead End) I thought I had the opportunity to have a pristine encounter with cinema—a screener disc, imageless, no idea the genre, the nation of origin, not a thing, I even started the disc without looking at the menu screen.

But before the film proper, the director appeared to give a kind of freeform introduction (more to say how happy he was at the distribution of the film than anything else) and in this introduction he explains he meant for the film to be funny and hoped the audience would laugh aloud at times.

This just a little bit in mind and something I would rather not have heard, the film began.

Quickly it became apparent that if Desire To Kill was meant to be funny, it was meant to be this darkly, darkly so.

A bedraggled, hopeless looking man, semi-comatose in a vague hospital explains in voiceover (or, to me, in subtitles, the film’s language Korean) that it has slowly occurred to him what he wants and what he wants is to kill a man—images of our character (Min-ho) being wheeled in a chair interlace with images of blood on the wall interlace with images of his electroshock treatment, his bloodshot eyes, his desperation at something unnamed—and that slowly he has come to remember what man he wants to kill and to realize that, in fact, he is that man.

He attempts to throw himself from a cliff but is rescued.

Title card.

So, fine. Nice stuff, well photographed, already marvelously performed (I imagine most directors would kill to work with actors with the exquisitely expressive faces of the entire cast of this film) but decidedly nothing I hadn’t seen before.

Sighing at the idea of my pristine experience of cinema being ruined just because of my own film watching history, I relaxed into a kind of smarty-pants huff as the thing continued.

***

Then—finger snap—nothing I have ever seen before. Then—slap—all at once I am being simultaneously choked out and stroked off by cinema at its most simple, profound, abstract and mesmeric.

Min-ho is now painted as having suffered a stroke, as having been confined perhaps for weeks perhaps for decades in this hospital room. His attempted suicide is patiently admonished by his care nurse who seems sympathetic to him yet baffled that he would give up on life when at any moment he might recover.

Min-ho attempts to kill himself, again—again, again, again—each time with increasing ingenuity, with increasing need. And it should be pointed out that this ingenuity, this dogged determination is no mean feat for a fellow whose mobility is limited to, weakly, his left arm and the occasional exhausting head jiggle.

After each attempt he is saved, resuscitated, thwarted, left interminably alive.

I am given no reason for this as I sit watching, no point to his actions. I feel an absurd topsy-turvy of hope pumped into me—hope that he will succeed, that he will achieve this desire I am made to believe is earnest, moved to intrinsically and intimately understand.

I need him to die. And I feel his disgust and frustration when the patient in the bed beside him quietly, suddenly, effortlessly expires.

And then this bed is filled by the survivor of a hit and run accident, a man almost a vegetable, alive only due to the administerings of a miraculously skilled (and unseen throughout the film, as much as her name is made an almost omnipresent force) neurosurgeon.

On the arm of this new patient (Sang-up) Min-ho’s blood-red, side turned eyes catch a glimpse of a tattoo and this tattoo leads him to a realization—this is the man he wants to kill, this is the man he has wanted to kill for whatever impossibly unnamed amount of time.

I sit watching, wanting to align the film to Becket, to Sartre, to Topor—but no it is nothing like that. I want to say it is A Pure Formality only darker, that it is Identity only more vicious, more precise, want to call it Rear Window crossbred with Birth.

But it is altogether something else.

Sang-up becomes less feeble but has no memory and is so fragile, Min-ho overhears, that the merest tap to his injured head would mean death.

So Min-ho finds a way to make that head get tapped—finds countless ways, desperate, sudden, providential, hard fought, finds ways ingenious, impossible to knock Sang-up’s head again and again, night after night (and when these methods fail, he finds methods absolutely amoral to kill the man, such as having a visiting child pour packet after packet of jelly into his sleeping mouth) insane and transfixing methods—methods I truly, truly want to succeed.

But each morning after passing out from his efforts with a fulfilled grin on his face, Min-ho wakes to a pleasant greeting from the man who should be dead, the man who recovers more and more for each time he is bludgeoned.

Each morning Sang-Up’s personality emerges, each day his memory returns, bit by bit—until he realizes that Min-ho is the man he has been looking for his whole life, the man who murdered the woman he loves, the man he wants to kill.

I sit in my chair struck dumb, riveted past reason—I sit watching a film about two men, neither of whom can move, laying, plotting each other’s murder, each accusing the other of the same crime. I sit watching the most violently intense, imperative, spellbinding bit of cinematic suspense, both psychological and physical, I have seen in a decade.

Sang-up killed the woman.

Min-ho killed the woman.

They attack each other, gain the upper hand, nearly die, recover.

It is a song of nameless need and torment—a communicable insanity, as one doctor surmises, and an insanity I could feel in my helpless insides as I wondered why why why with each passing frame I so very much wanted Min-ho, despite everything (despite each passing trick of lost cohesion) to ‘win’.

In my chair, my hand over my mouth, I whisper the words ‘This is motherfucking genius’.

***

Then—a blink—I have seen it all before.

And I admit to the hard fist down my gut of disappointment when, after one of the most unnerving, cathartic and flat out beautifully brutal struggles I can recall witnessing in a film (the two patients, left briefly unattended, like animals crawl on the floor finding ways to claw, bludgeon, bite, choke each other, suddenly stand only to fall, writhe in an endless, relentless, horrific howl of almost too simplistic cinematic anguish) I am being given reasons.

Reasons. Explanations. Revelations.

I am having things given to me and these things are taking things away.

I am having the perfection of this precise abstraction, of my personal—almost vital—knowledge of the characters and their dilemmas throttled out of me.

Back story.

Reasons.

Reasons.

The film is snatched away from the realm of my interior and tethered hard to some fictive other world I could not give a damn about.

I feel, sitting in my chair, almost assaulted.

Now, this is something I have seen many times, in itself, this need for a film to fulfill some pointless and rhetorical deal with the general audience. It is something maybe I should have expected, yes, and it is, certainly, something I wish to God had not happened here.

To me, the last ten minutes of Desire To Kill is the film apologizing to me when the apology itself is the insult, it is the film telling me ‘It’s alright, I wasn’t wasting your time with tricks. No, no,’ the film is saying, ‘this isn’t about you, don’t take it so personal.’

But I want to take it personal. I want my hand clamped back over my mouth and my whispered, unholy awe.

I want the horrible miracle that was.

***

Pablo D’Stair is a novelist, essayist, and interviewer. Co-founder of the art house press KUBOA, he is also a regular contributor to the Montage: Cultural Paradigm (Sri Lanka). His book Four Self-Interviews About Cinema: the short films of director Norman Reedus will be re-releasing October, 2012 through Serenity House Publishing, International.

29th September 2012
The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse – DVD Review

In 1922 Fritz Lang released the 4 hour epic Dr. Mabuse – The Gambler. It told the story of the criminal mastermind Dr. Mabuse controlling the gambling scene in Berlin and his use of psychology and disguises when playing opponents at the tables himself. It’s worth a watch itself (split into more digestible two parts) so I won’t go in to much detail over the plot.

Released eleven years later, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse shows Mabuse’s diabolical legacy as a crime wave sweeps the city. Robberies and assassinations show all the ingenious characteristics of the Mabuse’s fiendish mind. Investigating is the Harry Secombe-like Inspector Lohann (Otto Wernicke) who finds Mabuse locked away in an asylum, mad-eyed and furiously scribbling out evil plans. Despite being confined Mabuse’s schemes are being enacted to the letter. His psychiatrist Professor Baum (Oscar Beregi, Sr.) seems to hold some answers to this.

As the investigation continues we see Mabuse gang member Kent (Gustav Diesel – fantastic name) torn between a financially rewarding world of crime and his love for Lilli. Deciding to inform the police of the the devilish plot Kent and Lilli are thrown into a nightmarish situation.

Arguably being most remembered for the sci-fi masterwork Metropolis it’s easy to forget that Fritz Lang spent a large part of his cinema dealing with the criminal world. Often giving equal screen time to those on either side of the law he felt like one of the first directors to properly show the villains at work, even providing them with a motive to their crimes. In the case of ‘Testament’ the Lang gives us Kent. A criminal who we are led to feel sorry for, even look on as a hero character because of his conflicted morals and love for his new girlfriend. It’s refreshing to see in a film from 1933 this sort of moral dilemma as opposed to straight forward black-hatted villains. That being said though we do have plenty of that from the other crazed criminals following Mabuse’s plans. Speaking of which Dr. Mabuse in this film appears more as a shadowy cameo villain. Save for some surprisingly creepy hallucination sequences Mabuse remains silent throughout. His mad eyes and scribbling provided the closest to dialogue. Rather than making another film about Dr. Mabuse’s dastardly shenanigans Lang goes one further. Demonstrating his strengthening power the Doctor is able to control his psychiatrists mind into acting as his proxy, providing him with instructions in ghost-like form. It’s a technique of storytelling that would be likely found in a horror film these days, but its works effectively in creating a creepy atmosphere in this crime story – Lang accomplished the same in his previous film M.

Whilst not as technically interesting as Metropolis, Testament showcases Lang’s visual flare when called upon. The gridlocked traffic assassination is intricately staged and the effects work on Mabuse’s ghostly aberration are haunting even by todays standards.

It’s also worth mentioning Otto Wernicke’s performance as our hero Inspector. World weary and to the point he seems like an early template for the brazen cops will still see in cinema today. Sporting the same confidence and swagger that Denzel Washington used in Training Day, it’s hard not to cheer inside when he walks up to a room of gun shooting gangsters and tells them to stop such silliness.

Even with all the crime shows on TV (for the past thirty years) and also seeming to provide the plot for Police Academy 6: City Under Siege, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse holds up as a jewell in the crown of 1930s crime cinema.

The newly released Master’s of Cinema Series DVD features a very insightful commentary. Truthfully I didn’t listen to it all but it was very interesting up until I turned it off.

27th September 2012
Catfish (2010)

Is this love, reality, fantasy, or a lie?

A documentary style film directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman focuses on Yaniv Schulman (Nev) and his online relationship with Abby a child artist who sends Nev a painting of one of his first published photographs. It all starts with a click and a Facebook request before Nev, Henry and Ariel are wrapped up in not only Abby’s online world but have also been introduced to her mother Angela, Angela’s husband Vince, and Abby’s half sister Megan.

Nev also strikes up a close relationship with Megan, a relationship that is via email, postcard, phone, text message and Facebook but never in person. This is because Megan is from Gladstone, Michigan not exactly a train ride from Nev’s home of New York City. It makes for an unconventional relationship he receives many packages from the family mostly art from Abby who now has her work showing in gallery’s he always calls to thank them and the relationship with Megan also grows into more than simply an online friendship.

We see Nev interact online with Megan’s family and friends she is a keen singer posting songs on Facebook which of course you can like and comment on. When Nev, Henry and Ariel look up one of the songs they discover all it not as it seems is Megan really singing these songs or simply posting someone else’s music? When confronted she simply says they are meant to sound alike as they are covers, not accepting her explanation they decide the only way they will find out the true is if they visit Megan in Gladstone and plan a surprise trip to find out the truth. Will it really be love at first sight or have they caught Megan in a lie that is only just unravelling? When they arrive at Megan’s home in the middle of the night they decide to just scope out the house first when they find no one is home and the house looks abandoned they wonder are they getting themselves in deeper then they expected, why did Megan say she lived there, why would she lie. The postcards Nev has sent are in the postbox is someone simply driving to the middle of nowhere to pick them up? They have so many questions regarding the family and Megan the only way they can get the answers they require is to pay an unexpected visit to Angela and the rest of the family.

Cue the unexpected finale meeting Angela and Abby all becomes apparent to Nev, Henry and Ariel as the web unfolds and we find out everything about the family and who Megan really is! This is a film with unexpected turns that keeps you guessing prepare to be reeled in by Catfish and intrigued by the ultimate deception sit back and watch the unravelling and unsettling labyrinth of lies.

A film that really is a product of our generation and begs the question is anyone really who we think they are?

“There are those people who are catfish in life. And they keep you on your toes, they keep you guessin’ they keep you thinkin’ they keep you fresh. And I thank god for the catfish, because we would be dull and boring if we didn’t have somebody nipping at our fin.”

26th September 2012