The White Ribbon (Das weiße Band)

2009
Director: Michael Haneke
Cast: Ulrich Tukur, Susanne Lothar, and Mercedes Jadea Diaz

Plot: Strange events happen in a small village in the north of Germany during the years just before World War I, which seem to be ritual punishment. The abused and suppressed children of the villagers seem to be at the heart of this mystery.

Ominous German Children Dish Out the Punishment
by C. True

I cringe at the idea of movies being carried by children actors. When I like children in movies it is usually based on a great performance by one single child. In The White Ribbon Michael Haneke manages to masterfully direct a cast that is half children with some of the best and most important scenes carried by children that look to be about 5. Not only do the children act well, but Haneke has given them a difficult presence in the film which they capture entirely. They must be children, no precocious Dakota Fanning-esque performances. And yet they deliver characters with an unsettling level of dillusionment on the surface and bitter and cruel rage lurking underneath. And of course children can be unreservedly cruel, and maybe what's so creepy about this movie is that unlike playground bullying these children are pointedly aware of the consequences of their actions and have set out not to oppress an individual but to terrorize a town. Of course this is all just implied in a movie where most major events that propel the story happen off screen. That may sound pretentious or boring but it isn't. You can imagine if you lived in a small town and bizarre tragic "accidents" began occuring you could easily be shaken and intrigued without ever witnessing any of these events first hand. The one shown act of violence happens later in the film when the children are so consumed by hate that rageful impulses begin to be acted upon freely.

This direction of children really highlights Michael Haneke's ability to mold characters but he's really created a beautiful masterpiece that must have crushed all competition in receiving the Palme d'Or at Cannes this year. The movie is so stylistically complete there is a sense of transportation. The story is intriguing to point that I was eagerly anticipating every line of dialogue and no snack or bathroom break would have pulled me away if it meant missing a minute. And although it may sound exceedingly dark from the description above the movie is not overpowering (certainly not for Haneke) and there is even a sweet little romance for our narrator the school teacher. And its a noodle scratcher. Not everything is obvious, but you get the idea that in a film this precise every word in every piece of dialogue has its purpose. Makes you wonder what that Michael Haneke is up to, but then most of his movies do. He doesn't have anything else lined up yet but for me he is a must see director and I hope we can expect many more projects from him.

Poltergeist

1982
Director: Tobe Hooper
Cast: Jobeth Williams, Craig T. Nelson and Heather O'Rourke

Plot: A family's home is haunted by a host of ghosts.

We'll Never Know Why Putting a House on Someone's Grave Pisses Them Off So Much
by C. True

Gearing up for Halloween it was a pleasure to see Poltergeist on the big screen for the first time. However, before the movie I was a little worried about the audience at this particular theater. Other movies at this same second-run beer theater have been ruined by the guffawing slightly inebriated twenty-somethings. Sure St. Elmo's Fire had plenty to poke fun at, but I don't find Maverick's heartbreak over Gooses death especially cheesy and worthy of a laugh. I was pleasantly surprised though by how everyone really shut up, watched this movie, and got as scared as they did when they saw it as a kid.

So many great premises are at work here. We have a nexus of evil within the house which I always found very effective in giving me chills. One of my favorite scenes is a simple one (and according to imdb the first one shot) where Jobeth Williams hesitantly opens her children's bedroom door just to be screamed at by some supernatural entity and slam it shut again. Knowing the house is haunted is one thing, but knowing that the seat of the evil things happening is localized to one spot sets up some great scares. Another great theme is the surprisingly non-cheesy sentiment of a mother trying to save her child. And although it isn't a theme or premise, for my money there was never a scarier scene then when that kid starts getting swallowed by that tree. Who thinks trees are scary? I don't know but damn if that didn't give me nightmares for years.

The special effects really hold up well here as well. Most of them are pretty simple, I'm not even sure you'd call making a steak crawl across a countertop by rigging it with wires a special effect anymore. For instance the best special effect isn't even a real special effect. In a continuous shot where we see Jobeth Williams push all the chairs in at the kitchen table, then the camera pans with her as she goes back into the kitchen to get the cleaning supplies and then back to the dining area to see a shocking chair pyramid on top of the table. How was it achieved? As the camera pans away some guys come in with a preformed chair pyramid and put it on the table and grab the other chairs. It doesn't get much simpler than that and yet its one of the best surprises in the film. Not to get all preachy but there is something nice when it comes to effects about knowing what you're seeing is really happening, just not in the way you think it is.

Drag Me To Hell

2009
Director: Sam Raimi
Cast: Alison Lohman, Justin Long, Lorna Raver and Dileep Rao

Plot: A loan officer ordered to evict an old woman from her home finds herself the recipient of a supernatural curse, which turns her life into a living hell. Desperate, she turns to a seer to try and save her soul, while evil forces work to push her to a breaking point.

There Must Be Peanut Butter on That Chin
by C. True

The Raimi brothers apparently wrote Drag Me To Hell after Army of Darkness and it reeks of a sillier time in Sam Raimi's career. The story is straight B horror movie but its approached with a zeal that makes you wish more people approached the genre with some fun and not just gratuitous boobs and machetes. Having recently watched Wrong Turn 3, which I will decline to review at this time, I'm reminded of how often these movies rely on gore to accomplish all the scares. Instead of blood and guts Sam Raimi decides to have fun and disgust us by putting his poor heroine through some truly grimy scenes. She has a corpse somehow puke fixed fluid slime in her mouth and its just the kind of movie where she seems only momentarily phased and is back up and going in no time. She also gets her mouth filled with maggots, has flies flying in and out of her nose and mouth while she sleeps and has her chin sucked on by corpses and living hags alike. And her pluckiness is one of the reasons the movie is fun, she's not whiny, no "why me" and when she's forced to choose between a cuddily animal and her soul she doesn't even seem to bat an eyelash. There is also a great fight sequence between our main character and the old gypsy in a parking garage that shies away from all timid girl fumbling and the result is a gnarly beat down. The seance business and the psychic are rather blase but things moved quickly enough for even mediocre elements to go relatively unnoticed. It's not a fabulous film but if you don't enjoy watching it you may take movies too seriously (or justifiably have a weak stomach; this is not a movie my mother would enjoy).

I think most girls who could handle the gross-outs would probably like this horror movie more than most. Its rare to see a horror movie where the lead female character has some balls (substantially more than her boyfriend).

Paranormal Activity

2007
Director: Oren Peli
Cast: Katie Featherston, Micah Sloat

Plot: After moving into a suburban home, a couple becomes increasingly disturbed by a nightly demonic presence.

Demons Got Ya Down?
by C. True
Paranormal Activity does not disappoint in the scares department. With all the hype surrounding its release I was hoping that it wasn’t ALL just a marketing machine and I wasn’t disappointed. But it is not quite the bulldozer of fear I’d hoped for. As we follow Micah and Katie around their big huge house while some weird shit is going down it dawned on me that this movie did not quite build in the overall dread department like it easily could have. Not to draw yet another comparison to the Blair Witch Project but in that movie every scene went towards this building sensation that this was going end in a creepy bad way. When it wasn’t night time you were right there with the characters dreading the inevitable time when it would be. This really gave the scares a lot of their impact when they happened in later scenes as I found out while watching this movie. Almost all the nighttime scenes in Paranormal Activity were scary but when it was day and Katie was still kind of freaked and Micah was just curious it gave me some time to catch my breath and I was more prepared and less brow beaten when the next scare came. It’s a good scary movie but for my money there’s nothing really like that unrelenting horror movie that never lets you catch your breath. Alien and the more recently brilliant The Descent come to mind as horror movies that left me exhausted from fear in a great way. And Blair Witch Project proved it didn’t necessarily have to be continuous horrifying events, but rather the anticipation of horror and the dwindling hope of a happy ending. Katie and Micah’s situation doesn’t seem quite so desperate, and although it didn’t get to an obnoxious point, towards the end of the film it was hard not to start wondering why they seem to spend so much time at home when most people would have gotten their asses out of there weeks ago. Regardless of what any psychics advise.

The truly scary and unique element of the film is how much scarier something is when it’s viewed in this passive way. The main characters are sleeping in bed for most of the scares and as if that wasn’t creepy enough, we are all too aware that there’s no one behind that camera either. It’s a real helplessness that helped make scenes that out of context wouldn’t scare anyone into gut-twisting experiences. And there was more story development and few neat ideas that really made this more than it might initially appear to be. Finally the two actors really help make the movie work, they are suprisingly charismatic and you feel their fear even more.

Six Degrees of Separation

1993
Director: Fred Schepisi
Cast: Donald Sutherland, Stockard Channing and Will Smith

Plot: Flan and Ouisa Kittredge, rich NYC art dealers, are called on one night by a young man, Paul, who professes to be a friend of their kids' from Harvard. They offer him a bed for the night; he enchants them with a home-cooked meal and magnificent conversation. The next morning, they learn that he is not all he seems to be. Their investigations are intriguing and lead them to re-evaluate their lives.

A Movie You Might be Meant to Hate
by C. True

There comes a point when a movie tries for too much and you just don’t enjoy it anymore. Six Degrees of Separation barrels past that point and enters a sometimes comical level of cluttered confusion. The movie begins with a bourgeois Upper East Side couple relaying a story to a group of friends at a wedding. The story is about how the previous night the couple received an unexpected visit from a young man (played by Will Smith) claiming to be friends with their children at school. I think the pretension in this portion of the film is meant to reflect the melodramatic quality of antecdotes in general, and it is nauseating. On purpose or on accident? I think the moviemaker wants you to hate this portion of the film, and as it turns out its important for the big finale. But regardless of the ending, why make a movie that makes your viewers hate it? (It is precisely this sort of film making that makes this a Mean Movie, it is purposely unpleasant to its audience)

The second portion of the movie takes a big turn, as the couple, feeling they were dooped, continue to relay the story with a bit of self-reflective dry humor at their own folly of being conned so easily after just a little name-dropping by their visitor. This part plays out better since we are no longer trying to “get” this overly sensitive contrived relationship between these loathsome characters. And this next portion is genuinely funny. I was surprised to be generally interested in where this story was going, for it obviously wasn’t going anywhere conventional, after really just hating it 30 minutes earlier. But sometime later the story gets a little too enamored with its own originality and complexity and just seems to go off the rails. There are many more plot turns and new characters introduced that really detract from the original story. Every question is answered with its own plodding strange little subplot and the movie feels like it is about 3 hours long with its actual running time being 112 minutes. It makes sense that so many stories within the story might have translated better on the stage, where Six Degrees of Separation was originally conceived and well received. The movie ends with a real sentimental little speech by Stockard Channing, and I really just couldn’t take the movie seriously enough to find the revelation about how we shouldn’t turn experiences into antecdotes compelling at all.

I fluctuate between thinking this is one of the most pretentious movies I've ever seen, and thinking it had a good thing going for it but became to cluttered. Regardless, it is not a conventional movie and I can't say it didn't make me think, though it was usually about why I disliked it so much.

White Men Can't Jump

1992
Director: Ron Shelton
Cast: Woody Harrelson, Wesley Snipes, and Rosie Perez

Plot: Black and white basketball hustlers join forces to double their chances.

It's Hard to Dunk When You're 5'10'' like Woody (and Wesley?)
by C. True

Woody Harrelson plays the doofy white chump (who played a little college ball) come to hustle black street basketball players in early 90’s LA. The basketball games are well filmed and play out as tense and serious games that are given enough screen time to make them exciting without making this a sport-driven movie. It’s also partly about the generic comedy of a doofy white chump teamed up with a fast-talking black man, but it’s really a little sweeter and less stereotypical than that may sound. The real selling point of the movie is the originality of the story line that bounces to unlikely places. Instead of one long con movie, the hustler movie allows for several cons and in this movie they avoid repetition as the viewer and main characters are often surprised by who is and who isn’t in on the con. On top of these there is a mobster/money conflict and a sweet and funny aside when Woody’s girlfriend, played by Rosie Perez, lives her dream by appearing on Jeopardy. Overall the movie works because it finds a nicer balance between well-written characters, plot, and comedy than most. And perhaps most impressive is that this movie really never strays into cheese. There’s nothing I hate more than the cheap ending of girl and boy getting back together for no better reason than two hours are over, and this movie decidedly misses clichés of this sort and comes off as a little more watchable.

And I feel like I shouldn't, but I just love Rosie Perez and she's great in this movie. It's not just that she's sassy, it's that she does sass better than anyone.

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