The Bad Lieutenant Is Back, And This Time He’s Got Iguanas

When Werner Herzog’s remake/sequel of Abel Ferrera’s Bad Lieutenant was announced, it gave Internet cynics fodder for an endless stream of articles chuckling over how absurd the whole project was. Was this ridicule triggered by the potential folly of recreating a project as uncompromising as Ferrera’s original? Was it the standard cineaste’s resistance to recycling older movies, or the thought of recycling something made so recently? Or was it that Herzog had cast Nicolas Cage? Without a frame being shot it was already being heralded as a disaster, as if Herzog’s legendary take-no-prisoners attitude had suddenly metamorphosed into some kind of dementia. When the trailer arrived the derisory laughter increased. Cage’s reputation as the bad movie actor du jour has become so entrenched in popular thinking that the obviously intentional humour of the trailer was treated as evidence that Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans was another Wicker-Man-style disaster waiting to happen. The reality is that Herzog’s crime drama will more than likely disappoint those who were hoping for a failure, but thrill everyone else.

Cage portrays Terrence McDonagh, a police detective who inherits the mantle of Bad Lieutenant after injuring himself during a post-Katrina rescue. After this quick origin story we see McDonagh in the grip of an addiction to painkillers and coke, deep in debt and stealing drugs from criminals. The only thing that separates him from the perps he chases is his dedication to the job, especially his determination to bring to justice the drug kingpin Big Fate (Alvin “Xzibit” Joiner) who he suspects is responsible for the murder of an immigrant family. So far, so Keitel. McDonagh, however, is lucky enough to have a girlfriend (Frankie, played by Cage’s Ghost Rider co-star Eva Mendes) who just so happens to be a prostitute on a downward spiral of her own. Though neither of them are particularly admirable people, they seem to care for each other. As they become more absorbed into a depraved world, this connection seems to be the one thing that might save them.

The similarity to Ferrera’s original is obvious, but whereas that movie was harrowing and dark, Herzog brings an unexpected sense of possibility and even joy to this tale. Avoiding the tortured and oppressive air of Catholic guilt that made the original so distinctive, Herzog gives McDonagh a chance at redemption that doesn’t revolve around appeasing an indifferent God, and thus generates a sense of unexpected uplift. Additionally, while Ferrera set his movie in a decaying New York, Herzog takes metaphorical advantage of New Orleans’ recent history and the attempts of the citizens to rebuild their city, efforts that echo McDonagh’s own. Even at its darkest Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans is filmed in almost constant brightness, and it helps that Herzog has filled the supporting cast with amusing eccentrics played by terrific character actors like Vondie Curtis Hall, Jennifer Coolidge, Fairuza Balk, Michael Shannon, and Brad Dourif. Also included is a subdued and underused Val Kilmer as a cop lacking even McDonagh’s vanishing moral core.

All act as amusing foils for Cage, but special mention must be made of Shea Whigham as abusive mob goon Justin who appears midway through the film to abuse Frankie. His dopey attitude and woozily delivered threats are sure-fire crowd-pleasers. Perhaps that’s the most surprising thing about Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. Even though the trailer featured a number of amusing moments, the refreshingly breezy tone of the movie is a surprise, even though it features murder, sexual abuse, drug-taking, and old-lady-menacing. While Ferrera was determined to send the viewer to hell with Keitel, Herzog takes a cue from William Finkelstein’s script and makes a movie that does all it can to send the audience home with a smile on its face. The lackadaisical approach does come at the cost of narrative momentum: several scenes in the movie meander without purpose, which is something you wouldn’t expect from a seasoned TV writer who has worked on L.A. Law, NYPD Blue and Murder One, though the demented elements of the movie seem to tally with his work on lost TV classic Cop Rock:

It’s possible Finkelstein was partly responsible for the unconventional plotting, but even so, Herzog has little interest in the usual rhythms of crime dramas, happily chasing diversions or playing genre conventions for absurd laughs. He’s smart enough to keep an eye on the needs of the plot — especially the question of how out of control McDonagh actually is, which leads to some satisfying surprises in the final act — and to make sure we see the depressed human behind the outrageous bad behaviour of our protagonist, but he also has a need to drop in random instances of The Weird, often involving animals. A crocodile gets a memorable cameo, but it’s the iguanas that will stay with you when you leave the cinema. Nothing can prepare you for the already legendary Iguana-Cam. Herzog will be pleased to know that this scene brought the house down at the London Film Festival screening we attended. It is a completely deranged moment, a perfectly timed comedic aside, and impossible to forget. (If you wish to experience this scene in its proper context, avoid this clip until you’ve seen the movie.)

Herzog’s unpredictable take on the genre would not work without a strong performance at the core of it, and he is lucky to have Cage on his side. Herzog has found an actor of almost Kinski-esque intensity to guide his movie, someone who understands exactly what he wants and can collaborate as an equal, if this interview is to be believed. It often feels as if each of these imaginative artists has goaded the other on to greater weirdness. Nevertheless, even when the movie threatens to disappear into a cloud of peculiarity, their intelligence brings us back from the brink. Even the most formally or narratively daring moments in the film feel right, as if the movie couldn’t have been made any other way; eccentricity without the desperate quirkiness of a lesser filmmaker like, say, Richard Kelly. Without Herzog the movie would probably have stayed on a familiar genre path, and without Cage Herzog would have been forced to work with someone lacking in the ability to fuse madness with sincerity. Their collaboration is truly fortuitous.

Much has been made of Cage’s manic scenes, which range in tone from darkly funny to troubling, and sometimes both simultaneously. (Again, skip this if you wish to remain unspoiled.)

Less has been said about the humanity of Cage’s performance. While never having a scene as memorable and cathartic as Keitel’s astonishing breakdown in church from the original movie, Cage litters the movie with panicky moments where we get a glimpse of a man who knows he has gone astray. While Harvey Keitel’s lieutenant seems barely aware of his soul’s need for salvation until he collapses in church, McDonagh seems to know things have gone wrong and tries to correct this. Fans of Ferrera’s movie might complain that the remake loses focus by showing a man consciously scrambling to get back to a state of virtue, but what would Herzog gain from replicating Keitel’s downward trajectory? McDonagh’s desire for absolution generates a tension between his goals and his actions that powers what would otherwise be a fragmented and unsatisfying movie.

Cage brilliantly portrays McDonagh’s regression into a state of adolescent impulsiveness. His colleagues and acquaintances seem baffled or annoyed by his delinquent behaviour — both his unintentional outbursts and the rare moments when he harnesses his weird energy to do good –and only Frankie seems to want to help him. Casting Eva Mendes — a naturally charming actress capable of more than she is usually given to do — is another of Herzog’s masterstrokes. Her chemistry with Cage was one of the few truly great things to come out of Mark Steven Johnson’s terrible Ghost Rider.

This is easily the most layered and entertaining work Cage has done since Adaptation — not to mention his most likeable performance — and is enough to trigger hope of a new great Age of Cage. Even some of his more eccentric choices — such as suddenly imitating Ed Sullivan for about twenty minutes and then stopping with no explanation — make a weird kind of sense by the end of the film. His work here runs the risk of being little more than a series of gimmicky outbursts, but it often transcends mere flash to become something more profound, both comedic and tragic. McDonagh has become possessed by something alien and primal — something so destructive it’s almost a form of demonic possession — and it is thrilling to see him battle against it to reclaim his soul. The final, unexpected image will warm even the hardest heart.

But hey, if that’s not enough to convince you to see the movie, just go for the iguanas. You’ll thank me.

Announcing The Return of the Full-On Cage Experience

Recently I defended Michael Bay (while simultaneously expressing how odious his movies can be), and now I rush to the defense of another man used as a lazy punchline to a billion deeply unfunny jokes about bad cinema: the acting colossus called Nicolas Cage. As with Bay, Cage is treated like a cautionary tale about how that vile, Chthonic monolith called Hollywood can drive people insane with greed, how talented individuals can lose their way and begin a descent from making art to making dross. He is accused of sleepwalking through films, cashing checks, appearing in unworthy crowd-pleasing dreck, and working with anti-cinematic infidels. His personal life is raked over (he keeps impulsively marrying women! He calls his kid a silly name! He buys too much crap!), his eccentricities treated as signs of mental illness, and his success used as example number two in the case against modern culture (example one being the success of Bay). Only Ben Affleck is treated with less respect, a fact that I intend to address in a future post where I defend him too. (I’m serious about that. Affleck is awesome.)

There are millions who seem to love to take a short-cut in thinking and just refer to Cage as a has-been with no understanding of what a joke he has become, though Cage’s most famous critic has been Sean Penn, the former friend who once told the New York Times, “Nic Cage is no longer an actor. He could be again, but now he’s more like a…performer”. This was said around the time that Cage appeared in two Bruckheimer productions — The Rock and Con Air — which seems to be the one thing an artist can do that will sink his credibility. Why did Penn single out Cage for that and not Cage’s co-stars Ed Harris, or Sean Connery, or John Cusack, or John Malkovich? They’re respected actors who have won awards and are considered to be fine actors, but Cage falls into the line of fire for moving from carefully considered character pieces like Leaving Las Vegas to action movies, three of which he did in a row (the third being the classic John Woo SF actioner Face/Off). His wildly broad performances in those movies were almost certainly a factor, but then he has always given broad performances, within which lie subtle moments (see also Wild At Heart, Birdy, Peggy Sue Got Married, etc.). They’re entertaining displays of eye-rolling crowd-pleasing acting pyrotechnics, but there’s a soul there too. This is what I think of as getting The Full-On Cage Experience, with madness and soulfulness tied together. Penn could never pull off anything like that. When he mugs, he ends up wrecking the movie.

By all that’s holy and unholy, how much better was Penn in Milk, or Dead Man Walking (incidentally, that’s one of my favourite screen performances of all time)? It’s not even a fair competition. Besides, this accusation, insinuating that Cage is no longer an actor, is rich coming from someone who appeared in I Am Sam. I’ll take an entertaining and unpretentious actor having fun playing a demonic avenger with a flaming skull than some humourless chide wasting his talent on Oscar-baiting bullshit like that any day of the week. Sadly, Penn’s not the only one who thinks Cage has pissed his talent away. In this little essay, Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman compares Cage to Dr. Wesley T. Snipes, which is prescient considering Cage’s current tax woes, but while Snipes has descended into Direct-To-DVD hell, Cage is still working on big-budget movies and smaller curios, still attracting the viewing public, and still cranking out performances that are — at best — thrilling, and — at worst — merely entertaining.

The one argument that genuinely annoys me is the one where Cage is cranking out piss-poor, lazy performances since his last truly astonishing performance in Jonze and Kaufman’s Adaptation. I’ve often said that I think his work in that (along with his work in Leaving Las Vegas and Raising Arizona) deserves a coveted Shades of Caruso Free Pass…

…but of all the movies he has made since, only three performances really disappointed me: his work as Benjamin Gates in the first National Treasure movie, where he seemed awfully tired; his creepy performance in Next, the empty action thriller adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s clever short story; and his catatonic turn as a greasy-haired loser assassin in the disastrous remake of Bangkok Dangerous, which I suspect he took so he could get a holiday in Thailand. That last one really did give me cause for concern, but Gleiberman likes to make out that Cage is regularly signing on for “grade-Z genre schlockers”, which apparently include Ghost Rider and The Wicker Man. Neither of them are good movies, but they were not developed as low-budget cash-ins. Ghost Rider was obviously meant to be a big comic book adaptation, with a pretty good cast and a $110m budget, and even if it was absolutely dire, it was made with love by fans of the character, of which Cage is one.

The Wicker Man is a dumb-ass movie by any standards, but it’s made by Neil LaBute, who was once a promising director. He could have turned in a thoughtless remake of the excellent original (which would fit under Gleiberman’s umbrella of “genre schlocker”) but instead made something personal, for better or worse. For all it’s faults it’s obviously of a part with his other movies, dealing with his favourite themes of misanthropy, deceit, misogyny, fear of opening up to others, and gynophobia. I’ve occasionally argued that The Wicker Man is a satire on male fear of impotence and castration, a paranoid comical fantasy about a scheming cabal of exaggerated feminist ballbreakers who are out to destroy the penis, turning all men into drones and semen-donors whose sexuality is merely a sacrifice of power to the almighty womb in order to replenish the earth with children.

Sadly, even if this was LaBute’s intention — and even if Cage was in on this project for that reason alone — it’s still ridiculous and poorly made and filled with wonderfully camp moments. Cage maintains that the comedic aspects of the movie were not lost on him. In an interview with Spike Jonze, Drew McWeeny discusses meeting Cage, and Jonze is full of praise:

Jonze: I love [Cage]. We had the best time working together. He really works and focuses.
McWeeny: His publicist was a little wary of me being there, I guess, because he doesn’t do a lot of press and he doesn’t allow press around a lot, but he really was very accessible once I’d been there for a few days, and he kind of warmed up to me. And he was really just fascinating. I loved chatting with him about stuff.
Jonze: Totally chill.
McWeeny: Yeah. And I think far more self-aware than most people think. Like I think some people think Nic is in this vacuum and doesn’t realize how crazy some of his performances are. I got the feeling he was totally aware of how people perceive things. We were talking about THE WICKER MAN, and he was like, “How do people call that an unintentional comedy? I’m in a bear suit kicking Lelee Sobieski in the throat. I know it’s funny.”
Jonze: He just takes it so seriously that nobody knows how to take him. Like PEGGY SUE GOT MARRIED, I was like, “What is that?” Like I was 15 so I didn’t really know.
McWeeny: I just love how you can always count on him to push things further, like VAMPIRE’S KISS. He ate a roach, man.
Jonze: And also just the insanity of that performance, just the balls-out fearlessness.

Is it enough that Cage is aware of the ridiculousness of the movies he is appearing in? For me it is. I strongly suspect Cage is the most easily bored person in the world, and unfortunately that is paired with the ability to get work in movies that pay millions of dollars for him to spend on cars and comics and castles. Some of the films he has been in lately are truly awful, and I would never argue that they weren’t. Neverthless, I watch them for those flashes of manic commitment from Cage — The Partial Cage Experience — that delight me so. Are they valid acting choices, or is he merely trying to entertain himself while he trudges through formulaic populist bilge? As far as I’m concerned, even if he’s merely trying to entertain himself, he succeeding in entertaining me, and surely that’s what counts.

The only other popular actors that delight me as much are Clooney (who can do pathos and comedy equally well), Streep (who is always the best thing about everything she has ever been in), and maybe Jeff Bridges. Even those fine actors have not given me as much pleasure as Cage does, even when you forget about his early, golden years and concentrate on this bizarre stretch of poor movies. Since Adaptation we’ve had the insanity of Not The Bees…

…a literally hysterical fiery transformation…

…a Shout-Off with Rose Byrne (who is utterly overmatched, despite her invention of the word “chuldren”)…

…a run in with an obnoxious know-it-all child (the best part of which is how he treats the kid like an adult for most of the scene)…

…and a frustrating teaser of what could be his finest hour, if ever Rob Zombie got the money to make it…

His willingness to make fun of himself is the thing that keeps his crazy public and professional persona viable, and though many of his actions seem completely deranged, I honestly believe he’s playing a trick on us. Can someone who makes a series of adverts like these really be unintentionally weird?

(N.B. Anyone who has a sense of humour about themselves gets a break from me. Even the reportedly tyrannical and insensitive director Michael Bay gets points for playing up to his image with this commercial for Verizon:)

I’m a fully paid up Cage fan. For entertainment value, he can’t be beat. To see a person with such intelligence, quirkiness, restlessness, fearlessness, and energy do his thing in such big-screen movies is a rare thrill. If I squint I can see why Cage is now considered a hack by critics and film-watchers, because it’s easy to confuse being in a terrible movie and actually being terrible, but I worry that maybe people are also turned off by his intensity and his allegiance to the weird. The odd soporific performance aside, perhaps what baffles people the most is seeing him devote so much energy to projects that they feel don’t deserve it. Personally, I think that’s admirable. He’s getting paid enough, after all. Dance, you fucking monkey! Dance for your millions!

And yet even though I revel in his passionate and unpredictable work in crud, I’ve become concerned that we would never get another performance out of Cage that is as electrifying as his best work (disclaimer: I’ve not seen Lord of War or The Weather Man, and some have said he gives solid, rounded performances in both). Once upon a time he would work with Lynch and Scorsese, and the performances he gave were over-the-top yet grounded in some kind of emotional profundity, but lately those performances — while entertaining, memorable, and stronger than popular wisdom would have you believe — are lacking that extra fire. Well, I’m happy to report the return of The Full-On Cage Experience, as he takes on the task of being the 21st Century Klaus Kinski. More on that tomorrow, when I review Werner Herzog’s excellent Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans.

Sink The Boat That Rocked!

It’s not clear whether someone asked him or not, but Richard Curtis seems to think that he is now responsible for presenting a vision of Britain that glows with progressive energy and infectious optimism. Not for him the kitchen-sink realism of Ken Loach or Andrea Arnold, or the hard-knock macho silliness of Nick Lowe. He’s more interested in treating the stuffy image of Britain as a curtain that can be pulled back to show a country that will be compelled to dance if someone plays the right song. Thanks are due for making British history as funny as he (and co-writer Ben Elton) did with Blackadder, but his dominance over British film and TV becomes hard to swallow as we are submerged under a tide of worthy feel-good pablum such as The Vicar of Dibley, The Girl in the Cafe, the TV adaptation of Alexander McCall Smith’s cutesy The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, etc. As with overworked screenwriter Andrew Davies, Curtis gets everywhere, and for those of us who would like British culture to contain more than slightly raunchy adaptations of classic novels or movies that make committee-driven American product feel like the works of Jean-Luc Godard, the ubiquity of these two men begins to feel a little oppressive.

The Boat That Rocked is Curtis’ most recent attempt at mythologising the British Experience, taking the fascinating story of Radio Caroline and reducing it to a bog-standard rebels vs. Empire tale riddled with dick jokes, unappealing caricatures, and a depressingly retrograde attitude to women. Actually, “jokes” is the wrong word to describe the zaniness that pervades the movie. There is never anything as concrete as a joke delivered. Instead there is a nebulous air of “humour”, an ambience that feels funny without ever doing anything amusing. It is to comedy as froth is to food. Unfortunately that froth is thinly spread over two hours of footage.

Giving a synopsis of the movie is simultaneously difficult and very easy. Difficult because a lot of small things happen that mean nothing in terms of plot, but easy as the central thread of the movie — youth vs. old age — is presented with Manichean simplicity. As with Radio Caroline, the movie’s fictional counterpart — the imaginatively named Radio Rock — broadcasts pop music from a boat moored somewhere in the North Sea to a large audience of young listeners. Unlike Radio Caroline, Curtis creates a scenario where the British government — and by association the BBC — have restricted the amount of popular music played on licensed national radio, and Radio Rock serves as a corrective to this by pumping out a non-stop barrage of The Who, The Small Faces, The Kinks, and the odd Motown/Stax classic for variety. Of course, the BBC played more popular music — and Radio Caroline less subversive music – than Curtis will admit. He operates in broad strokes, and fact will merely reduce the impact of his blunt message.

While the boat is populated with a menagerie of ill-defined “characters” (in both senses of the word) having the time of their lives, the establishment is painted as a group of out-of-touch, sour-faced nags, as grey as Steve Bell’s caricatures of John Major. It is painful to see Kenneth Branagh trying — and failing — to breathe life into the character of Sir Alastair Dormandy. Given no inner life to work with, Dormandy states quite clearly that he is trying to destroy pirate radio as he thinks it’s horrible and hates the thought of the public enjoying themselves. His unsubtle grouching is mostly aimed his equally hateful second-in-command, played by Jack Davenport. Much has been made of the name of this character — Twatt — though less note has been made of the decision to change the name of personal assistant Miss C from the original name of Miss Clit. Curtis must be more interested in displaying Twatt than acknowledging the existence of Clit, I guess.

That might explain why The Boat That Rocked is set in a retrograde world where women are sexually liberated enough that they don’t seem to mind being swapped around from one Radio Rock DJ to another as if they were soulless commodities. One excruciating scene shows DJ Dave (Nick Frost) attempting to deceive groupie Desiree (Gemma Arterton) into sleeping with virginal wallflower Carl (Tom Sturridge, looking like a rabbit caught in the headlights), the inference being that Desiree will be just fine with this because it’s all fair game and not actually non-consensual sex. Even Radio Rock proprietor Quentin (Bill Nighy) endorses this deflowering project, bringing his niece Marianne (Talulah Riley) onboard as a figurative virginal sacrifice to Carl, who is then seduced by Dave behind his back despite his earlier efforts to help the young man.

It’s the last thing you would expect from Curtis, and one suspects he is trying to pay homage to Carry On-style British sauciness, but his attempts to make this seem charming and empowering fail because the only contrast to this selfish behaviour is the colourless world populated by fun-hating automatons like Branagh and Davenport. It’s either grey cardigans or thoughtless sexual voraciousness, and you don’t want to be on the side of the squares, do you? It doesn’t matter if you treat your fellow man / woman with contempt, as long as you’re having a good time doing it. Besides, Curtis is otherwise politically correct enough to add an almost mute black kid (Ike Hamilton) and a lesbian (Katherine Parkinson) to the crew, because yay diversity! Calling the tone of the movie schizophrenic is putting it mildly.

It doesn’t help that Curtis’ cast of characters are unforgivably awful, and his impressive cast wasted. Philip Seymour Hoffman and Rhys Ifans play egotistical buffoons who care more about upstaging each other than about the feelings of their colleagues, shunning feeble Omega-males Chris O’Dowd, Rhys Darby and Tom Brooke (playing Baldrick-surrogate Thick Kevin) as if tainted. Even Nick Frost’s innate likeability is not enough to make his character endearing, which says much for Curtis’ misunderstanding of tone. If only someone had taken Curtis to one side to explain a truth established a long time ago: there is nothing more tawdry and depressing than hearing an Englishman talk about sex. Memories of Robin Askwith peering through bedroom windows at horrified housewives in their underwear flash through the mind. If Curtis is trying to evoke memories of British sex comedies from the Sixties and Seventies, the pertinent question is: why in the world would anyone in their right mind want to do that?

If we’re meant to be attracted to this group of misogynistic grotesques, the reasons are lost in the edit, which could account for the majority of the movie’s flaws. Tales are told of an original three-hour edit, pared down to 135 minutes in the UK and 90 minutes in the US (where the title has been changed to Pirate Radio). The UK release seems so unfocused that it feels like Curtis lost track of all of the footage in the editing room and accidentally deleted the wrong scenes, leaving us with lots of pointless dancing and a disparate collection of second acts that have no context. As such it is hard to criticise the movie for its sexual politics or unappealing characters because we cannot know if these failings would have been resolved had the editing been tighter. Much as I don’t want to attribute gross negligence to a man who has been telling stories with some success (financial and artistic) for a long time, it’s apparent that The Boat That Rocked is not a finished product. Was Curtis bored with this project by the time of release? Did the shooting schedule run over due to all of the larks, leaving less time for post-production?

This stew of unresolved threads cannot be called a movie. It’s a themed sketch show, intentionally leaving the odd memorable moment adrift in a content-free tone soup of tone. Daisyhellcakes (whose affection for Curtis’ work was severely dented by this movie) observed that its poor-plotting and forced air of jollity were reminiscent of Mamma Mia, and she’s onto something, and not just because criticism of the subject matter comes with the risk of being labelled a humourless prude. Other than a subplot about Carl finding his father (played by Ralph Brown as a stoner, for a change), Curtis cannot bring any subplot to a satisfying conclusion and so resorts to Mamma Mia director Phyllida Lloyd’s trick of battering the audience with relentless upbeat exhibitionism. There are a seemingly infinite number of montages showing people dancing around their radios, cross-cut with shots of DJs yelling tedious insults about penis size at each other over the assorted Sounds of the  Sixties. If you thought Good Morning, Vietnam would have been a better movie without Robin Williams or the clumsy rhetoric about the horrors of war, you were wrong.

Perhaps Curtis has watched too many clip shows on Channel 4, and thinks that as long as he adds a couple of  scenes that resonate enough to get a mention in one of those time-wasting monstrosities then his job is done. The only moment that generates an emotional response is when Chris O’Dowd’s virginal DJ Simple Simon Swofford is jilted by his new bride (January Jones, not setting the world of comedy on fire with her two scenes). As she leaves him after seventeen hours of marriage to be with Rhys Ifans’ lothario Gavin, a heartbroken O’Dowd plays Lorraine Ellison’s gut-wrenchingly beautiful Stay With Me and mimes along, face contorted in pain.

Sadly, any hope that this scene will add an extra dimension by reflecting on the emotional fallout that can come with free love and — more importantly — what these characters actually think other than “Fab grooviness!”  is futile. O’Dowd seemingly forgives Ifans a few minutes later, and by the end of the movie he has found a new love interest whose boobs drive him into paroxysms of screeching joy. The calculation of Curtis is even more apparent when — during a credit sequence that features much of the leftover footage of the cast members dancing badly — Ellison’s breathtaking version of Stay With Me is replaced by a soulless cover version by Welsh squeak-merchant Duffy. Cross-media synergy pours from the screen, with Duffy’s impression of a jilted mouse providing the soundtrack.

Making this nostalgic movie in the Internet age — where we have a hither-to unheard-of opportunity to express ourselves or find like-minded individuals — there is potential here for an exploration of what it was like to live in an era when broadcasting thoughts and music from the fringe was a privilege of a select few willing to oppose the restrictive establishment. The Boat That Rocked is not interested in that, and shouldn’t be criticised for telling a different story. Nevertheless, what we get instead of an exploration of… well, anything, is a melange of disconnected anecdotes and an ill-defined shout of rage at officious nay-sayers who think they have the right to monitor and protect our morals. It’s impossible to tell if Curtis has anything substantial to say within the chaos of this edit, though it must be noted that his rush to paint the British government as the enemies of anything progressive means he has to attribute the formation of the pirate-radio-killing Marine Offences Act to a joyless villain with no soul. In real life the act was put into law by the Postmaster General, who at the time was Tony Benn, one of the most fearless and progressive politicians the UK has ever seen. Even though Curtis has made it clear that his movie is a fantasy, it’s still inspired by reality, and this misrepresentation of what Benn stands for leaves a sour taste in the mouth.

The Boat That Rocked is worth avoiding for many reasons: the relentless wave of forced glee, the depressing stream of witless dick jokes, the contrived Field-Of-Dreams-esque uplift of the final scene. However, beneath the whirl of colour and cheekiness  of his fantasy world is a mass of contrivance that betrays the far more interesting and complex tale of the battle between Radio Caroline and Tony Benn. Any serious message that could be derived from the very real conflict between the government and the motormouth DJs of 60s pirate radio has been drowned out by the endless Funn! ™, leaving us with a Cool Brittania promo vid that would have seemed hoary last decade. It’s a vapid exercise in nostalgia porn that wallows in the murkiest waters of seaside-postcard-esque British culture and reveals Curtis’ carefully sculpted reputation as a writer of sophisticated comedy is an empty PR fantasy. Other than the similarly regressive Lesbian Vampire Killers — a contender for worst movie of the decade — The Boat That Rocked is the most dispiriting British film released in 2009. Do yourself a favour and find a copy of Allan Moyle’s Pump Up The Volume instead. It features 100% less Rhys Ifans and has Leonard Cohen and Sonic Youth on the soundtrack. It’s good enough to make me moodily dance around my radio.

Stringer Bell and Sasha Fierce in: Futile Attraction

In the 80s and 90s Michael Douglas was the go-to guy to play men harassed, used, abused and manipulated by women, as seen in the White-Men-Under-Attack trilogy of Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct and Disclosure. After his screen avatar’s bad luck was purged by David Fincher in The Game his screen appearances have become sporadic. The next generation demands a new macho hero who can be hunted by the kinds of obsessive, dangerous women that only exist in movies. In Obsessed, the man attempting — and failing — to fill Douglas’ shoes is Idris Elba, who plays executive Derek Charles with a relentless and tiring intensity the movie doesn’t warrant. Happily married to his former assistant Sharon (Beyoncé Knowles), Charles is stalked at work by a temp assistant, Lisa (Ali Larter). At first she merely seems infatuated with Elba, but after he rebuffs a couple of aggressive approaches she becomes crazed, interpreting his rebuffs as evidence of his love for her, prompting her to insinuate herself into his life a la Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction and Jessica Walters in Play Misty For Me.

Those movies showed the male protagonist’s culpability, with the message being “Mess around, and you will suffer for it.” Here writer David Loughery and director Steve Shill seem to be saying “Guys, there are some crazy women out there, and they’ll fuck up your life for no reason.” This doesn’t even pass muster as a morality play. It’s just another movie stating that there is no such thing as the Other any more. No matter how well you live your life, people are going to hunt you down, drug you with Rohypnol, rub up against you while you are in a fugue state, and listlessly kidnap your child, though “relocate” seems to be a more accurate description for what she does, as the nefarious Lisa merely moves Derek and Sharon’s son from his crib to their car.

The worst that happens to Derek is that he is accused of having an affair. The evidence for this is entirely provided by Lisa, and yet despite the flimsy nature of it (for example, listing him as an emergency contact number, or writing about the imaginary affair in a diary), at least two women automatically believe he is in the wrong. In one of the stupider scenes of the year, a police detective (Christine Lahti) investigating a suicide attempt by Lisa interrogates Derek in the crowded waiting room of a hospital with Sharon sitting next to him. As the scene descends into incomprehensible histrionic chaos, we see Elba desperately trying to prove his innocence while both women irrationally dismiss his pleas. The movie seems to be saying that it just doesn’t pay to be honourable, because women will always distrust their man.

It’s tempting to think Obsessed is intentionally trying to trade in the most witless and offensive gender stereotypes possible, as some kind of poorly signposted satire on gender politics. The male characters (including Jerry O’Connell and Bruce McGill) are either flamboyant homosexuals mincing around the office or leering sexist pigs whose idea of small talk is to discuss how sexy women love to extort money from them with their feminine wiles. Still, at least gender politics are addressed, albeit ineptly. The potentially inflammatory racial implications of having the only black characters in the film threatened by a predatory and insane white woman are ignored altogether. Apparently, this was to avoid repeating the themes of Loughery’s previous movie Lakeview Terrace, which featured a racist black cop menacing a white family.

It quickly becomes clear the filmmakers are only interested in cranking out the least provocative thriller possible. With a blameless hero victimised by a villain who has no recognisable human qualities, even the dependable nightmare scenario of being framed and losing everything is diluted by the vast amount of contrivance needed to place our hero in jeopardy. We’re merely expected to wait — unmoved and unoffended by the mild PG-13 thrills — for the villain to get her comeuppance, which comes in a protracted and absurd finale, when Sharon returns home to find Lisa in bed. The poorly choreographed catfight that follows is violent but bloodless, and finally provides Knowles with something to do other than chide Elba. After mouthing some unconvincing threats and killing Larter, Knowles is comforted by her husband, and the last shot is of her, not the man who has been onscreen for most of the film. I’m not the only person confused by this shift in focus. Did Knowles — who co-produced the movie with her father Mathew – sign on just so she could film a long fight scene? Why would that appeal to her? Did she hate the third season of Heroes even more than I did? This mystery is the only aspect of the movie that invites further reflection.

Obsessed is as dreary and toothless a thriller as you’re ever going to see. Unimaginatively plotted by Loughery — the man who wrote Star Trek V: The Final Frontier — the viewer waits for anything shocking or interesting to happen and gets little more than some one-note shouting from Elba and some lazy misogyny. All that’s left for the viewers to occupy themselves is mockery of the risible dialogue (“I’ll take up that slack. That is one smoking hot piece of ass!”) and direction. TV director Shill has worked on almost every notable show of the past ten years, including The Wire and Deadwood. However, he started out with EastEnders, Emmerdale, and The Bill, and it is these uncinematic melodramas that provide the closest link to his work here. Overlit, poorly blocked, and littered with even more establishing shots than in Tommy Wiseau’s notorious bad movie classic The Room, Shill fails to transform Loughery’s script into even a passable movie. Apparently the working title for Obsessed was Oh No She Didn’t. It’s a pity they went with the straight-to-DVD-esque title it now has. If they’d retained the original title, at least the laughs elicited by this dismal failure might have seemed intentional.

Here Comes The Sun (To Destroy The Earth With Mutated Neutrinos in 2012)

HERE BE SPOILERS! YE HAVE BEEN WARNED!

Last year Roland Emmerich took a break from making movies about demolishing civilisation so he could make a movie about the birth of civilisation. It seems Emmerich and co-writer Harald Kloser realised just how unbelievably boring it is to watch ancient Caucasian Rasta wannabes trek dozens of miles from icy tundra to scorching desert, and has returned to super-demolish civilisation as a weirdly nihilistic apology for the stultifying 10,000 BC. 2012 is possibly the last word in disaster movies, offering cataclysmic disaster porn on a scale even Emmerich has never been able to achieve before, and for that perverse dedication to kicking Earth in the ass as often as possible it’s tempting to respect the man. Just like Irwin Allen and Cecil B. DeMille before him, Emmerich thinks he knows what audiences want, and he’ll bend over backwards to give it to you.

This time the threat to Earth is not aliens or global warming but the sun, which magically becomes supercharged due to galactic alignment and begins firing mutated super-neutrinos at our planet, causing the core to heat up, thus melting the Earth’s crust and causing the tectonic plates that make up the surface to shift around like cards being shuffled on a table by a six year old. You have no idea how much fun it is to write that ridiculous unscientific sentence. Even better, a news report early in the movie refers to this as a Solar Climax, which means we’re going to be killed off by Mutated Neutrino Bukkake. For this moment, and for keeping the Mayan Calendar/New Age Nonsense to a pleasing minimum, 2012 will be kept off this year’s Shades of Caruso Worst Films List, despite the numerous flaws and annoyances that pop up through the rest of the film.

This imminent disaster is partially discovered by geologist Adrian Helmsley, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, who — after exclaiming “My God!” for the first of many times — convinces grubby politician Carl Anheuser (Oliver Platt) to begin plans to save humanity. These involve building Arks to house humans, animals (mostly giraffes, for some reason), and works of art, but as America doesn’t seem up to the job, they outsource the work to China. This is not a joke. It actually happens. To make matters worse, the Arks are actually located in Tibet, but Tibet is not mentioned once in the movie, even though there are a bunch of Tibetan characters included. Those shots in the trailers and posters of a Tibetan monk? He’s Chinese, okay? For god’s sake, don’t tell Richard Gere.

As Emmerich knows that his disaster epics require a cast of characters comprising normal folks alongside the frowning politicians and scientists, we are also introduced to Jackson Curtis (John Cusack), a failed SF writer and divorcee forced to drive a limo for a living. Through a series of insanely improbable coincidences that beggar belief, he finds out about the imminent destruction of the Earth after encounters with both Helmsley (who is his biggest fan) and Charlie Frost (Woody Harrelson), a high-larious pickle-eating conspiracy theorist broadcasting from Yellowstone.

Curtis goes from sceptic to believer just in time to evacuate his wife Kate (Amanda Peet, given nothing to do except fret about her kids), children Lilly and Noah (geddit!?!?), and wife’s new boyfriend Gordon, who all but wears an expiry date on his forehead. In a bravura effects sequence our protagonists drive through LA as an earthquake sends the entire city into the ocean, and Emmerich at first treats it like a fun park ride. As this scene is showing the deaths of millions of people this seems rather distasteful, but by the end of it we get to see faceless virtual people falling out of crumbling buildings, and tears are momentarily shed. This surface level grief for the billions soon to die features prominently through much of the film, though this promotional clip has excised almost every hint of the tragedy unfolding.

After this lucky escape via plane, complete with a race down a collapsing runway and some nifty flying past obstacles, our heroes go back to Yellowstone, which promptly explodes with what appears to be nuclear force, requiring another lucky escape via plane, complete with almost identical race down a collapsing runway and some nifty flying past obstacles. From there they progress to Las Vegas to hook up with a caricature from Russia (crooked billionaire Yuri Karpov, played with zero subtlety and maximum sterotyping by Zlatko Buric) and his two children, a bimbo trophy wife and a bodyguard/pilot. It’s not long before our expanded group of heroes get another lucky escape via plane, complete with yet another race down a collapsing runway and some nifty flying past obstacles. By this time we’re about an hour and thirty into the movie, and I figured the worst case scenario was another half an hour with two or three more races down collapsing runways. Well, I have good and bad news. After Las Vegas crumbles into an enormous chasm, there is only one more plane-based drama scene involving a glacier. The bad news is that the film is 160 minutes long, so there’s another 70 odd minutes of people looking at screens with ominous graphics and then exclaiming “My God!”

While all this is happening, we also get to meet the President (a shaky Danny Glover) and his daughter Laura (yet another weak performance from Thandie Newton), Helmsley’s dad Harry (Blu Mankuma) and his jazz partner Tony (a sadly underused George Segal), the occasional bunch of nameless bystanders who will act as catastrophe-fodder, and a group of Tibetans Chinese who just seem to be hanging around to be utilised in the final (fifth) act. This portion of the movie prominently features the other big theme of the movie: characters giving other characters permission to leave them to die so we can keep the plot moving without getting too worried about the majority of the human race dying in terror and agony.

Noble President Danny Glover decides to stay behind for no apparent reason, as does the Italian president. Unusually for a mainstream movie, both men make a point of praying for salvation, and then die. At least one other character makes a sign of the cross and then dies two seconds later. This approach to the effect of belief in the face of disaster is far more entertaining than the rampant symbolism and mealy-mouthed anti-reason bullshit of Alex Proyas’ Knowing which, as one AV Club commenter said, showed “God” destroying the world just so he could convert one atheist into a believer. 2012 seems to have none of that, with man’s will and science prevailing in the face of cosmically delivered oblivion, which is a message Proyas’ sappy movie was not even slightly interested in conveying. In 2012 the only other characters who even broach the subject of faith are the Tibetans Chinese, but they survive. Hours after seeing the movie I’m still trying to parse what this means, other than that the movie likes to point out that these guys live on a mountain, are obviously not as advanced as the rest of us, are super-honourable and spiritual, and killing them would be very mean.

In the film’s final hour we see the epic scale of humanity’s plans for survival, with huge ships poking out of the side of a mountain, ready to cut through the rising oceans after the crust of the Earth breaks apart and sinks. For a movie with such an ambivalent relationship with religion, it lays on the Ark stuff pretty thick, though Emmerich is mostly concerned with dramatising poorly written debates about the morality of leaving people behind to die. Ponderous and cyclical debates litter the last two acts of the movie, even after the symbolic parting-permission granted by President Danny Glover. Helmsley is one of the chosen few, and his disgust at the sight of rich men and women, aristocrats, royalty, and the slimy upper classes who have bought their way onto the Arks boils over. He even gets to throw a goblet across the room as if he was Jesus the Geologist. I’m still getting over the fact that the guys who organised this project to save humanity thought goblets were the preferred drinking vessels of the last vestiges of humanity.

Already sickened by Anheuser’s ruthless extermination of anyone who threatened to blow the whistle on the Mutated Neutrino Bukkake, things get worse when — for the third or fourth time in the movie — Helmsley’s calculations are proved to be wrong and the submergence of Tibet China is closer than he thinks. With thousands of potential survivors about to be stranded due to time constraints, Helmsley rebels and makes a plea for the heads of state to open their gates and let the people on, using the writings of Jackson Curtis to teach our leaders to show their humanity by saving others. To the horror of super-meanie Platt, the leaders do this, and everyone else — including the nasty Russian businessman — gets to have a hero moment.

The amount of fake drama flying around by this point is quite staggering, what with the act of getting the survivors onboard taking a couple of minutes (making the previous excuses for their abandonment inexplicable), but there is more to come. Our original band of heroes — who have flown from Las Vegas to the mountain base with the help of a fortuitous tectonic shift — have made their way to the same ark containing our other main characters (a 33% chance of getting it right, I guess), and in their haste to sneak on board cause a hydraulic meltdown that kills Gordon (long overdue) and stops the big door at the back of the boat from closing. With a tidal wave minutes away, can John Cusack fix the hydraulics and save the day? After 15 very very hectic minutes featuring a runaway Airforce One, Mount Everest, and a hint of comedy giraffe poo, he does, miraculously surviving drowning and a grievous head wound thanks to what seems like the intervention of a squeamish focus group. Does this mean he will appear in the proposed TV series sequel with the survivors pitching up in Africa? Our survey says no.

It might sound like I hated the movie, but as with almost all of Emmerich’s movies, it has enough bombastic energy and commitment to spectacle to make the first viewing seem like an absolute blast. There is so much madness here, so much effort expended to keep topping itself with senses-battering set-pieces that the silliness is easily ignored. With your forebrain melted by the visual and aural onslaught, it’s easy to give up your critical faculties, and more than once I found myself anxiously wringing my hands as one character or another found themselves in grave danger. It’s only once the movie is over that you realise the exhausting  fifteen minute suspense sequence at the end revolves around closing a door. Kudos to Emmerich for generating so much tension out of such a small thing, but still, they’re just closing a door. Two people die doing it. It’s a bit of overkill.

However, if you’re trying to make the ultimate disaster movie — as I suspect Emmerich is trying to do — overkill is the name of the game. Bad news for actors who spend 65% of their screentime on some gimballed set screaming at exploding mountains off camera, but good news for anyone who takes pleasure from seeing extravagantly rendered visions of enormous peril. Believe me, this movie features some of the most impressively detailed and imaginative effects sequences of all time. It’s much easier to be swept away by Emmerich’s fantasies of global doom when they are so beautiful. Ghastly and kind of pornographic, yes, but overwhelming to look at. The LA earthquake scene above might be the most impressive sequence in the film (a shame that it comes so early), but the Yellowstone eruption comes close to topping it. Some of the visuals are truly the stuff of nightmares, and I doff my cap to Digital Domain, Sony Pictures Imageworks, Double Negative, Scanline, and Uncharted Territory for knocking it out of the park. If you’re going to see this, it’s best you see it on the biggest screen possible, just to drink in the complexity of those FX blowouts.

His debt to the rest of the disaster movie genre is obvious. Throughout 2012 we’re reminded of Dante’s Peak, Volcano, Earthquake, Meteor, When Worlds Collide, When Time Ran Out and The Poseidon Adventure. All we needed were a burning building and a swarm of killer bees drunk on mutated neutrinos and we’d have the full set. The similarities to his own movies are numerous too, from the cutesy old people (Segal and Mankuma in this, Judd Hirsch in Independence Day), to the nefarious politicians or soldiers  (Platt in this, James Rebhorn in Independence Day, Kevin Dunn in Godzilla, and Kenneth Welsh in The Day After Tomorrow), to the redneck eccentrics driving around in camper vans (Harrelson in this, Randy Quaid in Independence Day), to the dog that almost gets killed but is saved at the last minute in a display of simply astounding manipulative excess. The dog rescue in 2012 will very probably dwarf your memory of the dog rescue in Independence Day, it’s so contrived.

But then contrivance is the lifeblood of Emmerich’s films, with tight plotting replaced by clunkily convenient narrative steps needed to get characters from one hazardous and spectacular situation to another. Part of the fun to be had with 2012 is guessing how our heroes will get from America to the Ark base on the other side of the world, and then seeing Emmerich provide the easiest and silliest answers possible. Jackson just happens to know a Russian billionaire getting on an Ark, and just happens to meet a conspiracy theorist who knew some scientists who have been killed by the government, and Jackson just happened to know one of those scientists, and he just happens to meet Helmsley, who just happens to love his terrible SF novel, and Jackson just happens to have lost his wife to a plastic surgeon who can fly and who once operated on the trophy wife of the Russian billionaire who is getting on the Ark… No wonder Emmerich is not too concerned with the deaths of billions. He seems to think there’s only about twenty people on the planet.

That said, 2012 spends far more time pondering the unpleasant logistics of selecting survivors than I thought it would, considering how Emmerich usually skates over difficult emotions as quickly as he can. There’s an argument that Emmerich and Kloser were only adding this plot thread in because they love having self-serving bureaucrats as villains in their movies, and seeing a creep like Anheuser beaten by the non-more-inspirational Helmsley will make audiences cheer. Take that, pencil-pusher who doesn’t understand what it is to be human! Maybe I could swallow this because even when addressing the themes of extinction, this is a lighter movie than another movie about the end of the world: Mimi Leder’s Doomsday fantasy Deep Impact. That had similar subject matter, but used the conventions of the disaster movie genre to explore the emotional cost of surviving an impending cataclysm, with much less voyeuristic sadism on display.

That movie was written by death-obsessed Buddhist Bruce Joel Rubin (whom I have talked about before), and with its seemingly endless parade of tearful farewells and last minute reconciliations is one of cinema’s great downers. Emmerich is not about to let that happen, so while we get hints of reflection on the fate of billions, once the White House has been destroyed and the older fathers (Glover, Mankuma and Segal) have been killed, he pretty much acts as if there are only the survivors left to think about, and all further talk of saving humanity refers only to the Ark passengers. Easier to hit an upbeat tone at the end as “everyone” got saved. Does it make me a bad person that I preferred this shameless emotional whitewash to Deep Impact’s po-faced and pessimistic treatise on extinction and mortality?

Without that deeply reflective and enquiring approach — to his credit Emmerich asks the questions, but he doesn’t seem to want to hear the answers — we’re left with BOOM-gasm setpieces, shameless emotional exploitation and a cavalcade of trite dialogue. There’s no line too obvious or cliched for Emmerich, but even though it is perfectly right to rail against the lack of imagination shown by him and his collaborator Kloser, you have to give him props for yet again gathering a cast of entertaining character actors to give those weak words some life, or even selling clangingly obvious Emmerich conventions such as having a character say “There’s nothing to worry about,” and then having a building fall on them or their mode of transport malfunction horribly (this happens numerous times). Though the female characters have almost nothing to do, at least we get to see Cusack, Platt (operating at approximately 68% Platt-ocity), Harrelson (channeling Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now), and Glover doing their best to breathe life into this word-stodge. It even has a late appearance by Stephen McHattie as the captain of one of the Arks, which means the movie scores 10 bonus McHattie points.

Best of all is Chiwetel Ejiofor, who steals the movie in the first couple of scenes and then runs away at warp speed, leaving everyone else in the dust. He’s always been an impressive figure on screen, but here he makes you believe in very nearly everything that is going on. Only the final speech about humanity and honour and compassion and big fucking BLAH defeats him, but then it would defeat anyone. It’s a monolith of banal sentiment, but Ejiofor still gives it all he has. Though Cusack is ostensibly the lead in the film, it’s Ejiofor’s conviction and commitment to the project that will have the biggest impact on audiences. Maybe this will be the movie to make people sit up and notice his immense talent. If so, then all of this expensive and ghoulish guilty-pleasure death-pr0n will not have been made in vain.

some of the most impressively detailed and imaginative effects sequences of all time. It’s much easier to be swept away by Emmerich’s fantasies of global doom when they are so beautiful. Ghastly and kind of pornographic, yes, but so stunning to look at. The LA earthquake seen above might be the most impressive sequence in the film (a shame that it comes so early), but the Yellowstone eruption comes close to topping it. Some of the visuals are truly the stuff of nightmares, and I doff my cap to Digital Domain, Sony Pictures Imageworks, Double Negative, Scanline, and Uncharted Territory for knocking it out of the park. If you’re going to see this, it’s best you see it on the biggest screen possible, just to drink in the complexity of those FX blowouts.

End of Season Review: Mad Men

[Before I go any further, a strong word of warning. This post will discuss a LOT of things that happen in the third season of Mad Men. The whole post is one big, throbbing spoiler, so if you're not up to date with the show and wish to remain unspoiled, please go no further. I won't even put a spoiler picture from the season up this high, just in case an image is enough to wreck things. I'll put a generic one here instead. One from last season, with Joan and Sal, my favourite characters.

That's the stuff. Now, on with the spoiling!]

I could kick Matthew Weiner in the shin. Throughout the third season of Mad Men I have mocked online commentators for bitching about the pace, a complaint voiced so often that it began to seem like an official comment from God or Crom or something. It’s the same sort of received wisdom as “The Lost showrunners are making it up as they go along,” or “Dexter is just so deep and morally complex”. Raging in my seat like an affronted parent watching their child’s behaviour be picked apart by snarky assholes, I shrieked “Too slow? But in this episode Betty met up with a guy in a diner and then came home. And Don was mean to Sal! That shit is seismic!” After a debut season of crashing unsubtlety, the torrential flow of information about Mad Men’s characters became a dripping tap of clues, vague hints, and ambiguous behaviours. To any viewer who loves to patiently pan for gold (Lost fans have become experts at this), Mad Men’s third season was, for the most part, a gift.

And then Matthew Weiner comes along and gives us a final episode that — compared to the rest of the season — races forward, hurlings big events at us, all with the cool style of Lewis Milestone’s original Ocean’s Eleven, though with none of the smug tedium. Season three had seemed to be a delicately paced conundrum, but in fact was a set-up for a gargantuan upheaval played out like a rebirth for a group of characters who appeared to have hit an emotional and psychic dead-end. Coming from a showrunner who has, in the past, talked about how organic his writing is and how he doesn’t think in terms of season arcs, this fake-out was just as beautifully played as the sneaky tricks played in the formation of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce.

Who would have believed that a season of such depressing revelations and upsetting events would pave the way for the thrilling and utterly satisfying final episode? Most notably, this season had seen anti-hero Don Draper brought low by his own existential panic. The first episode of the season shows a relatively happy Don, excited about the birth of his new child, unusually attentive to his wife Betty, mostly uninterested in continuing his philandering, and considerate of Sal’s homosexuality (the “Limit Your Exposure” line being one of the highlights of the season). Yes, Don still ends up in bed with another woman (flight attendant — or should I say stewardess — Shelley), but her pursuit of a disinterested Don is relentless, and he almost seems to be trying to get away from her for much of the scene. As she is not an equal for him — like Rachel Menken or Midge Daniels — he orders her around, obviously bored by her playful attempts to excite him.

Compare that to episode 9 — Wee Small Hours — with Don’s regretting his decision to sign a contract that leaves him even more mired in the petty politics of his office. His frustration boils over as he angrily fires Sal for an act of self-preservation that jeopardises the firm…

…and then father-surrogate Connie Hilton rejects his big pitch (with the heartbreaking line, “What do you want from me? Love?”). His job, his lifestyle, and a truly meaningful and fulfilling relationship all in doubt, Don’s old habits rear up as he chases teacher Suzanne Farrell, aggressively and testily flirting with her until she surrenders to him. In a season where he seems to fall into both good and bad luck without expending much effort, this unusually desperate move stands out, but as his life revolves around keeping an exit strategy at hand, it’s understandable that this symbolic escape — which has helped him forget his troubles and feel free — would appeal to him so much.

Though his connection to Suzanne seems as honest as his previous dalliances with confident brunettes (who are obviously his type), Don’s panic is only temporarily held at bay. When Betty finally discovers his birth name and Don unburdens himself to her, the collapse of his marriage sends him into such a tailspin that he barely even registers the assassination of JFK. As everyone else responds with shock and sadness to this event, Don skulks around as if looking for someone to blame for revealing his secret. As he was the fool who kept mementos of his former life in a drawer in his office, perhaps he wanted to be found out. The cost to him is his marriage, as Betty takes this long-time betrayal as the perfect excuse to jump out of one marriage and into another. Funnily enough, her new love — political adviser Henry Francis — is as much a father figure for Betty as Connie is for Don. Though Don’s relationship with Connie slowly disintegrates as he fails to live up to his impossible standards (Don literally fails to provide his deranged employer the moon), Betty gets her man by playing hard to get.

In the final episode of the season, Don is given a chance to reclaim something of himself. In previous seasons it always looked like Don would thrive in the 60s. Though he has the look of the stereotypical Brylcreemed businessman, with a glass of Scotch and a teeny-tiny cigarette (are they filterless? Is it a Lucky Strike?), Don has seemed to be a secret bohemian, responding to poetry, foreign cinema, and jazz. There has been evidence that he values the opinions of ethnic minorities, women, and homosexuals, three groups that are about to fight back against the oppressive mores of Sixties America. In the third season this beatnik streak seems to vanish as he is hemmed in by responsibilities he had previously been able to avoid. He treats Peggy and Sal — two people he had seemed willing to mentor in the past, as much as someone as solitary as Don would ever mentor anyone — with disdain and disrespect, with the consequence that Sal vanishes from Don’s life entirely and Peggy almost turns her back on him for good. Don also rejects Roger’s friendship, ostensibly because he finds his new marriage — and possibly his blackface routine — distasteful, but possibly because he envies him for jumping out of an unhappy marriage and chasing his dream.

To be honest, I feel stupid for thinking that Don would take this restrictive situation lying down. Though obviously in a paralysing depression, Don would have to escape this trap, otherwise the last two seasons of the show would have had little to offer other than variations on this soul-crushing sadness. Why tune in to see this once vital man sitting in a corporate office, watching the world change around him? Though it might be a fitting end for someone who can be as morally unpalatable as this, we forgive Don most of his trespasses because he is a fighter. There’s only one thing in fiction more appealing than a character who can save their own ass, and that’s someone who can save others too, which made this finale even more satisfying as Don faces up to the possible break-up of his marriage and realises that with that tether gone he has more freedom to reclaim his place in the world, bringing others up with him.

Throughout the season Don is haunted by flashes from the past: an imagined conception and birth scene, reminders of his step-brother’s suicide, visions of his father taunting him, and finally a memory of that man throwing away the help of a farming co-operative to go it alone. That decision might strike Don as noble, but it turns out to be ultimately foolhardy as his father is badly hurt by a horse during a storm, throwing their plans for self-sufficiency into turmoil. Nevertheless, these visions guide Don to find a third way between dependence and independence. With the help of a select few Sterling Cooper employees — including Sterling and Cooper — Don inspires the formation of the new firm of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, with a staff/family composed of the few people he respects, including the third season addition of the initially sinister and eventually adorable Lane Pryce.

That said, while Don is in cahoots with others whose abilities he now depends upon, he is so much his own man that he brings no accounts to the new firm. He just brings himself. While Bert brings money, Roger brings American Tobacco, Pete brings his accounts (note that he proudly displays his account acquisitions but won’t admit to getting the Clearasil account back from his father-in-law, as this lessens his moment of victory), and Lane brings a canny business mind and some sneaky pre-operation planning, Don is just Don. He’s there because he is the self-made man that he thinks Connie is. He could well bring the Hilton account — Connie mostly rejects Don at the start of the episode because he doesn’t want to deal with McCann Erickson, which would not be a problem with SCDP — but he doesn’t as that would tarnish him. He would be beholden to Connie, that little dependence holding him back from satisfying himself both professionally and emotionally. He has moved on from his father’s solitary ethos by creating a co-operative with the others, but has given them only his brain — the sweat of his brow — not his connections.

This is one possible interpretation of Don’s motives, and seems to fit with his visions of the past, but there is also the possibility that Don finds Connie’s pro-American stance a little distasteful. As we have seen with his trip to Italy, his interest in foreign cinema, and his encounter with European aristocrats in season two’s The Jet Set, Don seems to relish encountering other cultures, and would see Connie’s insular politics and worldview as restrictive and unpleasant. This will, of course, play out as the season goes on and America’s military begins to expand its operations in Vietnam (a conflict that is metaphorically alluded to with dark humour in the notorious lawnmower scene)…

…but is a love of world culture really Don’s main motivation in severing ties with Hilton? No matter what the cause, this act of intentional sabotage propels Don into the rest of the decade in a position of real power, and hopefully with the respect of the others. Knowing his own mind, Don becomes the persuasive and appealing businessman he once was, able to quickly win over the people he has hurt over the course of this season. Pete, Peggy and Roger are mad at Don for his actions, but it only takes him a few minutes to win them all back to his side, such is his enthusiasm and energy. Only Peggy really resists, but then his betrayal of her seems more personal and unexpected. Of course this works metaphorically as well, as Peggy stands for the rising tide of feminist thought. More than any other female character in the show she seems to be the one who instinctively follows her own path, though all the while dismissed and snubbed by the men who run the world.

An aside: I’ve often felt that she is growing into a Randian heroine, though Ayn Rand would probably have argued that you are born great, that you don’t become great over time. I suspect this association looms large in my mind for a number of reasons — including the continual exploration of the theme of individual responsibility, especially as expressed through Don’s arc, but I’ve also wondered if Peggy is modelled on Rand.

This connection with Peggy — which may or may not be intentional — is not the only time Rand has been referenced on the show. As the show dramatises many characters’ quest for self-determination, Rand’s philosophy seems to have affected Weiner’s thought processes as much as Rand’s fiction would have affected the belief systems of a group of affluent white men in the Sixties. These are the men who have the best opportunities laid at their feet and yet pretend that everything they have accomplished is thanks to them and them alone — a belief that would be bolstered by reading Rand’s fantasies. Bert Cooper is a big fan of Atlas Shrugged, though his semi-retirement at the end of season two seems to have more to do with torpor than an attempt to deprive the world of his wisdom. There is also a connection to The Fountainhead: Don has always struck me as a less-confident Howard Roark figure, and Jon Hamm even reminds me of Gary Cooper, who played Roarke in King Vidor’s adaptation.

Of course, Don is less steady than Roark, who is a typical Randian heroic figure, more god than man, flawless and honourable and utterly dismissive of all who do not live by his creed. Don does many things Roark doesn’t do, such as give advice to others out of a sense of altruism, which is of course the worst crime a human being can commit, according to Rand. However, though Don does seem capable of being vulnerable around the women in his life (another thing Rand would frown at), he can use sex as a weapon, as shown by his despicable treatment of Bobbie Barrett in season two. Of course, this is not quite as bad as the Sex-As-Actual-War-Between-Two-Gods scenes of Roark raping Dominique Francon.

Which character is worse? Is it possible for there to be grades of awfulness? Oh God, one of the few bad things about Mad Men is that just when I think I’ve suppressed memories of the craziness of Rand, the show brings it back up again. Well, this show and idiot teabaggers with their banners talking about Going Galt. Yes, the world will tremble once the right-wing bloggers of the world pack up their Macs and go hide in a cave somewhere. As the characters in Mad Men are very human, and capable of a full gamut of emotions, let’s just say that these guys are as influenced by Rand as anyone in the Sixties would have been (i.e. as much as people nowadays are superficially influenced by whichever dreary hot-topic book is riding high at number 3 on the best seller list after Twilight and The Lost Symbol), and then just forget the comparison I just made ever happened.

Back to Peggy, who is nothing like Rand and I’m sorry I brought it up. She’s a sexually open, confident woman who is unwilling to be treated as second-rate by the men she works with. She’s even in front of the curve on this, as other women on the show seem less able to find their own way than Peggy. Only Joan seems to be moving in the right direction, though with less haste and confidence than Peggy. While Peggy is now going after what she wants and confronting men about this (up to and including finally saying “no” to a request for coffee from Roger, who accepts this), Joan is still at the beck and call of the men in her life, a fact that seems to frustrate her enough that she will snap and crack a vase over your head if pushed to breaking point:

Her return was still the result of a hand-out from her former lover Roger, which blunts that moment of triumph, but even though she has yet to reach her full potential the way Peggy has, that entrance was still something else. I doff my cap to Christina Hendricks for that glorious sashay of victory, and to the showrunners for manipulating the feelings of Joan fans everywhere. It was possibly the best moment in the whole wonderful episode, with Lane’s final phone-call to St. John Powell a close second. Even so, Joan remains perhaps even more of a mystery than Betty. What do we really know about her? That her ambitions have been crushed? That she has embarked on a relationship with the man who raped her simply because you’re supposed to marry a rich man, and he seems like a good enough match? That she can rock the accordion like Sexiness Incarnate?

In comparison, Betty is becoming an open book. By now we’ve seen how she reacts to her family, the death of her father, and the breakdown of her marriage, we have more of an idea of how she views herself. In one of the few mis-steps of the season, in The Fog we see Betty hallucinating a meeting with her parents and, bafflingly, recently assassinated civil rights activist Medgar Evers:

That entire episode was shaky, with some of the worst on-the-nose dialogue in the show so far (we’re talking season-one-esque lack of subtlety), but even if it was obvious, the image of Betty staring admiringly at a butterfly unable to escape its cocoon is memorable. She has no urge to expand her horizons the way Peggy and Joan do, possibly because she has no real idea of what it is to become her own person. Though she has finally thrown Don out of her life on her terms, she has just moved from one relationship to another, with Henry taking control in social situations while she sits passively at his side.

There are hints that she might one day move on from dependence on the men in her life, such as a quick shot of her in an earlier episode reading the proto-feminist novel The Group. That said, if she does indeed love Henry, is this dependence or finding her own way? For much of the season it seemed like she was falling for him as a side-effect of the emotional fallout following her father’s death, but she does seem to genuinely feel something for him (though this affection is barely noticeable considering that “Nordic” affect she has). Maybe this is enough for her, and it’s unfair to compare her happiness with Don’s, which comes from his independence. Bear in mind the last time we see her she has symbolically left her previous life behind, flying to Reno with Henry and her new son Gene, while Sally and Bobby remain in her old home with Carla. Her eagerness to run away from that life might have disastrous consequences.

It’s also telling that she is courted by Henry on her terms. Her idea of romance involves a fainting couch bought especially as a focal point for her erotic and romantic fantasies. Poor Henry cannot fathom this kind of mindset. When he clumsily tries to seduce her she pushes him away, driving him to ask what exactly it is she wants:

Even someone who seems more understanding than Don cannot figure out why blunt come-ons aren’t working the way they should. Eventually he realises she wants their relationship to be built on something more “noble” than the trysts that her husband embarks on. Once he has raised the possibility of marriage to her, she accepts his advances. In the final episode Don grabs her and calls her a whore for taking another lover, but in her mind she has behaved more honourably than he ever has. Instead of being intimidated she holds his gaze long enough to make him release her. Does he let her go because the baby wakes up and begins crying? Or is he rattled by her confidence? I’m willing to bet he didn’t expect his quiet wife to threaten him with blackmail, and her defiant glare was the thing that convinced him to get the hell out of the house.

It’s tempting to feel happy for her and even for Don — who seems a little lost without his trophy wife but nevertheless as free as he always wanted to be — as long as we forget about how hard their break-up is going to be on their children. Baby Gene won’t even notice, but Bobby and Sally are already distraught. Sally especially seems to be the one who will come out of the whole affair with the most damage. Betty seems unable to understand her daughter, who acts out after the death of her grandfather and whose emotional outbursts and rebellious nature terrify her mother. Don seems to understand and accept her now that she seems like a human being with needs of her own and the drive to fulfil them, but he is now out of the picture.

Sally’s arc seems to be heading downwards, and of all the characters on the show, she is the one I feel most sorry for. Everyone else has their own tribulations to contend with, but even when they are trapped with seemingly no way out (as many characters seemed to this season), they can at least rely on their wits to regain their autonomy. Of those chosen by Don to work at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, Harry is an innovator, Roger knows his own mind and dares to get a divorce even though such things were taboo at the time (unlike using blackface in a scene of such colossal WTFness that no one who has seen it has recovered yet)…

…and Pete has shown more ambition than Ken, who just follows everyone else like the chummy idiot he is. Paul has no imagination, unlike Peggy, and none of the receptionists seem to have any clue about what is going on around them (and can be so foolish as to drive a lawnmower over someone’s foot, as was seen in the memorable episode Guy Walks Into An Advertising Agency). Until Don rallies his new team and harnesses their drive and imagination, they are doomed to a life of unsatisfying drudgery.

There are so many threads to the Mad Men tapestry that even though I have rambled on at horrible length I’ve barely touched the surface. The rest of the Sixties looms over the show, with the rebellious acts of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce mimicking not only American independence in the 18th Century (if we are to take the American/Brit divide so literally) but also the forthcoming youth movement, casting off the staid ways of their parents (with stuffy Brits with their upper-class accents here metaphorically representing the trad parents of hip young things). We’ve seen drugs infiltrate the hallowed offices as Paul tries to kickstart his malfunctioning imagination with marijuana, though unfortunately for him he only succeeds in bonding with an old college friend while Peggy is inspired to save the day, as ever.

There’s also the changing relationship between sex and guilt, with one character embracing her sexuality and another learning a lesson. Peggy learns to love her libido, seducing a young college student early in the series and pretty much accepting it, though being much more mature about birth control than she was in the past. We also see Pete –wracked with boredom while his wife Trudy is away — “seduce” (i.e. blackmail and coerce) his next door neighbour’s  German au pair into sleeping with him, but after getting confronted about it by the neighbour…

…he does something Don would never do: he realises the error of his ways and phones Trudy to beg her never to leave him alone again. Is he doing that because he was caught? Considering how he didn’t learn his lesson after sleeping with Peggy — an act, let’s not forget, that ended with Peggy secretly pregnant — it’s odd that this tryst rattled him, even though his actions were technically forgiven by the neighbour who only seems mad because he has to deal with an upset maid, and then gives Pete advice on how to conduct his affairs in future. I’d like to think Pete has finally learned a lesson and appreciates Trudy and her selfless support. Of all the couples in the show, Pete and Trudy end the series in the best shape, acting as a team to first conspire against Sterling Cooper, and then help Don and his gang of rebels.

So we’re seeing the notoriously transformative Sixties shake up this WASPy, Republican world. We’ve seen how JFK’s assassination has shaken them up (in an episode sensitively written by Weiner and first time writer Brett Johnson, and brilliantly directed by Barbet Schroeder), but what next for the show? If the usual timejumps are anything to go by, the show will be set around 1965-66, before the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., before Woodstock, around the time of the Watts Riots and the escalation of the Vietnam War. By then I hope that Matthew Weiner has found a way to bring in all of the regular characters from the first three seasons, not just because I like Paul, Ken (Cosgrove! Accounts!) and Sal, but because without them in the show there will be no more appearances by the gang (plus LeVar Burton) on The Soup:

In the meantime, we’re looking at another sweep of the Emmys and Golden Globes. I’ve been annoyed in the past when other shows I love don’t get awards thanks to the usual shut-outs by Mad Men, but this year there’s a good chance I won’t mind at all. How can the amazing work from Jon Hamm, Elisabeth Moss, John Slattery, and Jared Harris not be rewarded, or the superb direction from Phil Abrahams, Lesli Linka Glatter, Michael Uppendahl, and Daisy von Scherler Meyer, or the crack writing staff headed by the perfectionist Matthew Weiner? In the past, even when I’ve liked the show, it’s been a superficial respect. I had never embraced the show the way I have The Shield, or Lost, or Friday Night Lights. Perhaps that’s the thing I liked most about the third season. Finally I have come to think of the characters as imaginary friends, and the offices of Sterling Cooper as a kind of playground that my mind can run through. At last I am a Mad Men obsessive, with both mind and heart. It was a triumph, then. An absolute 100% triumph. And for those who think the show is po-faced (as if any show featuring the comedy stylings of Roger Sterling could ever be truly po-faced), here is a screen capture of the Art Department door.

A fart joke! On the classiest show on TV! Paradoxically, that makes the show a little classier.

(Thanks to Daisyhellcakes, Cat Vincent, Anne Billson, and all the other Twitter Mad Men fans I have similarly pestered. Their conversation throughout this season has helped crystallise the millions of disparate thoughts inspired by this thoroughly challenging show.)

Matthew McConaughey and the Genre of Potential Doom

Matthew McConaughey is one of those actors I can’t help but like. He’s a man who — in the real world — seems like a perfectly affable party fiend who would be fun to hang around with. Someone who doesn’t really give a damn, who makes movies to fund his lifestyle, and only gets to make movies because he’s just popular enough to justify a continued career. He’s famous for pot-smoking, naked bongo playing, and anecdotes about goat sex. His website is so completely “him” it’s as if he has been reduced to a computer echo of himself, a la Jeff Bridges in Tron, and then blasted onto our screens as a series of chill statements and photos of him on mountains, complete with lazy faux-dub rhythms in the background. The most lovable things on the site are the randomised “McConaughey Facts” that pop up at the bottom of the screen. Sample McConaughey Fact: “In my most recent trip to Papua New Guinea I was inducted into the Kuppa Tribe of the Malagan Clan.” That’s just so McConaughey.

As I’ve said many a time, anyone who can laugh at himself is all right in my book. When presented with footage of Matt Damon doing an impression of him on Letterman…

…he seemed to take it with good humour. (It’s about two minutes from the end of the clip.)

My favourite thing about that clip is that at the end of the interview, as the presenter is trying to wrap things up, he goes off on a tangent about spending his Christmas with a family he once visited as an exchange student. It’s right out of nowhere, but that burning need to communicate some random fact about himself for no reason other than that he seems to be looking forward to the excursion is something I — a notorious blabbermouth — can really relate to.

Even though I find McConaughey the Man endlessly entertaining, McConaughey the Actor is another matter. Watching one of his movies is a bit of a crapshoot. Will we get one of his committed performances, such as his delicate turn in Robert Zemeckis’ Contact, or as the demented Van Zan in Reign of Fire (which he was easily the best thing about)? Or will it be a frustratingly light but not particularly funny effort, as in Ron Howard’s instantly forgettable EdTV? For every Frailty or Lone Star there is a Wedding Planner, a Fool’s Gold, and probably a Failure To Launch to boot. Appearing in disposable romcoms might work to keep him in sex wax and bandannas, but it makes following his career difficult. Any hope that he might become Brad Pitt to Richard Linklater’s David Fincher fell apart when The Newton Boys came and went without making a ripple in the popular consciousness. He’s doing better than former girlfriend and fellow romcom stalwart Sandra Bullock right now, but it’s becoming touch and go.

He doesn’t even have an action career to fall back on. U-571 is only memorable for the shameful lies about the Enigma decoding effort, and Sahara — a film I quite like — is notorious for being one of the rare projects whose financial workings have been put on display for all the world to laugh at. Though not me. Seriously, I liked it. It was refreshingly irony-free, just a big crazy adventure about guys who get into scrapes for fun and do the right thing with no soul-searching. It was not of its time, sadly. It’s another film used as a short-hand for excessive Hollywood trash by people who haven’t seen it. Yes, it was obscenely expensive, and there’s no argument for that, but it’s got some charm. With about 20-25 minutes lopped out, it would’ve been treated with a lot more affection.

Unfortunately Ghosts of Girlfriends Past sees too much of the coasting McConaughey, with only hints of his real film-star energy. In a very loose adaptation of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, writers Jon Lucas and Scott Moore aim for easy emotional targets and don’t bother to complicate the story too much. McConaughey plays Connor Mead, a photographer with Austin Powers’ hunger for consequence-free sexual encounter but none of the dental problems. Forced by a flicker of conscience to attend his brother’s wedding, Mead quickly upsets and alienates the wedding guests with his cynical anti-marriage attitude, until he is visited by the ghost of his lothario uncle Wayne, played as a Robert Evans/Hugh Hefner hybrid by Michael Douglas. Wayne warns his Scrooge-like nephew that he will be visited by three “ghosts” (though at least one of them is still alive; the movie ties itself in knots trying to be light while addressing themes of death and loneliness). These apparitions — who enjoyably treat the “visions” like interactive videos — show Mead the miserable consequences of his actions, and reveal the reason he’s so emotionally disconnected: as a teenager, he was snubbed by his true love, Jenny Perotti (Jennifer Garner). It broke his heart and sent him to find solace in the dubious wisdom of Uncle Wayne.

Mead’s dark night of the soul forces him to accept the idea of true love just in time to help his brother (Breckin Meyer) marry his long-term sweetheart (an unbearably whiny Lacey Chabert), and to rescue Jenny from a relationship with potential suitor Brad (Daniel Sunjata). This last task is the most problematic one in a movie that otherwise has too many easy answers. Though we’re meant to side with Mead as he throws off his selfish persona, he’s also trying to ruin a potential relationship between Jenny and a scarily handsome volunteer with Doctors Without Borders who seems to be a really sweet guy. Mead, on the other hand, is intolerably arrogant and thoughtless, though he maintains the same level of oily charm throughout. McConaughey isn’t given enough room to adequately show his conversion to the cause of love, so that while Dickens did a thorough job of showing how Scrooge could change from curmudgeon to saint, Mead’s post-revelation persona seems much like his previous personality, except more manic.

This isn’t the only problem. Lucas and Moore’s script holds few surprises and fewer laughs than even their inexplicably popular breakout hit The Hangover. Director Mark Waters, whose work on The Spiderwick Chronicles was so impressive, manages to bring some life to this formulaic project, with the added bonus that he lights the movie with something other than a very very bright light — a concept that seemed to elude the directors of other 2009 romcoms, especially the biggest romantic comedy hits of the year, Robert Luketic’s The Ugly Truth and Anne Fletcher’s The Proposal. Waters also gets entertaining performances from Michael Douglas and Emma Stone as the “ghost” who deflowered Mead in college. Garner is given less to do, but she sells her big emotional moments, including a moving bedroom scene midway through. It’s also McConaughey’s best scene, with Mead forced to watch his past self mistreat the woman he loves simply because he’s scared of his feelings. In moments like that, the conceit of making the romcom Christmas Carol seems more inspired than it actually is.

My affection for Garner is even greater than my support for McConaughey. Ever since her career-making turn in Alias, I’ve been a huge fan, obnoxiously maintaining that she would get an Oscar nomination (at least!) by the end of the decade. Unless the Academy is going to surprise me and give her a nod for her extremely entertaining turn in The Invention of Lying, I think I’m going to come up short on that one. Her decision to cut down on film roles while raising her children is an understandable one, but I wish she made more movies. There hasn’t been a single film featuring Garner that wasn’t massively improved by her presence — even something as weak as Daredevil occasionally flies thanks to her. In fact, the only thing that didn’t suck about Electra was her performance as the titular assassin; she brought far more pathos and commitment to the project than it deserved.

Compare Ghosts of Girlfriends Past to The Invention of Lying, which was even more fascinated with the interplay of honesty and self-deception. After a brilliant riff on belief and religion, it spends a long, entertaining time banging its head against the disparity between the concepts of love and biological necessity, playing games with the conventions of the genre while at the same time pointing an accusing finger at the audience for expecting such cliches. (500) Days of Summer plays a similar trick; a love-struck Joseph Gordon-Levitt is beguiled by a romantic vision of life soundtracked by The Smiths and Belle & Sebastian and then left crushed by the realisation that he’s been deluding himself as much as he has been lied to by Zooey Deschanel’s idealised Summer. Compared to those two movies, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past has no big ideas to share, other than that love is all you need.

Maybe it’s unfair to give Ghosts of Girlfriends Past a black mark for not matching up to the ambition of Gervais and Robinson’s high-concept fantasy or Mark Webb’s deconstruction, but now that filmmakers seem eager to break the genre down in order to build it back up, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past might end up being the last even vaguely entertaining traditional romcom made. Surely we can at least give it gold stars for being a more involving, charming, and imaginative movie than those flat and cynical laugh-free disasters The Proposal and The Ugly Truth. Where they trade in cheeky, strained jokes about sex and modern gender politics, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past has more luck focusing on the people in the relationship than the gimmicks that get in their way, and then trounces those films completely by casting two charming actors who seem to have some sparks together. Though McConaughey’s performance is disappointing and lacks modulation, the relentless charm that stops him from hitting a deeper note still has its uses. More so than many male leads in recent romcoms, at least he can flash a winning smile and drawl some flirty come-on with naughty aplomb, and when he’s matched with Garner’s wholesome persona, it’s hard to dismiss the rote shenanigans completely. Sometimes, making a reasonably successful movie really is that simple.

It’s Burke’s Law!

Last Friday, while attempting to write yet another lengthy post about the London Film Festival, I was repeatedly distracted by Twitter. This is nothing new. However, one of the people I follow whose name escapes me now (sorry) linked to an article posted on the film discussion site The Auteurs. I’d heard of it before but stayed away as I thought it had something to do with the dreary Luke Haines band, but in fact it’s a nice way to completely waste hours of your time, rating and “favouriting” movies to create a Profile for yourself, complete with representative movie still selection so you can have an iconic image next to your name (I went with Gene Hackman in The Conversation). It was pleasantly pointless, though I did take enormous pleasure in giving Slumdog Millionaire and Happy-Go-Lucky one star each, and Kung Fu Panda the five stars it so richly deserves. Take that, Sight and Sound subscribers.

The article that directed me to this site via Twitter was this lovely little prose poem half-heartedly giving Michael Bay some credit while referring to “fascism” and suchlike. This is possibly the only even vaguely positive critique of Bay’s work I’ve seen on the Internet that hasn’t been written by a teenager with an apostrophe allergy, and as such deserves to be preserved in amber. It might never happen again. As I said earlier this year, my opinion of Bay is torn between fascination and revulsion, the latter becoming more pronounced after the casual (but no less odious) racial insensitivity of Transformers — with the breakdancing jive-talking African-American parody known as Jazz getting killed in the final act, as is sadly the norm in movies — “transformed” into the full-on indefensible racial stereotyping of Skids and Mudflap. Shades of Caruso reader and former Transformers fan Lindywasp (one of her noms de Net) once sent me a very passionate disavowal of the sequel after an upsetting experience at a screening where the audience went from excited to silence once the extent of the caricature settled in. I was concerned by Bay’s decision before, but after reading her heartfelt condemnation, I became furious.

Though I’ll not be able to think of Bay without thinking about that incredible cloth-eared arrogance, I have still long been fascinated — as Daisyhellcakes can attest, having listened to me go on about it at length — by his public persona as the Fratboy DeMille, a man who stomps around like an over-excited teenager while making canny backroom deals for profit points, keeping the cost of his (sill expensive) movies down with obnoxious product placement, and buying effects houses such as Digital Domain. This bravado is ripe for parody, most brilliantly by the faux-Twitterer Fake Michael Bay (sample tweet: “Dammit, if I had a dollar for every time I dropped my iphone out of a helicopter doing a barrel roll…”), though I suspect he’s in on the joke.

Even more fascinating to me than Bay the Man/Douchebag is that signature style of his. Like haphazardly edited two-hour-long trailers, his films are plot-light endurance tests; a relentless swarm of images that he hurls at the audience, seemingly not caring why image B must follow image A. As long as the barrage of glowing, flashing, swirling pictures and the cacophony of multi-tracked sound effects keeps audiences pinned to their seats, Bay seems to think “Job done!” and then returns to his swanky Bay-Cave to drink Crystal and watch Total Wipeout. Is this good filmmaking? Hell no, and as I’ve attempted to explain before, I would never be able to argue that it was (though Danny Boyle’s similar everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach wins critical approval and Oscars). However, he does create an experience that no one else has the studio backing, the technical know-how, and the obnoxious confidence to be able to pull off.

Examples: Transformers ends with a city being pulverised, complete with epic firefights on a main street that totals buildings and blows up cars. The destruction-gasm setpiece in Pearl Harbor — a wretched film of enormous ethical dubiousness — contains the single most expensive shot caught on film, which is ghoulish, wasteful, and logistically impressive all at the same time. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is capped off with a huge scene where an Egyptian village gets mashed into the ground, pretty much (I’m sure it was not a real village, but if it’s fake he still managed to get it built before blowing bits of it up). He shows aircraft carriers getting split in half as if it ain’t no thing. These are stereotypically big and dumb crowd-pleasing moments that I’m sure Eric Rohmer’s fanbase would consider utterly vulgar, but they look impressive in slices. It’s not in Bay’s interest to coral these images into a coherent narrative other than “Man go from point A to point B while the world explodes.” It’s enough for him to hint that there is a goal that his heroes are trying to achieve, and as long as it seems there is some kind of forward momentum while he stages bravura visual orgasms containing complicated visual and physical effects, that’s enough for him.

Again, I’m aware that this is not technically artistically valid on a large-scale level, but on a micro-level, I cannot look away. Every dumb populist miscalculation like his nasty treatment of women, or his blindness to the wrongness of using racial stereotypes for stupid lowest-common denominator jokes, or his infantile reliance on slapstick and screaming instead of nuance and character growth, or any number of other admittedly dreadful habits, run parallel to his facility with composition. There are so many shots he has created that make my eyes wobble with pleasure that I cannot forget them. His reliance on patriotic button-pushing aside, he can create stirring moments just through imagery in a way that would probably make propagandists salivate. That ability to capture an emotion through manipulative visuals, aided by the pounding music of Hans Zimmer or Steve Jablonsky, is unparalleled. He truly is Leni Riefenstahl with a baseball cap and a collection of sports-cars in his Beverly Hills mansion.

And yet, despite this facility with imagery — perhaps the one thing I think even his detractors should accept, even if really really really grudgingly — he is treated like the Boogeyman. Numerous people accuse Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen of being the worst film of the year. Granted, it’s not very good, but I’ve seen far far far worse movies released this year. Just a cursory flick through the Auteurs site sees a number of forum threads based around hating him, including Why is Michael Bay on Criterion?, Is Michael Bay the worst director of all time?, and Reasons to *HATE* Michael Bay. The thread NAME THE FILM MAKERS YOU THINK SHOULD RETIRED OR SHOULD NOT BELONG TO THIS INDUSTRY AT ALL is filled with calls for Bay’s immediate withdrawal from the film industry. I get the feeling that this is a running joke, though it is borne of genuine frustration at his movies and his success.

They’re not the only ones who dislike him, of course. Mainstream critics are revolted by his movies, and even on a site oft-visited by the people you would think comprise his most ardent fanbase (Ain’t It Cool News), Bay is treated like a pariah. “Damn You Michael Bay” is a long-running Internet joke that has become a mantra. Bay hatred appears to be reflexive, the last word in an argument. Why accuse any other filmmakers of crimes against decency? Isn’t it obvious that Bay is the worst of the worst, representing everything that is debased and evil about modern cinema? He’s an unpleasant man with poor taste who appeals to the slack-jawed yokels and the hoodies and the youths with their popcorn and their knives and their mobile phones and suchlike and so on and so on etc. ad infinitum.

He’s the Hitler of films. Mike Godwin postulated that the overuse of mentioning Hitler in online arguments was sadly inevitable (“As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.”) Well, I reckon that there is another law we can accept as fact by now. “As an online discussion about film or culture grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Michael Bay approaches 1.” I don’t think this law should be associated with my real life name, which doesn’t have the Ooomph that “Godwin” has (that’s the kind of name that belongs in front of the word “law”). Therefore I propose we refer to this as Burke’s Law, named after the TV series from the 60s that was revived in the 90s. Why Burke’s Law? Because I always hear that phrase said in the same way as in the 90s title sequence, i.e. with this voice…

…and there is nothing more awesome than that. Sex up that show title, Sexy-Voiced Lady. (Here’s the first part of a full episode, just to show it in amazing context.)

So yeah, whenever a discussion about sucky film directors inevitably begins to focus almost exclusively on the vapidity of Bay’s destructo-porn epics, feel free to mention Burke’s Law. If Bay is what people think represents the true nadir of modern filmmaking, that’s up to them, but if they’re not willing to expand their search to other far less talented individuals out there, then I just can’t take them seriously. I see Dr. Uwe Boll get mentioned a lot, and he’s certainly a candidate. He’s made a shit-ton of laughably awful movies in the past — many more than Bay — and he has now tried to make himself seem classier by making a film about Darfur. However, he’s filming real rape victims re-enacting their own rape for his camera. Making fun of his shitty output suddenly doesn’t seem so funny.

If we’re going to talk about directors who create deafening, poorly storyboarded and edited action scenes that substitute crashing, clashing cacophony for flow and plot momentum, how about Stephen Sommers? He combines Bay’s inability to understand the clear, unambiguous narrative progression of a movie or an action scene with a flat eye for visuals, as evidenced by the busy but tedious G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra? Or Rob Cohen, a man who has yet to make even a half-way decent action movie? Though I’ve not seen his most recent movie — Fast and Furious — I did endure Stealth (where some of the best visual effects ever committed to film were wasted on a farrago of galactic proportions) and The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, which actually managed to be the worst film in the Mummy franchise. It takes a special kind of witless hack to out-Stephen-Sommers Stephen Sommers. I’d rather watch a Bay action scene than something by either of these guys any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

I’d also like to make the case for Robert Luketic, who keeps pumping out the most artless dreck, seemingly with no understanding of what cinema can do. His last three films were lifeless committee-borne crowd-pleasers that couldn’t even be bothered to do anything pleasurable, rendered even more unbearable by being presented in a lifeless cavalcade of wretchedly awful compositions. As a bonus they also featured either reductive, retrograde gender-politics (Monster-In-Law and The Ugly Truth) or ethnic white-washing (the utterly worthless 21). Or what about Jon Avnet, aka the modern day Ed Wood? His last two movies — Righteous Kill and the incredible 88 Minutes — were among the most catastrophically misjudged movies I have ever seen, made by someone without a single artistic bone in his body. It’s so bad that I suspect he doesn’t even understand the scripts he adapts. No matter how hard he tries, he will never be able to come up with a single memorable or inspiring image in his entire career. Not counting this one with Leelee Sobieski taking aim, that is.

If you’ve thought long and hard about it and have come to the conclusion that Bay is less talented than these directors, or that he represents something far greater than just bad filmmaking (i.e. he’s a mascot for the debasement of the culture at large), or that his Platinum Dunes production company is committing a terrible crime by making bland remakes of great horror movies, or that the compositions I love are just ugly but shiny commercialised parodies of actual art, or that he’s the worst kind of patriotism-spouting pro-military arrested adolescent, or even that he’s just an obnoxious douchebag (James Cameron without the brains or the talent), that’s perfectly understandable. I’m cool with that, if you show me your calculations. But don’t just say, “Michael Bay is the worst director ever” because that’s the accepted wisdom. That’s not film criticism. That’s letting someone else do your thinking for you.

Love And Violence At The London Film Festival

Though I’ve lived in London for a decade, it was only this year that I finally joined the BFI and made an effort to attend the London Film Festival. Even when a colleague saw the original cut of Miike’s Ichii The Killer (which he maintains is far superior to the really quite tedious UK cut included on this DVD), I was not compelled to try. If the giddy joy I experienced this year is anything to go by, mark me down as a fool for not trying earlier. I’ve not been this excited about a cultural event since 2000, when Scott Walker’s Meltdown festival on London’s Southbank featured Smog, Jim O’Rourke, Elliott Smith, Jarvis Cocker, and the unforgettable Fuckhead, all in the same week.

Perhaps I’m most excited as the movies I saw were, for the most part, extremely good, not to mention impossible to see in the UK any time soon. Enter The Void, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, Les regrets, White Material, Extract, Metropia and Valhalla Rising don’t have release dates yet, and some of the others are coming out slowly. The Men Who Stare At Goats is out now, with The Informant!, Un prophète, We Live in Public, and Up In The Air rolling out over the next couple of months. Getting a jump on some of these was essential, as I plan to spend the rest of the year catching up with as many movies as possible before the traditional end of year Shades of Caruso Listmania! event happens. At the moment I think I have my top ten sorted, though there are still a couple of yet-to-be-released films that could crack the list. We shall see.

There’s no doubt in my mind that Jacques Audiard’s Un prophète is on my list. Newcomer Tahar Rahim — in one of the performances of the year — plays Malik El Djebena, an Arabic youth with a troubled past who is sent to prison for six years after assaulting a police officer. Though he is intent on keeping his head down, Malik’s stay is complicated by the arrival of an Arab prisoner (Reyeb – Hichem Yacoubi) who is to testify against Corsican gangster César Luciani (played like a kind of corpulent and manipulative spider/crook hybrid by the amazing Niels Arestrup). The Godfather-esque crime boss cannot approach Reyeb, who is surrounded by Arab prisoners, and so enlists Malik upon pain of death. The young boy has no choice but to kill Reyeb, leading to his estrangement from his brethren. Even worse, he is treated like a servant by the Corsican gang. Humiliated, powerless, and haunted by the murder he has committed, Malik begins to plan his revenge, but first he must better himself, consolidating allies and resources during his six year sentence.

After I stumbled from the screening, my jaw scraping along the floor like a broken fender, I found it impossible not to compare Un prophète to De Palma’s Scarface, but please don’t take that as a comment on the quality of Audiard’s film. Even as a fan of early career De Palma, the appeal of Scarface has baffled me for decades — it has struck me as one of his most misjudged films, half deathly serious cautionary tale, half gaudy semi-parodic nonsense. The one or two good setpieces are surrounded by kitsch, madness, and a horribly pitched central performance from some kind of demon who resembles mid-80s Al Pacino but can’t possibly be him because that kind of roaring caricature didn’t show up in his filmography until the 90s. If it was a demon taking Al Pacino’s place in Scarface, I reckon the name of the demon is Hooahhh, and is a distant relative of Pazuzu.

Nevertheless, the similarities are there. Tony Montana and Malik El Djebena are immigrants who fall foul of the law and find their calling while in “prison” (actual for Malik, symbolic for Montana, who is kept in a camp for Cuban immigrants with criminal backgrounds in Florida). They both kill to get out of their tough situation, and undergo baptisms of blood (Montana in the notorious chainsaw scene, Malik in the soon-to-be-notorious razorblade seduction scene). They start off as enforcers but climb their way to the top using ruthlessness, opportunism, and pluck. There is even a straight homage later in the film, as Malik and his colleague Ryad are given the job of eliminating an associate of Luciani, a job which begins to go wrong almost immediately and ends with Malik taking matters into his own hands. Compare this to a similar scene in Scarface as Montana resists killing a Bolivian anti-government activist with a bomb. Despite being shot in similar styles, there are deviations. Malik’s decisions don’t doom him the way they do Montana, and both films have very different endings: there is no “Say hello to my leetle fren!” craziness in Un prophète. The most dramatic and satisfying moment in the final act is played out silently, and manages to be even more emotionally resonant than Montana’s final stand.

Audiard’s style couldn’t be further from De Palma’s, yet he generates far more cumulative power and tension through careful use of pace and composition. His only concession to stylistic excess comes with Malik’s dreams/hallucinations, as he is visited and advised by the ghost of Reyeb, who gives him glimpses of the future that, at least once, save his life. The fantastical touches are scattered so lightly through the film that they barely register. Compare that to De Palma’s near-insane overkill, all long takes, flashy Hitchcock references, and crash-zooming. In many of his other movies that’s just fine, but Scarface always looked like a red-tinged mess, and now — when compared to the spartan aesthetic of Audiard’s instant classic — it looks even sillier.

Plus, while De Palma and writer Oliver Stone liked to play up Scarface’s depiction of the American Dream gone awry in an attempt to add inject profundity into what would be more acceptable as an out-and-out exploitation flick, Audiard and his co-screenwriters (Thomas Bidegain, Abdel Raouf Dafri and Nicolas Peufaillit) touch on enough uncomfortable aspects of modern French life that — as Dafri explained prior to the screening — many politicians have used the movie to score points against their opponents. French prisons are notoriously overcrowded, and relations between French natives and Islamic immigrants are fractious, so a movie which deals so frankly with both issues is bound to be explosive. No matter how much Audiard protests that his movie has no message, the backdrop of his crime drama is portrayed vividly enough that it’s hard not to take the film as an indictment of the system as it stands. Scarface’s message about the corrupting effect of greed on the human soul was crushed under tons of tacky sludge, and amounts to little. Here, Audiard tells the story of one young man bettering himself (at the expense of others, sadly), and speaks volumes about contemporary racial and economic politics in Europe. Everyone who adores De Palma’s movie should do everything they can to check out Un prophète, because this is how it’s done.

Attending so many movies in such a short space of time left me greatly fatigued and mildly ill. Like some kind of Vitamin B injection, Audiard’s crime thriller gave me a burst of energy that lasted until I saw Cédric Kahn’s Les regrets. Kahn was responsible for L’ennui, one of my favourite films about sexual obsession. Adapted from a novel by Alberto Moravio, L’ennui depicts a philosophy teacher (Charles Berling) who falls for a young woman (Sophie Guillemin) to such an extent that his life falls apart as he pursues her, oblivious to her dark past. His efforts to stalk her and keep her interested in him become frantic, though as the object of his desire seems utterly unmoved by his devotion, there is a poignancy there too. It’s a memorable portrait of a man made into a fool by his desire.

Sadly, Les regrets feels like a retread of the same themes. Whereas the earlier film is an adaptation, here Kahn directs his own screenplay. Architect Mathieu (Yvan Attal) returns to his childhood home while visiting his dying mother, and accidentally encounters the former love of his life, Maya, played by Valeria Bruni Tedeschi (who spookily resembles Virginia Madsen). Though married to another architect with whom he owns a small company, Mathieu is compelled to sleep with Maya in an attempt to make right what once went wrong. At first Mathieu seems to be fighting against his urges, but it’s not long before his desire for Maya takes control of him, and he jeopardises his marriage and his career. Maya is similarly afflicted, unable to resist her attraction to her former lover, until eventually she realises that Mathieu’s obsession will destroy both of their lives. Though she recovers a little, Mathieu is too far gone, and his actions doom him.

Les regrets is not without its pleasures. The three leads — Attal, Bruni Tedeschi, and Arly Jover as Mathieu’s neglected wife Lisa — are all wonderful, balancing on a line between absurdity and pathos with skill. Several scenes are simultaneously farcical and gutwrenching, with Mathieu and Maya racing around France to grab brief moments together, their desperate lovemaking becoming more passionate but less intimate. Late in the film Mathieu finally meets Maya’s daughter — a figure who has been mentioned but never seen — and yet this sobering collision does nothing to stop him, so determined is he to reclaim Maya’s love. Those regrets, those lost years, drive both characters to self-destructive lengths, and every so often Kahn captures a moment of panic or lust that perfectly reflects that experience and our own desire to turn back the clock and make things right with those we once loved, all while satirising the awful selfishness of these middle-class idiots who only occasionally give a damn about anyone else in their lives. The final ambiguous scene is especially damning.

Nevertheless, this feels more like a variation on a theme than a movie on its own, and as I’ve only seen once of Kahn’s movies it was especially disappointing. Perhaps if I had seen one of his thrillers (Roberto Succo or Feux rouges) this similarity would have seemed less bothersome, and certainly the stakes aren’t as high as in L’ennui, but the scenes of Attal and Bruni Tedeschi racing around to arrange one of their trysts were too familiar. Plus, I’m sure Kahn intended to make his protagonists so unlikeable, but for much of the movie the tone wavers between romantic tragedy and satire. Daisyhellcakes is convinced the movie is making fun of French erotic cinema, right down to the stolen moments of passion, the agonising and sub-poetic exhortations of love, and the overheated final act with characters passing out from stress and exploding with erotic rage. It certainly has its share of funny moments, but as a cultural visitor and heathen with only a passing knowledge of French cinema, I can’t help but feel that I was laughing at the tragedy and feeling empathy during the comedy.

These reservations are, of course, entirely subjective. Consider Les regrets recommended, especially if you’ve not yet seen L’ennui, though I’d say that’s still the superior movie. Of course, similarity to other films isn’t really a killing blow. There was one other film we saw that was heavily indebted to another, but this film was inspired enough to add iguanas, abuse of the elderly, and an uncanny — and entirely random —  impression of Ed Sullivan. More to follow…

What Now For Horror?

For the first time in a long while, Halloween was a real event at Shades of Caruso HQ. Sure, we’ve had pumpkins and decorations before, which were fun, and absolutely no Trick-or-Treaters, which was even better, but this year I was hit with the sense that the day was imbued with some kind of unholy significance, far more so than usual. A pumpkin was carved…

…and horror movies were watched. Twitter greatly helped. Scary videos, photos of costumes, and blog articles celebrating Samhain were linked to, creating a real sense of event. Twitter does a few things really well, and being a sort of mini-aggregator of topical observations and relevant information is top of that list. It really tied the night together.

The one thing that let the whole experience down were the movies we decided to watch, which were either thoroughly awful or distractingly inconsistent. The best of them was the insane mega-hit Paranormal Activity, which has become the most profitable movie of all time after grossing $85m on a $15000 budget. It’s a terribly flawed movie, filled with banal dialogue and repetitive arguments, not to mention tortuous plot contrivances that keep the conceit floating. Some of the best moments are punctured by the behaviour of Micah, whose defiantly obnoxious confidence — a plot requisite, sadly — doesn’t sit well with the really quite terrifying events surrounding him. Special mention here to the amusement he greets an EVP recording of his girlfriend’s demon. As someone who has long been utterly terrified of the sound of unearthly events captured on tape (this book fucked me up as a kid), the moment should have been chilling, but having this doofy jerkbag giggling and goading the demon on ruined the moment.

And yet, and yet… Let’s just say that there are several moments in the film that gave me the fear, and one in particular nearly made me give up on the film entirely, it was so scary. Writer-director Oren Peli has hit on a magic formula that is effective and durable enough to survive the distracting necessities of the plot mechanics that hobble the movie, with help from committed performers Katie Featherston (this year’s Scream Queen for sure) and Micah Sloat. Who cares about the contrivance, or the unpleasant behaviour of Micah, or the late-movie YouTube exorcism silliness that complicates the hair-thin plot? None of that matters. When Micah’s camera switches on at night, and the creaking starts, you forget every annoying thing that you had to go through to get there, and you instantly put yourself in their position. You’re going to be asleep later, and you’re going to be unaware of what’s going on. The scares in the movie — manifested with absolute mastery of the craft — are one thing. What makes the movie so terrifying is knowing that you are going to bed later. It’s impossible not to imagine yourself in the same situation, and that’s the scariest thing of all.

Luckily for my sanity, the resolution of the film is more mundane than the build-up, which blunted the effect of the film. For most of the running time we can’t understand the motives of the demon haunting Katie. Terrorising her from childhood is one thing, and the thought that Katie will never be able to escape her psychic torture is more upsetting than the actual resolution, but as this is a movie with a finite running time, we have to have a resolution. I’m not sure what Peli could have done to fix this problem, and the fact that the movie has three different endings suggests he wasn’t sure either. A disappointment, then, but a disappointment that touches greatness at times, and lingers in the mind far longer than you would like.

Though Paranormal Activity invites comparison with 1999’s The Blair Witch Project, it’s still very much of its time. When considered alongside Matt Reeves’ Cloverfield and Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza’s magnificent [Rec], this kind of faux-subjective horror — with the line between onscreen participant and viewer blurred — has become one of the most significant innovations in horror cinema of the past twenty years, and has surprisingly been used rarely enough to still feel fresh. Certainly, though the genre seemed to be in a rut during that period, Blair Witch and [Rec] are two of the most effective horror movies around, arguably more so than almost all others, and have revitalised the traditional horror sub-genres (ghost story, zombie movie, monster attack).

That’s not to say the genre has been completely moribund. The other horror movies that have stood out – certainly in my view — are partially most effective for playing off real-world fears that have been ignored by numerous tedious slasher films, remakes of Japanese techno-ghost stories or “torture” movies. In a world where increasing automation and computerised interaction has made us less likely to wander out of our comfort zones, the best horror movies of recent times have worked on our fear of other people, where stressful situations make us turn on each other. While a lot of horror concerns the Fear of the Other, as the groups we ally ourselves with shrink in size we find The Other is not that alien any more. The Descent, The Ruins and The Mist all feature characters trapped in horrific environments, surrounded by unthinkable horror, but ultimately these movies are upsetting because of the way the protagonists react to these threats. In all three the most dangerous thing you can encounter is the person standing next to you, who is probably someone you have known all your life.

The thought that it is not the Other that could provide the horror, but maybe even you yourself if pushed the wrong way — by betrayal in the case of The Descent, politics and religious intolerance in The Mist, and allegorical Idiocracy-style selfishness and ignorance in The Ruins — is where the real horror lies. My other favourite horror movie of the past few years — James Watkins’ gut-wrenching Eden Lake — is as topical as The Ruins or The Mist, with two well-to-do UK city-folk undone by their inability to respect their countrified brethren. Their fate is sealed when they antagonise some children — The Other — but protagonist Jenny’s ultimate doom is provided by people who should be on her side. Hell really is other people. As we increasingly use the Internet to interact, and often realise that being physically present with other people is a mixed blessing, it’s tempting to think that the current popularity of the zombie genre is down to the cathartic pleasure of seeing hordes of “people” mown down. It’s the most misanthropic of horror sub-genres, and increasingly the one where the appeal of it seems to be watching the violence we can perpetrate upon surrogate humans without worrying about morality getting in the way as much as it is the thrill of being menaced by something unpleasant.

During our weekend of horror we also watched some endearing throwbacks to previous horror eras, though sadly they left us even more cold. Ti West’s House of The Devil has been attracting attention and rave reviews for its intentionally retrograde approach. Set in the 80s, West fills his movie with period detail: feathered haircuts, synth soundtrack, clunky Walkman etc. He also spends much time setting up an atmosphere instead of throwing a bunch of youngsters into a rusty basement to have their teeth pulled out. About 75% of the movie shows college student Samantha (played by Saffron Burrows lookalike Jocelyn Donahue) walking around a creepily deserted campus and an even creepier isolated house, as she babysits an old woman for Tom Noonan and Mary Woronov. We’re talking about half an hour of walking around a campus, and then half an hour of walking around a house, with as little plot as a short movie expanded to feature length.

Though I certainly didn’t take against West’s movie, and though it had several pleasurable things to recommend it (casting Noonan and Woronov certainly makes up for a lot of the movie’s flaws), I suspect a lot of the praise heaped on House of the Devil is for what it isn’t, rather than for what it is. It’s not torture porn. It’s not a shitty remake of a slasher classic. It’s not edited into an incomprehensible, staccato mess. It generates atmosphere instead of relying too much on turning the volume up to jolt the viewer. It’s paying its respects to the horror movies adored by a certain sub-set of movie critics. It has charm and is made with reverent love, and never once feels like a cheap cash-in. For those reasons, it is to be applauded.

For the most part there is little dialogue and a couple of shock jump moments (in their defence, they’re earned), but also lots and lots of longueurs. West goes the extra mile in setting up an atmosphere of eerie stillness before things kick off in the final act, but as with a lot of average horror movies from the past, that involves having very little happen very slowly. The 95 minute running time feels a lot longer, and by the time the scares arrive, there’s a good chance you’ll be bored. Is this a result of eroded attention spans? Or has West balanced the film wrong? It doesn’t help that the finale is overplayed to the point of not being that scary after all, shooting past “effectively scary” to settle at the total opposite end of the horror spectrum.

As for West’s influences, sometimes they seem to have inspired him too literally. Like the runty child of Rosemary’s Baby and The Dunwich Horror (with a pinch of The Medusa Touch), it serves up something we’ve seen a million times before which, after the long wait to get there, is just not enough. I’d even argue that it’s got its eras mixed up. While the film goes out of its way to add 80s period details, the pace and subject matter of the movie feel more suited to the 70s, like something Roger Corman and Samuel Z. Arkoff would have made before The Exorcist and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre came along and changed the rules of the genre. 80s horror movies were pacier and often sillier than this, and if you’re going to pay homage to that era, you need to have more going on.

As in Michael Dougherty’s Trick ‘r Treat, which was a proper 80s horror homage right down to its bones. Ostensibly an anthology of tales linked by a couple of common threads, Dougherty pays tribute to numerous horror classics while playfully subverting expectations. Hoary horror conventions that are given a sprucing up include the sexuality of the vampire, the vulnerability of young virgins, townsfolk trying to kill a group of undesirables who then come back from the grave, the pillar of the community who has a terrible secret, the Bad Seed, and the unstoppable killing machine seemingly intent on enforcing some bizarre rules. By the end of the film, the nods to other films were keeping me more entertained than the narrative tricks or the lacklustre scares: The Howling, The Thing, Fright Night, Pumpkinhead, The Evil Dead, Nightmare on Elm Street 1 and 2, Creepshow, Pet Sematery, The Company of Wolves, Halloween (obviously)… There’s almost too many to count. While House of the Devil serves up the familiar and hopes it will still scare us, here Dougherty simply tries to pay respectful homage.

This approach has its pros and cons. On the plus side Dougherty captures the look of 80s cinema with images full of rich golds, reds and oranges, not to mention leaf-strewn suburban streets, Bacchanalian fire-lit orgies of violence, and use of the frame that calls to mind vintage Carpenter and Dante. It’s a gorgeous movie, despite its low-budget, but as with House of the Devil it’s low on scares. The balance of the movie falls too heavily on the lighter side, which wouldn’t really be a problem at any other time of the year, but after seeing something as soil-yourself-scary as Paranormal Activity it couldn’t help but feel like a bit of a letdown. While the intertwined stories and narrative surprises are cleverly unravelled by the end, all four tales (and the two linking arcs) feel underdeveloped, even taking into account the bigger picture. It’s Love Actually Syndrome. Four two-act tales linked together do not replace one tale with three acts. As much fun as Trick ‘R Treat is (and it is a lot of fun), it can leave the viewer unsatisfied. Consider it recommended, however, especially if you grew up loving any of the movies listed above.

All three movies feel like throwbacks in one way or another (if you’re ungenerous and take Paranormal Activity to be a straight rip of Blair Witch), but the fourth movie we watched over the Halloween weekend was very much a modern mainstream horror movie. Jaume Collet-Serra’s demented Orphan was probably more thriller than horror movie, but with the various Catholic orphanages, wintery settings, bloody carnage and concerned nuns — not to mention that it is a Dark Castle Entertainment picture — it felt very much of a piece with everything else we had seen. Except terrible. Vera Farmiga and Peter Sarsgaard (resembling a pudgy, effeminate Keifer Sutherland with a bad case of narcolepsy) adopt a Russian child after Farmiga’s third pregnancy ends in disaster. Haunted by this, a previous alcohol dependence, and an accident that left her second child deaf, Farmiga puts all her hopes of recovering from her past on the new child, who sadly turns out to be a murderous psychopath who tears the family apart with psychological games, a can of lighter fluid, and a big hammer.

The movie starts unpleasant and stupid, and gets more unpleasant and stupid than you can possibly imagine. During its initial theatrical release, an internet meme appeared that claimed the murderous child (Esther, played with astonishing eerie skill by 12-year old Isabelle Fuhrman) was actually a Lithuanian hooker born with dwarfism. This rendered the movie impossible to take seriously, though the actual reveal at the end is just as silly and possibly even tackier, especially when taken with some absurd third-act loose-end-tying of breathtaking clunkiness (I’m thinking of the frozen pond, here).

It certainly seems odd… nay, depressing that something this catastrophic and tasteless can be made with a cast of talented actors such as Farmiga, Sarsgaard (in a career-worst performance filled with drowsy histrionics), Margo Martindale and poor CCH Pounder. What’s worse is that a far superior movie with a similar plot was released in 2007 to massive indifference. George Ratliff’s Joshua starred Hott Sam Rockwell and Farmiga as — again — parents dealing with the psychological manipulations of a devious child, and again hamstrung by their inability to deal with this threat due to the perceived vulnerability of their nemesis (echoes of Watkins’ Eden Lake there). Ratliff created an atmospheric and disturbing tale with almost no tricksiness, relying instead on talented actors portraying people at the end of their tether. Collet-Serra — who, let us not forget, is part of the Pointless Remake Brigade thanks to his astonishingly tedious Paris Hilton vehicle House of Wax — has no interest in creating something as challenging as this, despite his excellent cast, relying instead on cheap shock tricks, over-direction, gothic lighting and unsubtle musical cues. Luckily, it’s hilariously wrong, and littered with bizarre tonal and directorial mistakes. It’s not quite a failure along the lines of, say, Shyamalan’s The Happening, but it’s damn close.

When critics praise House of the Devil for being a breath of fresh air, it is garish, tawdry nonsense like Orphan that they’re comparing it to. After seeing it the other movies of the weekend seemed much better by comparison. It was particularly amusing to note that the frenetically edited Orphan generated not even a fraction of the tension created by Paranormal Activity which contains hardly any cuts at all, in defiance of Hitchcock’s theories on editing. Sadly none of these Halloween movies thrilled me as much as the movies I linked to a horror renaissance in this post (scroll down). Pastiche can be fun, but unless it has something else there, it can be little more than an empty exercise in playing off nostalgic feelings, and suggests a lack of imagination in the filmmaker. A working knowledge of the various developmental stages of a genre, allied with a vivid imagination, can give us something as respectfully constructed as Juan Antonio Bayona’s The Orphanage – which is a classic ghost story in the mold of The Haunting and The Innocents that pays homage to its forebears and then becomes its own thing — or something that bursts conventions like Tomas Alfredson’s Let The Right One In. This year, pastiche had its pleasures, but didn’t take the next step. The closest we got was seeing Sam Raimi return to what he does best with Drag Me To Hell. It was pure joy, yet another wonderful amalgam of disturbing comedy and silly horror from the man who gave us Evil Dead II. Of course, when you’re making a pastiche of a sub-sub-genre of horror that you yourself invented, it’s going to be hard to fuck it up.

So is there cause for concern? I’d argue no. This year the only completely satisfying straight horror movie I’ve experienced is Lars Von Trier’s harrowing Antichrist, which is one of the most astonishing sensory assaults in recent memory. Doused in unpleasant atmosphere and featuring imagery that will probably haunt me for years to come, even if Von Trier’s intent was not to make a great horror movie — he’s more interested in parsing his recent depression, and exploring recurrent themes like violent misogyny and humanity’s destructive urges — he managed to create something that disturbs more than anything else released this year. That’s not just because of the now-notorious genital mutilation scene. That one moment — which is utterly horrifying but not exploitative — would not be anywhere near as effective if it were not for Von Trier’s command of mood up to that point.

While it certainly doesn’t look or feel like anything in the mainstream of the genre, there’s the hope that other filmmakers will see what Von Trier has done with the conventions of the genre, mixing fairy tale imagery, nightmarish atmospherics a la David Lynch, sustained suspense, extreme body horror, and an oppressive, Hideo-Nakata-esque dread to create something new, something chilling and unforgettable. Maybe Von Trier, who operates outside the sometimes claustrophobic and relentlessly self-referential confines of the world of horror cinema, will accidentally influence other horror filmmakers and bring about another evolution in the genre. It’s that or someone very very smart comes up with a new approach, just like Carpenter once did with Halloween. One can only hope.

Note: This blogpost was not written in an attempt to exorcise the memory of Paranormal Activity from my branes so I can get a decent night’s sleep. Anyone suggesting this is the case is dead wrong. ::whimpers::