Saw VI (2009)

Jigsaw takes on investment bankers and America’s health care, and it’s pretty darn funny.

I will not recap the five previous films, because this film series is almost solely existent on retcons (retroactive continuity) and has a history of concocting new characters and having the audacity to pretend that they’ve existed throughout the film series' story all along. In short, Hoffman (Costas Mandylor), the new Jigsaw who’d taken over for John (Tobin Bell), the original Jigsaw who died by the end of the third film was, apparently, around since even before the happenings of the first film and even before Jigsaw’s “first” protégé Amanda (Shawnee Smith) came to light. Hoffman is a detective who's on the Jigsaw case and must juggle two jobs at once: protecting the innocent and murdering the guilty.

The story of Saw VI centers on the fact that corporations run the country and to the screenwriters, apparently that’s news. The problem with the script is that Original Jigsaw wasn’t aware that the corporate world had existed until recently and had found out about health insurance the hard way: he was dying of cancer and his health insurance company had turned him down because of company policy: “we are not certain that the procedure, one having a 30-40% chance of success will succeed and also, because you are old we have to turn down your insurance claim, etc... more lawyer speak.”

The film’s protagonist, William Easton (Peter Outerbridge -that's right, Jigsaw should never be the protagonist-) was the man who had turned John “Jigsaw” down and therefore, must be punished. He finds himself kidnapped and he must survive a series of traps that result in slight personal mutilation, be they physical or mental, that mostly result in others being murdered. The idea, like in the previous Saw films is that the person that pulls the trigger is the one that commits the murders and not Jigsaw and William must learn what it means to actually “live” through the ideal of facing death. However, Jigsaw’s still a tad bit of a jerk because he’s attempting to save lives through the process of teaching and preaching about torture and the possibilities of death. Once again, Jigsaw takes on the corporate world believing that they are unaware of the decisions that they make and in there lies a terrible screenplay.

To add insult to injury, not a single one of the Saw films is ever shot well, lit well, or edited properly. They're concocted with a strenuous low budget and won’t have it any other way. They are incomprehensible (some are far dumber than even what was thought to be the dumbest) and the performances are always poorly acted. Also, they are always entirely existent throughout flashbacks (this Saw film is at least 50% flashback and they have all been fabricated for this film alone). On all of those notes, the Saw films are consistent and to that I add a very unenthusiastic yay.

I don’t hate these films because on several accounts I'd laughed and laughed hard. No Saw film has managed to make me laugh more than this one because during its intro Jigsaw was actually heard saying to the investment bankers, and I loosely quote: “You have consistently provided citizens with payments that they could never afford throughout the entirety of their lives and for that you are being punished. How much will you sacrifice in order to set your guilty consciences free?” Again, I did not make that up but someone got paid very well to write that drivel.

I laughed throughout this film and I was also bored in the middle of it for a good thirty minutes. It’s normal for a Saw film to significantly slow down in the middle but one never turns it off because terribly, cheesy special effects are just around the corner; a remarkably dumb trap is there to make us feel better while reminding us of how stupid we are for watching these ridiculous films.

During this last paragraph I will mention that I liked Saw V (5) more than any other Saw film because of the fact that it was the first Saw film that didn't take itself seriously. It was a ton of fun and was made for laughs and kicks. Then we come full circle and back to this dreck that believes in what it preaches and that was always what made these Saw films terrible. It’s like when an Evangelical Christian preaches to one The Word and when listeners don’t like what they hear or disbelieve in God they are automatically wrong. If one was to go to a forum discussing Saw VI and claiming that it’s one of the worst movies in the series and of this year they, too are in the wrong. Well, soooooory!

Watchmen (2009)

Alan Moore’s 12-issue, 800 page graphic novel from 1985 was deemed unfilmable for over two decades. Breaking barriers and taboos in the graphic novel realm, Watchmen contains the ideal of superheroes that are average human beings.

In an alternate reality, basing itself in the 1930’s and moving forward through to the 1980’s, average citizens disguise themselves in costumes and parade into the night, fighting crime. They form a group called The Minutemen and are condoned by the police force and government. Fast forward to the present, the year being 1985 because the novel was written and drawn at that time, the Minutemen have changed into The Watchmen and they are a collective of second-generation superheroes, in some cases they are the original members’ offspring. What's interesting about the concept of average citizens fighting crime on their own time is that they have their own personal demons and problems; drugs and other addictions for one, and a lack of super powers.

In the film, faithfully borrowing from the graphic novel, the Watchmen are Dan Dreiberg/Night Owl II (Patrick Wilson), a scientist who had inherited his father’s millions and designed costumed suits for combat and a floating airship; Laurie Jupiter/Silk Spectre II (Malin Akerman), who reluctantly inherited the title from her former superhero mother Sally Jupiter/Silk Spectre I (Carla Gugino); Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias (Matthew Goode) is the self-proclaimed “Smartest Man in the World” who had built an empire through technological wonders, political support and intel, and action figures; Rorschach/Walter Kovacs (Jackie Earle Haley), who wears a mask that shifts Rorschach Test blot images that symbolize his thoughts and feelings, and is slightly on the unstable side; Edward Blake/The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), who supported and fought for his country from WWII to Viet Nam, performed political assassinations, and found out how depressing the American Dream really is; and Jon Osterman/Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup) was a nuclear physicist who, in a freak accident was ripped apart atom by atom, and in a parallel universe had pieced himself back together. Now he is a sort of demi-God.

Dr. Manhattan is the most fascinating character in the film because he can see and sense existence in a quantum universe and existence, and sees time in a none-linear manner. He grows bored on Earth, teleports himself to Mars, constructs a fortress out of glass and ponders his own existence and purpose behind his past.

The best performance in the film, unanimously, is that of Jackie Earle Haley’s Rorschach but I still find the performance to be sub-par because he is masked throughout most of the film and speaks in a gruff voice, channeling Christian Bale’s Batman. My favourite performance, however is a split between Billy Crudup and Patrick Wilson. Crudup plays Dr. Manhattan to perfection: he’s calm and speaks in a tranquil voice, channeling melancholy, has the body of Adonis (thanks to decent CGI work), and always looks and sounds depressed. When he says that he had lost faith in mankind and needs a good reason to save them we feel his pain; Patrick Wilson plays Night Owl II like a very average, slightly chunky man who wears prescription glasses and is slightly impotent, but he plays him with conviction. We sense that Dan Dreiberg is average and doesn’t care about his past as a superhero.

Watching the film we notice that it’s entirely a character-driven piece. However, the drawback is that the film is three hours long so developing six main characters while providing intensive back-stories becomes tiresome rather quickly. We do not lose interest in the characters, only in the flow of the film.

There is some action in the film but it’s designed to sound and feel cheesy, and I don’t know why. When someone swings a punch we hear the air whooshing and the connecting punch’s sound effect is like that of a video game; the choreography is similar to Kung Fu flicks’ and director Zack Snyder insists on super slow motion throughout a good half of the film. What results is that we see someone walking towards the camera in normal speed that turns into slow motion, and then the speed slows down even more. Snyder does that many times throughout the film and eventually we realize that we are watching many montages. Every character’s back-story is simply a montage showcasing the time periods changing, and played to appropriate pop cultural music. It’s easy to follow but one cannot take the film seriously. For example the film’s opening credits showcase the 1930’s to the 1980’s in a long, super slow motion montage that plays Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’”. It’s a nice piece of cinema but ultimately, Snyder uses that technique throughout the three hours following and we grow tiresome of the film’s style and notice the lack of substance.

Where the film has the most substance is in its beginning, where The Comedian's murder by a shadowy assassin provides the film with a detective story aspect, a flash-back structure, and finally, at the end when the “bad guy” is revealed and is revealed to be doing something terrible for the greater good. There is a lot of philosophy in the film in many different aspects, and especially in its third act, but I find the film as a whole to lack substance and decent performances. I liked only three characters and their actors in the film, and their combined determination to find out the truth is muddled by MTV-style music videos, criminally overused slow motion, lackluster CGI, and a musical score that changes styles with each montage. Plus, every licensed song in the film is a remix or cover. Ugh... terrible soundtrack.
Fans of the graphic novel will notice that Zack Snyder emulates images from the source material faithfully into his film. Some shots are exactly similar in composition and colour but that‘s just using the novel as a storyboard. The rest is in the screenplay which is faithful and ironically, therefore, doesn’t work as a three hour film.

Maybe if Zack Snyder invested the budget toward a Made-for-TV, 10 hour mini-series we’d see something worth mentioning. As the story is already fragmented in its entirety, a miniseries makes a lot more sense.

Watchmen is far too long and mostly uninspired but contains some very interesting ideals, like the Keene Act: in 1977, Senator Keene passed a bill that outlawed vigilantism and asked all costumed heroes to reveal their true selves. Everyone except Rorschach and The Comedian had done so. Rorschach is slightly nuts and his mask is his actual personality, removing it showcases the true face he had lost in the past and hates; The Comedian still works for the government but under guise, and Dr. Manhattan works for the government as well, until a conspiracy had led him to outcast himself to his Martian fortress.

Good storytelling exists in the graphic novel and it contains drab, primary colours that insinuate a dreary existence. New York City looked like the real one: decrepit, beautiful, and old; not without its ups and downs. But in Snyder’s film, the entire universe is colourful and glossy. It’s not the “film effect” because in post-production everything can change; day can become night and gloss can be superimposed to apply a surreal effect. The graphic novel contains certain realism and the film lacks it entirely.

To sum it up, I should have watched the film before reading the entire graphic novel. I would have found it to be “full of itself” in style but containing great idealism. Having read the novel first, I thought the novel was, overall pretty good and the film weak. In almost every aspect the film is weak but at least it looks nice, which is ironic because the novel wasn’t glossy and didn’t pull any punches.

Public Enemies (2009)

We are thrust into the 1930’s without a warning, like being dropped into a cave without a flashlight. We wait for all available light to cast outlines of every object and person and we listen to surrounding sounds ion order to find out where you are. Such is the style of director Michael Mann’s biopic on John Dillinger and his short lived career. It lacks drama and character but it showcases the period with great respect.

Public Enemies opens with John Dillinger (Johnny Depp) being thrown into a prison and within minutes he manages to escape with a group of inmates. The group hides out in a house in the middle of a field, in the middle of nowhere; we identify Dillinger as a bad guy. Then we see FBI Agent Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale) chasing a man that’s armed with a Tommy gun through an apple orchard and with his rifle, Purvis shoots the pursued man dead. We identify Purvis as a good guy, as he is surrounded and backed up by cops. We come to understand that John Dillinger is a notorious gangster and that FBI Agent Melvin Purvis is hot on his trail.

The film’s style is curious because it features the period of the 1930’s but it isn’t shot or directed like a movie from that period; it’s very avant-garde. Michael Mann chose to shoot the movie with an extremely expensive, high definition digital video camera and handheld. Because of that decision two things happen: 1) we have a period-piece that is shot in a semi-documentary style and we feel like we are actually in the 1930’s, 2) we have an ugly looking HD movie that tries to be a period piece but looks like Mann’s traveled back in time with a camcorder. The end-result is paradoxical and is hugely hit and miss; much more miss than hit. Audience’s opinion differs greatly on the final product solely because of the choice Mann made of shooting the movie in High Definition.

Depp wisely plays Dillinger like an average Joe. It allows him to portray the character naturally and the audience relates to him as to a normal man. This version of Dillinger doesn’t care about anything, not even his life. He doesn’t even care that he doesn’t care. He never offers more than a smirk and that’s seen only when he’s having fun with the cops. It’s a nice touch but nothing outstanding. Ultimately Dillinger becomes nothing more your average Joe.

Early in the film, Dillinger picks up a coat-check girl named Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard) who becomes his woman because he told her so, and even his pick-up sounds threatening.

The fact that the film offers no background to any character within it is a huge step backwards and we eventually don’t care much for Depp’s Dillinger, either.

Bale plays Purvis like a proficient cop and a competent predator. We notice his determination to uphold the law due to his perfect posture, and his cocky style showcases a hotshot that gets work done. The irony here is that cocky cops in movies end up getting killed because they try to be “cool” at the wrong time. Here Purvis is always in control and Bale pulls off this minor character better than Depp does his, and he showcases Purvis with his entire body.

The weakest link of the film is the screenplay, or lack of. Between the opening jail-break and second jail-break in the middle of the movie, a nighttime shoot-out later on, and the eventual death of Dillinger outside of the Biograph Theater in Chicago, nothing much happens in between that is of any importance to the plot progression. A screenplay must contain a story and within it, possibly a plot. The story itself must have three acts: a beginning, middle, and an end. Public Enemies does not contain a specific beginning, middle, or end because we are not provided with any information about the characters in the movie, save for their jobs. “You are what you do” is a terrible cliché that incorporates itself with this movie and outside of their jobs, these characters to do exist.

Dillinger is a bank robber/cop killer and because we aren’t given insight as to his past or childhood we forget to care. Purvis is a good cop with a great attitude but what had made him so determined to be so good and insistent? And who is Billie? She’s simply Dillinger’s girl for an X-amount of time. Before Dillinger’s appearance and after his death she ceases to exist.

The film doesn’t drag because the plot never slows down, and that's because there isn’t a plot. That’s an enormous drawback. The conversations in the film don't contain any exposition and drama is never actually developed. However, top marks are earned by the art direction department. Like aforementioned, it feels as if Mann and the cast and crew had traveled back in time to the 1930, bought clothes, cars and guns during that time and shot the movie while enjoying their stay. Then they had traveled back in time to the present and edited the movie. I did feel like I was transported back in time a few times but I didn’t exist before the 1980’s and so I also felt a tad detached.

Cinematographer Dante Spinotti shoots almost every shot in a close-up or tight shot and the camera almost always shakes, which reminds us of Mann’s time travel escapades once again and throughout.

I wanted to like this movie or, at least enjoy it but there is too little to offer. Good costume designs and art direction do not make a movie good. Here, the performances are natural but they lack a bite and conviction because of the lack of drama within the screenplay. The direction is under par because Michael Mann threw all accessible and comprehensible film compositions out of the window in the pre-production stages, and the cinematography is made up of 140 minutes of close-ups showcasing Dillinger, Purvis, and Frechette’s pores.

I like some of Mann’s work but if he insists on shooting the rest his movies from now on entirely in HD I might just skip them altogether.

GREAT MOVIES: Akira (1988)

"Humans were like monkeys once; and before that, like reptiles and fish; and before that, plankton and amoebas... Even creatures like those have incredible energy inside them. What if there was some mistake in evolution and the progression went wrong, and something like an amoeba was given power like a human's?"

In Tokyo, on 07.16.1988, a huge explosion takes place and destroys the entire city. World War III is in effect and this story takes place 31 years later, in 2019 A.D. Neo Tokyo. The government of Neo Tokyo is in a type of dictatorship but a megapolis manages to thrive, nevertheless. The citizens need their high-rises and 100-foot tall bridges/promenades that connect between buildings. Biker gangs rule the city and the police force, surprisingly cannot handle them. The average citizen is terrorized only slightly because most of them collaborate. And the school system has crumbled beyond repair. The colors of the city are lush and buildings stand taller than needs be. This, among Blade Runner and Dark City is one of the best films of its kind since Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926).

Akira is about a teenager named Tetsuo whom has a history of being picked on, and his childhood foster-school friend Kaneda who is always there for him. He always helps Tetsuo in any situation and therefore, becomes like a father-figure to him. Kaneda and Tetsuo are in their late teens and they belong to a popular biker gang.

The film opens with a gang battle between Kaneda’s gang and a gang of youths that somewhat resembles clowns. "The Clowns” lose the fight and the police are on its way; pity that Kaneda’s bike just got warmed up. Soon after, Tetsuo has a motorcycle accident and military troops come to claim him. They perform tests on him while his biker friends are worried about his well being.

All of the youths in Neo Tokyo hate its government, its military, and its police force, and so does a guerrilla troop that attempts to uncover a government conspiracy, one that involves three children that may have telekinetic powers; those kids have gray shriveled skin and Tetsuo is given the same treatment as them. He finds out that he does have telekinetic powers and lets the power go to his head. When Kaneda tries to rescue Tetsuo from the military hospital he is confronted by Tetsuo and is told that he doesn’t need his help anymore, that he can take care of himself now. Tetsuo ties a long red cloth around his neck, like a sort of cape, and flies across the city like a superhero; but he destroys anyone that is in his path. He has single-handedly become Kaneda’s antagonist.

This film carries two major themes: the first theme is of ‘youth gone wild’ in a city that had brought the situation upon itself, and the second theme is of a boy that hates being helpless. Tetsuo hates being helped more than being unable to help himself. The army attempts to destroy him using riot squads and tanks, and even resorts to firing a particle-beam satellite onto him from space. Tetsuo then flies out of the atmosphere and destroys the satellite with his new found powers. The themes collide well: we see bikers roaming the street with blunt metal instruments at hand, and later we see a teenage boy (Tetsuo) destroy an entire bridge using only his mind. The first group rebels against authority and Tetsuo rebels against everyone that stands in his way.

The first act of the film is the bikers and the youths, the most violent part of the film. The second act is of the powers that were vested within a few individuals and of the system being brought down from within. The third act is the most strange and gruesome one, like when Tetsuo loses his right arm to the particle-beam satellite and replaces it with metallic component (wires and such). My favorite act is the first one: it may be the most violent but it feels the most free. It packs a wallop to see such young people terrorizing citizens simply because they have nothing better to do. It reminds me of the first act of Kubrick’s classic A Clockwork Orange (1971): we do not condone what these youth do to for kicks but we can’t look away. It’s fascinating to see what triggers certain people and we almost forget that what is happening on screen is terrible because the filmmaking has so much energy to it.

The ideal behind Akira is that Akira has turned into the form of pure energy. As a child he was unable to control his mysterious powers and the scientists who were in control took measures of securing his powers from overtaking him and destroying the city. Some say that the nuclear bomb was Akira. Tetsuo is on the same path Akira was and cannot control his power because human beings cannot have such power. The tragedy is that even if we have it we simply cannot control it, for it is not designed for us. The power takes over Tetsuo and the three other “special” children team up to revive Akira in order to stop Tetsuo.

Akira premiered in 1988 and became an instant landmark in animation, graphics, and storytelling that was geared for adults. Claiming that the rating for this film is Restricted is an understatement but because it is animated the rating is suitable; we all need suspension of disbelief.

I mentioned that the animation is fantastic but that, too, is an understatement. It is due to the arduous work of animating frame by frame. When viewing the film shot by shot one notices that buildings and walls are present in almost every shot. It gives off the feeling of being closed in, of being a part of an organized machine, and when we see open roads and bikers, the sides of the frames are more empty signifying a feel of freedom.

Akira is, rightly the most famous anime of all time, in North America and probably, also the most popular anime in the world. It is a pinnacle in animation and imagination and is the father of many other popular anime films and series; most distinctly Dragonball Z. Many segments from this film are copied outright; especially what Kaneda does with his awesome motorcycle. This film has received the Blu-ray treatment and is being released on that medium on February 24, 2009. Trust me, buy it at any cost. This one is truly a keeper.

GREAT MOVIES: Hana-Bi (aka Fireworks, 1997)

*Note as of 07/14/12* - Click here to read my updated review for Hana-Bi on Commentary Track.

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Nishi (played by “Beat” Takeshi Kitano) is a no-nonsense but quiet man, and is the quintessential protagonist found in most of Kitano’s films. He’s a cop whose daughter had suddenly died, a fact mentioned only in gossip by co-workers and whose wife, Miyuki (Kayoko Kishimoto) has developed leukemia; possibly any disease would suffice the screenplay in order to signify that a mental illness can cause a physical one. Nishi wears dark sunglasses and sits around most of the time, smoking and contemplating the quiet brought forth by sudden death. However, he’s never suicidal because of his strong bond with his wife.

The film sees Nishi as a normal person but he can also be seen as a psychopath, due to his tendency to suddenly attack others and decimate them quickly. Be they Yakuza punks or straightforward, undisciplined youths Nishi is quick to anger and he strikes as quick as lightning. But he always wears a blank expression. He’s simply a wall, lacking all emotion yet somehow that we know he means well.

Nishi is indebted to the Yakuza and refuses to pay them back simply because he doesn’t want to, nor does he like to be hurried; the Yakuza apparently don’t frighten him. He’s even audacious enough to ask the block leader’s boss for another 4 million yen (approximately $40,000 USD) so that he could place it towards his wife’s medical bills; nothing is more important to him than the well being of his loved ones, an admirable theme that is present in most of Kitano’s tragedies.

Nishi’s best friend Horibe (Ren Osugi), also a cop, is shot in the line of duty and is crippled and in the process, left wheelchair bound. Horibe’s wife and daughter leave him and he tries to commit suicide, but his friends save him in time. He eventually agrees to see the brighter side of life and does what he can, taking up painting; his paintings depict bizarrely beautiful people and creatures with flowers for heads.

The shooting of Horibe and the later killing of another cop on the police force are showcased, with some realism throughout the film in fragmented flashbacks, adding to the film’s dramatic arc and sense of gratuitous violence. There is a puzzle for the audience to solve and the film unravels it ever so eloquently. There are many layers to the story of the film and the use of a fragmented timeline is very suitable towards making this an art-house project not a Michael Bay movie.

The plot centers on Nishi quitting the police force and eventually having to contemplate robbing a bank in order to pay off the Yakuza once and for all. But because he’s no longer a cop, the Yakuza don’t take his games lightly and pursues him further. But before more graphic violence ensues, Nishi takes Miyuki to the beach and they have a wonderful and, ironically melancholy time.

The robbery is ironic in that it consists of Nishi dressing up a stolen taxi cab as a police cruiser, dressing himself up as a cop, and walking into a bank with a pistol and simply demanding cash without even speaking. I will say nothing further on the matter except that it’s brilliant and is entirely within character.

Does this film sound exciting or depressing? Well, Kitano’s cops and Yakuza epics are filled with philosophical intrigues, the contemplation of death or suicide, murder, brutal beatings, and above all a mysteriously poignant and startling beauty. He uses a minimalist approach in his filmmaking: his characters do not walk or talk much; they barely react to happenings outside of their surroundings. And when all a character must do in a single scene is walk the camera is fixated upon him or her for minutes on end until he or she leaves the frame. Kitano also likes to leave the shot on screen after said character had already walked out of frame for a few seconds more so that the audience can feel the time go by, and also to punctuate the scene with a moment of minimalist serenity. I believe that he’s borrowing from the great Yasujiro Ozu and Andrei Tarkovsky who are, personally the greatest masters of minimalism.

The violence in Kitano’s films, as I’d mentioned earlier is showcased like a flash of lightning; we never see it coming. And when it does, it lingers in our minds for a few seconds while we slowly process what we’d just witnessed. By the time the following scene takes place we understand exactly who had died and who did the killing and why. As an example, early in the film Nishi is seated in a bar and two Yakuza youths approach him. They pester him about overdue payments until he grabs a pair of chopsticks and stabs the Yakuza youth that’s standing behind him in his eyes. In the next shot, we see that the other Yakuza youth had fallen off his stool and as Nishi stands up he kicks the youth in the mouth and walks away; all in one swift movement. The youth on the ground is bewildered and spewing blood. There is a story in the violence that’s on screen and the film’s story is dependent on violence depicted within.

I love Kitano’s cinema. His movies look and feel like they were directed and shot by young, indie filmmakers who know how to tell their stories without having to resort to clichés or unnecessary dialogue. The minimalism approach is used in all of Kitano’s films and while watching any of his films we should embrace it with all our hearts. So what if the film is violent? Through the way it is constructed not a single shot goes to waste and everything means exactly what need it needs to; no punches are pulled. I am reminded of style of the French New Wave, the way that useless actions and pointless dialogue are cut out.

Kitano is a superstar and had made a great impression on me from very early on. I will follow his cinema until he stops breathing and I hope there’s still a long way to go.

GREAT MOVIES: No Country for Old Men (2007)

"There’s this boy I sent to the electric chair at Huntsville here a while back. My arrest and my testimony. He killed a fourteen year old girl. Papers said it was a crime of passion, but he told me there wasn’t any passion to it. Told me he’d planned to kill somebody for as long as he could remember. Said if they turned him out he’d do it again. Said he knew he was going to hell. Be there in about 15 minutes. I don’t know what to make of that. I sure do don’t."

That’s the film’s opening voiceover narration, spoken by the tired sheriff of a Texas-Mexico border town, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones). The sheriff believes that in his life of work one must always be prepared to put his life on the line, but he doesn’t want to confront whatever it is he cannot comprehend. That’s his philosophy - a sound lesson - and he can easily be interpreted as the film’s protagonist.

No Country for Old Men tells the tale of a simple man, Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin) who stumbles upon a drug deal gone bad. He finds the blood money belonging to the two murdered factions in the middle of desert and decides to keep it for himself.

Enter Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem, who’d won the Oscar for his performance in this film), an assassin hired to retrieve the money. Chigurh sports a mushroom hair-cut and wears black clothes; he is tall and pale, and sometimes lets out a creepy smile. His is a personality that one cannot comprehend, for Chigurh is literally evil incarnate. When he speaks he does so without suggestion, always meaning exactly what he says and he carries with him a very unusual weapon, a makeshift cattle prod: a hose is connected to a canister of compressed air on one end and on the other end is a metal piece that protrudes a 6 inch spike and then retracts it. It is normally used on cattle but Chigurh uses it on fellow human beings.

Chigurh is a murderer who's methodical but his actions are not predetermined, therefore Chigurh is not a psychopath but a compulsive killer. At the start of the film, while choking a cop with his own handcuffs and slitting the cop’s throat in the process, he showcases an emotion like that of sexual gratification; he is wide-eyed and ecstatic. He then walks over to the bathroom and washes his hands and bloodied wrists. It’s brutal in nature and tough to watch but we take note that Chigurh is basically a homicidal fetishist.

Llewellyn, Chigurh, and the sheriff never meet throughout the entirety of the film. Llewellyn comes across Chigurh a couple of times in exquisitely shot, extremely tense, lightning quick shoot-outs but never actually sees him in person because in both instances he’s fleeing for his life; that and the directors never show the attacker. The sheriff wants to find Llewellyn and to protect him from Chigurh and the three are always on a merry chase throughout.

This is the first film in which the Coen Brothers use realism as their filming style. The scenes with the shootings are bloody and somewhat realistically gory and the film has no musical soundtrack at all, which allows us to immerse ourselves in its atmosphere and to insert own subconscious to the atmosphere and situations; in short we feel like we’re there with Llewellyn, Chigurh, and the sheriff. The feeling of hopelessness grows deeper within us because the Coens use constant shots of barren, searing landscapes.

If Llewellyn had been city born and bred and had come across the money in a city like Austin or New York, then this film would be a much more action packed and brainless film. What this film offers is a huge visual metaphor of hopelessness in the face of an unstoppable force and Llewellyn tries to become an immovable object, but he is a mortal man and Chigurh and is the personification of evil.

The moral is simple: know what you’re doing or whom you’re dealing with. If one sees a shotgun around the corner then it’s best to keep one’s distance from the gun and if one sees a rifle then it’s best to stay completely out of site. Llewellyn tries to hide from Chigurh and outrun him but he is never able to kill him. The best advice that Llewellyn should follow would be to avoid a fight or a war altogether; heck, he could simply give up the money. But it’s not in his nature to do so and when Chigurh is metaphorically described to the audience we understand that Llewellyn will grow into a tragic figure. And the sheriff always tries to protect Llewellyn instead of fighting against Chigurh because he’s the wisest of them all.

Josh Brolin and Javier Bardem’s performances are career defining; here, the actors perform their characters with realism. We know that we are watching a film but we feel that we are watching people and not actors. And Tommy Lee Jones can never give a bad performance.

The shot compositions are terrific and the Coens are the types of directors that don’t waste a single shot. Every shot in the film is meaningful and the film can be studied shot by shot to verify my claim. I should know because I have an excellent comprehension of shot compositions and because I’d watched this film several times since its initial theatrical release.

This is a perfect movie in every way. The performances are all excellent, the direction and cinematography are masterful, and the editing and the use of [atmospheric] sound effects raises the hairs at the back of one’s neck. It’s also a great exercise in shooting a film with a moderate budget. Fargo (1996) is also a perfect film but was only the beginning. No Country for Old Men is a longer, bigger, meaner, and deeper philosophical masterpiece and is therefore, easily one of the greatest films of the past decade.

GREAT MOVIES: The Road Warrior (a.k.a. Mad Max 2, 1981)

Mel Gibson drives a turbo-charged Ford Falcon throughout a punk infested, post-apocalyptic desert world in Mad Max 2: the Road Warrior.

The first film, properly titled Mad Max (1979), is about a cop whose job is to “intercept” criminals that are on the run. After a biker gang that's entirely insane runs over his wife and infant child, Max loses his sanity and seeks murderous revenge against the entire gang. When that film premiered in the United States it barely made any money because it was too out there and audiences just didn’t “get it”. And when director George Miller made a sequel, he was afraid that it would receive the same consensus overseas. So he decided to call it The Road Warrior instead of Mad Max 2. It's also a good thing that he did not treat it as a hardcore sequel because it soared in the North American box office and became an instant cult hit.

Fast-forward 28 years and the film continually receives critical praise and has been added to many “1,000 movies you must watch before you die” lists.

It’s quite a praise to be placed on such a list, seeing that there are, probably, over a billion movies out there. And I certainly would place it in my top 200, if I ever decided to not have a life and start such a list.

In The Road Warrior, Max is still driving his turbo-charged Ford Falcon, which most none-Australians had confused for a Pontiac Trans Am for decades, and he still has his trusty dog. Only this time, he's just on the lookout for gasoline and survival because hat's all that's left to do on this planet. Max is leather clad and totes a shotgun and in the film's intro he's chased through a desert highway by punks on motorcycles and ATVs. He outmaneuvers most of them and drives on. Eventually he sees a small colony that's built around an oil pump right smack dab in the middle of the desert, but they're also surrounded by the rest of that desert punk gang. The punks are lead by a hockey-masked wearing, terrifically muscular, homicidal maniac who calls himself Humongous. Max decides to help those being murdered by the desert punk gang but only because they can get him gasoline.

This film features breathtakingly fast car chases that are performed with real cars and real stuntmen, and it final thirteen minutes showcase a car chase that involves a semi truck, dune buggies, a gyro-copter, and various styles of motorcycles. The Road Warrior is brutal, fast-paced, and most importantly, terrifically fun. It’s also, easily one of the best action films ever made.

There’s really not much else to say except that the stunt work will make audiences cringe. In one scene, a man riding a motorcycle while driving 120 km/h smashes into a car and goes flying at an incredible distance. You see the bike get smashed and you see the biker fly through the air toward asphalt. It’s even crazy just thinking about it but this movie was shot entirely on location and outdoors, and every stunt is real. Except, of course I doubt that there were stuntmen during the one-on-one collision between a semi truck and a dune-buggy. I can only hope that dummies replaced the real drivers.

Watch what a 23 year old Mel Gibson can do with a shotgun, a hungry dog, a really fast car, and the determination to stay alive.

Passchendaele (2008)

Paul Gross will forever be remembered as that Mounty who rode on that brown horse in that Canadian television series Due South. But now he comes out of left field with a Canadian war film about the battle of Passchendaele, also known as the Third Battle of Ypres, in Belgium. The British were trying to destroy the German forces there with brute force and were backed by, eventually, up to 600,000 Canadian troops. I wish all of this was in the film; at least a mention of it would have been nice. I had to look that up on Wikipedia.

The first 7 minutes of the film take place in France where Sergeant Michael Dunn (Gross) and a platoon of soldiers, whose number you could count with one hand, are outgunned and outnumbered by German soldiers. They fight back until Dunn is left alone with only one other German boy. When the boy asks for a truce Dunn stuffs his bayonet in the kid’s forehead, because earlier he had asked for a truce and didn’t get it. Dunn is hospitalized and diagnosed with Neurasthenia but pretty much everybody, including the military doctors use it as innuendo, calling him a coward for not wanting to return to battle.

Paul Gross’ grandfather is the owner of the aforementioned story and he died some time later while he was still incarcerated in the hospital. But in film terms, the show must go on.

Dunn falls immediately in love with Sarah Mann (Caroline Dhavernas), the nurse that is treating him, and she plays hard to get for a very long time. Her brother David (Joe Dinicol) is old enough to join the army but cannot, for he is asthmatic. He wants to prove to his girlfriend’s father that he’s a real man but alas, it was not in the cards for him. That is until a doctor (his girlfriend’s father) describes him as medically eligible and he goes off to war in Belgium.

I skipped, roughly 75 percent of the film because between Dunn meeting Sarah and David joining the army, I am sad to say, not much happens. Throughout those ninety minutes we learn that Sarah and David’s father was of German descent and when he joined the army at the start of World War I he joined the Bavarian side. Prejudice ensues through the town and Sarah and David begin to hate their heritage.

Dunn and Sarah develop a great physical and mental relationship and cannot be separated again. That is until David leaves the country and Dunn feels obligated to look over him on the front, entirely for Sarah’s sake, not David’s.

I really wanted to like this film because a) I am a Canadian citizen and have lived in Canada for most of my life, b) I heard that it’s a wonderful or excellent film, and c) I like Paul Gross as an actor. But when I was bored nearly to tears watching grass grow I found myself laughing throughout the last 20 minute battle sequence.

60 Canadian soldiers, containing Dunn and David are dispatched to a German battlefield and the 800 that were situated there think that they are their backup. Dunn asks a random soldier, “Where are you going?” He replies, “We’re leaving. We’re tired and hungry and have been sitting here for 8 hours.” Dunn then says, “But there are 800 of you and only 60 of us.” The soldier shrugs and the entire platoon leaves.

Dunn tells his men to wait for the Germans to come closer and when they’re 10 feet away a brawl takes place. The fight consists of bayonets, shovels, and big rocks to smash heads with. I will say nothing further except that what followed made me laugh and shake my head; just think The Passion of the Christ (I am not kidding).

It’s a well made film. Paul Gross received a 5-million-dollars grant from the Province of Alberta and the overall budget came close to $20,000,000. The war scenes are shot well, with plenty of grit and dirt and high helicopter shots, but the actual battle choreography and cinematography were laughable. Whenever a mortar struck the ground, soldiers spun horizontally in the air as they flew away from the blast. And not once was the word “mortar” actually used, they called them missiles.

The music is effective and is composed by a full orchestra and Paul Gross plays his character well, but everybody around him were complete morons. A love story was necessary but it did not have to hog sixty minutes of our precious time and, personally, Joe Dinicol is a terrible actor. He lacks conviction throughout and embodies a fourteen year old boy.

Even though it's a terrible film, I don't hate it. And I'm surprised that I'd managed to stay awake the entire time. Whenever Dunn speaks to Sarah they are either seated or standing. You can cut to another ten minute scene involving other characters but when you return to them they are still either sitting or standing and simply are having a different conversation. Either make it a wartime film or make it a war film. The advertisements showcase a lot of warfare but that is what’s greatly lacking from this film, and I wish it took place entirely on the battlefield and not behind the scenes because it had great potential.

It’s not a very patriotic film either; I did not see a single Canadian flag anywhere.

GREAT MOVIES: Sunrise - A Song of Two Humans (1927)

I have a feeling that for as long as I live, the two greatest film of all time will always be Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (1941) and F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise (1927). On a technical level both films bring out the impossible and although the techniques used today in standard filmmaking are different and more advanced, it still looked more impressive back then.

Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans is the heartwarming and breaking story of a farmer (George O’Brien) who is unfaithful to his wife (Janet Gaynor). He has an affair with a city woman (Margaret Livingston) and she is wicked; wearing her exotic city clothes just the right way, teasing him with fresh lipstick and promising to take him with her and live in the city. The farmer, of course refuses to leave and so she drops the bomb on him: she proposes the farmer drown his wife in the lake and run off with her. The thought of murder is extremely cruel and the farmer becomes angry. He strangles the city woman but then, ironically, realizes that he might just have it in him to do exactly what she had proposed. He yells at her and orders her to leave him be and takes a walk around the swamps surrounding his farm. The sun is fast approaching and he must make an important decision.

The farmer tells his wife in the morning that he would love to take her on a boat ride. She, suspecting his affair with the city woman through village gossip, still accepts his invitation believing that he has changed. While drifting in the river on the boat, the farmer stands erect and his angry fists reshape into claws. He approaches his wife, hands toward her throat and with a wild look in his eyes...

She yells and he awakens. Recognizing the look on her simple but dainty face, he feels like the worst human being on the planet and immediately begs her for forgiveness. He rows the boat to the nearest shore and she runs off. He takes chase. They arrive in The City. After almost being run over by several cars the farmer protects his wife and they proceed to have the greatest day of their lives.



In 1926 Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau moved to the United States. After receiving critical praise for his film The Last Laugh (1924) he was given carte blanche and Sunrise was his first American film; but unlike Orson Welles, he did not lose his career afterwards. It was worse than that, actually because he was killed in a car crash in 1931, four years after the release of Sunrise.

Sunrise has stood the test of time because when Hollywood was fast approaching the talkies, many directors still wanted to continue making films in the silent form; but most had wanted to transfer over and quickly. Talkies first appeared in 1927 with The Jazz Singer and by 1930, the whole world was aware of the phenomenon. Charles Chaplin released City Lights in 1931, still as a silent film, and the whole world was astonished that he didn't conformwith the times. However, it was still viewed as amasterpiece and rightly so. It's also, still considered to be his best film, and one of the best silent comedies of all time.

Many call Murnau the master of German Expressionism and his greatest ally, and competition, was Fritz Lang (the discussion is still raging on). Most still prefer the artistic style of Murnau because Lang's films were either too farfetched or had too much overacting (if that's even possible). Try comparing M (1931) to Nosferatu (1922): you can't. I say they're like apples and oranges. They're both of the same medium but are of different species.



The cinematography here is worth noting even today, because some shots seem impossible. How can one possibly dolly track while in a swamp? Well, Charles Rosher, Karl Struss, and Murnau had figured it out that they could use a platform that hovered over the swamp while the camera was locked onto it, and the platform was suspended by strong cables. There are also plenty of forced perspective shots, much like how Lang shot Metropolis (1926). Mirrors were strategically placed around the sets providing the illusion that certain people were on different areas in the frame, and sets that were much smaller than others were also placed in the background of certain shots. Those sets physically got smaller as you walked through them. Sometimes midgets were used for wide shots from afar (like the airport runway in Casablanca).

If Citizen Kane is the textbook on how to make films, then so is Sunrise. Kane is as much a special effects picture as Sunrise and even though Sunrise lacks sound it still gets the job done, containing a strong emotional core through brilliant, atmospheric cinematgrpahy and powerful, reliastic performances.

In 1929, the first ever Oscars Ceremony was held and Sunrise won 3 awards in the categories of Best Cinematography (Charles Rosher, Karl Struss), Best Actress In a Leading Role (Janet Gaynor - who'd also won two other Oscars that year for Seventh Heaven and Street Angel), and Best Unique and Artistic Production (Best Picture).

Every time that I watch this film I see something new in it. Whether it's a gesture that someone makes or a camera movement I had missed before, Sunrise feels new every time. And just remember: this is an American film with an American cast and it was directed by F.W. Murnau, who directed and conceptualized Nosferatu (1922) and Faust (1926). It's more than just a triumph it's an important film, and it will always provide audiences with the emotions that they forgot they once had.

GREAT MOVIES: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919)

Fritz Lang bailed out on The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari to work on Die Spinnen (aka The Spiders), and when Robert Wiene took over the project he opened the doorway to feature films that incorporate the flashback setting, the horror setting, and this still being the greatest example of German Expressionism. With its Lovecraftian styled architecture, its political standings and satire of the German government, and the pale-faced psychopathic somnambulist from hell, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari stands among the best horror films to ever have been made.

Of course having read the blood chilling origins of the Caligari tale, we know that Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer did not write a screenplay about a government that brainwashes and puppeteers its citizens, and there is no Nazi symbolism here either. The Nazi party was formed in 1933 and this film was made between the years of 1919 and 1920, for starters.

According to Wikipedia, in 1913 Janowitz had the unfortunate luck of witnessing a stranger exit a row of bushes and disappearing into the shadows of the night. The next morning a young woman’s body was found ravaged. He told that tale to Mayer and it scared them stiff. Also, many times they would enter a fair and one night they had witnessed a sideshow called “Man and Machine”, in which a man did feats of strength and predicted the future, supposedly under hypnosis. They combined those elements into a horror film screenplay and tried to get Erich Pommer to green light the production. After hearing the origin tales he was convinced and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was underway.

Werner Krauss plays the deranged Dr. Caligari and he approaches a fairground in the mountain village of Holstenwall. He appeals to present his performance in the fair and receives a grant. That night, the audience of the fairground witnesses a pale, mushroom cut, somnambulist, played creepily by Conrad Veidt, who apparently had been sleeping for 23 years; and he can also foretell the future. He exclaims that someone in the crowd will die before sunrise, and boy is he right. That night the protagonist’s (Francis, played by Friedrich Fehér) best friend is murdered in his own bed.

The somnambulist (Cesare) and Dr. Caligari are not immediately suspected because there are rumors around of a serial killer on the loose as is. Was Caligari using that knowledge as a front for hiding his own murders?

Cesare looks creepy. He wears full body black spandex and walks like a marionette, but without the strings. He has deep penetrating black circles around his eyes and they hypnotize and creep people out.

One morning the lovely Jane, an acquaintance of Francis, ventures into the fairgrounds and bumps into Dr. Caligari; he decides to showcase Cesare to her. Encased in a vertically erect coffin, Cesare opens his eyes and stares into those of Jane. He becomes entranced and she frightened. She runs off. That night Francis decides to spend the night outside of Caligari’s house to monitor him and the somnambulist. Plausibility unbeknown to anyone, Cesare pays Jane a visit at the same time and kidnaps her. A chase ensues: Cesare with Jane in his arms, clinging to walls in the streets and almost dancing freakishly, the police hot on his tail. The morning comes and he passes out letting go of Jane. Francis cannot believe that Cesare is caught because he was sleeping inside his coffin the entire night. He must have been!

Now that I got your attention that is all that I will say about the story. The origins and ideals of German Expressionism work mainly through the actors’ body language and strange architectural backgrounds. Usually, a tormented soul or dementia is involved, much like in this classic film. Seeing that the film opens in an insane asylum and that the story is told though the flashbacks of Francis, one can only guess what goes on in his noggin.

Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926) is another great, classic example of German Expressionism but it’s not a horror film so dementia in not present. The actors throw themselves around the sets; they throw their arms towards the heavens and decree that something is wrong with the system and must be righteous again. Rudolf Klein-Rogge plays professor Rotwang, the evil scientist that built the man-machine (an early version of an android). Equipped with black leather gloves and wild white hair he throws his right hand toward the heavens in a cry of insanity, clutching his heart with his left, many times throughout the film. You can smell the passion that the actors portray and especially the one of Gustav Fröhlich.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was seen by many, probably millions, by now and is almost unanimously a great example of its genre. By today’s standards the makeup in the film is dodgy and the sets look like bristol-paper cutouts, which they were. But the film is terrifically atmospheric and, for the most part one does not notice the “fakeness” of it. There is no perfect angle or a straight line, per se, in this film. Windowpanes are crooked as are the houses themselves. One almost feels confined and prays that another’s house will not fall on them. But the crooked architecture in the disturbed psyche stands on its own and frightens its citizens by remaining as is. There is also a great use of shadow-play in this film, reminiscent of Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922.) Seeing a tall shadow creep along a wall, disembodied and alone until the creature, its master emerges into frame. The creature is more frightening than its shadow. That was Count Orlock (played cautiously and mysteriously by Max Schrek), that was Cesare (Conrad Veidt), and even now they are The Strangers from Dark City (Richard O’Brien, Ian Richardson, and Bruce Spence).

Film noir, another film genre that I love, needs to provide special thanks to German Expressionism: Dutch angles, superimposed shadows, lots of night scenes, and the feeling of dread and evil around the corner. German Expressionism will live on as a lesson in atmosphere and silent storytelling. Visually grand and rich in character, Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen (1924), Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922) and The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933) are long going to fill voids and enter uncorrupted minds alongside this pinnacle of perfection, that is The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. And Cesare will never be forgotten; like his successors Gwynplain (also played by Conrad Veidt in Paul Leni’s The Man Who Laughs (1928)) and The Joker (from the Batman series).

Quarantine (2008)

This film is some kind of bad. Last night I'd watched REC for the second time just so that I could admire its cinematography. Then I watched Quarantine and what can I say that hasn't already been said? This is a carbon copy, surprisingly shot by shot remake of REC but REC involves a subplot about a scientist who has been decreed by the Vatican to find the cure to a certain girl's possession, which is centered on a type of virus. Quarantine deals with evil cults and the virus that infects everyone is, get this: rabies. A mutated therefore, accelerated version of rabies that causes frothing at the mouth, tears, dementia, and lots of running around and screaming. So where's the zombie aspect? Are we truly supposed afraid of a few tenants who are running around, infected with mutated rabies? Oh, please.

Now, for the technical aspects. Let's just run a quick check list:

- Claustrophobia (check)
- Screaming (check)
- The Shaky Camera Syndrome (check)
- Nauseatingly bad cinematography where the cameraman always records what is chasing him rather than where he's running to (check)
- The cameraman not turning off the camera when being chased but rather shaking it as much as possible and even taking it off his shoulders sometimes (check)

This film is a misguided and mishandled concoction that was headed toward a dead end and right from the start. The results are as follows: this film is literally too dark, at all times; the camera operator overuses the rack zoom and far too frequently; and every actor in the film overacts so much that it becomes embarrassing. That includes Jennifer Carpenter who is excellent in the series Dexter and a terrific little horror film titled The Exorcism of Emily Rose.

I didn't want to hate this movie but it's a carbon copy of REC. It doesn't try to do anything different, in any way, except ruin the original film and its intriguing story. This film reminds me of Gus Van Sant's superfluous remake of Psycho (1998) but at least he made up for it with Milk (2008).

I wonder what director John Erick Dowdle (who?) has in store for us next.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)

I will attempt to refrain from making comparisons between this film and Forrest Gump (1994) by stating one simple and short sentence: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button IS Forrest Gump. Screenwriter Eric Roth is being honored at this year’s Oscars ceremony with a nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay for this film. He wrote Forrest Gump fifteen years ago and when recently asked about the similarities he, astoundingly answered with: I had Benjamin Button on my mind when I wrote Forrest Gump.

How? What does one have to do with the other? I read the F. Scott Fitzgerald novella, all 21 pages of it, and I ask myself “how did Eric Roth adapt a 21 page book into a 2 hour and 45 minute film about a man who ages backwards?” And unlike the book, this Benjamin Button is not born old in physical and mental terms, only physical.

Now knowing that, if you take out the reverse aging aspect from the story you have the same film.

I issue a spoiler warning right now.

Brad Pitt plays Benjamin Button utilizing a very bland performance and the titular character is, as stated above, born old. At first he is a baby but has very shriveled skin and his bones are weak. He is such an abomination that his father, upon first glance, steals the baby from the hospital and drops him off at a retirement home. Because he is physically old he can not walk but, guess what? Neither can a baby. Infants and the elderly are almost one and the same: they lack hair and teeth, they can barely walk, and they have a weak skeleton. So if Ben Button was to be born an infant this film would still be the same.

Button befriends a young girl named Daisy and they hit it off. She finds him strange, an old man who hides under tables and plays with little girls, and he finds her to be what he wishes he was. Then again, Benjamin, fueled by a lackluster performance by Pitt, is so bland that whenever you look at his face or into his eyes you see nothing; it’s like running into a brick wall. Benjamin is a simpleton, recently dubbed a Southern Naïf, and therefore, completely and utterly uninteresting. That is when the supporting players must come into play and make everything around Button interesting. But alas, we already saw Forrest Gump. I am not kidding when I say that you will know everything that is going to happen.

Button grows up with a walking disability and overcomes it and then he decides to travel the world. He cruises on a tugboat with a drunkard and witnesses the follies of World War II. Upon returning home, in his early 20’s and looking like he’s in his late 60’s, he reunites with his slowly aging mother and with Daisy who now looks like a prettied-up Cate Blanchett. They hit it off well, but only as acquaintances, and she leaves to pursue her career of dancing the ballet.

Time goes by where nothing happens. Button’s dad decides to meet him and to give him his button-making company before he dies. Then Daisy returns home and decides to live with Button as a couple.

That’s an hour and a half of the film so far. In the next hour and ten minutes not much else happens except that Button grows younger, Daisy grows older, they have a child and grow apart. Then they reunite again and again they cannot be together. Then Button is an infant.

The End.

The cinematography, the second-most notable aspect in this film is truly fantastic. Giant superimposed shadows like in noir pictures, flashbacks that look like footage from the 1910’s with flickering images and color tinting, long tracking shots that seem impossible but we know that in the movies nothing is impossible! The most notable aspect is somehow invisible to the general audience and it is that Brad Pitt is entirely computer generated for the first half hour of the film. From when Button is born until he is as tall as Brad Pitt he is entirely computer generated. I can tell because his features are perfect, he is constantly shiny and glossy, and when his clothing wrinkles they wrinkle in a repeated sequence. This means that for cinephiles, this movie should be rather annoying. Why not use the Lord of the Rings approach (a film series that I greatly dislike) and simply shoot those difficult scenes twice? Or how about state of the art special effects makeup? I’m quite certain that this film is being nominated for an Oscar for its makeup but it lacks it a bunch.

Don’t let my rating for this film fool you, it’s not a 50% deal. I am not recommending this film at all to anyone who likes original films that stand out due to having a great story and great performances.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is being nominated at the Oscars this year for 13 awards and I think it only deserves one: Best Cinematography. But hey, film students and experts can’t be in the Oscar committee so my opinion is superfluous. I don’t hate this film I just think it’s an hour too long and is entirely unimportant and uninteresting.

Shame on you, David Fincher. You are one of my favorite living American filmmakers and now you have directed, to quote Roger Ebert, two “good-looking BAD movies”; the first one was Alien 3 (1992).

I love Zodiac (2007) and placed it in the #3 slot in my Top 10 Films of 2006 list, right behind Letters from Iwo Jima (#1) and The Departed (#2). I also love Fincher’s Se7en (1995), The Game (1997), and Fight Club (1999). So what ever happened to substance in films? Is it no longer important?

Do yourselves a favor and read the novella. It’s a terrific social satire and it’s really neat. Just forget about The Curious Case of Forrest Gump.

*REC (2007)

REC is a great example of how a film can be made with a very small amount of special effects and a moderate budget. Spanish films had had their ups lately with Rec and with another excellent horror flick called The Orphanage (2007). Both films are fueled by atmosphere and good performances, leaving the plot elements to be gathered properly throughout and put into place properly in the third act.

REC is about a television reporter and her cameraman who are shooting a piece about what firefighters do when everybody’s asleep. Of course it’s late at night and they grow bored stiff. That is until the alarm goes off and a crew of firefighter is dispatched to the scene where a woman is locked in her apartment. The TV reporter and her cameraman are allowed to tag along and in the three-story apartment building they arrive at an old woman is bloodied and out of her mind. She attacks one of the firefighters and bites him severely in the neck. It’s gruesome and it’s awesome and it’s still early in the film, and we immediately subconsciously know that it’s going to be a zombie film.

The firefighter is carried downstairs to the lobby, where he is to be escorted to the paramedics unit that is waiting outside in the street but the group find themselves locked inside the building along with all its tenants. A police force is waiting outside the building and they quickly quarantine it while yelling into a megaphone what is happening outside. They tell the crew and tenants that the officer locked inside the building with them will be issuing orders to them while they instruct him on the situation via his dispatch radio.

Minutes later another police officer’s body plummets from the stairway onto the lobby floor, crashing with blood spraying everywhere.

From here on out it’s not your usual zombie flick because you only have about ten characters and the building has three floors, one of which is unexplored until the end. One by one, some become infected and run amuck trying to bite others and infect them and the main crew find themselves running up and down the stairs quite frequently:

“We must go there and find this person”, and “Oh no! She’s disappeared! …wait, there she is! Run!”

You hear that quite a lot but it never repeats itself because there is only so much you can do inside a small building. From here on I will reveal nothing further that happens in the film except to say that the last fifteen minutes are some of the creepiest, scariest minutes I have ever seen in a film.

REC is shot entirely through the perspective of the cameraman, which is a familiar growing style but only some movies pull it off well, like George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead, and some fail miserably, like Cloverfield.

It looks like it was shot with only five or six edits but I know the magic behind filmmaking and I know that there are many hidden edits. Whenever there is a dark segment on screen that lasts for even a couple of frames an edit can be hidden in there, but viewing the film a second time I honestly could not find so many hidden edits and that is a sign of great filmmaking and editing.

This movie was made two years ago and it finally makes its way onto video in North American. It also has an English dub so weaklings and egoists can watch it, too. Last but not least, a similar film called Quarantine has hit theatres a few months back and apparently it’s a shot by shot remake of this film. I ask you "why"? Was this movie so terrible that it had to be remade? If you go to IMDB or Rottentomatoes you’ll notice that everyone hates Quarantine but loves REC. Why? Because REC came first, that’s why. Nobody likes a lazy remake.

GREAT MOVIES: Dark City (1998)

*Note as of 07/10/12* - Click here to read my more up to date review of Dark City on Commentary Track.

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A little over 10 years ago I watched Dark City in the theatres, for the first time and I distinctly remember being absolutely blown away. The cinematography is breathtaking: the olden buildings, the elevated streamlined trains flying over pedestrians’ heads, the '30s, '40s, and '50s noirish shadows and Dutch angles, and, of course the feeling of a more contemporary version of Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1926). This city also reminds me of the one depicted within Blade Runner (1982), but, ironically has a bit more life to it. It has less of the hustle and bustle of an overpopulated megapolis and the atmosphere of a properly captured forgotten moment in time.

Dark City tells a detective story, a story of identity and finding oneself, a classical science fiction tale, and somewhere in its center lies a love story. John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) suffers from lack of memories and tries to piece his past together, but nothing seems to connect because whatever memories are still in his mind are not real (more on that soon). Emma Murdoch (Jennifer Connelly) is John's wife, who finds it hard to believe when John's doctor, Doctor Schreber (Kiefer Sutherland), tells her that John's suffered from a psychotic break and complete memory loss.

John finds in his overcoat pockets newspaper clippings that suggest he is a serial killer, and inspector Frank Bumstead (William Hurt) is on his case. Bumstead follows leads and ends up nowhere. In fact, he ends up further away from the truth and so do Emma and John.

To add to Bumstead’s case running in circles, I am reminded of an early scene in the film where John awakens and emerges naked from a bathtub. He then, accidentally knocks over a fishbowl. He picks up the fish and places it in water in the bathtub. Later, when Bumstead inspects Murdoch's apartment, he asks a fellow police officer: "What kind of a killer stops to save a dying fish?" Inspector Bumstead is tired but alert and he was on the beat for a long time, but still plays by the rules.

On the other side of the spectrum, Dr. Schreber is more of a Nazi-type scientist who simply follows orders. Equipped with blond, parted hair and round metal-framed spectacles, a crooked eye, and a limp, he does everything that he is told to do by The Strangers.

The Strangers are a race of aliens that had come down a long time ago and began to experiment with human test subjects. We learn that their race is dying and that they want to study human beings to find out what makes them tick. To that end, they borrow human corpses and use them as vessels. The Strangers look very pale. They have an affinity to strappy leather clothing and they wear overcoats and fedoras outdoors just like we do. They're kind of like vampires with their leather fetish and sensitivity to sunlight, but there is nothing erotic or exotic about them. They also have the ability to "tune", which is a form of telekinesis; it allows them to fly in between buildings, create non-existent doorways within brick walls and even push people back without laying a finger. The Strangers have found out that John Murdoch has the same abilities they do, and they are terribly worried about it.

The city literally changes shape every time the clock strikes twelve and every human citizen mysteriously falls asleep: everyone, but John. He wanders around the dark city and watches as buildings erect from the ground up and some others simply disappear back into it. Some buildings even slide horizontally across the streets and merge with other buildings. In one incident John Murdoch was on a fire escape and noticed another building sliding towards him. His coat has caught on the corner of the fire escape and he managed to free himself at the last second and enter the building before being crushed.

Upon the citizens falling asleep, The Strangers invade their homes and change their identities. Dr. Schreber injects new memories into the subject's foreheads creating "new personalities", and then life goes on for another twelve hours. There is a wonderful scene in the film where a night watchman shares with his wife that his boss will take him off night duty (a personal joke from the writers) and within seconds the couple fall asleep in their soups. The Strangers enter their home and change them into elitist, rich snobs. Their house gains a few stories, a huge foyer with gargantuan support pillars appear and so does a beautiful skylight. The dinner table is stretched three times its size, in reminiscence of Citizen Kane but much quicker, and finally the couple awaken. The man begins to speak and says that he'll fire someone from the company the next day, ironically speaking about the man that he used to be.

One big reason for the film's title is because The Strangers had removed the sun from sight. Nightfall is always present but no one seems to notice. The citizens drone around in their meaningless jobs from day to day (pun intended) and The Strangers follow their every movement like rats in a maze.

What an imagination this film has! Alex Proyas (director of The Crow and I, Robot) is the visionary genius behind this film. It was co-written by Lem Dobbs (Kafka, The Limey) and David S. Goyer (Blade, Batman Begins). The film works on many different levels. Multiple viewings only enrich the atmosphere and experience of the film even more.

Recently a director's cut had been issued on DVD and Blu-ray. The director's cut is 15 minutes longer than the theatrical version; the intro monologue from Dr. Schreber is cut out and some of the soundtrack has been removed from the background of select scenes and replaced with sounds of buildings being “tuned”. The original special effects in the film were magnificent in general, and they were never placed there for the sake of having special effects. They were minimal and they assisted the storytelling. The director's cut has the film treated for high definition and the special effects were tweaked as well. A few more special effects were added and, somehow, it makes the final climactic showdown in the film even more epic.

I love this film and have viewed both versions of it multiple times. I have also studied it frame by frame. I love the reoccurring motif of a spiral: when Inspector Bumstead falls asleep at his accordion, a spiral of milk spins in his coffee; when Murdoch inspects the subway system routes he notices that they lead in spirals; spirals are cut into the flesh of "Murdoch's victims", the serial killer version anyway; and when The Strangers inspect what aspects of the city to change their miniature model of the city is spiral shaped. Every little thing that can occupy time and space does so meaningfully, in every frame and without waste. This is a perfect film and I believe that it will be remembered for a very long time to come.