Good Luck Getting to Sleep After This One

POSTER QUOTED, BITCHES!

Having finally been discovered, after... er... not posting for an entire month, a quote from my Paranormal Activity review has been put on posters that are up all over the country. "Good luck getting to sleep after this one", and "possibly the scariest movie ever made".

That second quote I didn't actually say. The closest I came to actually saying that was "one of the scariest movies of the decade" or "one of the scariest movies in years". Reading back, I was getting a little repetitive, huh? No matter. "Good luck getting to sleep" is all Gun in the First Act.

Paramount Australia, if you're reading?

I will accept free passes to more of your films, and be your poster-quote whore. I will put Peter Travers to shame. I am metaphorically standing on a street corner in high heels and a short dress for you people, waiting for the tinted windows of your limo to roll down, if it means free passes.

Think about it.

Due to a chronic lack of money and overabundance of brokeness, until tonight, I hadn't been to a movie since early November. Tonight's movie was a free preview of Where the Wild Things Are which I'll totally review soon, I swear. Hence a lack of posting. Well, there are some movies from TIFF yet to be tackled, but I don't have a lot to say about them. An Education was fantastic, but it has been discussed everywhere by everyone, and Women Without Men is Iranian, so I'm not cultured enough to say anything smart about it.

Also I saw The Hangover on a flight back to Sydney and it was pretty overrated. I found myself wanting to know what happened more than wanting to sit through more unamusing gags, so fast-forwarded through the film to get to the end. It strikes as something aimed at people who would non-ironically enjoy Las Vegas. I am not such people.

New Moon also came out. I haven't seen it, but shall review it anyway.

The Twilight Saga: New Moon

Awful.

1/10

No matter, though. I shall return to the warm, glowy bosom of cinema very soon.

Dear Saw: Suck It

This weekend marked the international release of the latest goddamn Saw film, creatively titled Saw VI. It also saw the wide opening in the US of Paranormal Activity, which I have been harping on about since seeing it at the Sydney Film Festival earlier this year. Guess which came out on top at the box office?

Go on. You can have a minute.

Paranormal trumped it. Saw VI is cowering on a corner, presumably shackled to some horrible device, and Paranormal Activity is pointing and laughing. Saw VI made under $16 million - less than Saw made, the previous lowest grossing film in the franchise - while Paranormal made $22 million, taking it to a $62 million dollar total.

The world is finally getting over that franchise. Today is a good day.

In related news, I rewatched Paranormal Activity this evening, at a free, buzz-gathering screening before its December opening here in Australia. The session was kind of a mess. There was no one to introduce the film, so people used to having ads and trailers before a movie - most of the audience - were unsure whether they were watching the movie when it started with no fanfare. This was not helped by the lack of audio, which didn't start until about thirty seconds into the film. The audience, too, was quite obnoxious, with some members forcing disdainful laughter at parts which would have been much more atmospheric had they shut the fuck up.

Nonetheless the film works on a second viewing. Not as well, and it doesn't have the lasting effect that makes you afraid of the dark for the first night or two after watching it, but its got enough atmosphere to sustain it as a very good horror film, even knowing what's about to happen.

Now we just have to crush the Final Destination franchise (the first film was decent, the second and third were fun, the fourth was the laziest script ever printed on paper) and put a stop to 98% of remakes, and the horror world will be good again.

TIFF Part Five: [Rec] 2 Review

Job hunting etc etc etc. More posts coming and so on and so on and so on.

So, as you may know, Spanish horror film [Rec] was radcore. That was the consensus. How does its sequel live up? Midnight Madness was the perfect place to find out.

[Rec] 2

The original [Rec], a Spanish film remade in the US as Quarantine, has a reputation as one of the scariest films of all time. It is not an unearned one. Part of the found footage subgenre of horror – think Blair Witch, Cloverfield and the excellent (and finally getting a wide release) Paranormal Activity – the film took place in a Barcelona apartment building that quickly became overrun with 28 Days Later style ‘zombies’. Few films rival its intensity, particularly in its final half hour. It is a rare horror film with a climax as scary as (if not scarier than) its build up. The writers and directors of the first film, Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza, took a risk, banked on its success, and made a sequel.

Set minutes after the first film, [Rec] 2 takes us back inside the zombie-infested apartment building of the first film, now with a group of SWAT-type soldiers and a doctor from the health department. One of the team carries a video camera; most of the footage comes from here, but this time around it is intercut with the headcams of the our characters, and, later… well, that would be telling.

[Rec] has a well-deserved reputation of being a terrifying film. Beyond the sheer unrelenting nature of the action, what worked so well was how trapped in the film the audience felt. Just as the characters were trapped in the building, we were trapped in the camera’s point of view. If something happened – and it would, and did – the camera could never cut away, because we were watching uninterrupted takes of found footage. So the multiple points of view in play in [Rec] 2 could, in theory, lessen this effect. This is not the case. [Rec] 2 comes very close to matching the intensity of the first film. Aside from a gear change halfway through the film, introducing new characters, the film does not relent. Upon entering the building, our characters go straight to the location of the climax of the first film. This final act of [Rec] was a rarity in horror, in that it matched the levels of fear of its build up, and where this scene took place was a huge part of that. When [Rec] 2 takes us directly to there, we know we’re in for terror. The climax of [Rec] 2, is should be noted, comes very close to being as memorable as its predecessor, although it goes for extreme creepiness over nerve-shredding terror.

More than this, [Rec] 2 is more than just a rehash of its predecessor. While few moments echo the first film, this sequel builds on and changes the mythology of the first film in huge and unexpected ways. Balagueró and Plaza could have got away with copying what they know, but they turn expectations around, so what we thought we were dealing with in the first film is something else altogether. It is a risky move that plays out to great effect, adding another level of dread to and already very scary movie.

The biggest problem of the film is the lack of a character to get us into the film. The SWAT characters are mostly interchangeable, and Jonathan Mellor, as the health department doctor, is too shifty to become a likable character. [Rec]’s Angela Vidal (Manuela Velasco), the lead character of the first film, was a great character who easily allowed an audience access to the film. Such a presence is missing here.

Nonetheless, [Rec] 2 is scary enough, and has enough shocking turns of plot, to make it a very good film. It would have been hard to come close to being as good as the first, so that it doesn’t quite get there cannot be held as a sleight against it. It almost gets there, and that’s a thing that’s worthy of praise.

8/10

Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza were present for a Q&A - that's them there - but getting into detail on that would be spoiling the film. It was revealed that they made the first film with no plans for a sequel; I asked how much of deepening of the mythology present in [Rec] 2 was planned in part one; the said very little. They also said there were no current plans for a third film, although there are now rumours of a third without Balagueró and Plaza’s involvement.

Meanwhile, Paranormal Activity, which I mentioned in the review and well near shat my pants during earlier this year, is going really well, having passed the $30 million mark in the US box office. That sort of things happens when you actually release a film rather than letting it sit on the shelf, Paramount. It has a wide release in the states, at last, after a city-by-city roll out. It's coming to Australian cinemas in early December, but its local distributors seem to want to go the viral route here as well, and appear to be having free screenings all over the place. If you go to university, or know someone who does, I'd advise seeking out their film society to enquire if they have tickets to a pre-screening of it. They just might.

More to come!

TIFF Part Four: The Loved Ones Review

I'm on holiday; leave me alone.

The Loved Ones

It was, of course, not the first Australian horror movie – it wasn’t even the first of this decade – but Greg McLean’s Wolf Creek is rightly seen as responsible for the revival of the country’s genre cinema. In terms of pure horror, there has not been a great Australian film since. Some have been quite good: McLean’s own follow up, crocodile flick Rogue, was a lot of fun; Storm Warning had some intensity. On the whole, however, the films have ranged from adequate to appalling. Enter Sean Byrne, and The Loved Ones.

Brent (Xavier Samuel) is a high school student in a country town. A stoner and self-harmer, he has almost climbed out of a depression caused by a tragedy six months earlier that he feels responsible for. He has a goofy best friend Sac (Richard Wilson), who is courting Holly (Victoria Thaine), the goth daughter of the local cop, and a girlfriend Mia (Jessica Macnamee) willing to put up with his stunted state. He also has a would be suitor, Lola (Robin McLeavey). A shy, pink-clad thing, Brent turns down her invitation to the school dance. Brent doesn’t know about Lola’s past, her father (John Brumpton), or what he will do for her.

No Australian horror film since Wolf Creek have reached the levels of intensity that The Loved Ones has; no Australian film in memory has reached its levels of violence. Brumpton – his character is credited only as “Daddy” – is a skin crawler, with his clear lust for his daughter and his willingness to oblige her every twisted whim. Lola herself is spectacular, with McLeavey going all out for her performance. She is breathtaking, scary, unstoppable and hilarious, and deserves to be remembered as a horror icon. Her performance is fearless, and her final moments in the film are mesmerizing. Everyone else is very good – our hero Samuel does fine work in what is, for a lot of the film, a silent role – but it is McLeavey who steals the film. And just wait until you meet Bright Eyes.

Byrne, like Greg McLean before him, has made a bold and brave first feature, unafraid to mess with audience expectations, and to have them writhing in their seats. His script turns the high school movie on its head, while his direction pushes the audience right to the edge, and then further.

The Loved Ones is as intense as a horror movie can get while still holding onto its humanity. It is the best Australian horror film in years, and one of the best from anywhere in the last decade.

9/10

This film - rightly so - won the audience award for Midnight Madness. The reaction on the night was amazing, so it wasn't a huge surprise, as great as it was. For me, this film was one I knew little about, and my excitement levels were low.

After the film, they were high.

There's something special about seeing a great local film that does enormous amounts with little money, especially if they're genre movies. The budget wasn't made explicit in the Q&A, but it wasn't high, but the film looked amazing.

Enough gushing. The film is released in Australia early 2010, and hopefully it will make it in overseas markets as well. It's not for the faint of heart, but if you like your horror intense, you've got something to look forward to.

BOOM

This is brilliant. io9's take on 2012:



2012 actually looks like it has something going for it. Not quality, of course, but shit blowing the fuck up like shit has never blown the fuck up before. It's a pity that there is a plot to it, please that will be without point. Soon there will be a time when special effects porn (click that for a great article by David Foster Wallace) will do away with attempts at story. No one cares about that.

Did anyone go to Transformers 2 to watch Shia LaBeouf chasing artifacts all over the globe? Did the audience for The Day After Tomorrow sit on the edge of their seat waiting for Jake Gyllenhaal and Dennis Quaid, as father and son, to reunite? Or, for that matter, take any environmental message home with them? Of course not. They were sitting there to watch stuff being destroyed. Roland Emmerich and his cohorts should do away with all pretence and just feature that. I would actually consider making the trek to the movies for 2012 if it were, say, forty minutes long and just features explosions, rather than intercutting those sequences with John Cusack pissing away his career. Of course the shorter length would have to mean a cheaper ticket, but it would be much more satisfying as well.

That clip's porn music has given me a hankerin' to go watch some Boogie Nights.

Swears!

I've just started watching Deadwood. I should have started a lot sooner.

It's very good.

Obliiiiige him!

Bidness is a-boomin'!

Sydney Film Festival: Day 5

Still no Hugo Weaving, the bastard. I had to settle for gritty Australian convict cannibalism and fake blaxploitation instead.

Van Diemen's Land

Alexander Pierce has influenced a lot of entertainment of late; it's like he's a volcano and it's the mid-nineties. Earlier in the year, ABC screened a factual film, The Confession of Alexander Pearce, and his legend was used as the basis for the awful Dying Breed, where his descendants are the villains. Now Van Diemen's Land shows his story as it played out: a group of eight convicts, upon escaping their penal colony, resort to cannibalism to stave of starvation. If you ever wanted a film that could make cannibalism boring, Van Diemen's Land has granted your wish.

The Sydney Film Festival's organizers have put the film alongside Dead Snow and Paranormal Activity in the horror strand. Their failing here can't be held against the film; that would the same as begrudging Finding Nemo after being told it was a film noir. It's not scary or fast moving, but it's not supposed to be. It's barely even a thriller: it's a drama. While Van Diemen's Land cannot be faulted for being a genre film without tension, it can be faulted for being a drama without tension. We start the film by meeting eight convicts in the mid-1800s in what now is Tasmania. They escape, led by one who doesn't appear to actually know where he is heading. It is out of desperation that the idea of cannibalism is raised.

The production values here are great. It almost does feel as if the filmmakers – it's Jonathan auf der Heide's feature debut – were dropped into the bushland a century and a half ago, and hired local actors. Authenticity is high; everything's dirty and dangerous, and any romanticised ideas of Australian colonial life are thrown out the window. Here, the straightforwardness of the story lets it down. Events simply unfold without any turns. The convicts walk; one is killed and eaten, they walk some more, then another is offed. Ethical questions aren't really raised, although that may have made this film Alive 2: The Convicts, so we can be thankful for that. It would have helped were we given a character to let us into the story. Pearce himself (Oscar Redding, who cowrote the film with auf der Heide), is the closest to a lead character, but no attempts beyond the occasional arty voiceover are made to help us to understand him. Auf der Heide is happy to just show the slow journey and the forces of nature instead.

The problem is the story. "Convicts resort to cannibalism" makes an interesting sentence, but not a two-hour feature, when that's all that happens. In prose form, with access to the inner workings of the convicts, but that lacks here. Despite the impressive production and the fine acting, this film just doesn't grab. It aims for bleak, but hits dreary.

4/10

Since seeing Van Diemen's Land I've come across more positive reviews than negative, and after talking to other festival-goers who have seen it, I seem to be in the minority in my opinion. Turns out I'm an artless pleb.

Black Dynamite

Jive suckers.

Sick of spoofs yet? When those motherfuckers Seltzer and Goldberg churn out a new [Blank] Movie every thirty seconds that lampoon the most fleeting elements of pop culture simply be recreating them; when the Wayans brothers are ripping of those two, who were ripping them off in the first place; when even David Zucker has lost his touch, by celebrating US conservatism and, even worse, not being funny when he does so, we're in trouble. That's what makes Black Dynamite so refreshing: it won't date, as it actually feels like it comes from the period it's spoofing, and belongs to the genre: 70s blaxploitation. The jokes will still work in a decade's time. Also: it's fucking hilarious. That helps things.

The titular Black Dynamite (Michael Jai White, who also cowrote) is a badass former CIA agent from the CIA who sets out to avenge the death of his brother, after promising in adolescence to their dying mother that he'll never let him die. He follows the trail from his local neighbourhood, soon uncovering a nefarious honky plot that leads to China and all the way to Washington. Black Dynamite is a funny character in himself, but at the same time, is a genuine action figure. This helps cement the film in the seventies, as if it were actually made then – and at times it's easy to forget that it wasn't. It does this as well as Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, which takes apart bad 80s television horror, but is even funnier.

There's some slight lag in the middle of the film but laughs still come throughout. The soundtrack, by Adrian Younge, deserves special praise too, not just (as with everything on display) for feeling so period-real, but for being so spot-on funny. Director Scott Sanders has done such good work here, if the film weren't so perfectly contained, I wouldn't complain about him handling a number of sequels chronicling Black Dynamite's further adventures. As it is, the film is destined for cult status. It is deserved.

8/10

I was running out of synonyms for "funny" there. Word suggested "mirthful". Fuck you, Word.

Lessons Learned

• Cannibalism isn't as glamorous as Anthony Hopkins will have you believe.
  
• Cannibalism isn't as funny as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 would have you believe.
  
• People still have to try a lot harder if they want to beat Dying Breed at being the worst thing inspired by Alexander Pearce
  

Sydney Film Festival: Day 1

It begins. The only time of the year that Sydney is a city actually worth living in.

It started with a night of double third wheelin': I saw Food, Inc. with friends Fran and Kent, and then jumped ship to Oliver and Amy for Paranormal Activity. It's okay; I got my hand held during the scary bits.

Food, Inc.

This documentary by Robert Kenner should be the next entry at Stuff White People Like. It also happens to be indispensible.

Food, Inc. is similar in substance to 2003's The Corporation, only rather than tackling capitalism as a whole, it focuses on the food industry. There's no one narrator; rather interviews serve as voice-over: most prominently Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation and Michael Pollan, who wrote The Omnivore Dilemma. Beyond them, we meet farmers, workers and activists.

Prepare to be guilted. If you've ever set foot in a supermarket or a fast food restaurant, this movie will make you feel bad for doing so. We meat-eaters know where our food comes from; I doubt few people would be unaware that animal care practices these days aren't of the highest standards. Here, it's really highlighted. Not just animal treatment, but how they're fed and kept for the sake of growing animals bigger, faster and cheaper.

Food, Inc. points the finger – and may not be surprised to hear this – at corporations, as well as the government for subsidizing their practices and for the ineffectuality of the FDA. It's all eye-opening, but it wouldn't be a strong film if it left its audience up this creek without a paddle. Fortunately the film offers solutions – what individuals can do to try to make a change. Message-heavy documentaries such as Food, Inc. need this element. If they were simple to list a series of problems, they would almost be rendered pointless.

There's a lot of insight here. We meet a farmer who continues to use organic practices and refuses to go commercial and expand, as well as a former activist whose organic food company is sold at supermarkets all over the US – he has no illusions that the corporations he sells to buy his products for business rather than ethical reasons, but sees capitalism as a tool that he can use for change. We also see how intellectual property laws, of all things, are used against farmers growing crops.

The film is one-sided, of course – we see few arguments defending the food industry – and is certainly preaching to the choir. But if this little, well made, fascinating, troubling and eye-opening documentary – apologies to Stephanie Meyer for the number of adjectives I just used – can make it big, maybe change can be a possibility. If you watch this movie, you'll know why we need it.

9/10

Paranormal Activity

Katie (Katie Featherson) and Micah (Micah Sloat) are a happy, ordinary couple who have just moved in together, who have discovered that the entity that has been haunting Katie on and off since she was eight years old has taken up residence as well. The film is entirely through the lens of the camera that Micah has bought to document what's going on. What some may call a Blair Witch Project rip-off manages to be one of the scariest movies in years. Scary: not grotesque, not shocking, but something to bring back that fear of the dark you thought you lost years ago.

The film is set over a period of three weeks, starting without a studio logo – just a thank you to the families of Lisa and Micah, and the San Diego police for the footage – and ending with director Oren Peli getting the only credit, as the editor. It's not real, of course, but the authenticity – naturalistic dialogue, unknown performers – helps Paranormal Activity to no end. The characters aren't larger than life, but are interesting; Katie has known this phenomenon all her life and is getting increasingly upset by it, while Micah starts the film fascinated by it but as it goes on he positions himself, narcissistically, as the hero.

The structure of the film is the reason it works so well. Micah is constantly filming, often against the behest of Katie. Every night the camera is put on a tripod facing the couple's bed and the doorway into their room. During this set up, we get a subtitle ("Night 1", "Night 3") and a timecode. It's here that the creepiness really sets in. On each of these night set ups, things get progressively scarier – what starts as some sounds and the movement of a door early on gives way to things far worse – and soon the audience is audibly filled with dread the moment these sequences begin, to the point where, by Night 21 (hell, even Night 13) it's almost too much to take.

The scares are lo-fi – no CG demons mugging for the camera – and therein lies their believability, and the terror of the film. Paranormal Activity is the best American horror film in recent memory, and one of the scariest movies of the decade. Good luck getting to sleep after this one.

9/10

This horror subgenre – the found footage movies that can be traced back to Cannibal Holocaust but more recently, of course, to The Blair Witch Project, to the point of accusations of ripping it off – should, by all rights, be dead by now. Yet, against all odds, a number of them continue to impress. Rec was fantastic, Cloverfield was a lot of fun, My Little Eye and The Last Horror Movies weren't great, but interesting. The only out-and-out misfire I can remeber is, tellingly, by an experienced filmmaker. George Romero's Diary of the Dead failed, largely, because he refused to let go of theatrical dialogue and acting styles. And music, for Christ's sake – the music nearly undermined the whole experience on its own. Cloverfield wasn't exactly Curb Your Enthusiasm in how naturalistically it was played, but it still had just enough of an air of realism to make it work.

Sadly it seems that Paranormal Activity is being held to ransom by Dreamworks, who bought the rights to the film years ago. There was talk of a remake, by Peli himself, but now the status of that is unclear. If they're not going to do that, they have a perfectly terrifying film that they should release to an unsuspecting public as soon as possible.