John Carpenter's The Ward

John Carpenter's The Ward (2010) dir. John Carpenter
Starring: Amber Heard, Jared Harris, Mammie Gummer, Daniella Panabaker

**

By Alan Bacchus

Well, it's fun to have John Carpenter back after so many years dormant and more than a decade of forgettable films, even if this latest effort is not the reverie we all hoped for. At least it’s a pure horror film. There are no vampires or ghosts on Mars. But there is a contained location, specifically a psych ward in the '60s, and the ghost of a missing or dead girl tormenting a group of female patients.

We're treated to a classic Carpenter opening including a number of establishing shots of the ward strung together. Before that we see Carpenter’s heroine, a gorgeous and athletic Kristen (Heard), lighting her house on fire, an act that sends her to the looney bin. It’s 1966 and the ward is something we’ve seen in numerous films before - cold, dehumanizing decor, ornery doctors and nurses who seem to care little about the patient’s well being, and of course, experimental treatments like electro-shock therapy and labotomization. Kristen hangs out with other gorgeous young gals, inmates we presume are crazy too.

It doesn’t take long for Kristen to figure out there’s something not right about the ward, specifically an ominous dark-clad figure making creepy appearances around the building. Based on the glum reaction of Dr. Stringer (Harris), this seems to be a part of why Kristen is here. A few of the gals try to escape but are caught and killed by the demon ghost before Kristen has her one-on-one confrontation, and, as we can expect with these period mental patient films, all is not as it seems.

Carpenter manages to engineer a few scary sequences with creative ways to make us jump. His demon woman is a wholly Carpenter creation, a grotesque humanoid in a dress resembling one of the devil worshippers in Prince of Darkness.

But what’s sorely missing is the rich texture Carpenter used to have between his scary moments. Think of the build up in They Live before Roddy Piper first put those sunglasses on, or the monotonous music tones of Ennio Morricone in The Thing, or the religious back story in Prince of Darkness, or John Houseman’s opening campfire story in The Fog. There are no feelings like these in The Ward.

Carpenter’s later pictures have all been plagued with bad casting. Here Amber Heard is simply not believable as a tortured girl from the '60s, too generically beautiful to be psychotic. The stilted dialogue of all the girls feels more like a high school clique than four crazies in a psych ward. Thus, when Carpenter’s not trying to scare us, it’s all flat and devoid of atmosphere.

Sadly, Carpenter has lost his touch, but not without a superb body of work behind him. The Ward is like those last few films from Alfred Hitchcock, admirable but forgettable.

The Ward is available on Blu-ray and DVD from Alliance Films in Canada.

Blood Simple

Blood Simple (1984) dir. Joel Coen
Starring: Frances McDormand, John Getz, Dan Hedaya, M Emmett Walsh

****

By Alan Bacchus

The confidence and command of the medium with this very first feature film from the Coen Bros is kind of astounding. The loosely documented story behind the making of this film has it that Coen Bros made a short demo, or trailer for the film as a pitch to some family friends to invest in their feature version. With their meticulously detailed story board, the maximized their million and a half budget instantly launching their successful career.

It’s a remarkably precise execution of their for the brothers . Despite some rough-around-the-edges cinematography Blood Simple is tight as can be. No shot seems wasted. An artfully rendered jigsaw puzzle, full of crafty shadowy characters all of whom with their own dispicable agendas. We’re not even sure who to root for. The thrill is in the clever unveiling of this dynamic anti-morality tale of greed, desire and a little bit of chance.

Most of the familiar Coens’ motifs are present in this first outing. The opening shot for instance features a car speeding down an open road at night, visuals cues prevalent in Fargo, Raising Arizona and No Country For Old Men. Even M Emmett Walsh’s lazy, heavily-accented narration told with the simplicity of a fairytale forecasts it’s use in Raising Arizona, Hudsucker Proxy, The Big Lebowski and more.

The story, a deliciously plotted pot boiler, bringing to mind the best of Hollywood noir of the 40’s and 50’s. Ray and Abby (Getz and McDormand) are lovers hiding out from Abby’s husband Marty (Hedaya), who also happens to be Ray’s boss in the local saloon. Marty suspects something and hires an old private dick (Walsh) to confirm his suspicions. The detective even offers to kill them both for a tidy sum. After Marty’s double-crossed and left dead, in order to properly clean up the trail of evidence he has to kill Abby and Ray.

But the detective finds an unusually strong opponent in Abby, resulting a remarkable cat and mouse chase in her loft apartment, a memorable blood curdling finale to an ice cold nihlist thriller.

The Coens are not shy to put their cinematic style in front of content and character. But it’s a noir film and the genre requires this kind of panache and swagger. The Coens have it spades, impressing us with clever camera moves, including their famous bar tracking shot which has their camera creep along the thin rail of the bar then literally move up and over a drunkard passed out on a stool. The more erratic camera moves seem to be influenced by Barry Sonenfeld, their first DOP, who would go on to direct his films and use similar expressive moves. But the Coens also know when to slow down and hold our attention. Numerous scenes use excessive silences to amplify the tension before unleashing it’s force. The sniper scene is remarkably tense, a Hitchcockian scene through and through, one short moment drawn out by creative editing for a long as possible to maximize the shock value.

The Coens revel in the detailed procedural actions of their characters. When Ray discovers Marty's dead body in his office for instance, it begins a lengthy sequence showing his disposal of the body. Again, as influenced by Hitchcock, the steps taken by Ray to clean the scene, and transport the body into the car along the highway and eventually to it’s final destination in the shallow grave of a farmer’s field is remarkably involving, like Norman Bates' removal of Janet Leigh's body in Psycho, or the famous sack of potatoes scene in Frenzy. Though Marty’s body never moves at any time, in the back of our minds, we expect him to come back to life and attack Ray.

And remarkably it isn’t until the final act when the Coens find their true hero, Abby, the meek unassuming female victim, who at first is characterized as a femme fatale, another recurring theme for the Coen's, a resourceful everyman or woman who trumps the miscreants at their own game.

Blood Simple is available on Blu-Ray from MGM Home Entertainment

Pulp Fiction

Pulp Fiction (1994) dir. Quentin Tarantino
Starring: John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, Bruce Willis, Uman Thurman, Tim Roth, Ving Rhames, Amanda Plummer

****

By Alan Bacchus

We can’t underestimate the impact of this movie. The fact is, this film burst into the cinematic zeitgeist at large with a force comparable only to a few films in recent memory. It wasn’t a Jaws-like box office blockbuster, but it was a phenomenon just the same. From the extended opening dialogue scene full of inane ramblings from Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer, which flipped itself onto its head revealing the crazy lovebirds as free spirit criminals on a crime spree, to the opening credit sequence featuring an oddball mix of ‘50s surf music and ‘70s funk, Pulp Fiction was something fresh and new.

And yet, Pulp Fiction is really a collage of other movies delicately hidden beneath the recognizable Tarantino-isms. Many of us already knew and revered his bloody heist movie, Reservoir Dogs, a ‘60s Jean-Pierre Melville movie disguised as a clever ‘90s thriller. Some of the motifs transported into his second film included the retro-cool black and white suits with skinny black ties worn by the hitmen Jules and Vincent. There’s the hard-boiled attitude of his heavies, which is disarming based on his characters’ affable sense of humour and awareness of pop culture. There’s also Tarantino’s twisting narrative, which loops back and forth over itself like an Elmore Leonard novel, or in cinematic terms, Stanley Kubrick’s noir classic The Killing. Yet no one would ever refer to Pulp Fiction as an homage to Kubrick, Melville or Godard. Tarantino's whole is greater than the sum of its parts – a brand of cinematic deconstruction that is wholly his own.

This is also something we’ve lost from Tarantino over the years. While Kill Bill and Inglourious Basterds are terrific films, they rely on overt references to his influences. Pulp Fiction acts like a culmination of his pre-Hollywood storytelling, his Video Archives days, where he famously thought up the scenes and characters in True Romance, Reservoir Dogs, Natural Born Killers and Pulp Fiction, and to some degree From Dusk Till Dawn. All of these exist in their own Tarantino universe, like a self-contained quadrilogy/time capsule of Tarantino’s fantasies and desires as a filmmaker.

His later work, written after the success of Pulp Fiction, is clearly the work of a successful filmmaker, another phase of his career. But Tarantino has always been aware of his place in the pantheon of filmmakers. His characters feel the same way.

Many people resent the presence of QT in his movies. I disagree. In this respect, Tarantino is comparable to Alfred Hitchcock, as they are two filmmakers whose personalities are quintessential to the existence of their films. With Hitchcock we expected his appearance in his films. Taking an audience ‘out of a movie’, or becoming aware that we’re watching a movie, is usually cause for trouble. But we need to watch a Hitchcock movie in the context of his full body of work, his obsessions with voyeurism and blondes, and even his obsession with 'obsession' itself. This is the definition of the auteur, the director as the author of a film wherein he or she essentially (or thematically) remakes the same movie over and over again. Hitchcock did this. So does Tarantino.

With today’s eyes Pulp Fiction is as good now as it was then. Absolutely nothing is lost with age. It also seems impervious to overexposure. The individual moments that make up Tarantino’s meandering narrative add up to a hallucinatory loop comedy of errors of crime in Los Angeles.

Going from Vincent’s and Jules’ truncated journey starting in Jules’ car as he describes his experiences in Amsterdam and ‘little differences,’ to Vincent passing his test of loyalty, not without severe shock and trauma, and to his bitter end in front of Bruce Willis’s smoking gun is a magnificent journey. Bruce Willis's scheme to leave the shady boxing racket, which takes a very wild detour in the dungeon of the hillbilly S&M rapists, is one of the greatest 'left turns' in cinema history. And the climactic ending not only shows us what happens to the lovebird criminals from the beginning of the film, it also gives the steely-eyed Jules Winfield the film's greatest moment of change.

Pulp Fiction successfully survived the '90s, which can't be said of other lauded films of the era, thus rightfully earning its place in the cinematic pantheon.

Tucker & Dale vs. Evil

Tucker & Dale vs. Evil (2010) dir. Eli Craig
Starring: Tyler Labine,

***½

By Alan Bacchus

Tucker & Dale vs. Evil manages to find an angle in the cabin movie horror genre still untapped. Eli Craig lampoons these films by putting his audience in the point of view of hillbilly psychopath characters creating a great comedy of errors pitting a couple of lovable but hapless hillbillies against a group of pretentious college students. It makes for a riotous comic horror affair.

Tucker and Dale (Tyler Labine and Alan Tudyk) are a couple of backwater hillbillies lifted from Deliverance, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes, except they’re actually really conscientious, genuine and respectable citizens. But to a bunch of spoiled college kids on a camping trip who’ve seen all these movies they look like psychopaths.

They first meet at a local gas station where Eli Craig cleverly intercuts the two conversations of the two sets of characters. The college kids can only see crazed maniacs based on the hillbillies’ actions and words, but from Tucker and Dale’s point of view, they’re just trying to make friends. Tyler Labine plays the trivia-smart/common sense-dumb Tucker with great sincerity. Early on, Tucker tries to ask the blonde hottie Allison (Katrina Bowden) out on a date. Despite his good intentions, he comes off as more than awkward and, to Allison, a psychotic inbred killer.

Tucker and Dale and the college kids (which becomes Tucker’s generalized term for them) convene again at a decrepit cabin in the woods. What looks like an Evil Dead cabin to the kids is the ‘summer home’ purchased by Tucker and Dale, who have become proud homeowners.

The comedy of errors escalates into action when, by accident, the kids start killing themselves in horrific ways, which of course make Tucker and Dale look like murderers. At one point, while Dale is chopping some wood, one of the kids runs after him and accidentally jumps into the chipper. A fun love story emerges between Tucker and Allison, a beauty and the beast romance, which caps off this ingenious genre twister.

Tucker & Dale is fun midnight madness entertainment. Like Shaun of the Dead, Craig has an intimate love for the genre, and his knowledge of the tropes of cabin-in-the-woods storytelling makes for a movie as genuine as it is honest. And Craig has heaps of comic gore to satisfy the blood quotient of the genre. But it's Tyler Labine and Alan Tudyk, who riff and roll like a great Laurel and Hardy comedic duo, that make this even more fun than the twisty concept.

Zero Hour!

Zero Hour! (1957) dir. Hall Bartlett
Starring: Dana Andrews, Stirling Hayden, Linda Darnell, Peggy King

***½

By Alan Bacchus

Ted Stryker is a shamed WWII pilot suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder after failing his squadron and taking the blame for their deaths in battle. In the present he’s a wreck, as his wife recently walked out on him with their young boy. When he learns about her location and gets a seat on a flight across the country, he’s suddenly thrust into another traumatic situation. With half of the passengers, including both pilots, sick from food poisoning, Stryker has a chance to redeem himself by flying the plane to safety – if his nerves don’t knock him down first.

No, this is not the summary for Airplane!, the wild Zucker/Abrams/Zucker comedy from 1980. But Zero Hour! was their main influence – a disaster film, which, looking back, serves as a near carbon copy of their film, right down to the exclamation mark at the end of the title!

I know Airplane! intimately. It’s one of the greatest and most influential comedies ever made. And yes, I know the film was intended as a satire disaster film. And yes, I even know Zero Hour!, made years before the genre trend in the ‘70s, was a plotting influence. This would be considered blatant theft, but the filmmakers had such reverence for the material they outright purchased Arthur Hailey’s screenplay rights (originally broadcast for television on the CBC!) to remake the movie as a comedy.

Remarkably, both films line up perfectly side by side. Even the character names are the same. Dana Andrews as Ted Stryker in Zero Hour! is just like Robert Hays – a sweaty, twitching shell of a man ruined by his war experiences. The opening flashback sequences to 'the War’ resemble Airplane!’s Vietnam sequences right down to the superimposed images of Stryker’s anguished face over the battle footage. Once on the plane, even the compositions and mise-en-scene are the same.

Geoffrey Toone, playing the doctor character, chews the scenery so marvellously, rendering Leslie Nielsen’s over-the-top serious recreation of the character even funnier. And like the comedic version, as we see the tense decisions made on the plane we also get to see the cigarette-smoking air traffic controllers sweating buckets on land. Midway through, Sterling Hayden enters the picture playing Stryker’s former Captain charged with guiding Stryker to safety. Like Robert Stack’s egotistical Capt. Kramer, his bravura presence and cigar-chomping, no-bullshit attitude trumps even Toone’s authoritarian presence. And early on, Joey, Stryker’s wide-eyed boy, is introduced to the pilot in the flight deck. Watching that scene play out knowing how deliriously naughty Peter Graves plays it is difficult to take out of one’s mind.

So how can I even judge Zero Hour! on its own merits? It’s impossible. But, looking back on my old review of Airplane! I have to quote myself:

“Airplane! is rooted in a real story, which, if told in another genre, could actually work. Although the filmmakers try their best to score every gag, not everything hits the mark for everybody. But in between the lewd, rude and crude behaviour, there’s engaging and likeable characters. So when you’re not laughing, it’s not a chore to actually watch the film."

The fact is, Zero Hour!, however overdramatized, is a lean, mean tense thriller. At 90 minutes, it’s a white knuckle action film. There’s almost no inter-character conflict, and it is suspense cinema stripped down to its essential elements – all the chaff is stripped away. The fact that both versions are supremely watchable on their own and are enhanced by the presence of the other is a testament to the words originally put onto paper by its creator, Arthur Hailey.

Elephant

Elephant (2003) dir. Gus Van Sant
Starring: Alex Frost, Eric Deulen, John Robinson, Timothy Bottoms, Elias McConnell

****

By Alan Bacchus

Like Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, in Elephant Gus Van Sant magnificently manages to create great art out of great tragedy. Indeed, both works of art are comparable. From the bombing of the city of Guernica in the Spanish Civil War, Picasso rendered his most recognizable painting. For Gus Van Sant, his inspiration for Elephant, his universally celebrated Palme D’Or-winning film, was a reaction to the Columbine school shooting – a seminal event in recent US history. Years from now when we look back on his career, this might be his crowning achievement.

Van Sant’s determined minimalist style is so very deceptive and wholly cinematic. It’s cinematic in the sense that the languid and quiet pace creates an eerie tension. This serves to establish realism and makes us believe that the high school and students depicted in the film could actually exist – a high school with nameless, faceless kids free of all preconceived notions of a movie ‘high school’. But it also establishes a sense of boredom, which disarms the viewer to the inhumane tragedy about to unfold.

The film is a technical touchstone of cinematic technique. Harris Savides’ steadycam achieves some rather unique accomplishments, moving both inside and outside the school with complete unity in the lighting and depth of field. Whether or not you notice this specifically, the fluidity of the camera that creates a feeling of elegant motion is front and centre. The visual design of placing his characters in the centre of the frame moving through hallways might even connect, whether purposefully or subliminally, with the point of view in which computer games are played by the two killers in the film. Or maybe Van Sant intended to echo the eerily cold feeling of the overlook hotel in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.

Look closely to follow the shifting point of view. In mid-shot, Van Sant often moves from a tracking shot following a character to a reaction shot of other characters looking down the barrel of the camera. This occurs specifically when the handsome jock turns the heads of the nattering bulimic girls in the hallway.

If there’s a false note in the film it’s the depiction of Alex and Eric as emotionless stone cold killers. When the film switches to their stories, he’s clear to show their inane and confounding activities prior to the carnage, including their planning process, executed without an ounce of remorse or self-doubt, or an acknowledgement of their fate. There’s also the gay shower scene, which creates even more confusion and questions. Regardless of how the Columbine killers conducted themselves before their rampage, their detachment from reality is frightfully terrifying.

The massacre scene that fills the third act admirably does not sensationalize the murders. The depiction of death and the often confusing actions of some of the kids just before death feel so utterly real. Benny, for instance, skulks around the school like a brainless zombie thinking he’s immune to the killers’ weaponry. And his death, so undramatic and thoughtless, is difficult to comprehend or make sense of, yet it makes sense given the way Van Sant plays out Benny’s movements.

That said, Elephant is not meant to make sense of any aspect of this tragedy, other than, like Guernica, an abstract instinctive visceral reaction from the soul of an artist.

Chasing Madoff

Chasing Madoff (2011) dir. Jeff Prosserman
Documentary

**½

By Alan Bacchus

The latest subject of white-collar crime activist filmmaking is Bernie Madoff, that detestable Wall Street fraudster and conspirator of a 50 billion dollar Ponzi/Pyramid scheme. Based on the title, Chasing Madoff isn't about the man himself. Rather, it’s about the team of men chasing him down, specifically chief whistleblower Harry Markopolos, a Boston financial manager, who at first sought to compete directly with Madoff for clients until he discovered the damning evidence of market fraud, thus compelling him to embark upon a decade-long journey to expose Madoff's crimes.

Like the fine financial docs Inside Job (Charles Ferguson), Casino Jack and the United States of Money (Alex Gibney) and the Sundance-screened The Flaw (David Sington), Chasing Madoff is effectively harsh towards not only Madoff, but also the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission), The Wall Street Journal and other checks and balances that are set up to prevent this shocking miscarriage of justice.

Director Jeff Prosserman takes an especially clinical approach, employing most of the same cinematic techniques as the great Errol Morris (Thin Blue Line, The Fog of War, Tabloid): centre-framed interviewees against monochrome backgrounds looking directly into the camera. Morris has been doing this for 30 years, and as used by Prosserman, his techniques are still effective. Prosserman also employs a significant amount of well-executed digital effects to transition between interviews ― the effect of scrolling through photos on a touch phone or iPad. His dramatic recreations are also in the Morris style: abstractly visualized scenes that fill in the visual gaps of his subjects' testimony.

Prosserman's clinical approach wears though, specifically Markopolos's emotionally detached testimony, which dampens the dramatic tension. Unlike Inside Job, Chasing Madoff simmers but never boils.

After the 10-year odyssey of Markopolos risking the safety of his family to "do the right thing," Madoff is caught by the same market he manipulated for so long ― the financial crisis of 2008. Not even Madoff could escape the pressure of the sub-prime mortgage affair, thus toppling his precarious house of cards almost instantly. Does this render Markopolos's efforts obsolete? Perhaps. With or without Markopolos, the financial crisis would have happened, and Madoff would have gone down, which consequently reduces the dramatic power of the film.

And though it's a different film, we also can't help but want to know more about the actual Bernie Madoff and how a wealthy, educated man would commit such heinous crimes. I suspect that might be a better story. That said, Chasing Madoff accomplishes its goals and is a strong cinematic documentary informing us about the events that led to the indictment of this now infamous Wall Street criminal.

This article first appeared on Exclaim.ca

The Terminal Man

The Terminal Man (1974) dir. Mike Hodges
Starring: George Segal, Joan Hackett, Richard A. Dysart, Jill Clayburgh, Donald Moffat, Matt Clark, Michael C. Gwynne, James B. Sikking and William Hansen

***½

By Greg Klymkiw

Forces increasingly dominate us beyond our control. In this respect, Mike Hodges’s brilliant 1974 science fiction thriller The Terminal Man, adapted from Michael Crichton’s chilling novel of the same name, seems more scary and necessary than ever.

A few nitpicking details from when the film was made over 35-years-ago – outmoded robots and doctors puffing away on cigarettes in a hospital – are not enough to seriously date it.

The Terminal Man is a movie that displays a keen ahead-of-its-time sophistication in both execution and subject matter.

Harry Benson (George Segal) is a brilliant young computer scientist. He suffers from epileptic blackouts wherein aberrant behaviour, including vicious uncontrollable acts of violence lead to criminal incarceration. Adding to this mix is Harry’s paranoia-fuelled mistrust of computers themselves – an especially queer fear for someone considered above the curve in terms of his research.

In seeming desperation, Harry agrees to become a human guinea pig for a group of surgeons who believe behaviour can be controlled by implanting chips and electrodes in the brain, which, in turn, are connected to a mini-computer within the body.

Like any great Frankenstein tale, shit goes wrong - horribly wrong.

What makes The Terminal Man such a terrific picture is screenwriter-director Mike Hodges. Working at the peak of his powers (having just rendered Get Carter, the extraordinary and deliciously nasty British crime thriller with Michael Caine), Hodges infuses the movie with an ultra-creepy mise-en-scene that, for its first half, keeps you super-glued to your seat, eyeballs locked firmly on the screen.

What gets to you is how quiet the movie is – the hollow, late evening reverberations permeating the hospital wherein much of the movie is set, slithering so deeply into your guts that every sound you DO hear is fraught with urgency and where the hushed tones of doctors and nurses infuse everything with paranoia.

One of the stranger cutaways in the picture is when Hodges occasionally directs us to a group of proletarian orderlies guffawing as they disparage their charges. It’s an odd visual and aural juxtaposition between opposite ends of the hospital hierarchy – those on the “bottom” are upfront about their contempt while those on “top” hold their proverbial cards close to their chests. On one hand, this seems like an obvious directorial touch. It is obvious. Importantly it doesn’t take you out of the drama, but forces you at the proper juncture in the story to come to this juxtapositional conclusion and, in fact, adds to the overall feeling of manipulation that is directed at Harry. It also suggests that the world is increasingly fraught with a lack of caring and where self-preservation and contempt are perfectly comfortable bedfellows.

There is also no traditional musical score save for the occasional use of Glenn Gould tinkling his creepy ivories with one of the Goldberg Variations and a brief moment when hospital Muzak filters onto the soundtrack and into Harry’s brain as he is wheeled into the operating theatre. Lack of a full-bodied orchestral score for a thriller was – even in the 70s – a brave, unconventional move. These days – when every thriller is replete with herky-jerky cutting and bombast – such a touch is virtually unheard of (much, I think to the detriment of the genre, audiences and cinema on the whole). Val Lewton’s thrillers for RKO in the 40s were a perfect example of how true horror could be found in the dark and by what you didn’t see. With The Terminal Man, it’s what you don’t HEAR that adds to the terror.

One of the more grotesque elements of Hodges’s terrific picture is how so much of the film is set in a hospital, but even more intense is the inclusion of a brilliant sequence when the operation itself is performed upon Harry. He keeps his lens trained on virtually every pre-op, post-op and during-op moment – the sweat, the rubber gloves, the clamps, the needles, the scalpels, the blinding lights, the fluorescent glare and the ever-present view of white-coated officials viewing the proceedings from above behind glass.

The look of the film also adds to the creep factor. The movie is drained of primary colour – white rules, as does the darkness, the black shroud of evil. The only colours to ever punch out are (appropriately enough) red (during several shocking punctuations of blood-letting) and a typically sad 70s climax/conclusion set amidst the grey tombstones in a lush, green cemetery. Hodges's compositions are straight forward and many of the shots play long - allowing for maximum dramatic impact. One of the more chilling shots that recurs throughout the film is an eye through a peephole, surrounded only by pitch black and framed so that our eyes are drawn immediately to the exposed image and stay there - almost as if we were one the other side being examined.

The cast is first-rate. The gorgeous Joan Hackett provides a bit of offbeat warmth as a psychiatrist who doesn’t trust the operation being performed on Harry. She is surrounded by stalwart 70s character actors like Richard A. Dysart, Matt Clark, Michael C. Gwynne, James B. Sikking and Donald Moffat all delivering their cold, calculating best as the raft of bureaucrats, doctors and scientists. There’s a terrific cameo from the great William Hansen as a doctor from the “old school” who delivers a stirring condemnation of the use of surgery for mental illness and a very young and hot Jill Clayburgh briefly lights up the screen as Harry’s sex kitten girlfriend.

As the title character, George Segal is the true revelation. He was the go-to guy for 70s romantic comedies – in fact, a whole whack of great comedies, my favourite being the thoroughly insane black comedy Where’s Poppa where Ruth Gordon pulls down his pants to kiss his “tuschy”. Segal was, and still is, a great actor and certainly, as he proves in this picture, no mere lightweight. He always had an edge that many comic actors lacked. His performance as Nick in the Mike Nichols film version of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf proved that in spades. Here, he blends his edgier qualities with his lighter leading man qualities to present a character we’re with from beginning to end.

The Terminal Man suffers slightly from inevitabilities inherent in both the genre and narrative itself – it’s a Frankenstein story, after all and only a matter of time before Harry runs amuck and must be hunted down. The journey to get there, however, is tremendously compelling.

Mike Hodges is a tremendous underrated director. Not only is it worth seeing The Terminal Man, but I highly recommend the aforementioned Get Carter, his strange crime comedy Pulp, the wonderful, Flash Gordon, a joyous 80s celebration of sci-fi cheese with a score (no-less) by Queen and one of the best British films of the past couple of decades, Croupier.

The Terminal Man is available via on-demand special order from Warner Home Entertainment via the Warner Archives collection. You’ll also find it for sale or rent in specialty video stores. In Toronto, Canada the only places that carry a wide selection of these titles are the flagship store of Sunrise Records at Yonge and Dundas and the newly resurrected Starstruck Video at Dundas and Tomken. As per usual, it’s a simple on-demand package. It features the movie and the trailer. The transfer is from best available materials. One can see the reel change markers every so often, so it has obviously been taken from a solid archival print. The colours – when Hodges allows them – are vivid and the whites are suitably stark. I was especially impressed, as I have been with many of the Warner Archives transfers, with the grain. It’s there!!! And it’s doing its magical dance as only grain can. I’m thankful no over-zealous control room hack has taken the time to mute it.

I’m disturbed, however, that Warner Bros. has chosen not to release this film properly. It’s a sci-fi picture that the core audience – especially of a certain age – absolutely love. Those who missed it the first time round (I was a 15-year-old genre geek when I saw it first-run in the 70s on a big screen), will love it. As well, a whole new generation of geeks deserves to experience it. Given that director Mike Hodges, stars George Segal, Richard A. Dysart, Michael C. Gwynne, Donald Moffat and Matt Clark are all still alive and also given the film’s many admirers (one of whom is Terrence Malick), I’m sure there would be a huge audience if the movie was properly transferred to Blu-Ray (where I think it would look magnificent) and featuring a solid Laurent Bouzereau-styled documentary and one or two commentary tracks. Warner Home Entertainment: ARE YOU LISTENING?

Three Colours - Red

Red (1994) dir. Krzysztof Kieślowski
Starring: Irène Jacob, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Frédérique Feder, Jean-Pierre Lorit, Samuel Le Bihan

****

By Alan Bacchus

Red, White and Blue, the glorious trilogy of French films from legendary Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski are essential viewing for lovers of international cinema. Using the three national colours of France, representing Equality, Liberty and Fraternity, Kieślowski creates a thematically complex yet wholly accessible linked trilogy. Unlike traditional film franchises, sequels and threequels, each of these films is unique and self-contained. There’s no particular order in which they need to be seen, with the films freely weaving themselves in and out of one another with grace.

Kieślowski specifically chose three different cinematographers to shoot his films resulting in three distinct ‘looks’. Blue, shot by Slawomir Idziak, is dark and brooding, using predominantly blues (of course), but also deep yellows and noirish grey shadows concealing much of his frames. White is the least stylistic, a bright and traditionally composed imagery subordinate to the narrative, while Red is shot with a dreamy, romantic, effortless style, both energetic and effervescent.

While it’s painful to even consider ranking these films, arguably Red is the standout picture. It’s the last of the three colours films, garnering Mr. Kieślowski two Oscar nominations for Best Director and Best Screenplay. Portraying the theme of Fraternity, Kieślowski puts us in the shoes of Valentine (Irene Jacob), a model who accidentally hits a dog while driving home after a photo shoot. Her compassion for the animal causes her to seek out her owner, thus sparking a remarkable, enlightening journey of discovery and reconciliation of her own inner anguish.

Red is the most romantic of the three films, hence the use of that colour prominently throughout. Yet, Kieślowski’s heroine never experiences love. We can feel love in the air, like God almighty moving his characters around like chess pieces on a board to be in a position to fall in love, or at least release themselves of their fates. Such is the happenstance meeting of Valentine and Kern, the dog’s sad owner, who spends his days listening in on his neighbour’s conversations before his emotional reconciliation brought out by Valentine’s gentle innocence.

As with the other two films, Kieślowski uses coincidence and chance to express his themes of existence, love, repentance and forgiveness. His use of parallel narratives that twist and turn within one another and even double-back through the other films of the trilogy (although sometimes obliquely) gloriously connects all three characters as one form of human conscience. Red is elliptical without being self-consciously clever. It’s a glorious finale to this landmark series.

Still Life

Still Life (2006) dir. Jia Zhangke
Starring: Tao Zhao, Zhou Lan, Sanming Han, Lizhen Ma, Hongwei Wang

****

By Alan Bacchus

The Three Gorges Dam is China’s massive hydroelectric dam, a marvel of engineering built in 2006 and the largest power station in the world. As a manmade structure that tamed the great Yangtze River, it became a symbol of the might of the new Chinese economy. But because of the ensuing environmental impact and displacement of millions of rural citizens, it’s also seen as a stake for liberal activism in the country.

Ironically, out of this massive economic change and upheaval begat a number of great international films in the past few years. Yung Chang’s great documentary, Up the Zangtze, showed this change from the point of view of a tourist sailing a boat on the river. Jia Zhangke’s celebrated Venice Golden Lion winner, Still Life, is arguably the crowning artistic statement of this period of change.

It’s a challenging piece that magnificently juxtaposes the journey of two lost souls in search of their loved ones against the background of a centuries-old rural way of life about to be drowned for all eternity by rapid progress.

Han Sanming is a coalminer arriving in the town of Fengjie, which is about to be flooded. He’s searching for his wife who left him 16 years ago with a daughter he’s never seen. Han goes from person to person asking about his wife and where she might be, with each person guiding him to the next, like connect the dots. There’s also Shen Hong, a nurse in Fengjie, who is searching for her husband, Guo Bing, who hasn’t come home in 2 years. Like Han, she wanders through the near wasteland of vacant buildings and impossibly beautiful mountainous landscapes looking for answers.

Through the compartmentalization of Han's and Shen’s scenes (Han is featured in the first third, Shen in the second, then Han again in the final third), Zhangke forms a rudimentary three act structure. But nothing at all feels familiar in Zhangke’s world. While the real-life personalities he finds and uses as actors in his film along the way lend an observational documentary-like feel, there’s a strong tone of mystical realism. At one point from Shen’s daydreaming point of view we see her imagining one of the derelict building skeletons suddenly launching into the sky like a rocket ship. Zhangke elegantly weaves these elements of spiritual fantasy into deeply emotional personal character stories.

Despite the title, Still Life seems to be constantly in motion, albeit slow and methodical at a snail’s pace. But it is motion and we can feel it. In every frame, people are constantly working like worker bee drones in unity for the greater purpose, either swinging sledgehammers to demolish the massive buildings that now look like industrial carcasses of the former Communist era, or operating large and complex machinery while making trinkets for the West.

Or perhaps it's a Maoist metaphor for the ability of the Chinese people to form a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Zhangke’s camera complements these themes, moving at the same pace, creeping into its subjects like a Hitchcockian voyeur, or just elegantly gliding across the often astonishing visuals.

It truly is a visual masterpiece featuring one stunning composition after another, at all times making us reconcile in our minds the achievements of man against the achievement of nature and earth.

Things to Come

Things to Come (1935) dir. William Cameron Menzies
Starring: Raymond Massey, Ralph Richardson, Cedric Hardwicke

****

By Alan Bacchus

Things to Come is an early and largely unheralded masterpiece of cinema and one of the all-time great science fiction films. H.G. Wells, the famed novelist, actually wrote the screenplay adapted from his book The Shape of Things to Come. It’s one of the most ambitious films ever made and tells the story of a fictional city in England from 1940 to 2040 – a hundred-year journey of technological and political progress filmed with the most advanced special effects and production design of its time.

The English city of “Everytown” is a not-so-subtle double for London. The film begins in 1940, when the world was at the brink of a war (and remember the film was made in 1935, four years before WWII broke out). Though most people knew a World War was imminent, the damaging effects nobody could predict, and so when war does break out in the film and literally destroys the world, we get to see an extreme view of our future.

The second stage of the film takes place in 1970, when the world is still reeling from the destruction caused by the war. The world is divided into smaller warring communities – a world where scarce commodities like gas, oil and water are the prime necessities. Communication and technology have disappeared, and people live spartan post-apocalyptic lives of need. Out of this environment emerges a tyrannical Nero-like despotic leader, Rudolf, who leads Everytown into battle against its neighbours. But when a member of a more advanced group arrives to the city in an airplane, hope of a better future is clear on the horizon.

The final chapter fast forwards to 2040 where it’s a completely futuristic world of peace. But the progress that brought the peace is moving too fast for some. A backlash against the technological advances ironically creates more tension, and a new rebellion moves to reverse technology and revert society back to where it was. The film climaxes with a riot as the leaders of the city launch the first manned mission to the moon.

Despite some clunky on-the-nose dialogue, the film is highly entertaining and a technological marvel. Wells writes his dialogue in the form of ideological speeches warning viewers about the dangerous world we’re headed towards. The ideas and themes of war and the irony of progress and conflict are simplified, but a 1935 pre-war point of view makes it remarkably profound and thought-provoking.

But the production value is the star of the film, including the design, editing and cinematography. More impressive is that it’s a wholly British production with no Hollywood ties. It was directed by the renowned production designer William Cameron Menzies, who would go on to win an Oscar for designing Gone with the Wind and shooting the famous Burning of Atlanta sequence. He would also direct the sci-fi classic Invaders from Mars in 1953.

The staging and set design in Things to Come are unbelievable and rival any film of its day or since. The design of the demolished city bears a striking resemblance to the bombed cities of Europe after the war – Berlin, Tokyo, etc. – and matches the destroyed city designs of Full Metal Jacket and Saving Private Ryan. The futuristic city in 2040 is even more impressive. Model work, matte photography and rear projection imagery are seamlessly combined to create a visually stunning future world. Menzies chooses a series of awe-inspiring frames that would set the bar for all other science fiction films to come.

Legend Films distributes the fine Ray Harryhausen-restored DVD. I highly recommend picking up Things to Come either to complete your science fiction collection or to start it. If you’re a cinephile, this needs to be on your shelf.

Something Borrowed

Something Borrowed (2011) dir. Luke Greenfield
Starring: Ginnifer Goodwin, Kate Hudson, Colin Egglesfield, John Krasinski, Steve Howey, Ashley Williams

*½

By Alan Bacchus

Laziness and complacency in screenwriting were never more apparent than in the latest Ginnifer Goodwin romcom. A potent internal conundrum of conflict for Goodwin’s character is wasted with dumbed down characterizations, diffusing the film of all substance.

Writer Jennie Snyder, adapting Emily Griffin’s novel, has an audacious conundrum for her main character. Rachel (Goodwin), an underachiever in the romance department, has been in love with her law school buddy, Dex (Egglesfield), for years. Unfortunately, her sexually adventurous bombshell of a best friend, Darcy (Hudson), already scooped him up years ago. Now they’re set to be married with Rachel as the maid of honour. But when some kind of romantic spark randomly hits Rachel and Dex after her birthday party, they sleep together, thus bringing to the fore years of suppressed desires and many complications.

While there's a romance going on between two souls seemingly destined to be together, at odds with these desires is a strong lifelong friendship – a relationship that goes back much longer than the romance. This is the stuff of great drama.

Like the indecisiveness of Hamlet, Rachel continues to see Dex, undercover of Darcy, and though she knows she has to tell her friend, she just can’t do it. It’s the same with Dex, who reciprocates all romantic signals but just can’t decide between Darcy and Rachel.

The guts of this situation are that it’s a zero-sum game. Rachel can’t get Dex without losing Darcy, and if she keeps Darcy’s friendship, she can’t be with Dex. Unfortunately, Rachel and the audience are immediately let off the hook from her indiscretion by Darcy’s cardboard characterization as a self-centred, shallow bitch, who cares little for Rachel’s needs. We quickly learn that despite 20+ years of friendship, Darcy is a terrible friend, unworthy of Rachel.

By portraying Darcy with such disdain, there’s no real decision for Rachel to make. The situation is no longer a zero-sum game. The choice is obvious, thus robbing the audience of Rachel’s internal conflict. And without any sense of realism or colour, Hudson simply becomes set dressing.

I understand why she was written this way. It’s easier, plain and simple. Writing Darcy as a cliché antagonist bitch is like putting together Ikea furniture. Even on Dex’s side, his parents are portrayed as money grubbing stuck-up assholes who tell their son not to do what’s right, but what’s expected.

Perhaps the biggest insult goes to John Krasinski’s character, who represents the ‘Ducky’ (from Pretty in Pink) character. He’s the barely-straight best friend who has loved Rachel all along but has never expressed his feelings. In the end, when he confesses his secret crush to Rachel, he’s so easily dismissed and discarded by Rachel. The moment is meant to get Rachel to finally make her decision and tell Darcy the truth about her feelings. But instead, it represents the tragic irony of this movie – opportunities lost with lazy screenwriting.

Something Borrowed is available on Blu-ray and DVD from Warner Home Entertainment.

Senna

Senna (2011) dir. Asif Kapadia
Documentary

***½

By Alan Bacchus

Senna continues a recent trend towards giving real-life stories in sports the treatment of a feature documentary. With the recent HBO Sports docs playing at festivals and on pay cable, and the great ESPN 30 for 30 series, people have finally started to realize that looking back at sports with a journalistic and artistic eye will produce cinematic experiences far and above what can be done with good old-fashioned fiction.

Why reinvent the wheel when sports by their very nature feature dramatic characters going through immense physical and emotional stress that pushes their bodies to the limit, often putting themselves in danger? Add to that the fact that all of these great dramatic moments have already been captured on film/video.

Senna, as a documentary feature, is no exception. Asif Kapadia’s film brings us back to arguably some of the most exciting years of Formula One racing between 1984-1994. These were the years of Alain Prost and Ayrton Senna, one of the great rivalries in the history of sports featuring two personalities in the big money, high stakes arena of Formula One. Senna chronicles this decade-long journey of the humble Brazilian’s rise to become the best driver in the world, one of the best ever, pushed by his teammate and fierce competitor, Frenchman Alain Prost, to create a sympathetic and deeply tragic study of a man fighting battles on and off the racetrack toward a tragic destiny. Senna is a deeply moving and emotionally affecting character study.

Kapadia is surprisingly lean with his information, certainly not wasting time getting into things. With as little time as possible dwelling on Senna’s childhood or upbringing, we're almost immediately thrown into his rookie season in Formula One – off to the races if you will.

The stylistic hook at play here is the exclusive use of stock footage through which Kapadia tells his story. The footage is fantastic. Even the lesser quality ‘80s and ‘90s video, which threatens to subvert the big screen polish of the film, is given a clever filter treatment that translates to a nostalgic feel for the era.

What this means is that we never see the interviewed colleagues and journalists we hear providing the commentary. We also never see any of Senna’s private life. Like the tunnel vision of a racer on the track, Kapadia lasers in confidently on Senna’s racing career from the media’s point of view. It’s an admirable self-imposed challenge, but we also miss out on the reactions of, say, his dear friend and F1 doctor Sid Watkins reacting to Kapadia’s questions. Same with Alain Prost – other than the media interviews at the time, we don’t ever hear from him until the end of the film.

The lingering effect of the film, though, is the remarkable face of Senna. The cameras capture through Senna’s eyes enormous humility, grace and honour. After spending an hour-and-a-half watching him in competition, with his family and simply reacting to the cacophony of media attention on him, even though we know he dies, it’s a truly heartbreaking moment.

Though I rarely advise learning about a subject before watching a film, knowing how and when Senna dies at the end of the movie adds a level of intensity and tragic destiny to the experience. Every moment of jubilation is tempered by the sad knowledge of Senna’s ultimate fate.

The moments just before Senna’s death on that day in San Marino will rip your heart out. Kapadia holds dramatically on an on-board camera shot from Senna’s car, a frequently used camera angle in this film that creates a unique kind of personal intensity we don’t get from a regular Formula One broadcast. The sheer length of time for which Kapadia holds the shot sets us up for what we all know was coming as soon as we started watching the film.

Leaving the theatre, the tragedy lingered in my mind longer than most other film experiences, even some of the best movies I’ve ever seen. Thus, Senna triumphs as a legacy for the great racer and as a sports documentary in general.

Creature with the Atom Brain

Creature with the Atom Brain (1955) dir. Edward L. Cahn
Starring: Richard Denning, Angela Stevens, Michael Granger, S. John Launer, Gregory Gay

***

By Alan Bacchus

Sam Katzman is one of cinema’s great schlockmeisters – a Roger Corman-like producer of 1950s B-Horror films. According to the IMDB he has 250 various producer credits to his name. My first entry into the cinema of Sam Katzman is Creature with the Atom Brain, a classic piece of disposable celluloid fom the atomic era.

The film jumps right into the story with not an ounce of backstory explanation. A zombie-like man with a scar across his brain follows another man to his office late at night. The zombie moves to the windows and rips open the covering steel bars with Hulk-like ease. The zombie then approaches the man and strangles him to death. Somewhere else in the world, a maniacal gangster and his German scientist partner, Dr. Wilhelm Steigg (Gregory Gay), watch the action from the point of view of the zombie. They are able to control his movements remotely with simple instructions read into a microphone.

The gangster is the diabolical Frank Buchanan, who has returned from exile in Europe to exact revenge on his enemies. One by one his former colleagues and lawmen that did him wrong die at the hands of his army of remote-controlled humans. There’s a fantastical scientific explanation for how they can control their brains, but essentially they are zombies before there was such a term. The army is called in to help and the authorities, led by mild-mannered scientist Dr. Chet Walker, hunt down Buchanan and Steigg.

I doubt Sam Katzman ever thought this film would last beyond its life in the theatre. In fact, he’d probably be shocked that someone like me would be discussing it 50 years later.

But a film like this changes over time. What was probably a very scary movie for teenagers in its day is now a time capsule comedy – a hilarious slice of the times. Modern films about the 50s frequently make fun of the blindfolded view of the world that cinema showed its audiences (e.g., Far From Heaven and even the Canadian horror-comedy Fido). Domestic suburban life was a blissful fairytale world, and politics and war was noble, heroic and fun. And so, the naiveté of films like these provide us with unintentional absurdist humour.

Remarkably, as a piece of disposable low budget cinema, it actually survives as a polished piece of entertainment. With the help of a fantastic DVD transfer, the black and white image is as crisp and clear as it was in 1955 (probably better, actually). In fact, the sharpness of the image rivals any black and white film made today – try doing a comparative analysis of Clooney’s Good Night and Good Luck and this film. It’s surprisingly difficult to find the technical differences.

The film plays to the lowest common denominator of intellect. The actors are there to tell the audience, on the nose, what is going on – and to set up the fun action horror sequences. Some of the acting is horrendous, but excusing this in the context of time is necessary to enjoy the film. Though it’s not particularly scary, once the film gets moving at its brisk pace I got caught up in the melodrama.

The finale will provide some laughs, as the zombie-warriors engage in a huge hand-to-hand battle with the police on the lawn of a suburban home. Director Edward L. Cahn frequently uses a point-of-view shot to show the zombies strangle their victims. It’s overused, but I can imagine it causing a fright to ‘50s teenagers.