The Canal

So...I'm not crazy about The Canal. I really want to stick to writing about movies I like as much as I can, even if I have issues with them, because, well, I don't want to be a dick. Every movie is someone's favorite movie and I'd never want to try to talk someone out of loving something. Also, I'm not even remotely a critic and I feel no responsibility to write about anything unless I want to. So there.

But The Canal a) does a a lot right and b) it's faults are interesting enough to warrant a discussion. Look, the movie is crazy well directed. And well acted. The issues are all in the script, and I think they mostly center around lack of characterization. The movie is supposed to be about David's (Rupert Evans) descent into madness after the death of his cheating wife, maybe or maybe not prompted by a ghost. But we never really see him act, you know, happy or like a well-adjusted human being, so it doesn't feel like that much of a descent.

I mean, the only thing we know about him is that he likes Cat People. We don't even know for sure which Cat People (though context clues point to the Val Lewton one. If you're interested). His entire character is: a grieving husband who might be going crazy. I don't know, I guess it's kind of a pet peeve of mine, but I have a hard time caring when a character's entire personality seems to exist solely for the story and everything we know them relates to plot. Does that makes sense? I need to feel like a character exists outside of the frame to get fully invested.

There's a moment fairly early on when David flings a folder of crime scene photographs at the door to his bedroom, not realizing that the live-in nanny he's hired to take care of his son is standing there. He hits her with the photos AND HE DOESN'T APOLOGIZE. I mean, okay, I get it, he's supposed to be totally out of it and consumed by grief, but if he's that weird that early on, it doesn't feel like there's a huge journey to go on.

The other thing that bugged me, the one that completely lost me, is really spoiler-y. So skip the next paragraph if you haven't seen the movie.

About, I don't know, maybe a week or two after the police dredge Claire's (Antonia Campbell Hughes) body from the canal, the detective shows up again and says that they found a hammer in the canal with David's fingerprints on it. I immediately stopped paying attention to the story because I was totally consumed with trying to figure out how/why they found this hammer. Did they keep dredging the canal? For, like, a week? For...fun? Maybe they were paid up on the dredger rental for another week, so why the hell not. And, okay, fine, but Claire's body showed no bruising, no signs of a struggle, much less evidence of being hit with a hammer. So...the hammer is weird. Suspicious, even. But I have no idea how it would constitute a reason to re-open the case. Does the detective just have nothing better to do? And that's what I was thinking about for the following ten minutes or so.



Like I said, the movie is incredibly well directed and some of the scary scenes are scary as shit. It just bums me out, because I feel like it wouldn't have taken that much work to make a much stronger movie – mostly, just give us some more first act. Let us see David and Claire happy, or at least happier, so we have a sense of what's been lost. Let David have interests and friends (more than one) so that his obsession is consuming his life rather than just seemingly taking up residence as the only thing in a fairly empty existence. Ugh. Sorry. I'm totally being a dick, which is exactly what I don't want to be. It just bums me out when a movie is ALMOST one of my favorites, but the shortcomings are so sever and specific that they ruin the whole damn thing for me instead. I don't know. Maybe you'll love it; plenty of people do!

Why I Think Kristy Is Kind Of The Shit

Kristy is on Netflix. You should go watch it, because it's awesome.

The short version: it's about a poor college student, Justine, who can't afford a flight home for the Thanksgiving break, so she stays on campus. She borrows her roommate's BMW to go get some groceries at a convenience store and, while there, she has a weird run-in with a woman named Violet who turns out to be part of some sort of vaguely Satanic cult. Violet and her three co-cult-members follow Justine back to her dorm and hunt her around campus.

It's a straightforward setup, and it's a straightforward movie. But the details are what make the movie, like, totally super cool, and to talk about them, I have to get into at least minor spoilers. The spoiler free version: I thought the writing, especially the character work, was incredibly smart and subtle. It's one of those movies where most of the background is revealed through subtext rather than text, which I suspect might be why a lot of people don't care for Kristy; if you're checking your phone or whatever and only catching the broad strokes of the movie, it will feel a lot more rote than it actually is.

Small spoilers ahead. You've been warned.

I've heard complaints that the whole cult element was undercooked and it's true that we never really get much background on them, but I kind of loved that: I got the impression that the religious aspect of the killing was just a loose framework which gave a bunch of sociopathic meth-heads with low self-esteem an excuse to go kill rich girls who, in their eyes, have everything they (the sociopathic meth-heads with low self-esteem) do not. Justine was ultimately targeted because she was driving a BMW. If she'd shown up to the gas station in a beat up, dirty 1994 Honda Civic (I miss my car), then Violet probably would have left her alone. And, worse, she offered to buy something for Violet. That rich bitch!

But anyway, that idea (religion as a loose framework entitling the devotees to do what they want) is really to me. True believers in a vast, underground, Satanic cult seems a little far-fetched to me, but people who just want to find a cause that will vindicate their desire to kill people who make them feel bad about themselves and then post videos of said murder online? That feels uncomfortably plausible.

I also loved the journey that Justine goes on. Yeah, it's from victim to fighter which, sure, not exactly plumbing the depths of originality. But she's interesting, smart and resourceful from the beginning and that goes pretty damn far for me. It's really only her level of aggressiveness that changes, and the shift is really specific. There's a moment toward the middle of the movie when something horrible happens in front of Justine and she starts repeating the word no, chanting it, unable to do anything else with the situation presented to her, and the word acts as a sort of pivot point. Her delivery of the word shifts with each repetition until she's gone from helpless to pissed. Now, she's going to kill these motherfuckers.

**End Spoilers**

It's also just really simply and beautifully shot and cut, which is something I've become increasingly appreciative of as I get older. I'm not terribly interested in flashy camera work any more and I really like directors that let the writing and the acting do a lot of the heavy lifting vis a vis storytelling.

Look, to some extent, the movie is what it is, but it kind of hits all of my sweet spots: deceptively complex villains, character development through action, a smart, capable protagonist and a slasher-y premise. Your mileage could certainly vary, but I really dig Kristy.

How BAM Can Take All of Your Money Next Month

This is a PSA: if you live in NYC, Brooklyn Academy of Music is doing a Michael Mann retrospective during the first half of February and following that with a series of witch movies during the second half, in honor of the release of The Witch, a festival darling from last year which is supposed to be absolutely terrifying. Do you know what this means!? Heat and Suspiria will both be screening on 35mm at BAM in February!

They're also screening pretty much everything Michael Mann's made, including his masterpiece, Miami Vice. Not kidding, I fucking love that movie.

Other notables: The Witch, The City of the Dead (not to be confused with Fulci's City of the Living Dead), Blair Witch, The Wicker Man, The Witches, The Craft, and Viy, the first horror movie from the Soviet Union. I haven't seen Viy, but from what I've heard, it was either a big influence on The Evil Dead or there were some very strange coincidences (e.g., the floating, Demon POV camera). Either way, I'm really curious.

Anyway, here are the links:

http://www.bam.org/film/2016/michael-mann

http://www.bam.org/film/2016/witches-brew

I'm super excited! Everyone should go!

Evil Dead (2013)

Okay, so, Evil Dead. The new one. I'm just gonna get this out of the way: I'm one of the many people for whom the original The Evil Dead is a landmark film. The Evil Dead trilogy served as a sort of gateway drug to horror for me, starting with Army of Darkness, then moving to Evil Dead II and finally, Evil Dead (i.e., moving incrementally from straight comedy to straight horror).

It's pretty much the same story as the original, but this time with the (kind of brilliant) inclusion of the idea that the main character (not Ash, which is so the right choice) is going through withdrawal, which allows the possessions and the violence to take on a thematic resonance that was never really in the original movie. More about that later, though.

First and foremost, the thing that drives me a little crazy watching the movie is, I wish the shot selection felt a little more precise. None of the shots are bad and I wasn't confused (which, really, in and of itself is sort of an accomplishment to be applauded), but I feel like, especially when dealing with violence, the more you can do in a single shot, the easier it is for the viewer to forget that they're watching a movie and get sucked into the story (which, by the way, see It Follows if you haven't; it's total proof of that concept, and it's SO GOOD!!!). So you start with that opening shot of the girl wandering through the woods. And it's a gorgeous shot. But then, you cut to maybe eight different angles of the girl walking when really, you need the wide shot of her walking and close-up of her hand dripping blood; in those two shots, you get all the information and all the mood building that you need, but I get the feeling that they wanted to use all of the coverage they had. Which, it's totally unfair for me to assign motive to people I've never met, it could be that they were trying to disorient the audience with all of that cutting, but I'm just saying it feels to me like maybe they could have shown a little more restraint in the editing room and they would have had a stronger sequence.

And that's kind of a consistent...not problem, really; it's more of a taste thing. I should maybe mention that I'm a huge fan of the Alan J. Pakula, Hal Ashby school of filmmaking: you compose your shot to tell as much of the story as possible as effectively as possible and then you cut when the scene demands it. And, whatever, that's just me, but in Evil Dead, it kind of feels like they covered everything as thoroughly as possible and figured it out in editing. Obviously, that's not literally true; it's a coherent and often elaborate movie which just doesn't really happen if you don't know what you're doing, but there is sort of this syndrome where it feels like you're getting one piece of information in each shot and then cutting to the next shot for one more piece of information, etc.

I'm also not crazy about the opening sequence from a storytelling standpoint, where we're introduced to the random possessed girl. I do get why it makes sense to have it there: it announces the tone of the movie (grisly, squirm inducing fun that's also, simultaneously, kind of sad) so that the rest of the movie is a little more emotionally palatable. If we just spent twenty-five minutes getting to know these characters and then they start getting killed in horrible ways, the movie would be really depressing. Somehow, opening with something that brutal and over the top softens the blow later. But shouldn't horror be depressing?¹ It's art as a way of processing death and disaster and I'm not sure that letting the audience walk away from the experience emotionally unscathed should necessarily be a priority of the artist. “But,” you could argue, “it's Evil Dead; seriously?” To which I would have to say, “touche.”

Okay, so Christ, I've written so much on the opening sequence; let's get into the movie. The biggest issue, I think, with Evil Dead is that we really, really don't get to know these characters. Which is probably why I'm having a hard time recalling details about any of them to write this. We learn what their relationships to one another are and, in a few cases, what their jobs are and that's...that's not really enough. Not that the original had a hell of a lot more character development (maybe even less, actually), but the original wasn't trying to, is the thing. The new Evil Dead has the hook that this whole thing is about getting clean. The point is that this version of Evil Dead tries to build characters that we care about because the crux of the movie isn't inventive filmmaking and relentless scares, like it was in the original, but the idea that these people care about one and other and no one can quite get their shit together to tell each other that. But if I don't care about them, then I'm not sure how much I can care about that emotional hurdle. 

 

The biggest issue for me, character wise (aside from not knowing why, exactly, Eric thought it was a good idea to read the words from the book out loud; a couple of lines of back story about his character could totally sell why he'd be so fixated, but as it is, it just seems like kind of a strange choice on his part; I mean, his friend is withdrawing from something really addictive in the next room and clearly, people had gone to a lot of effort to hide this book, so why is he pouring so much energy into it? Actually, reading that sentence back, I may have just answered my own question, so fuck me.), is the character of Natalie, David's girlfriend, who has, what, maybe three or four lines? I'm not trying to be dismissive; I might be exaggerating, but not by a lot. Which makes sense in the context of the story; she's sort of the interloper who doesn't have a place in the group dynamic, but it also makes it feel like the only reason she was written into the script was to bump the character count up to five. Which makes the kitchen self-amputation scene feel a little bit sadistic and gratuitous; watching someone I really don't know cut off her own arm with a turkey carver is...I'm not sure what I'm supposed to get out of that besides some really intense gore and a callback to Evil Dead II. There's something weirdly icky about watching someone I don't have an emotional connection to go through something that horrible and disgusting.

And, okay, last major criticism: the pacing is, for me, a little bit too relentless. You don't quite have the same lulls that you do in the original, so the suspense/eww factor becomes a little numbing. For me. 

I do have few more specific nits to pick, but I think I've covered the broad strokes pretty well. So what works: holy shit, the makeup effects. I can't believe this movie got an R rating; the split tongue alone would definitely get a low budget indie an NC-17; the use of CGI is sparing and smart; the aforementioned theme of addiction is really interesting; the Abomination sequence is great; the movie looks gorgeous; and the actors are clearly working their asses off, as is everyone else, and the performances are good enough to carry you (or at least, me) through some clunky dialogue and underdeveloped characters.

So let's get into the addiction thing. This more or less saves the movie for me: adding a heavy theme like that allows it to be more than just a collection of horrific set-pieces; it makes the whole thing about what we do to ourselves and others in the name of getting a substance and then in the name of getting clean. You often have to leave all of your friends behind when you leave a substance behind to avoid potential triggers, so, you know, killing off the people that care about you as you go through this intense journey kinda works thematically. 

And the Abomination sequence is just flat-out great. For me, that last twenty minutes is when the movie really kicks into high gear. You're clear of everything that happened in the original movie, so the remake is over², and once it starts raining blood, all bets are off. Plus, you know, confronting yourself as a demon totally plays back into that addiction/sobriety thing! So, you know, cool! Maybe just a little heavy-handed, but cool!

Look, I don't think Evil Dead is a bad movie, but I do think it could have been better than it was with more confident direction and about five more minutes of character development. And that's not exactly a knock on Fede Alvarez (the director); I mean it is, but look, as a first feature, it's pretty damn impressive and I'm sure he'll only get better and more confident as a director. But the gore. Oh my god, the gore!

1 And from the “I'm a fucking hypocrite” file, I should just go ahead and admit that I love the Hatchet movies, Tremors, Sleepaway Camp, Severance, Re-Animator, etc. - I'm a big fan of fun horror, but I'm not as big a fan of any of those movies as I am of, say, Don't Look Now or Kill List.

 

2Yeah, I know it's actually technically not a remake because of that post-credits thing, but it's a remake.

Ghosts of Mars

Let's talk about Ghosts of Mars. It more or less ended John Carpenter's career (at least until The Ward which I think is pretty underrated) and arguably for good reason: the movie feels like someone trying to make a John Carpenter movie and missing the mark by a pretty substantial margin.

I can find things to like about it because I love John Carpenter movies and siege movies, but there's way too much you need to forgive to enjoy it. Generally, I'm going to try to avoid discussing whether a movie is good or bad because there are plenty of places out there to get reviews and that's not really what I want to do with this blog. I want to talk about what does or doesn't work and why specifically and avoid the blatantly dismissing or accepting movies wholesale. Plus I want these blog entries to be conversation starters and there's really no faster way to end a conversation than to declare an absolute truth. 

But, yeah, okay, fine, with all those disclaimers out of the way, I'll just say it: Ghosts of Mars is a bad movie. I don't think that's a very controversial statement. But what makes it bad also makes it kind of fascinating (and really sad): it feels like you can reverse-engineer the studio notes that were handed to John Carpenter and seemingly ruined the movie's chances of even falling into the category of trashy awesome like They Live or Big Trouble in Little China. And here we go with the spoilers. You've been warned. Also, just want to make this absolutely clear: unless I cite a source (i.e. “Carpenter says on the commentary track...”), anything and everything I say about what went on behind the scenes is pure speculation and inference.

So, for starters, let's talk about the flashback structure: it's kind of terrible. On the commentary track, Carpenter claims that he used that as a device to try to make genre conventions feel a little more fresh. I hope he's covering the studio's ass by taking responsibility for that one because if he did in fact write the flashback structure into the screenplay before they started shooting, then there's no excuse for how fucking sloppily it's executed. 

First of all, straight up, it doesn't feel like it was shot with a flashback structure in mind. So it works like this if you haven't seen the movie in awhile: Natasha Henstridge is talking to the Mars board of, um, government or something. She tells them something, they stop her and ask what Jason Statham with hair was up to. She tells them she can only tell them what he reported to her. Then we hop back in time to when Jason Statham with hair walked away from Natasha Henstridge and follow his side of the story.

Every time we come back to the initial, choose-your-own-adventure point, it's the same shot that we saw previously. That's fine in and of itself, but it does suggest that maybe it wasn't planned, i.e., was re-shot one afternoon. But whatever, the recurring shot also grounds us in a particular point in time and lets us know exactly where we are, so like I said, no big deal.

But then the idea of the flashbacks feel awkward from a structural standpoint; what exactly is she telling the government officials? What we're seeing is full of details no one would ever report. Which, yeah, I know, it's a movie, it's a conceit, fair enough. It just seems like if they'd made that decision early on, Carpenter and his co-writer, Larry Sulkis, could have maybe found a way to streamline the narrative a little more by limiting the POV. I mean, it's kind of fucking weird to employ a structure in which the entire narrative is a single character's flashback and tell the story from an omniscient POV.

I can deal with it, though, nothing noted above is really a movie killer, it's just a bunch of...odd, let's say, choices. The other damage that the flashback structure does to the narrative, though, is that it pretty much let us know who's going to live and die. Not that we don't know that by the five minute mark anyway, but, I don't know, can't we all agree to pretend to be surprised?

But where it gets really irritating and unforgivable is the dialogue: it seems like the studio (or maybe Carpenter and Sulkis) thought people might show up half an hour late or nap through most of the first act or something. People talk about the fact that they're on Mars damn near constantly and repeat more or less the same information about themselves and each other until shit hits the fan. That's not quite literally true, but it's not too much of an exaggeration, either. Bad dialogue is a pet peeve of mine as is sloppy exposition and in this movie, it's...it's just really annoying.

I'm not really going to touch on the casting issues too much, but it's rumored that Jason Statham and Ice Cube were cast in each others' roles up until a few weeks before shooting and the studio forced Carpenter to swap them out at the last minute because Ice Cube was a bigger name. And, well, a lot of Ice Cube's dialogue would work a little better coming from a British guy and Statham's dialogue feels more appropriate for a black guy. For example, Statham while trying to seduce Henstridge says something like there aren't too many English guys around and he wouldn't want her to miss her chance to have sex with one. Now...I don't think the British are particularly well known for being well-hung or having overwhelming sexual prowess, are they?Nor do they have a reputation as uniquely bad lovers, they just...that's a '90s black guy thing (which I think is actually a fairly racist stereotype harkening back to the noble savage idea and the concept that they're mysterious and/or more animalistic, but that's another conversation altogether). Again, it's just kinda fucking weird

Shit, I gotta keep moving. There's way more that doesn't work about this movie and this review's getting long.

Let's stick with the first act for a second: what's with all those weird-ass time lapse dissolves that skip over maybe two seconds worth of action? It feels like the studio demanded a ninety minute run time (which is definitely not unheard of) and Carpenter and his editor, Paul C. Warschilka, cut the movie to the absolute bone (a little more atmosphere up front would go a long way toward making this movie more watchable), but they were still in the two hour vicinity and the studio said “the fact that cutting anything else at this point would make the movie incoherent sounds like a YP, not an MP. Make it shorter, we don't give a shit how.” And I'm guessing that's what happened.

Pushing forward to the action scenes, this is a really strange complaint for Carpenter, a man known for his love of wide angle lenses, but it feels like they didn't get enough wide shots to quite make the geography of the scenes clear. With pretty much every battle sequence, we start wide on people approaching each other to fight and/or our heroes shooting at the ghost/zombies, but once the battle proper starts, the scene devolves into a series of sort of vignettes of individual characters fighting cross-cut with one another, but without enough information to figure out where they are in relation to each other. I can't go after Carpenter too harshly for this because 1) he mentions on the commentary that they lost seven shooting days when Henstridge got sick (though I have no idea what was scheduled for those days) and 2) shooting and cutting action is fucking hard. It's not like I could do a better job and it's not like the action scenes are totally incoherent, they just...could be better is all. And Carpenter has shot better action scenes in the past.

Ooh, and as long as we're on the topic of “how did John Carpenter of all people make THAT mistake,” the entire thing feels really over-lit; the whole time, I found myself wondering who thought an action/horror movie didn't need a lot of contrast. To be fair, it is more of a western than a horror movie and westerns tend to be lit more like comedy than, say, film noir: we want to see everything, especially the depth of the landscape. But still, from what I remember, Carpenter is generally pretty comfortable with deep blacks and I'm not exactly sure why he stepped away from that here, especially considering the entire movie takes place at night in an artificially lit environment; you could light it pretty much any way you wanted to.

Okay, so what works? Honestly, I find the ghost/zombie things pretty creepy. Is that embarrassing? Yes, they look like Marilyn Manson wannabes, but that doesn't mean they don't creep me out just a little. Um, other than that...I don't know. I like the sub-genre and I root so hard for Carpenter that I'm inclined to be really forgiving, so once the shit hits the fan, I'm more or less on board. Sure, there are still plenty of moments that make me wince (oh, god, that last line. That last fucking line), but I can enjoy it anyway because I pretty much AM the target audience. And, I know by next week, I'll have forgotten how bad it was and sometime in the next couple years, I'll find myself thinking, “hmm, Ghosts of Mars wasn't that bad, was it? I mean, I know I didn't like it, but maybe I just didn't quite get it. I'll watch it again and I'm sure this time it'll click!” (For the record, I've seen Ghosts of Mars three times so far, so...yeah...but next time it'll definitely work for me!)

But, I don't know, if your target audience finds this much to complain about, then...well, then the movie definitely has some issues, I guess.