Family plot
The Visit is easily M. Night Shyamalan's best recent feature (Anyone out there willing to speak up for The Last Airbender? Which I prefer over James Cameron's latest epic of roughly the same title...but that's more a measure of how much I dislike Cameron's work than of how much I like Shyamalan's). A question still hangs over the movie though: is it any good?
In tribute to Setsuko Hara 1920 - 2015
Forgotten masterpiece
Akira Kurosawa's 1951 film Hakuchi (The Idiot), his adaptation of Dostoevsky's novel, is pretty much forgotten now, or is rarely mentioned when talking about the filmmaker or his masterworks. The work is seriously flawed--about a hundred minutes were chopped off before the film was released, and you can see Kurosawa trying to make up for this with lengthy expository titles and voiceover narrations, trying to explain the characters' complex relationships in a few minutes of screen time. Critics who do get past the rushed, awkward beginning note the film's literalness, its director's apparent need to get as much of the novel as possible up on the big screen.
Horrorshow
The horror genre is experiencing some kind of renaissance, interesting premises hurled at our faces right left fore aft, with varying degrees of success. Leo Gabriadze's Unfriended (2015) had a brilliant idea--tell its story entirely through a computer's many popup screens--but dissolves quickly in a sea of tired cliches, of the 'found footage' variety. Jennifer Kent's The Babadook (2014) starts out strong as a harrowing portrait of a single mother and her troubled child, but doesn't seem to know how to direct its focus properly (who's in danger, who's the danger: mother or child?). Genre outlier David Robert Mitchell's It Follows takes its cue from John Carpenter's gliding-camera sense of menace to record the constant approach of a vengeful shape-changing wraith, only to stage a silly swimming pool climax that undercuts much of what went before (to its credit the victimized teenagers are fascinating fatalists--if anyone can survive or even thrive under such circumstances they probably would).
Best of the lot is relative old-timer M. Night Shyamalan's The Visit, who uses the aforementioned found-footage cliches--done with a more stylish camera than is standard for the genre--to tell the touching story of a fragmented family's attempt to pull together. The plot's all kinds of nonsense--if you look too closely it immediately falls apart--but the movie's emotional thread, at least, feels strong.
Far
'nuff
Thomas
Vinterberg's adaptation
of Thomas Hardy's first real success is, well, middling fair. The
producers must have thought: "If we're doing a smart
stylish update of a staid overfamiliar English novel we need a Dogme
95
filmmaker to shake things up literally (Vinterberg is fond of the
handheld shot) and figuratively (Vinterberg's The
Celebration
involved incest while The
Hunt told the story of a man accused of child abuse)." Vinterberg's not a bad
choice--he has the grave, gravid approach to storytelling that
Hardy seems to demand, with the kind of unflinching eye willing to
capture the novel's more disturbing nuances.
For Veteran's Day, my short piece on a film about the Pacific War:
Hell on earth
Gerardo De Leon and Eddie Romero's Intramuros
(The Walls of Hell, 1964), a fairly big-budgeted (for a Filipino production; as far as Hollywood goes it's in the B movie range) war epic set inside
the actual Intramuros, outlines the story of how Japanese
soldiers made a suicidal last stand within the walled city during the
final days of the Second World War. Perhaps not that
suicidal--Intramuros was designed and built to act like a massive
city-sized fortress, with walls of solid rock twenty feet thick; as
one American officer so vividly describes it, they hurled a hundred
thousand shells against those walls, and still haven't breached them.
Spirited away
Word has it this latest Bond flick doesn't live up to the promise of the previous, better-regarded installment; that in fact this is the worst Bond movie in thirty years. Word-of-mouth like that will make you walk into a theater with head held low, in case the sheer awfulness onscreen catches you full in the face.
Well paddle my butt cheeks with a brass carpet cleaner--tain't bad at all.
The
hired assassin's trade
Denis Villeneuve's latest work begins with an FBI
raid to rescue what are supposed to be drug hostages in an empty
house in Chandler, Arizona; the raid ends with two officers dead, and
the discovery of the mutilated corpses of men and women, wrapped in
plastic, sealed up in the walls--a grim and silent reminder to
Agent Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) that war is being waged with
unprecedented violence but elsewhere. These are just detritus,
leftovers from past battles.
