Check out my article and interview with Spanish director Marçal Forés on his debut film, ANIMALS (2012) for SPECTACULAR OPTICAL.

Dear Hollywood Blockbuster Machine (Warning: a bit of profanity ahead):

Two nights ago, I suffered through the third of your summer “tentpole” or “tentpole-hopeful” movies. And I have come to realize that, while there is something wonderful about this sheer spectacle that you parade in front of me each summer—with its aesthetic of fragmented close-ups that fire images at audiences from point-blank at the pace of an AK-47 (very U.S.A.)—I actually go to most of your event movies because they either feature a promising concept, or tap into my sense of nostalgia or appreciation for characters (a.k.a., properties) that I grew up with.

OBLIVION: So pretty, so stupid.

Well, I’m starting to learn my lesson … way too late, perhaps. This devotional blockbuster viewership of mine must end. Here are my three mistakes of 2013, plus a bonus.

The Bonus first: I’m embarrassed to say that I saw OBLIVION, the handsomer evil twin of AFTER EARTH, which I didn’t see because I cannot encourage the hiring of M. Night Shyamalan to make more films, even as a director-for-hire. I dislike Shyamalan, but I loathe Tom Cruise (except for in MAGNOLIA, in which he plays himself … a megalomaniacal dick). I had no reason to see this movie outside of my love for sci-fi, and wanting to look at pretty machines in high-definition. I got the pretty machines, and OBLIVION’s rather odd evocation of Joss Whedon’s crappy CABIN IN THE WOODS from last year.

SUPERMAN RETURNS: Want.

MAN OF STEEL:  Bizarrely (if you know me), I love Superman. I love him when he’s a happy-go-lucky Clark Kent and when he’s a chiseled tight-suit-wearing hottie who can freeze the surface of a lake with his breath, and then carry it on his fingertip. This is why I (and five other people, I guess) liked SUPERMAN RETURNS. But when you decide to re-reboot the franchise with Zack Snyder directing and Christopher "Batman Goes Darker" Nolan producing and co-writing, this means that 1) by the end of the first ten minutes, I have a migraine and a burnt-in afterimage on my retina that reads only the colour green, and 2) after two-and-a-half hours, I have suffered the tortures of the damned with yet another put-upon hero who’d rather brood and scowl than give me a reason to cheer him, than give

a performance, or than make me like him at all. Logic flaw #342: The U.S. government would nuke any superhero who did more damage to New York City than Osama Bin Laden just to kill three supervillains. Christopher Reeve (or Brandon Routh ... what was wrong with him?!) wouldn’t fuck up New York just to kill three stupid jerks.

STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS: Going down with the Enterprise.

STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS: The height of my devotional viewing. Last year, this would have been PROMETHEUS, another bombastic Ridley Scott spectacular that tried to refashion a decent horror movie (ALIEN) and a better-than-decent action movie (ALIENS) into a mythical event. J.J. Abrams likes to play around with time and space (see LOST and FRINGE, ad nauseum), and he and his self-important co-writers (at least one of them also responsible for PROMETHEUS) have a deep love for the STAR TREK characters. But they have no love for the philosophy of STAR TREK, or the gee-whiz spirit of the project. The beauty of STAR TREK (the original series, at least, which Abrams and Co. are ostensibly riffing on) is that it celebrated the rewards that come through thinking through a problem. It had a bizarrely colonialist/anti-colonial stance which, more bizarrely, worked. Abrams has made two STAR TREK reboot films so far (the first one, far, far better, but not great), that throw characters we already know and love into the action ringer. This was the reason that the NEXT GENERATION films faltered, and it’s the reason that Abrams’ films become boring by the 30-minute mark. On a positive note, Abrams will be directing the new STAR WARS films, which could never be as horrendous as George Lucas' prequel trilogy (which took apart many a fanboy childhood, brick by brick). Perhaps they’ll get Zack Snyder to direct STAR TREK: BEAT THE SHIT OUT OF THIS WITH CGI in Abrams’ wake.

Mana Ashida, one reason to watch PACIFIC RIM

PACIFIC RIM: I went to this one out of devotion to Guillermo del Toro, who got caught up in two blockbuster machines (THE HOBBIT, and his own personal dream-project, AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS), only to be sucked into a third. That would be PACIFIC RIM, which has possibly the worst script and acting of any of del Toro’s films. The presence of del Toro vets like Ron Perlman, whose character survives the film (if you stay to watch the credits), only serve to remind us that this is not HELLBOY (or even HELLBOY 2, for that matter). Two highlights here are the performances by Rinko Kikuchi as the female robo-pilot, Mako Mori, which the film’s narrative struggles to foreground (because there are macho men around), and the wonderful Mana Ashida, who plays the young Mako. Del Toro weirdness abounds, thankfully, but it cannot save this disasterpiece of TRANSFORMERS mashed up with monsters you’re never allowed to get a really good look at. Del Toro is a monster movie maker, for sure. But his presence is overwhelmed by the blockbuster machinery at work here. At least monster masters Ray Harryhausen and Ishiro Honda (Gojira), to whom del Toro’s film is dedicated, were proud enough of their monsters to give us a good look at them.

I’m not sure I can do this to myself anymore. Even going in with low expectations yields little payoff in the Hollywood of 3-D conversions and editing-so-fast-and-framing-so-close-you-missed-it. Don’t get me wrong, I love the idea of a big-budget spectacle, but the powers-that-be need to think a bit more beyond the log-line.

Maybe I’m not quite ready to give up my blockbuster devotions. But I sure feel like I’m nearing the end of a long relationship.

Yours,

Oland

Click here for info on 2012-2013 Miskatonic Courses.

A More "Moral" Fake-Found-Footage Horror?: EVIL THINGS

  

  

Evil Things (Click for Trailer), a 2009 reality horror film by Dominic Perez, features an interesting twist on the fake-found-footage conceit of apparently aleatory footage as a "raw" document of (usually) traumatic events. Found-footage horror films, such as Cloverfield and Home Movie (both 2008), attempt to mimic the sense of immediacy of accidental or incidental footage; these films must appear to be untampered-with records of events, "unedited" and unrehearsed. In keeping with this found-footage illusion, Evil Things, like Cloverfield, begins with a title card identifying the film as evidence collected by the U.S. Department of Justice, found with a handwritten label identifying the film's title. [I suppose I should warn you not to read on if you're interested in experiencing the film's twists first-hand.]  However, Perez's film deviates from its status as found footage when, at about midway, the perspective shifts from victim to victimizer, and what originally appeared to be unedited found footage is identified as a manipulation.

Like The Blair Witch Project, Evil Things crosses the kind of anxiety around the constant presence of (and need for) a camera apparent in most reality horror films, with horror's more traditional dread of isolated, open, unfamiliar rural spaces. Five friends head out on a road trip to sequester themselves in an isolated house in the snowy Maine woods, one of the friends incessantly documenting their journey to the initial amusement, and later frustration, of the others. As they navigate treacherous icy mountain roads, the group is menaced by a stalker in a black van with opaque windows who appears out of the night in a series of scenes that are unnerving and effective in creating the general sense of paranoia and inevitable doom common to rural horror. The group seems to have lost their pursuer once they have reached the house. When the inevitable home invasion occurs, it comes initially in the form of a videotape delivered to the front porch of the house, showing the group that their highway stalker has continued to pursue them, recording them from both outside and inside the house, creeping into their rooms as they sleep. At this point, control over the footage/narrative splits between the group and their stalker; later, after the requisite series of unfortunate events, their stalker acquires the group's camera and takes over all documenting duties from the group. 

It is not long after this point that the entire film is identified as a manipulation by the victimizer--even showing him at a console, laptop at the ready, reviewing multiple screens of footage we have already seen (which I suppose explains, however implicitly, why this "found footage" features artful dissolves into static, slow fades to black, and occasional non-diegetic music to underscore some of the film's more tense moments). Not only do we learn in the film's latter half that the stalker is the primary perspective structuring the film's footage into a coherent whole, the film fairly explicitly suggests, over an extended end-credit sequence, a moral motivation on the part of the stalker (and, I presume, killer). This information comes in the form of footage inserted into the film from other shoots showing the stalker in Central Park singling out a film crew and choosing to include them in his sadistic-voyeuristic pursuits. Camera-bearing in Evil Things thus seems to bring on a threat of in-kind punishment and a sort of video retribution, where the protagonists go missing and become consumed by the visual record that contains them: here, within the video footage presumably left (or delivered?) by the film's malevolent video-stalker to be found by the authorities.

As James Keller has argued of the monstrous editorial presence in The Blair Witch Project, Evil Things is, in its own way, about "the progressive loss of control of the cinema process" in that it, like Blair Witch, fails to divulge its monsters, preferring to suggest it/them at work behind the camera (Keller 60). While Blair Witch is perhaps more ambivalent about its filmmaker-protagonists' faith in the recorded image, Evil Things explicitly links its obsessive filmmakers to that of horror's usually malevolent, monstrous force by framing the final events of its narrative as a moral comeuppance somehow deserved by the camera-bearing protagonists (and their friends). In Evil Things this sort of moral imperative is made fairly explicit also in the scene in which the protagonists view the video-stalker's footage of them in horror, footage in which their own invasive camera is featured prominently.

Evil Things results as a bit disappointing in that it does not follow through on its conceit of victim and victimizer struggling for control over the producing and constructing of the footage we see. To this effect, there is one effectively disconcerting scene in the film in which the spectator is not exactly sure just who has control of the camera as it searches through the silent, pitch-black house in night-vision mode. As in the Gothic's proliferation of points of view and often conflicting, increasing layers of text, this battle of enunciating presences in Evil Things has the potential to subvert the comfortable notion of any visual perspective (or medium) offering unfettered access to the real.

Yours,
Oland

Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies: Universal Horror, Class #1

The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies held its first class of the 2011-12 academic year last night. Instructor Charlie EllBé led the class through a lecture on the origins of Universal Studios' first cycle of horror films (1931-1939), with screenings of clips from F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu and the Spanish version of Dracula, shot on the same sets (at night) as the more iconic film starring Bela Lugosi and directed by Tod Browning. EllBé also elaborated on the inspiration and production practicalities for the set design of the Universal horror films, pointing out shared elements between Browning's Dracula and the sets of films such as The Man Who Laughs (1928, d. Paul Leni). A screening and discussion of Browning's beautiful, poetic and dreamily-paced film followed. Highlights of the lecture and discussion included insights into Bela Lugosi's star-making performance, as well as regarding the film's careful, impressionistic use of sound and silence, and its parallel visual play with fullness and lack, particularly in the film's framing of its iconic monster, Lugosi. I look forward to three more weeks of Universal Horror studies!

Creeping Camera: Introductory Sequence to DARKROOM (1981-2)

A classic (and horrifying) example of "creeping camera," Dennis Giles' term for unmotivated camera movement in horror films that creates a sense of monstrous presence without manifesting a monstrous object. The sense of absence or lack courts a scopophilic response in the spectator of horror, a simultaneous desire to see the monstrous and to be protected from full revelation of the monstrous. This series, hosted by actor James Coburn, aired from 1981 to 1982. I adored it as a kid. Sadly, it is not available on DVD in North America. 

Documentary Guide

Check out this new search resource for locating all sorts of documentary films, festivals and organizations.

http://www.documentaryguide.com/