Warm Bodies

2013 // USA // Jonathan Levine // January 29, 2013 // Digital Theatrical Projection (Wehrenberg Ronnies 20 Cine)

Zombie films are now such a ubiquitous aspect of contemporary pop culture, it’s difficult to believe that a little more than a decade ago the subgenre was in a bit of slump. A mere month after George Romero’s original Living Dead trilogy was completed in July of 1985, the sophomoric goofiness and embarrassing “punk” aesthetic of the Return of the Living Dead franchise rose up to take its place. Occasional bright spots such as Tom Savini’s remake of Night of the Living Dead (1990) and Ryuhei Kitamura’s undead-against-yakuza feature Versus (2000) managed to keep the zombie flame alive during those dark days. However, it wasn’t until 28 Days Later hit the ground running in 2002 that the zombie tale was truly reborn as a borderline-respectable cluster of horror conventions, one that could eventually support lavishly produced hour-long television dramas. This resurrection happened quickly, too, if one can assess the maturity of a trend by events of sub-subgenre fission. Only two years passed between 28 Days and Shaun of Dead (2004), the first post-revival zombie comedy and unquestionably the finest example of the form.

Sadly, the zombie comedy has had a lackluster unlife in the wake of Shaun, delivering one reasonably strong also-ran (Zombieland) and a string of forgettable features that range from the merely dull to the howlingly unfunny (Dead & Breakfast, Boy Eats Girl, Fido, Dance of the Dead, Dead Snow). Writer-director Jonathan Levine’s new film, Warm Bodies is the latest clammy-skinned hopeful in this particular category of cinema, and unfortunately it stumbles far more often than it succeeds.

Adapted from Isaac Marion’s post-apocalyptic “zombie romance” novel of the same name, the film strikes an unusual tone that is somehow both earnest and acerbic. Its narrative is a rather shameless mash-up of warmed-over love story fragments: both Romeo and Juliet and Beauty and the Beast lend their contours to the story. The former work, in fact, is referenced so overtly that the film is practically a zombie retelling of the Bard’s tragedy (with a happy ending!). Warm Bodies presents the bland, star-crossed romance between awkward pretty-boy zombie R (Nicholas Hoult) and tough, sensitive human Julie (Teresa Palmer) in a blithely matter-of-fact way. (R and Julie: get it?) The ardor of their forbidden love is more asserted than illustrated through dialogue or action, and Hoult and Palmer lamentably don’t have much chemistry with one another. Levine’s screenplay dresses up this tale of necrophilic puppy love with doses of tiresome action-horror and equally tiresome science-fiction allegory, but these elements only serve to draw attention to the thin, unengaging romance.

Yet despite the straightforward, shallow stance that the film assumes towards its central love story, Warm Bodies strives to be a satirical riposte to the serious-minded angst of most fictional adolescent romance. The resulting tone is damn strange. While the film never feels phony, there is a smug heedlessness in the way that its winking ridicule is scrawled in between moistened, unconvincing declarations of emotion. To the film’s credit, R’s professions of love are groaned in a gurgling Tarzan pidgin, consistently underlining the vacuousness of the couple’s fairy tale yearnings. However, this sardonic impulse never convinces, if only because the film is never truly bloody-minded about attacking mindless storytelling formulae.

Nonetheless, Warm Bodies does score some critical hits against deserving targets: the leaden longing of post-Twilight young adult lit; the creepiness of male characters in Sundance-bait relationship films; or the rotten, god-awful cliches of mainstream romantic comedy cinema. (One standout gag involves a character putting a screeching halt to the use of “Oh, Pretty Woman” during a Makeover Scene.) Most of the film’s mockery is delivered loudly and unambiguously—often via R’s pointedly ironic internal voice-over—but there are some exceedingly sly moments here and there. When R haltingly insists on the superiority of vinyl over digital music, it’s presented in such a deadpan manner that it’s difficult to discern if the script is satirizing actual music snobs, the Hollywood conception of music snobs, or the lazy use of music snobbery to denote character depth. The film’s humor really only falls flat when it lamely attempts to ape Shaun of the Dead by pointing out the similarities between the pre- and post-undead worlds.

Zombie movie purists will likely find the entire premise of Warm Bodies objectionable on a certain level. The story is predicated on R having retained a sliver of intelligence and emotion within his moldering brain, an idea that flies in the face of the normally strict depiction of the living dead as mindless horrors that are beyond salvation. What’s more, the plot presents Juliet’s love for R as a sort of redeeming contagion, capable of stirring not only her undead boyfriend’s putrid heart to beat, but also the blood of other zombies with whom he comes into contact. While this concept is faintly ridiculous, it’s not self-defeatingly stupid, nor is its contravention of zombie tropes especially bothersome. Works of fiction can, after all, posit whatever rules that the creator wishes, and there’s only so many living dead films that can be made in the unremittingly bleak mode of 28 Weeks Later and [REC]. Far more annoying than the film’s conceit of a curable undeath is its failure to play fair by its own rules. The zombies seem to move slowly, until the plot necessitates that they need to sprint. They can smell human flesh with shark-like precision, but are easily bamboozled by a smear of undead ooze.

These might seem to be the nitpicky gripes of a horror obsessive, but they are indicative of the slipshod quality to the broader story. The filmmakers add a third prong to the human-vs.-zombies conflict in the form of the feral, desiccated “Bonies”: living dead who have become sightless, walking strips of beef jerky. It’s an arguably necessary device in order to maintain a sense of threat even as the less monstrous “Corpse” zombies are being humanized, but it nonetheless seems narratively cheap. There is an obligatory showdown with the Bonies in the film’s final act, during which the spacial relationships between the three factions are so hopelessly muddled that it’s unclear where the hell events are even occurring.

Indeed, the geography of the film’s post-apocalyptic landscape is downright ridiculous at times. R force-marches Juliet from the human survivors’ walled city to the zombie-infested airport in an afternoon, but their later return by car inexplicably takes a couple of days. The majority of the interior spaces are governed by a kind of fractured geometry: subterranean crawl spaces seem to connect to parking ramps, which connect to subway stations, which connect to baseball stadiums, which connect to chemistry labs. This sort of careless disregard for spatial coherence is the marker of a third direct-to-DVD horror sequel, not a theatrical film in wide release (even if it is a February wide release). Ultimately, the biting humor that Warm Bodies occasionally exhibits is not sufficient grounds to overlook either the banal romantic plot or the laxness of the film’s construction.

Mama

2013 // Spain - Canada // Andrés Muschietti // January 15, 2013 // Digital Theatrical Projection (Wehrenberg Ronnies 20 Cine)

[Note: This post contains minor spoilers.]

It’s a tough call as to whether there is a salvageable, halfway-decent horror flick lurking somewhere within the dismal boundaries of Mama, but the film would almost certainly need to be demolished and rebuilt from scratch in order to reveal it. The feature exemplifies quite a bit that’s banal and irksome about contemporary horror filmmaking. There’s the over-reliance on repetitive, lazy jump-scares, a horror “method” that migrated from Asian to Western films well over a decade ago and is now applied with absolutely no sense of artfulness or restraint. There’s the colorless-to-crummy performances, which do not in any meaningful way reflect how actual human beings would behave if placed in the film’s circumstances. (This holds even for the lead actor, the suddenly-ubiquitous Jessica Chastain, who is almost unrecognizable in a short black wig and "rock" wardrobe.) Then there is the film’s worst sin: Its absolute mess of a screenplay, larded with ridiculous dialogue and festering narrative missteps.

It’s a bit of a shame, because there is a nugget of potential in Mama. A great horror film is waiting to be made based on the “feral child” folk tradition, perhaps something akin to François Truffaut’s The Wild Child by way of David Cronenberg. Mama is absolutely not that film, but Argentinean writer-director Andrés Muschietti at least seems to have an appreciation for the disturbing potential of such a story. The film is at its unsavory, discomfiting best when it dwells on the fragility of adults’ efforts to civilize children, and on the arbitrary nature of moral urges that are assumed to be intrinsic to humankind. To the film's credit, it doesn’t blink when it wanders into some harrowing, even downright appalling, places. The first ten minutes of Mama feature an unhinged man who intends to shoot his oblivious three-year-old daughter in the head, and the rest of film offers some comparably unsettling situations. The feature’s climax posits that if a child suffers severe psychological trauma between ages one and five, they may be a total lost cause, and no amount of tender loving care will make them “normal” again. It’s rough stuff, but no one ever suggested that the aim of a horror film is to make the viewer comfortable.

If only Muschietti and his co-writers (sister Barbara and Luther creator Neil Cross) had the discipline to leave out the supernatural elements and explore the chilling possibilities in a story about two little girls abandoned in the woods and discovered years later. That is where Mama seems to be heading at first, as fugitive wife-killer Jeffrey (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) hustles his fearful young daughters Victoria and Lilly into the snowbound wilderness of rural Virginia, and eventually to a remote, run-down cabin. There, Jeffrey’s murderous plans are abruptly thwarted by a sinister ethereal entity (Javier Botet) that materializes out of the shadows. This is about the point where it becomes unfortunately apparent that Muschietti intends to cram a vengeful ghost story into his feral children story—and nothing brings out the unimaginative side of a horror filmmaker like a vengeful ghost story.

Five years later, a backwoods search party employed by Jeffrey’s twin brother Lucas (Coster-Waldau again) stumbles upon the cabin, where it is discovered that the girls are now filthy, scrawny, animalistic CGI effects. Three months in the care of state psychiatrists is evidently all that is needed to restore eight-year-old Victoria (Megan Charpentier) to relatively well-groomed normalcy, but six-year-old Lilly (Isabelle Nélisse) is another matter. Having never learned to talk, she isn’t much interested in doing so now that she’s back in the bosom of central heating and Nick Junior. Standard kindergartner play isn’t her strong suit: when she’s not skittering around creepily on all fours, she’s devouring the black moths that mysteriously proliferate around the girls. None of this dissuades Lucas from his plans to adopt Victoria and Lilly, although his contentedly child-free girlfriend Annabel (Chastain) is less than enthusiastic about the assumption of such a responsibility. And that’s before she learns about the baleful spirit from the cabin, which the girls call “Mama" and which has apparently followed Victoria and Lilly back from the wilds.

The film presents "Mama’s" backstory as though it were an absorbing puzzle whose solution will herald some vital turning point in the plot, but nothing of the sort happens. Most of the second half of Mama consists of Annabel following the breadcrumbs left by child psychologist Dr. Dreyfuss (Daniel Kash), who is in turn a step or two behind the viewer in his understanding of what is unfolding. There’s little in the screenplay that asks for the viewer’s emotional or intellectual engagement, and as a result, the film just sort of muddles along. Annabel mopes about in an exasperated way, Victoria furrows her brow and glares, and "Mama" pops up every seven or eight minutes like a spring-powered Dracula in a cheap funhouse. Even on the most exploitative level, the film flops: Mama is strictly PG-13 violent, and none of the characters are garish or unlikeable enough for the viewer to get a sadistic thrill out of watching them blunder into the clutches of an undead monster. (Annabel’s baffling compulsion to open doors that any sane person would be nailing shut doesn’t prompt much but eye-rolling.)

Narrative problems abound in Mama, which is overflowing with convenient turns, frustrating cul-de-sacs, and a laughable understanding of how social service agencies function. In one particularly egregious case of storytelling fail, a sidelined Lucas receives a plaintive vision from his dead brother’s spirit, in an apparent attempt to draw him back into the story and prod him to assist in the unraveling of "Mama’s" origins. This leads to... nothing. Lucas makes an urgent journey into the forest at night, and is then forgotten until he shows up suddenly at the film’s climax, at which point he is hastily sidelined again so that Annabel can have an obligatory (and ambiguously written) one-on-one confrontation with "Mama".

These sort of plot fumbles are distracting on their own, but the film further annoys with its obnoxious regard for motherhood as the most sacred and worthiest of all human endeavors. It’s unfortunately familiar sexist nonsense, but what’s novel is Mama’s reactionary disdain for Annabel and Lucas’ childless, hipster-lite urban lifestyle. It’s not enough that Annabel is scolded for preferring band practice and bourbon shots to diaper duty, or that her lack of maternal rapport with Victoria and Lilly is portrayed as a deep character flaw that needs correction by dire supernatural means. The film also sneers at the very notion that she and Lucas could raise two children in (gasp) an apartment, one filled with artwork and music, no less. Narrative potholes are one thing, but even a stellar screenplay would have trouble recovering from that sort of clueless classism and cultural contempt.

What Has Sunk May Rise: The Haunted Palace (1963)

1963 // USA // Roger Corman // January 14, 2013 // DVD - MGM (2003)

Based On: The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1941)​

[Note: This post contains spoilers. Part of a series on film adaptations of the works of H. P. Lovecraft.]​

In 1963, the revelation that the first cinematic adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft’s work would be an American International Pictures production was probably not greeted with enthusiasm among devotees of the author’s distinctive stripe of Weird Fiction. Set aside for the moment the still-simmering question of whether Lovecraft’s particular brand of cerebral, cosmic horror can be successfully translated to film at all. AIP’s output at that time did not suggest a studio that was capable of (or all that interested in) the cinematic equivalent of the author’s fussy, vividly descriptive prose. James H. Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff, the founders and executive producers at AIP, had developed a simple formula for cranking out low-budget features that generated robust ticket sales: they made the kind of movies that teenaged boys wanted to see. By 1963, the company was accordingly known for its “wild youth” pictures featuring hot rods and untamable coeds (Reform School Girl, Daddy-O), its grim yet cheesy science-fiction and horror features (It Conquered the World, The Amazing Colossal Man), and the occasional gestalt of those two currents (I Was a Teenage Werewolf). (The company also produced, improbably enough, La Dolce Vita). In other words, aficionados of verbose, obscure Jazz Age sci-fi magazine authors were not generally in AIP’s target audience.

That said, films based on works of American horror literature were not completely outside AIP’s wheelhouse. In 1963, the company was in the middle of its highly successful “Corman-Poe Cycle,” a series of exceedingly loose Edgar Allan Poe adaptations helmed by AIP fixture Roger Corman and starring (with one exception) the lusciously menacing Vincent Price. The Haunted Palace was the sixth film in this cycle, and it has the dubious distinction of not being an actual Poe adaptation at all. (The author’s 1839 poem provides the title and the tacked-on closing lines, but that’s it.) The film is, in fact, the first feature film based on one of Lovecraft’s works; specifically, his masterful novella The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, penned in 1927 but not published until 1941, four years after the writer’s death.

The Haunted Palace is the thinnest sort of adaptation, drawing little from Lovecraft’s tale other than the rough outline of its scenario, the names of the principal characters, and a memorable detail here and there. (Compared to some of the other films in the Corman-Poe Cycle, however, it’s positively reverential.) The film opens with a prologue set in the fog-shrouded New England village of Arkham, in what one can reasonably deduce to be the late eighteenth century. The menfolk of the village have just reached the point where their outrage over the nefarious deeds of wealthy eccentric Joseph Curwen (Price) has overtaken their fear of the man. The suspected necromancer has been making a habit out of magically luring Arkham’s lovely maidens to his palace at night, to do Devil only knows what to their minds and flesh. Gathered at the local tavern, the villagers are spurred to action by the sight of yet another victim (Darlene Lucht) shuffling through the gloom towards the wizard’s estate. Led by the hotheaded Ezra Weedan (Leo Gordon) and the considerably more perturbed Micah Smith (Elisha Cook, Jr.), the residents of Arkham take up pitchfork and flame in order to confront Curwen on his own doorstep. Unconvinced by his flimsy explanations for all the recent virgin-enchantment and grave-robbing, the mob ties Curwen to a tree and sets him aflame. In his final moments, the doomed sorcerer speaks a dreadful curse, declaring that the descendents of his executioners will suffer for all time.

The film then jumps ahead one hundred and ten years, as Charles Dexter Ward (Price again) and his wife Anne (Debra Paget) arrive in an Arkham that seems not to have changed one jot since the time of Curwen’s unholy trespasses. As it happens, Ward is the wizard’s descendent, and has recently come into possession of Curwen Palace. The superstitious villagers—who, like Ward, bear a startling resemblance to their 1700s forebears—do their best to dissuade the Wards from venturing up to the estate, and even the more rationally inclined Dr. Marinus Willet (Frank Maxwell) advises that the couple return to Boston posthaste. Ward, of course, is not about to walk away from his inheritance on account of a few ghost stories. Within the structure’s walls the couple discovers not only an unsettling portrait of Ward’s necromancer ancestor, but also an unctuous live-in groundskeeper named Simon (Lon Chaney, Jr.), whose grayish-green skin is just one of numerous glaring signs that all is not right in Curwen Palace.

The painting of Curwen both spellbinds and disturbs Ward, and in short order he is acting quite strangely, as the spirit of the damned warlock begins seizing control of his body for extended periods of time. Unbeknownst to Anne, Curwen-as-Ward meets secretly in the bowels of the palace with Simon and another sickly-complexioned retainer, Jabez (Milton Parsons). The diabolical trio labor to not only resurrect Curwen’s exhumed mistress Hester (Cathie Merchant), but also to complete the twisted ritual that was interrupted over a century ago by the little matter of the sorcerer’s lynching. The logistics of this rite are a bit unclear, but it culminates in the offering of a living woman to an abomination dwelling in a pit beneath the palace. Meanwhile, Curwen finds himself distracted by the fleshy opportunities afforded by his Ward guise, not to mention by his longing for a blazing revenge against his murderers’ families. There is also a somewhat neglected subplot about the strange deformities have proliferated in Arkham; in particular, Ezra Weeden’s descendent Edgar (Gordon again) is imprisoning a Thing that seems to be his own feral, misshapen child.

Corman’s film deviates extensively from Lovecraft’s story, such that The Haunted Palace is less a straight adaptation of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward than a complete reconception of it by way of the cinematic horror conventions of the 1950s and 60s. If one were feeling generous, one could ascribe the same single-sentence summary to both novella and film—dead eighteenth century necromancer takes over the body of his modern descendant—but there the similarities end. In the book, Ward is an introverted university student and hobbyist antiquarian who is quite familiar with the unsavory legends surrounding Salem refugee Joseph Curwen, even before his genealogical connection to the sorcerer is uncovered. Charles Beaumont’s screenplay changes Ward into a devoted middle-aged husband (Price was fifty-two in 1963) who has never heard of Curwen prior to Dr. Willet’s somewhat redundant explanation of the events from the film’s prologue. In Lovecraft’s tale, Curwen’s eighteenth-century lair—a country bungalow with concealed catacombs and arcane laboratory—has vanished into ruin, and its present-day location is one of the book’s more significant mysteries. The film, meanwhile, observes darkly that Curwen’s opulent estate was reassembled stone-by-stone from “somewhere in Europe,” which has evidently preserved it against the ravages of time. (Simon apparently responded to his master’s incineration by throwing white sheets over all the palace’s furniture and working out an upkeep agenda for the next century.) The film script also switches the setting from Lovecraft’s hometown of Providence, Rhode Island to the more provincial fictional village of Arkham, which elsewhere plays a central role in the author's “Weird New England.”

These various alterations make it easier for the filmmakers to ground The Haunted Palace in conventions that would doubtlessly have been more familiar to a mainstream audience than those of Lovecraft’s musty, bookish brand of horror. None of the elements in The Haunted Palace would feel out of place in another low-budget period horror picture from AIP or from its British equivalent, Hammer Films. There are almost too many classic horror signposts to count: the glowering, undead lord who wishes to reclaim his former power; the lost scion of a noble lineage who exactly resembles an antecedent; the outraged mob that storms the palace; the twisted man-thing locked in an attic; the cobwebby secret passage; the magical painting; the cursed village; the women swooning about in ludicrously lush, revealing costumes.

This kitchen sink approach to the narrative makes the film feel a bit unfocused at times, cluttering up the story with B and C plots and too many underdeveloped avenues that might have paid dividends, terror-wise, if they had been given more space to breathe. Often, it’s not clear precisely whose story Corman and Beaumont are interested in telling. Lovecraft’s novella benefits from the unambiguous presentation of a pitiable victim in Ward and a stalwart (if a bit slow-on-the-uptake) hero in Dr. Willet, but Beaumont’s script muddles this clear-cut approach. Price is clearly the lead of The Haunted Palace, so the filmmakers understandably feel a bit obliged to linger on him. However, Movie-Ward is not much of a protagonist. He isn’t really characterized beyond his dismissal of the supernatural and his fondness for his wife. After the arrival at the palace, Ward spends most of the film doing one of three things: staring into space in fright as Curwen’s spirit slowly works his mind-control voodoo; being temporarily but wholly consumed by the necromancer’s personality, and therefore effectively off-screen; and occasionally rousing himself from his ancestor’s enthrallment in order to wince and grimace and thereby convey the battle of wills raging inside him. (None of this is a slap to Price, who—with an assist from the makeup department—does a fine job of smoothly switching between the malevolent Curwen and the anodyne Ward, often within the space of a line or two.)

If not Ward, then, who is the film’s protagonist? Compared to the rest of Arkham’s villagers, Dr. Willet is honorable and at least somewhat clear-eyed, but the physician is far too passive and spends too little time on-screen to be the Real Hero. Anne is mainly present to look concerned about her husband’s eroding sanity, to be verbally abused and sexually menaced (at a PG level) by Curwen-as-Ward, and to be rescued from the necromancer’s clutches at the film’s fiery climax. The blinkered, snarling Edgar Weedan gets an unusual amount of screentime, given how little the subplot about his mutated son eventually matters, but he’s plainly a secondary character (given that he is dead before the third act). This leaves the film in a rather unpleasant situation where its loathsome villain turns out to be the most active, compelling character, if not exactly the “real” protagonist. There are films that have pulled off this trick, but they tend to be pitch-black, modern-day character studies (Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, American Psycho, Spider), not Roger Corman horror flicks from the 1960s.

Conspicuously absent is the novella’s focus on Curwen’s necromantic experimentations, which entail not only the creation of twisted servitor creatures but also the summoning of deceased ancients in order to plunder their knowledge. In the film, the only undead resurrection is that of Hester, who doesn’t seem to have much of a purpose given that Anne becomes the object of Curwen-as-Ward’s’ carnal appetites. This watering down of Curwen’s supernatural activities turns him into a much more vague antagonist. Book-Curwen is almost monomaniacally bent on acquiring esoteric knowledge and magical power in order to secure his position in a future Earth ruled by the unfathomable Outer Gods. Movie-Curwen, meanwhile, pursues several different, unrelated schemes, including a rather prosaic revenge plot to burn alive the descendents of his original murderers. Moreover, the wizard’s most far-reaching plan is annoyingly fuzzy: evidently, it involves breeding women with gibbering horrors in order to spawn monstrous demigods... or something... for some reason.

Its story problems aside, The Haunted Palace is nonetheless an entertaining work of camp horror, chock-a-block with shockingly gorgeous widescreen visuals and a typically lip-smacking (if lesser) performance from Price. Both Corman and regular AIP cinematographer Floyd Crosby are in fine form, and there is an abundance of aesthetically breathtaking sequences, particularly for a low-budget film with repurposed sets. An early highlight is the first foray into the cavernous Curwen Palace, filmed in a single shot that pushes in through the front door and sweeps through the Great Hall. Moreover, for all its silliness, the film succeeds in being genuinely frightening at times, alternating adroitly between suffocating dread and pure shock. One of the most memorable scenes in the film falls unambiguously into the latter category: Curwen suddenly emerges from the shadows of nocturnal Arkham, douses a passing Peter Smith (Cook) in oil, and sets the unfortunate man ablaze, barely lingering to watch him burn. Corman perfectly conveys the out-of-left-field, appalling violence of this moment, leaving the viewer dazed and unsteady.

Given that The Haunted Palace is such an carelessly loose adaptation of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward—not to mention the studio’s shameless Poe bait-and-switch—it’s unsurprising that the footprint of Lovecraft’s wider mythology in the film is light. During one of Dr. Willet’s three or four exposition scenes, he mentions both Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth almost offhandedly, as though the non-fan should know exactly what those nightmarish god-things are and shudder appropriately. (Aside: How strange is it from the vantage point of 2013 to hear Cthulhu’s name spoken aloud in a film made during the Kennedy administration? Really strange.) The notorious grimoire The Necronomicon makes a faintly ridiculous appearance, its leather cover helpfully printed with its English title in gold lettering. At least Willet has the good sense to dissuade Anne from opening and reading from it, as she is plainly and inexplicably tempted to do. The most disappointing object to be borrowed from Lovecraft’s work comes directly from the source novella. In the book, Dr. Willet’s encounter with the Thing in the Pit is one of the standout moments of raw horror, a slow-burn descent into stomach-flopping dread that culminates in a characteristically hazy glimpse of the monstrosity. In the film, when the creature is finally revealed as an unmoving rubber prop under a wavering green light, it’s a colossal letdown. Moreover, this sight demonstrates just how unsatisfying it is when Lovecraft’s unspeakable abominations, described with his long-winded and yet unsettlingly nebulous prose, are plucked out of the mind’s eye and put to celluloid. (Many similar disappointments will no doubt emerge as this series of posts proceeds.)

The film’s thematic kinship with Lovecraft’s body of work, although thin, is more substantial than its literary allusions. The bleak, almost nihilistic worldview of the author’s fiction doesn’t receive much attention, but it is there, bubbling beneath the surface. It’s most evident in the film’s final shot, which intimates with a sort of cynical smirk that Ward can never completely escape Curwen’s control, and that he was doomed from the moment he set foot in Arkham. The passivity of most of the characters throughout the story creates the sensation of a downhill slide to the film’s nasty conclusion, underscoring that the warlock is ultimately unstoppable. The “victory” for Good at the end of The Haunted Palace represents little more than a speed bump, a short-term disruption in Curwen’s generation-spanning efforts on behalf of the Outer Gods. One of the film’s more disturbing, distinctly Lovecraftian lines actually contradicts the book’s portrayal of Curwen. The novella paints him as a power-crazed wizard, not an actual worshipper of blasphemous entities, and certainly not a fanatic in the service of anyone’s goals but his own. However, the film presents the madman as a devoted disciple of the Outer Gods, and even permits him a moment of fearful humility. Late in the film, Curwen betrays a flicker of awestruck dread, as he admits to Anne and Dr. Willet that his masters are beyond his comprehension: “We don’t fully understand ourselves. We obey. That is all. We obey.”

Gangster Squad

2013 // USA // Ruben Fleischer //January 8, 2013 // Digital Theatrical Projection (Wehrenberg Ronnies 20 Cine)

It is hopefully uncontroversial that even the slightest, most straightforward genre exercise can be a gratifying work of cinema if the filmmakers regard both the material and the viewer with respect. Nowhere is it written that a film (least of all a work of Hollywood entertainment) must say something profound, or that a film laden with cliches must also be a work of high-minded deconstruction or winking satire. Doing just One Thing and doing it exceptionally well can be a deceptively tricky feat, and when a filmmaker pulls off such a stunt, it’s a marvelous sight to behold. (Witness, for example, Sam Mendes’ pitch-perfect Skyfall.) Even a film whose pleasures are almost entirely superficial and fleeting—a puff of cinematic meringue, if you will—can coast for quite a distance solely on charm.

Even by such modest standards, however, Ruben Fleischer's Gangster Squad feels like a listless chore, more absorbed with genre box-checking and wallowing in dull, repetitive violence than with actually engaging the viewer. On paper, the broad outlines of the story are promising: The film is very loosely based on Paul Lieberman’s esteemed 2008 Los Angeles Times series (and his follow-up book) on the LAPD’s secret anti-Mafia task force, which employed mostly illegal means to pursue boxer-turned-mobster Mickey Cohen and other “Eastern hoods” in the 1940s and 50s. Gangster Squad therefore unfolds in what one might call James Ellroy Country: a post-War landscape of housing tracts, glittering nightspots, automotive grime, and Hollywood artifice. This provides production designer Maher Ahmad with a tempting sandbox in which to play, but Will Beal’s crude, predictable script seems to understand the setting mostly through third-hand tropes. It’s a Disneyland version of 1949 Los Angeles, bereft of human habitation or any sense of real mortal peril.

Desperate to stop Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn) before his stranglehold over Los Angeles’ underworld is complete, police captain Parker (Nick Nolte) hand picks the bull-headed Irish-American Sergeant John O’Mara (Josh Brolin) to lead a clandestine squad of cops that will operate without official sanction, department backup, or legal restrictions. Hardened and honorable but not too bright, the WWII veteran O’Mara isn’t so much the Last Honest Cop as he is an undomesticated warrior, unable to back down until his Enemy is defeated. In one of the screenplay’s few memorable touches, O’Mara’s very pregnant wife Connie (Mireille Enos) selects the other members of the squad from the dossiers piled on their kitchen table, reasoning that the men who are watching her spouse’s back should meet her standards of toughness.

The ranks of the unit eventually include an appropriately diverse array of archetypes: Kennard (Robert Patrick), the Old One; Harris (Anthony Mackie), the Black One; Keeler (Giovanni Ribisi), the Smart One; and Wooters (Ryan Gosling), the World-Weary Womanizing One. Kennard’s eager beaver partner Ramirez (Michael Peña) eventually joins group as well, filling the role of the Latino One. Unfortunately, the film’s treatment of these cops is as reductive as it sounds, and as a result, nearly every effort to summon a laugh or a tear lands with a hollow thud. (Patrick’s drawly quips are the only lines that succeed in eliciting a chuckle here and there.) The cynical Wooters is the sole cop character who is allowed an arc, and the event that brings him around to O’Mara’s righteous viewpoint is so bald-faced and repugnant that it is downright astonishing that the filmmakers had the shamelessness to include it.

Once the squad is assembled, the story slogs ahead through a blood-soaked cops-and-robbers war: O’Mara’s team attacks Cohen’s empire with arson, beatings, and summary executions, and after suffering some fatal setbacks, they finally bring down the crime lord himself. Oh, and along the way Wooters falls into bed with Cohen’s slinky moll, Grace (Emma Stone), which adds a wrinkle or two to the Good Guys' mission. It’s rudimentary stuff, which isn’t necessarily defeating, if Fleischer or Beal regarded the story as anything other than an opportunity to gape as cardboard cops and foam latex gangsters spray artfully recreated post-War Los Angeles with hot lead. It’s hollow and cartoonish, and even on a purely adolescent level, it’s not much fun.

It doesn’t help that the actors are mostly sleepwalking through the proceedings. None of the performers but Penn is actively bad, but only rarely is a sense of genuine human emotion permitted to peek through the eye-rolling dialogue. Penn, meanwhile, at least seems to sense that the awful script gives him carte blanche to play Cohen as a sneering, spittle-flecked comic book villain. Nonetheless, for this critic's taste, Penn doesn’t camp it up nearly enough, and the result is just an ugly, unpleasant portrayal that leaves no lasting impression.

Equally unpleasant is the look of Gangster Squad, which seems to have been subjected to a drastic post-production color correction and softening in order to approximate a deranged person’s conception of “retro”. It’s the kind of digital tinkering that can work in fantastical films like 300 and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, but here it’s just distracting, especially given that it is inconsistently applied. In the close-ups during an early nightclub scene, Stone’s skin is so polished and smooth that she looks like a creepy porcelain doll; later, the freckles dusted across her cheeks are permitted to peek through. It’s a nitpicky detail, but it underlines the sensation of slipshod excess that characterizes Gangster Squad: the film feels naggingly like a work in which great effort and expense is expended on not giving a damn.

Not Fade Away

2012 // USA // David Chase // January 3, 2013 // Digital Theatrical Projection (Wehrenberg Des Peres Cine 14)

It feels a bit ungenerous to criticize David Chase’s tale of a starry-eyed, college-age rock group in 1960s New Jersey of hewing too closely to the well-worn narrative formula of the Band Movie. Writer-director Chase, after all, makes pains to portray the tribulations of the fictional Eugene Gaunt Band (later the Twilight Zones) as distinct from those in the conventional rock-n-roll story, at least as depicted by Hollywood. Not Fade Away's adolescent narrator, Evelyn, (Meg Guzulescu) reveals in the opening scenes that her older brother’s band will never Make It. In this, Douglas (John Magaro) and his fellow Stones-worshipping buddies will follow a trajectory that is dispiritingly commonplace—not just among musicians from small-town Jersey, but pretty much all artists. Not Fade Away is therefore a film about disappointment, and about whether fame and fortune are integral to rock’s ethos, or utterly beside the point.

On this matter, Chase’s film is agreeably ambiguous, and the most fascinating moments in the script are those that achieve a delicious balance between straight-faced, simple-minded optimism and vicious satire of that same optimism. The film conveys both fist-pumping approval and eye-rolling disdain at Douglas’ routine declarations of “Rock-n-Roll Will Never Die, Man!” (or some rough equivalent), a pronouncement usually made to his frustrated parents (James Gandolfini and Molly Price). Chase and his performers aren’t always successful at maintaining this conflicted stance towards the rock cliches Not Fade Away employs so enthusiastically, but when the the film works in this regard, it’s heartfelt and darkly amusing.

This is the first theatrical feature from Chase, who is renowned as the creator and producer of The Sopranos. While the film is mostly unremarkable visually (and a bit too murky, lighting-wise), there are some moments of genuine cinematic verve. During a pivotal audition scene, Chase cuts repeatedly between the band’s performance and Douglas’ girlfriend Grace (Bella Heathcote) as she sits listening on the stairs—outside the room, where the arm-candy belongs. The camera pushes in slowly on Grace’s face as drummer-turned-vocalist Douglas pours out his heart in a Dylan-like warble, and her expression is a marvelously enigmatic thing. It at once says, “This song is amazing, and I am hopelessly in love with this man,” and “I absolutely do not want to spend my life waiting around obediently, smoking in the stairwell with the other girlfriends.” Another highlight occurs late in film, as newly-arrived Douglas wanders predawn 1968 Los Angeles in a post-party haze. It’s a fantastically moody sequence, capped by a creepy moment where he wisely turns down a ride from a Manson Family-esque couple. It feels for all the world like a 1970s horror film is twitching insistently at the margins of Chase’s 60’s period piece.

The primary problem with Not Fade Away is that Chase’s affection for musicians and this particular period in American history are so strong that he can’t sustain the narrative and thematic nerve that the story needs. The film is positively brimming with 1960s cliches, right down to the breakfast table quarrels about civil rights and the Vietnam War, and when the film fumbles the sincerity-satire balance, it fumbles hard. Occasionally, the story becomes downright predictable, exasperating, and even boring, as Douglas and his bandmates proceed through their expected arcs, while the adults mutter their disapproval at this whole rock-n-roll nonsense. There is even an obligatory concession to the Dark Side of the ‘60s in the person of Grace’s perpetually dosed, possibly mentally ill sister Joy (Dominique McElligot). The aforementioned Manson couple, glimpsed only briefly, leave a far nastier mark than scene after scene of Joy’s cartoonish, Luna Lovegood eccentricities and drug-fueled unraveling.

Ultimately, the film’s determination to tell an atypical rock saga is more asserted than expressed. The tale of the Twilight Zones is essentially the story told by every Behind the Music episode, save that the group in question never got a recording contract and never escaped the purgatory of friends’ basements and high school auditoriums. Chase at times finds ways to cunningly upend the expectations of this formula, as when the band suffers an apparent Duane Allman-style tragedy that u-turns in a deflating, oddly funny way. In the main, however, the film presents all the usual contours of its subgenre, and without the liveliness that might excuse such excessive reliance on tropes. There are creative differences, naturally, and spats about drug use and women and What’s Best for the Band. Most of the melodrama revolves around cluelessly pompous guitarist Eugene (Jack Huston), who dismisses Douglas’ original songs, misbehaves sophomorically on stage, and pouts when he is (justifiably) supplanted as lead vocalist. This hackneyed dimension to the story is wearisome, and ultimately dispiriting, given that Chase provides glimpses of a far more compelling and courageous take on the grizzled Band Movie template.

A Fine, Good Place to Be: The Iron Horse (1924)

1924 // USA // John Ford (Uncredited) // January 1, 2013 // DVD - Fox (2007)

[Note: This post contains spoilers. Part of a series on the silent films of John Ford.]

There is a sharp difference in scope between John Ford's 1920 debut at the Fox Film Company, the light-hearted buddy picture Just Pals, and his next surviving feature film, the sprawling 1924 historical epic The Iron Horse. A portion of this contrast may be an artifact of an incomplete twenty-first century vantage point. Remarkably, Ford directed at least fourteen other features in the four-year span between Just Pals and The Iron Horse, nine of them at Fox. However, given that those intervening films are either lost or fragmentary, it's difficult to say whetherThe Iron Horse represents Ford's first, dramatic foray into ambitious, D. W. Griffith-scale filmmaking, or merely the surviving endpoint of a transition from relatively small-bore features to lavish spectacles. The only contemporary expansion in production size under a single director that might compare is Peter Jackson's leap from 1996'sThe Frighteners to 2001'sThe Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. Of course, in that five-year interregnum, Ford could have cranked out fifteen or twenty features.

Regardless, The Iron Horse is undeniably a grand film. The restored American cut encompasses 149 minutes, and the film stacks that running time with the sort of sweeping Hollywood extravagance not seen since Griffith's own Intolerance from 1916. The story presents a highly fictionalized retelling of the completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad, as seen primarily through the eyes of Davy Brandon (George O'Brien), a wannabe-surveyor turned all-around frontier adventurer. Davy dreams dewily of a path that stretches across America from sea to shining sea, longing for it the way less rugged men might long for the love of a woman. There is a woman in The Iron Horse, of course, the fetching Miriam (Madge Bellamy), Davy's childhood sweetheart and daughter to prosperous railroad builder Thomas Marsh (Will Walling). Nonetheless, the film’s central romance is not between Davy and Miriam, but between the United States and the locomotive, that steam-powered vessel of the nation's economic might.

Hovering over the film is the sanctifying presence of Abraham Lincoln (Charles Edward Bull), who did in fact have a slender real-world connection to the Railroad's early development in his post-Congressional years as a prairie lawyer. However, this historical footnote is not sufficient for The Iron Horse, which casts Lincoln as the the visionary creator of the Railroad, and rather glibly writes him into its first scene, set in Springfield, Illinois at an unspecified mid-nineteenth century time. (The film’s treatment of history is so muddled that making sense of the timeline is probably a hopeless endeavor.) A young(ish) Mr. Lincoln eavesdrops approvingly as surveyor David Brandon, Sr. (James Gordon) enthuses about his dream of a coast-to-coast railroad. Son Davy (Winston Miller) has absorbed this rather civic-minded ambition, and not even the charms of local girl Miriam (Peggy Cartwright) can dissuade him from heading West with his father. Unfortunately, the older Brandon is eventually captured by Cheyenne warriors on the frontier, and as a concealed Davy watches in terror, his father is hacked apart by a sneering, axe-wielding brave with pale skin and two fingers on his right hand.

The film then jumps forward to 1862—unlike in the Springfield-based prologue, the year is pointedly mentioned—as now-President Lincoln puts his signature to the Pacific Railroad Act. The grown-up Miriam is preparing to follow the westward progress of the Union Pacific with her father and her new fiance Jesson (Cyril Chadwick), a starchy and sniveling engineer. At this point, the film’s canvas broadens considerably, following the progress of the railroad’s westward march and lingering over the struggles and antics of a broad cast of characters. These include: cigar-chomping saloon proprietor Judge Haller (James Marcus), who holds ad hoc trials in his canvas-walled establishment; spitfire dance hall girl Ruby (Gladys Hulette); Irish railroad laborers and Union Army veterans Casey (J. Farrell MacDonald), Slattery (Francis Powers), and Mackay (James Welch); and wealthy, shifty-eyed landowner Deroux (Fred Kholer), who holds the lion’s share of the Smoky River tract along the planned Union Pacific route near North Platte, Nebraska Territory. In case it wasn’t obvious that Deroux was the primary antagonist, Kholer squints and sneers beneath so much oily makeup he practically oozes off the screen.

The villainous Deroux swiftly enlists the newly-arrived engineer Jesson into his schemes, which entail quashing Thomas Marsh’s attempts to find a mountain pass that bypasses Smoky River. (Mountains in Nebraska?) Fortunately for the future of the Transcontinental Railroad, it’s roughly at this point that Davy reenters the picture, having been raised by mountain men on the frontier after his father’s gruesome demise. Now a strapping Pony Express rider, he fortuitously appears to valiantly fend off an attack by marauding Cheyenne, promptly fanning the dormant flames of Miriam’s passion. Davy is smitten as well, but his heart ultimately belongs to the railroad; he views the completion of the Transcontinental route as a debt he owes his murdered father. This longing is matched in intensity only by his smoldering loathing for the mysterious, two-fingered white Indian, who naturally surfaces to provoke the local Cheyenne chief (John Big Tree) into escalating his assaults on the Union Pacific.

Ford handles all of this with admirable deftness. Despite The Iron Horse’s lengthy running time, the feature is a terrifically entertaining work of epic filmmaking, packed with rousing action, tense thrills, affecting melodrama, and droll comedic set pieces. Everything moves at a good clip, and although there are numerous subplots, the film pulls nearly all of them all together into a remarkably clean story over the course of its two and half hours. Even the cattle drive that ambles along almost entirely in the narrative’s background becomes a vital plot point in the final act. (Although Ford checks in on the drive so infrequently and so briefly, the reaction it provokes is mainly, “Oh, right, that’s happening.”) The only components of the film that feel somewhat unnecessary are the bits of comic thumb-twiddling, such as Ruby’s legal tap-dance when she is accused of shooting at a lout in Haller’s saloon, or an almost vaudevillian sequence in which a reluctant Casey visits the dentist for a toothache. However, while these comic scenes often feel extraneous to The Iron Horse’s main ambition to tell a ravishing story of the taming of the Old West, they are still charming and memorable, and serve to alleviate the achingly earnest devotion that the film displays towards the Almighty Railroad.

In some respects, Ford’s film function as an American cousin to Battleship Potemkin: a work of Silent Era propaganda that trumpets its ideological message with unabashed enthusiasm, while also serving as an breathtaking showcase for contemporary filmmaking at its grandest. (Potemkin, of course, also has the distinction of being thoroughly revolutionary experiment in cinematic grammar; Ford’s film is excellent, but comparatively paltry in its artistic ambitions.) To contemporary eyes, The Iron Horse’s triumphalist Manifest Destiny worldview is deeply problematic, but only rarely discomfiting to the point of distraction. Less easily set aside is the film’s almost fetishistic regard for the locomotive, which is so over-the-top that its straddles the line between poignant and silly. No scene embodies this wobbly quality more perfectly than a moment late in the film when Davy privately savors the railroad’s completion at Promontory Point, Utah Territory. It’s a great sequence: touchingly intimate in a film that is otherwise grandiose and sprawling, and strangely willing to acknowledge of the phoniness of the upcoming “official” Golden Spike ceremony. Undeniably, it is one of George O'Brien’s best scenes in the whole feature, but when he sits down on the tracks to stroke the steel rails almost sexually it invites a tear and a titter in equal measure.

As one might expect from a Western made in 1920s, the film also features a thick slathering of racism, and not only with respect to Native Americans. The spokesman for the railroad’s Italian workers is Tony (Colin Chase), a mustachioed caricature whose dialog titles are dense with stereotypical accented English. The film depicts this fellow and his countrymen as eager to drop their picks and shovels at the slightest provocation—for example, after not being paid their promised wages for weeks (the layabouts!). Of course, they eagerly return to work after a stirring oratory from Miriam, because as hot-blooded Latins, they are easily persuaded by the charms of a lovely woman. The Irish get off comparatively lightly, for while Casey and his compatriots serve as comic relief, they are also depicted as courageous Indian-fighters, enthusiastically embraced by Davy as “real Americans”. (Ford was himself a second-generation Irish-American.)

The Chinese workers who pushed the Central Pacific line eastward to meet the Union Pacific are given short shrift, and there are no black characters to speak of at all in the film. (Despite the grimness with which the film regards the Civil War, there is no mention of slavery, and much is made of the unifying power of the Transcontinental dream for Union and Confederate veterans.) The Cheyenne who attack the railroad are generally shown to be cunning, murderous devils, apparently resistant to technological progress out of savage spite. Of course, the film makes a point of directing the viewer’s attention to the Pawnee who defend the Union Pacific against the Cheyenne. Meanwhile, the main Indian villain, “Two-Fingers,” is not actually an Native American at all, but a white man who playacts as one in order to pursue his malevolent ambitions. However, these concessions to a 1920s version of racial nuance are in some ways just as pernicious as the broadest scalp-hunting, war-whooping stereotype. The film’s view seems to be that Native Americans will naturally acknowledge the virtues of the railroad and eagerly genuflect to its might, unless they are led astray by a villainous white, in which case an entire tribe can be prodded into a frenzy with little effort.

None of these race-based criticisms is presented to suggest that The Iron Horse is an Evil FIlm, or that its sins as a history-distorting Manifest Destiny mash note overwhelm its virtues as engaging cinema. (If one is prepared to disregard every John Ford feature that offers an ugly depiction of Native Americans, one would have to skip over several essential touchstones in the director’s filmography.) Indeed, the film serves to illustrate just how little has changed in pop cinema in nearly a century. The Iron Horse underlines that the viewer has permission to feel conflicted when a film is superbly entertaining, yet deeply entangled with troubling political or cultural attitudes.