Best of the Bloody

The new column is up at The Film Experience. Up for discussion this week is one of my favorite horror movies: Neil Marhsall's The Descent. Go check it out.

And for the record: Top 5 Horror films of the last decade: The Descent followed by 28 Days Later, Let the Right One In, The Devil's Backbone, and The Host. Not counted as horror are Shaun of the Dead (Comedy) Pan's Labyrinth (Fantasy) or Sweeney Todd (musical) although you could make a case for any of them. Affectionate honorable mention to Sam Raimi's daffy Drag Me to Hell which plays like an especially icky Warner Bros. cartoon most of the time, but has an absolutely killer final shot.

Great Shots: Night of the Hunter

Trying to pick a favorite shot from Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter is like trying to pick a favorite note from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. My favorite is whichever one I'm experiencing at the moment. I went with this shot for this post because it encapsulates a number of things I love about this unforgettable movie.

Firstly, the shot is just plain beautiful. Shot by Stanley Cortez, The Night of the Hunter goes on a list with The Third Man and Raging Bull as one of the most breathtakingly photographed black and white films ever made.

Furthermore, it's funny. Not content to be merely scary, Laughton insisted his movie be clever too. The more you think of Hunter, the more you realize how subversive it is. The religious townsfolk in this movie are a gullible bunch, all too eager to form a mob today against what they loved yesterday. They fall for Reverend Powell's honeyed words with no resistance simply because he identifies himself as a man of God. Shelly Winters' poor Willa is so brainwashed she's declaring her faith in God's plan right up until the moment she's destroyed. The only religious person to peg Powell for what he is Lillian Gish's Rachel, but for all her faith in the Lord she's taking protection into her own hands in this scene. All throughout the film, especially in the shot above, Laughton uses the visuals to emphasize his warped view of Americana.

I love how utterly unconcerned Night of the Hunter is with realism in its lighting and production design. It's a film noir diorama that unfolds with the logic of a nightmare. I know modern movie audiences have lost the taste for blatant artifice. Most of them would likely dismiss Night of the Hunter as "fake." They're missing out. Hunter doesn't hesitate to discard realism at every turn, and it's all the better for it. It colonizes the imagination so long after other realistic horror films are long forgotten precisely because it's so unrealistic.

Filmmakers like Guillermo Del Toro and Darren Aronofsky are keeping the spirit of Hunter alive. They know what Laughton and Cortez knew: A movie's success is not measured in its realism but in the power of its images. Any random slob with a smart phone can give you real life. It takes some of the best artists in cinema history to give you images like this.

Previous entries in the Hit Me With Your Best Shot series:

The Royal Tenenbaums, There Will Be Blood, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, Angels in America, Se7en, La Dolce Vita, Pandora's Box, A Face in the Crowd, Black Narcissus

5 Great Overlooked Horror Scenes

Around this time of the year we usually get various countdowns about the scariest movie moments ever. It's all good fun even if the lists are just rearrangements of the same classic scenes, with Psycho, The Exorcist, and Jaws occupying the top three spots, most likely in that order. All good stuff to be sure, but I though for the sake of variety I would suggest five equally scary scenes to mix in amongst the classics.

1. The Descent - Tunnel 

One of the reasons the reasons Neil Marshall's The Descent works so well is because the survival story  has the audience squirming in their seat so badly they forget the horror elements are lurking there waiting to be sprung. The most nerve-wracking example of this is the tunnel scene which is guaranteed to make you want to crawl out of your skin if you are the slightest bit claustrophobic.

The women of the film are unaware that they are diving in uncharted caves, not the safe tourist attraction they expected. Struggling through the darkness they find a treacherously narrow tunnel to be the only way forward. (The sight of the tunnel alone is enough to send chills. That's your way through? You ladies don't want to keep looking?) Sure enough the last one through the tunnel gets stuck in a horribly awkward position. Then she starts to have a panic attack. Then the tunnel starts to cave in. Given the choice between that tunnel and hand-to-hand combat with the ghoulies that turn up later, I would take the monsters every time.

2. The Host - Escape Attempt 

Joon-ho Bong's The Host gleefully discarded monster movie rules which have been pretty much written in stone since the release of Jaws in 1975. Hide your creature from the audience as long as possible, the rules state, showing only shadowy glimpses and the aftermath of its actions. Yet its barely ten minutes into the movie when a sea monster the size of a parade float emerges from the water in broad daylight bounding across the shore like an excited labrador. It could have been a fatally goofy moment but the gambit pays off. The monster is good enough to withstand direct, prolonged scrutiny.

The high point of the film is a masterful sequence that takes place when a resourceful little girl attempts to escape the monster's pit where she is being kept as a future meal. What follows is a scene worthy of Hitchcock. She has managed to make a rope out of the clothes, but has accidentally thrown it too high to reach. The girl is forced to climb the sleeping monster itself. It's a perfectly timed, extremely clever sequence, but the visual wit of the filmmaking is easy to miss when the scene is this frightening.

3. Let the Right One In - Cats

Audiences could be forgiven for thinking that the last thing they needed in 2008 was one more vampire movie. No one could have known that Thomas Alfredson's Let the Right One In harkened back decades, back to the days before Anne Rice sexed up the vampire genre. The vampirism of this film feels more like a descendant of the grotesque, animalistic vampire of Nosferatu than the suave monster of Dracula. As a result it reinvents some tropes that one would have thought done to death.

Take the inevitable scene where animals sense danger humans cannot. This is material we've seen dozens of times before. Alfredson wisely doesn't try to top previous attempts with a lot of flash and style, directing instead with a starkness that is unsettling in its realism. This makes it all the more jarring when the newly infected Ika Nord returns home to find her pets less than welcoming. Sudden violence is rarely as shocking as it is here - the sound of a cat thudding against a glass door is more frightening than a full-fledged vampire attack.

Or maybe it's just that I'm not a cat person.

4. Zodiac - The Movie Poster

David Fincher's Zodiac deviously plays with the audience expectations shaped by The Silence of the Lambs and all the subsequent psycho killer movies. All the killings in Zodiac take place in the first third of the movie leaving behind only maddeningly unsolved mysteries and a pervasive sense of dread. But just because the violence is over doesn't mean Fincher is above teasing us with the possibility of more, and towards the film's end he springs a doozy on the audience.

Graysmith's obsession with the Zodiac has led him to a hand-drawn movie poster he is convinced was done by the killer, and he tracks down the one man who can identify the artist behind the poster. After unwisely showing up alone, and even more unwisely blabbing all the reasons he's searching for the poster's creator, Zodiac lowers the boom. "That's my handwriting," the man tells him. "I do the posters." It's the modern movie equivalent of the "The call is coming from inside the house!" moment, aided immeasurably by the eerie performance of Charles Fleischer as the movie theater proprietor. It's a heart-stopper of a sequence in the midst of a mostly cerebral movie.

5. The Witches - Painting

Honestly, most of The Witches is too silly to be frightening to anyone over the age of eight. The big exception being the chilling prologue which involves a tale told to the boy by his grandmother to instruct him how to spot witches.

Witches are bald, have no toes, and can't stand the smell of children, she warns. All well and good and plenty creepy, but then she goes on to tell the tale of her childhood friend who didn't heed these warnings and became the victim of a witch. She was missing for weeks before the little girl's father spotted his daughter staring back at him from inside an oil painting. I don't know which part of the scene bothered me most, the little girl mutely looking out from the painting, or her father's twisted face upon realizing what he was seeing.

Oscar Race - Where is the Critical Bar Set?

The only significant event of the Oscar race this week was Eastwood's  Hereafter wide release being greeted with middling reviews and weak box office.  It looks out of the race except for the several big name boosters in its corner, most vocally Roger Ebert. This leads some to declare it a dark horse thanks to the more forgiving expanded Best Picture category. So with everything else in a holding pattern buzz-wise, now seems like a good time to explore the question: Exactly how bad can a film be and still land a Best Picture nomination?

I'm going to try to answer this as objectively as I can, so that means leaving personal grudges aside (You got off easy this time, Erin Brockovich). Seems to me the fairest way to rate the quality of recent nominees would be to take an average of the two main sources for critical consensus: Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic.  Also, let's look at just the last decade, since data from before then is spottier and less relevant to current Academy tastes.

The Ten Worst Reviewed Best Picture Nominees of the Last Decade

So what does this show us about how to slide into the Best Picture line up without overwhelming critical praise? Well for starters:

Stay Fresh - No film has managed a nomination without maintaining a fresh rating (60%) on Rotten Tomatoes. So Hereafter is going to need divine intervention to get nominated with its 51%. Films like Shutter Island, Conviction and Secretariat, although they didn't have the critics doing cartwheels, aren't quite out of it yet with their ratings in the sixties.

Be Divisive - If a film is going to get in without overwhelming support it has to at least have pockets of critics crying "Masterpiece!" Films like Moulin Rouge and Gangs of New York may have had noisy detractors but they had equally noisy people declaring their greatness. Crash got some scathing reviews but none of them could top Roger Ebert's beating the drums for the film for months on end.

Look Like an Oscar Nominee - When The Reader side-swiped the much better reviewed Dark Knight out of the Best Picture race it was a mystery to exactly no one as to the reason. The Reader is about Nazis; the The Dark Knight is about Batman. No contest. Look at the list above again. Everyone one of those, with the possible exception of Moulin Rouge, fits nicely into safe ideas of what an Oscar nominee should be. If the Academy is going to go out of its way for a film it has to at least look great on the surface.

Make Bank - You can underperform with the critics or at the box office, but you can't do both. If movies like Gladiator and The Blind Side hadn't been box office sensations there is no way that they would have come with in a mile of Best Picture nominations on quality alone. If a movie has blockbuster status then voters will bend over backwards to cut it some slack.

* Crash's rating is missing from metacritic. If the site updates the info I will update the chart.

We Named the Dog Indiana

My new column is up over at The Film Experience. This week it's all about giving credit to an uncredited writer. One of the most prominent writers in the world and most people don't know he wrote  some classic banter for Connery and Ford.

Mad Men - Season 4 Yearbook

Best Roger One-Liner - 

Roger to the Japanese: I'm sorry. I didn't know this meeting was happening. But then again I know how some people love surprises.

Roger's behavior with the businessmen from Honda was appalling but that doesn't make him any less clever.

Funniest Sequence -

The extended farce that occurs behind the clients as the SCDP crew try to discreetly deal with the expired Mrs. Blankenship and Don tries to focus.

Best Zinger -

Henry: Don, it's temporary.

Don: Believe me Henry, everybody thinks this is temporary.

You can't expect to take Don's wife and live in his home without his getting some shots in.

Sexiest Joan Moment -

The conga line, easily. Still doesn't hold a candle to the accordion scene from last season though.

Most Missed - Kinsey

Everybody is still lamenting the loss of Sal, but this season's parade of sexist pigs, sad sacks, and hacks at SCDP left me pining for the return of Kinsey. Nobody was a prick with half as much panache as Sterling Cooper's resident ascot-wearing, pipe-smoking, overly competitive, frustrated playwright.


Best Prop - Roger's giant op-art painting stole many a shot and threatened to suck Freddy Rumson into the modern world.

Most Improved Character - Sally Draper. She's gone from the drink-mixing prop of Season 1 to one of the most complex characters on Mad Men, and Kiernan Shipka has stepped up her performance to equal it.




Best New Character - In a season all about change there was no shortage of new faces, from Hellcat Ida Blankenship to Peggy's boyfriend Mark: expert on the ways of Swedish love. But my favorite was Teddy Chaugh - Salieri to Don's Mozart. He also does a passable Robert Kennedy.

Best One Episode Character - Mrs. Francis. She seems really mean and unfair until you realize she's 100% right about everything.

MVP - Jared Harris as Lane Pryce. He improves any scene he's in. His character is a great level-headed presence in the office and was at turns both hilarious (Lane vs. The Comedian) and touching (Lane vs. His Father).

Best Shot - Bronze

Best Shot - Silver 

Best Shot - (Sterling's) Gold 

Most Heartbreaking -

"How old is your daughter?" It takes time for the weight of this line to sink in. I root for Joan more than any character yet she always finds herself in such awful circumstance.

Most Heartbreaking (Runner-Up)Sally's sad little wave upon seeing her father. Divorce has taught her to keep her expectations in check.

Most Cringe-Inducing Scene 
Lee Garner Jr. forcing Roger into the Santa suit. Was it worth it? 

Most Cringe-Inducing Scene (Runner-Up) 

Don's excruciating drunken train wreck pitch for Life Cereal.  The looks on Pete's and Peggy's faces are enough to make you turn away.

Don's Proudest Moment - Showing up to Baby Gene's birthday party despite all the reasons not to.

Don's Most Disappointing Moment - Telling Alison to write her own recommendation for him to sign. If I can't look to Don Draper for guidance on how to treat women then what is the world coming to?

Most Inexplicable Scene - "Did you get pears?" I've read a dozen different interpretations of why this scene is in the episode. 

Most Awesome Moment - Bronze: Peggy and Don discover Roger's book.

Most Awesome Moment - Silver: Godzilla

Most Awesome Moment - Gold: This one speaks for itself

"She makes me very happy." - First heard from Roger Sterling then Henry Francis now Don Draper. The call of the man who got married way, way too fast.

Best Foreshadowing: This shot which now seems a lot more important than it did at the time. Sally choosing for Don.

Best Episode: The Suitcase. Like the Ali-Liston fight, this wasn't even close. This all-nighter that puts Don and Peggy through the emotional wringer is one of the best hours of television ever produced.

Runner Up: Waldorf Stories - an episode that bounced from tense to raucous to dark to funny with some beautifully executed flashbacks along the way. 

So onward to Season 5. It can't get here soon enough, but first...Victory Lap!

Review: Hereafter

In his last HBO special, George Carlin dissected the idea of deceased loved ones watching over us from the afterlife. A quaint, comforting idea he agreed, but isn't it a really crummy deal for the dead person, just watching live people all the time? What kind of eternity is that? You're granted access to the answers to all the great mysteries of existence and all you're going to do is hover over my shoulder and make sure I pass my driving test? Seems more than a little disappointing, doesn't it? Clint Eastwood's Hereafter pretty much subscribes to this view. It presents a very sophisticated, polished production, but on a basic level it is saying, "Yes, your loved ones are all in Heaven and want very much to talk to you and tell you everything is going to be alright."

The story involves three separate strands that we assume, but can't be sure, are on a course to intersect. In the first Cecile De France plays a French female TV news personality who has trouble returning to her regular life once she glimpses the afterlife as the result of a near-death experience. In another strand, a young English boy has difficulty coping with a death in his family and turns to the world of psychics for answers. In the third strand, Matt Damon plays a man with genuine psychic abilities who turned his back on fame to live a blue collar life free from the constant intrusion of death.

Just by structuring the story this way screenwriter Peter Morgan suggests a grand meaning that the film never really delivers on. Whenever the spiritual is addressed the mystery of it is barely if ever acknowledged. Is there an afterlife? Yup. Do psychics really exist? Sure do. Do dead people have messages for us? Yes: Stop crying and move on with your life. Now a movie can present one or all those things as true and still be good. Wings of Desire is a genuinely great film and that had angels strolling all over Germany. But that film had what Hereafter lacks: a sense of awe in the face of the unknowable. Hereafter even drops in a scientist to claim that there is irrefutable proof of an afterlife that is being suppressed, an idea the movie never explores.

Now I'm not asking for divine intervention. I don't need a Magnolia-style plague of frogs to descend. In fact, I think Hereafter was on the right track rooting the film in the mundane details of day-to-day life. All the better to show the amazement of the supernatural when it arrives. But Hereafter never manages to astound us. It falls back on a reductive, cliched view of death - white lights, glimpses of glowing ghostly figures, psychics holding your hand "to make a connection." It's Touched by an Angel dressed up in A-List Hollywood clothes.

So philosophy aside, how's the movie?

It's a pretty flat affair. Peter Morgan's gift for writing sharp dialogue and memorable characters appears to have abandoned him for this script. I didn't know going in that he was the writer and I never would have guessed that the man behind the quietly witty The Queen and hugely entertaining The Damned United was responsible for this. Despite a game cast none of the characters pop, and most of the dialogue is functional. I could have done without Damon declaring "This isn't a blessing. It's a curse!" once, let alone the three or so times he says it.

Not that the film is terrible by any stretch. I was never bored - Clint is too much of a pro for that. Although I think it's telling that all the film's best moments have nothing to do with the spiritual side of things. The life of the little boy living with his addict mom, covering for her with visiting social workers, is a wonderful self-contained short film. The scenes involving Damon tentatively starting up a flirtation with Bryce Dallas Howard in a cooking class are charming, and the near-death experience of the news woman is a stunner, one of the most riveting depictions of a natural disaster that I've seen in a movie. It's almost as if when the subject turned to the spiritual Eastwood and Morgan felt obligated to be somber and stone-faced. The life goes out of the film (so to speak) and we get lots of shots of Damon laying in the darkness staring at the ceiling.

I give a lot of credit to Eastwood for attempting this material. Here is a guy who willing to step out of his comfort zone and try something daring. But I wonder if Eastwood's instincts as a showman may have held the him back here. He is one of those directors, like Hitchcock, who is all about the audience first. The film can contain depth and meaning, but only after priority one, entertain the crowd, has been met. That hasn't kept him from exploring some complex ideas about good and evil in films like A Perfect World, Mystic River or Unforgiven. But those films were couched neatly in straight-forward narratives. With this more unconventionally structured story one gets the feeling that Eastwood and Morgan are letting the spiritual material be simplistic for fear of leaving the audience behind.

In the end, Hereafter settles for some predictable character beats to wrap things up, when what the film really needs is to reach for something grand. A payoff that shakes us even if it leaves us on unsure footing. As it stands the film is about some nice people who step a toe over the line into the next world and are a little better for it. Not terrible, but the film had the potential to be much more.

Verdict: It's hard to not let one's personal beliefs influence things. I've loved films both spiritual (The Passion of Joan of Arc) and overtly religious (The Last Temptation of Christ) so I believe I can say with some objectivity that Hereafter comes up short by not evoking in the audience some of the awe inherent in crossing the line between life and death. It's an ambitious film but it filters that ambition through familiar life-after-death banalities until there is little of it to be found in the finished product. 5 out of 10

Oscar Race Roundup - Oct. 16

Secretariat takes a tumble from third down to fifth in its second weekend or release, cementing it as a box office under-performer. With Secretariat hovering in the sixties on Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes it would need to be a popular favorite to make the Best Picture cut. Seabiscuit made around 120 million in 2003. Secretariat will probably make a modest profit on its 35 million budget, which likely falls under the heading of not good enough. Of course, if voters love it they vote for it, period. But history has shown they're reluctant to vote for films perceived as duds.

In the space of a week Secretariat went from big time contender to a long shot, with Diane Lane going from Annette Bening's main competition to dark horse for a nomination. (Good news for Jennifer Lawrence) The buzz giveth and the buzz taketh away. If it doesn't make it film writers everywhere will mourn the loss of untold hundreds of horse racing/Oscar race puns.

If you look a notch below Secretariat on the box office chart you'll see that The Town has turned into one of the Fall's success stories. It keeps chugging along, looking like it will finish somewhere north of 90 million - a blockbuster by recent Oscar standards and the most successful straight-up adult drama of the year. With box office and critical success comparable to last year nominated District 9 it looks like those dismissing it out of hand spoke too soon. It's cleared both the financial and critical hurdles with room to be spare, and if one of the December unknowns like The Fighter fails to deliver, look out.

It looked like Hereafter was going to be completely torpedoed by critics right out of the gate, but some powerful supporters came off the bench in NY and LA joining Ebert in support for the film. It stands on the precipice of rotten status at Rotten Tomatoes with a 60% which I believe would be an all time low for a Picture nomination (correct me if I'm wrong but Blind Side's 66% is where the bar is currently set) It's got its work cut out for it but If anyone can make it happen its Clint.

Lack of critical support looks like it managed to sink It's Kind of a Funny Story. It stands at a barely fresh 61% at Rotten Tomatoes and it dropping out of the top ten in it's second week, and from there probably out of the discussion for good, taking Zach Galifianakis's well-regarded supporting work down with it unless critic's award unexpectedly rally.


The Social Network is still has the lion's share of the heat now that it erased its bizarre perception as a box office weakling. The charge was ridiculous on the face of it, but it might have stuck had the film not shown such great staying power at the box office. It's also shaken off sexism charges with no discernible damage to its momentum, so it looks locked and loaded to go all the way to the big show as a genuine contender for some major awards. Network's rising tide has also raised it's fortuned in other races besides Picture. Sorkin is now way out in front of the pack as the favorite to win Adapted Screenplay and Eisenberg is looking like even money to break into the top five, especially since he has all the acting buzz to himself since none of the supporting actors are breaking out of the pack. Some people, ahem, saw this coming a while ago.