Ever Seen It: Coma (1978)

     Many people may be able to recognize his name, but many fewer are actually able to give an example of his work. Michael Crichton, author of such books as Jurassic Park, Sphere, Congo, Disclosure, and Timeline (to name a few), is known even less for his directorship. Director of the films Westworld (1973), The Great Train Robbery (1979), and Looker (1981) Crichton's slew of films may not be the most renowned, but are decent nonetheless. Coma, his 1978 adaptation of the book of the same name by Robin Cook, is definitely in the style of his other contributions to the world of cinema.
     Young doctor Susan Wheeler's best friend comes out of surgery in a coma. Nothing overly suspiscious about this, save for the fact that it was a routine surgery that went off with nothing more than a slight loss of blood pressure in the patient. Susan believes it to be more than just a mistake and decides to search deeper into the issue to determine the true reason behind the coma. What she discovers is shocking and horrid, and the worst part is: nobody believes her.
     At least, it is supposed to be shocking and horrid... unfortunately, this high-suspense action/drama is riddled with sidetracks and elongated chase sequences that provide the audience with little excitement. Where the true heart of the film lies within the shock received from paranoia, the chase sequences last too long. The audience is provided with a respite from pure paranoia and given the opportunity to prove the conspiracies, but then they are forced to watch poor Susan get chased for over ten minutes.
     The film comes down to the last fifteen minutes of the story, finally providing the audience with answers they most likely guessed after the first fifteen, but with at least one forgiving and relieving detail (that I won't discuss here due to its spoileristic qualities).  All-in-all, Chrichton's film is a bit bland, a bit predictable, but still intriguing. The acting, although decent, can be as bland as the plot of the story, especially from the supporting actors and extras.

Snooping in the O.R. by Vincent Canby

Shotgun Stories (2007)

I required a much-anticipated second viewing before fully addressing this film with more depth than a sentence or two. To my satisfaction, this occasion outmatched its predecessor and firmly solidified the film as one of my favorites. And it could be for its simplicity, the static camera and location filming, or it could be for its complexity, the social implications of moral and personal motivations, but is probably for their fusion.

In a small Arkansas town, the death of a father refuels hatred between seven sons. The two sets of half brothers, one set estranged from their mother, one encasing her, were raised to hate the other. And in a cold yet decidedly personal conflagration of emotion the sides are forever damaged. Michael Shannon, plays Son, who with his younger brothers Boy and Guy, carve out a meek existence in a sedated and un-stimulating small town. With the death of their father, and words exchanged at his funeral, their brotherly rivals demand that the feud end. If the threat wasn't clear enough, blood will have to be spilled to do so.

The camera in this film is an observant bystander; it could almost act as another unseen sibling. It watches the interactions with formal documentation, identifying the players involved and letting their actions determine outcomes. There is nothing flashy in the delivery; even the title could be considered a misnomer by suggesting a prevalence of shotguns. The trailer itself is much more action oriented than the film remains, although for a trailer there is still very little. The film relies on a brooding and unrelenting anger, a deep seeded and growing bond of hatred. Nichol’s film is so stylistically understated that it could easily be confused with something drab and unrewarding. Rather, its execution becomes flawless, not relying on commercial tactics to build its much more developed climax.

For a film about family, it is truly scary. At the same time, its devotion, for a lack of a better word, is inspiring. The rounded characters do not exist as cut outs of small town yokels, but exist in a much more fully formed state than much of what we see today. It is difficult not to notice the aggression fermenting under the mellow, if stern, facades. A town, so depressed and uninspiring, has bred people whose complexity and intensity make up for their un-motivating surroundings. We are not to be distracted by an abundance of environmental stimulators with such a precarious status of social networks.

Shotgun Stories is a fascinating portrait of small town life. It is disarming and alarming in its content and discerning and concerning in its depth. The film broods over anger and the perpetuation of rage. And it does not, for one minute, suggest that the world is an un-navigable or inhospitable place to be.

The Last Station (2009)

I could have told you absolutely nothing about the life and death of Russian writer Leo Tolstoy. For that matter, I could not have claimed to care. Yet Hoffman’s film, which deals precisely with the end of days for Russia first iconic writer, casts aside any prior knowledge or interest in the man. The film cares not for its viewer’s personal exposure to the writer and manages to make the film fascinating for both the educated and ignorant alike.

Towards the end of his life, appearing much like Charles Darwin, Tolstoy took to the woods. His commune, a populated and strict society, seems by today’s standards as another attempt at fair and equal living for all involved. Yet Tolstoy himself admits to not being a very good Tolstoyan, proof that an idea can be taken from its creator and mutated into something unrecognizable. The fact that he cared not makes his aged character more intriguing. His final days saw him turn his entire work over to the public against the pleading of his wife. (This constitutes the majority of the narrative.)

The strongest suite of the film, for someone unfamiliar with its historical accuracy, is (this feels so film school) the mise-en-scene. The costumes range from simple to rich, dirty to clean, lively to dull. The sets are beautifully furnished with aged and endured artifacts, each could certainly tell a story of its own. The vast and lush countryside meld into the warm and inviting forest that takes on an almost fairy tale perfection. Warm yellows, calm off-whites, and vivid greens dominate the film. Every environment, whether lit by flickering candles or filtering sunrays, is captured with such rich and inviting cinematography that the film ultimately becomes a foremost example of naturalist escapist fare. It would appear impossible not to die in peace when surrounded by such sights.

The Last Station is not a film I would have sought out for its content. Yet in its conclusion, it is hard not to want more of the musically heightened emotions, enchanting photography, and thought provoking themes of death and family. For someone so young, it is yet another point of support for my anticipation of old age. And for someone so surrounded by film, it is a refreshing and exciting discovery far from the expected and customary areas of exploration.

Something Spectacular?

     Jame's Cameron's Avatar (2009) is no doubt a spectacle. The people have flocked to witness the vast new world of Pandora, and the enchanting creatures that inhabit it. There are, of course other films in cinema's history that have more to offer visually than dramatically or intellectually, and it is my opinion that Tim Burton's latest film Alice in Wonderland fits this bill.
     Despite the fact that it's based on a beloved story with characters and lines as classic as any other book, this adaptation didn't wow me. Although I cannot speak on the subject of whether it was a decent adaptation or not, seeing as how I haven't read the books, nor recall watching the full 1951 animation, I can speak on about the film as a unique entity.
     The emphasis, it would appear, was on the spectacle, elaborating sequences of jungle trudges and shape shifting, rather than focusing on the film's main character Alice. As New York Times critic Manohla Dargis points out, Alice seems to be a mindless wanderer through the Underworld, as much a visitor to the story as the audience. But I find it rather difficult to identify with a character who neither knows who she is, nor has a major role in figuring it out. She is a character who undergoes changes that are merely shallow, vapid ones, and we never truly get to see under the surface.

     No, I'm afraid we are forced instead to stare at the CG version of Underworld. In fact, I'm not sure I can consider this film any more of a live-action film as I do Avatar. Everything was animated, from the Red Queen's sidekick to the earth Alice walks on, to Alice herself (for portions of the film). I found myself disappointed in the amount of CG necessary, and in the verisimilitude of the world. I would much rather have seen constructed sets with a moderate amount of amazing CG, than a moderate amount of reality mixed into an unsatisfying world of CG.
      So, unfortunately, I cannot say that the main focus of the film, the spectacle, was up to my standards, and therefore the film was not up to my standards. It was, however, a delightful film full of quaint characters, even if it was rather dull. It seemed to move quickly, and at an hour and forty eight minutes running time, it was not a rather large waste of my time. Don't let me discourage you though, there were plenty of people at the theater who seemed to enjoy and appreciate Alice in Wonderland.


What's A Nice Girl Doing In This Hole? by Manohla Dargis


Alice In Wonderland film website

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Drag Me to Hell (2009)

It’s very hard not to read this film as a parody. Yet nowhere outside the film’s title is there anything to suggest that this isn’t a horror film that takes itself seriously. But, if we can look to the ultimate entry in Raimi’s Evil Dead trilogy, we see the stage for supernatural horror comedy had been set years before.

Drag Me to Hell moves to the modern context and switches to a female protagonist vying for a promotion at her trivial bank job. Her competition and boss, both male, are obtrusively ignorant and traditionally one-dimensional. Even her boyfriend, whose presence is interjected purely for narrative continuity, cannot even manage a convincing sympathy or concern for his girlfriends newly acquired curse. Per usual, then, the woman because the target for torture, a good deal of which manages to find its way into her mouth. Here is a short and incomplete list: a fly, mealworms, vomit, blood, handkerchief, and eyeballs. This film does manage to take extreme advantage of propelling disgusting content onto the face of its doomed heroine. Appropriately, the visceral and repulsive materials mark a sharp contrast to the neatly tidy and not unattractive actress whose screams come at almost consistent intervals throughout the entirety of the movie.

The opening titles suggest a classic horror film of decades past. Yet the clean cinematography marks a sharp contrast to the grainy (read: low budget) splatter fests of yesteryear. Throw in the distracting amounts of cheesy computer effects that make their presence known minutes into the film and it is marked as a modern piece of filmmaking. Thus it is hard to see Raimi’s film as anything but a gross exaggeration of the jaw-dropping horror fans flock to see. No one will question why the anvil was hanging on a pulley when the rope is then cut with an ice-skate and gravity forces the old gypsy’s eyes out of her head and onto the girl’s face.

Of course, I’d rather step down from my hypercritical pedestal for a moment and commend the film for the consistency with which it delivers scare tactics, a fact that certainly doesn't refute my preferred reading of the film. If I, or anyone, had a nickel for every time something popped out with intent to scare then we would have dollars, dollars. The film manages to take all these moments, many absurd, none scary, and keep the audience tense and expectant for much of the running time. The fact that on numerous occasions they involve vomitous, explosive bodily fluids and audibly enhanced grotesquery makes their infusion often satisfying. The film was not that entertaining, but for many (read: everyone I talked to) it was a successful and cinematically rewarding experience.

Short Films

No needless exposition from your humble narrator, just short films.

Weekend Retreat

Hercules is a legendary character regardless of who plays him. Clint Eastwood is legendary regardless of who he plays (or directs). It is here that the connections between Don Siegel’s Escape from Alcatraz and Pietro Francisci’s Hercules Unchained end. Rather, there is not really any connection between the 1979 prison break film and the MST3K treatment of the Italian sword and sandal film made 20 years earlier.

Based on J. Campbell Bruce’s book of the same name, the story needs little explaining aside from the title. The non-fiction story ends with a degree of ambiguity as to whether or not the escape was successful. The real men’s bodies were never found. Eastwood’s athletic figure figured prominently in both his casting and his un-simulated stunt work during the escape. Most of the movie is actually the preparation for what would be a daring and exciting break for freedom.

The story itself is truly fascinating and the movie does pretty well creating the rivalry between prisoner and guard. The prisoners, despite having failed at some point, are often intelligent, talented, and observant to every potentially helpful detail. What seems ironic is that the only reason for escape is the desire to do something with all that time. Yet it is precisely that time that is needed to perfect a means to escape. The fact that Alcatraz is the most infamous prison ever makes both the need to escape and its success more captivating.

On the other hand we have muscle-bound Hercules traveling the countryside until he meets someone a little bit larger and must fight him, ultimately throwing him into the sea. This time, Hercules drinks from the Fountain of Forgetfulness and is inadvertently lives with some gaudily beautiful princess. There he is forced to live the life of leisure with his own slave boy who tries to convince him he is actually the great Hercules. Fortunately, the film fell into the hands of the MST3K guys who made it slightly more bearable. With Hercules Versus the Moon Men they did not. This film does not end with a giant sandstorm. Rather, Hercules battles tigers and mercenaries with his giant chest and puts everything back in its place. The bad English dubbing doesn’t help one understand the story yet when Hercules takes to the Octagon, who cares?

I hate to say it, but I would like to see another take on the Alcatraz escape (No, not The Rock) film. If it refrained from being an adrenaline and action driven film the potential for a very psychological preparation/outwitting/escape is certainly there. If they never made another Hercules film I could probably die just fine.

Art on Demand.

Would modern cinema be able to function without the classifications of genre that have been established by a century of filmmaking? Would modern audiences be able to choose a film to see without understanding the categorical organization developed? Would filmmakers even be able to make similar films without an understanding of like-minded films that have come before? Of course, but this doesn't mean genre is irrelevant.

The most blatant purpose of genre is to reproduce a type of film that was successful. Casting aside the art vs. commodity argument for a minute, commercial filmmaking is a business. The American film industry has done a rather amazing job at making it a profitable business at that. Yet their ability to identify the type of films that kept people coming back would not be possible without understanding the idea of genre. On the one hand, the audience likes a certain story and wants to see it again. Thus the proliferation of genre films, be it gangster, western, melodrama, ensures that audiences will find similar films. At the same time, keeping in mind the word ‘similar,’ the viewers do not (exceptions, of course, exist) want the exact same film a second time around. Thus we get what has come to be called the standardization/differentiation dialectic.

What is interesting is that genre films propagate their own existence. Creating films of similar style/theme is rationalized by their success in the box office. Like stated, the film will then need to differentiate itself from the competition by offering something that audiences have not seen in this particular genre. Naturally, this is not always achieved and the hoards of entries will fall into obscurity. Thus the downside of consciously creating what is wanted.

Mass production of films diluted the quality of existing films by increasing competition. We could easily blame our culture for insisting one cannot have too much of a good thing and applying the mindset to its arts and creative endeavors. The results can be a commercial compressed and dry film that offers nothing to the viewer but the same old story. It is not my intent to rant about the detrimental effects of commercial filmmaking, I rather like many a film of today. However, the nature of the genre film is both a blessing and a curse, something to look forward to or something to be weary of. It can feel like a prepackaged, assembly line product, yet one that is aimed at pleasing the largest amount of people possible.

Soviet artists Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid hired a professional polling company to find out the average person’s aesthetic preferences. The results were used to create paintings, country by country, of the most desired and least desired elements. Of course, the artists did it to comment on the commercial nature art has taken on while at the same time ‘selling out’ in a way be producing said pieces. The film industry, to a large degree, operates on this very same research. The most successful movies are the one that will get reproduced, serialized, re-released, and most advertised. But does the matter of size, the fact the movies can cost millions and paintings not so much, validate its system? If a painter only painted what people wanted, knowing it would make money, would they be selling out all the time? Would they even be creating art? Would this style of work make the product nothing more than a commodity for mass consumption? If that were the case, a large majority of this country’s films would fit the bill. More later.

Peter Jackson's Bad Taste (1987)

Every filmmaking machine has to be turned on at some point, perhaps before its output is of epic proportions. Such is the case with kiwi Peter Jackson and his string of splatter fest films through the late 80’s and early 90’s. This particular film is his first feature, taking four years to produce, and was filmed without sync sound, a finished script, actresses, or real guns.

The finished film is almost textbook bad, if only moderately bad taste. Filmed only on weekends, the elements to be filmed had only come to mind in the previous week. This makes the film feel, and I will of course give it a lot of slack, a bit disjointed and at times episodic; one scene to the next is joined by blurred connections. But all this hardly matter in relation to the on-screen events and shear audacity of the filmmaker and his devoted crew.

My favorite part is when a guy cuts a hole in the floor with a chainsaw and dives through it onto an alien and cuts his way through the top of the alien’s head and out the bottom, wiggling his way to the floor as his feet disappear through the alien’s mutilated face. And this is only one of the countless examples of gratuitously ingenious and comically headshaking carnage dished out on the invading aliens whose only goal is the strip humans of their fat and ship the rest of the meat back to the home planet in cardboard boxes. Of course, for much of the movies the aliens take on human form and stumble through the New Zealand landscape in search of humans to eat.

Bad Taste, despite it consistently creative disemboweling endeavors, becomes a bit taxing to view. All manner of weaponry reap harvest on the cranium and trails of blood and guts must have polka-dotted the entire island. The novice construction, and obvious and confirmed lack of direction, make the narrative (albeit just an excuse for some splatter effects) unbearable and purposefully laughable. This film, besides being a creative stepping-stone and experiment, is basically an excuse to kill aliens in ways that have always just been talked about. I will not use the term endearing, but there is something quaint about this film having been spawned by the peaceful kiwi country and helmed by a man whose fame comes from films that bear little resemblance to this one.