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.