American Gangster

American Gangster is a strong crime drama and, like Fincher's Zodiac, is a throwback to '70s thrillers, with the absence of digital frills and cellphones and other ubiquitous modern technology surprisingly refreshing. Also like Zodiac (which, by the way, is so far the best film of 2007, in my humble opinion), the period setting is naturalistic, never calling attention to itself. But there's a great frisson in watching cops cruise dingy streets in beat-up '70s cars, smoking like chimneys, draped in leather jackets, jeans, and wide-lapeled shirts. It's like we're back in the heyday of Hollywood thrillers, and you almost expect Gene Hackman as Popeye Doyle to stride around the corner (the case that inspired Friedkin's The French Connection is even name-checked a few times).

So the setting and the look of the film are authentic to the period, and after all creating a world is something that director Ridley Scott excels at, and he masters the details of American Gangster, which suprisingly doesn't have that stylish cinematic sheen that his best work has. The photography, in fact, is rather drab, but this is clearly an artistic choice and it's one that works. Scott sells the setting, imbruing the film with grimy moral corruption, we as an audience are there, and the film then lives and dies on the strength of the story and the acting.

Thankfully American Gangster has one of the most talented casts of any Scott film. The two leads, Denzel Washington as titular gangster Frank Lucas and Russell Crowe as Detective Richie Roberts, deliver thoroughly engaging and textured performances. Crowe in particular demonstrates that he's one of the few major film stars around today that carries within him the soul of some of the great stars of the past who were, like Bogart, a synchretism of character actor and magnetic screen icon. Detective Roberts is an interesting character, totally against the usual type we see as cops in big movies. He's strong, honest and capable, but also low-key, uncomfortable and almost awkward around other cops.

Washington is his match, but he has the more cliched role, a bodyguard to Harlem crime kingpin Bumpy Johnson who ascends the criminal hierarchy after his boss dies, by smuggling high-quality, low-price heroin into the U.S. directly from the supplier in Thailand. Lucas is played a little against type, though -- he's low-key, professional, smart, and under control.

The plot makes the point that, by cutting out the middle-man and offering a superior product at a lower price, what Lucas was doing in the illegal drug trade merely mirrored what capitalism was doing in major department stores. The script, written by Steven Zaillian based on a magazine article about the real-life Lucas, ingeniously keeps the story of the gangster and the cop entirely separate for most of the film, and finally brings the two characters together in a way that is unexpected (i.e., not in a bloody shootout or car chase). American Gangster is packed with detail and incident, and even at about 2 1/2 hours is never boring, even though it lacks any big action sequences other than a tense shoot-out.

There's a strong supporting cast that includes Armand Assante, John Ortiz (Carlito's nephew from DePalma's Carlito's Way), Jon Polito (the gangster from the Coen Brothers' Millers Crossing), Cuba Gooding Jr. (partly redeeming himself for a string of subpar roles), and John Sayles' regular Joe Morton. The standout in a supporting role is Josh Brolin as a corrupt scumbag cop, oozing slime and mendacious reptilian menace.

While it doesn't ascend the heights of greatness achieved by the classics in the crime genre, American Gangster is solid, well-acted, and engaging.

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Directed by Ridley Scott

Written by Steven Zaillian

Starring:
Denzel Washington...Frank Lucas
Russell Crowe ...Richie Roberts
Chiwetel Ejiofor...Huey Lucas
Josh Brolin...Detective Trupo
Lymari Nadal...Eva
Ted Levine...Lou Toback

Keane

English actor Damien Lewis gives an astonishing performance in independent filmaker Lodge Kerrigan's mesmerizing Keane. Lewis is William Keane, a psychologically damaged man torn apart by the disappearance of his daughter, who obsessively haunts the area around a bus station in New York City, where his daughter was taken. Keane stalks the streets, ticking out staccato mutterings to himself, barraging strangers with questions about his missing little girl, but is the trauma at the centre of his shattered mind real or a product of mental illness?

Lewis is in every frame of the film, shot by Kerrigan using a hand held camera in continuous four-minute takes and edited in-camera. Kerrigan keeps the camera tightly focused on Lewis, often framing shots with Lewis in close-up to one side of the frame, like the camera is perched on the actor's shoulder, forcing us into Keane's world with an intimacy infrequently seen in modern cinema. Keane’s gritty, realistic aesthetic achieves what the trendy shaky-cam style reaches for but usually misses: raw, honest immediacy.

I usually try to avoid hyperbole, but it's no exaggeration to say that Lewis' acting in Keane is among the most brilliant I have seen in a film: a staggeringly detailed portrayal of a complex, confused, sad, angry, fragmented soul. One of the most memorable scenes has Keane drunk in a dingy bar, shouting out the words to I Can't Help Myself, trying to drown out the images and the sheer pain in his head. In one simple but searing moment, Kerrigan and Lewis draw you into the agony of the character in an uncommonly tactile way.

The post-9/11 zeitgeist seeps into the film through the fearful paranoia and disorientation of the main character and of the cityscapes he inhabits. Keane meets another lost soul, a woman with a little girl, who she ends up entrusting Keane with for an extended period of time during which the movie tightens the screws as it becomes unclear if Keane will protect the kid or disintegrate.

Brilliantly filmed and constructed, Keane is elevated to the upper cinematic echelons by one of the most vivacious and involving performances in cinema.

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Written and Directed by Lodge Kerrigan

Starring:
Damian Lewis...William Keane
Abigail Breslin...Kira Bedik
Amy Ryan...Lynn Bedik

S U N S H I N E

Sunshine is a visually stunning piece of science-fiction, convincingly dramatized and bursting with the majesty and belittling terror of the cosmos. Cillian Murphy plays Robert Capa, the physicist among the crew of Icarus II on a mission to deliver the ultimate bomb into the Sun, which is inexplicably dying.

The first sections of the film deal with the discovery that the first ship sent on this mission--Icarus, which disappeared--is still in orbit around the sun and a series of mind-bendingly difficult dilemmas the crew faces when they decide to rendezvous with the first ship to obtain its unused payload. Needless to say, things do not go well, and decisions are difficult and fraught with brutal consequences that must be weighed against the future of humanity, which hangs on the success of this mission.

This part of Sunsine is absolutely riveting, drawing together philosophical threads on the worship of the Sun as an entity and the humbling vastness of space and cosmic indifference, and mixing these introspective subtleties into an absorbing tech-space drama. The interplay of the characters is convincing, the design of the sets and technology utterly realistic, with the result that the focus is on the human drama rather than whiz-bang effects. Murphy leads a stellar cast, with even Chis Evans redeeming himself for the dreadful Fantastic Four movies.

Director Danny Boyle brings some beautifully filmed sequences to life, with the highlight being a nail-biting space walk as two of the crew attempt to manually lower two malfunctioning shield panels, garbed in thick, confining protective sunsuits. Boyle shows us the claustrophobic view of the astronauts, peering out through a narrow helmet slit, movements severely limited, perched precariously on the outside of the ship, less than mere motes in the eye of the galaxy. Writer Alex Garland layers on conflict and tension, pushing the characters in extraordinary circumstances, and requiring them to make critical sacrifices and ethical choices. How they react and what happens as a result is carefully built into the fabric of the story. A SF film that is a philosophical drama instead of an over-the-top action film is both a rarity and a breath of fresh air.

The film switches gears for its last third, in a manner that I will not describe. The change of direction is unexpected, but if you run with it, the concluding sections of the film are satisfying. If the end of Sunshine lacks the philosopical and dramatic edge of the earlier passages, it makes up for it with horrific suspense.

Sunshine is a frequently stunning and emotionally and viscerally exciting vision.

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Directed by Danny Boyle

Written by Alex Garland

Starring:

Cliff Curtis...Dr. Searle
Chipo Chung...Voice of Icarus
Cillian Murphy...Robert Capa
Michelle Yeoh...Corazon
Hiroyuki Sanada...Capt. Kaneda
Rose Byrne...Cassie
Benedict Wong...Trey
Chris Evans...Mace
Troy Garity...Harvey
Mark Strong...Capt. Pinbacker

Amicus' Tales from the Crypt

In the 1960s, Amicus Films emerged as a challenger to Hammer Films in the production of low-budget but profitable English horror pictures. Whereas Hammer are known for their vivid Technicolour gothics, Amicus' trademark was the horror anthology film, which featured four to five short shockers held together by a wraparound story that usually involved the protagonists of the various stories being doomed in some fashion. Amicus' first anthology, Dr. Terror's House of Horrors (1965) was a hit, and the studio followed with multi-story chillers Torture Garden (1967) and The House that Dripped Blood (1970), both of which were scripted by famed author Robert Bloch, writer of the original Psycho novel that Hitchcock immortalized on the big screen. In 1972, for their fourth anthology movie, Amicus producers Max J. Rosenberg and Milton Subotsky turned to the American horror comics published by William Gaines and EC Comics for inspiration and the result was Tales from the Crypt, scripted by Subotsky from stories in the titular comic and Vault of Horror (itself destined to be the title of another Amicus anthology pic).

A gruesomely fun affair, Tales from the Crypt involves five people strangely drawn to a ruined crypt becoming seperated from a guided tour and stumbling upon a secret chamber presided over by the Crypt Keeper (deadpan ham Ralph Richardson), who tells them their fate, visualized as short stories within the narrative. The best of the lot, Poetic Justice, stars genre great Peter Cushing as Arthur Grimsdyke, a lonely widower adored by children, who is persecuted by snobbish neighbour James Elliott (Robin Phillips) because he feels the old man lowers the tone of the neighbourhood, the heartless smear campaign reaching its nadir with a bundle of insulting Valentine's cards that Grimsdyke fears were written by the villagers but were in fact the work of Elliott, a cold-hearted bastard like all EC Comic villains. This being a horror picture, Grimsdyke returns from the grave to exact Hallmark-inspired revenge upon his callous neighbour, who gets his just desserts in the same way as all the other selfish assholes do in this film and in the weirdly moralistic universe of Gaines' horror comics.

Cushing expertly and effortlessley garners our sympathy, sitting by himself to supper while talking to a portrait of his dead wife, a photograph that is actually of Cushing's beloved wife Helen, who died prior to the production of the film. Cushing adored his wife, and if you read his autobiography Past Forgetting, the actor reveals that he contemplated suicide after her death, so deep was his grief at her passing. The inclusion of her photograph in the film undoubtedly helped Cushing in his performance, and adds a deeper layer of melancholy for those who know the subtext. Grimsdyke's awful dismantaling by heartless Elliott is beautifully captured by Cushing, proving once more that the actor was worth his weight in gold to any horror film, as director Freddie Francis has noted. It's a wonderful performance, one for which Peter Cushing was awarded The Licorne d’Or Award for Best Actor at the 2nd French Convention of Fantasy Cinema, and it elevates the Poetic Justice segment to heights the other stories can't quite reach.

That's not to say there's not lots of fun to be gained from the other segments. In All through the House, for instance, Joanne Clayton (Joan Collins) murders her husband on Christmas Eve, while her little girl sleeps upstairs waiting for Santa, while a psychopath dressed in a Father Christmas outfit pays her house a visit. It's fun to watch Collins portray the kind of bitch she became famous for, this time in a low-budget horror film. The best of the rest is the last story, where another genre vet, Patrick Magee, stars as a blind person who leads his fellow sightless inmates of a home for the blind in taking sadistic revenge against the heartless new head of the institution. In all of the stories, the awful bastards responsible for awful deeds receive a comeuppance that is an order of magnitude worse than those they perpetrated in the first place. A gruesome collection of horror stories is an odd place to get such a conservative message, but here it is, in all its 'eye for an eye' glory.

Famed cinematographer Freddie Francis directs with a colourful if undistinguished sense of style. Francis got his start in helming several films for Hammer, but achieved his real fame as an outstanding director of photography for movies like Glory, The Elephant Man, and The Innocents. His directing career was less stellar, being confined mostly to low-budget British horror films, and he is not the horror auteur that Hammer's Terence Fisher was, but he did make a substantial contribution to genre films in the 60s and early 70s. Films like The Evil of Frankenstein (1964), Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968), the aforementioned Dr. Terror's House of Horrors, The Creeping Flesh (1973) and The Ghoul (1975) represent pulpy but beautifully-shot highlights of British horror from its (arguably) golden age.

Tales from the Crypt is available on a DVD double-bill on the Midnite Movies line with its sort-of sequel, Vault of Horror (1973). Note for the cinephiles: on this DVD Tales is uncut, but Vault is a censored TV version.

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Directed by Freddie Francis

Written by Milton Subotsky, based on stories published by William Gaines

Starring: Peter Cushing, Joan Collins, Ian Hendry, Patrick Magee, Robin Phillips, and Ralph Richardson

3:10 TO YUMA

3:10 To Yuma shows how smart writing, solid direction, and excellent performances can elevate a genre picture to something way beyond the reach of most standard fare. Uncommonly absorbing for a mainstream film, 3:10 To Yuma builds its story and characters with care and restraint, even giving room for subtext on the mythologizing of fathers, the nature of heroism, and the callous treatment of war veterans, all while delivering some slam-bang entertainment.

Christian Bale's Dan Evans is a rancher and veteran of the Civil War, now partially crippled having had part of his foot shot off. With a wife and two boys, one of whom is chronically ill, Evans struggles to farm the land, abandoned by his government and harrassed by the local landowner who is intent on selling Evans' land to the encroaching railroad. Evans' path crosses with that of outlaw Ben Wade (Russell Crowe), a warrior-poet who leads a gang of vicious thugs including psychopathic Charlie Prince (Ben Foster). When Wade is captured and has to be delivered to the 3:10 train to Yuma to face trial, Evans seizes the opportunity to earn some cash as part of the posse and to redeem the sense of himself as a hero both in his son's eyes and his own heart. The propulsive core of the story is Evans and the posse leading Wade to the train across hostile land, pursued by Wade's outlaw gang.

Interestingly, the film plays Evans and Wade against one another in a series of oppositions and comparisons. Evans is down-to-earth; Wade sketches pencil drawings of people and animals around him. Evans' son looks upon him with disdain; Wade's surrogate son Charlie Prince idolizes him. Evans is a downtrodden, struggling, fallen hero; Wade is the smooth, charismatic, successful outlaw. No cop-buddy picture in chaps, 3:10 To Yuma avoids the cliched route of two dissimilar characters coming to be friends, and continues to play them in opposition until a key turning point that unites them in a way that is believable and unexpected.

The layering of the characters adds welcome complexity and is delivered through two riveting lead performances by Bale and Crowe, and is enhanced by the reactions of two key supporting characters, Evans' son William (Logan Lerman) and Wade's second in command Charlie. William clearly despises his father, viewing him as a coward, while looking upon mythologized outlaw Wade with quiet awe. The arc of this character as respect for his father slowly seeds itself and grows deeper is a connecting thread to the film that anchors it just below the story's surface. Charlie, by contrast, worships Wade while remaining in the outlaw leader's shadow, lacking the humanistic soul, a point reinforced in a wonderful moment when Wade does that hoary stroll though the saloon doors and Prince quickly scuttles in behind him before the doors close on him.

We know that this movie is leading up to one mother of a gunfight, and we get it at the climax, but exciting as it is, it has greater impact because of the careful build up that comes before it. It's not one of the great shoot-outs a la Open Range, but it does bring the film to a satisfying edge-of-the-seat finale.

Director James Mangold and cinematographer Phedon Papamichael build the visuals with the expansive style of old epic Westerns, carefully framing the actors against spectacular landscapes. And the whole film successfully feels part of a genre while quietly pushing at the bounds of that genre.

Oh, and I would be remiss in not mentioning the wonderful character acting of Ben Foster, Firefly's Alan Tudyk, and screen legend Peter Fonda, adding spice in a memorable ensemble cast.

3:10 To Yuma is exactly what genre filmmaking should be, but so rarely is.

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Directed by James Mangold

Written by Halsted Welles and Michael Brandt & Derek Haas
Based on the Story by Elmore Leonard

Starring:
Russell Crowe...Ben Wade
Christian Bale...Dan Evans
Logan Lerman...William Evans
Dallas Roberts...Grayson Butterfield
Ben Foster...Charlie Prince
Peter Fonda...Byron McElroy
Alan Tudyk...Doc Potter
Gretchen Mol...Alice Evans

The Woman in Black

The great British SF/fantasy writer Nigel Kneale wrote the nicely-layered screenplay for the made-for-TV ghost story The Woman in Black (1989), based on a novel by Susan Hill. The film is shot largely in the English countryside, revealing the indefinable but tangible alchemy of great locations, something digital realms can not duplicate.

The location shooting adds an appropriately haunting atmosphere to a tale that is reminiscent of the marvelous literary supernatural writings of M.R. James (if you are unfamiliar with James' work, I advise that you immediately fill this gaping hole in your life by purchasing Ghost Stories or another of the various collections of his classic short stories). James took the prim and proper facade of English life and quietly, subtly injected the uncanny, and The Woman in Black does a creditable job of capturing James' style, right down to the inclusion of a flat-out bone-chilling scare scene that has all the more impact because of the careful build-up that came before.

The story involves solicitor Arthur Kripps (Adrian Rawlins), sent to the small English coastal town of Crythin Gifford to tidy up the effects of recently-deceased Alice Drablow, who lived in a solitary house surrounded by a marsh and cut off from the mainland at high tide. Kripps sees the titular woman in black at Mrs. Drablow's funeral, a spectre that according to local tradition fortells the death of a child. Kripps spends time at the deserted house, sorting through the dead woman's papers, and begins to learn more about the black-clad woman and the past events that surround her.

If, like me, you devour classic ghost stories, then many of the narrative elements will be familiar, including a locked room, furtive locals with buried secrets, mist, graveyards, and a particularly nasty spectre. The 'woman in black' of the title only appears a handful of times, but each visitation is memorably spooky, and the ghost itself leaves a chill that haunts the film even when its off-screen because of its apparent malevolence and determination to do ill-will.

Unfortunately out of print on Region 1 DVD and VHS, with some copies still available on eBay, The Woman in Black is a simple but effective ghost story, and is well worth the effort to seek out.

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Directed by Herbert Wise

Written by Nigel Kneale, based on the book by Susan Hill

Starring:
Adrian Rawlins...Arthur Kripps
Bernard Hepton...Sam Toovey
David Daker...Josiah Freston
Pauline Moran...Woman in Black

THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM

Roger Ebert wrote in a recent review of the tendency of modern action films to substitute visual chaos for visual elegance. The Bourne Ultimatum, perched as it is on the edge of a tech-modern, jagged, capricious new film aesthetic, embodies the strengths and visually numbing weaknesses of this style. Unarguably lean, mean, and propulsive, the film is driven by Paul Greengrass' docu-verite style, previously applied to fact-based cinema verite landmarks Bloody Sunday and United 93 to great effect, and here alternating between exciting, tough immediacy and nausea-inducing visual overkill.

The film is all visual chaos, with Greengrass' jerky, mobile cameras, grainy look, and whiplash-fast editing, which works beautifully to cover the absurdities of the story with a patina of plausibility. The holes do manage to peek through in some of the few slower patches, high-ranking CIA operatives conveniently lacking blinds on their office windows which fortunately face a building with an empty room that allows Bourne to watch them file secret documents away being one example, but most of the time the film drowns the viewer in sound and fury and image and yanks them along by the lapels to the next exotic locale in its violent, grimy travelogue.

Greengrass does deliver a couple of enthralling set-pieces, a long chase sequence in Tangiers is perhaps the highlight, though the fight sequence that climaxes this sequence is easily one of the most confusingly shot hand-to-hand combat scenes ever filmed. I was reaching for a sadly-lacking bottle of dramamine after that one.

The Bourne Ultimatum captures the morally ambiguous zeitgeist through its portrayal of secret CIA operations that train killers, flaunt civil liberties and human rights, and think nothing of applying 'rendition protocols'. The villains lie rotting at the heart of the institutions that are supposed to secure us, with Bourne himself being a walking, seemingly indestructible example of blowback, a wetware Frankenstein returning to confront his makers, and learning to control the creature lurking inside him and construct the semblance of a normal soul.

Given the interesting subtexts of the political and the personal, Bourne himself is a surprisingly flat character, with little nuance, though this may be the fault of the screenplay and its inability to escape being yet another extended chase, rather than Matt Damon himself (but part of me can't stop thinking of Damon as being miscast, perhaps unfairly). It's left to some of the supporting cast to provide acting spark -- Albert Finney, Joan Allen, and David Straithairn are all riveting in their performances (Julia Stiles seems merely out of place).

With The Bourne Ultimatum the brilliant Paul Greengrass is struggling to perfect adapting his chaotic on-the-ground style to the Hollywood action film, with some mixed results. With a better story, and some opportunity to slow down and allow visual elegance, character, and performance to make their mark, Greengrass could deliver something approaching the brilliance of some of his earlier work. As it is the film, though uncommonly smart for an action picture, too often misses the mark.

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Directed by Paul Greengrass

Written by Tony Gilroy and Scott Z. Burns and George Nolfi, based on the novel by Robert Ludlum

Starring:

Matt Damon...Jason Bourne

Julia Stiles...Nicky Parsons

David Strathairn...CIA Deputy Director Noah Vosen

Scott Glenn...CIA Director Ezra Kramer

Paddy Considine...Simon Ross

Edgar Ramirez...Paz

Albert Finney...Dr. Albert Hirsch

The Day the Earth Caught Fire

The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961) marks one of the most potent uses of dramatic realism to tell a science-fiction story in the cinema. A bleak commentary on humanity's insane experiments with nuclear weapons, the story involves the events that follow the detonation of several excessively-powerful nuclear warheads, which seem to begin affecting the planet's weather. The film follows events in London through the eyes of newspaper reporters Bill Maguire (Leo McKern) and Peter Stenning (Edward Judd), who eventually discover that the atomic bomb explosions have knocked the Earth off its axis and are sending it into the Sun.

Memorably gripping, director Val Guest films The Day the Earth Caught Fire with a documentary-like realism, capturing the bustle of a newspaper office with fast, believable, overlapping dialogue and incorporating real footage of natural disasters to rachet the verisimilitude. Screenwriters Guest and Mankowitz are careful to write in key details that show societal reactions to the disaster, such as the rationing of water in 'washing centres,' which makes the film all the more convincing and gripping.

The visual effects by Les Bowie are simple but effective, with one memorable sequence showing an eerie mist flowing down the Thames. The plot builds with deliberate pacing to a terrific, memorable ending which has the black and white film tinted orange to show the burning heat as the planet heads closer to the Sun. It's a simple but highly effective trick, and the recent Anchor Bay DVD release of this film restores this tinting for the first time on home video.

The inclusion of a romantic subplot, with Stenning wooing Jeannie Craig (Janet Munro), doesn't hurt the film a bit, mostly because it's handled with the same realism and is well acted. Judd delivers a finely textured performance as Stenning, a journalist who has fallen from the heights of his profession, and struggles to maintain a relationship with his son after the failure of his marriage. Guest's deft incorporation of a social-realist subplot into the science-fiction story adds depth to the film and gives us fully-realized characters to care about as they react to the inexplicable events.

Leo McKern delivers a sympathetic portrayal of a veteran journalist doing his best to cover for Stenning's drinking and shirking. And Bernard Brayden, who plays the editor of the Daily Express, actually held that position in real life. The way he handles the coordination of the paper, snapping out orders to his workers, figuring out who and how to push, is utterly believable. The investment in the characters of the piece pays off in the climax of the film as we experience the hopelessness that they feel.

Val Guest--an uncredited writer on Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes and director of the Nigel Kneale-written The Quatermass Experiment and Quatermass II--is one of the great unsung British filmmakers and The Day the Earth Caught Fire is one of the best little-known science-fiction films of its era and one of the starkest critiques of the nuclear age in film.

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Directed by Val Guest
Written by Wolf Mankowitz & Val Guest

Starring:
Janet Munro...Jeannie Craig
Leo McKern ...Bill Maguire
Edward Judd...Peter Stenning
Michael Goodliffe...'Jacko', Night editor
Bernard Braden...News editor

28 Weeks Later

All jagged visual chaos and capricious fury, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s sequel to Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later is a successful invocation of the futile, violent militaristic zeitgeist and a surprisingly fresh product from the inevitable movie-world sequel mill.

28 Weeks Later opens with a tour de force sequence in a boarded-up English farmhouse housing several survivors of the Rage virus outbreak that was the subject of the first film. The survivors holed-up amid the infected countryside include Don (Robert Carlyle) and his wife Alice (Catherine McCormack). The arrival of an uninfected kid triggers the release of Rage-hell as hordes of the infected descend on the farmhouse, leading to a cowardly desertion by Don who saves his own skin and turns up later as a high-level caretaker in the ‘green zone’ of London (one of the many references to the Iraq War).

Thus begins the main thrust of the plot, the reconstruction and repopulation of Britain after the infected have starved to death, supervised by a NATO force headed up by the U.S. Army. Don welcomes his children into the green zone, a heavily-fortressed safe area guarded by the army, including Special Forces snipers stationed 24X7 on the rooftops. The desolate feel of Cillian Murphy wandering the dead streets of London is captured here in a startling shot of the bright lights of the green zone as an island amid the empty blackness of the surrounding decay. The militaristic repopulation effort seems under control, an illusion that shatters upon the discovery of the still-alive Alice, who appears to be an uninfected carrier of the Rage virus. The virus, of course, is unleashed, people become the raging zombie infected, and the shit hits the fan.

When it does, Fresnadillo simulates shocking, confused, ground-level chaos through his use of staccato images captured in turbulent, non-cohesive, handheld camera, in a style consanguineous with Cuaron’s Children of Men and war-time photography. Particularly effective is a sequence set in a shelter packed with civilians that captures the utter animalistic terror as an infected enters and spreads the Rage virus through the panicked crowd.

Parallels with current military misadventure and occupation are undeniable. It becomes impossible to discriminate infected and uninfected (terrorist and civilian?), with the virus spreading faster than the ability to kill the infected. The military’s response quickly collapses and the army stops discriminating its targets, leading to the shooting, fire-bombing, and chemical gassing of the civilian population. The film then morphs into an extended chase sequence, with empathic military sniper Doyle (Jeremy Renner) leading a group of civilians out of the hell of the infected green zone and to a chopper piloted by a pal.

Though the chaotic directorial style is overdone---with a couple of sequences particularly seizure-initiating---and lacks a strong central character to pull you through the story, 28 Weeks Later is an exciting, subtextually rich, visually interesting thriller, in many ways the equal of its precedent. In the 2007 summer film season of bloated blockbuster bores, it is a welcome surprise.

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Directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo

Written by Rowan Joffe and Juan Carlos Fresnadillo & Jesús Olmo

Starring:
Robert Carlyle...Don
Rose Byrne...Scarlet
Jeremy Renner...Doyle
Amanda Walker...Sally
Shahid Ahmed...Jacob
Harold Perrineau...Flynn
Catherine McCormack...Alice
Garfield Morgan...Geoff
Emily Beecham...Karen

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Special Bonus Feature: 28 Days Later Review

Through the grainy colours of a digital camera, 28 Days Later takes you on an eerie journey through an empty landscape made desolate by a viral apocalypse. The first scenes of the film show how the apocalypse is unleashed, by a trio of animal activists who break into a research laboratory in Cambridge, England, to liberate the chimpanzees caged there. Bad mistake: the chimps are infected with a genetically-engineered virus called “Rage” that turns its victims into crazed, mindless brutes driven to attack and kill with ferocious strength and speed. As if that isn’t bad enough, the virus acts within twenty seconds. One of the chimps attacks and bites an activist, who quickly succumbs to the infection and turns on her compadres, and we fast-forward 28 Days Later, when injured bicycle courier Jim (Cillian Murphy) wakes up in a hospital bed wondering where the heck everyone went.

In a series of startling shots, which must have required incredible logistics, Jim wanders through a completely deserted London, shouting “Hello!”. Though Jim doesn’t know it, this is perhaps not the best thing to do. In a spooky scene reminiscent of George Romero’s zombie movies, Jim has his first encounter with “the infected” in a deserted building, mistaking them for corpses. Unlike the aforementioned zombie flicks, however, these “zombies” move with startling speed, glaring with scarlet red eyes, slashing at the air with their hands while emitting a cross between a hiss and a roar. Luckily, Jim runs into Selena (Naomie Harris), who has hardened herself to the point that she is a bitter, merciless, relentlessly driven survivor, though wondering exactly why the hell she is bothering to survive.

The contrast and byplay between Jim’s somewhat naïve hopefulness and Selena’s embittered cynicism is what drives the story forward in its early stages. We want to believe Jim, but suspect that Selena is right. Jim and Selena eventually find two other survivors, Frank (Brendan Gleeson) and his daughter Hannah (Megan Burns). In search of the source of a recorded radio broadcast, they head North in a car, on their way travelling through a dark tunnel partially blocked with wrecked cars, leading to one of the creepiest scenes in the film, which I will not describe. I will also not reveal what happens to them from here onwards. The film’s climax does include, though, a weird reference to Apocalypse Now, which seems fitting as screenwriter Alex Garland’s first novel The Beach included characters that were obsessed with that classic war film. Very subtly, the film hints that perhaps the Rage virus is merely bringing out something that is lurking in all of us.

28 Days Later is hardly original. There have been many films and books dealing with humanity crumbling or the planet emptying due to some vast disaster. George Stewart’s novel Earth Abides, Stephen King’s book The Stand, Richard Matheson’s classic novel I Am Legend, the New Zealand science-fiction film The Quiet Earth, and George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead are just a few examples. However, the idea of being suddenly alone on the Earth and the society we know and depend on gone is a resonant one, and director Danny Boyle, writer Alex Garland, and the excellent cast expertly bring the film to life and reinvigorate the concept. Moreover, the digital photography, sparingly-used special effects, and the matter-of-fact acting brings a documentary-like immediacy that is compelling.

28 Days Later is at heart a story examining the classic Hitchcockian situation of ordinary people dropped into extraordinary circumstances. Having awoken from a coma and not knowing what has happened to the world he knew, Jim is our way into this story, and we see the film mostly through his eyes. The way that Jim and the other characters react to the horror that has overtaken their lives makes sense. There are no moments where they do something simply because the plot mechanics require them to. Their motivations as ordinary people trying desperately to survive connect with us, the audience, rendering the film all the more believable. And all the scarier.

Very gory at times, and so not for those with squeamish constitutions, 28 Days Later is a well-mounted, intelligent, genuinely scary science-fiction thriller.

Kill, Baby...Kill (Mario Bava Collection)

Kill, Baby...Kill (1966; original Italian title: Operazione Paura) is a micro-budgeted, stylistically enthralling gothic ghost horror film from maestro Mario Bava. The admittedly thin story follows Dr. Paul Eswai (Giacomo Rossi-Stuart) arriving in a crumbling village to perform an autopsy, and getting entangled in the community's belief that a ghost is responsible for a series of murders.

The central plot fulcrum--a girl left to die by neglectful villagers wreaks bloody vengeance from beyond the grave--fascinatingly anticipates both The Omen (1976) and Friday the 13th (1980). But neither of those films, regardless of their relative fame and higher budgets, can hold a candle to the filmaking prowess on display here. Bava packs the frame with foreground and background detail, lit with his trademark pools of vivid, primary-colour light. In a couple of interior scenes, notice that a cobweb is lit with bright chlorophyll green. How many directors would go to the trouble of lighting a cobweb? Bava's sense of detail in his compositions lends subtle, layered texture to the film. The exteriors, shot amidst authentic ruins, project a palpable sense of decay, building on the theme of a group of people cursed by their past.

There are several directorial touches that convey a genuine sense of the supernatural. The shot of the girl's face at a dirt-frosted window, and the appearance of a child's toy ball, bouncing towards the camera, announce the intrusion of the vengeful ghost with effective eeriness. The scene on the spiral staircase, brilliantly set up and shot, and the sequence where a character appears to chase themselves are virtuoso set pieces, worthy of comparison with Hitchcock.

It perhaps shows a particular kind of cinematic snobbishness that Bava, working in less-respected film genres, has never received due respect from film connoisseurs. However, for true lovers of film, who can respect great work regardless of where its done, Bava's Kill, Baby...Kill is a cinematic treat.

The Anchor Bay DVD, from the Mario Bava Collection, Vol. 1, boasts a clear, vivacious picture, in anamorphic widescreen, that shows little sign of the film's age.

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Directed by Mario Bava
Written by Mario Bava, Romano Migliorini, and Roberto Natale

Starring:
Giacomo Rossi-Stuart...Dr. Paul Eswai
Erika Blanc...Monica Schuftan
Fabienne Dali...Ruth (the sorceress)
Piero Lulli...Insp. Kruger

Black Sabbath (Mario Bava Collection)

Anchor Bay Entertainment recently released their Mario Bava Collection, Volume 1, containing five films by the Italian maestro: Black Sunday; Black Sabbath; Kill Baby, Kill; The Girl who Knew too Much; and Knives of the Avenger. As I slowly make my way through the attactively-packaged box set, I'll post a review of the individual films, only one of which I've seen (the gothic horror classic Black Sunday).

Mario Bava was an Italian director who used his training as a painter to great effect in the beautiful colours and striking visual compositions of his films. Bava began his film career as a cinematographer, building a reputation as an optical effects expert, and took his first directorial steps by replacing director Riccardo Freda on I Vampiri in 1956 after the filmaker left the project. His first complete film as director, Black Sunday (1960), was a wildly influential gothic shocker that launched the career of 'scream queen' Barbara Steele and unleashed a wave of European horror films that lasted through the 1970s. He worked in several genres, including historical epic, western, science-fiction, and giallo (pulpy psycho-thrillers), but it is his horror films that are most fondly remembered by film fans. He made striking use of lighting, set design, rich primary colours, and visual composition in a directorial style that has heavily influenced subsequent filmakers like Scorcese, Fellini, and Tarantino, and has delighted generations of film buffs. Bava died in 1980, leaving behind a vivacious legacy of pure cinema.

And so on to the first Bava Collection review: Black Sabbath (1963).

Black Sabbath is an anthology of three short horror stories, introduced by Boris Karloff. The Telephone takes place solely in the apartment of Rosy (Michèle Mercier), who is being terrorized by phone calls from an anonymous woman who promises to kill her (and also, in daring--for the time--hints of homosexuality, makes admiring comments about her body). The story is a simple and fairly transparent Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode, but is beautifully shot. Bava moves the camera effectively, shooting on one set and using foregrounds and backgrounds to create a sense of depth and texture and claustrophobia. Though it features an obvious twist, The Telephone is a textbook example of how to build and layer suspense through extremely limited means.

The Wurdalak spins the gothic horror story of the patriarch of a family (Boris Karloff) that returns with the curse of vampirism. This story features some evocative set design and pellucid lighting that Bava uses to emphasize character and mood, and some effective shock-editing. In Bava's hands, the stark European landscapes become dark fairy-tale domains bathed in rich primary colour.


The final tale, The Drop of Water, is the most famous and chilling of the three. A nurse (Jacqueline Pierreux) steals a jewelled ring from the finger of a dead psychic, and pays the price when the psychic's ghost returns to claim it. Bava's astonishing use of lighting and colour is most prominent here, with different primary-coloured light focused on different planes in a shot, giving a profound sense of depth that lends itself to uneasiness as we wonder what could possibly be lurking there. The disturbing makeup on the corpse and the ghost, and the use of the sound of dripping water on the soundtrack contributes to the chilling effect of this segment, resulting in one of the most satisfying tales of the supernatural ever committed to film.

The picture quality on the DVD is stunning, beautifully conveying the bright, phantasmogoric colour in rich detail. Black Sabbath is a must-have for all serious film buffs.

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Directed by Mario Bava

Written by:
Mario Bava
Alberto Bevilacqua
Ivan Chekhov (story, The Drop of Water)
Marcello Fondato
F.G. Snyder (story, The Telephone)
Aleksei Tolstoy (novelette, Sem'ya vurdalaka)

Starring:
Michèle Mercier...Rosy (segment The Telephone)
Lidia Alfonsi...Mary (segment The Telephone)
Boris Karloff...Gorca (segment The Wurdalak)
Mark Damon...Vladimire d'Urfe (segment The Wurdalak)
Susy Andersen...Sdenka (segment The Wurdalak)
Jacqueline Pierreux...Helen Chester (segment The Drop of Water)
Milly Monti...The Maid (segment The Drop of Water)
Harriet Medin...Neighbor (segment The Drop of Water)

GRINDHOUSE

Grindhouse is Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s grungy hymn to the cheap dingy theatres that showed endless double and triple features of wild exploitation movies in the ‘70s. A specious enterprise, indeed, but it’s like a theme park ride, a complete recreation that comes with fake trailers, “Our Feature Presentation” in cheesy swirls of psychedelic colour, animated film clips gleefully announcing the “Restricted” rating of each film, and even a scratchy ad for a tex-mex restaurant within ‘walking distance of the theatre.’

Now if only theatre owners would paste fake vomit on the theatre floor, rip up seats, and hire actors to portray down-and-out theatre patrons to hurl abuse at the screen and their neighbours, and we’d really be in business.

The core of the Grindhouse experience is, of course, two feature-length films, albeit both featuring a ‘missing reel’ (strategically placed in movie moments that get a big laugh--one getting the director out of a plot corner, the other cruelly depriving us of some sleaziness). Bottom line: Rodriguez’ Planet Terror is wildly fun but overly self-referential and parodying, while Tarantino’s Death Proof is a genuine movie and a worthy follow-up to Kill Bill.


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Planet Terror involves the release into the atmosphere of an evil bioweapon gas that turns people into gooey, blistered zombies intent, George Romero-style, on devouring any hapless victims in their path. El Wray (Freddy Rodríguez) is the mysterious gunman, ripped from John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13, who emerges as the reluctant saviour of a hodge podge of uninfected humans. His former lover Cherry Darling (Rose McGowan) has her leg torn off by zombies, and Wray helpfully provides an assault rifle as an artificial limb, which leads to much enjoyable silliness as Cherry jumps and spins around while blowing apart biozoms with her handy appendage.

All the key beats of ’70s and ’80s sci-fi/horror are here, resulting in a stew of sleaze, gooey violence, weird characters, handheld POV camera, Rio Bravo-like last stands, and escapes from hordes of pustuled creatures, all underscored to a music track that mashes up electric guitar and Carpenteresque synths. The film even morphs briefly to one of those cheesy postapocalyptic nomad films that were shoved into existence post-Mad Max.

Even with its smug, winking tone of self-parody, Planet Terror is more fun than it has any right to be, thanks mainly to its sheer kinetic energy. The film is digitally scratched up to approximate the look and feel of a cheap exploitation film, but features some digital effects that are clearly beyond anything such films could afford, resulting in a strange hybrid of re-enactment and the fevered hopes of viewers that these films could possibly, maybe, live up to the promise of their trailers and posters. With its tongue firmly in its post-modern cheek, Planet Terror is hugely entertaining, but would not stand on its own outside of the Grindhouse theme ride.


Tarantino’s Death Proof, on the other hand, is a genuinely good film that happens to use the grindhouse style to tell its story. Subtle difference, but it makes all the difference in the world. In Death Proof, Tarantino mixes up the car chase and female revenge genres with his unique dialogue-driven sensibility. The film follows two groups of women and their encounters with psycho ex-stunt driver Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell, reminding us he has serious acting chops) and his ‘death proof’ movie stunt car, which he uses as a weapon to slaughter pretty young women that take his fancy. So, in a way, I guess the slasher genre is represented here also.

The second group of women, headed by Zoe Bell (playing herself, a stuntwoman who doubled for Uma Therman in Kill Bill), eventually get the upper hand in a final car chase sequence that forgoes any digital effects work and delivers some great, old-school gritty stunt work. It’s not really an action picture, though, it’s a Tarantino picture through and through. More than any of his films since Pulp Fiction, there are reams and reams of fascinating dialogue delivered by fleshed-out characters, something that will likely turn off a sizeable chunk of the audience that may be attracted to this whole double-feature in the first place.

However, if you’re hip to this kind of stuff, and can shift like Tarantino between cinematic smarts and pulp exploitation, Death Proof is heady stuff.


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Planet Terror

Written and Directed by Robert Rodriguez

Starring:
Freddy Rodríguez...Wray
Rose McGowan...Cherry
Michael Biehn...Sheriff Hague
Naveen Andrews...Abby
Josh Brolin...Dr. William Block
Marley Shelton...Dr. Dakota Block

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Death Proof

Written and Directed by Quentin Tarantino

Starring:
Kurt Russell...Stuntman Mike
Zoe Bell...Herself
Rosario Dawson...Abernathy
Tracie Thoms...Kim
Sydney Tamiia Poitier...Jungle Julia
Jordan Ladd...Shanna

Slither: '80s horror's greatest hits

James Gunn's Slither is a great mash-up of gory '80s horror and '50s alien creature flick. Grant (Michael Rooker), after being spurned by his hot wife Starla (Elizabeth Banks), makes out in the woods with Brenda (Brenda James). Earlier, a meteorite hit the ground in these same woods--blissfully ignored by local Sherrif Bill Pardy (Firefly's Nathan Fillion) as he tries to snooze in his cruiser and avoid inane conversation from his partner. In a riff on the 1950s The Blob, the meteorite contains an alien organism that fires a slimy something into Grant's chest, and after that he is, well, not himself--he eats raw meat, padlocks the basement door (informing Starla it is a 'surprise' for her birthday), develops acute skin problems, and slowly transforms into a slithering, tentacled Lovecraftian monstrosity.

The real fun starts when thousands of alien slugs get loose. These wormy things try to leap into people's mouths (and other places, courstesy of a homage to Cronenberg's Shivers) and turn their victims into mindless zombies, which cuts director Gunn loose to unleash hordes of B-horror references to Romero films and comic-splatter classics like Stuart Gordon's Re-Animator.

Though it's obviously a pastiche of '80s cult classics like From Beyond, The Fly, The Hidden, Evil Dead and more, Slither works on its own as an engaging horror-comedy. Harkening back to a time when the makeup effects guys were stars, the prosthetics are appropriately elaborate and slimy, enhanced by the occasional CGI. Cult actor Rooker manages to give a real performance buried under layers of makeup and goo, and there's an attempt to populate the film with memorable characters.

The film is never genuinely scary, but it is fast and witty, with several laugh out loud lines. One of the Sherrif's posse, for instance, on a stakeout for the mutated Grant, spots the slithery creature and comments that it looks like "something that fell off my dick after the war."

Slither is a great little B-movie, best watched with a few beers.

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Written and Directed by James Gunn

Starring:

Nathan Fillion..Bill Pardy
Elizabeth Banks...Starla Grant
Gregg Henry...Jack MacReady
Michael Rooker...Grant Grant
Tania Saulnier...Kylie Strutemyer
Don Thompson...Wally

ZODIAC

Working from a literate script by James Vanderbilt, director David Fincher has crafted an absorbing drama with his latest film Zodiac. This is not a serial killer film, but a movie about the investigation itself and its effects on those who were obsessed with finding the Zodiac killer in San Francisco. It’s fascinating, textured, compelling stuff, with great central performances by Jake Gyllenhaal, Robert Downey Jr., and Mark Ruffalo.

Gyllenhaal plays Robert Graysmith (the real-life author of the book that is one of the key sources for the screenplay), an editorial cartoonist who finds himself drawn into an unofficial search of his own for Zodiac. Downey Jr. is Paul Avery, alcoholic crime writer at the same newspaper, playing the part with the obvious relish of a solid character actor. And Ruffalo is magnetic, believable, and borderline tragic as Inspector Toshi, doggedly pursuing multiple leads and blind allies for many years. The narrative centres around these three individuals, and how they cope with the bleak, lengthy, and ultimately unsolved mystery of the Zodiac killer, who haunted the San Francisco area starting in 1966. The killer writes letters to the local newspapers that include coded messages and begins taunting the police, launching the labyrinthine investigation that spans three decades. The film details the complexity of the search for the Zodiac in convincing, but never overwhelming, detail, and emphasizes the grueling passage of time with the use of context-setting subtitles that show the place and date in relation to the previous scene (“2 weeks later”, for example). The agonizing pace of the investigation, the frustration of the dead-end leads, and the emotional toll this took on the principal investigators is brilliantly portrayed in the film.

Zodiac’s attention to detail and historical accuracy is remarkable. Even a brief review of some of the accounts of the crimes reveals that the film sticks closely to the facts. In the first murder, for example, the killer returns to the car after shooting the victims, and shoots them again. (For a fascinating review of the case, see http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial_killers/notorious/zodiac/river_1.html). The production design, set decoration, and costume design effectively recreate a period ’70s setting, without loudly announcing the fact. There is undoubtedly a subtle, complex art to creating a period feel, especially one set in this decade, that does not garishly distract from the story.

Though this is first and foremost a character drama and a mystery, and not a suspense thriller, the actual Zodiac killings are shown and are frightening in their bleak authenticity. Fincher shoots these sequences from the point of view of the victims, with ominous close and medium shots, allowing tension to quietly build before exploding into shock at the stark, cold brutality of the murders.

Zodiac features a brilliant artistic use of digital effects. Using digital camera moves by Matte World Digital, there are several aerial shots of 1970s San Francisco that are beautifully rendered and detailed, giving a genuine sense of place. Digital effects are used to recreate a period cityscape, with historically accurate buildings and freeway. The panoptic matte shots are so incredibly detailed and constructed that they don’t announce themselves as effects shots. They just add to the authentic setting and help advance the narrative and thematic elements. In one astonishing sequence--digitally rendered--the camera follows a Yellow Cab on the streets of the city, appearing to be locked into place on the car’s orientation, shifting as the vehicle turns street corners. Another inspired sequence shows the time lapsed construction of the Transamerica building, a lithe pyramidal structure that assembles itself before our eyes, giving the feel of time passing on in the city as the Zodiac investigation proceeds ever onwards. Perhaps the most unique visual effect is a short sequence that shows the mountain of clues, leads, and dead ends that accumulate on the case by having the characters walk through settings that are draped and ornamented with written text from the case files. Though it’s not an effects picture per se, the effects team on Zodiac has done stellar work, in a signature example of how to use digital effects in the service of story.

Zodiac is not for those in search of cheap thrills. It is a complex, intelligent character drama, and an often remarkable document of one of the great unsolved serial murder investigations.

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Directed by David Fincher

Written by James Vanderbilt

Based on the book by Robert Graysmith

Starring:
Jake Gyllenhaal...Robert Graysmith
Mark Ruffalo...Inspector David Toschi
Anthony Edwards...Inspector William Armstrong
Robert Downey Jr....Paul Avery
Brian Cox...Melvin Belli
John Carroll Lynch...Arthur Leigh Allen
Chloë Sevigny...Melanie

300

300 is a bombastic, stentorian, and vivid fantasy, esurient for the gory glory of ancient battlegrounds in all their blood-spattering, limb-slicing detail, and punctuated with operatic speechifying about combat, death, and freedom. And yeah, it's a blast.

Based on an actual story from ancient history, 300 tells the tale of King Leonidas (Gerard Butler) of Sparta leading 300 Spartan warriors, against the decrees of the rulers of Sparta, to stop the rampaging Persian army with a last stand at a narrow cliff pass in the Battle of Thermopylae. Frank Miller, famous for Sin City, wrote the 300 graphic novel, and the film adaptation uses Miller's work as source and template, sometimes duplicating frames from the book.

The cliched and superfluous narration should have been cut, but the lean narrative works as a spare action fantasy, though the cross-cutting between the battle and Spartan politics in the last third of the film doesn't entirely work. There's no depth here, of course, and the dialogue is often layered with cheese ("Tonight we dine in Hell!") and delivered at earsplitting volume. We're not talking subtlety here, obviously, but the film succeeds on a primal, visceral level, and the hyper-visual stylization results in several beautiful sequences. The film is shot almost as a digital watercolour, with mocha skies and dark, vivid reds in the Spartan capes and copious blood that spatters artfully across the screen. The visual style almost makes the film into a science fiction fantasy that was shot on some alien world (it's easy to imagine it as akin to an R-rated film version of Burrough's A Princess of Mars) but it is an effectively dreamlike rendering of an ancient tale of blood and thunder.

Director Zack Snyder captures the fighting sequences well, slowing and speed-ramping key action, so that we can admire the combat form of the Spartan soldiers. There's no coy cutting away of sword or spear thrusts, either. In 300 the carnage that bladed weapons wrought is front and centre, with swords slicing off limbs and heads and cutting flesh in an elaborate montage of mayhem. This is definitely a film for those especially keen on decapitation.

The film does stray into oddball-fantasy, almost like David Lynch meets the sword-and-sandal genre. Persian King Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) is a humanoid alien, with lidless black eyes, body adorned with sinuous jewelry like something from a Clive Barker story. Also lurching into the frame during the battle sequences are golden-masked Persian soldiers; squat, toadlike executioners with blades for hands; and a bald, freakish troll-giant who is unchained to wreak havoc. Clearly this is not a documentary; this is Lynch's Dune meets Gladiator by way of Cronenberg/Barker.

The cast is effective, but it is Gerard Butler who will benefit most from appearing in this film. Always teetering on the verge of a breakthrough, Butler plays Leonidas with great verve and gusto, and 300 should finally punch him through into some major leading roles.

Though a bit loud and overdone at times and undeniably shallow, 300 is a unique, stylish and effectively visceral cinematic experience.

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Directed by Zack Snyder
Written by Zack Snyder & Kurt Johnstad and Michael Gordon
Based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley

Starring:
Gerard Butler...King Leonidas
Lena Headey...Queen Gorgo
Dominic West...Theron
David Wenham...Dilios
Andrew Tiernan ... Ephialtes
Rodrigo Santoro ... Xerxes

James Bond 'Ultimate Editions': Random Thoughts, Part 2

My goodness, Live and Let Die is bad. I have fond memories of watching this, Roger Moore's Bond debut, on British TV back in the late '70s and thoroughly enjoying it. Catching up with this on the Ultimate Edition DVD, I'm struck by how thoroughly pedestrian the film looks. The photography and direction are subpar, on the level of your average '70s TV show, and the whole affair is played so lightly that the movie threatens to float away. Moore is bland and forgettable as Bond, and the portrayal of 007 edges further afield from Ian Fleming's conception. Even the speed boat chase, which I recalled as a highlight, is boringly staged, with director Guy Hamilton's annoying insistence on throwing in dumb gags -- moronic Sherrif J.W. Pepper; an old fart driving too slow in a truck; a speedboat demolishing the cake at a wedding; etc. The film lacks any sense of danger or true excitement. I couldn't even finish watching the damn thing. Another treasured childhood movie memory bites the dust.

Anyway, Volume 3 of the Ultimate Edition Bond DVDs has two true 007 classics: From Russia With Love and On Her Majesty's Secret Service. The former is my favourite Bond film of all, and holds up remarkably well still, especially in this new, gorgeous, digitally-restored transfer. From Russia With Love has Connery, in his second Bond outing, in top form, and a story that sticks relatively close to the Fleming novel, while adding some elements unique to the movie Bond, such as the famous one-liners. From Russia With Love features actual espionage work and boasts a superb supporting cast, especially Robert Shaw as the lethal Grant, Lotte Lenya as Rosa Klebb, complete with a poisoned dagger in her shoe, and Pedro Armendiaz as 007 ally Kerim Bay. The fight between Bond and Grant on the train is truly one of the greatest fight sequences ever filmed. Young shot it with two cameras in an extremely confined space, and Connery and Shaw did almost all of the sequence. The result is brilliant cinema. The film succeeds as a stylish, memorable thriller, not just as a Bond movie, and it's a shame that director Terence Young didn't return for the third 007 flick.

OHMSS is the odd sheep of the 007 film family, with George Lazenby's sole turn as 007, unluckily following in the footsteps of mega-popular Sean Connery. Lazenby had no acting experience, and it shows, but he does remarkably well for such an amateur in a large-scale production. The film is arguably the most faithful adaptation of an Ian Fleming novel, and for once there is the sense of a story being told and not the joining of dots between set pieces. The narrative is involving, the photography beautiful and lush and wide in scope, and the editing sharp in the excellent action sequences. Add to this an emotional finale with Bond marrying Tracy (Diana Rigg), and the result is one of the very best 007 films. The UE DVD does the film superb justice, showcasing the lush colours and epic scope beautifully. This is truly the best I have ever seen this film looking on home video.

OK, now it's time to offer some positive commentary for once on a Roger Moore Bond film. For Your Eyes Only is a welcome return to Ian Fleming minimalism. Though sometimes pedestrian, the script ties in narrative elements from several short stories in the titular source book, and features a more ruthless, world-weary Bond. Moore, quoted in interviews as disliking the toughening up of the character for this film, actually plays the part well, doing some of his best work. Though the film is marred by a dire comedic coda, overall this is the best film of the Moore era, and a welcome course-correction for the series after the atrocious 007 comedy Moonraker.

Letters from Iwo Jima

In Letters from Iwo Jima, director Clint Eastwood complements his Flags of our Fathers by telling the story of the WWII battle for the tiny island of Iwo Jima from the other side, from the perspective of the Japanese soldiers charged with defending the island from the invading American forces.

The film follows several soldiers and officers in the Imperial Army: General Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe), the commander of the forces on Iwo Jima who arrives on the island at the start of the film; Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya), a conscripted baker who has left behind his pregnant wife; Nishi (Tsuyoshi Ihara), an aristocratic champion horse rider; and Shimizu (Ryo Kase), Saigo’s friend. Through letters written to their loved ones we hear their thoughts and learn something of their past, which gives the film an intimate, personal feel that is, refreshingly, at odds with the epic scope of many war films. The entire first section of Letters from Iwo Jima is all set-up, carefully building up to the invasion of the island, dropping bits of information that show how outgunned the Japanese soldiers were and bringing us into the world of the characters.

The film is shot in the monochromatic colour of the black-blue sands of the beaches of Iwo Jima, in a minimalist visual style that lends considerable authenticity. The few sequences of large-scale destruction are impressive and sometimes hair-raising. A brief shot showing bombs raining destruction on the Japanese soldiers is scary and foreboding, and the extent of the American armada descending onto Iwo Jima is breathtakingly shown. Interestingly, there are no 'god's-eye view' shots in the film. Everything that is shown is as it would be from the perspective of the characters, with many close or medium shots, which forces us to identify with the Japanese soldiers. This identification results in a unique frisson when individual American soldiers--who usually represent the 'good guys'--finally appear to confront the Japanese.

In the last third of the film the attention to character pays off as we follow the ultimate fate of all the soldiers we have come to know. The situation they are in is hopeless, and how they react to their inevitable doom forms the compelling backbone of the film’s concluding passages and lends a dolorous, fateful tinge. The triumph of Letters from Iwo Jima is that it gives a face to an adversary that is usually faceless in fictional depictions of WWII, and shows the Japanese soldiers to be as scared, ruthless, fractionous, flawed, brave, and human as their Allied counterparts.

Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima is a bold, valuable counterpoint to other western World War II films.

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Directed by Clint Eastwood

Written by Iris Yamashita, based on a story by Iris Yamashita & Paul Haggis and the book Picture Letters from Commander in Chief by Tadamichi Kuribayashi, edited by Tsuyoko Yoshida

Starring:
Ken Watanabe...General Tadamichi Kuribayashi
Kazunari Ninomiya...Saigo
Tsuyoshi Ihara...Baron Nishi
Ryo Kase...Shimizu
Shido Nakamura...Lieutenant Ito

Heresy: Bond with Dalton

I've been published! Here's a link to a VUE Weekly article I wrote for their "Heresy" series: http://www.vueweekly.com:80/articles/default.aspx?i=5742.

The Heresy series involves a writer either defending a much-maligned movie or panning a widely-praised one. I took a bit of a different approach and defended a performance: Timothy Dalton as James Bond. Enjoy!

PAN'S LABYRINTH

Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth is an astonishing, vibrant film, alive with magic and emotion, and laced with beauty and violence and the primal fears we carry from childhood. As a work of cinematic fantasy, the film stands easily with the classics of the genre, a touchstone dark fairy tale.

Set in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, the story follows Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), a young girl in the twilight time change from child to adult, and her mother Carmen (Ariadna Gil), who travel to a remote outpost to be with Carmen's new husband, the brutal Capitán Vidal (Sergi López). A cruel sadist, Ofelia's stepfather is on a mission to hunt down and exterminate the last remnants of the Republican army that are scattered in the wilderness. Ofelia, a lover of fairy tales, is drawn into one of her own when she discovers the ancient doorway to a labyrinth in the forest, guarded by a faun who proposes three tests for the little girl to discover if she harbours within her the soul of the princess of a magical underground kingdom. The film alternates between the stark, capricious brutality of Ofelia's everyday life and the lyrical, though sometimes frightening, magic of her forays into the fantastical.

Del Toro masterfully weaves together several story strands--Carmen's difficult pregnancy, Ofelia's completion of the three tests, Vidal's unquestioning and cruel extermination, Republican spying among Vidal's domestic staff--into a richly textured and symbolic exploration of the primal roots of fear, yearning for magic, and the source of our will to destroy others. And in the hands of a talented cast, the characters of the piece shine, bringing vivacity to the artful writing. In the central role Ivana Baquero easily becomes the core of the film, a gracile and engaging performance that would be noteworthy from someone twice her age. Sergi López plays the true monster of the piece to the hilt, lending subtle touches of humanity and even eliciting grudging admiration. The supporting cast are uniformly superb, especially Doug Jones as the faun and the white man, two fantasy creatures brought to convincing life.

In the classic Latin American tradition of magic realism, the film never once feels forced, dexterously fusing the fantastical and the brutally real into one organic and fiercely compelling whole. The film is beautifully designed, especially in the fantasy settings and creatures, and the astonishing visual effects do not call attention to themselves but feel like a natural element. At several points a digital character flutters into the foreground of a shot and the camera moves to follow it, creating the impression that the effect is a syncretic part of the sequence.

In the sure hands of Mexican writer/director del Toro, who has now claimed the apex of genre filmaking, the film winds its way to a compelling, satisfying, and intensely moving finale. Pan's Labyrinth is unquestionably a triumph of cinematic imagination.

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Directed by Guillermo del Toro

Written by Guillermo del Toro

Starring:
Ariadna Gil....Carmen Vidal
Ivana Baquero....Ofelia
Sergi López....Capitán Vidal
Maribel Verdú.... Mercedes
Doug Jones....Pan/Pale Man
Álex Angulo....Dr. Ferreiro