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frankjackdaw
Reviews
Diary of the Dead (2007)
Fear of commitment
The problem with this film is that George Romero, for whatever reason, has been unable to commit fully to the notion of making Diary Of The Dead a mock-documentary. What made 'Blair Witch' so convincing - for all its faults - was that the cast were fully immersed in the film. The dialogue was improvised and naturalistic, the film-making was choppy and genuinely cinema verite. Whether or not you liked that actual content, the whole thing felt authentically like what it was trying to evoke. Even the more mainstream Hollywood 'Cloverfield' made more convincing concessions to the film's supposed source.
Diary Of The Dead, on the other hand, is little more than an above-average teen horror b-movie with a bit of wobbly camera work. The lighting is cinematic, the cast are all good looking (even the clichéd techno-geek), and, crucially, the lines are all delivered cleanly with no attempt at naturalism. We're never in any doubt that this is a movie and that the cast are acting. At no point does our subconscious ever think this is really happening.
To illustrate my point, the the editor of this apparent documentary tells us that she has added music to "scare you". What, a documentary of the end of the world isn't already scary enough? Where did she find this music, anyway? And did she also add the comedy banjo music over the 'Texas girl on a mission' sequence? And what about all the other horror movie techniques used in the movie? Did she really find it necessary to spice up film of a "real" cannibal holocaust in this way? In other words, it's just a horror movie with some documentary trappings.
Even the tics added to try and lend authenticity to the film - for example, the CCTV signal breaking up - just feel like the kind of thing that these sort of films always do, rather than sometime from real life. George is just making a horror film in this particular style, rather than attempting to actually convey a convincing reality. Matters are not helped by the cheap computer effects, which pull us out of reality even further, as does the moment when it dips into self-parody towards the end.
On top of this, the message is thuddingly obvious. While Dawn Of the Dead was hardly subtle, the consumerist parable took a back seat to the action and story. Here the idea of the information age meeting the end of the world is shoved in our face every ten minutes, and 'Cloverfield' did it better.
On a different topic, the final shot, and the final statement - which I won't give away here - only serves to make George seem like a hypocrite considering the way he's been inventively chopping up zombies and people for the preceding hour and a half. Is this really the same director as Night Of The Living Dead?
In Dreams (1999)
A mishmash clichés
** SOME SPOILERS ** There are a handful of directors out there - Brian De Palma is another - who believe that the way to make a convincing psychological thriller is just to steal wholesale from Psycho. Neil Jordan goes further and steals not only from De Palma's famous Carrie ending too, but also the red-obsession and drowning themes of Don't Look Now and the dripping red wallscrawl of The Shining, plus all the usual lunatic asylum clichés. He also reckons that by attaching a Roy Orbison song onto the end of the movie the effect will be as chilling as a David Lynch film, rather than just plain funny.
In Dreams wants to be an intelligent and adult thriller, but like a director with obsessive-compulsive disorder, Jordan just can't help himself loading his film with meaningless clichés and nods to his favourite horror movies.
The early domestic scenes are effective, as is the gut-wrenching murder which takes place a short way into the film; but once Bening is committed, the film takes a turn for the usual, and instead of being interesting, incisive or intelligent, just throws a lot of MTV tricks and regurgitated movie moments at the screen hoping that some of them will stick.
By far the worst thing about the film is Robert Downey Jr., who undoes anything remaining to keep the viewer interested by his cartoonishly camp turn, and we're treated to yet another mother-obsessive lunatic with a penchant for cross-dressing.
This is a good film to watch if you have an apple fetish or enjoy being untroubled by original ideas.
My Little Eye (2002)
Not as bad as some would make out
Unlike the viewer's comment on the title page, I found the first 3/4 of the film sufficiently scary and intriguing and the final payoff - like that other recent British horror The Hole - a let down. So.
*SPOILERS*
The Good
Some genuinely creepy stuff. Nice camera shots, good use of tension and mystery. Generally well directed.
The supposed brinksmanship of The Company trying to scare the contestants out of the house. The conflict between the tactics of the unseen company and the very much seen characters. An intriguing set-up.
The feeling during the first hour that this is going somewhere really interesting and will have a great payoff.
The scene where they discover they may be on a snuff site.
The Bad
Apart from Rex, trying to tell the characters apart. The girls and two blond boys look very similar and have similar characters. And not very interesting ones at that. *MAJOR SPOILER* As with too many of these things (eg. Scream 2) it's the blandest and least developed character who is the 'surprise' killer, as if the film-maker didn't dare make it anyone more interesting.
Everyone has model good looks. Even the bad guys.
*MAJOR SPOILER* The mundane payoff. As soon as we know who the killer is the tension and fear element is lost leaving the final half an hour to be pretty bog-standard stalking and killing by night-vision. There were some neat potential plot-lines - the company trying to scare them out of the house early, Emma's creepy childhood friend - that were dropped way too early and would have been much more interesting than the one they settled on. Even the snuff element wasn't grotty or sordid enough. That could have really been played on.
Lack of chemistry between people supposedly living in each others' pockets for 6 months. Why has there been no bonding? Why does no one have much of a sense of humour? You'd think it would be a riot by this time and everyone would be giddy and delirious by now. These people would be almost telepathically close. Where's the camaraderie?
What kind of snuff channel makes you wait 6 months for the killing?
The Ugly
DV. Looks nasty on a cinema screen. Many of the shots were blurry. Okay, it was kinda necessary for this particular film, that's more a gripe at the use of DV in general.
The sound. The 'frightening' music was effective enough, but I think - due to the nature of the film - it would have been even more effective to have played it naturally with no music or sound effects at all, as if we were watching it on the net ourselves.
The acting. As above. The naturalism of Blair Witch would have been more effective than the "stock horror" acting of this. People don't talk the way those kids were talking, except in horror movies - the film would have been better if they spoke like real people would. The film would have been miles scarier if we occasionally forgot we were watching a movie.
Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones (2002)
On C3P0's amnesia and The Beatles...
Episode II: Attack of the Clones is fine sci-fi entertainment and a definite improvement on its predecessor. But does it deserve the Star Wars brand name?
Gone is the bold economy of the earlier works; I am reminded of the scene in the original film in which Moff Tarkin informs Vader that the Emperor has dissolved the senate. One line, that's all we need to know, back to the fun stuff; the background politics are sketched in and give the movie extra weight and character, but they do not intrude upon the central action. It doesn't matter if we miss all mention of the senate, or if we are too young to know what a senate is and understand the effect its disollusion will have - all we really need to know is that a bad guy has a beautiful girl locked up and she needs rescuing. In AotC, there are an awful lot of officials looking very grave and saying and awful lot of things to each other in a very grave and official way. All political manoeuvrings are up there on screen and consequently the entire film is a slave to them. Gone is the gung-ho swashbuckling adventuring of a motley band of rebels - these guys have government endorsments. (And this is significant: George Lucas is no longer the rebel fighting against the rigid and out-dated studio establishment with his low-budget motley crew, he's one of them now, he is Hollywood hierarchy.)
The plotting: The original trilogy was an epic tale of good against evil, drawn from myth and legend and ancient tales. It was elemental, it spoke to us all. Every part of it - the characters, the situations, the plot - was an archetype, and that's what made it great, a real feeling of an age-old story playing itself out against the backdrop of space. To be sure, everything about AotC is fine: the characters and story are good, the visuals superb... but it's a TV mini-series. It doesn't speak to race-memory as the original trilogy did, it merely does everything it should to take the story from point A to point B. The overwrought political machinations, the complex character motives, the somewhat lacklustre set-pieces all belong to a 10-part serial explaining to us what happened leading up to the actual movies.
The set-pieces: it's all fine fun, but where are the great, indispensable moments? Maybe, at a push, the final duel of the first film and Yoda going nuts in this one, but that is all. Do a couple of poisonous centipedes, a rainy brawl, a dangerous conveyor belt and some gladiatorial action even compare to the trash compactor, the space station which blows up planets, the assault down the trench, the snowy battle against lumbering tanks, the father-son revelation, the Sarlaac pit, the speeder bike chase etc. etc. - indelible scenes which turned cinema upside down and yet at the same time seemed to have been around forever? The original trilogy was teeming with defining, iconographical moments, whereas pretty much everything in TPM and AotC has been... adequate.
Add to the plot complexities and diluted pacing Lucas's seemingly compulsive quest for ever-tightening spirals of internal continuity. In the original film, R2D2 and C3PO were the lowly "everymen" with whom we could identify and who just happened to be in the right place at the wrong time - they found themselves parties to a magical adventure beyond their wildest dreams. They were merely two droids, any old droids, knocking about the ship at the start of the story but who ended up part of something special. They were proof that any of us could have what it takes to be heroes. But now what? C3P0 was built by Darth Vader and spent 12 years on a farm he had no recollection of sometime later when he just happened to drop by there again by sheer one-in-a-billion chance; R2D2 was in it right from the outset and wasn't in fact lying in the original film when he said that he was the property of Obi-Wan Kenobi in order to get the message to him - it seems that Old Ben (in similar fashion to C3PO) was suffering some form of advanced amnesia when he claimed never to have owned an R2 unit! So in fact, when we join "innocent bystanders" R2 and 3PO at the start of the original film, there's a whole lot they're not telling us.
In many respects, Star Wars reminds me of The Beatles. Yes, Free As A Bird and Real Love were nice tunes in an airbrushed, MOR kind of a way, but compared to I Am The Walrus, Hey Jude and Strawberry Fields Forever, they are worlds apart. And the reason is the same: like The Beatles in 1995, George Lucas is no longer lean, hungry and desperate to prove himself against the stodgy might of the old establishment with his pioneering spirit of invention - he's middle-aged, comfortable and has the whole world at his disposal... and that means a whole lot of polish for very little wood.
Summer of Sam (1999)
It's a shame so many people have missed the point
After reading some of the reviews of this film, it seems to be a shame that so many people have so badly missed the point.
Summer of Sam is not a thriller. It is not Copy Cat. To be expecting a regular by-the-book Hollywood serial killer movie is to be watching the wrong film. Summer of Sam is a drama, focussing on the lives a group of disaffected young people in the Italian American community of the Bronx, set against the backdrop of the sweltering summer of '77 and the fear created by David Berkowitz's murder spree. The main element of the film is not whether the police will catch the Son of Sam and when he will strike next, this is merely the scenery. The important plot elements of the film are John Leguizamo's marital problems with Mira Sorvino, and Adrien Brody's rebellious submersion into the punk ethos.
Summer of Sam should be avoided by anyone who likes their serial killers homogenised with all the glossy Hollywood packaging, and those who just want a fun romp in which no one really gets hurt and the best time can be had in persuit of a quirky killer. Yes, go watch Copy Cat again. Summer of Sam, however, is a brilliant, subtle and explosive piece of film-making that sets Spike Lee up to be one of the potential greats of his generation.
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)
In defense of the fighting
I have read Lord of the Rings only once, about ten years ago, but am quite familiar with the whole realm of Middle Earth from childhood readings of The Hobbit and so forth... so for me it was great to see the whole thing brought to life. Even the CGI, unlike recent installments of Star Wars, didn't let it down. Die-hard fans of the novel have their own issues - if you can't handle the fact that it doesn't adhere to every single punctuation mark in the book, simply don't go and see it - but for those people who had previously believed that the book was the preserve of fey hippies, Stonehenge types and spotty schoolboys, this adaption shows it to be a much earthier and gutsier (and darker) tale than many of its fans may let on.
In defense of the fighting, to compare it to The Matrix or Crouching Tiger is to miss the point. Those two films are centred around the grace and fluidity of very precise martial arts skills; they're show-cases for almost balletic action. Lord of the Rings is closer to films like Braveheart or even, in a different context, Saving Private Ryan. You are not supposed to gasp at the skill of the fight choreographer, you are supposed to *feel* the fighting - confusion and half-seen glimpses are a well-worn technique for portraying a combatant's-eye-view of battle which the protagonists have no control over, the terror and mayhem of warfare rather than the grace and skill of martial artists in full control of the game.
Apart from a slightly slow bit in the Council of Elrond, a great piece of cinema - can't wait till Christmas 2002!
The Chase (1994)
Terrible
Awful acting, abysmal script - one of the worst comedies in a long time. It would pass as pretty innocuous if it weren't for the "comedy with cadavers" sequence. Truly offensive. Other than that, 99% of the gags misfire and you are left wondering why you bothered!