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Review: Hostel (2006)

What's it saying about American films, that sex: the pursuit, the promise of it, and ultimately the fulfillment of the act itself, is scarier than the violence that said sex inevitably conjures? Being kidnapped, tied up and, of course, etc. (there's no horror film without the et cetera.) can't hold a candle to the weird, creepy act of copulation in American horror films. If you haven't seen Hostel, and I'm going to eventually, with only some reservation, recommend that you do, to reveal further, the et cettera, would kill the fun, would deflate what's best about the film: a long, seductive, nearly forty minute slow burn that constitutes much more restraint in the realm of the American horror film than you are accustomed to.

Films that revel in large scenes of explicit, uninteruppted torture, your "Saw" movies, your "Wolf Creeks" and so forth, have been labeled as "torture porn" by better writers than myself. It's glib, its one of those things a writer says hoping to be the first to have said it, but it fits something as mindless as the Saw series (which are basically the David Fincher movie "Seven" crossed with a game show of your choice, Wheel of Fortune perhaps, only in this case you would spin a wheel once to choose a body part, and again to specify which ironic instrument of torture be used to remove said body part). At this juncture, though he may eventually compell me to eat my words, I think its unfair to lump Eli Roth, director of Cabin Fever, and Hostel, in that group just yet. He's a little too enthralled with crappy 1980s conventions that don't work (cartoonish violence, intentionally un-PC jokes that aren't funny anyway) but he has ambition, and when his indulgences are in check, something close to real style.

"Hostel" concerns three backpackers in Europe on a quest for great pot and even greater pussy. They are young, they are about to go to college and/or write the great American novel, and they, like everyone, want that last great drug binge/lay before they settle back in to more socially acceptable lives. Roth gets this right, he understands the conventions of a slasher film enough to know that at least a third of the slasher film's running time is devoted to screwing with you, but he has the talent, and the sense, to make the opening act play like more than just marking time. The kids' dialogue is right, they drop the f-word with a cadence that's familiar to anyone who's been to a kegger til five in the morning, and they aren't burdened with leaden expository passages. Roth knows you know this part of the story already, so he slims it down, tweaks, and gives you something just a little bit off from your preconceptions of a film presented by Quentin Tarantino with a bloody chair on its poster.

The problem is, just as you drop your guard with "Hostel", and begin to engage in the pleasures of the film's dank, eerie atomsphere and cheerfully amoral, xenophobic characters (ripe for a lesson delivered via power drill), the film becomes exactly what it just covinced you it wasn't: over the top, and eventually quite stupid. "Hostel" has cooked up a theme, the continual anxiety between the U.S. and every other country who resents our egotistical entitlement, that is worthy of a great, timely horror film. But Roth, backs off and slacks off, and provides the usual slasher jollies, better directed than most (its still leagues over the Saws and Wolf Creeks of the world) but still the same-o, same-o.

"Hostel" is not as violent as Roth is hoping you think it is, but I think it's still probably too violent. I say this not as a concerned parent, but as someone who feels the forboding Roth works up in the first half (he even manages a visual cue or two from "Don't Look Now") should not, on any grounds be compromised. The tonal inconsistency of "Hostel" is epitomized in a scene an hour and change into the picture when the lead character (the one who hasn't succumbed to the film's evils) meets one of the predators face to face, and the predator, mistaking the hero as one of his own, begins to work himself up, to rant, about the pleasures of his circumstance. Roth has a great idea here, but unfortunately he makes the obvious choice, to portray the bad guy as a complete loony. A scarier possibility, and one that can be seen in the 1988 film "The Vanishing", would have been a character pushed by a malignant curiosity, a nice guy rotting from within. The fact that this rot is acknowledged at all in "Hostel" marks it as a cut above the usual business, but Roth spoiled me, made me greedy for the possibility of a slasher film that actually cuts socially as well as literally.

-Bowen

Review: The Producers (1968)

"The Producers" is about a Broadway producer Max Bialystock (Zero Mostel) and a frustrated accountant Leo Bloom (Gene Wilder) who conspire together to stage the worst play in the world, so they can pocket a bunch of old ladies' money and live the good life. As Bialystock sees it, this is a no brainer, he's been staging flops for years, only this time he'll actually get paid for it, and can be redeemed (though that's a poor word choice, one doesn't think Bialystock is too interested in being redeemed from anything) from a life of sleeping with woman old enough to be his dead grandmother. All he has to do, Bloom tells him, is sell much more stock in the play than available, produce a horrendous flop at a tenth the budget that closes in a night, and sprint to an island of your choosing. Of course, it doesn't go this way, because, as my father is fond of saying, if it did there would be no movie.

"The Producers"'s set up sounds like a comic noir, the sort of thing that we sometimes get from the Coen Brothers, but this is the legendary debut comedy from writer-director Mel Brooks, who went on to become an institution in the genre with films such as "Blazing Saddles", "Young Frankenstein" and, for people closer to my generation, the Star Wars spoof "Spaceballs". Brooks is hit or miss, and "The Producers" encapsulates everything we'd see in his future in just under ninety minutes.

The first third is shrill, loud, screeching, dreadful, think the worst of Billy Wilder's comedy work ("One, Two, Three", perhaps) crossed with a Neil Simon annoyance of your choice. Brooks mistakes loud for funny in this section, and you may find yourself tempted to turn the volume down or turn the damn thing off entirely. Turn it down, but don't turn it off, because, at about minute forty, Bialystock and Bloom, after finding their suitably atrocious play (the now legendary "Springtime for Hitler") knock on the door of fruity, clueless theatre director, Roger De Bris (played by a pre-Mr. Belevedere Christopher Hewitt, a precursor to Christopher Guest's Corky St. Clair) and the whole thing shakes loose of the stagey grip Brooks has had on the proceedings up until this point. "The Producers" becomes funny, real funny, with more classic lines in a five minute clip than I could keep up with. (My favorite has to be De Bris's "I never realized the Third Reich meant Germany! This is filled with historical goodies like that!)

Bialystock, Bloom, and De Bris then find their Fuhrer in a fellow named L.S.D (Dick Shawn, who's performance is like The Fonz if he dropped the '50s thing for a more '60s "its cool daddy yo" vibe) and "The Producers jumps the rails, drops a tab that's probably in L.S.D.'s back pocket and becomes something more free form, organic and surreal. The awkward set ups of the long, nearly laughless first third begin to clash and bang against one another like billiard balls, and reconfigure into something delightful weird, just a dash off from what you expected, culminating in a set piece of zonked out brilliance, the performance of "Springtime for Hitler", which is like Grease crossed with Triumph of the Will as restaged by Busby Berkeley.

The performances are largely good, but take some getting used to, the film is so over the top you have to a take a nip, process, and then move on. Zero Mostel powers the first third, and invests his lines with an animal vulgarity that's hard to shake; when he addresses his secretary as a "Swedish tease" you think he's saying something truly dirty. Gene Wilder, overall, is disappointingly underused, but he invests the character with a pathos, a rumpled lonely dignity, that can be found in even his most bizarre characterizations. Wilder does get the one real laugh that occurs in the first act, a hissy fit over his valued childhood blanket, and another memorable non-sequitir in the third, when Bloom, realizing that Bialystock and himself are doomed to a successful play, screams at Bialystock: "Fatty! You Fatty! Fat! Fat! Your Fat!"

Brooks doesn't know how to end his film. "The Producers" doesn't so much conclude as stop, but by this point you've witnessed so much nearly hallicinatory comic snap that it hardly matters.

Review: The Roaring Twenties (1939)

There's a scene, justifiably revered, in the James Cagney headlined-Raoul Walsh directed gangster classic "White Heat", where power-hungry criminal Cody Jarrett (Cagney), in jail on purpose to avoid a bigger come down, hears that his mother has died, and worse, at the hands of people he was aligned with. Jarrett launches into a slow boil psychopathic rage that continues to trump your expectations as it continues to get worse, and worse and worse. It's not hammy, it's not Cagney showboating for an Oscar, he's MEANS it, and its one of the great bits of unexpected humanity in a villian in the movies. (Perhaps DePalma or screenwriter David Mamet was thinking of this as they shot the scene where vicious kingpin Al Capone cries at the opera , even as he's ordering good guy Sean Connery to his death.) "White Heat" is considered a classic, and its a sacred lamb that I'm more than happy to stand beside.

Is "The Roaring Twenties", made ten years prior, also starring Cagney and also directed by Walsh, as good? The answer is no, it lacks the originality of the above scene, but expressing disappointment would be churlish, because, on its own terms, "The Roaring Twenties" is a fabulous, well polished genre picture. The plot isn't worth rehashing, its a rise and fall gangster morality story. Nowadays, with cynicism a little more chic, there is some possible suspense as to how these things will play out, but in the time of these movies, Hollywood was required to have the bad guy either die or go to jail, crime was not allowed to pay, and "The Roaring Twenties" is a little laughable in the insistance that crime went out with the repent of Prohibition.

But that couldn't matter less in this case, Cagney's a remarkable bad guy that you can't help but root for, and it's not just because his movies constantly stacks the deck in his favor (always providing a rival you hate more), but more because he seems to be getting into crime to ease a raging case of little man's syndrome. Cagney's squat, funny looking, has a higher voice than you would normally require from your villian, is always messing with a more attractive woman than you'd expect, and there's a reason, because she always screws him over for a better looking patsy on the periphery. Cagney isn't Tony Soprano, and he's not even allowed the vulgar grace of a hood in a Martin Scorsese movie, he's truly the avenging little man, with an id and a tommy gun that will square the odds in a hurry.

The treat of The Roaring Twenties is that the target of his vengeance, after a sluggish first half, eventually becomes Humphrey Bogart, two year before Sam Spade made him a legend. Like "The Maltese Falcon", Bogart seems hungry here, Cagney doesn't treat him with the respect he feels he deserves, so he defects from the gang, and with more success than you'd expect. Bogart's contempt for the Cagney character perhaps mirrors the frustration he felt at the time in real life, for having not quite broken through the industry, not enjoying the success he deserved. Either way, Bogart is unchecked, feral, wonderful, with a look on his face that constantly signals frustration for yet another person he hasn't gotten to kill. The final confrontation, between the little man who's down in the shitter again, and the contemptious thug upstart, who's tux seems to be mocking his unchecked fury, is explosive. For a few minutes, "The Roaring Twenties" previews the brilliance that would come ten years later in "White Heat."

-Bowen

Review: Brick (2006)

Brendan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a brooding high school student with problems that I imagine a majority of teenagers can relate to at some point or another. His girlfriend, Emily (Emilie De Raven) resenting him for being so closed of, has recently ditched him for another clique. To retaliate, Brendan rats Emily’s new boyfriend out to the VP (Richard Roundtree, welcome in any film), who as a result, now views him as his own personal stool pigeon and whipping boy.

Perhaps unavoidably, Emily’s new clique also hates him, he feels detached from everyone else and eats alone, and, at least over the course of the film, only converses with one character who doesn’t resent or want to hurt him, and that would be the Brain (Matt O’Leary), who’s more comfortable watching and reading than doing (screw being a teen I can relate to that now) but, fortunately, as a result can be depended on for dirt on just about everyone else, probably because nobody notices him, which is at least preferred to the more malicious attention that Brendan receives.

Brenden’s other major crisis, and one that I hope most teens can’t relate to, is that Emily, is, at the start of the film, dead. Her vitality and livelihood, as well as Brendan’s hopes of ever again having her, seemingly washing away in the drain pipe she was either killed or deposited in. This opening, with Brendan discovering Emily in the drain pipe, the most we see of her being the strange blue bracelet she wore, is jarringly beautiful and melancholy. It has an erotic dread that instantly recalls the dead Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks , the genre bending, culture defining noir TV series from the early 1990s. Brick is a genre bender too, a surprising hybrid of noir and high school melodrama, a film where dodging class, and solving the murder of your ex-girlfriend carry not entirely unequal weight.

Brendan, like many a P.I. and love lorn sucker before him, sets out to solve and avenge Emily’s murder, and over the course of his investigation, he brushes up against the kinds of oddballs and eccentrics that you can depend on a noir to provide. I won’t go through all of them, discovery is half the fun in a film like this, but I will say that, besides Levitt’s compelling, grounded lead performance (following his implosive, brilliant turn in last year’s under looked Mysterious Skin), the characters that most impressed me were “The Pin” (Lukas Haas) a slightly older drug dealing string puller who dresses like a German Expressionist’s version of a vampire bat, limps on a cane and lives with his mother, Tugger (Noah Fleiss), The Pin’s henchman, a hot head who engages (in one of Brick’s best scenes) Brendan in a game of chicken in a parking lot, and, the sirens of the film, Laura (Nora Zehetner), who’s playing one of the Pin’s best dealers, and Kara (Meagan Good), a drama guru who, as Brendan puts it, “picks her teeth with freshman.”

I loved parts of this film and the high school noir fusion is gimmicky but reinvigorates both genres in surprising, rewarding ways. High school is a perfect backdrop for the inherent paranoia of the noir genre, and the setting seems to heighten the stakes of everything involved. He may talk like it, but Brendan isn’t Bogart, and he’s never able to totally hide his vulnerability. (Though, truthfully, neither was Bogart, and that’s part of the secret to his everlasting appeal. “You think no one notices you eating lunch by yourself”, Laura tells him, in a wonderful scene that I’m paraphrasing, “but they do.” Brick is a stunt, but it’s a stunt with a surprisingly deep current of teenage ache.

The film’s writer-director Rian Johnson (in his debut, he previously edited the overlooked horror film May) displays an intimidating, dazzling control of atmosphere and mood, but his ambitions sabotage him toward the end. In the second half, Brick becomes more obviously a contraption, playing the old incomprehensible plot game that so famously served The Big Sleep many years ago. Here it’s a fizzle, and by the time Brendan finds Emily’s killer he’s lost in so many other double crosses that he didn’t seem to care any more than I did. All’s forgiven though in the quiet, knockout final scene that underlines just how much was at stake.

- Bowen

Review: Night Moves (1975)

"Night Moves" is, like Altman's superb "The Long Goodbye", an example of the existential detective picture that was briefly popular in the 1970s. This is the type of movie where the story, which normally in this genre is dominant and rigoruously thought out, plays sometimes startling second banana to the eccentricities of the main character, who is allowed to be more anxious and less sure of himself than his 1940s noir counter part. The hyper macho conventions of the genre are usually satirized or frowned upon.

All of that said, the 1970s movies have their conventions too, and, while I agree that its probably the richest decade in American cinema, it wasn't nearly as free-wheeling and "truthful" as we tend to make it out to be. The 1970s just had a more entertaining, refreshing pack of myths to sell us. The detective in the 1970s noir may be more of a realistic man in the sense that he's not as fearless and always loaded with a Raymond Chandler quip, but he's still a pretty suave, sexy in an unconvential way pseudo-hipster. Elliot Gould may not be Humphrey Bogart, but he isn't you either. If you ARE Elliot Gould, my apologies.

Gene Hackman's Harry Moseby, the PI of "Night Moves" is much closer to you than Humphrey Bogart or Elliot Gould, and this is the film's greatest asset. Moseby isn't hip, and we never really see him act particularly tough. He's a troubled middle aged guy with a middling profession and a wife (Susan Clark) who cheats on him because she resents his emotional vacancy. Tellingly, Moseby doesn't even confront his wife when he finds out, he confronts the other guy, and the man, knowing this was coming, precedes to lecture Moseby on insecurities he's had to hear about second hand from the wife: his absent father, his lapsed promise as an athelete, etc. The man even asks Moseby if he's gonna hit him like Sam Spade.

I'm making "Night Moves" sound like a pretentious slog, but I've only discussed about the first fifteen minutes of the picture. Harry is offered a new case (obviously) and he soon becomes enmeshed in a mystery involving a promiscious teenager, Delilah (Melanie Griffith, in a funny, wry little performance) and several older men working on the periphery of the movie industry that Delilah knows through her mother, a faded actress that has put Harry on the case.

As interesting as Harry Moseby is, the case, and the various symbolic allusions to it (the title is a pun, and Harry is obsessed with a famous missed opportunity in a chess tournament) are not as interesting or as well developed. You will probably walk out of the picture confused, as the resolution comes out of nowhere and is stuffed into the last ten minutes. This is intentional though and characteristic of the anti-genre stance of the decade, and especially director Arthur Penn, who made one of the most anti-genre movies of all time with "Bonnie and Clyde". "Night Moves" is told completely from Harry's point of view, and the sudden convergence of several surprises at once is meant to put us in Harry's bewildered shoes, it works, but it bewilders us right out of the movie, and while one respects the intention, it doesn't totally pay off.

But "Night Moves' is worth seeing for a lead character a little off the beaten path of noir films, and for Hackman's wonderful performance as that character. The film also has a pair of beautiful, creepy death scenes near its conclusion, and some memorable, cranky, wannabe tough guy dialogue. Be sure to note the distinction between wannabe tough guy and tough guy, that's the kind of movie you're walking into with "Night Moves".

- Bowen

Review: "For Your Consideration" (2006)

For ten years and now four movies (Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, A Mighty Wind being the prior three) director Christopher Guest, his co-writer Eugene Levy, and their inspired cast of improvisers have perfected a very personal, signature comedy. Let's call it the 85 minute deflated sigh, the realization that you can't have what you want, that the stars are most certainly NOT the limit. The luckiest characters in Guest's universe never realize this, and continue to march along to their own inward tune of mediocrity.



Guest's movies have become increasingly melancholy, culminating in "A Mighty Wind", the most emotionally rounded, satisfying of the three. The comedy of the clueless was still present (though not as mean as Guffman) but there was, especially in Eugene Levy and Catherine O'Hara's raw performances, a newfound empathy, a sense that this what Guest and Levy had been working toward all along.

"For Your Consideration", a spoof of Oscar fever as seen through the cast and crew of a broadly inane movie, has the lamest premise of the four, and Guest himself covered similar ground in the non-improvised, not bad "The Big Picture" in the early 1990s. The first half of Consideration, detailing the making of said movie, is underwhelming. Guest's routine, his rhythm, has gotten predictable, and, as talented as the cast is, they are disappointingly unstretched. Its especially disheartening to see Levy, so good in Wind, return to playing the clueless schmiel that he's honed in paycheck pictures.

But then Oscar hope spreads through the project like insidious wildfire, and "For Your Consideration", at that point a forgettable fourth trip to a familiar well, becomes the blackest, most unflinching thing Guest has ever made, epitomized in Catherine O'Hara's brilliant, wax figure freak show variation of Gloria Swanson's work in Sunset Blvd. O'Hara plays Marilyn Hack, the lead of the film, and the one most damaged by delusions of grandeur. Hack's fall, and her chilling final line, bluntly brings to the forefront everything Guest has been up to for the last decade. Catherine O'Hara is worth seeing the movie for, and, while the film is largely uneven, this direction leaves one wondering what Guest and Levy will be up to next.