This looks like a home invasion horror film, but it has a different take on that genre, one that is not quite given away by the trailer, and it is a pretty good turn. That said, the biggest spoiler that is possible is to say that M. Night Shyamalan leans into the concept of the story, and there is no big twist ending. It plays out in a very straight forward manner, generating all of it's tension from the impossible choice that is being given to the family.
Without going into too much plot, the family is tasked with making a sacrifice and the four strangers who have captured them in the vacation cabin, attempt to convince them that the prediction of the apocalypse is real. Most of the dramatic elements of the film revolve around this attempt at persuasion. The strategies used seem to de-escalate instead of building. Force and threat is the first approach, conveyed by Ron Weasley himself, Rupert Grint. Since this approach dissipates quickly, you might think that the tension level would drop, but instead it actually increases.
The emotional plea is very effective if you can empathize with Adrienne, the cook played by Abby Quinn. She is sincere and seems motivated by her desire to save her own child from the horrors that the visions hold for the four heralds who have invaded the house. One of the reasons that her empathetic pleas fail to register with one of the two dads in the story, is that he dismisses even the existence of her child. In a strange quirk, one of the reasons he doubts any of the people who have shown up is a prejudice he has built up in reaction to an attack on him many years earlier. He has associated the homophobic assault from earlier, with religious beliefs, and since the four people presenting this scenario seem to believe that this is a divine message, then the whole thing appears as a plot to Andrew, played by Ben Aldridge. The other dad, Eric, played by Johnathan Groff, has some religious background and he seems more open to at least listen to what has been said.
Another element that keeps the tension up is that the two das and their little girl, respond exactly as you would think a rational person would to this kind of approach. They are fearful, convinced that the four people are delusional fanatics who have met on a message board and are playing out some social contagion of end of times beliefs. They fight in any way they can when given the opportunity. The irrational beliefs of the four invaders overwhelm their rational explanations and approaches to the embattled family. Apart from one character, the other three all seem sincere and even tempered. One is a little desperate, but all of them are trying to find convincing ways to influence the family to choose.
Dave Batista as Leonard, the apparent leader of the four, is calm, even tempered, and approaches the little girl Wen, in as non-threatening a manner as a man of his looks could come up with. There are a couple of action moments, but Batista is not here to exert control through his physical power, but rather, his level even toned voice and his demonstrable regret at what he feels they are compelled to do. It is a very good performance from an actor that is going against type to make the story work.
I have a few reservations about the interpretations that get offered in the climax of the film. I think that the flashbacks of the family are fine, but I also think some history of the antagonists would have made this more understandable. The effects found at the end of the film, are not quite enough to explain how it all came together. The cryptic drawings and doodles in the opening are not much help either. This was a pretty effective thriller, if you can buy into the premise. It is easy enough to do, most of us have played "would you rather" a couple of times in conversations. This just gives us the ultimate version of that party prompt.
Throwback Thursday on the KAMAD site will be a regular occurrence in the next year. As a motivational project, to make sure I am working on something, even in a week where I don't see a new film in a theater, I am going to post on movies from 1975. Along with 1984, this is one of my favorite years for movies and it is full of bittersweet memories as well. 1975 was my Senior Year in High School and my Freshman Year in College. The greatest film of the last 60 years came out in 1975, as well as dozens of great and not so great cinematic endeavors. Most of the films in this weekly series will have been seen in a theater in 1975, but there are several that I only caught up with later. I hope you all enjoy.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
I have been an apologist for this movie since the very first time I saw it, which unfortunately was not during it's original theatrical run. My friend Dan had recommended it, I have no idea why he had seen it and I had not, but it was not until two years later, when it was becoming a cult phenomena, that I discovered the joys of "Rocky Horror". I have heard people say that the movie is terrible and stupid, it's my opinion that those descriptions apply to those critics rather than the film. This is a perfect satire of the culture, science fiction films, and musical theater, all wrapped up as a filmed entertainment.
I will get to the cult audiences in a little bit, I want to start with the film itself. Brad and Janet are like all young couples in horror movies like "The Blob" from the 50s, they get stranded in a rainstorm and end up asking for help at the nearest house. Hysterically, Brad says "Didn't we pass a castle a castle back down the road a few miles?" How can you not be in on the joke at this point? We have already had a corny song about their love, with a deadpan chorus of future characters in the background, and the narrator has pontificated in solemn tones with a melodramatic pause in just the right places. I was laughing at every second glance, cliché, and sly reference to sci/fi horror films.
The title sequence is famous for the close up of the red lips and mouth, this image was used on much of the promotional material as well. When you listen to the lyrics of the song, you should be doing an inventory of all those old movies from RKO, Universal and others that are being referenced so cleverly. The Dana Andrews line should make you plotz. This film version of the stage play was my chance to see the story that had been a popular live show in Los Angeles in 1973. I remember seeing a billboard sized ad on the Shrine Auditorium, for the show that was playing in Hollywood at the Roxy Theater. In the summer of 1973, I attended a workshop for a month at U.S.C. right across from that ad and I thought it was intriguing, but I was too young to be driving over to Hollywood on my own to see the play.
I have always been a fan of musicals, and having seen "Jesus Christ Superstar", I was especially entranced by the Rock musicals of the era. The year before this opened, I'd seen Brian DePalma's "Phantom of the Paradise", which has only a little bit of the tongue in cheek attitude of this film. When Riff Raff points out that Brad and Janet are wet, and she says "Yes, it's raining", the on the nose sarcasm is amusing as heck. And then "The Time Warp". Director Jim Sharman, who had done the play, took full advantage of the film formant to shoot this sequence in interesting Dutch angles, over head Busbee Berkley inspired shots and a cast of background dancers that is demented and dressed to suit that dementia. Having the Criminologist describe the dance and lead us through the steps in inserts during the song is additional icing on the humor of this movie.
When star Tim Curry is slowly revealed as descending in an elevator, the shots are nicely matched with the rhythm transition to his introductory song, and when he throws off his cloak, revealing his get up, if you are not all in at this point, you better just give up, and I pity you. This is a performance that is fully committed, exuberant and just plain old fun. Maybe these days it would not seem shocking, since there seem to be drag performers everywhere, but in 1975, it was audacious. The juxtaposition with the straight laced Barry Bostwick and Susan Sarandon in their square cloths is another way we are being let in on the outrageous joke that everyone is involved with here.
The creepy old house has the requisite living room for our dance sequence, but there is a delightful shot of the laboratory from the elevator perspective which focuses on a color change nearly as dramatic as when Dorothy arrived in Oz. The pink tile floors and walls assault our sense of what a "lab" should be, and the red instrumentation is flashing out at us as a production design made to draw attention to the color scheme. As Brad and Janet step into the scene in their charming underclothes, their sense of alienness is exacerbated. Curry's Colin Clive style delivery of his speech to the conventioneers and the guests, is another salute to the old style of the classic Hollywood horror films. Sarandon and Bostwick are terrific in their uptight, wooden mimicking of the innocent bystanders.
Almost every number is a showstopper, but it never feels like they are trying to outdo themselves from one song to the next. The progression of songs feels organic to the weird nature of the story. Meat Loaf shows up in a spotlight performance which is maybe the one segment that feels a little inorganic, but who cares "Hot Patootie – Bless My Soul" is a smoking solo number that gives us a motorcycle sequence, an axe murder and a chorus line dance, all in a short order and we get saxophone solos. The fifties sensibility with "Eddie" the greaser biker played by MeatLoaf reinforces the rock and roll roots of the musical and the time period of films that are being saluted here.
Several sequences feature musical instruments being used in unusual ways. There is an organ pumping out gothic tunes at first in the scene where Riff Raff is teasing Rocky. Then there is a drum machine and an electronic organ to follow up. The guitars and piano in so many of the songs are more reflective of older style rock songs. The guitar plucking during "Touch-a, Touch-a, Touch-a, Touch Me" reminded me of Elton John's Crocodile Rock. Rock and Roll Porn!
The Experience
When I finally caught up with the film, it was in the Midnight Screenings that happened at the Rialto Theater in South Pasadena on Saturday Nights. In the summer 1977, my then girlfriend and future wife, would drive down to Hollywood for "Star Wars" at the Chinese Theater, and then on Saturday Night, go up to the Rialto for Rocky Horror. The audience participation there was full of the call outs and props that were probably found in other venues around the country. The Janet Umbrella was accompanied by showers provided by squirt guns. Cards and Toast were tossed at the right moments, and the swaying matches during "Over at the Frankenstein Place" probably violated a hundred local codes, but we did not care. When we ventured to the Tiffany Theater in West Hollywood, we were surprised that there was cosplay and that the people dressing up acted out the movie in front of the screen. There was a guy who sold supplies to people in line. He would walk up and down the line with the refrain "Rocky Rice 25, Rocky Matches 10", and he had little bags with the logo filled with rice and matchbooks with the title on them. So for 35 cents you could participate too.
This was a soundtrack that we played in Dolores's dorm room and in the car on a cassette player. The first MeatLoaf album also came out that year and we paired those two together on a regular basis. Oh to be young and in love with the movies.
Once upon a time, I saw all the nominees for Best Picture before the Oscar ceremonies. As time as gone by in the last few years, I have become less and less interested in the Awards. The expansion of the Best Picture Category was done to include more popular films and keep audiences coming to the theaters and the TV ceremony, but the effort has largely resulted in the inclusion of more independent, specialized films. Sure this year a couple of big movies have been included, but there are at least three films on the list that would not be there if the category had not been expanded, that very few people know or care about. This film would not be one of those. This is a large scale historical epic that is compelling and deserving of attention, however, in the past it would have stayed contained in the "International/Foreign Film" category. Even beyond that classification, it might have been excluded because it was not a theatrical release. This is a Netflix film that probably got a token theatrical exhibition in order to qualify for awards, in spite of the fact that Netflix's model is almost exclusively streaming.
By waiting to see this, I was lucky enough to find a theater that would play the movie on a big screen because of it's award nominations. People who experience this at home are missing out on a very immersive experience, and probably the whole reason that the story is being told in the first place. The film makers want you to share the horror of war, especially the meat grinder that the European Conflict was in WWI. In the past couple of years, there have been a number on movies that featured the horrors of the trench warfare of WWI: "1917", "They Shall Not Grow Old", even "Wonder Woman", "The King's Man" and "Death on the Nile". All war is horrible, but the environment and conditions in this first of the modern wars was particularly brutal.
It has been almost a hundred years since the first version of this story was brought to the screen. It is not as visually brutal as the new film is, but it was emotionally powerful nonetheless because of our ability to empathize with the young men who had excitedly volunteered for the war. Their disillusionment does not take long, and in this modern version it is accompanied by extreme fear, violent dismemberment, and the gruesome duty of collecting the bottom part of the dead soldiers dog tags, as a way of inventorying the casualties. One element I did not remember from the 1930 film, is the negotiations for a ceasefire and the insistent resistance of some of the German general staff to making such an arrangement. Neither side was able to achieve a military victory, but the war of attrition took a toll on the homefront, which is largely ignored in this story.
The structure of the film is roughly the same, as we follow the schoolfriends from enlistment to battlefield. The local politics from the first film, where a postman becomes an authority and abuses his power, is missing from this version. The relationship between the veteran Katczinsky and the newbie Paul is developed substantially, and there is a well told moment when the two men share a latrine, where we see that each of them has something that is being lost by the continuation of the war. The final resolution of their friendship occurs not in combat but in the sort of savaging that is typical of a war and with an unlikely antagonist being responsible for the end. I'm not sure if this expansion of the dangers of war improves the film's message or dilutes it.
Production design on the film feels authentic, with the trenches being a miserable puddle for most of the time the soldiers occupy them, and the bunkers being a claustrophobic nightmare, especially with the arrival of tanks on the front, One of the memorable segments from each film is the period when Paul is trapped in an artillery crater, with a French soldier he has brutally overcome, but who takes so long to die that Paul apologizes, attempts to rectify and then suffers from guilt by the experience. The one famous moment from the 1930 film, which ends the story, is not present in this film. Instead we get an end card that totals up the dead, measures it by the territory gained and losses, and makes a final case for the futility of war through the text rather than the visual.
"All Quiet on the Western Front" may be a more difficult film for American audiences because of the use of German and French. The authenticity is meritorious, but the need to read the words does add a layer to the experience that can distance the emotional investment we make with the soldiers. It is not the sude of the war that they are on, or their cultural differences that might impede us, it is simply the fact that we may not be as in synch with each moment as we might be if it were in our own language. Still, I mourn for Kat, Tjaden, Franz, Albert and Paul, for the humanity that they lost and the needless sacrifice that they made.
The film that this is based on what is thought of as a classic. "Ikiru" was once listed on "Sight and Sounds" poll of critics as the 12th greatest film of all time. The controversial 2022 version of the poll does not even have it in the top 100, which sounds like another reason to see the new poll as highly suspect. I doubt that an English language remake, 70 years after the original, will gain the same sort of respect, but as a film from the last year, "Living" would certainly qualify for a number of top ten lists and it also addresses one of the grave injustices of the Academy Awards, by finally acknowledging the great Bill Nighy.
I have yet to see "Ikiru", but if it is better than this film, then it must be pretty darned great. "Living" is another film set at the tail end of a man's life, asking some of those questions all of us face when we get close to whatever is next. Like "A Man Called Otto" from earlier this month, "Living" has a protagonist who is facing death, but his situation is somewhat different, and the issues the film speaks to are maybe more universal. Rodney Williams is an imperial supervisor of a group of bureaucrats, working in the public works offices of the British government in postwar London. The formality of his dress and manner of speaking, ring of an old world style that is still entrenched in the class system of Britain. He wears a suit, and a Bowler hat, which mark him as a member of the professional class. We quickly learn that he is feared and revered by the coterie of government men working under him. A new employee, rapidly begins to absorb the forms of communication and work ethics that the office employs.
If your image of dystopia is the bureaucratic nightmare found in Terry Gilliam's "Brazil", then you will find it's origins in this set of offices. Mr. Williams however, discovers on the one day he changes his routine in order to see his doctor, that his life has a rapidly approaching expiration date. The story follows Mr. Williams as he has a crisis of identity and questions the life he has lead. Many people would probably do as he first attempts to do, by discovering fun under the tutelage of a confirmed hedonist. These two come together and there is some pleasure to be had, but ultimately, is cavorting a satisfactory pursuit for Williams? The answer appears to be no. This interlude in the film, makes up the first of three phases that Williams goes through at the end of his life. There is a strongly implied moment where suicide might have been considered, but Mr. Williams has always been too proper a man to actually do such a thing. Bill Nighy interacts with a man he meets in a diner, and while they do take pleasure from an evening of frivolity, it is easy to see from the performance, that Williams is not quite made out for this lifestyle.
The second phase is where Nighy really gets to shine. He is attracted like a moth to a flame, by a young co-worker who is leaving the bureaucracy, for a job in the service industry. She seems to enjoy the idea of working in a different environment, and Williams, who has not gone back to work for days, indulges in the simple pleasures that she enjoys. A walk through the park, a visit to a museum, a drink at the pub. His interest is not romantic, but the neighbors are scandalized by his involvement with a young woman, and he always looks like he is trying to fit in without ever quite accomplishing it. His formality in speaking with her, the posture he holds when sitting at a table that she is waiting on, and her discomfiture at his occupying so much of her time, also indicates that he has not really found the meaning he is looking for.
Ultimately, the film is about making the life you have chosen, rather than choosing another life. At one point after he has returned to work, and then after his funeral, his colleagues begin to question whether he had changed. It turns out that neither his manner or way of speaking has altered, but rather he has changed his perception of the job. Mortality has confronted him with an opportunity to stop being merely a cog in an ever grinding wheel, but rather to act as a facilitator to the objectives that his position really expects of him. The fact that everyone else in the government has become a zombie of bureaucracy, does not change, but Williams has.
I thought that it was an interesting choice to change the perspective in the last phase of the story from first person to second person. Mr. Wakeling, the new functionary, becomes almost a narrator of the story. He is potentially the one person who will be influenced by Williams progress, but even that is in doubt at the end. Anyone who has dealt with a government agency, knows the despair of trying to get something done, and being faced by polite but indifferent minions of the system. Mr. Williams finds a small redemption for a life of monolithic intransigence, by fulfilling a purpose that should be obvious to all of us. Do something, don't simply be something. There is dignity in life and work, not just from showing up, but from also considering why you are showing up. It is a lesson that was true 70 years ago in Kurosawa's Japan, and it should still be true whether it is 1950s England, 2020s America, or any other place in the world.
A ridiculous premise for a film about the consequences of our actions , transforms into an incoherent mess becoming more inconsequential as it goes along. "Infinity Pool" is a horror film with a science fiction conceit that gets completed wasted and turns the story into an examination of unpleasantness for no reason whatsoever. This could have been something interesting and important, and it gets less and less of each of those things the longer it goes on.
Alexander Skarsgård is failed novelist James Foster, on holiday at a resort, in a country trapped in poverty and full of the kinds of cultural improprieties that we are supposed to overlook to avoid ethnocentrism. The tribalism and cultural imperative of family honor requires immediate retribution for offenses committed in the nation. So go ahead and trust the people you just met, and venture outside of the resort enclave, meet people from the place you are visiting, and learn their quaint form of justice, except there is a get out of jail card. Maybe the wilder the idea, the more fun we can have with it, after all "Face Off" ,was a blast in spite of being completely bonkers. The problem here is that no one is having fun with the premise, instead there are pretentions of insight into human behavior. That might have also made for a good story, but writer/director Brandon Cronenberg leaves that on the table to wallow in excess revulsion.
The idea of buying your way out of the consequences of your actions is an interesting one. What does that process do to a persons sense of self. Does guilt linger or vanish? Will your morality disappear entirely? These are great questions that the film asks, but it's answers are muddled by a series of indulgent episodes that become increasingly boring and irritating. Mia Goth, who gave what I thought was a fantastic performance last year in "Pearl", at risk of being trapped in the same kind of roles in the future if she keeps getting parts like this. She is great here, but her character is just a slightly different twist on the sick mind that cropped up in that earlier film. Her character Gabi, at first is mysterious, but quickly becomes tritely cruel and less and less interesting.
A few examples of the pointless excess that Cronenberg has created here might help you understand why this movie is infuriating. Gabi gives James a reach around after a few hours of picnicking with James and his wife? We get to see his seed spilled on the ground. Why? The sense of unearned intimacy is probably what the writer is seeking here, but that is physical rather than emotional, and the emotional is where this movie needs to be working. The best character in the film when it comes to dealing with the questions being raised by the premise, is James's wife Em, played by Cleopatra Coleman. Unfortunately, she is removed from the film and the only characters that James has to measure his behavior against, are the ones who are indulging in the reckless excess that will turn off most of the viewers. There is an extended orgy sequence shot as if it is the "stars" sequence from "2001". It goes on interminably, the lights flash in different colors, and we see hazy images of people entangled in some sort of sexual behavior, but what it is will never become clear. Obtuse abstractness is supposed to be artistic in these moments, rather, it is pretentious diddling. One last thing to irritate you, there are grotesque masks worn by the characters during many of the scenes of violence and lasciviousness. They were introduced early on, without a clear explanation and the cultural symbolism is completely baffling. The art house sensibility can't be masked by the fact that this is a horror film, it simply makes the film less frightening and more vaguely symbolic. I call bullshit.
There was another potential direction the film could have gone in, one that the director set up and then completely ignored. How do we know that the doppelganger is the one being executed? Maybe the accused has been replaced by the clone. If that is the case, is there in fact a redemption of guilt because the surviving "person" is in fact, blameless? That is an intriguing thought. Unfortunately, it is not the thought Cronenberg wanted to dwell on. Instead, we get violent and emotional cruelty. Trippy visual interludes don't make the film deep, they simply fill in the time between unpleasant characters doing more unpleasant things. None of it makes any sense, and the symbolism is too trite to be taken seriously, much less understood. Somewhere some cineaste will write about this and make it sound like an artistic breakthrough, I'm sorry, they will be as full of it as this movie was.
Throwback Thursday on the KAMAD site will be a regular occurrence in the next year. As a motivational project, to make sure I am working on something, even in a week where I don't see a new film in a theater, I am going to post on movies from 1975. Along with 1984, this is one of my favorite years for movies and it is full of bittersweet memories as well. 1975 was my Senior Year in High School and my Freshman Year in College. The greatest film of the last 60 years came out in 1975, as well as dozens of great and not so great cinematic endeavors. Most of the films in this weekly series will have been seen in a theater in 1975, but there are several that I only caught up with later. I hope you all enjoy.
Lucky Lady
Three big stars, on a boat, in 1975, that's a hit right?, Only if you add a shark, otherwise you have the misbegotten and mostly forgotten "Lucky Lady", an action romantic comedy adventure starring Academy Award winning actor Gene Hackman, Academy Award winning Actress Liza Minelli and soon to be Number One Box Office star in the world Burt Reynolds. You wonder how it could wrong, well let me count the ways.
To begin with, the director Stanley Donen was probably wrong for this kind of picture, although at first blush it seemed like he would be perfect for it. Donen had directed some of the greatest movie musicals of the 1950s, including "Singin' in the Rain" and "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers". Liza Minelli had recently won her Academy Award for a musical drama set in the 1930's, "Cabaret" and she was a friend of Donen's so it seemed like a good fit. There is a musical number at the start of this film. This part is right up his alley. Unfortunately, that sequence is only 2 minutes of a movie that ran a hundred and twenty-five minutes. Most of the film takes place on boats and you know, that ain't easy to get right.
The second problem is that the film can't quite balance the tone. Is this a slapstick nostalgia piece, is it an action film with gangsters shooting it out, or is it a romantic comedy with a ménages à trois as it's centerpiece? It tries to be all of those things and never hits the right amount of any one element. There were several films in the 1970s that were set in the depression era, gangster films and some others, but there were two that seemed most likely to have inspired Twentieth Century Fox to back this project: "Paper Moon" and "The Sting". Both of those films managed to get the hardscrabble era right, with a good amount of humor, but not turning it into a cartoon. This script by the married duo Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, is all over the place and Donen compounds the problem by having the lead actors playing it for laughs, in the face of machine guns mowing down people left and right. Burt Reynolds mugging, Gene Hackman aw shucking, and Liza sometimes sincere and sometimes shrill.
In "The Sting" and "Paper Moon", everyone is playing it straight. Sure there are a couple of double take looks by Redford when shooting takes place in the story, but you feel the stakes are real. Ryan O'Neal is in serious danger from John Hillerman and his thugs in "Paper Moon". Hillerman is one of the bad guys in this film, but you never feel like the main characters are at risk. Reynolds is taking pratfalls during the action and Hackman is aiding and abetting in all of that jocularity in the face of killers. Maybe you can get away with that in "Some Like It Hot" but the premise there is comedic to begin with as the leads are cross dressing to escape the gangsters. It simply doesn't work here. Especially, when the young companion of the three, gets shot to pieces and we see it with squibs and everything. The joke won't work in these circumstances.
Both Gene Hackman and Burt Reynolds had four movies that they starred in during 1975. They were clearly very busy. I will be covering at least four of those other seven films during the yearlong project here. One of the co-stars in this picture was also in four movies in 1975. Geoffrey Lewis plays the captain of a Coast Guard ship that tries to stop the rum running scheme of the three main characters. This part was all bluster and buffoonery, even when he is pointing machine guns and shotguns on the two men and ordering his crew to basically murder them. This feckless character might work is the violence in the film was all cartoon like, but in the big climax, dozens of people are getting killed.
The film was given at least three different endings, one of which involved the demise of the two male leads. But having tried to make this a light hearted romp thru bootlegging, that downer of an ending was dropped for something more in keeping with 80% of the film we have been watching. The big sea battle that is the finale of the picture would have made more sense if the eastern syndicate had been pitied against some of these other independent groups earlier in the film. Otherwise, as it seems in the film, they come out of nowhere at the end. In "The Sting" we get a sense of the community of con artists who have come together to take down the bad guy. No such connection was established in this script.
I can't quite criticize the cinematography, it seems like it should be a good looking movie, and
Geoffrey Unsworth, a two time Academy Award winning Director of Photography, had just done "Cabaret" and "Murder on the Orient Express" , two terrific looking period pieces. The problem is, the print I viewed this movie on was from a out of print DVD, that seemed to be badly in need of a remaster. This film is not available to stream anywhere, I had to go to ebay to find a DVD. It looks like it never had a home video release until the 2011 Shout Factory DVD. So though the whole VHS era, this movie was missing. That will tell you how forgotten it must have been.
This was a blind spot for me from 1975. I never saw this film before today, in spite of the fact that it features my favorite actor and it came out in my favorite film year. This was a Christmas release and Christmas 1975 was a tough time for us that year. I was in my first year at college and my schedule with the debate team kept me busy. It slipped by because it bombed and I never caught up with it until now.
