Film School Rejects » Landon Palmer

Culture Warrior: What is Hitchcockian Suspense?

Landon Palmer — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 05:30:00 +0000

In a conversation with Dr. Cole Abaius while he was formulating his thoughts on spoiling and The Fourth Kind, he assessed the effectiveness of the scare tactics within the recent trend of found footage filmmaking in the horror genre. This past September when I reviewed Paranormal Activity at Fantastic Fest, I praised the film for ascribing to the “Hitchcock 101 School of Filmmaking” in that it achieves its frightening effect through revealing as little as possible. Having recently reassessed Psycho in my “Horror 1960″ post and while being surrounded by this continuously popular new brand of horror filmmaking, Cole brought up the idea that found footage horror filmmaking might not actually be employing Hitchcockian suspense at all—or, if it does, it’s a filtered, cheaper, and simpler definition of the term that’s come to be accepted when discussing horror and suspense.

Hitchcock, the Master of Suspense (not the Master of Horror, as they guy technically only made two horror films—Psycho (1960) and The Birds (1963)) certainly advocated a faith in audience imagination, allowing a moment to potentially make any film far scarier through imagined, anticipated fears rather than the potential disappointment of something less terrifying being manifested on screen. He implied more than he exhibited, and this was central to the chilling effectiveness of many of his films. Hitchcock gave us a detail here and there, and our minds filled in the rest.

Not only was this style a product of shrewd directorial restraint, but it was part and parcel of the times as well. Hitchcock’s films existed before the ratings system, and thus were subject to the censorial force of the Production Code Administration (also known as the Hays Code). Movies could be released without a Code seal, but through the stigma this caused such films would often have trouble finding theaters which would be willing to show them. It was also understood that the big studio films with big stars that often characterized Hitchcock’s work had far too much riding on them not to be released with Production Code approval. So Hitchcock articulated stories of obsession, murder, and sexual frustration with innuendo and implication rather than blatant exhibition of content. Not that Hitchcock wouldn’t have employed such restraint and trust in audience imagination regardless, but such factors help make his films so rich and enduring. And several of his films seem even more subversive as a result—movies like Vertigo (1958), which chronicled the obsession of a misogynistic stalker, and in the process subverting the nice-guy everyman persona of Jimmy Stewart, or Rope (1948), whose central protagonists are read today as being a homosexual couple.

The point here is that restraint wasn’t a tactic Hitchcock used only to create suspense, but permeated many aspects of his filmmaking and was determined by factors both creative (interior) and social (exterior). But is restraint the central aspect to the effectiveness of his type of suspense? Is the act of letting audience imagination take the reigns all it takes to be characterized as Hitchcockian? If this was the case, found footage horror films like Paranormal Activity can very accurately be called successors of Hitchcockian suspense, as they no doubt rely on the audience’s ability to infer what they don’t show rather than in an exhibition of horrifying images that they do show. The demon is terrifying because he’s never revealed. Same with the witch in The Blair Witch Project, or only seeing bits and pieces of the alien beast in the first half of Cloverfield.

This is the definition we as a filmgoing culture have, for the most part, arrived at a consensus on when it comes to Hitchcockian suspense. There’s good reason for this, as the man himself discussed at length this restrained aspect of his process, and such stylistic choices are easily identifiable within much of his canon. But this definition does in fact reduce and simplify how Hitchcock achieved suspense in most of his filmmaking.

Restraint implies minimalism, and Hitchcock was hardly a minimalist, and not every horror film or thriller that uses restraint comes across as Hitchcockian. What we think of as Hitchcockian suspense today, in which fear is induced through minimal revelation and an ambiguity allowing for audience interpretation, was something only occasionally practiced by Hitchcock himself. I can’t think of a Hitchcock film besides The Birds that ends on a note of ambiguity or contains a mystery that isn’t revealed. Rather, what Hitchcock was talking about can be illustrated best in a scene from his early British film Sabotage (1936, you can watch it here starting at 5:50 and continuing here) in which a boy is assigned to deliver a reel of film from one location to another, and he doesn’t know—while the audience does know—that a bomb exists in the film can. So we watch him go through his lengthy, banal commute while we are being totally suspended waiting for the bomb to go off. (An excerpt on this scene is featured in the nitrate film explanation montage in Inglourious Basterds, and QT also homages this scene through the iris reveal of the bomb under Eli Roth’s chair in the movie theater at the end).

Hitchcockian suspense can’t be defined as mere restraint of audience knowledge, but a careful, intricate management of the differentiation between what the audience knows and the characters know (for more information about this practice, consult his lengthy interview on Sabotage in Hitchcock/Truffaut). If we know there’s a bomb and the character doesn’t, it’s suspense; but if neither the audience nor the characters know, it’s surprise (or, to put more relevantly, a jump scare). Ambiguity and audience imagination takes a surprisingly small role in this process. It’s more about audience control. It all sounds so simple, it takes a masterful filmmaker to really pull it off. Yet these found footage horror films are released and critics like me take the bait by calling them Hitchcockian, which simply isn’t true.

I get excited when any new horror film employs restraint and trusts audience imagination, and the success of Paranormal Activity should display the powerful effectiveness of movies that do this well. It’s a welcome relief and a return to classical form after torture porn’s many manifestations of the mistaken idea that the more you show, the more terrifying it is. But Hitchcokian suspense is called Hitchcockian suspense for a reason: because it’s a means to an end that the man himself achieved and perfected time and again, one that very few other filmmakers have accomplished.

Of course, the man himself explains it better than I ever could:

What do you think?

For more Culture Warrior: Click Here. We dare you.

Culture Warrior: Slow Isn’t Boring

Landon Palmer — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 03:27:47 +0000

Pacing is a tricky thing to pull off in movies. It takes a truly talented filmmaker (and editor) to maintain a rate of movement, events, or forward-moving plotting that sustains audience interest while avoiding the potential to overwhelm. In an era where ADHD music video editing has become a decades-worn norm (with, admittedly, a great deal of its own unique artistic merit), a fast pace can become a fruitful means for audience engagement or an all-too-evident handicap trying to cover up a film’s inadequacies through distraction—in other words, it could run the gamut between Trainspotting and Crank 2, or from Martin Scorsese to recent Tony Scott, or…well, you get the picture.

But what’s even harder to pull off is the effective slow-paced film. It’s not something that comes around very often, but when it works it can result in some magnificent cinematic revelations.

I’ve been guilty of this just as much as anybody, but lately the use of the word “slow”—by critics and everyday filmgoers—to negatively characterize a film has started to bother me, because “slow” is so often used simply as a substitute for “boring.” The word slow as a descriptive term for a film’s pacing has no inherent qualitative distinction; it’s simply a description with no judgment call immediately attached to it. But slow has instead evolved into a stigma, as if the presence of slow pacing at any point in a film is automatically a disparaging element to the quality of the film as a whole. This implies—through, I’m sure, no intention of the orator or writer using the word—that fast-paced (or even moderately-paced) films warrant superior merit simply by the very structure of their pacing, regardless of strengths and weaknesses contained in the film overall. To use slow disparagingly ignores the quite apparent reality that cinema potentially embodies an endless variety of approaches to pacing and, more importantly, that some films are (*gasp*) meant to be slow.

Okay, I’ll step back a little at this point. Depending on the context, “slow” can be an appropriate means of descriptive criticism. If a slow pace stunts the film as a whole, isn’t appropriate to its tone or story, or evidently doesn’t work as intended, “slow” can be a more accurate delineation than “boring” with knowledge of the filmmaker’s intent in mind. But this knowledge is the deciding factor. If a movie is intended to be slowly paced, and comes across as such, then this is a sign of success on the filmmaker’s part, not failure. To dismiss a movie constructed in slow pace through intent deliberation becomes self-defeating from the outset, for if this intended pacing is dismissed and the spectator/critic can’t even meet this intention halfway, what the filmmaker is attempting to achieve with such a pace, or any other merits of the film therein, are rendered impossible to broach. It’s also stating the obvious and sounds dumb. To criticize a deliberately slow movie for being such is like criticizing a horror movie for being scary—it becomes a delineation of what a film isn’t rather than what it is, and ultimately filters down to matters of personal taste rather than qualitative, informed criticism. Upon closer examination, it’s evident that there are many merits of slow-paced filmmaking.

I recently Netflix’d Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Light (2007), a film about the philandering patriarch of a Mennonite family living in Mexico. With rural Mexico beautifully captured in the film’s setting and the laborious Amish-lite lifestyle typical of the Mennonites accurately portrayed here, it makes sense that a fast pace would be a disservice to the subject matter at hand. So Reygadas here employs a pacing that matches the lifestyle of the characters, taking in the sounds and slow-moving reality of nature that stands in stark contrast to the metropolitan lifestyle of the filmgoer that would most likely see this film because of its limited theatrical release. The end result is an honest complementary style to the film’s story and a rare look into a way of life unfamiliar to most audiences. The slow pace allows one to be immersed in a time and place to such an extent that the honking of car horns and the noise of intrusive technology will come as a shock when leaving the theater, or a welcome contrast when entering it. To use a more familiar example, many of my friends who have come to love AMC’s Mad Men initially had a cautious or even negative reaction to the show’s deliberate pacing until giving in. Being a television show that contains an attractive, even cinematic approach to visuals, the slow pace allows audiences to take in the illustrious scenery as well as establish the slower pace of life of the early 1960s (portraying the slower pace of life existing even in the metropolitan areas of the past).

In addition to helping portray a time and place or subculture accurately, the slow pace also allows for a potentially hypnotic tone through the framing of beautiful images when the right filmmaker is taking the reigns. Kubrick was probably best at this, staging prolonged shots that came across more as photographs than moving images, and I struggle to think of a director who incorporated more stunning imagery in every single shot than the perfectionist that was Kubrick. Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood (2007) and Gus Van Sant’s recent work before Milk (his “return” to indie in Gerry (2002), Elephant (2003), Last Days (2005), and Paranoid Park (2007)) contained pacing that not only slowed, but sometimes came to a halt, which allowed for some rare, unique cinematic moments and, if for nothing else, surmount whatever other flaws exist (i.e., Van Sant’s sometimes suffocating pretension) with an intricate depiction of sustained, arrestingly photographed imagery. This allows the frame to become like a piece of art displayed in a museum in that we are allowed to examine its details at our will and on our own watch rather than fall to the dictation of the director/editor. There’s a reason that the most stunning of these slow-paced works were photographed in 2.35:1—the CinemaScope ratio is a perfectly epic means to contain such artful filmmaking.

But besides setting-appropriate pacing and the potential for manifesting beautiful imagery, the most important asset of the slow-paced film is its ability to manipulate time in a way that only cinema can. Say what you want about the patience-testing pace of a film like Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York (2008), cinema’s ability to make a two-hour film that takes place over several decades actually feel like it takes place over several decades is an impressive and underutilized feat, unavailable in any other art form. Cinema’s ability to speed up time and manipulate chronology (e.g., Goodfellas) is complemented by its equally potent potential to slow moments down to an even more measured pace than reality (and I’m not just talking about the use of slow-motion). Without doubt the king of this style of filmmaking was Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky, who with films like Andrei Rublev (1966), Solaris (1972) and Stalker (1979) had an uncanny ability to meticulously slow time down, as time itself stopped—and our lives, in turn, halted—while experiencing one of his films (indicated by his appropriately-titled autobiography Sculpting in Time). The end result contained an observation of details usually ignored by most films and overshadowed by the faster pace of reality. Many are turned off by Tarkovsky’s films, but I believe that those giving his films, and other slow films like these, a chance can embolden an experience truly unique and exclusive to cinema, one in which the moving image can be so immersive to the degree that we get lost in it, and thus encounter details—and even, sometimes, revelations—which are hardly apparent elsewhere.

Culture Warrior is our weekly walk on the wild side with actual film school graduate Landon Palmer. To read more from Landon, you can follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/landon_speak

Culture Warrior: Horror 1960

Landon Palmer — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 17:34:33 +0000

Although Halloween has come and gone, the FSR universe of readers and contributors alike have hardly satiated their horror fix, so this week’s Culture Warrior presents three movies that were major game-changers for the genre.

1960 saw the horror film, and filmgoing at large, change dramatically and permanently. Long gone was the horror of the literary monster that characterized 1930s Universal classics personified by Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, and the dawn of a new decade in turn also said goodbye to the 1950s B-movie creature features. In 1960 horror switched its gaze to a far more terrifying direction: inward. Horror now focused on the horrific capacities of the human being, on the grotesque monster potentially inside all of us. No longer would horror be relegated to B-movie status, instead enabled with the capacity, through depiction of psychological trauma and inner monstrosity, for a unique kind of profundity that other genres couldn’t even come close to. Three different films from three different countries, all released in 1960, manifested the new brand of horror in fascinating ways. The following films are, without a doubt, essentials of modern horror.

USA: Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock)

Hitchcock’s magnum opus was a game-changer on many levels. Within the horror genre itself, it challenged expectations by removing villainy from a one-dimensional locale of pure evil and replaced it with all the vulnerability and nuance entailed in being human. Like the still-reverberating horrors of WWII, Anthony Perkins’s Norman Bates embodied an evil so banal that it couldn’t be ignored or dismissed by the one-dimensionality implied by the “evil” label. Bates represented something different: the evil made possible through insecurity, through a fear that projected more fear onto those who encounter him. What’s so horrifying about Bates’s evil is that it’s hardly evil at all. His actions, rather, seem something, given the right conditioning and abuse, that any impressionable mind is capable of embodying. Evil in Psycho is not a brute force that can be wiped out without further concern, it’s instead an unstoppable presence that moves its way through people and culture. Bates proves that being meek or (seemingly) sincere is not antithetical to manifesting horrible actions, that the villain can simultaneously be the victim of devices far beyond himself. The world of Psycho is the world of the grey, refusing the simplistic, irrelevant delineation implied in a perceived war between the opposing Biblical forces of good and evil.

Psycho also changed the course of filmmaking narratively, articulating its confusion of good/evil movie logic by getting rid of its perceived protagonist shortly after the first act break, thus establishing a no-rules brand of mainstream horror. This extended to a drastic change in film spectatorship, as venues which previously allowed patrons to come and go as they please (audiences often bought tickets at any time of day and would walk into the middle of a movie to wait for the movie to end, start over, and come back around to where they began) were now forced to make audiences come exclusively as the movie started, refusing latecomers so as to not ruin the shock value of the film’s well-kept secret. Every serious moviegoer that appreciates a quiet, orderly theater is in Mr. Hitchcock’s debt for this.

UK: Peeping Tom (Michael Powell)

Sure, while Hitchcock explored voyeurism to disturbing degrees with Rear Window, Vertigo (anybody that can make Jimmy Stewart a creepster is doing something right) and even Psycho, nobody had the brass balls Michael Powell had to depict a sexual obsession and psychosis as troubling as this. I’ll defend any day of the week Psycho’s stance as a classic, but one has to admit that its scares have become so iconic that it’s lost a great deal of its shock value. Powell (this time without his directing cohort Emeric Pressburger), however, made Peeping Tom fifty years ago and the film is still as discomfiting as it ever was in its exhibition of a film production assistant who captures his murders of women on film, complete with a mirror beside the camera so that his victims may witness their own final moments of life. The psychology of obsession, misogyny, and sexual inadequacy aside, Peeping Tom is at its most confrontational when it frames these murders from the first-person perspective of the eye of the camera, thus making this film the forerunner for the recent trend of found footage horror filmmaking as established by Paranormal Activity and [Rec].

Seeing murders through the camera’s eye, of course, is not the same as seeing it from the murderer’s, so the focalization of the frame makes the camera itself as complicit in the act of violence as the murderer. Enjoying this film can be a complex and troubling experience, as Peeping Tom’s audience was one of the firsts to ever be confronted with their own desire to witness violence on behalf of genre, and seeing death face-to-face (despite the fact that it’s staged) implicitly makes us and the murderer one in the same. Added interpretive value comes from the tripod-knife he uses to kill his victims, making for quite the penetrating phallic symbol (read feminist film scholar Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” for more on the typically masculine complicit violence of the audience found in films like these). Although I’d be wary of a remake, I’d honestly be interested in what Peeping Tom would look like with an update to the seriously invasive DIY culture of voyeurism through digital technology/media, YouTube, and social networking sites.

France: Eyes Without a Face (Georges Franju)

Where Psycho and Peeping Tom make the monster human, Eyes Without a Face turns the human into a monster. In an innovative spin on the classic mad scientist formula, Franju’s film finds a surgeon routinely hunting down beautiful women so that their faces can serve as sources of surgical transplant for his daughter’s face, which was disfigured in a tragic automobile accident. The film serves as a scathing critique of the lengths people will go to achieve allegedly objective standards of beauty, but its real enduring appeal lies in Franju’s eclectic filmmaking which finds him altering between slick, elegant, assured style and gritty, visceral gore. It’s a beautiful contradiction that prevents its spectator from ever getting too comfortable in their seat, priming them for the inevitable squirming that entails the narrative trajectory of this film.

So many horror films are indebted to Eyes Without a Face that it’s impossible to name them all, but it’s undeniable that the disquieting surgery scene stands the predecessor for visceral horror at large (see, at your own risk, Franju’s short “Blood of the Beasts” (1949) for a primer on his relentless depiction of violence (it’s possibly a Holocaust allegory, but it’s undeniably his unique brand of horror)) and David Cronenberg’s visceral style especially (e.g., Dead Ringers). Also, the mask Christiane wears allegedly inspired Michael Meyers’s immortal façade. But what places Eyes Without a Face thematically alongside Psycho and Peeping Tom is that it employs the mad scientist and takes away the madness. Of course the surgeon’s actions are unforgivable, but he is never depicted as psychotic, and, through his daughter’s tragedy, the film even approaches empathy for the motive of his actions, if not approval. The true protagonist and antagonist of this film, like the delineation of good and evil between the three of these films, is made indistinguishable, even irrelevant, as no real understanding can be attained through dismissing society’s agents of horror as evil.

Culture Warrior is our weekly walk on the wild side with actual film school graduate Landon Palmer. To read more from Landon, you can follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/landon_speak

Culture Warrior: Good and Bad Biopics

Landon Palmer — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 17:42:16 +0000

The successful biopic is something that takes a truly masterful hand to accomplish. A lifetime, like history itself, contains no inherent narrative—no arc or three-act structure—yet, like in studying history, we narratavize the exceptional human life in order to better understand it. In biopics this involves a lot of condensing, creative liberties, and difficult executive decision, requiring delicate filmmakers to execute properly and convincingly.

Biopic is also sometimes an elusive definition, as not every movie based on a true story should be considered a biopic of its lead character, and it’s often difficult to distinguish the two. Capote, for instance, despite the title, is hardly a biopic of Truman Capote, but specifically portrays the writing of In Cold Blood. Yet one could argue that it is a biopic because it covers one of the most significant, or at least the most notorious, event in that author’s life, and many of the best biopics often cover such significant events rather than focus on the life as a whole (Ed Wood comes to mind).

But a fascinating life story does not necessarily make a good biopic. This weekend’s new release, Mira Nair’s Amelia—an inevitable biopic of Amelia Earhart and a clunky mess of a film disguised as Oscar bait—shows that the interest of the subject does not entail a successful telling of the story; just because we find her fascinating does not mean the filmmakers should suppose we will find her narrativized life story fascinating from the get-go. Too often the formula of the biopic is to cram as many important life incidents as possible into the running time while treading on the appeal of the character, which is why these films are so often better-known for the oft-recognized embodiments of the individual by the lead performers rather than the merits of the films themselves, a conundrum that often allows for incredible performances within weak, directionless movies (e.g., Jamie Foxx in Ray). Too often do biopics do no more than tread on the magnetism of the life portrayed and equally, if not more so, on the performer portraying that figure. This practice is especially prevalent in the musical biopic, a genre all its own that has made recognizable some of the genre’s most apparent clichés: overcoming a tragic event/adversity/poverty in childhood to achieve recognized musical talent and fame until an addiction (drug, sex, alcohol) is fought and (sometimes) overcome. It’s funny that a single unique, exceptional life story can be told in the exact same way time and again.

When a biopic succumbs in total to these clichés, often enough these true stories don’t ring true at all. Some filmmakers don’t realize that a movie based on fact is not enough, that a “based on a true story” title card can’t be expected to be all that is required to suspend disbelief. All movies—be they based on fact or works of pure fiction—need some degree of conviction in order to come off convincingly. Don’t just tell us your story is true, make us feel the truth, the reality, the immediacy of an allegedly important life story. Convince us that we have something to learn and gain from observing this person.

We deserve better biopics, and several trends need to be wiped off the map for that to happen.

First of all, don’t try to contain an entire life in your movie. This is the first big misstep, thinking that a life story can be successfully and adequately told in the running time of a film. This brings with it inherent contradictions, as any life story usually necessitates creative liberties for narrative focus, so trying to fit as much information into a life story while condensing that story usually results in people nitpicking your facts. Admit from the outset that you can’t fit an entire life in your film, and the story that truly needs to be told becomes a lot easier to recognize. Usually biopics portray famous people, so it should be assumed that the audience knows about the person portrayed to some degree going in, so under that assumption, there’s a lot of groundwork that really doesn’t need to be laid. We don’t need to know these characters from birth to death—some biopics manage to tell us a lot about a person’s youth without portraying it through subtlety and inference. Bronson, Milk, and Control are three recent, and three very different, biopics which focused on a small portion of their characters’ lives, and as a result they gave us coherent, compelling stories and convincing cases of the importance of the figures portrayed. They were self-sustaining, not overwhelming.

Second to this, embrace creative liberties. Filmmaking has an inherent fiction. Putting Will Smith in front of a camera and calling him Muhammad Ali is a lie in of itself, so let go of any loyalties you feel to each little detail and work on telling the best story possible. Sometimes making a fiction out of a real person approaches an essential truth about them that a strict-to-the-details story can’t achieve, like the meandering psychedelic mosaic that is I’m Not There, a film that admits from the outset that some famous lives elude understanding the more one investigates, and that one person can in fact be an amalgamation of many.

Next, don’t be afraid of making your figure an asshole. Everybody’s human, and most often even the most beloved public figures (or, rather, especially the most beloved public figures) make shitty decisions. Ray Charles, Johnny Cash, and even Amelia Earhart did things in their lives that justifiably made them, at least temporarily, assholes. Because the story is so often meant to be inspirational, we hold the lives of these famous people (especially if they have passed on, silenced from expressing counterpoint to their cinematic double) to such a high regard that we become timid to shed any negative light on them at all. If you want to portray a life, don’t make them a saint, a figure so pure and unapproachable that even their shortcomings are framed as virtues. Show us the true life, warts and all. Instead these movies deal with issues of infidelity, irresponsibility, and drug abuse with kids’ gloves, diving in briefly and then emerging as if there are no long-term consequences when famous people commit such acts.

Lastly, lose the destiny crap. Nobody is destined to become the world’s greatest country singer or the first woman to fly across the Atlantic. It takes a great deal of hard work, failure, compromise, ass-kissing, and most of all, sheer coincidence for infamy to happen. But ever since John Ford’s The Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) biopics have framed their characters solely through hindsight, as if every event of their life was a preordained essential step towards their inevitable achievement of success. Nobody is famous solely because of their talent. These figures rose about at a time when masses needed something that in turn made such a figure magnetic, larger-than-life, turning Amelia Earhart into Amelia Earhart. Timing is essential to cultural resonance, and it’s a process more complex and more significant than some connect-the-dots achievement towards notoriety—there’s a reason it happened at this particular place and at this specific time and that’s what makes it interesting.

The central flaw and contradiction of Amelia is that it shows, through Richard Gere’s character, how celebrity is manufactured through media manipulation and commerce, yet the movie itself succumbs to the same clouding mythology that enables such a cult of the celebrity in the first place, elevating the figure being filmed to a status above the flawed, mortal human being while simultaneously relegating them to nothing more than an icon of delicately constructed significance rather than a fallible, imperfect, multidimensional personality. We don’t go to a biopic to see a famous person in the same way we’ve seen them everywhere else in media—we expect and deserve something more intimate and real.

What do you think? What are some biopics that you think work well and why?

Culture Warrior: Through a Child’s Eyes

Landon Palmer — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 18:16:59 +0000

I try to avoid getting all autobiographical in my posts, but when discussing Where the Wild Things Are I really can’t avoid it. When I was around fourteen years old I was certain I wanted to become a filmmaker (that certainty has since changed), and my childhood is basically the reason for this. Like many children, I lived largely in my own head, preoccupying myself with the peculiar adventures and creatures of my imagination that manifested an immediate reality that seemed to make so much more sense and feel far more profoundly real than gazing onto my playroom through the objective eyes of adulthood. With the accompaniment of toys, costumes, and the occasional friend, the power of youthful imagination enabled an improvised, lucid creation of characters and narratives that could seem to go on forever. This practice, of course, is better known as playing, but it often felt more like storytelling.

Filmmaking in many ways seems like a natural extension of storytelling during playtime. As a child you use the development of characters and narratives to visualize and act out specific scenarios appealing to you. Filmmaking is this same practice, or at least this same vague idea, applied with time, deliberation, structure, and knowledge. Some of cinema’s most famous filmmakers have cited childhood as an inspiration for their eventual careers. Spielberg, who made amateur films as a kid and often uses childhood as a major theme in his films, has repeatedly stated in so many words that his career is an attempt to recapture the imagination of childhood, or at least make good on that imaginative potential.

Manifesting the unlimited imaginative potential of childhood is, of course, simply one of many ways to utilize the moving image, but the head-in-the-clouds ideal of cinema as an object that has the ability to bring dreams to life draws to mind the boundless directions the creative mind particular to childhood can reach. As a kid I had images and stories in my head, and later in life filmmaking seemed to be a way that could make those images real. Of course, it’s never that easy. Filmmaking is bound by restraints that can often limit creativity as much as it has the potential to enliven it. The boundaries of budget, time, collaboration, work hours, practicality, responsibility, and rationality don’t exactly preserve the spontaneous creative urge of youth. Perhaps the essential difference is the development of critical thinking in adulthood. Even when indulging in creative ventures, we adults question the intent and execution of our projects of imagination with skepticism and criticism, and even the most abstract and spontaneous forms of art are intent with meaning. This, of course, is a necessary practice that makes for a better artist, but it is distinctly different from the comparatively lucid, spontaneous, uncritical, and often purely emotion-driven “works of art” made throughout childhood. So attempting a film career to manifest the imagination of childhood is something of a contradiction and an impossibility, as cinema as a technical achievement involves the necessary critical capabilities of adulthood with the fueling creativity of childhood that grownup modes of thinking naturally inhibit.

It is in this context that Spike Jonze’s adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s infamous children’s book achieves something truly unique, even remarkable. This is the first film in quite some time that shows how telling a story from the logical perspective of a child is not the same thing as telling a dumb story. Jonze here outlines, from the motives and actions of the characters to the larger structural perspective of the film itself, the emotional logic of childhood. The film is structured episodically—there is no specific goal or achievement outlined for the characters, rather the film is strung together with episodes of events naturally tied to instances of conflict. This is exactly the structure of childhood play, moving from one preoccupation to the next at the pace of a young attention span; here games abruptly end, and massive projects are abandoned in favor of arising conflicts or newly inspired ventures. Where the Wild Things Are presents a world that needs little explanation—from the nature of Max’s real ties to that world to details in the arrangement of the wild things’ society—for through child’s eyes the unexplained and improvised act is the one that most naturally makes sense. Childhood logic here is never illogical, and to act as a child is not the same thing as being childish.

Jonze also thankfully captures a child’s perspective without submitting to the sentimental trappings of idealizing childhood. From the outset, childhood is never presented in this film as innocent, blissful, or enviable. While childhood has potential for great joy, it has equal potential for loneliness and sorrow. The nature of play as presented in the film—especially in the war of the mud clots—involves some heavy emotional bruises and an all-too-familiar capacity for cruelty. Childhood can be a relentless and discouraging place, and (as they are, depending on interpretation, objects of Max’s imagination) the wild things act and interact with the same emotional logic of a child Max’s age, equally as prone to spontaneous bursts of positive energy as they are to overwhelming frustration with no outlet. That they are larger than life, intimidating characters with an equal capacity for compassion and cruelty makes all the more apparent the potential constructive and destructive behavior of childhood and the consequences therein (just as there are repercussions for Max biting his mother, Carol’s violent behavior amongst his brethren has sustaining negative effects). The physical breadth of the wild things accompanied with their childlike behavior reminds us that as a kid, nothing seems innocent, pure, or inconsequential. We can get weary and hurt by the world long before we even have the cognitive capability to attempt understanding it. The wild things embody (quite literally) writ large all that is embroiled inside Max’s tiny stature.

Jonze here simply achieves something I’ve never seen before. He manages to capture the spontaneous lack of logic in childhood within an art form that, by contrast, requires a careful, deliberate process of logic every tiny step of the way (especially with a movie of this scale). It’s difficult to encapsulate exactly what Jonze here has achieved, as he seems to have tapped into something essential, something beyond cognition, something the critical capabilities of adulthood prevent me from fully coming to terms with. If anything, it was these critical adult attributes (as both movie critic and grownup) that prevented me from enjoying the film even more than I did. While many parts of this movie had me emotionally enraptured, I could never quite reach where my emotions seemed to be headed, constantly being pulled away from an emotional apex (and WTWTA is a film far more rooted in emotion than, say, rationality (which is not to be confused with plausibility)). It felt like the adult in me kept getting in the way. Never have I envied more the movie-viewing eyes of my single-digit self.

Culture Warrior is our weekly walk on the wild side with actual film school graduate Landon Palmer. To read more from Landon, you can follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/landon_speak

Culture Warrior: Found Footage Filmmaking

Landon Palmer — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 19:25:57 +0000

If there is ever a sleeper hit in 2009, Paranormal Activity is it. Accompanied with a lackluster visual marketing campaign (lame poster, lamer trailer), the years-long shelved film is now encountering success by an intense and calculated word-of-mouth, demanding a wider release through online petitions and an exponentially increasing per-theater average to an astonishing total this weekend in the #5 spot with $7 million in only 160 theaters. The film works with its rather simple, straightforward idea of amping up the creepiness slowly and with as minimal revealing material possible (rarely these days do horror films get so much out of so little). The device this movie uses to achieve its creepiness is also simple and is becoming an increasingly familiar way to make horror films, framing the film as an archive of home-video footage made by the victims themselves.

This approach to horror arguably started with The Blair Witch Project and has been since reawakened with more recent films like Cloverfield, Diary of the Dead, [Rec], its US remake Quarantine, [Rec] 2, and now Paranormal. Blair Witch ten years ago (yes, it really is ten years old) relied on a shrewd marketing campaign taking place on both the grassroots (it takes the disputed title as the first movie hyped up by the Internet) and professional levels (its trailer did accompany The Phantom Menace, after all). It also used the hype of its notoriously creepy Sundance screening to bankroll into its mainstream success. This, however, occurred when there was still a conversation going on regarding whether or not the footage was real, a conversation that ended shortly after the film’s commercial release. Inevitably, a huge backlash occurred, as many attested that believing the footage was real was integral to its effectiveness as a horror movie—without that, all you had left was nauseating camerawork and an ineffective gimmick of a concept.

As with many sleeper hits, a similar backlash will no doubt occur with Paranormal Activity, but the film seems to operate effectively as a scary movie whether or not one is duped into thinking it’s real, and it seems nobody involved with this film is trying to sell it as found footage. This I believe is indicative of a significant change in how we view fictional media objects posing as nonfiction, evidential, or found footage, and why a movie like Paranormal Activity can be released ten years after Blair Witch and use the same conceit to a much better effect.

While Blair Witch may represent progressive DIY marketing as much as it does clever (if still gimmicky) DIY filmmaking, its use of 16mm and home video footage is indicative of its status as part and parcel of a dial-up era still making the transition to the digital global neighborhood we know today. Blair Witch was part of Web 1.0, existing before YouTube, blogging and vlogging, or the many social networking sites that we use every day, enabling us to potentially express our random thoughts to people all around the globe.

Leading up to 2009 we’ve seen the collapse of grassroots and corporate worlds, lines blurred between amateur and professional sources of web content as the professionals have become able to convincingly imitate the amateurs, or the fake and staged being able to imitate what we previously accepted as real (e.g., lonelygirl15). We’re used to seeing talking heads on websites spouting varied opinions on subjects ranging from the Iran elections to Obama’s birthplace to whether or not Britney should be left alone. This remains a culture in which we’ve felt invited to turn the camera on ourselves, where our daily thoughts are worthy of dissemination as long as they don’t exceed 140 characters. Occasionally we take interest in the rare people out there documenting themselves who either have something important to say or say nothing in a compelling way—the problem is, we can’t always know where they’re coming from. Is this the puppet of a lobbyist, or is this a normal Joe just feeling the need to put his words in the ether of cyberspace? Am I being friended or followed by a person or a robot? At some point it simply doesn’t matter, as the compelling degree of the content trumps the validity or merits of the source.

We’ve done the same with documentaries, interrogating every detail and being aware of how the camera (both ideologically and aesthetically) frames an issue or the way a filmmaker stages events. Where audiences simply took the benefit of the doubt in decades before, blindly assuming that documentaries were objective documents of reality, audiences now are far keener (in healthy and in nitpicking ways) to question every little detail and seek out the documentarian’s agenda. Even Errol Morris—the anti-Michael Moore—was accused of agenda-driven filmmaking when admitting that he paid his interview subjects for last year’s Standard Operating Procedure, which is actually common practice in nonfiction filmmaking. On the other hand, we also consume narratives that are obviously fiction existing in the guise of nonfiction, as faux-doc shows like The Office and Parks and Recreation structure their laughs through shaky-camera immediacy and direct address, a format which would have been distracting for the sitcom format fifteen years ago.

There’s no way Blair Witch would have been successful today. The film would have been dismissed as fake immediately, or its veracity would have been so questioned or debated over as to render it irrelevant or label it untrustworthy. Telling a 21^st century audience “this is real” simply won’t work anymore. Why Paranormal Activity works is that it remains an effective piece of filmmaking whether or not one believes it to be a document. The “San Diego Police Dept.” header at the film’s beginning does not serve as forged evidence trying to convince the audience that the film is something it’s not (unlike the forged evidence on Blair Witch’s website), rather it simply exists to be consistent with the overall aesthetic. Paranormal Activity plugs into our culture’s acceptance that effectively pulling off the illusion of the real is not the same thing as passively accepting something as real. This film works off the notion that we’re used to normal people around the world turning the camera onto their own faces while we don’t know nor care whether or not it’s real or fake—the aesthetic is now so familiar and the content so compelling that it’s effective nonetheless. And the requirement of compelling content is probably why this approach has been so popular recently in the horror genre—there’s something exciting about the extraordinary posing as the mundane.

Fantastic Fest Review: Bronson

Landon Palmer — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 16:31:28 +0000

When I’ve shared the trailer for Bronson with friends, I repeatedly noticed an initial confusion followed by curious interest. The confusion always results from the question, “Why would there be a biopic called Bronson not about the most famous Bronson?” (that’d be Charles), a question quickly answered as the eponymous protagonist of Nicholas Winding Refn’s Bronson states that he adopted the infamous action film star’s moniker to create his own tough-guy persona from scratch. This title-to-film confusion is indicative of the larger unconventional, surprising, and expectation-defying nature of Bronson as a biopic. Bronson is a truly unique and ambitious, occasionally impenetrable piece of filmmaking carefully calculated in its execution and matched by Tom Hardy’s magnificent, career-defining lead performance.

Bronson is the story of Michael Gordon Petersen, aka Charlie Bronson, one of England’s most notorious prisoners. The film is in no way your run-of-the-mill biopic, forgoing the typical linear inciting-childhood-incident-to-fulfilling-legacy-in-adulthood that many a mainstream biopic subscribes to. Even though the character in question is far from notorious (at least in American culture), so skipping over certain life incidents would not be seen as disappointing, the filmmakers smartly concede from the outset that no entire life can be successfully covered within the span of a normal film’s running time, so they instead set their ambitions on a handful of detailed episodes in Bronson’s ‘career’. Even when Petersen’s childhood and youth are covered in the film, it is dealt and done with so briskly in a way that seems to spit in the face of convention, using nothing in the story of his younger years to explain his adult behavior and almost painting it as completely irrelevant, or as arbitrary and meaningless as the crimes that get him into prison time and again. Petersen/Bronson is framed as always having been one who challenged authority, but none of this is rooted in simplistic demons or insecurities. He’s simply a force of nature for the very sake of it, and this comes off as far more fascinating than the alternative.

Bonson’s narrative is punctuated with snippets of the titular character reciting the details of his life story as a one man-play in an elegant opera house. This peculiar approach to narration starts off as a direct character address until the audience is revealed, and it becomes apparent from the beginning that these scenes have no direct relationship to the rest of the film. There is no point in Bronson’s life where he actually does this; rather this is a device for the film’s unique method of storytelling.

To me these scenes are indicative of what Bronson essentially is and what it does and doesn’t do. These scenes introduce the idea of performance, which I interpreted as the film’s thematic core. Throughout his life, Petersen/Bronson seeks notoriety, and surprisingly finds prison to be a place where he feels he can make a name for himself, where he can (ironically enough) live to his full potential, a place where he aims to gain a reputation as the most dangerous prisoner in England. His crimes and abuse of the guards and fellow inmates of the prisons and institutions he is relegated to are never posed as hateful or truly dangerous. There is never a sense that he has anything less than complete control over the situation. His motivation is not money, power, bloodlust, or any of the other trappings films typically instill upon such characters. He simply causes chaos for others for his own amusement. It gives him worth. So in a sense, Bronson never really is England’s most dangerous prisoner, but a man posing to be, a man who wants people to think this is what he is. This is why his adoption of the name of a famous actor is essential to his personality (even before he chooses this name, there is an overt sense throughout that he is actively molding a vision of himself). Like a movie star, he embodies on the surface a persona rather than a personality. He is constantly acting, with fellow prison guards and prisoners as his always-attentive audience. The framing of the narrative with Bronson’s direct address, then, establishes from the beginning this performativity essential to understanding his nature.

Bronson seems to exist entirely within the head of this lead character. The film represents a case of the unreliable narrator as he chronicles his own life through his own words, occupying every scene and nearly every frame. We never see Bronson from the perspective of others or from any outside source, so there’s no way to say whether or not he achieves the reputation he thinks he has earned (there’s no evidence of fear from prison guards, neither fear nor respect from fellow prisoners, and the closest title he gets is “the most expensive prisoner in England” in a newspaper). So the film’s dense formal style, including its direct address, goes hand-in-hand with this subjective narrative approach. There is evidence, especially in his affair with a woman he thinks he loves, that Bronson doesn’t really embody the confidence he sees in himself, but all that’s important here is how Bronson sees Bronson as a larger-than-life figure to be reckoned with.

This filmed has been called “Kubrickian” by others, mostly by comparison to A Clockwork Orange; and like that film, Bronson stages much of its imagery as if it were a photograph rather than a moving image, allowing characters the time to stand still comfortably within their surroundings. The few episodes that comprise Bronson as a whole are lengthy, stagey slow burns, often resulting in some beautiful imagery. Unlike the hurried pace and attempted real-time naturalism of his Pusher trilogy, Refn here allows his images to breathe and imbues a dense, thoroughly stylistic filmmaking personality into every moment of the film. Bronson also, like Kubrick, contains some of the most iconic and artful (and wide-ranging) employments of classical and popular film music to grace the screen in quite some time, particularly its climactic appropriation of “Viens Malika” from Léo Delibes’s Lakmé and its use The Pet Shop Boys’ “It’s a Sin” as a motif (for some reason British films can capture the 80s like no others). This is not to say the film in any way copies Kubrick, rather it seems more like a point of departure. Bronson is a rare film where stye matches substance. However, Refn’s style is sometimes overbearing and occasionally brings the film to a halt, and I occasionally wished he would lay off the formal staginess and let the film flow a bit more naturally. Additionally, the film felt like it should’ve picked up the pace time and again, not because it ever feels slow or boring, but because I wish I could have seen more of this fascinating character. In many ways Bronson left me unsatiated.

This film, of course, wouldn’t work without a commanding lead performance, and Tom Hardy knocks it out of the park with an intricate, detailed, fully dimensional performance that sustains even the film’s weaker moments (appropriate for a character that is always ‘performing’). It’s a true character embodiment and one of the standout performances of the year. Hardy thankfully avoids the distracting business of quirky mannerisms that many actors would ham up with a character as eccentric and enigmatic as this. Hardy avoids the easy route, using Bronson’s moments of quiet restraint to inform the character just as thoroughly as his outbursts, and having a sense of humor all the while.

The Upside: Ambitious, experimental bravura filmmaking in an unconventional story of a fascinating character, grounded with a magnetic lead performance.

The Downside: The movie occasionally gets suffocated by a style that doesn’t always do it justice.

On the Side: Bronson has been accused of taking many a creative liberty, fudging a lot of facts of the real man’s life. To me, since the movie is about a performance, seems to take place within the character’s subjectivity, and does not aim to tell a true-life story, these liberties are justifiable.

Culture Warrior: Responsible Film Criticism and the Case of ‘Antichrist’

Landon Palmer — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 18:39:16 +0000

Warning: In the interest of discussing the problem of spoilers, this article discusses the act of spoiling in criticism of the film Antichrist, a discussion which necessitates revealing spoilers. Confused, yet? So am I. Anywho, if you’re planning on seeing Antichrist, don’t read the fifth paragraph of this post.

Everybody gripes about how movie trailers reveal almost everything one would want to not know about a movie going in, sometimes spoiling plot details that occur well into the second and third act. It’s a rare and special experience to go into a movie with little to no expectations—that is not to say low expectations, but without expectations strategically shaped by advertising and materials written about films—to the point that such an experience has become an absolute anomaly. Even if one avoids press, advertising, and tweets about a film, buzz emanating from unintentionally overheard conversations, or simply shaping the atmosphere going in, is probably that hardest thing of all to avoid. I wish as much as anybody that trailers revealed less, or that I didn’t often spend the entirety of a film silently, unintentionally notifying those moments seen in the trailer and anticipating those other moments from the trailer yet to come. Nevertheless, I choose to watch trailers—sometimes multiple times—before seeing a movie. I simply enjoy watching them and believe trailers to be (like the music video) a cinematic art form all their own (e.g., the recent trailers for A Serious Man and Up in the Air). However, I’ve made the habit in recent years not to read reviews, articles, or even press kits before seeing a film, because in my own experience these can be the most potentially spoiling of a given film’s many outlets for analysis or advertisement.

Of course, it is ultimately the responsibility of the filmgoer to shape the framing of their viewing experience through an active, informed method of choosing whether or not to consume trailers or reviews before seeing a film, but this doesn’t remove the responsibility from the trailer editor or the film critic when it comes to potentially revealing too much. For movie critics in particular, revealing some plot detail is par for the course. Often occurring in the second paragraph of a review, a plot overview is often necessary to shape and qualify the criticisms and praises within the review at large. But sometimes movie critics overstep their bounds, and it remains vital, no matter the critic’s particular opinion of the film, that the review not reveal anything that may spoil essential surprises or take away from the film’s intended weight and effect beyond the simple, restrained, typical plot synopsis we’ve come to expect (spoilers are more acceptable, of course, accompanied with a warning like the one at the top of this page). Although some of us actively choose to avoid reviews or related articles until after we’ve seen the film in question, it must always be safe for a moviegoer to read everyday film criticism before deciding to venture out to the theater and spend their hard-earned cash.

The peculiar example of Antichrist seems to me a compelling case study because it represents a special situation where movie critics by and large have felt justified in revealing certain plot points within the body of their reviews that should not be known going into this film simply because their very opinion (often negative) of this film makes it seem okay.

Take Todd McCarthy’s Cannes review of the film in Variety from May. Though Variety is an industry publication often concerned with the bottom line, their early reviews sometimes set the stage for later critical consensus. For many reasons McCarthy’s review is one of the most appalling pieces of film criticism I have ever read (it must be noted that I’ve felt rather neutral about McCarthy’s criticism up to this point). Though I am not the biggest proponent of Lars von Trier’s latest provaca-film, my opinion on its merits differs from McCarthy’s significantly (particularly with his first-sentence dismissal of Antichrist as an ‘art-film fart’—jeez, with language like that you’d think he works for a movie blog or something). But my problem in this case isn’t with his particular take on the film (just as valid as anybody else’s) or his unfortunate rhetorical approach, but rather his warning-free revelations of the specifics of Antichrist.

The Spoilery Fifth Paragraph: One of my problems with this write-up is McCarthy’s detailed partial revelation of Dafoe’s character’s fate and Gainsbourg’s character’s incapacitating him through some sort of abuse of his genitals, before not-so-cryptically mentioning a violent act Gainsbourg performs on her own genitalia. To McCarthy’s credit, he doesn’t explicitly state what happens, but mentioning these occurrences at all creates an aura of expectation not intended or made available through the film’s advertising and promotion. Combined with similar revelations made in reviews by other major publications, the new Lars von Trier film suddenly became the “genital mutilation” movie or, somewhat inaccurately in its voyage through the rumormill, the “castration” movie. McCarthy even reveals the source of the film’s now-famous line “Chaos Reigns,” a line that only works as an in-joke to those that have seen it, and a polarizing moment indicative of the larger polarized response this film has received. Laughable or not, the “Chaos Reigns” moment (a line which could potentially come this year’s “I drink your milkshake”) is only effective (forcibly taking the spectator out of the movie or leaving them curiously, if not firmly, in their seats) if it is unanticipated.

Those of us hearing or reading such reviews and gaining such knowledge with or without seeking now can’t help but see the film under this rubric, helplessly anticipating what is to come in a way that inevitably and unavoidably hinders our perspective of what comes before the film’s climax, framing our expectations in a way the filmmaker never intended. Yes, what happens in Antichrist is gruesome, but the particulars of this challenging material should remain hidden in reviews like McCarthy’s so as to give this film the chance to play to its full, intended effect. Film critics, regardless of or despite their own take on a film, have an essential responsibility to write in such a way that still allows the film experience to still potentially belong to the reader when they see it for themselves.

I get it, Antichrist is an extreme film, and it’s human nature to share the witnessing of something as demanding, graphic, unusual, challenging, pretentious, ham-fisted and even unintentionally funny as Antichrist with others. In a social setting, the sharing of such details would be acceptable, but in legitimate film criticism it is never acceptable. Even if a given critic thinks this film is an abomination, it doesn’t give them the right to spoil, as if there was an accepted philosophy somewhere that deemed it okay to spoil “bad” films but not “good” ones (a meaningless designation, of course, as all art is subjective, and some art can find worth outside the limitations of its own autonomous merit).

Film criticism is never meant to take the place of a spectator’s eventual opinion or experience. Good, effective, responsible film criticism contextualizes a film’s existence, gives an informed and reasoned argument on its merit and value, and sometimes even initiates or participates in an ongoing discourse on various subjects related to the film. It even, to a degree, is expected to frame the film with a set of expectations necessary to properly consume it (what so-and-so film is, what it isn’t). Responsible film criticism should not, however, replace the potential experience of the spectator. It should never look at itself as an ultimate, discussion-halting end-all opinion justifying the discussion of such details to help its case. The cinematic experience of the reader of film criticism is just as valid as that of the informed critic, and the potential of their experience should be handled with great care and respect above all else. Anybody can write a plot synopsis or a list of spoiling details. The successful film critic stands out in their ability to frame and discuss with authority filmic experience for the reader while allowing (even enabling) their readers the autonomy of the cinematic experience that they are always entitled to.

What do you think?

Fantastic Fest Review: Antichrist

Landon Palmer — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 14:48:59 +0000

When Lars von Trier co-wrote the Dogme 95 manifesto quite some time ago with fellow European filmmakers, he mandated that, for a film to receive the Dogme 95 seal of approval, it mustn’t include any credit given toward the director anywhere in the film. The goal, implicitly, was to remove film from the baggage that a famous director’s cult of personality carries, undermining the role of the auteur and acknowledging film as a collaborative creative experience rather than some manifestation of a vision articulated by a single artistic mind. Almost ten years after von Trier’s own Dogme 95 entry hit screens (the frustratingly commercially unavailable The Idiots (2000)), the director seems to have abandoned this radical idea entirely, as the opening seconds of his newest, the unavoidably controversial Antichrist, features his name in big letters scrawled across the screen (without the expected “directed by” or “a film by” credit).

This decade-long 180 by the director is indicative of von Trier’s active role not only within the aesthetics and themes of this newest film (suggesting a regression to pre-Dogme ideals, the gorgeous use of slow motion and black-and-white is a throwback to his earlier films Europa and An Element of Crime), but also how he has taken such a role to actively and provocatively shape audience opinion of Antichrist. In a Q&A after its premiere at Cannes last May, von Trier notoriously uttered that he is the world’s greatest living filmmaker. Only those present at the Q&A can attest to the tone and context of this statement, but there is no doubt that von Trier has an ego that translates into a weighted cult of personality of the auteur that he had sought to reject some time ago. Despite the arrogance of such a statement, it is arguably not without validity, as von Trier should be credited as one of the last of a special type of filmmaking personality, one whose worldview explicitly informs all level of content in each of his films. Von Trier, a walking contradiction, is pretty old school in the way he goes about spreading his auteur ego. He’s unwavering in his politics, intense and demanding in his filmmaking process, challenging and fearless in his technique, and he’s probably the last living filmmaker that, you know, writes manifestoes.

I mention all this because it’s impossible to view Antichrist without engaging in some debate regarding many factors surrounding the film, including the merit of von Trier’s work as a whole. While any movie critic worth his weight in DVDs should be expected to judge a movie solely by the movie itself, the experience of seeing Antichrist is determined not only by the debates and polarized reactions surrounding the film, but by the fact that the film itself seems to actively incite these ongoing debates. In many ways, the intense reactions to von Trier’s latest are exactly what the director expected and intended.

In short, Antichrist is about a dysfunctional couple (…). I provided that ellipsis for those reading this who have seen the film so that they have time to clean whatever they were drinking or eating off their computer screens. Dysfunctional, of course, is an understatement to end all understatements. The film opens with the death of the couple’s toddler, who falls out a window as the couple has sex. The rest of the film deals with the various forms of the wife’s grief. Dafoe’s character is a therapist who decides to make his wife’s grieving process his own personal project, objectively guiding her through the many stages of grief while seemingly never realizing that he too should be suffering over the loss of their shared offspring. Charlotte Giansbourg’s character’s intense emotional turmoil becomes more of a venture to allow Dafoe to prove his chops as a therapist, making her his own personal experiment, rather than a couple’s mutual process of overcoming. Gainsbourg is correct when she accuses Dafoe of emotional distance, and in this respect the film explores interesting ideas regarding gender relations in a relationship, empowerment through psychoanalysis, and relationship responsibility vs. selfish need. In a way, then, the eventual manifestation of her grief as violent action onto him is inevitable, even justified by her character logic, rather than the unremitting ‘evil’ the movie itself introduces it to possibly be. Antichrsit indeed introduces the possibility that what ideas the film itself seems to propogate may not be exactly the message that intends to come across.

Antichrist seems like at first like an unusual film to show at a genre fest, but in many ways it truly is a horror film. Here the villain is grief, and the prospect of a grief so strong that it is unavoidable and never-ending to the point of actually taking control of the person is truly terrifying, and horror is a fascinating way to encapsulate such an idea. Such an experience is inferentially universal, but Antichrist could have been much more effective if we experienced the relationships between this family of three before the paralyzing grief began. Instead von Trier launches us head first into some really emotionally complex territory, and in this respect he potentially loses a great deal of his audience long before the truly challenging material appears onscreen.

Central to how one experiences Antichrist is the way in which one makes a distinction between the perspective of the characters and the perspective we bring to the film itself. Antichrist has received many an accusation of being misogynistic. There’s certainly an argument to be made there, and the film will no doubt become a central text in feminist film theory and criticism, coupled with von Trier’s history of treating his lead actresses in not the most respectful manner (many of which have consequently resulted in some of the best performances of their careers, including Gainsbourg’s). But to call Antichrist misogynistic is like saying American Beauty is a movie the champions pedophilia. Just because the idea is introduced and explored does not mean the standpoint of the film, the filmmaker, or how we perceive the film simply and directly runs in line with that. To make such an accusation is dismissive and simplistic, ignoring the many of ideas going on in a film whose central flaw lies in its very ambition. That the message of Antichrist is confused and muddled is a reaction to be expected, but the accusation of misogyny entails a frustrated preemptive refusal to explore the film any further. If Antichrist should be lauded for anything, it’s the many debates on sexism, the depiction of violence, the responsibility and influence of the filmmaker, and the important differences between meaning intended by the filmmaker and meaning interpreted by the audience. But the only way these debates can be constructive is if one genuinely attempts to view this film outside its now-notorious knee-jerk reactions at Cannes and take it at face value.

Granted, the many messages of Antichrist do become muddled, confused, and often contradictory. The film, like all of von Trier’s work, remains intent with meaning to a suffocating degree, but unlike his other films this meaning is elusive and debatable, tarnished with holes and inconsistencies. This is not necessarily a criticism of the film, as it is refreshing to see a filmmaker with such a predetermined agenda (the guy wrote manifestos, god dammit!) who truly challenges you to take away whatever messages you may come away from this movie with. This might be the first totally unambiguous film I have seen that dares the audience to fill in its meaning themselves. Part of the muddling comes from the quite fair criticism that audience alienation results from the pretentious the execution of this film, especially in dialogue, featuring ham-fisted but frustratingly vapid and vague thematic snippets like “I was dead once, too” or “nature is the devil’s church” (and, of course, that indefensible much-quoted two-word line of dialogue from a very unexpected source that could not have come across any further from von Trier’s intention). And by the film’s second half, it is easy to feel like von Trier has copped himself out from the complexity and confident but challenging moments of wholly original (and, in its own way, violent) cinematic elegance set up in the first half. Gainsbourg’s transformation seems at times like the easy way out of an ambitious reach the director has set up for himself that he can’t quite grasp, taking his own carefully formed structure and suddenly tearing it down. But this doesn’t take away from the first half, or even from the second, as it is in this way, for better or worse, that the film truly challenges the audience. It is the first bout of elegant, intricate filmmaking, which smacks the audience on the back of the head. I simply haven’t seen anything like it before.

It is not von Trier’s intention that we like his film, but it’s also not provocation for its own sake. Antichrist is a film worthy of its existence, worthy of any non-simplistic praise and criticism it receives. It deserves to be mulled over, debated over, spit at, and embraced. I might not have enjoyed Antichrist or even thought of it as the major cinematic achievement von Trier undoubtedly regards it is, but I found the experince revealing and even enlivening. I am thankful that such films, and such filmmakers, exist to allow us to react and question. Antichrist is proof that cinema still has the capability to shock, resonate, polarize, and infuriate. It is cinema as an event. As a film it is both fascinating and infuriating, beautiful and brutal. Antichrist is neither good nor bad. It simply is, whether we like it or not.

The Upside: It’s already a pretty notorious film, and you might want to join the debate.

The Downside: Chaos reigns.

On the Side: Antichrist features an end dedication to Andrei Tarkovsky (which Cannes audiences sneered at), the beloved Soviet filmmaker who died twenty-three years ago. Besides Antichrist’s preoccupation with nature (a recurring obsession with Tarkovsky), I saw know real connection between film and filmmaker, as Tarkovsky never made anything resembling a horror film…Also, there are no discernible religious themes in a movie called Antichrist. None.

Fantastic Fest Review: Clive Barker’s Dread

Landon Palmer — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 05:24:37 +0000

Anthony DiBlasi’s Clive Barker’s Dread has a fascinating premise: it centers on a group of college students who engage in a project on fear, interviewing subjects who delve into their very worst fears in great detail and with transparent emotional vulnerability. The film, however, spends very little time on its central premise, focusing more on the changing relationships between the characters as the story progresses. This would be fine, however, if Dread contained a full cast of compelling characters. Unfortunately, the film tries to sustain itself on the weight of its weakest aspect.

Based on one of Barker’s short stories, “Dread” (which has gone by either the single-name title or as titled with Barker’s ownership) concerns loner film student Stephen Grace (Jackson Rathbone) convinced by eccentric philosophy student Quaid (Shaun Evans), who is obsessed with the topic of fear and its causes, to engage in the previously mentioned project with Stephen’s collaborator Cheryl (Hanne Steen). Besides a few select interviews, the particulars of this project are primarily relegated to montages of excerpted interviews, showing what seems like a lack of confidence in the movie’s central concept. Dread contains a great concept, and I wish they could have used it to its full potential. I would have loved to see some sex, lies, and videotape-style inquiry into the depths of human fears as captured uncut on cheap DV.

That is not to say there aren’t some compelling documents of fear in their project. When they turn the project inward and the filmmakers begin turning the camera on each other and those close to them, these characters reveal some interesting and unexpected dialogues on fear. Perhaps the most captivating character of this film is Abby (Laura Donnelly), Stephen’s coworker who was born with a birthmark covering half her body. Her description of devastating alienation as a result of her appearance, and the damaging lifelong insecurity is caused, makes her the most layered and compelling character of the film.

The film primarily focuses on Stephen’s relationship with Quaid, who is an eccentric, demanding personality whose outspoken (but never well-articulated) personal philosophy overtly motivates his everyday (inter)actions. Quaid seems to fancy himself as a college-kid variation on Tyler Durden, a character whose radical perspective on life compels him to share, embody, and propagate these views to all who surround him, and successfully so through a sheer force of charisma. At least, that’s what Quaid thinks he is. Instead, he comes across as codependent and needy, a toxic friend that latches onto you and continues pushing you, testing to see if you will abandon him and only then apologizing and asking for you to come back. Quaid is clearly portrayed in the movie as delusional, as he is illustrated to have a few interesting demons in his past resulting in years of medication and (probably) therapy, so there’s nothing wrong with this characterization in general, but he simply isn’t compelling enough to convincingly attract the attention and trust of loner Stephen, who is painted as having a noble empathy and being a wise judge of character. A consistent Stephen would have turned his back on Quaid at the first sign of craziness or overt manipulation for his own selfish needs. For a character like Quaid to work as a friend that becomes the movie’s central villain, we need to see the charisma that compels Stephen to want to work with him. Dread simply did not provide a desperate need within Stephen that necessitated a friend like Quaid in his life beyond his simple loner status or need for a thesis topic. Furthermore, the problem of Quaid’s poor characterization is extrapolated by Evans’ performance, which runs on fumes, never being believable or charismatic in his characterization or convicted in his character’s decisions (also, his attempt at an American accent distractingly fails).

This problem is quite unfortunate, as Quaid is positioned as the film’s backbone, and furthermore because he is surrounded by (comparatively) far more interesting and well-developed characters, especially Abby. This is a Clive Barker adaptation, so one should expect an atypical villain, but Quaid is simply too weak, and his personality and motives stretched too thin, to sustain the film.

DiBlasi has a cinematic eye worth taking note of. His visuals are sleek, compelling, and effective, making this literary adaptation truly cinematic. I have no doubt he’ll have higher profile projects in his near future. However, this stylish approach in this case does a disservice to the film’s subject matter, turning what should be a movie about disturbing confessionals captured on gritty, cheap DV tape into something inappropriately resembling a David Fincher music video. This feels like a great opportunity that deserved to be dealt with far more carefully.

On the Upside: Lush visuals, compelling concept.

On the Downside: Weak portrayal of a central character and a distrust of the film’s own subject matter.

On the Side: Many, many of Clive Barker’s other stories are being slated for feature-length adaptations. The scripts have already been written.

Fantastic Fest Review: The Children

Landon Palmer — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 00:40:03 +0000

Children have been used with a polarized range of convention in horror film. On one end is the perception of childhood innocence, using children as an emblem of hope to put a finishing touch on many a horrifying movie involved in exploring ruthless despair up to that point. On the other end on the pendulum is the frequent cliché of the creepy, sometimes evil child, a convention that only works because of the previously established perception of children as innocent. Films ranging from The Omen to Village of the Damned to their respective remakes to the cinematic miscarriage that was The Orphan play off the idea that turning something perceived to be innocent turning evil is one of the scariest things of all. However, we’ve seen it in so many movies by this point that this convention has lost its ability to be effective.

The UK horror flick The Children gives a nice fresh tweak to a tired and all-too-familiar horror trope. The story is simple: an extended family goes on vacation to celebrate New Year’s in a cozy but lonely cabin in the woods, and their youngest children gradually go violently insane and attempt to kill their elders off one-by-one. The children’s motive is only half-explained, resulting from a mysterious sickness that possesses them, youngest to oldest. The film’s ending alludes to something more complex going on, but The Children thankfully avoids the type of clear explanation that often takes all the air out of films like this. The ambiguity works.

The experience is not told from the children’s or their parents’ perspective, but from the standpoint of the oldest “child,” a disaffected teen largely ignored and undervalued by her relatives as a result of the constant attention given to the needy children surrounding her. This POV succeeds because she sees the children like the audience is meant to see them: not adorable icons of innocence and purity, but intolerable agents of noise and pitiful codependence. The whining and screaming of the children in the film’s beginning establishes them as selfish, disruptive, maddening forces of nature, paving away for their acts of violence later in the film rather than revisiting the worn and far too two-dimensional cliché of innocence-turned-evil.

This particular depiction runs against the notion that children possess some sort of innate purity lost somewhere in adulthood that pervades not only horror cinema, but society at large. The Children instead poses the opposite idea, that children—or, at least, these children—contain a unique capacity for inhumanity lost somewhere in pubescence (which is why the ‘sickness’ doesn’t affect the grown teen). The children of The Children aren’t emblems of hope seen before in all kinds of movies, but are depicted the way many people refuse to acknowledge them to be: insufferable. These are the children you see screaming incessantly at the supermarket. Kudos to The Children for constructively using one’s daily rage at other people’s kids as the starting point for a unique and entertaining horror film.

As with any horror film taking place in an isolated location, there are limited characters and thus a limited amount of kills, but writer-director Tom Shankland (adapting a short story by Paul Andrew Williams) makes the most out of this willful restraint. Each violent action is innovative, satisfying, affecting, effective, and well-worth-the-wait, avoiding the buckets-of-blood aesthetic and incessant violence characteristic of subsets of this genre. The film makes great use of parallel editing to complement one moment of violent suspense with several others occurring at the same time, amplifying this effect through sounds of seemingly arbitrary details, like a tea kettle or loud toy. The Children is also a uniquely colorful horror film, covering the frame with a varied range of yellow hues combined with contrasting colors, subverting the palette typically used by filmmakers to depict an aura of positivity and juxtaposing an attractive palette with horrifying acts. This combined with the factor of the film taking place mostly in the daytime shows that The Children isn’t going for the easy scare, separating itself from the pack of scary kid movies through Shankland’s confident stylistic approach (some disturbing images come off downright beautiful, like a close-up of blood permeating the white snow). The performances are decent all around, and Shankland avoids the typically flat performances given by children by focusing on the young actors’ facial expressions rather than overwhelming them with dialogue that would inevitably be badly delivered (this is one movie, Mr. Fure, that kids don’t ruin).

That being said, The Children really isn’t all that scary or creepy. It flirts with ideas like the troubling implications of hurting a child in self-defense or a literalized Freudian horror of being killed by one’s beloved offspring, but the film, intentionally or not, won’t resonate or get under your skin. It’s nothing more than an entertaining and well-made horror film.

The Upside: Attractive visuals, effective filmmaking, and an interesting new twist that revives what was a dead cliché.

The Downside: It won’t stay with you.

On the Side: Kids are assholes.

Fantastic Fest Review: Macabre

Landon Palmer — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 23:03:23 +0000

You’ve seen it a hundred times before. A group of young, naïve twentysomethings with the whole world ahead of them pick up an ominous stranger who needs a ride home. This seemingly simple ride becomes a much larger endeavor than the group bargained for, and each and every one of them suffer for their random act of kindness. This has been the conceit of dozens of horror movies for decades now, and Macabre is hardly anything more than another entry in the long line of films that have followed this formula. Macabre feels like it was structured as a checklist of expected plot points for these types of horror films. Enter ominous girl. Enter guy that wants to help girl because he thinks she’s cute. Enter girl’s odd but extremely hospitable family. Enter the possibility that things may start to go sour for the protagonists. Enter lots and lots of blood. Rinse and repeat.

It sounds like I’m harping on Macabre for lack of originality, but the film’s predictability isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Clichés exist mainly because they’ve been proven to work time and again, and while Macabre is an all-too-familiar genre exercise, this doesn’t necessarily make the film feels tired or contrived. On the contrary, there is something immensely satisfying about a movie giving you exactly what you expect beat-for-beat. We’ve been conditioned to know what happens next, and as soon as an expectation arises—Bam!—Macabre reliably delivers, and there’s something to be said about the sheer satisfaction of such an experience.

Macabre is the Indonesian take (a country that, apparently, has a rich history of horror—thanks, Lars) on this narrative trope made familiar to those stateside through Herschell Gordon Lewis films of the 60s, the gritty mid-late 70s works of Tobe Hooper and Wes Craven, and the many imitations since (all the way up to the ever-polarizing Rob Zombie). Macabre delightfully proves that this conceit is used time and again because it’s universal enough to pervade across borders, oceans, and cultures. This particular variation on the trope follows a group of six friends on their way to Jakarta. The central couple, Astrid (Sigi Wimala) and Adjie (Ario Bayu), is expecting and all are on their way to bid them farewell…and then what I described in the first paragraph of my review takes place.

The Mo Brothers (not their real names) do a commendable job establishing the characters quickly without delaying the jump-start of the plot through useless dialogue, making them distinct through an admirable economy of effort. We are given reason to actually give a damn about these characters. They aren’t simply interchangeable bodies introduced as nothing more than flesh for later mutilation (like many filmmakers making this type of film have done), they’re as dimensional as one can reasonably expect for such a film. Astrid’s pregnancy initially makes Macabre stand out from the pack, providing interesting emotional depth and a refreshingly new added layer of suspense (not to mention a different type of suspense altogether), but even this factor eventually resorts to the renowned book of cliché.

There is little explanation given to the family’s reasons for acting the way they do (virtually nothing is revealed in their mandatory creepy old 8mm films), but the film is so conventional and familiar that further explanation would be far too ambitions than what the film is trying to accomplish, maybe even unnecessary, even when it teasingly alludes to the supernatural. The performances by the protagonists are convincing and are likely the main catalyst in effectively differentiating these characters. The actors playing the family, however, do not approach their parts so homogenously. Imelda Therrine is great as the daughter, Maya, who incites the plot, displaying perfect levels of creepiness and magnetic cuteness, even hinting at a deep insecurity motivating her actions. Shareefa Daanish as the matriarch Dara was obviously cast for hauntingly captivating eyes, which she uses to her fullest advantage (watch the whole film and see if she blinks once), but she definitely tests the water (if not occasionally submerges) in caricature now and again. However, Arifin Putra as the brother, Adam, proves that overacting can speak any language.

The Mo brothers thankfully don’t resort to excessive or interfering stylization (unlike a certain horror director named after an undead corpse), keeping the look of the film, like the plot within, clean and transparent but modestly effective. There’s an innovative shot here and there (some work, but some—like a certain POV weapon shot—are laughably gimmicky), and there’s a moment now and again of amateur filmmaking seeping through, but for the most part the filmmakers allow the narrative to speak for itself without trying anything too ambitious style-wise. I like the horror film that understands the subtle effectiveness of a slow dolly in.

The kills are satisfying, but towards the end the violence goes over the edge to a point of no return (for me it was a specific moment involving Adam), losing the reliability of the familiar but believable structure established beforehand. By the end a film filled with satisfying clichés gets overtaken by them and ultimately uses them as a crutch rather than a tried-and-true generic trope. It’s ironic that Macabre is one of the few films I’ve seen at Fantastic Fest that I knew absolutely nothing about going in, because by the first few minutes it was clear exactly where this surprise-free film was headed. Macabre is reliable genre fun, but I wish it had the balls to venture just a few steps beyond the formula.

‘Panic’ is Coming to a Town Near You

Landon Palmer — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 18:51:20 +0000

There are many things the FSR Death Squad disagree on regarding what’s happened on and off the screen so far at this year’s Fantastic Fest (btw, Rob, we’re still not talking until you apologize for making me climb the ladder to film the attic of FSR HQ), but it seems the one thing we’ve come to a consensus on is that A Town Called Panic is one of the fest’s most entertaining and delightful surprises. I’m completely on board with Cole’s dead-on praise, and the film is a joyfully absurd experience that taps into a very whimsical sense of humor without itself ever coming across as childish. I’ve never heard my buddies quote a movie in French and laugh hysterically at themselves until now (or, for that matter, imitate the hilarious act of eating toast).

Well, good news came at last night’s screening: A Town Called Panic has been picked up for US distribution by the New York-based Zeitgeist Films, a specialty distribution company with a history of bringing fascinating foreign films and documentaries to American movie screens and DVD shelves that might never have been seen commercially otherwise. They have a release date for A Town Called Panic slated for December 14 at NYC’s famous Film Forum – and what better way to spend the holidays than to see a great animated Belgian comedy-adventure film about toys, waffles, and playing piano with hooves? We’ll keep you updated as we get wind of when A Town Called Panic will be expanding to other cities, but in the meantime check out Zeitgeist’s page devoted to the film.

UPDATED: We got official word directly from Nancy Gerstman over at Zeitgeist, and she had these glowing words to say:

In the final days of screenings and meetings (and burnout) of Cannes I met my friend, the Toronto distributor Ron Mann of Films We Like. He enthusiastically rallied my failing spirits to watch A TOWN CALLED PANIC, a film that was playing for distributors in one of the more obscure screening rooms in the Palais du Cinema. I had been speaking to PANIC’s sales agent about another one of their films but Ron assured me that “this is the one you’re going to love.” From the moment the credit sequence began I knew he was right.

After showing it to my business partner and our team at Zeitgeist we were biding our time (but never forgetting this wonderful, crazy movie) until we were able to acquire it. The rest (we hope, and expect) is history!

At Zeitgeist we love to mix it up. We do everything we feel fervently about: whether it’s an almost-3 hour almost-silent film about life in a French monastery; a vertiginous documentary about being in the eye of Hurricane Katrina; a tender love story from Kazakhstan about a woman who’s never seen; the incredible animations by the Brothers Quay; the astounding visions of Jan Svankmajer; and approximately 150 other extraordinary and diverse features and documentaries.

We can’t wait for A TOWN CALLED PANIC to open in December and we hope that, eventually, every town in the U.S. will welcome PANIC!

What do you think?

Fantastic Fest Review: Paranormal Activity

Landon Palmer — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 18:35:50 +0000

Paranormal Activity has a complicated and frustrating history. Released in competition at various festivals as early as October 2007 and picked up by a major studio primarily for remake rights so that it could be redone more “polished” with name actors, these plans fell through and now Paranormal Activity is finally getting a commercial release in limited venues this weekend by Paramount Pictures following a hasty, misguided, underwhelming, and gimmicky advertising campaign whose sole selling point seems to be showing night-vision footage of various audiences reacting to the film.

I’m going to set aside my typically meandering sentence structuring for a minute and give the readers of FSR some advice: don’t watch the ads. If you know nothing about this movie, don’t watch any trailers or seek out any of the marketing. Though it’s certainly arguable that any movie can ultimately become a better experience going in without having seen any of the footage or allowing expectations to be molded by advertising, Paramount clearly doesn’t know how to market this film specifically, and some of their ads (like many a spoiling trailer these days) give away a few key moments.

Paranormal Activity is a recent entry in the trend of fake home-video style horror. It’s a trend whose landmark popular inception was The Blair Witch Project, followed several years later with [Rec], Cloverfield, Romero’s Diary of the Dead, [Rec]’s American remake Quarantine, and recently [Rec] 2 (also playing at Fantastic Fest). Although all these films are obvious and legitimate points of comparison, Paranormal Activity reminded me greatly (though only superficially) of the first act of David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997), whose very effective scary moments relied on home video footage filmed within a couple’s bedroom as they sleep. This is not, however, to assign Paranormal Activity the baggage that a Lynch comparison would often entail. Rather, Paranormal Activity as a whole is as simple, straightforward, and restrained as the now-familiar cinematic conceit used to deliver the thrills.

The film concerns a live-in couple experiencing phantom noises and hints of activity from an apparitional entity occupying their house and bedroom while they sleep. As she explains to a psychic visiting the house trying to solve the problem, college student Katie (Katie Featherston) has experienced such occurrences before, leading the psychic to believe that this particular entity is following her and that such happenings do not occur (unlike they do in most films about hauntings) specific to the house—in other words, it’s inescapable (yikes!). Katie’s boyfriend Micah (Micah Sloat) has been recording their sleep and select daily activities with newly acquired video and sound equipment (which, of course, make up the film’s overall structuring approach) to find evidence of the haunting entity. Micah treats this as an exciting venture at first, then as an opportunity to prove alpha dog status both to his girlfriend and against what may or may not exist between the walls of their home. His inability to treat the situation or Katie’s history of being haunted seriously becomes a point of contention for the couple, who fill the shoes of their characters with just enough functional believability. Micah’s arrogance and belligerent insistence that he try to solve the problem itself causes the encounters to become increasingly aggressive, and he continues to attempt making communication with the possible apparition despite Katie’s justified insistence not to do so.

The many limitations of this no-budget horror force writer-director Oren Peli to get creative with his scare tactics, and these limitations and the restraint required therein work as the film’s blessing. Paranormal Activity follows the Hitchcock 101 school of filmmaking like it’s scripture: show as little as possible and let audience imagination fill in the rest. It’s a rule most horror films could implement a bit more, and it works in this film to an astoundingly effective degree. I can’t think of a film in recent memory that has garnered so much terror out of such simple activities, and this is why you’ll be taking the film with you when you go home and try to sleep at night (which is something I predict to have a hard time doing after I finish writing this review). It takes a skilled hand at work to make doors closing, lights turning on, and powder on a hardwood floor this ridiculously scary.

Unlike Blair Witch, Paranormal Activity doesn’t feel DIY amateur where the gimmick is always apparent, and unlike Cloverfield it isn’t the same Hollywood movie you’ve seen time and again except with a gimmick trying to make it seem new. In this film, it isn’t a gimmick. Paranormal Activity understands the strengths and utilities afforded to the mock home-video subgenre, and it uses them to an astoundingly effective degree. The film gives itself many opportunities for a cheap scare, but thankfully chooses lingering creepiness over making the audience jump. Paranormal Activity takes its time to deliberately build up a suspenseful mood and a stress-inducing foreboding atmosphere, as it slowly manages expectations through a structure of repeated happenings over footage of the couple while they sleep, and the wait for the inevitable to happen is often the most terrifying part of all.

That being said, Paranormal Activity in some ways isn’t the fear-inducing shit show some champions of the film promised, but that isn’t necessarily a criticism, for I’d prefer an aura of creepiness getting under my skin rather than an opportunity to see a theater scream in unison (as the poor advertising campaign misleadingly promises). It’s nothing groundbreaking, but is is remarkably effective, especially in a crowded theater. That being said, the ending of the movie (and by ending I mean the very final few seconds) break the films cardinal rule of showing more than alluding, and it feels like something of a cop-out (but not enough to tarnish the integrity of the film as a whole). There were several other endings in screenings of this film at previous festivals, and the descriptions of these endings sound like preferable alternatives to the one attached to the commercial release (I look forward to comparing them when the film is released on DVD). The only way this movie will get an audience is by word of mouth, and I’m fervently on board with endorsing Paranormal Activity as something close enough to the terrifying experience many people say it is.

Go see it. Tell your friends. Good luck sleeping.

Culture Warrior: Cinemetropolis

Landon Palmer — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 18:37:45 +0000

Austin is now the third major US city I’ve lived in since officially leaving the nest of my parents’ home in central Texas six years ago. After spending several years in both Los Angeles and New York before my current settlement in Weird City, I’ve had the fortunate chance of getting exposed to three very distinct cultures of cinephilia. In preparation for and anticipation of a week of sleeping, eating, and living exclusively in Austin’s uniquely cinephilic Alamo Drafthouse and Paramount Theater for the upcoming Fantastic Fest, this week’s Culture Warrior takes a look at three great American cities and their equally great movie theaters.

Los Angeles

The home of infamous movie palaces like Mann’s Chinese, Mann’s Egyptian, the ArcLight Cinerama Dome, and gigantic one-screens in Westwood frequently used to house major west coast premieres, Los Angeles is a city known for a particular type of celebration of the theatrical moviegoing experience. As evidenced by the Cinerama Dome (and the city’s many IMAX screens and various outlets for digital projection), LA is a place where innovation and the cutting-edge are par for the course in spectatorship, and bigger is always better. Since LA is the home of Hollywood, this unapologetically grandiose embrace of the event movie makes perfect sense, making every movie an experience through the very immensity of the exhibition outlets offered. LA convinces the serious moviegoer that it is criminal to not see any remotely big movie on anything less than the most intimidating screen possible. But moviegoing in LA can be an expensive hobby, so for more modest films (indies, docs, and foreign films), the city offers some smaller independent (and notably cheaper) movie theaters like Leammle’s Sunset 5 or—my personal favorite—the Los Feliz 3.

But the movie culture of LA—both in filmmaking and in filmgoing—is far too preoccupied with forward-thinking innovation and the next big “event” to have any sort of tangible long-term memory when it comes to cinema. Sure, the walls surrounding Mann’s Chinese have the names of every Best Picture winner, but this reads more as a celebration of the institution of Hollywood than an appreciation for today’s films in the context of film history. Sure, the city houses the UCLA archives and the Silent Movie Theater, but these act more as museums and artifacts of movie culture rather than serious evidence that Angeleno cinephiles are interested in retrospectives (as further evidence of this, LACMA is in the process of likely shutting down its retrospective film series). Sure, the ArcLight and the Egyptian show the occasional old movie, but they are often obvious choices with a guaranteed audience (La Dolce Vita at the ArcLight, Lawrence of Arabia at the Egytian). Overall, LA is a great place for the modern day movie event, but it is a city whose moviegoing culture, like Hollywood nearby, is too concerned with today and tomorrow to give a shit about yesterday.

New York

New York City’s cinephilic culture is the opposite of Los Angeles in so many ways, filled to the brim with retrospectives and small screens. NYC is clearly a place where film history matters, and where filmgoing is taken very seriously (the 2002 documentary Cinemania evidences this, as we are introduced to four cinephiles in Gotham who treat the movie theater as a sanctuary to an amusing but sometimes frightening degree). In New York the big screen is a treat (the Ziegfeld, AMC at Lincoln Center’s IMAX), but it is hardly essential to seeing any movie old or new. The theaters that probably house the biggest movie geeks are often the ones with remarkably small screens, while the event movie experience is often left aside for the larger populace of moviegoers. After moving to LA, I found this a bit troublesome, as I couldn’t fathom seeing any movie in Film Forum’s David Lean marathon last year on such a small screen (and the “purity” of the movie event is also not taken so seriously, as Gothamites visiting the Angelika—one of NYC’s major limited release outlets—have to condition themselves to battle or ignore the sound of subway trains passing by). But NYC has more to offer than any city in America when it comes to revisiting all facets of film history, canonized classics under every disparate definition of the term, with competing retrospectives constantly going on at the IFC, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Museum of the Moving Image, Museum of Modern Art, the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center, Anthology Film Archives (the veritable home of American experimental filmmaking), and, most importantly, Film Forum.

Film Forum sums up NYC moviegoing culture in a nutshell, as cinema in the Big Apple is seen as part and parcel of the city’s major artistic tradition, a worthy competitor with the other forms of art that make up the city’s dense creative history. While housing the best in new independent and foreign filmmaking often weeks before such films go anywhere else in the US, Film Forum perhaps more famously houses ongoing retrospective series containing an astounding amount of films rarely exhibited on the big screen today, centered around an actor (e.g., Tatsuya Nakadai, James Mason), director (Nicholas Ray, Jules Dassin), or a country and trend (French crime wave, US Depression-era films)—and the choices are thankfully not always obvious. The Forum is also famous for first-time showings of historic films in their intended form—like the first-ever American exhibition of Melville’s Army of Shadows (1969) in 2006 or Tarkovsky’s Russian cut of Solaris (1972) in the early 90s.

New York City has its own unique canon of films deemed important that stretch across its filmmaking, filmgoing, critical, and academic communities, and the ongoing emphasis of this canon (through published work like Film Comment and The Village Voice) further influence the both static and evolving tastes of this community. New York is a city that contains no wall between the archive and the movie theater. It’s a serious film nerd’s dream.

Austin

I feel as if I’ve lived in these three cities in perfect sequence, for each has torn down something I assumed about what moviegoing is supposed to be in the previous city. Where LA touted the large and immersive film event experience, NYC emphasized the quality of the canon over the need for a big screen or perfect sound. Then Austin flipped everything I assumed from the NYC filmgoing experience on its head. While Austin does notably contain an impressive film archive at the University of Texas as well as a summer retrospective series at the Paramount, the epicenter of Austin’s cinephilic culture is undoubtedly the Alamo Drafthouse. Sure, the Drafthouse is a great fun place to have a meal and some beer while watching the latest anything, but this is hardly the reason why this theater is so revolutionary. For me, it’s the Alamo’s ongoing event series that makes it one of the most important and unique moviegoing experiences in the US.

First of all, the Alamo is reflective of a larger culture within Austin that seems to rail against any active canonization of film history. Where cities like New York promote an “essential cinema,” those movies that are too important for the serious moviegoer to miss, the Alamo revels—sincerely, not ironically—in an appreciation of movies below the radar. Weekly events like Terror Tuesday and Weird Wednesday celebrate often obscure and forgotten cinematic oddities not for their obscurity alone, but for their own merit and value as cinematic objects and pieces of entertainment, collapsing the lowbrow and the highbrow into a serious-though-always-fun veneration of the populist art form that cinema really is. Movie nerd Austinites are well-aware of the cinematic canon, but do not give it reverence simply for its existence, as they seem to see value in almost any film, whether its been dismissed or embraced by fellow filmgoers or by film history itself. This is why at Terror Tuesday you won’t see “essential” horror classics like Halloween (1978), but rather a revival of the often-dismissed Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982).

Secondly, the Alamo transforms the experience of the movie theater itself, replacing the often solitary spectatorship of NYC theaters with a collective community experience. Although the Alamo strictly (and thankfully) employs noise rules, they often host events that encourage audience participation, like quote-a-longs and sing-a-longs (the Alamo may not be the first theater to have done this, but they’ve certainly pioneered it). Events like Master Pancake Theater (a live version of MST3K) or Foleyvision (where a group provides a full live soundtrack for the accompanying film) transform the theater from a place of passive spectatorship to a locale of live performance and participation, taking the film away from its bounds by the filmmakers and making it truly belong to the audience, thus removing any reverent “film as holy” approach and letting the participants make the film their own. It’s an innovative idea of what moviegoing is and what moviegoing should be, and this rejection of the canon and embrace of audience participation I think makes the Alamo one of the most progressive filmgoing experiences in American cinephilic culture, and I’m very much looking forward to practically living there during Fantastic Fest.

Culture Warrior is our weekly walk on the wild side with actual film school graduate Landon Palmer. To read more from Landon, you can follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/landon_speak

Film School Rejects » Landon Palmer

Culture Warrior: What is Hitchcockian Suspense?

Related Reading:

Culture Warrior: Slow Isn’t Boring

Related Reading:

Culture Warrior: Horror 1960

Related Reading:

Culture Warrior: Good and Bad Biopics

Related Reading:

Culture Warrior: Through a Child’s Eyes

Related Reading:

Culture Warrior: Found Footage Filmmaking

Related Reading:

Fantastic Fest Review: Bronson

Related Reading:

Culture Warrior: Responsible Film Criticism and the Case of ‘Antichrist’

Related Reading:

Fantastic Fest Review: Antichrist

Related Reading:

Fantastic Fest Review: Clive Barker’s Dread

Related Reading:

Fantastic Fest Review: The Children

Related Reading:

Fantastic Fest Review: Macabre

Related Reading:

‘Panic’ is Coming to a Town Near You

Related Reading:

Fantastic Fest Review: Paranormal Activity

Related Reading:

Culture Warrior: Cinemetropolis

Related Reading: