The House of the Devil

2009 // USA // Ti West // June 1, 2011 // Netflix Instant

It's a tricky thing, executing a feature-length homage. Single-minded resolve to recreate the look and feel of a particular era and/or genre of filmmaking can result in an embalmed bauble that functions inadequately as a work of entertainment. The House of the Devil, Ti West's hat-tip to the cheap-but-chilling supernatural horror and slasher flicks of the 1970s and 80s, avoids this trap quite capably. The film succeeds first and foremost as a work of lo-fi atmospherics and astonishingly unhurried suspense. I didn't have a stopwatch or anything, but I'd guess that about a third of the film's 95-minute running time consists of little more than naïve coed Samantha (Jocelin Donahue, evoking a Black Christmas-era Margot Kidder) poking around a dark, creepy house. Said house is the abode of the equally creepy Mr. and Mrs. Ulman (Tom Noonan and Mary Woronov), who have conned / bribed the cash-strapped Samantha into "babysitting" dear old Granny for a few hours. She'll probably sleep through the night, and almost certainly won't emerge from her room. Did I mention it's the night of a total lunar eclipse?

The House of the Devil builds upon a grab-bag of vague urban legend and ghost story motifs: the terrorized babysitter, the local eccentrics in their sinister house, the menacing stranger out for a nocturnal stroll, and the unsuspecting woman lured to a terrible fate by a mysterious ad. Most prominently, the film plays upon the Satanic panic of the 1980s and the attendant fear that every town held a cabal of Lucifer-worshiping, Bible-desecrating, baby-eating Luciferians. (I wonder what proportion of the film's likely audience is old enough to even remember the era when Dungeons & Dragons was allegedly the diabolical gateway hobby of choice?) If the film's Big Reveal feels a tad underwhelming and goofy, it has less to do with the Black Sabbath trappings per se than with the contrast to the moody discipline that prevails elsewhere. West exhibits sharp affinity for eliciting scares from naught but dark spaces and weird sounds. The film works quite well on its own terms, and one is doubly thankful that the director approaches the retro style and setting with absolute sincerity. Who needs irony when you have a pretty girl in a dark, creepy house?

Kung Fu Panda 2

2011 // USA // Jennifer Yuh Nelson // May 30, 2011 // Theatrical Print (AMC Esquire)

I admired Kung Fu Panda quite a bit when it burst onto the scene in 2008, perhaps more than its screwball cartoon sensibilities or wearisome believe-in-yourself message warranted. Bear in mind, please, that it featured a portly panda bear in little shorts. I'm not made of stone, people. Beyond its visceral appeal, the film served as encouraging proof that Dreamworks could, in fact, produce a charming, frothy work of feature animation without resorting to atonal pop culture references, repugnant musical numbers, or scatological humor.

This hopeful sign was buttressed by an even better animated feature from Dreamworks last year, How to Train Your Dragon, a vanishingly rare example of a film that utilized 3D to excellent, enriching effect. However, in the past three years, the studio has also given us Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa, Monsters vs. Aliens, and Shrek Forever After, films which I'm quite comfortable dismissing as rubbish, based solely on the good judgment of trusted critics and the assurances of a wife who attends a lot kiddie flicks. Also: Fuck you, Dreamworks, for forcing me to type that execrable title, Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa.

Whatever enthusiasm I had going into Kung Fu Panda 2 was therefore tempered by wariness about whether the film would preserve the funny, frisky, wholesome qualities of its predecessor, or resign itself to flickering in and out existence as an opening weekend cash-grab. Happily, first-time director Jennifer Yuh Nelson and returning scripters Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger are keenly aware of original film's strengths. They ably pull off a tricky balancing act: maintaining a sense of stylistic and tonal continuity with Kung Fu Panda, while refraining from ratcheting the successful formula up to the point of shrillness.

The humor is still an appealing blend of slapstick and gently subversive deadpan gags that routinely deflate the film's most solemn moments. The design and the martial arts action are just as spectacular as in the previous outing. (Seriously, can we strap down some contemporary live-action directors and show them these movies? Maybe they'll learn how to make action sequences engaging and coherent again.) Even more admirably, the filmmakers actually manage to present a honest-to-goodness sequel. The film doesn't push the reset button on the events of its predecessor, but instead advances and deepens the ongoing story, mainly by exploring the mystery of Po's origins.

Not everything works. The peacock villain, Lord Shen (Gary Oldman) is menacing enough, but the film's odd fascination with his psychology bumps up against the crudity of his Take Over the World scheme. The story gets a bit wooly in places, and the Taoism-for-Tots gestures are a little half-baked, even if they are a welcome change of pace from the usual Western fairy tale tropes. Still, it's hard to find fault with a sequel that so successfully fulfills its own promise. Marvelously satisfying cartoon fun.

13 Assassins

2010 // Japan // Takashi Miike // May 27, 2011 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Tivoli Theater)

My familiarity with the absurdly prolific, genre-defying Japanese director Takashi Miike is, predictably enough, limited to the two films for which he is most notorious in the West: Audition and Ichi the Killer. His new film, a rough remake of an unfamiliar 1963 samurai film from Eiichi Kudo, does not represent the first feature foray into period action-drama for Miike--that would be, apparently, Izo--but this particular nexus of director and genre is, as they say, new to me.

Unsurprisingly for a director best known for bloody, stylized yakuza pictures, 13 Assassins is a lean, mean sort of samurai film. It gets right down to the business of establishing the utterly diabolical character of its villain, Lord Naritsugu (Goro Inagaki), the brother of the shogun and also a ice-hearted sociopath, the kind of entitled monster who calmly murders and rapes his way across the countryside because... well, because he can, I suppose. Miike complicates things a touch by providing Naritsugu with an honorable and conflicted lieutenant, Hanbei (Masachika Ichimura), but in general the viewer is expected to side overwhelmingly with the titular ragtag band of assassins who take aim at the depraved lord.

Secretly tasked by the shogun's loyalists to eliminate this black sheep, out-of-work samurai Shinzaemon (Koji Yakusho) sets about recruiting twelve other swords, plus one unlikely forest barbarian, for his Hail-Mary mission. At bottom, 13 Assassins is not really a martial arts showcase or a gritty war picture, but a heist film in the spirit of Ocean's 11, and the beats will be familiar to Western viewers. Accordingly, once Naritsugu's singular wickedness is established, the film's action is more or less divisible into a Putting the Team Together section, followed by a Last Big Score section.

In this case, the latter is mostly comprised of a 45-minute battle in a muddy village, pitting the assassins against two-hundred-plus bodyguards. There's no doubt that Shinzaemon's band will ultimately succeed, but as with any heist picture, the pleasure lies in watching their scheme unfold. Most of the assassins' preparations for the ambush occur off-screen, such that the tactics they use to demolish Naritsugu's entourage are genuinely unexpected. Unlike most heist films, however, the overall tone of 13 Assassins is grim rather than lively, and the context for all the blood-soaked action is the growing difficulty that Shinzaemon and his fellow ronin have had finding their place in the world as the Edo Period wanes.

I'm a tad reluctant to call such a brutal, melancholy film "fun," but it's unquestionable that 13 Assassins' raison d'être is the sheer giddy spectacle of a small band of guys on a righteous mission slicing their way through hordes of enemies. It's elemental, to be sure, but fashioned with such effortless regard for pacing and visual crackle, there's no doubt one is watching a seasoned action director operate on all cylinders. Miike delivers the kind of thrilling and straightforward tale of against-all-odds heroics that is a rare beast from Hollywood in the current era.

Audition

2000 // Japan // Takashi Miike // May 24, 2011 // Netflix Instant

Audition cries out for a "cold screening": I would love to find a friend who has never even heard of Takashi Miike and sit them down for a viewing without revealing a thing about the film they were about to watch. Of course, depending on the disposition of the person in question, our friendship might not survive the evening intact. Despite the film's reputation for a sudden, third-act U-turn into wrenching horror, Miike actually tips his hand quite early, revealing in cutaway scenes that the former ballerina and aspiring actress Asami (Eihi Shiina) is more than a little touched, as they say. When she finally pulls out the needles and wire saw, it doesn't elicit stupefying shock, but squirming revulsion at what is plainly about to unfold: a vivid lesson in the depths of this woman's fractured and sadistic psyche. The gore that follows is unsettling, to say the least, but not half as disturbing as Asami's expression of utter glee as she slices into her lover's flesh and bone. She enthuses over her gruesome work the way a schoolgirl might over a new Hello Kitty sticker book.

Audition is in part a scathing riff on the treatment of sex and gender in Japanese culture, although, not being Japanese, I'm fairly confident that some of the film's nuances sail over my head. However, it's abundantly clear that what Miike is attempting is far more ambitious than merely carrying the psycho girlfriend thriller epitomized by Fatal Attraction to its nihilistic endpoint. The film's style signals as much, as Miike frequently interrupts the main narrative with unhurried flashbacks that expand on previously presented scenes, and with fever-dreams that reveal back story and off-screen events. It's surprisingly elliptical and unsettled, especially in its final forty minutes or so, which has apparently led to wildly differing interpretations as to what "actually" happens. My reaction is the same sense of awed revulsion I experienced when I first encountered the film years ago, enhanced with a bit more admiration for Miike's approach. Remarkably, the majority of the film consists of just pairs of characters in conversation, which is a gratifyingly lean way to advance the story in an ostensible horror film. Much of the dialog seems anodyne at first, but it artfully reveals the witch's brew of suffering, entitlement, contempt, and self-deception that runs through the story and, by extension, through all manner of real-world romantic and sexual kabuki.

Robocop

1987 // USA // Paul Verhoeven // May 22, 2011 // Blu-ray - MGM (2007)

I've always struggled a bit with Paul Verhoeven's peculiar stripe of satire. The director's ironic films look awfully similar to his genuinely brainless, lurid genre works, to the point where distinguishing between the two can be challenging. I'm comfortable placing Flesh+Blood, Basic Instinct, and Hollow Man unambiguously in the latter category, but films like Showgirls and Starship Troopers straddle the kitschy and satirical in a way that's strangely slippery. It's telling that a decade and a half later, enthusiasts and critics still debate whether those two films in particular are actually colossal jokes.

Not so with Robocop, which I regard as Verhoeven's best film precisely because it so effortlessly and successfully exemplifies the bloodthirsty excesses of the Reagan era while also viciously dismantling those same excesses. In short, it functions as both a satire and the target of that satire, and it does so without feeling clunky or smug. Unlike Showgirls and Troopers, which I find exasperating in places, Robocop is juicy R-rated entertainment from beginning to end. Verhoeven is clearly having a grand old time, and his unflagging, demented playfulness shines through every frame.

Case in point: Just before the climax, the film spends several minutes observing the Bad Guys as they turn a city block of Old Detroit into rubble with a pair of gargantuan assault cannons. Verhoeven presents the scene in a manner that suggests spoiled little children at play with their shiny new toys. This sort of gratuitous digression--reveling in violence and also mocking it--is emblematic of Robocop's approach, but also conspicuous in a film that is otherwise fairly lean and mean. The smash-cut opening and closing shots in particular make me long for the days when action films presented themselves with such ruthless, no-bullshit efficiency.

It's tempting to laud the film's futurist vision of nihilistic consumerism, corrupt privatization, and acute economic stratification as eerily prescient. However, I think that vision says less about the soothsaying abilities of Verhoeven and screenwriters Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner than it does about their ability to discern the most enduring warts on the American character. The casting provides some hefty backup in this respect: Ronny Cox and Miguel Ferrer practically ooze loathsomeness as caricatures of the 1980s Corporate Asshole (Veteran and Young Turk models, respectively). When Cox sneers that his company's "urban enforcement" robots don't have to work properly, they just have to generate a lucrative parts-and-maintenance contract, you have to pinch yourself and recall that this film was released sixteen years before Halliburton became a household word.

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

2011 // USA // Rob Marshall // May 20, 2011 // 3D Digital Theatrical Projection (St. Louis Cinemas Moolah Theater)

We all have our guilty pleasures, and where the contemporary cinema is concerned, mine is without question the Pirates of the Caribbean film series. I defer to no one in my utterly indefensible affection for them. Of course, under a candid appraisal, the Pirates films are the embodiment of Hollywood's recent summer blockbusters: loud, garish, bloated things, weighed down by convoluted plotting and an elaborate, sketchily-conveyed mythology. They are, without a doubt, Bad Movies... and yet, there's something enthralling in the franchise's kitschy Disney heart.

Paradoxically, part of the thrill lies in that aforementioned mythology, the creation of series scribes Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio. If the Pirates films could be said to have auteurs, they would unquestionably be Elliot and Rossio, rather than directors Gore Verbinski or Rob Marshall. (One should also acknowledge Johnny Depp himself, who allegedly defied the studio in establishing Jack Sparrow as a swishy ne'er-do-well, a choice that has been thoroughly vindicated.) Elliot and Rossio amalgamate an unexpectedly deep appreciation for nautical and historical detail with a diverse array of familiar fantasy influences. The result is a playful and tremendously rich (and yet curiously unheralded) feat of cinematic world-building. Also crucial to the films' appeal are a crop of deliciously memorable and game performances, not only from Depp, but also from Geoffrey Rush, Kevin McNally, Bill Nighy, and many others.

Fortunately for viewers, the story arc of Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) and Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley) concluded with At World's End, permitting the series to jettison its dreary romantic leads. On Stranger Tides presents a new story mostly unconnected to the prior saga, with Depp, Rush, and McNally being the only significant faces to return. Perhaps "new" isn't entirely accurate, as the fourth film is based on Tim Powers' 1987 novel On Stranger Tides. Yes, 1987, as in "predating the film franchise by sixteen years." Therein lies a tale...

Powers' historical fantasy novel weaves together Blackbeard, voodoo, and the Fountain of Youth, but it had nothing to do with Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean theme park attraction. However, both the novel and the ride were key influences on video game designer Ron Gilbert when he created LucasArts' popular Monkey Island adventure game series in the 1990s. Monkey Island, in turn, is assumed to be a major and unacknowledged influence on the Pirates film franchise, due mainly to Elliot's work on a Monkey film adaptation that perished in Development Hell. Disney evidently acquired the right to Powers' novel long ago, and when the time came to churn out another Pirates film, Elliot and Rossio reworked On Stranger Tides into the mythology of Jack Sparrow's world. Accordingly, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides is something like the bastard progeny of a film series by way of its own grandfather.

Well, what of the new film? There's nothing fresh to lure in viewers who long ago washed their hands of Jack Sparrow, but there's plenty of the pulpy goodness that fans of the series expect from Elliot, Rossio, and Depp. Namely: cartoonish swashbuckling action, cunningly realized supernatural marvels, and a sense of humor that alternates between the groan-worthy and the deliriously offbeat. Happily, the writers seem to have learned a bit from the worst excesses of the past two films. The action sequences no longer go on and on to the point of monotony, and the plot is relatively straightforward compared to the tangle of double-crosses and triple-crosses that bedeviled the earlier entries. Blackbeard (Ian McShane) proves to be a menacing but thoroughly human villain, which is both a refreshing change of pace and a bit of a letdown following Nighy's stupendous, tentacled Lucifer, Davy Jones. Despite the love-hate sparks between Jack and Blackbeard's daughter, Angelica (Penelope Cruz), the series still insists on presenting a trite storybook romance between a couple of gorgeous white people. Instead of Bloom and Knightley, this time the chaste yearning is reserved for a sensitive missionary (Sam Claflin) and a distressed mermaid (Astrid Berges-Frisbey). It's pointless, but at least it's relegated to the background for this outing.

For hardcore devotees of the Pirates franchise, the most fascinating aspect of On Stranger Tides is the extent to which Jack Sparrow is actually evolving in his worldview and priorities. In this, and in an unfortunate number of plot details and gags, the writers seem to be drawing directly from the Indiana Jones films. Jack's personality is just as cheeky and craven as ever, but the subtext running through the new film (yes, subtext!) is Jack's emergent acceptance of mortality as a crucial component of his libertine values. Moreover, Jack's tribulations in the first three films--and myriad off-screen misadventures--seem to have soured him on the supernatural as a shortcut to wealth and power. These wrinkles undeniably enhance the potential of the planned fifth and sixth films, especially given Jack's predicament at the conclusion of On Stranger Tides. His unease with the confinements of the emerging eighteenth-century modernity raises the question that unabashed Pirates aficionados will have to confront: How will bonny Jack Sparrow finally meet his end?