Category Archives: Movie Reviews

Twixt Twixt 2 stars

February 12th, 2013 by surlaroute

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I’ve been meaning to watch Twixt for a long time but I didn’t really know what form it would be best consumed in. Francis Ford Coppola planned to take the movie on the road as Kevin Smith did Red State with an added twist (hence the title, I suppose): many alternate takes and scenes were shot during production and the movie would be assembled “live”, remixed (hence the title, I suppose), in front of different audiences to produce a different film every time. How this could be reproduced in a home format is anyone’s guess (although I’m sure it’s possible). So, I don’t know if the version I saw is the best version.

A “bargain basement Stephen King” writer (played by Val Kilmer, looking even more like he could play Jim Morrison at death’s door, especially as he swigs liquor) enters a small town to sell his book (the town is so small that there is no bookstore: he sets up in the hardware store). The tone is strange, tongue-in-cheek-ish, thanks to a Twilight Zone-like narration by none other than Tom Waits. Kilmer meets Elle Fanning, seemingly his only fan in town, but for some reason she won’t (or can’t) come back with him to the place he’s staying at to get a book signed. By the way Fanning is shot (hauntingly but beautifully) it’s pretty clear what’s going on. Then he runs into Edgar Allan Poe…

Twixt is full of beautifully shot images (and one extraordinary moment I’ve never seen before – fangs pushing braces off a person’s teeth as they grow) but the remix concept shows. Perhaps, as I wrote of the similarly conceived Tracey Fragments (Tracey: Refragmented), if there’s so much other footage maybe one day a more coherent movie will emerge of it. I watched it in a double bill with Hick and it falls into the same category for me – forgettable movies lifted higher than they deserve by a couple of my favourite young actresses.

Room 237 Room 237 4 star

February 12th, 2013 by surlaroute

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Room 237 opens with a surely deliberate attempt to cheekily mislead. We see footage from Stanley Kubrick’s film Eyes Wide Shut, only… is Tom Cruise looking at a poster of The Shining? People less familiar with Kubrick might accept it as actual footage, like the rest of the footage that makes up the bulk of the image portion of this documentary, perhaps knowing or having heard of Kubrick’s more subtle intertextuality (a 2001 soundtrack album is hard to miss in one scene of A Clockwork Orange, for example; Quilty refers to himself as “Spartacus” at the beginning of his Lolita; there are many YouTube montages of breathtakingly similar shots from all his films). Even Kubrick fans, though, might think to themselves, “I can’t have missed that… can I?”

The Shining poster doesn’t appear in Eyes Wide Shut but this moment does come back into one’s mind later when some of the more visual theories about The Shining (the one that really knocked me back was the pattern of the carpet reversing from shot to shot) are discussed and footage is shown as “evidence”. I don’t doubt for a second that the other footage presented here is untampered-with, but I guess what I’m saying is, boy does this documentary make you want to go back and watch the movie again (and I’ve watched it a lot recently, working through Taschen’s Kubrick Archives book and the recent Movie Geeks United Kubrick series).

Speaking of those other extraordinary Kubrick works (the Taschen and Movie Geeks United podcast series – particularly the latter’s episode on The Shining – both musts for any Kubrick fan), what most impressed me here was that Room 237 never felt redundant. Even when discussing theories I’d heard before, the use of Kubrick’s own footage only hammered it home all the more. There’s an enormous disclaimer right at the start of the movie and I’m assuming it’s the only way they could get away with using so much of the man’s own imagery in conjunction with often controversial ideas of what he meant by it. It’s one of those documentaries that benefits hugely from this somewhat official blessing – like the use of the Sherman Brothers music in a documentary I recently watched, The Boys, or the slick old horror documentary Terror in the Aisles hosted by Donald Pleasence, it makes it so much more than if it were just a series of talking heads (which is essentially what the soundtrack consists of). It’s more a jumping off point for infinite further discussion than a definitive collection of theories and interpretations, but the fact that it managed to thrill me so much by the end after having heard so many of the stories before is the highest recommendation I can give.

Excision Excision 5 star

February 11th, 2013 by surlaroute

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“If I do get into heaven, and my relatives have been watching over me, a lot of relationships may have been compromised.”

I can’t exactly say this wasn’t what I expected because from first shot to last, Excision is as blood-drenched as any horror movie I’ve seen, and that’s all I really wanted or expected from it. Shortly before this, I saw American Mary (which I’ll review soon – I intend to watch it again first) and from the first scene there I really expected this decade’s May, but in the end wasn’t exactly satisfied. It was a thrill then, with every passing minute of Excision, to realise that the weirdness I craved was right here. Having watched it twice now, and with few notable titles yet to see from last year, I’m fairly sure this was my favourite movie of 2012 by a long way.

To explain the story without spoiling anything, it actually resembles American Mary in a lot of ways. A young woman with aspirations to be a surgeon finds the more standard route to that profession, shall we say, blocked to her (in American Mary it’s more of a money/misogyny thing; here, the young woman is the high school weirdo). Where the Mary of American Mary is (initially, at least – but compared to Pauline here, totally) balanced even in her alternate pursuits, however, Pauline here is clearly troubled inside. The first shot of the movie is one of many insights into her mind that punctuate the film, and where most of the gore is seen – two Paulines face each other in a clinical blue room. One of them seems to be in horrific pain, blood pouring from her mouth – the other is quite the opposite, seemingly more orgasmic with every drop of blood she sees come out of the other. Pauline often comes out of these grotesque visions visibly aroused – there’s no question she’s not “normal”. Whether you take this movie to heart as much as I did I guess will depend on where you draw the line between fantasies and reality.

AnnaLynne McCord’s Pauline here is played to lip-curling precision, if anything in fact out-weirding Angela Bettis’s May, but the focus isn’t just on the oddball teen. The surprise here is the equal attention given to the parents (Traci Lords – I thought she was Hope Davis till I saw the credits! amazing performance – and Roger Bart). Their own struggle in dealing with one daughter who’s a misfit and another with cystic fibrosis is given so much weight I imagine my sympathies will shift each time I watch this movie in future in the same way as when I watch The Bad Seed depending on my mood. The mother is a horrible character, spouting unbelievably narrow views at each dinner scene (where the movie most clearly pays homage to American Beauty), and in a flashback to Pauline’s near-drowning telling her father (after he gives her a last minute kiss of life), “You have a cold sore on your lips, you should’ve waited for the lifeguard!” But there is something there that tells you she can’t help it any more than Pauline can, that she’s doing her best with everything she’s been directly or indirectly, for better or worse, taught is right.

I’ve seen a lot of comments on the movie saying the ending was predictable but I think that’s kind of the point – the inevitability of the final unbearable scene underlines even the funniest moments leading up to it. Myself, I had an inkling of where it was going, but not of who the real victim would wind up being, and that reveal broke my heart profoundly. The writer/director Richard Bates, Jr joked on Twitter recently, “Some people say Excision’s a horror film. Others say it’s a comedy. I call it a period piece.” You’ll get it when you see it, but I can honestly take it as a serious statement too – with its precise tonal balance of extreme gore, the darkest comedy, and final tragic pain, it speaks volumes about how unbalanced people end up actually acting out the horrific things in their head at this precise moment in time. It’s the American Beauty of horror movies.

The Master The Master 4 star

February 4th, 2013 by surlaroute

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My favourite shot in The Master (after this first viewing, at least – it’s about as futile to talk about this movie after seeing it only once as Prometheus but I’ll try) might be of Philip Seymour Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix in adjacent jail cells. Phoenix is strait-jacketed, sweaty from thrashing around, the toilet in his cell shattered by a single kick. Hoffman is suited, calmly urinating into his. It’s the kind of perfect expression of duality I expected the moment I saw the trailer for The Master, in which every single beautifully composed shot reminded me of a different Stanley Kubrick movie. The Master is about much, much more, but on this first viewing it was this story of two entirely different men – animal and civilised – though both a little trapped, that struck me most.

From all the talk around the movie (mostly about its possible Scientology/L. Ron Hubbard angle) even before its release I imagined Hoffman’s character would be much more clearly painted as the “bad guy”, but this is one of those “bad guys” who is all too seductive – who, when presented alongside the all too headstrong arrogance of Phoenix, seems like a much more appealing bedfellow. But he isn’t necessarily shown to be always in control either – he snaps multiple times when rationally questioned by others, and a key scene has his wife, played by Amy Adams, masturbate him into a sink in a way that resembles his own controlling process on others, as she warns him off his attempts to tame Phoenix. She does a similar thing with Phoenix, too – without the hand job – catching him in-between sleeping and waking, trying to get him to stop drinking. In a way Adams kind of dominates the movie, arguably giving it a slight feminist bent similar to Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. In this sense the movie is less about good/bad/right/wrong and more about cycles of control – we all wish to control, manipulate or direct the universe around us in our own way and reality is just the balance.

I find criticisms of The Master‘s lack of plot if anything more bewildering than the ones I saw of Magic Mike – there’s a very clear narrative here, at its simplest a Pygmalion story. I think people’s responses to this movie are really split into two – those who need to make a snap judgment the moment the credits roll and move on, and those who know that some things need to be left to stew a while, possibly years. It’s the reason I don’t find the movie’s seemingly low score on the IMDb as I post this worrisome – why I don’t feel odd giving the movie only 4 hearts right now even as I want to call it a masterpiece. It took me nearly 15 years to see Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut for the perfect summing up of what he was always trying not to say… I’m willing to give The Master even more than that. I think Paul Thomas Anderson himself knows it too, as an exchange between Hoffman and Phoenix goes at one point:

“It’s a hard, slow process.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I don’t either. That’s why we’re here.”

Wreck-It Ralph Wreck-It Ralph 4 star

February 4th, 2013 by surlaroute

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“Are there medals for wrecking stuff really well?”

[SPOILERS]

For a good chunk of Wreck-It Ralph I really wondered and worried exactly what it was trying to say. The Toy Story like story (“in a world where games come to life when the arcade is closed…”) has Ralph, the bad guy in an old 8-bit game, decide he doesn’t want to be the bad guy anymore and set out into the wider world of gaming (from 8-bit all the way to modern) to find a gold medal. The trouble is that without a bad guy, Ralph’s game (“Fix-It Felix”) will be reported as broken and be put out of service; and his forays into other games threaten to cause similar problems to those games too. In one game, “Sugar Rush”, he meets Vanellope, a “glitch” with a similar desire – she wants to be a part of her game. But if she becomes a part of the game (she is told) her glitch will be seen, be reported, and the game will be over. It’s a hell of a dilemma, and it’s presented in a way at times that truly suggests that the moral might be to “know your place”. Thankfully, as always, Disney know better.

Somewhere towards the beginning, an animated sign in “Game Central Station” (there’s a lot of these puns – Nesquik-sand, “I’m not a glitch, I’m just pixlexic!”, “Are you hurt, sire?” “No he just glazed me!” and for me they did get slightly irritating and Aardman-ish – there’s an hilarious Wizard of Oz reference involving Oreo cookies, however) has Sonic the Hedgehog for some reason informing passers-by, “If you die outside your game you don’t regenerate, ever.” The intention may have been for this to merely add a note of peril to the seemingly harmless environment but my problem, which might make sense if you read my Frankenweenie and ParaNorman reviews, is I took it a little further. When a big sacrificial moment is suggested towards the end, I really braced myself for something profoundly emotional – even more than a heartbreaking moment earlier when Ralph “wrecks” something very precious to Vanellope – and it never came.

This moment is followed by something that threatened to make me give up on Disney entirely as I almost did after Enchanted. I’ve never liked movies where a hero or heroine (usually heroine) has to essentially integrate into society to be accepted by it – it’s the reason I will take any opportunity to tell people Grease 2 is better than Grease, and, closer to Disney, why my heart always sinks a little when Violet seems relatively “normal” at the end of The Incredibles. The way Vanellope the glitch’s story plays out here, then, is kind of wonderful. What actually happens when she becomes part of her game is, the game “resets” and her glitch disappears. She literally becomes a princess, complete with puffy pink dress – at which point my face must have been a picture – which (yay!) she promptly glitches out of, because that’s who she is.

I guess what I’m saying is, I really didn’t know what Wreck-It Ralph was doing half the time, which is probably a good thing. For now I really don’t know where it sits for me as far as Disney are concerned. It’s almost simultaneously a step forwards, backwards, and sideways for them, feeling more at times like a (albeit good) Dreamworks animation – perhaps because of the more recognisable voices of John C. Reilly, Sarah Silverman and Jane Lynch – and with a much more complex message than even their most recent work. It’s certainly one I’ll revisit – it’s possible my experience a second time could be wildly different if I know what’s coming.

I Am Nancy I Am Nancy 4 star

February 1st, 2013 by surlaroute

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“I’m Nancy from A Nightmare on Elm Street.” “Oh really. Where’s Robert?”

You’d think I would’ve had enough of Nightmare on Elm Street extras after the 8 hours of Never Sleep Again and all the other Elm Street stuff I spent weeks watching a couple of years ago but I’ve actually been looking forward to seeing this, which has now seemingly been rebranded as “Never Sleep Again 2”, for over a year now. I don’t really know which is the higher praise – that it more than deserves to sit beside the vast array of material in Never Sleep Again, or that it made me appreciate again the original movie – which I’ve said before is one of those movies that have kind of grown a little stale to me over time through over-watching – more than any other horror documentary I’ve ever seen.

As the title suggests, this is billed as Heather Langenkamp’s story but in all honesty her contribution is not as total as I expected. The documentary is split into two major parts: footage of a horror convention celebrating the original Nightmare’s 25th anniversary where Heather spends most of her time asking people “what about Nancy?” and looking for an action figure of herself (one that doesn’t suck – she finds a “freezing cheerleader” in one Nightmare board game but no Nancy), and a great extended interview with the creator of Freddy and Nancy, Wes Craven. This interview is intercut with another interview with his daughter Jessica, holding a baby daughter of her own – Jessica explains that she may have “inspired” Nancy by saying of Craven’s Swamp Thing 2 years before Nightmare, why are the girls always falling down in your movies?

The documentary reaches some real moments of honesty towards the end – I’m incredibly cynical about emotional moments in these things since the whole reality TV boom but (though not quite as tragicomic as Best Worst Movie) there’s an awkwardness to the human interactions here that I believe can’t be faked. The parade of fans lining up to get her autograph in the convention segment is really something to behold – a worrying moment has one fan pull out a machete to be signed, then there’s a deaf girl with her father, a lot of young children, a guy who wants to tell Heather all about his recent break-up, and most notably a British girl in a wheelchair who moves Heather to tears telling her what Nancy and the Elm Street movies meant for her. Langenkamp’s mission is to get all these people, and us, to “be Nancy!” through the dark times – it sounds corny, but I couldn’t believe how good this movie made me feel.

Summer of Fear aka Stranger in Our House Summer of Fear aka Stranger in Our House 3 star

February 1st, 2013 by surlaroute

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Wes Craven says in the DVD commentary (which is actually more enjoyable than the movie itself) that he views Summer of Fear as an important movie in his career because it was his first 35mm production with a studio that got him into the Director’s Guild. So I guess you could say it’s important in the sense that Cop Out was important for Kevin Smith (albeit for opposite reasons). For me, it’s a TV movie that probably should’ve disappeared, but what are you gonna do? It stars Linda Blair and fans (including myself) are going to want to watch it.

The story is essentially Poison Ivy (which I realise came later but for me is pretty hard to beat for what it is) with a little witchcraft thrown in, which ironically kind of makes it less scary. The use of Blair so soon after The Exorcist isn’t wasted – one scene actually has her in bed screaming “Motherrrrr!” as her skin erupts in boils. I love Linda Blair but she’s not too good here excepting one scene featuring the death of an animal – unsurprising given her commitment to animal rights, PETA, etc in later life (producer Max Keller says in the commentary she brought “45 dogs” to the set even then). Aesthetically she’s as nice to watch as ever, if not as adorable in the horse scenes as in Wild Horse Hank (was that really made a year after this?) or as shameless in the trashier scenes as her later more exploitative work like Savage Streets.

Particularly in the effects laden (and you can imagine how hilarious that is on a 70s TV budget is) finale it’s odd Wes Craven followed his hyper-real debut Last house on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes with this, but it clearly served its purpose for him and it’s not a complete waste of time if you have an interest in any of the participants.

Savage Streets Savage Streets 2 stars

February 1st, 2013 by surlaroute

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This is kind of movie where you know exactly what the next scene will entail when a gym class ends with “okay girls hit the showers” – and not in a plot-moving, semi-tasteful way like Carrie. I’ll admit the teenage boy inside me was perfectly fine with that. I wanted to see this for Linda Blair, of course, and all the artwork I’ve seen for it over the years has been spectacularly 80s-tastic in the worst way.

The plot concerns Blair’s deaf sister who is raped in the gymnasium while Blair is busy having a cat fight in the locker room, followed by Blair’s revenge on the boys who did it. Tone-wise it lies almost directly between Born Innocent (in which Blair played the victim) and The Accused, which says just about everything about early eighties cinema at its worst. Tastelessness aside, however, the bad music and styles etc didn’t let me down here – there’s a great moment where one of the rapists gets run down by a car which, as an IMDb boarder wrote, is a lot like the henchman in Austin Powers who gets run over by a steamroller… sadly I read that before enjoying the pleasure of making the connection myself.