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When someone's paranoid in a movie and no believes him or her, that paranoia will be justified.
It's cliche. Similarly, when the neighbors are perfect, they aren't. In Arlington Road,
Michael Faraday, (Jeff Bridges) teacher of an American-Terrorism course, suspects his neighbors
just might be terrorists. And no one believe him. And this isn't the second installment of
Blown Away. It does fade-in moments after an explosion, though, with one of the strongest
opening sequences since se7en, which both sets the combustible tone for the rest of the
movie and, in economical fashion, serves to introduce widower Faraday to his new neighbors,
Oliver Lang (Tim Robbins)and stepford-wife Cheryl (Joan Cusack).
Soon enough Faraday begins
to uncover what we already know from the trailer: that the Langs aren't perfect. Which makes all
the foreshadowing concerning them a little heavy-handed, but so be it. In writer Ehren Kruger's
credit, however, Faraday's dawning suspicion is at least layered in with grief for his
wife, which is effecting his current relationship with his girlfriend, whose presence is causing
something of a rift between Faraday and his son, etc. And all this develops more or less
simultaneously, to the point where it begins to seem this may all be one of those narratives
where the emotionally-maimed protagonist (Faraday) is only able to achieve cathartic release
via immersion in some high-tension storyline.
But it's not.
At it's most basic level it's
closer to another narrative, most recently commercialized in Sleepers : the criminal
initially getting away with the crime, then somewhere down the road encountering one of his
victims wholly by chance, who metes out justice. But too, and in spite of its cast, Sleepers
was a failure. Arlington Road isn't, again thanks to strong writing, to the fact
that Oliver Lang isn't directly implicated in the death of Faraday's wife, but is instead simply
identified as the type whose file gets flagged by the FBI. Faraday's wife died
investigating such a flag. Constructing it this way you get the association without the
causality, which--because not dependent upon serendipity--is even stronger. Meaning we wholly
expect Faraday to mete out some long-overdue justice to Lang, which is right where Kruger wants
us: these carefully cultured expectations allow Arlington Road to use less contrivance
to turn everything upside down, which it does very effectively in the closing frames. And
quietly.
The thing is, in a movie about bombs, the plot's about subtlety. Not just the
inevitable surprise we've come to anticipate, but a development which forces us to reconstruct
the whole movie scene by scene. Which is rarely done well. Even rarer is that, in retrospect,
(and disregarding the opening sequence) every prior event is open to dual
interpretation. Perhaps it was Mark Pellington's unobtrusive camerawork that eased our
suspicions; perhaps it was simply Tim Robbins and Jeff Bridges on-screen together, never a
mistimed delivery or stray eyebrow between them. Either way, Arlington Road is far
and away the best college-professor-just-trying-to-get-out-alive movie since D.O.A.,
though it is loyal to it all the same.
(c)Stephen G. Jones
Lest we forget, Deliverance was 1972. Six years later The Hills Have Eyes. Two
decades later they still do. And James Dickey's backwoods have always been there in the
unconscious, waiting. What The Blair Witch Project does is take us back to those woods,
and then leave us there with three film students--Josh(ua Leonard), Mic(hael Williams), and
Heather (Donahue)--there to document the Blair Witch Legend, get in and get out. But, as the
opening title card informs, they never make it out, meaning that during the next 80-odd minutes
the issue isn't Will they die, but How will they die? Which is quite a gamble for
independents Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, dramatically speaking. But they make it pay.
Before the opening sequence is even over, narrative matters have ceased to intrude. This thanks
to genre--not horror, but documentary: they idea that anything can happen, and did.
But the
documentary brings with it its own set of conventions, one of which is that the filmmaker is
able to keep and objective distance from the subject. Which is to say the filmmaker doesn't
believe. Which, conveniently enough, is the first mistake in any horror film. The second is to
get suddenly curious. Here, Myrick and Sanchez provide that tragic curiosity via documentary
interest, and then collapse any and all objective distance Josh and Mike and Heather might have
had from the Blair Witch Legend by making them subject to it. Which is exactly the kind
of sophisticated reversal so often absent from horror.
All the same though, this is a horror
movie. Josh Mike and Heather do make all the typical mistakes--splitting up, with-holding
information, turning on each other, etc--and they do often choose, as Josh says, to stay and
record instead of help, but still, it never quite becomes formulaic. And it's not just about
cinematography, presentation, improvised lines, so-called method-filmmaking. It's about
stumbling deeper and deeper into the darkness. The Blair Witch Project draws upon our
most primal fear--the unseen presence. The strongest scenes in it aren't the ones with the
leaves rushing by and the noises just beyond the frame, they're the ones where the screen is
black, and all we have to gon on is audio whispers. The weakest points perhaps all occur in the
first 15 minutes, where Myrick and Sanchez had to edit this raw footage together in a back and
forth manner, so as to firmly establish that everything we're seeing is through the camera of a
crewmember. A necessary evil, perhaps, in the absence of voice-overs or scores or potential
soundtracks we're trained to cue into.
Does The Blair Witch Project intend to
retrain us, though? Perhaps. If we pay attention. First, however, it just disturbs us at a
fundamental level, and then, by foregoing the Hollywood ending, it doesn't take that
disturbance away. Suddenly, American cinema isn't so American anymore.
(c)Stephen G. Jones
The Jaws structure works because it's simple: oversized shark enters isolated community,
begins feeding, has a few good kills and chase scenes, then is in turn chased and killed,
largely because the whole meal-thing got a little too personal somewhere along the way. Man
versus nature, intellect against instinct, all that. Deviate too far and you don't have a
shark-movie anymore. Duncan Kennedy and Wayne Powers were aware of this during writing, and it
shows. Deep Blue Sea is a shark movie, this time set out on a Waterworld-ish
compound, complete even with another anti-social man from Atlantis, right down to the haircut,
sleeveless wetsuit, and underwater acrobatics: Carter Blake (Thomas Jane) the soon-to-be-redeemed
ex-con.
And of course his chums, led by the overworked Samuel Jackson and rounded out by the
beautiful-anywhere Saffron Burrows, playing a female Victor von, LL Cool J in the mix there
somewhere, in another unreprised yet still entertaining role (see H20). The low point of
the movie is everytime his alcoholic preacher character tries to get metaphysical. The high
point is the sharks: Renny Harlin (Die Hard 2, Cliffhanger, Long Kiss Goodnight
) knows how to put an action sequence together in the computer, and has plenty of opportunity.
Remember the floating cow in Twister? Deep Blue Sea has a similar moment with the
floating leg/twitching foot of a recently-bitten-in-half crewman. But yes, the structure is
Jaws all the way, what with the waterborne Aquatica compound, the isolating storm, the
sharks fenced in so they can't leave.
Yes, plural sharks. In keeping with Anaconda,
Lake Placid, Ghost & the Darkness (Jaws 3), etc., there's not just one of them
anymore. That would be too easy. And they're makos this time, which have a cooler color scheme
anyway. Needless to say, these sharks are vatgrown, genetically-enhanced, smart. Pretty much
Benchley's Creature without the bothersome legs. We get the gist of this via some
particularly clunky exposition, where Jackson's Russel Franklin--the cashcow of Aquatica, there
to pull the plug unless the good doctors can convince him otherwise--gets the grand tour.
What
perhaps saves Deep Blue Sea from being just another Jaws sequel is the awareness
that this isn't 1975. Not just talking animatronics here, either, but pop knowledge: we know
too much about sharks by now to listen to a Dreyfuss character wax poetic about feeding habits,
rogue behavior, life cycles, etc. This can all be assumed, and is. In addition, there's enough
environmental guilt circulating that if these sharks weren't essentially man-made (see: Godzilla)
their eventual destruction would be pretty much unwarranted, (see: King Kong) in spite of the
havoc they wreak. What perhaps doesn't save Deep Blue Sea from being just another Jaws
sequel is when it tries really hard not to be, which is to say when it tries to supplant
Spielberg's underwater POV's we know love and expect with overwater character history,
motivations, revelation, all that small Sphere-type drama. At least there's no love
sub-plot. Just a lot of people getting ripped apart, which is what we paid to see.
(c)Stephen G. Jones
When we think stadium rock the kneejerk association is the decadent hairbands of the 80's. But
there was a time when it was more pure. Or, less pure, but in a more original way. The time is
1978. The band is KISS. The place is director Adam Rifkin's Detroit Rock City, temporary
mecca for MyStery, a KISS-tribute band made up of Jam (Sam Huntington), Hawk (Edward Furlong),
Trip (James DeBello), and Lex (Giuseppe Andrews), skipping school and driving in from Cleveland
on borrowed wheels and stolen time. Just four guys on what for them is a pilgrimage, with all
the necessary pitfalls, pratfalls, obstacles, etc to make it interesting. To make it seem like
they won't make it, that this will be 'that' kind of coming-of-age movie. Refreshingly, it's
not that kind of movie.
Instead, it's the kind of movie with a soundtrack, maybe the best
since Robert Alt's Dazed and Confused. And yes, Detroit Rock City toys with some
of the same torch-passing type of generational material as Dazed and Confused, but in a
significantly less introspective manner than Alt. Which gives it the freedom to go overboard,
to have an overweight Elvis security guard chase this KISS-tribute band into the future, a
little retrospective allegory we can all appreciate via dramatic irony: we know how the music
wars went. We know that KISS is in facepaint again and nobody has Saturday Night Fever
anymore.
All the same though, Detroit Rock City isn't just a movie for the faithful.
Instead of writing it for the heavy metal equivalent of the snickering in-group Star Trek:
Insurrection appealed to--and thus relying solely on the nostalgic appeal of a mythic KISS
concert to propel things--writer Carl V. Dupre chose instead to make the concert's importance
proportional with the obstacles MyStery has to deal with to get to that concert. And, as
they're big issues, especially for Jam, having to deal with his MATMOK (Mothers Against The
Music Of Kiss) mother, the concert is important, even pivotal. In case this isn't enough, though,
Dupre also has a back-up structure: this is Jam's last night of freedom before two years of
boarding school. Which is to say tonight they're going to let it all hang out, even dancing at
a male strip club for ticket money.
Which is where Shannon Tweed has her big cameo, playing
Sylvia again from Hot Dog, coolly oblivious to the 15 years between then and now, but
still in full possession of the camera. And then of course there's Paul and Gene and Ace and
Peter, playing themselves on stage, still breathing fire and spitting blood. There's even a
strange little shot of the audience from the POV of Gene Simmons' throat, down along his
legendary cow-tongue, which is perhaps the one moment when the Detroit Rock City goes
a little far. As for the rest of it, though, just be satisfied that it's not Phantom in the
Park. It's 1999 now. Suddenly the devil's music is in DTS.
(c)Stephen G. Jones
The structure of Stanley Kubrick's swan song Eyes Wide Shut is older than cinema itself,
but hardly new to it: an everyman type encounters boundary situation X, which draws him into
some analogue of the unconscious, where he journeys, learns, etc, and then that man is reborn.
It's the Odysseus monomyth. Most recently featured in Lynch's Lost Highway, which is at
least as sexually charged as Eyes Wide Shut. The difference being that whereas Lynch
represents the unconscious journey overtly, by marking it with the illogical, Kubrick chooses
instead to dramatically incorporate it. Which gives Eyes Wide Shut more the surface
texture of, say, (talking Lynch) a Blue Velvet: some naïf stumbling deeper and deeper
into the mystery.
In this case, however, that naïf is Tom Cruise. Playing 'Bill Hartford' to
Nicole Kidman's 'Alice Hartford,' but still--perhaps as Kubrick intended--it's Tom Cruise and
Nicole Kidman on-screen, husband and wife. That's part of the mystique. The other part is the
overhyped sexual material, which, as this is Kubrick, is significantly more subdued (see:
stylized) than the trailer would suggest. This isn't 9½ Weeks revisited. Not that kind
of classic.
But it does have its moments, when there's no dialogue, when Bill holds his index
finger to his lips, trusting that that slight motion will be enough to shush the prostitute
he's with long enough for him to talk on the phone with Alice. Moments when Kubrick allows his
characters to interact at such a basic, human level that words aren't even remotely necessary,
would in fact be, in the middle of all this social indecency, indecent themselves. Another such
moment is the liturgical orgy, where Kubrick baldly presents the theme of the movie with the
mask everyone's wearing, which makes all this sex impersonal, purely physical, which is just
the quick-fix Bill is looking for in the wake of Alice's revelation that left him reeling: that
she's betrayed him emotionally. That he has to reinterpret their relationship in the light of
that betrayal.
Which is a common enough premise, but then Kubrick, pushing the monomyth to
its extremes, takes Eyes Wide Shut a little too far into fairy-tale land for credibility.
Meaning Bill's 'sexual education' is a little too convenient for modern audiences to stomach. A
medieval audience would have had no problem, but then they were tuned into the morality play,
were used to the main character being essentially a spectator in the underworld, continually
warned away from real danger, etc. Perhaps this 'convenience' is simply a result of Kubrick
dramatically incorporating the unconscious trip into the storyline, though. Give him that.
However, Cronenberg was able to dramatically incorporate the unconscious trip into Crash,
and it never quite got unpalatable. So.
What the modern audience can cue into, however, are
the occasionally heavy-handed psychoanalytic references. Say, Bill being led into the sexual
underworld by his 'pianist' friend. Or the foreshadowing, at the Christmas party Eyes Wide
Shut opens with: while Bill repeatedly touches his 'pianist' friend, Alice essentially
swaps bodily fluids with some stranger, via a glass of wine. All of which suggests that their
marriage might not stand on as solid ground as it could be, which--trained on Annie Hall
as we are--we get as soon as Nicole casually smokes pot in bed.
It's difficult to imagine
that Kubrick was thinking Woody Allen when he conceived Eyes Wide Shut, though. In
Boogie Nights, porn magnate Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds) dreams of making an adult film so
compelling that the raincoated gentlemen evenly spaced throughout the theater will stay in their
seats for the full feature, instead of ducking out early. Word is that Stanley Kubrick had a
similar vision. Perhaps Eyes Wide Shut is the result. If so, then it is compelling enough
to sit through once, just a little transparent for the second time around.
(c)Stephen G. Jones
What gets you in a haunted house movie are the quiet moments, when you expect something to
happen. A good haunted house movie incubates this, stacks up a few false positives, then knocks
them down all at once in a crash of cymbals, only to start the whole process over. Think The
Shining, Amityville, even Poltergeist. Jan de Bont's The Haunting, a
liberal remake of the 1962 Haunting of Hill House, based on the Shirley Jackson novel,
doesn't so much concern itself with this second stage--remounting the tension. Instead it jacks
it up and keeps it there, until the baseline (the quiet moments) are the moments when only
some of the faces on the wall are tracking a character's progress across a room, down a hall,
through one of the countless thirty-foot tall doors of Hill House. This isn't to say there isn't
escalation, though. More like overload. The place is an absolute amusement park of horror, the
ideal setting for Dr. Marrow (Liam Neeson) to stage an experiment on fear; he wants to know what
use sweaty palms, rapid heartbeats, pupil dilation and all that have in today's world. His idea
is that they're vestigial responses, of no use anymore. How observing a handful of insomniacs
is supposed to answer his question is a bit murky, though, which is just as well, as the sweaty
palms etc are never given a chance to redeem themselves. So it goes.
Suffice it to say that
the three subjects--homebody Eleanor (Lily Taylor), bisexual party gal Theo (Catherine-Zeta-Jones),
and sardonic Owen (the intractable Luke Wilson)--walk the halls all night trying to get to the
bottom of the many strange goings-on. Voices, cherubic faces in the curtains, interdimensional
gongs, the whole gamut. And of course no two of them ever see the same phenomenon simultaneously,
which isn't so much a trick of camerawork as an accepted convention. Where The Haunting
departs from tradition, however, is in the noticeable absence of sexual tension. Nevermind that
Catherine Zeta-Jones is splashed all over the trailer, still in supermodel shape from Zorro
and Entrapment. She's evidently just window dressing. The one or two token
innuendoes (invitations?) her Theo directs Eleanor's way hardly even register, perhaps because
Eleanor--suddenly the central character--has other things to worry about. Like distinguishing
the scary but good ghosts from the scary and bad ghosts, and how she may or may not fit into
the history of Hill House.
About this scary and bad ghost: aside from being a Scrooge
lookalike, he seems more intent upon frightening Eleanor & Co. to death than upon actually
killing them, which--judging by his insanity level and the power he wields--would be a short
night's work. But then we wouldn't get startled, right? And The Haunting does startle,
something of a feat in itself, taking into account a slightly jaded audience. It does this by
not allowing us to anticipate the narrative, and it does that by more or less replacing the
narrative with special effects. The same ones introduced with The Frighteners and abused
in The Mummy, both of which fell similarly short on story but spent a lot of money doing
so. Like them, The Haunting is best seen in the theater, where you can be wowed by sound
and lights and not have time to consider what might be missing.
(c)Stephen G. Jones
In Lake Placid staying alive is easier than you'd think, with a 35 ft. crocodile prowling
the waters. All you have to do is talk: none of the characters with significant dialogue are
killed, though they sorely need to be. Viewers sometimes bemoan the conventions of the horror-
movie--all the little faux pas you can make that get you dispatched: investigating noises,
having sex, refusing to see the 'truth,' separating yourself from the group, etc. Just as
distressing, though, is when there's no justice at all, when those genre-taboos are breached
and the transgressor doesn't get his or her desserts. This is Lake Placid, set in
King-country, where the ecosystem's been seriously thrown out of whack by a crocodile big
enough to take a grizzly bear out in one bite. What's a grizzly doing in Maine? It doesn't
matter. There's crocodiles too. The lake isn't even called Lake Placid.
It all starts with
the embittered sheriff (Brendan Gleeson) trading quips with a scuba-geared ecologist, setting
the bickering tone for the rest of the movie. Yes this ecologist dies and dies ugly. Yes, a
tooth is recovered from his corpse which effortlessly attracts another game warden-type (Bill
Pullman), a museum curator running away from a broken relationship in the city (Bridget Fonda),
and one Hector Cyr (Oliver Platt), croc specialist extrordinaire. The sheriff is already there,
grumbling in place, acting as reluctant guide. Not a bad opening sequence, all in all, and the
group dynamic Steve Miner (everything from Wonder Years to H20) kickstarts is
distracting enough that when the crocodile finally begins snatching the supporting cast away,
it initially catches us off guard. However, this group dynamic is also what pulls the movie
down for the death roll: all the one-liners incessantly traded back and forth about the city,
the country, the bugs, men women and love, etc, finally just get in the way, or, only succeed
in establishing the movie firmly enough on land that the crocodile, for all it's technical
splendor and appetite for expendable crewmen, is upstaged.
In addition to these four core
characters there's a little old lady who lives on the lake, makes cooing sounds to herself,
and has a soft spot for the crocodile and a little dab of profanity for everyone else.
Typically, she'd be the token comic foil for the movie, rounding it out, but in Lake Placid,
slapstick is already part of camp life. Brendan Gleeson's sheriff falls into every crocodile
trap Hector Cyr sets. Which isn't their only point of contention: while the sheriff wants to
kill the beast, Cyr wants to swim with it. It's a mystical thing with him. Soon enough everyone
has to take sides, switch sides, sit on the fence, all that.
Which is to say we're not in the
water. Which is to say we never get the sense that these characters are in any real danger. Who
would deliver their lines if they were dead?
On the plus side, there is an animatronic cow
suspended from a helicopter, as well as a surprise at the big kill scene. Think Anaconda,
but don't accidentally compare the two. In Anaconda people die, suggesting that the
monster might actually win this time. Lake Placid doesn't even flirt with that. We root
for the croc not because of the amount of meat it can grind per frame, but because, when pitted
against the seeming invulnerability of a good-natured crew in the vital process of bonding,
it's the underdog.
(c)Stephen G. Jones
In Speilberg's Always, the dead hang around for awhile, tying up the loose ends of their
lives. In Jacob's Ladder, the dead hang around in a similar manner, having to make peace
before they can move on. Ditto with Beetlejuice, High Plains Drifter, Ghost,
etc. It's all about preparation. In that regard the The Sixth Sense is no different.
There's even a brilliant little thematic moment where a red balloon is released in a staircase.
It climbs, climbs, rising steadily away from the party, and then finally comes to rest against
the ceiling, unable to go any higher. Yet. It's no accident either that director/writer M. Night
Shyamalan has the young Cole (Haley Joel Osment) be the only one aware of this balloon. He can,
after all, see the dead, who are similarly trapped.
But of course he doesn't tell people this.
Until child psychologist Malcolm (pay-attention-to-the-name) Crowe (Bruce Willis) enters his
life. The deal with Crowe is that he feels he once failed to reach a similarly tortured patient,
and his failure led to the tragedy which the movie opens with: that former patient breaking into
Crowe's home for some impromptu therapy. The Sixth Sense is set a year after that tragic
session, but Crowe is hardly over it. During that year of ostensible convalescence--both
psychological and physical--his marriage has fallen quietly apart, to the point where he and his
wife no longer talk. If he can only help this Cole, maybe everything will be all right again.
So for Crowe, it's about redemption.
For Cole, however, it's about making it down the hall
to the bathroom at night, an acute terror we feel with him, although at that point there's yet
to be anything supernatural on-screen. But when it comes, hold on. Remember about 45 minutes
into Exorcist III, where an unannounced nun with some cadaver tool floats silently across
the hall, in the background? One of the single scariest moments in moviedom, for the simple
reason that, 45 minutes into it, the tension level is so high that the slightest thing can
release it all at once. M. Night Shyamalan understands this thoroughly, and handles his
'manifestations' with a steady hand. He never crowds a room with them, but chooses instead to
simply reflect them in a child's reaction shots. It's not so much that they're out of the
frame, though, as with The Blair Witch Project. It's that they're locked into Cole's
point-of-view, thus inaccessible, or, only accessible when dramatically effective, which drains
a little off the illusion of reality any horror film depends upon. In Shyamalan's defense,
though, perhaps he delayed putting Cole's 'sixth sense' on-screen simply because he wants us to
know the viewer before the viewed. Otherwise Cole might get upstaged.
All minor issues aside
though, what stands out is how Shyamalan leads us to believe that the dramatic line is lifted
directly from Good Will Hunting: the therapist and the patient both depending on each
other for a cure. And in a sense this is the dramatic line, but in the final moments, in what's
already looking like a typical Hollywood epilogue, it's recast in an unconventional light. One
that makes you reconcieve the whole movie, much as Arlington Road did. Much as Jacob's
Ladder did. The real surprise, though, is that The Sixth Sense owes more to
Always than to Jacob's Ladder. The dual-epiphanies Cole and Crowe eventually
achieve--tying together subplots which seemed incidental but were in fact pivotal--make you
appreciate the darkened theater. People can't see your eyes without lights. But then they're
misty too: The Sixth Sense is a horror movie with an unexpected love story embedded in
it. Prepare.
(c)Stephen G. Jones
In the summers that aren't Bond-summers, we get the Bond-movies without Bond. Which is to say
gadget movies, all the high-tech toys and death-defying leaps that'll fit into 2 hrs.
Entrapment is all of this and more: it even has the original Bond--Sean Connery--playing
high-stakes cat thief Mac. More or less the same veteran criminal-type role he had for The
Rock, except this time he's starring opposite Catherine Zeta-Jones, insurance agent (Gin
Baker), high-altitude acrobat, sharp dresser. The Bond-girl has to be all of this and more.
Gin Baker is, and then some. But too, she has a day job, or, more specifically, an assignment:
to gain Mac's confidence via assuming the role of fellow-thief, then turn him in. In a nutshell,
this is Entrapment (and Donnie Brasco, and countless more). Granted, the technical
difficulty-level of the robberies Mac and Gin attempt together does escalate, which is satisfying,
and their relationship does flirt with intimacy, which is necessary, but, as the title suggests,
that's not really what it's all going to be about. What it is all about is entrapment, defined
in the trailer as what the law does to the unlawful. And whether honor among thieves applies or
not. And who's entrapping whom in the first place. Ving Rhames is even in there somewhere,
waltzing through his Mission Impossible role again. To director Jon Amiel's credit,
though, he does keep us guessing until the final frames (via occlusion, which isn't quite fair,
but so it goes), when everyone takes their double-agent masks off and bears their collective
souls. Which is to say he never quite lets Entrapment get lost in its own gadgetry.
Instead, he does another version of the same sleight-of-hand Raiders of the Lost Ark
pulled off once and for all: he not only legitimizes the thief, he glorifies the thief. The
thing is, if we don't have sympathy for the main character, if we don't want Indiana Jones to
get away with the golden idol (and thus 'preserve' it), then the rest of the movie tends to
fall apart. And there's many ways of legitimizing the theif. Absolute Power does it by
essentially cleansing the (similarly) aging criminal's crime, making it petty in comparison to
the crime he witnesses. Which creates a hierarchy of criminal acts, which succeeds in making
the thief less a thief. Entrapment goes about it differently. What Mac steals is largely modern
art, which the 'modern' world doesn't assign that much value in the first place. So, suddenly,
petty larceny's the name of the game; nobody's starving as a result of Mac's crime habit. Add
to this the fact that he's not stealing it to resell, but to ornament his Highlander-
esque castle, and he's either a lonely gentleman addicted to the thrill of the game or a
particularly debonair bachelor in need of interior decoration, either of which are forgivable.
Where Entrapment breaks away from tradition--at least the Bond-type tradition--is
that the narrative finally isn't hinged upon one final stunt that outdoes all previous stunts,
but upon a man and a woman alone in a train station. This isn't The Jackal or The Saint,
with little epilogues tacked on as an afterthought. Here, the epilogue is the final stunt.
While that may not quite satisfy those who actually expect such developments in a movie, it
does set Entrapment slightly above the usual Bond-replacement, which, in a Bond-less
summer, might just be enough.
(c)Stephen G. Jones
Romantic comedy is largely about
oppositions, and the eventual collapse of those oppositions into a happy ending. Which suggests
that those oppositions weren't oppositions after all. In Gary Marhsall's Runaway Bride,
Maggie (Julia Roberts) and Ike (Richard Gere), are earmarked early on for such a happy ending
by how opposite they seem to be: city boy and country girl; misogynist and man-eater; harried
freelance journalist and sedentary 9-5 hardware store manager; etc. This is all established in
about four minutes. Underneath those tags, however, are two people who are both defined by
their manner when the clock's ticking down: Maggie walking down the aisle and Ike with 15
minutes left to write a story.
Which is how Runaway Bride
opens, with Maggie running and Ike getting a second-hand version of her running and then
writing it into his column. Which is the initial complication that draws them together: Maggie
disagrees with Ike's write-up of her vehemently enough that he's 'assigned' to cover her
pending wedding. If she runs, he's vindicated; if she doesn't, he loses this country girl he's
falling for. It all gets a little complicated, which is nice. What isn't so nice is that Ike's
assignment feels a little contrived, a little too functional. This is a direct result of there
being no sharp turning point into the country for him, but more of a gradual and inevitable
curve, shaped not by dramatic events but by the necessity of reuniting Gere and Roberts
on-screen for another Pretty Woman, a pressure Pretty Woman alumn Gary Marshall
must have been acutely aware of. It shows.
Since then and now
though things have changed a bit, however. Most recently, there's been My Best Friend's
Wedding and Forces of Nature, both offering non-traditional 'comedic' endings which
skew our expectations a bit as concerns wedding-movies, both of them suggesting that the
happiest ending isn't always the one we want to be the happy ending. Runaway Bride
could have used this to its advantage, but it chooses not to. Instead it relies a bit
desperately on Gere and Roberts to turn mediocre writing into magic. Granted, Joan Cusack is
wonderful in her habitual sidekick role, adding humor and a little tenderness to the
proceedings, but in the final analysis it's Gere and Roberts. There's simply no room for
anyone else, not even Maggie's current betrothed, Coach Bob.
And Coach Bob even seems aware of this in his military-athletic way, bowing gracefully out for
Ike. And again, it's a little bit of a set-up, but at least this time it's supported by
convention, by the need for comedic reversal: Maggie, habitually running away from men she's
attracted to, will instinctively cling to the one she's repulsed by. She has to. The genre
demands it. Similarly, Ike has to be the groom that no other groom was for Maggie, do what
none of the others did: chase her, literally or figuratively. Like the boy who brought the
king water in Fisher King. In Runaway Bride's favor, however, there is at least
the suggestion of a larger narrative functioning, a little tension over whether Maggie will
become part of Ike's story (another sacrifice to the dailies) or whether he'll become part of
hers (another groom left with a lot of cake left to eat alone), which, in a Gere/Roberts movie
not predicated on a Roy Orbison ditty, is finally all we have to cling to.
(c)Stephen G. Jones
In Austin Powers:
International Man of Mystery, set in the 90s, Austin's arch-nemesis Dr. Evil is laughably stuck
in the 60s, demanding a million dollars to ransom the world, etc. Now it's the second installment,
though, and, to keep it interesting, Mike Myers has turned it all around: back in his own
time--the 60s--Dr. Evil is now laughably stuck in the 90s. Meaning he now wants to ransom the world
for a billion or so dollars, which is just as preposterous as his 90s ransom demand. Which is
precisely what Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me is all about: temporal dislocation. It's
why we love (or hate) Austin--via some fantastic cryogenics, he's managed to preserve a 60's mindset
wholly unsullied by the 70s and 80s. But, to return to the little binary set that propels both
movies (Dr. Evil/Austin Powers), while this childlike quality is light-hearted and attractive in
Austin, in Dr. Evil it's a character flaw. Granted, a lighthearted, entertaining one, but still,
more or less the reason Austin defeats him in International Man of Mystery.
The Spy Who Shagged Me isn't quite so balanced. This time the
binary set of Austin/Evil falls apart a bit, with Dr. Evil more or less taking the lead role,
leaving Austin and Agent Shagwell (Heather Graham) to their series of hijinks etc. Perhaps this
is a result of the introduction of Fat Bastard (Mike Myers again), Dr. Evil's lackey, or perhaps
Evil's Mini-Me skewed everything somehow. Whatever the case, with Austin and Evil no longer
counterbalancing each other narratively, the mojo that propelled us through the first
installment is somewhat diluted, and all we have to pull us through then is the slapstick, the
self-conscious intertextuality, the in-jokes.
But there is
plenty of all three.
Maybe even too much. Granted, Dr. Evils'
Puff-Daddy intermezzo is one of the highlights of the movie, something we can cue into, and
there's Austin mistaking a stool-sample for coffee, even Agent Shagwell pulling an Austin from
International Man of Mystery (sleeping with the enemy), but it doesn't all cohere. Instead of
going constantly forward as a 'fantastic' comedy absolutely needs to, The Spy Who Shagged Me
sidesteps again and again into un-plot-related SNL-ish sketches. Dr. Evil's Puff-Daddy
intermezzo is a case in point. But , again, these sketches are entertaining (especially Will
Ferrel's Monty Python take-off), they just make The Spy Who Shagged Me a fundamentally
different type of movie than International Man of Mystery, which used the sketches as plot
devices.
In spite of these narrative difficulties, however, The Spy Who Shagged Me does redeem itself,
both with the frame it sets itself in (Jerry Springer episodes) and with a wonderful little
device it uses never to say 'penis' when 'penis' really needs to be said. Just as in the closing
scene of International Man of Mystery the naked Austin and Vanessa Kensington's (Elizabeth
Hurley) R-rated parts are always hidden
at the last possible moment, so in The Spy Who Shagged Me--via wordplay, editing, and cameos (Woody,
Willie, etc)--'penis' is never said in the proper context, though it's what everyone's talking
about. This is Austin Powers, after all, and, while we may not expect narrative rigor, we can
can count on extended joke-sequences such as these, handled with that signature Mike Myers touch.
(c)Stephen G. Jones
The X-Files taught us
that alien colonization won't be loud like Independence Day, but insipient, like Body
Snatchers, Puppet Masters, all that. More They Live than War of the the
Worlds. The trailer establishes all this with minimal effort, too, as it's already
conventional knowledge. And we are hungry for it, or something like it. It's been two summers
now since Contact made the aliens benevolent, paternal, essentially erasing the
(ir-)rational fear of the Alien series. Which is to say it's high time to give those
aliens fangs again. The Astronaut's Wife does just that.
Or, to be more specific, it gives NASA pilot Spencer Armacost ('Texan' Johnny Depp, a long way
from 21 Jumpstreet, bit closer to Elm) fangs, via a low-orbit close encounter. And of course no
one can see those fangs for most of the movie. His wife Jillian (Charlize Thiron) has her
suspicions, but, luckily for Spencer, Jillian is an ex-mental patient, so is thus easy to
convince that it's all hallucination and paranoia brought on by her pregnancy. And there's even
the suggestion that it might all just be paranoia. But then there wouldn't be any special
effects. To writer/director Rand Ravich's credit, however, he is able to milk a lot of tension
from an otherwise subdued movie by keeping the range of Spencer's suprahuman abilities more or
less under wraps until the closing frames, a bit of dramatically-effective concealment.
But Spencer's not the title-character here. Jillian is.
Along with their marriage, which is so ideal for the first few minutes that it has to be doomed
('unmade in heaven'). This is something of a non-traditional approach, though, putting the
wife--the ostensible victim here--in the leading role. Typically, it's the alien's pursuer who
gets the screentime, which gives the movie license to use all the cop/criminal conventions in
space etc, but The Astronaut's Wife isn't Predator, is a bit more low-key than
that. Which is to say it has to rely on a whole nother set of conventions. Specifically, those
Polanski hammered out once and for all with Rosemary's Baby. Chereze Thiron even has a
schoolboy Mia Farrow haircut and a husband who spends his days at the office. And everyone who
shares her suspicions is summarily removed. It's all about isolation. The only difference is
that instead of giving birth to the supernatural, Jillian may be giving birth to the
extraterrestrial. Not the 2001 kind of extraterrestrial, though, but something less the
benign-infant, more our replacement. Again, it's how aliens get a terrestrial foothold:
hybridization. And don't think Starman here. Think Species.
Jillian does. But too, she has a little more of that final-girl
resolve than Rosemary did. Very Jamie Lee Curtis, except instead of intense action and
longindying screams we get intense dialogue and longindying stares. Which is a bit of a change.
The stand-off as opposed to the shoot-em-up. This is a drama, after all, nevermind the alien
overtones. It's about trust in marriage, what the breakover point is. What will convince
Jillian she's not losing it, that Spencer is in fact listening to the coded-static radio
transmissions we know from Contact, Arrival. And it's all fairly strong up until
then, until her convincing. And then, inside of two minutes, it simply falls apart, uses the
same cheap trick Fallen used to 'surprise' us in the closing frames. And the thing is,
there was such a better ending within reach. In all The Thing incarnations there's
always the distinct possibility early on that these people have just been cooped up too long.
Instead of expanding on that, using it for the ending, The Astronaut's Wife takes the
easy way out, the grand way out, the Hollywood way out. Shoots for the disturbing
Twilight Zone ending and doesn't quite make escape velocity, has to settle for the typical,
when it had the potential to be so much more.
(c)Stephen G. Jones
A work (novel,
movie, whatever) only gets the story-behind-the-story treatment when it's been part of conventional
knowledge for so long that the audience gets all the little in-jokes, can appreciate the asides,
the irony, etc. To look at it another way, a work only gets the story-behind-the-story treatment when it's
been overdeveloped in so many other directions that burrowing into the myth of its own origins
is about all that's left. This is what Shakespeare in Love does for Romeo and Juliet,
what Love and War tries to do for Farewell to Arms. This is also what the 13th
Warrior tries to do for Beowulf--to tell it from the POV of a minor/forgotten
participant in the 'actual' event, of which Beowulf is a loose retelling. The thing is,
however, Shakespeare in Love had the advantage of coming right on the heels of 199x's
Romeo + Juliet, meaning the play was still fresh in our minds, we were already piqued
for a little more iambic pentameter, please. The 13th Warrior doesn't have such an
advantage: disregarding the recent sci-fiBeowulf (not released in America),there's
been nothing to leave us hungry for Old English, mead, all that.
Writer/director Michael Crichton (along with Diehard's
John McTiernan) was likely aware of this poor timing, too, so, for the big screen, this
adaptation of his historical novel Eaters of the Dead draws more on, say, the enthematic
swordplay of Braveheart, the 'good fight' against-all-odds feel of Starship Troopers,
and, further back, all the Dungeons & Dragons-type movies (Flesh and Blood(1985),
Excaliber, etc.) which also manage to assemble a rag-tag group into some honorable
world-saving campaign.
In The 13th Warrior, that
rag-tag group is composed of twelve Viking volunteers, plus the initially-reluctant exiled
Arabian poet Ibn Fadlan (Antonio Banderas). The world this group has to save is a village in
Scandinavia. What they have to save the village from are creatures of legend--eaters of the dead.
Which is to say transgressors of one of our most fundamental taboos: cannibalism. And, when
fighting cannibals, you're automatically the good guy, which is how Crichton
manages to erase any raping and pillaging Eric the Viking-type associations, making the campaigners
honorable. In addition, though--or, to really establish the bad guys' inhumanity--the bad guys
are never really personified, which makes Ibn Fadlen and Co.'s series of skirmishes with them
impersonal, as it would be with a mass of animals. And this isn't necessarily a weakness, but
more of an identification trick: the bad guys are as dark and mysterious to us as they are to
Ibn Fadlan and Co. It does have a flipside, though: when the battle gets pared down to the
individual level, it doesn't have that same finality you get with, say, Conan and Thulsa-Doom.
Meaning we're not sure it's over when it is, in fact, over.
If that was the only flaw, The 13th Warrior could
possibly be a great movie. But there's more. There's the castle-intrigue in the opening
sequence, which establishes so little that it's never mentioned again. There's Ibn Fadlan's
love interest in the village they're saving, which feels tacked on. There's Antonio Banderas
playing a devout Muslim. There's some unwisely foregrounded translation difficulty
(Old English to Latin, then Latin to Arabian, which is cinematically rendered in English, etc)
which slows things down considerably. On the plus side, though, there is a lot of flashy
AD&D-type sword and horseplay, there's an ancient woman who talks with Yoda-syntax
('Seek you me?'), and there's even something of a transformation in Ibn Fadlan, which allows
him to put pen to paper again, write that epic. More than all that, though, what The 13th
Warrior leaves you with is a distinct nostalgia, not for a period in history that's lost,
but for a period in history that never really was, at least as it's presented on-screen.
Which is to say it does get us to buy its illusion, if only for a while.
(c)Stephen G. Jones
The trailer didn't lie: Casanova Frankenstein (Geoffrey Rush) has captured Captain Amazing (wholesome
Greg Kinnear), leaving a superhero-sized void in the skies of Champion City. Enter Mr Furious,
the Bowler, the Shoveler, Blue Raja & Co. (Ben Stiller, Janeane Garafalo, William H. Macy, and
Hank Azaria) to fill that void and save the city. All slapstick aside, this is Kinka Usher's
Mystery Men, a send-up of all the Supermans and Batmans and Spawns and Phantoms which have
been taking themselves too seriously for too long now. Granted, The Mask dealt with the whole
superhero shtick in a similarly tongue-in-cheek manner, but it didn't go nearly as far as
Mystery Men. Or, it was comic, but its comedy was confined to the scenic level; the backbone
of the superhero movie was left intact (i.e., the target audience--children--was conservatively
not overshot).
Not so with Mystery Men.
Mystery Men does to the superhero movie what Rustler's Rhapsody did to the western: reduces it
to the level of ridiculousness while still retaining that same mass appeal. Yes, it does still
have all the flash and gadgetry of the Batman series, but--and this is important--the standby
notions of good and evil have been called into question. And in a particularly clever manner:
the hero no longer fights evil just because s/he's good, but because it's good publicity to
fight evil. And good publicity translates immediately into corporate sponsorship, endorsement
opportunities, star treatment. But it's not easy being a superhero, either. You have to worry
about staying in character, sticking to a theme, matching your gloves with your boots, getting
the right publicist, and--as in Captain Amazing's case which sets things in motion--you have to
worry especially about having an arch-nemesis left to fight. Batman had The Joker, Superman had
Lex Luthor, etc. As Mystery Men opens, though, Champion City is pretty much free of arch-villains;
Captain Amazing has been a little too amazing for his own good, evidently.
This is remedied soon enough, by him, even, which, once it all turns around on him, leaves room
for the wannabees to fumble around and save the day. And this wannabee contingent is the one
brilliant aspect of the movie, simply because it's so logical: in a world where superheroes
wear Pepsi armbands, there will of course be hero-types a few rungs down, longing to wear that
armband as well, longing to save the city so as to get a little airtime. But not every wannabee
is a hero, either. Some are just grown men wearing tutus. And some, like Mr Invisible, can only
be invisible when no one's looking at them.
And the villains
are nearly as fantastic (disco gangs etc.), if a tad more traditional: they seem to still want
to take over the city just because that's what villains do. Which is something of a weakness,
in that their motivations are no longer the inverse of the heroes' (commercially-oriented)
motivations, which is to say that the good guys and the bad guys no longer counterbalance each
other. Even in Rustler's Rhapsody there is at least that balance. It lends a wholeness to the
proceedings, a wholeness missing from Mystery Men. It goes deeper, though. While the sub-arch-nemeses are equally
as theme-loyal etc as the heroes here, the arch-arch nemesis--Casanova Frankenstein--is, aside
from his wonderful name, wholly typical.
To return to Rustler's Rhapsody again, in it the
villain achieves balance with the hero by being equally eccentric-by hiring a good-guy gunman
to be his bad guy. Which is a fitting turnaround. Mystery Men has no such built-in turnaround,
but instead relies on the individual comic ability of its cast, which, while significant,
doesn't quite make up for careless writing. Too, and not dealt with, at the end of the movie
these Mystery Men are in the same predicament Captain Amazing opened with: though they have
airtime now, they don't have anything to do with that airtime, as they've defeated the one bad
guy around. Not for long is the idea, though, right? Which, in spite of itself, brings Mystery
Men full circle, transforms it into yet another comic-book superhero movie, albeit with more laughs than usual.
(c)Stephen G. Jones
Steve Martin is at his best when his
character is trying to sell something not really worth buying. See his silver-tongued evangelist
in Leap of Faith, a character both reprehensible and sympathetic, the endearing used car
salesman. Eddie Murphy's at his best when allowed to do variations on his always-one-step-ahead
-of-you-and talking-twice-as-fast Axel Foley. In Bowfinger--written by Steve Martin--both of these
actors get to be at their best: Steve Martin as the title-character--Hollywood outsider/
occasional filmmaker Bowfinger--and Eddie Murphy as Kit Ramsey, eccentric action star. And,
importantly, they get to be at their best in their own scenes. As with Dinero and Pacino in
Heat, Bowfinger and Kit Ramsey are hardly ever on-screen together, meaning heavyweights Steve
Martin and Eddie Murphy don't get in each other's way, which gives each whatever creative room
they might need.
Too, though, there's Eddie Murphy's other
character, Jiff, the lookalike stand-in Bowfinger recruits when Kit Ramsey refuses to star in
Bowfinger's picture "Chubby Rain." Jiff isn't a variation on Axel Foley. More a variation on the
Jerry Lewis-type character Eddie Murphy's been playing of late. Because Jiff isn't Eddie Murphy
at his best with Jiff, he and Steve Martin's Bowfinger can be on-screen together. There's even
room for Heather Graham, Christine Baranski, Jamie Kennedy, Terrence Stamp (not in his The
Hunger persona) some walk-throughs by Robert Downey Jr, etc.
Holding them all together too is a near-brilliant writing job: the premise of Bowfinger is that
if Kit Ramsey won't be in Chubby Rain willingly, then he'll be in it unwillingly--or,
unwittingly, via Bowfinger's cast approaching him on the street and running lines, all of this
surreptitiously caught on film. If left at this, Bowfinger would be merely clever, but then
Steve Martin takes it one step further, makes Kit Ramsey's 'alien' paranoia dramatically
dovetail with the script for Chubby Rain, which in turn makes kit Ramsey more and more
dependent upon his 'therapist' at MindHead (a thinly veiled Scientology), which is exactly the
kind of domino-action a comedy needs.
And then there's Frank
Oz directing, doing everything right, working in probably 80% of the exposition without
dialogue, as in the Rockford Files opening, where, by the time the camera gets to Bowfinger, we
already know him and his type: that, because he's existed at the fringe, never succeeded, he
thus deserves to succeed. Bowfinger is, after all, a Cinderella-story, a structure familiar
enough to us that Steve Martin can get a little fantastic with it and not lose us altogether.
However familiar, though, the structure and the writing can't
quite hide the occasionally inconsistent humor, the absurdist moments when someone made the
decision to go for the compulsive laugh when this isn't a movie about the compulsive laugh.
It's more akin to Rushmoore, or, talking Steve Martin, LA Story. Also painfully apparent is how
unnecessary Jiff is to the development of Bowfinger. Yes, a clown character was needed there, but
there's no reason for Eddie Murphy to play two roles for it. Granted, it looked good in the
trailer, it worked in the first Austin Powers and it was what Dead Ringers was all about, but
more often than not, one actor with two roles is either a glitzy hindrance or overcorrection
for a weak story. And Steve Martin didn't write a weak story here, meaning Jiff just slows things
down, or, provides the plausible excuse for the plot to lurch forward when it really had enough
momentum that it was going to lurch regardless. Other than that, though, Bowfinger is about as
close to flawless as it gets, right down to the spoof-ending (every martial arts movie), which,
while eerily reminiscent of a similar scene in Half-Baked, is, like everything else in
Bowfinger, somehow just a little better.
(c)Stephen G. Jones
Through Get Shorty we learned that to make it in Hollywood, you have to
be not of Hollywood. That way all your 'foreign' methods of doing things will be just new enough
to work. The west coast was a cakewalk for Chili Palmer and his in your face, loan-shark
approach. It's similarly easy for Sarah Little (Sharon Stone), the muse of Albert Brooks' The
Muse, not to be confused with Mighty Aphrodite, though the reflective brand of humor in both
targets more or less the same audience and both are organized around the continual dilemmas of
a neurotic/sardonic male lead and his associations with a mysterious women. Unlike Mighty
Aphrodite, however, this is LA, meaning that Lorenzo Lamas is in the diner, Rob Reiner's at the
aquarium, James Cameron is at the doorstep, Martin Scorcese's desperately seeking Starbuck's.
As in The Player, too, this long string of cameos is just part of the behind-the-scenes-
of-Hollywood Hollywood movie, pulling back the curtain on the machinery which makes the magic.
What The Muse does to that machine, though, is make it magic
as well. Sarah Little claims to be the daughter of Zeus, you see. Which makes her significantly
more foreign than Chili Palmer (Olympia vs. Florida). And more than claims: she has all the
big-name producers and directors at her beck and call, everyone dependent upon her for
inspiration. Enter 'past-his-prime' screenwriter Steven Phillips, (Albert Brooks, same
character as always, different name) just let go by a major studio because he's supposedly lost
his edge. Edge or no, though, he has a family to support, meaning soon enough he's just
desperate enough to believe in earthly deities, divine manifestations, whatever it takes to get
his 'edge' back, make him a commodity again.
The thing is,
though--as he finds out--muses are high-maintenance, requiring ideal conditions to sleep,
midnight salads, spontaneous daytrips, limousines etc, all of which harry Steven to the point
of exhaustion, strain his marriage in the usual, comical ways, all that. Which is satisfying.
To add to the mix he even has an advisor, Jack (Jeff Bridges, not playing Jeff Bridges, which,
in a cameo-heavy show, is initially confusing), who's also dependent on Sarah for inspiration.
In a movie founded in myth, though, of course the main character will have an advisor. And of
course Jeff Bridges pulls it off with grace; his tennis-serving scene is one of the two high-points of it all.
The second high point has to be at a cocktail party, when
Brooks really lets go with his signature ability to spool dialogue line on top of line, and
somehow keep it all at least peripherally pertinent. Every time you think the back and forth is
over, it's not, which is definitely his strength. It's why everyone quotes Broadcast News. But
The Muse isn't just about underbreath conversation (though it does start slow and hushed, until
Sarah gets on-screen). As expected, it's a touch intellectual as well, even going so far as to
toy with the foundational myth-structure, or, to foreground what's usually repressed in these
divine-intervention mythic cycles: the host/parasite dynamic. The way Sarah is at least as
dependent upon Steven as Steven is dependent upon her, which is something of a wry comment
upon religion, perhaps, or at least upon a culture always looking over its shoulder to Greece.
But quiet enough not to get in the way, too.
This is, after
all, a movie about the moviemakers, or, the realization of a screenplay about a screenwriter.
It has to hold itself to a higher, more self-conscious standard. Is it Skin Deep or Barton Fink,
though, right? Well, it has elements of both--even a surprise Coen-ish ending, minus the John
Goodman serial killer--but the laugh-a-minute pacing pushes it perhaps a little more in John
Ritter's direction, which isn't at all a bad thing.
(c)Stephen G. Jones
Stigmata was marketed as horror, when it's not. It's a religious thriller. There is a difference.
Whereas (good) horror startles and disturbs you, the religious thriller unseats you, unsettles
you. Doesn't make you leave the light on. Think Omen, Exorcist, not Prophecy. All the same
though, Stigmata is a bit more upbeat than Omen or Exorcist, which translates into less
unsettling (more reassuring). But the dramatics are all there.
It opens with Father Andrew Kiernan (Gabriel Byrne), the Vatican's miracle-debunker, doing his
job in Brazil. And of course he stumbles onto the real thing. And of course no one believes
him. Cut to Philadelphia, where a certain Brazilian artifact has found Frankie Paige (Patricia
Arquette), who, as the trailer's already told us, starts manifesting stigmata. Kiernan comes to
investigate, which involves the mandatory initial doubting session followed soon enough by
eventual conversion. All of this is typical, right down to Kiernan, the scientist who's a
preacher who's a scientist who's Damian Karras, Doubting Thomas etc.
What isn't typical, though, is legion. First, there's the Romeo + Juliet-ish camera/editing
work, which lends an MTV quality to everything-fast-paced, high-decibel, undeniable. Second,
there's something like a social indictment/imperative buried in all the techno-distraction:
that the church has become more important than religion. Third, there's no choir-singing
whatsoever, which is odd in a movie so consciously derivative that it hides secrets in
photographs (qua Omen), pancakes make-up on its Linda Blair character, has doves exploding
into the sky left and right, all that.
It does work, though,
for about three-quarters of its runtime (before Rome comes to Philadelphia, with no brotherly
love). Especially effective are the lengths writer Tom Lazarus goes to to establish that
Frankie is definitely not worthy of the stigmata, so something else must be going on.
Something is, as Kiernan--the ex-communicated detective of Stigmata--slowly finds out. And it's
more or less the same story as The Name of the Rose, or, more recently, pi: there exists
somewhere out there a lost book (in pi, number) which can change the world. Meaning the people
who are happy with the world as it is don't want that book being discovered.
Effective also is the structuring of Stigmata. Like Se7en, which is structured around the seven
deadly sins, Stigmata is structured around the five wounds of Jesus Christ during crucifixion,
only here each wound ups the ante via pushing Frankie that much closer to death, meaning she's
a victim in need of saving. Not quite as effective is Kiernan's occasional ignorance, when he
asks obvious questions for us about the gospels and such, which is supposed to function as
narrative exposition but instead makes his character a little less believable each time.
Too--and even though a token explanation is offered--there seems to be no reason for Frankie
to talk in demon-voices, tell you lies, fake flames, etc. Or, the only viable explanation isn't
within the story but in what we expect: the creepy dissonance of Patricia Arquette talking with
a male voice. It is unsettling, it just doesn't quite fit in a movie that tries to be so loyal
to the academic side of things.
Twice as unsettling as the
demon-voices, though, is an early shot of a woman and baby and a lot of traffic, which is where
Stigmata is strongest: in director Rupert Wainwright's meticulously composed audio-visual
moment, when he's got all the religious iconography standing small yet important against a
modern backdrop. It doesn't quite make us want to go to church as Omen did, or leave us feeling
dirty as Exorcist did, but all the same, Stigmata does leave us with questions, which at least
feel a lot like doubts, which is what the religious thriller uses to unsettle us. Even the
religious thrillers with MTV appeal.
(c)Stephen G. Jones
Take Chinatown
as the archetypical detective movie. In it a private investigator has to reconstruct some crime
bit by bit. And the crime of course happened before the movie started. And everyone tries to
steer him off the case. And it all gets real personal real fast, to the point where the
detective's need to know is held in balance against his need to live. These conventional
developments we expect from a hard-boiled detective movie. What we don't expect them from so
much, though, is horror, which is part of the appeal of director David Koepp's Stir of
Echoes (based on Richard Matheson's book)--that, although it has dead people walking the
halls, is nevertheless structured after the traditional detective movie, even down to the opening,
where Tom Witzky (Kevin Bacon)--private-investigator-like--is minding his own business, just
trying to scratch out a decent living, when a 'strange woman' enters and turns his world
inside-out.
Or, specifically, via an overextended Big Lebowski-ish
hypnosis session, she accidentally flips a switch in his psyche, which transforms him into a
'receiver,' which translates into the ability to see dead people walking around, to catch
glimpses of the past, the future, all that. But of course Witzky never quite sees it all in
detail (qua Blink), which is tantalizing enough to compel him to reconstruct bit by bit
whatever 'crime' occurred before the movie opened. Think Poltergeist; it's the same
story with a tighter cast and better music (or, it's 1996's Spectre with good direction).
And his 'investigation' unfolds conventionally, with all the appropriate setbacks, distractions,
isolations, etc. He even gets some help from his son (Zachary David Cope), who's a 'natural'
receiver, not unlike Haley Joel Osment from Sixth Sense, though Zachary David Cope is no
Haley Joel Osment.
Where Stir of Echoes breaks from the traditional
detective movie set-up is that the 'detective' here actually has a home life--nominally pregnant
wife and prescient son--which serves to heighten what's at stake for him here. And it is
effective in that regard, though at times the rounds of marital conflict and reconciliation
seem a bit forced, more dramatically necessary than developmentally. This home-life, however,
does give Witzky room to complain that his life is too 'ordinary,' which, in a horror-movie, is
another way of asking for it. Soon enough everything's all but ordinary, and Witzky only wants
to close the Doors of Perception which Jim Morrison wanted open so badly in The Doors.
And it's easy to understand why he wants them closed:
the undead he can see now are easily the summer's scariest, even moreso than Sixth Sense's,
this due largely to how Koepp renders undead movement--both fast and contained, as in Jakob's
Ladder, which is for some reason primally disturbing. Which is of course exactly what we
pay for--to be scared. In that sense, Stir of Echoes satisfies, and then some. However.
For a while, when the external pressure Witzky's facing is at low ebb, Stir of Echoes
tries to maintain the tension via the undead doing all the typical haunting things--turning out
lights, standing around every corner, etc, which doesn't fit with how the undead in the reality
of Stir of Echoes are 'supposed' to act. But oh well. It happens in Romero too, whom
Koepp unsubtly references. Aside from that, and in spite of an ill-advised (see: non-catchy)
title, Stir of Echoes is high-caliber horror, the kind that stays with you a little
longer than you really want it to.
(c)Stephen G. Jones