Review #6 "The Innkeepers"

Will Means

Cannes Study Abroad

05/30/11

Review #6:

The Innkeepers

As many people know, I am an avid fan of the horror genre. It’s sort of like my abusive lover and I am it’s weak spouse; it’s not always good to me and sometimes it even treats me badly, but I always come running back to it, ready to give it another chance. When I first heard of Ti West’s breakout feature film, The House of the Devil, I wasn’t going to give it a chance. Not until the film started garnering solid reviews from the critics did I decide to check it out. That film ended up being one of the biggest surprises to come out of the horror genre in a long time, and it is one of my favorite horror films of the past ten years. It’s combination of Hitchcockian slow-burn storytelling, Roman Polanski-ish camerawork, and 1970s setting gave the film a very unique and legitimately scary feel. It was a reminder to other creators of horror films that the majority of fun in a scare comes not from the delivery, but from the buildup to it.

I had high hopes from Ti West but started to doubt him when he agreed to make the straight-to-video piece of crap, Cabin Fever 2. But now he brings us The Innkeepers, the second film ever actually written and directed by him. West calls the film his official “follow-up” to The House of the Devil. Upon viewing the film, it became obvious that this was indeed his real follow-up…not Cabin Fever 2. The Innkeepers marked a welcome return to West’s signature slow burn style, with the main difference being that instead of this film exuding a 70’s vibe like House, West obviously took inspiration from the 80’s horror genre this time around.

The plot revolves around the two innkeepers of a hotel called “The Yankee Peddlar Inn,” who are required to run the hotel during its last weekend in business. There’s the youthful Claire (played by Sara Paxton) who despite her tomboy looks is also strikingly pretty, and then there’s the older nerdy innkeeper Luke (played by Pat Healy). Luke and Claire believe that the “Yankee Peddlar Inn” is haunted, and in a last attempt to capture some evidence for Luke’s paranormal website he is putting together, they walk around the hotel trying to record EVP in its last weekend of business. Their amount of opportunities is greatly amplified as they are required to not only run the hotel for the entire weekend, but also spend the night in it and sleep in shifts each night.

Just as he did with The House of the Devil, director Ti West takes his time getting to the scares in this film. In doing so, he proves that he has quite the knack for character development. In fact, the two leads in the film were some of the most believable characters I have seen in quite some time. They’re dialogue and interactions are so well written and realistic that you feel like you’re hanging out with friends whenever they share screen time. West also seems to have a knack for picking his actors. Most of them are relatively unheard of, but they deliver superb performances. Poor Sara Paxton has somehow become quite the underrated actress, despite the obvious range she has shown from her brutally realistic rape-victim role in the Last House on the Left remake to her charming character in this film. As Claire, she really wins the audience over. She’s witty and funny and she’s heartbreaking when we see her dreams crushed by a has-been actress who happens to be staying in the hotel. She even has a cute little inhaler she has to whip out whenever she gets startled. All of this only serves to make us feel for her more when the scary things start going bump in the night.

Speaking of those things that go bump in the night, they occur in waves throughout the film. The movie is broken up into three chapters, with each one building up to a scary climax for that section of the film. The first two are minimal and it’s the final chapter where all hell really breaks loose, but it takes quite some time before we get to that last ten minutes of the movie. The buildup to the big release in The Innkeepers is significantly longer than the one in The House of the Devil. In fact, I feel that if one were to remove the last fifteen minutes of The Innkeepers and replace it with something happy, you would have a funny, warm-hearted, character-driven story on your hands. It’s for this reason though, that the ending of the film becomes all the more devastating when we see some truly horrific things happen to our beloved characters. The effective usage of chapters serves to create an ever-amounting sense of dread leading to that final release. We know something bad is going to happen to our lead characters, but we’ve come to like them so much that we don’t want it to happen.

Nonetheless, this film is still at fault because despite all of its simmer and slow-burn, it’s pay-off is not quite as rewarding as the one in House of the Devil. The ghost makeup could have been a bit more effective for when it is finally revealed, and the ending didn’t have that same sense of fun chaos that House’s ending oozed with. I can even pick out one scene in particular during all the build-up that could have been removed altogether. Still, the movie has its truly chill-inducing moments. There were some scenes that had me sitting in awe at the wonders of horror as I literally felt waves of repeated chills crawling over my body in response to some of the sights in the movie. A lot of people would say that there is not enough horror in the film, but I feel that West truthfully gives us the perfect amount to make it memorable. He gives you just enough to leave you wanting more, and yet the storyline is still completely concluded and wrapped up in the end.

The Innkeepers is yet another solid piece of proof that you do not need gore and shock value to make something scary and sensational. Sure, it’s the gore that makes us want to throw up upon first sight, but it’s the scary campfire tales that get under your skin and force you to sleep with the lights on. Had I watched this movie at home alone, I probably would have struggled a lot more to get to sleep, but I had the benefit of watching it in a crowded theatre. Even so, that did not stop me from closing the doors to my hotel room a bit more hastily every time I walked inside for the rest of the week, and that is an example of well-done and effective horror: when it actually has a lasting effect.

“The Innkeepers”

Runtime: 100 minutes

Director: Ti West

Production Company: Dark Sky Films

Starring: Sara Paxton, Pat Healy, Kelly McGillis, George Riddle

Film Review #5: "The Kid With a Bike"

Will Means

Cannes Study Abroad

05/23/11

Film Review #5:

The Kid With a Bike

The Kid With a Bike was not only one of the more critically acclaimed films to debut at Cannes this year, but it was also awarded the Grand Prize for directors Jean Pierre and Luc Dardenne. People called the film “real,” “dark,” and “emotional.” I, however, call it blatantly French storytelling.

The film follows a boy named Cyril (Thomas Doret), a troubled youth who has been placed in a foster home indefinitely by his father. When Cyril finally goes to track down his father for answers, workers for the foster home soon show up to retrieve him, so Cyril flees from them and clings to a female stranger (played by Cecile De France) whom he knocks to the floor in a health clinic. Taking pity upon the young boy, this woman, named Samantha, returns a lost bike to Cyril and agrees to care for him on weekends. Together they find Cyril’s father, who tells Cyril that he left him at the foster home because he can no longer care for him anymore. The hurt and wounded Cyril then begins to act out and falls in with a gang member, all while Samantha selflessly battles to do what’s best for him.

The first thing that sticks out about The Kid With a Bike is the performances. Cecile De France effortlessly delivers an effective and emotionally diverse performance. The role requires her to express happiness, confusion, fear, extreme distress, and forgiveness, amongst other things. She successfully accomplishes each one in a realistic manner. Thomas Doret is a child-actor revelation. He is smart enough to know how a child should and would be acting given such circumstances that the story provides, and he manages to convey his hurt, confusion, and rebelliousness with the skill of a well-studied adult actor.

That being said, The Kid With a Bike is quite the troubling film for me. I know I liked the film, and I know I thought it was a good film, and yet there are so many things about this film that bother me. To be quite honest, I don’t like the style of the film. Not just the Dardenne brothers’ style, but the whole French approach to it in general. As I mentioned earlier, there were so many people who saw this film and called it “real” and “true” and “heartbreaking,” and yet I couldn’t bring myself to empathize. I never felt like I was watching something that was real and true and heartbreaking, but rather I felt that I was watching a film that was trying to be real and true and heartbreaking. For me, the film never broke the emotional boundary of the screen and became a “real” experience. It always just felt like a film trying to depict something realistically. I could feel the decision making behind the camerawork, the dialogue, and the plot structure, as if the vibe of collaborative efforts was seeping out of the images on screen.

I am not by any means attacking the French style of film whatsoever. This typical style I speak of lacks beginnings, middles, and ends with climactic build-ups. French films are not about creating great rousing endings or villains who get killed off or anything you’d expect from an American summer blockbuster. Instead, they focus on capturing a mood and a feel for a time and place, whether it be the paranoid-frantic feeling of a man who’s lost his wife in The Vanishing, or the cold build-up to the loss of a friend in the WWII-era film Au Revoir Les Enfants. On most occasions, I actually find this approach to film quite effective. The style is even starting to show its influence in American films such as the recent Martha Marcy May Marlene, or any type of Sofia Coppola-fare. The problem with The Kid With a Bike was that, for me, it did not capture the mood and feel of a child struggling with life; it captured the mood and feel of some filmmakers making a film about a child struggling with life. In my opinion, the Dardennes managed to capture a mood and feel much more successfully with their previous effort, L’Enfant, a much darker story that really pulled no punches.

Call me pretentious, cynical, or just plain haughty, but I feel like The Kid With a Bike is the type of film that people say they loved and speak so highly of not because it was actually all that groundbreaking or great of a film, but because it was highly stylized in a French manner and created by men with quite a reputation in the film industry. People speak so seriously of the film when they talk about how “dark” and “sad” it was. I can agree, it is dark and sad to a certain extent. The tale of a boy being abandoned by his father and struggling to cope with it is no laughing matter, but at the same time, I also felt like the film was far too soft. Sure, it had moments as dark and shocking as the kid giving Samantha a good jab in the arm with a knife, but then it goes so soft as to have her immediately forgive him and welcome him back in her open bleeding arms, which seems rather implausible for a film that is trying to be “real.”

Compared to something like L’Enfant, The Kid With a Bike is actually quite the happy bedtime story. Whereas L’Enfant ended with a man breaking down and weeping in jail as he finally comes to terms with the scale of his horrid actions, the only consequence that we see Cyril suffer is a painful fall from a tree that leaves him unconscious for a moment. From there, he rises and, obviously humbled, tells the men who are responsible for his fall not to worry about calling an ambulance. He then walks away having learned his lesson. Now he can go and live a happy, yet scarred life with his newfound childcare provider. Supporters of the film want to argue that such subject matter is far from soft and sweet and that it is a film intended for adults, but then what is something like Walt Disney’s Pinocchio? That film tells the story of young boys falling into drinking and drugs, and as a result, they are all turned into donkeys, which seems like a much harsher punishment than falling from a tree. And yet Pinocchio is rated G. Who’s to say that none of those boys in Pinocchio were abandoned by their fathers?

I feel that a film’s worth can be measured by its ability to have an emotional impact on the viewer. In the case of L’Enfant (which was awarded the Palm d’Or in 2005), that film took a young and homeless father who was also a thief and managed to make me worry for him, and then it hit me in the chest when I saw this man who had previously showed no signs of remorse finally start breaking down in a jail. I have no idea what it is to be a young parent, let alone one who is homeless, but I was still impacted by such a story. I know what it is to be child, and even a troubled one at that, but I truthfully just didn’t feel anything during The Kid With a Bike. That’s not to say that other people won’t feel anything. Films touch people in different ways, and there is definitely an audience somewhere out there for The Kid With a Bike, as there should be. It has a good moral beneath it, it’s a saddening coming-of-age tale about the rebelliousness that can come with loss, and it’s very well made. I recognize that it was a good film. I just can’t get past the fact that I felt like it was too aware of the fact that it was a well-made film, as if during the shooting of each scene, the Dardenne’s were sitting in their directors’ chairs ribbing each other and saying, “God we kick ass at making films!”

“The Kid With a Bike”

Directors: Jean Pierre & Luc Dardenne

Cast: Cecile De France, Thomas Doret, Jeremie Reiner

Distributor: Wild Bunch

Runtime: 87 minutes

Film Review #4: "You Instead"

Will Means

Cannes Study Abroad

05/23/11

Film Review #4:

You Instead

The plot of You Instead has all the makings of a hipster, indie, soon to be cult classic love story. Two rival punk musicians who hate each other, Adam and Morello, find themselves handcuffed together at a world renowned British music festival where they are both scheduled to perform, and gradually they find themselves falling in love with each other. While the film may be hipster, and it is indie, unfortunately it’s destined to never become a cult classic because it’s not very good. It has its positive attributes, but they are far from enough to save the film.

To start off, the whole reason behind the two rock stars ending up in handcuffs is a bit on the implausible side. As soon as the two characters meet each other, they break into a quick but harmlessly taunting argument, and just as soon as our two characters have met, a random old man runs up to them, tells them that the world should be “a place of peace,” slaps handcuffs on their wrists, and quickly takes off on a golf-cart with the key. In the hands of a talented screenwriter, this might not have been such a bad start, but the film’s ensuing story-line is too unfunny and too drab to warrant such an awkward introduction. From here, the majority of the film up until about the 40-minute mark seems like a compilation of footage that was thrown together just to extend the runtime of a film that’s already only 79 minutes long. We see the two handcuffed protagonists walking around trying to find a way out of their situation, and each shot of them walking around will last about 3 minutes at best before the film cuts to about 5 solid minutes of what looks like stockpiled band performance footage from the real music festival that the story takes place during. Not to mention that there’s a cameo thrown in the middle of all this with a lead singer from one of the real-life bands that serves no purpose whatsoever except, again, to extend the movie’s runtime.

It’s not until around the film’s 40-minute mark that the two leads abruptly decide that they are in love with each other. After they spend the entire first half of the film bickering back and forth with each other and seeming completely irritated with one another, it comes as quite the sudden but foreseeable shock when Adam tells Morello’s boyfriend that he is in love with her. Adam insists to the boyfriend that Morello loves him back, and when she doesn’t argue against it, the boyfriend walks away and leaves the handcuffed couple be. This begins an ongoing chain of all the other characters abruptly falling in and out of love with others, such as Morello’s (ex) boyfriend, who falls in love with another girl about 10 minutes later. These people change their minds and devote their hearts to others so quickly that you begin to think that they might have some form of bipolar disorder. These quickly forming relationships could have seemed like desperate attempts with a more thoughtful meaning behind them, but alas, they are simply poorly scripted attempts at chemistry. Speaking of chemistry, there is absolutely none between the two protagonists leading up to their confessions of love (except for one poor attempt in which they spontaneously create a rather sub-par remix of Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” together).

Once the handcuffed musicians have expressed their feelings for each other, the film turns into nothing but another montage of clips of them running around in the night with useless sub-plots scattered in between. The characters of Adam’s musical partner and his agent have quite a lot of screentime devoted to them, but they serve no purpose whatsoever as they do not help propel the story at all. Yet we are forced to watch the other band member pursue and hook up with a girl, and we have to watch the agent get so drunk that he passes out on the middle of the carnival grounds. I believe these were attempts at humor or comic relief, but they are so boring and far from succeeding that it’s somewhat hard to identify.

As I mentioned before, the film does have its positive attributes. For one thing, it managed to meet up to the standard that seemed to be running throughout the majority of films at Cannes this year, which was one of excellent cinematography. There are some beautiful shots scattered here and there, particularly when the time in the story transfers from late night to early morning, and the sun begins to turn the skies cold blue. One particular sequence that stood out was when the handcuffed couple started playfully wrestling in mud next to the carnival’s abandoned Farris wheel underneath the dreary early-morning sky. Something like this could easily make an eye-catching one-sheet. The film also benefits from a solid indie soundtrack and the acting from the leads. In fact, it seems that most of the trouble with the performances came not from a case of inability on the actors’ parts, but rather just the poor scriptwriting. They deliver when they have to in terms of emotion, but this emotion is accompanied with some nearly cringe-inducing dialogue.

While things like the cinematography and the soundtrack make the film easier to sit through, they still do not make it easy to sit through. The great premise is taken in very boring and predictable directions, right up until the ending that’s already been done a million times over. It’s likely that very appealing trailers and promotional materials could be cut together for this film, but once audiences see it (if it even makes it to audiences through buyers) it will undoubtedly flop. In a day and age when some of the best indie hipster films tend to flop (Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Wristcutters, etc.) it’s highly unlikely that one that’s just flat-out poor will even stand the chance of making it to mainstream theatres. However, if You Instead does make its way to theatres, it would probably be in your best interest to see something else instead.

“You Instead”

Director: David Mackenzie

Cast: Luke Treadaway, Natalia Tena, Sophie Wu

Distributor: Bankside Films

Romance Comedy

Runtime: 79 minutes

Review #3: "The Artist"

Will Means

Cannes Study Abroad

05/18/11

Review #3:

The Artist

Michel Hazanavicius’ The Artist is a film that celebrates the magic of cinema while simultaneously managing to create movie magic of its own. I cannot remember the last time I walked out of a theatre feeling so uplifted and joyful as I did once the credits rolled for The Artist. It really is that wonderful.

That being said, The Artist is also one of the most ambitious and risky things to hit the film world in quite some time. It was released in 2011 and filmed within the past year, and yet it is a silent black and white film, shot in a classic 1.33 full screen aspect ratio. Taking place in the late 1920s and early 30s, the film depicts the era in which silent films began to become obsolete as talkies took over Hollywood. It also follows the downfall of one silent film actor named George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) and the rise of an upcoming star named Peppy Miller (Berenice Bejo). To make an era film about silent films that is in and of itself silent (save for two brief scenes), it would seem that the creator of such a picture would have to be quite the cinema-lover, which is why it is no shock to find out that although the film is in English, and most of the actors are American (with the exception of the two main French actors), most of the people behind the camera of The Artist are in fact French, including the director.

From the time the classically printed opening title cards begin to flash across the screen, the movie sweeps you up in a feeling of old-timey magic and it doesn’t let you go. It was quite the remarkable feeling to be with an audience that was cracking up laughing at some of the simplest forms of comedy, such as a cute dog doing tricks, or a woman holding herself to make it seem like she’s being held by a lover. It was the kind of comedy straight out of Chaplin’s days, and obviously it still holds good footing in today’s day and age, which is reassuring for a member of a generation that requires over-the-top gross-out R-rated comedies to get its comedy kicks.

The Artist is basically made up of conflicts and contrasts, whether it be the rising fame of Peppy vs. the falling fame of George, or the conflict between silence and sound. The main issue is that of silence vs. sound, but there’s a lot more at work within this argument than what appears on the surface. The argument for sound in movies is essentially an argument for technological advancement in cinema and art, and this is a message that truly resonates with the current day generation that is having the integration of 3D technology into films pushed on them more and more. George refuses to adapt to the new technology, calling himself an “artist,” but the positive thing that The Artist does is it shows the value in both forms of art. First and foremost, The Artist is a staggering achievement as a representation of the value of physical expression. The film has less title cards than any actual silent film I’ve seen from back in the day, but the actors in it manage to convey their emotions perfectly and the director takes special care to notice just how often the audience doesn’t need title cards but can pick up on the dialogue and emotions themselves. It proves that a lot can be done with very little.

However, the film also has its moments where it conveys why sound is an important part of film. Occasionally our main character, George, has moments where he can’t actually understand what people are trying to say to him because he can’t read their lips. The audience can’t understand what’s being said either. We need the sound, just as George does. The sound is used sparingly, but when it finally springs to life, it is used to create some of the most magical movie moments I’ve seen in quite some time. When an entire audience gasps because they hear the sound of a glass being set down on a table, that is indeed what I call movie magic! At its core, The Artist is a celebration of art, and the different ways that art can be expressed. This leads us to the rousingly happy ending in which the conflict for superiority between silence and sound is settled through another method of expression: dance.

The film gets a little too slow towards the middle of its runtime, especially when that period follows such an exciting opening. Luckily, it leads to an ending that is equally as exciting as the opening, but the film could benefit from some mild trimming near its midsection. Other than that, there’s not much wrong with the film. It’s beautifully shot and the subject matter is handled with such precise care by Michel Hazanavicius. The actors should be commended for their willingness to take on such demanding work (the silence does not make their jobs easier; one would imagine it makes them harder.) but each and every one of them owns it. They are not over-the-top with their bodily expression. In fact, the film does a good job of mocking over-the-top “mugging” and avoiding it. The physical expressions and bodily movements of the actors are very much rooted in realism, which is perhaps what makes the performances have that much more of an impact: because we are seeing these people go through emotions that we are so familiar with.

In the midst of a festival showcasing tons of realism-based films that depict what is wrong with humanity, The Artist effortlessly stands out as a giddy celebration of life rather than a contemplation of what’s wrong with it. For this reason alone, I think the film will be easy Oscar bait for the foreign film category, and it has every right to be. The Artist is a breath of fresh air. It picks you up and makes your spirits soar by the time the credits roll. It has that soul-cleansing feeling of a classic Disney film. Aside from a rather intense scene involving a man attempting suicide, the film has every right to earn a PG rating. These are all just a few of the reasons why The Artist is my favorite film I’ve seen at Cannes so far. It really is art at its cinematic best.

“The Artist”

Director: Michel Hazanavicius

Production Company: The Weinstein Co.

Runtime: 100 minutes

Starring: Jean Dujardin, Berenice Bejo, John Goodman, James Cromwell, Missi Pyle

Review #2: "Sleeping Beauty"

Will Means

Cannes Study Abroad

05/18/11

Film Review #2:

Sleeping Beauty

“There was no story to draw from it.” “It wasn’t what I expected.” “The trailer made me think it would be something completely different.” “I just couldn’t get passed the fact that she was a prostitute, but no penetration was allowed.” “I hated it.”

These are the reviews I have been hearing from friends and peers for Sleeping Beauty, the debut feature from Julia Leigh. It is seemingly one of the more controversial films that has shown at Cannes this year and critics, for the most part, have been divided on it. Many of these friends and critics went in expecting something in particular based off the trailer and the plot synopsis. The synopsis is as follows: “Sleeping Beauty is a haunting erotic fairytale about Lucy, a young university student drawn into a hidden world of beauty and desire.” From what I can deduce, this led many people to expect an erotic thriller of sorts. A suspenseful, fun, and sexy ride. However, Sleeping Beauty is not fun, not quite suspenseful, and despite the physical appeal of some of the actors, it is far from sexy.

It comes as no surprise that the film’s writer and director, Julia Leigh, was previously a novelist before she set out to take on this project. The film has many novelistic aspects, and what a lot of people seem to not be getting is that the film is an “iceberg movie”. When I say “iceberg movie” I am of course referring to the style that was created by writers like Ernest Hemingway, in which only about 20% of the story is considered to be obvious and in the open, while the other 80% is hidden beneath the surface. Sleeping Beauty does indeed ask its viewers to look beneath the surface and read between the lines in order to take anything from it. In fact, the majority of the story and the underlying theme of the film as a whole is delivered in one pivotal shot of extended dialogue, which many viewers seem to clock out during. Without this one scene, the film is nothing. The rest of the message is communicated through the film’s rich symbolism. This presents a problem for people who went in expecting Fatal Attraction for the new generation and were given a more focused and shorter version of Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut.

Eyes Wide Shut seems like the best comparison piece for Sleeping Beauty, as the latter is filled with reminders of Kubrick’s style (with a hint of Michael Haneke). The cinematography is nothing short of gorgeous, filled to the brim with symmetric shots, centered actors, and some rather lengthy tracking and still shots. All of this comes together to create a very hypnotic feel that really pulls you in. That is the part that calls to mind images of both Kubrick’s and Haneke’s work. Where Kubrick dominates though, is in the execution of the film. Lucy (played by Emily Browning) is a character that we can’t quite get a read on, and the audience is given virtually no opportunity to create an emotional attachment to her. Many people referred to Browning’s acting as dull and stale. They blamed her for the lack of emotional connection to her character, when in fact the whole point of the film is that you can’t connect to Lucy and you can’t get a read on her. She is supposed to be cold, and mysterious. Her actions and her physical presentation are the tip of the iceberg. We have to interpret and guess what is going on with the other 80%.

The film’s synopsis which mentions Lucy being drawn into a world of “beauty and desire” may lead one to believe she is going to visit a lot of strip clubs or start sleeping around with men. Instead the film presents a vision of a girl who is bored with life and goes out of her way to pursue daring and destructive tasks. She has her fair share of day jobs: a copy printer in an office building, a table-buster at a restaurant, a guinea pig for unsettling scientific experiments (involving a balloon being shoved down her throat), and a student at her university. At night she becomes a sexual firecracker, literally having sex with men at the flip of a coin until she gets so bored that she ultimately signs up for a more interesting line of work. The new work requires her to wait tables for prestigious house-party dinners in her lingerie until she is upgraded to a job in which she takes drugs that put her to sleep and old men climb into a bed with her and have their way with her…up to a certain extent. They are not allowed to “penetrate” her.

*SPOLER ALERT* This job continues for Lucy until the last scene when she is awoken from a near-fatal overdose and she comes screaming back to life. A man who took his own life lies dead in the bed next to her. This is the same man who has the extensive dialogue scene that explains the whole plot and focus of the film. In that scene, he tells the story of a man who was completely dissatisfied with life and could find not substance in it, so he changes his way of living. When that doesn’t work, he changes his way of living again, but soon becomes unhappy again. Not until the man almost dies in a car accident but survives does he come to appreciate life and see the value in it.

This is exactly what happens to Lucy. She can find no happiness and substance in her life. When she makes money from a job, she burns it for fun, as it has no significance to her. She pushes herself to her limits, trying one daring and dangerous thing after another until it all catches up with her in the end. She is beauty who is essentially sleeping through life, and it takes a near-death experience before this sleeping beauty is awoken/ reborn/whatever you want to call it, and comes screaming back to reality. The film’s themes and focus center around ideas of death, life, and what it takes to make one worth more than the other. Perhaps Lucy is sleeping through life because she feels dead already, but not until she sees true death does she come to realize the value in living.

Browning gives quite the bravura performance in the role as Lucy, doing a fine job of remaining icy and cold until life forces her to break down and release surprising and sudden fits of emotion (Not to mention that she also manages to not flinch once during the scenes where her body is being abused as she sleeps). The role is certainly a far cry from her child-actor days in things like A Series of Unfortunate Events, but Leigh also oversees Browning’s exposure well. When many people went to see Eyes Wide Shut, Tom Cruise and Nichole Kidman were quite the tabloid couple, and viewers were excited to see them “get it on” and have sexy sex with each other in a sexy erotic movie. Kubrick, however, let audiences know that he was not about to cater to their curious voyeurism by making the first shot of his film one in which Kidman slides off her dress and is revealed as fully naked. It was as if he was saying, “There! Now that all the suspense behind what Kidman looks like naked is removed, can we please move on?” Leigh handles the nudity (which is quite ample) in her film in much the same way. Although we do not see Lucy naked in the opening shot, the camera does not shy away from her naked body, nor the naked bodies of any of the other characters. Also, interestingly enough, despite the fact that we know that the main character has a lot of sex, there is not actually one sex scene in the film. Not once is the act of sexual intercourse seen being performed. We only see the aftermath or what leads up to it. Leigh does a great job of turning what could have easily been a striptease of a film into one that handles nudity in a serious manner and makes sexuality disturbing on many levels. I think this is one of the big reasons why people rejected the film, just as viewers did with Eyes Wide Shut.

So while the film is a good focus on the disturbing side of sexuality and issues of life and death and how we spend our time getting from one to the other, it is not without its flaws. One of Lucy’s few real emotional connections with the character of Birdmann is lacking. The film doesn’t really allow one to feel any substance in their relationship. Although Lucy seems to care very much for Birdmann, the audience can’t really come to care for him at all and he just becomes a curious little side-plot for the story. The only purpose his character serves is to elaborate on the themes of death, life, and the space in between. This is just one of the examples of the many areas in the film where a little bit of emotional substance could have given the film a richness to really boost it a couple of levels. Again, this is where Kubrick’s style comes into play as, just as with a Kubrick film, we are not allowed to feel what a character feels, but instead we simply see them feeling certain things as we view their actions.

All in all, the film is a rather impressive debut for two obviously talented newcomers: the director and the lead actress. Browning’s role is seriously worth some consideration in the Cannes Best Actress title, but I’m sure it will be overlooked. Leigh has proven herself to be a strong force to look out for. Her film is indeed impressive, and it serves its purpose with its iceberg style. The biggest thing to worry about in regards to the film is not Leigh’s method of telling a story about a sleeping beauty, but rather all the viewers of the film who choose to sleep through some of the most pivotal moments of the film.

“Sleeping Beauty”

Runtime: 101 minutes

Director: Julia Leigh

Writer: Julia Leigh

Production Company: Screen Australia

Starring: Emily Browning, Rachael Blake, Ewen Leslie, Peter Carrol

Film Review #1: "Red State"

Will Means

Cannes Study Abroad

05/15/11

Film Review #1:

Red State

It becomes obvious that Kevin Smith’s latest film, Red State, is going to suck within the first ten minutes that it plays. The opening sequence comes across as preachy and it leads us right into the rather uninteresting establishment of the film’s main characters. At first it almost seems like Smith’s career is reaching an unavoidable fate. In recent months, Smith has managed to become a bit too comfortably outspoken to the masses and after his last film, Cop Out, flopped, it seemed only fitting that the film deemed “Kevin Smith’s attempt at horror” would fail.

However, about thirty minutes into Red State, the film does something weird and unexpected… it gets good. This is the first of many shifts in the film’s vibe that occur throughout its runtime. What starts off as quite the sub-par opening soon becomes a disturbing depiction of a psychotically religious family (this is the point at which Red State is a bona-fide horror film, but that only lasts about 30 minutes or so), and then it becomes an action film, followed by a dark comedy for the closing scene. These shifts in the film are surprisingly unpredictable, but what is even more unpredictable is that the these shifts in Smith’s story actually work!

Red State tells the story of three teenage boys who respond to a woman’s ad on a pornographic website in which she offers her body up for casual sex with multiple men at once. She tells the boys that she wants all three of them at the same time, and they set off on a little road trip, hormones blazing, to go meet her. When they reach the woman’s trailer they are drugged and soon thereafter they awake in the middle of a nightmare. They have been kidnapped by the crazy religious group of the town. They are people who not only preach fire and brimstone messages about gays and sexually active youth burning in Hell, but they help send those people “to Hell” by wrapping them in plastic-wrap and blowing their brains out. This family doesn’t so much resemble conservative southern Baptists as much as it does the Church of Charles Manson. The family is absolutely crazy, and therein lies the fun. While the film is a horror film for about the first 30 minutes of the runtime, it soon turns into an hour-long shoot-out action movie, and it is a thrilling one at that. The action is impressively well-staged for such a low-budget film, and even more impressive is the film’s impeccable sound design. The shoot-out sequence sounds like something out of a Steven Speilberg war film, and it only serves to get the adrenaline of the viewer pumping even more.

The performances in the movie are extremely above average for a film of this type (type being a Kevin Smith horror film). Michael Parks plays the pastor and leader of the church group and boy does he really shine! He preaches his word with the conviction of someone like Charles Manson. His wildly darting eyes convince us that there are some wires loose in his head, and even in the midst of the horrible acts that he commits, he is able to exude a southern grandpappy-like charm towards his family and the local police force. Also a standout (and no surprise here) is Melissa Leo, who plays the member of the family who was the woman to actually lead the boys into the trap. Even with Michael Parks and Melissa Leo thrown into the equation, one of the real surprises for me was the girl who plays the oldest daughter of Leo’s character (I would put the character’s name here, but I have no internet and therefore no idea what the name was. Bummer.).

Another reason I have to give kudos to the film is for the realistic reactions from the actors to each of their given situations. Usually in horror films, a character can have just watched their best friend or lover get brutally murdered, and they’ll shrug it off and run along for pace’s sake. In Red State, characters actually react to other characters’ deaths. People weep over bodies, they go into shock, they become manic with rage, and they even throw up. The talent of the actors becomes very valuable for scenes like these, and all of the actors deliver it well.

To be quite honest, Red State was not at all the film I expected it to be. Its marketing has not been true to the film’s real subject matter, and the title of “Kevin Smith’s first horror film” led me to paint an entirely different picture of what the film would be like. I have to give it more points because in more ways than less, it was one of the most different and original films I have seen in quite some time. The film is batshit crazy, but I mean that in the best way. There is nothing more thrilling about it than watching the chaos completely explode and then build to a boiling point of a climax. The film’s ending is very reminiscent of the ending to the Coen Brothers’ Burn After Reading, as it features more businessmen discussing a huge tragedy and how they should cover it up in darkly comedic ways. It seems like such an ending would be out of place in such a film, but the comedy in the scene worked and fit in pretty seamlessly with the rest of the movie, and overall I felt like it was a nice touch. After things get as crazy as they do in the film, by the time you get to the end, it feels like there’s nothing better you could do than laugh.

So although it has its flaws, Red State is a thoroughly entertaining film. It’s graphically disturbing, genuinely funny, well acted, and tensely action-packed. And even though Smith seems to be pointing to conservative religious fanatics as his inspiration (especially with a title like Red State) the movie does not make one fear that the religious freaks of their town might be getting a little out of control, but rather that those religious freaks could turn out to be the full-on next Manson family…with machine guns.

Final Exam Journal Response

I took this class so that it could help me improve my writing skills, and I really feel like it has. I have always liked writing, and it has always been a hobby of mine, so it was nice to have a class time to focus on just that. I’ve always thought that one of my biggest weaknesses as an author has been describing details, settings, features, feelings, and other things…altogether, I’ve just always thought my biggest weakness was detail. However, I feel like my descriptions have greatly improved as I’ve worked through this class, particularly with my short story, Balloon. I knew that I wanted Balloon to be all about vibe, mood, and feeling, and after reading what I have done of it, I feel like I’ve done a good job of conveying the darkness in a hot sunny, southern, Georgia town. I come to like writing more and more the more that I do it. As a kid, I used writing to express cool ideas of action-packed stories, but as an adult, I use writing to express my inner self and my feelings. Stories I have written such as New, Balloon, and several of my blogs have been methods of complete catharsis for me. New is among one of my favorite works, and I’m sure that Balloon will be when I finish it. I really love and respect the stories that I pour my heart into because they are my thoughts and personal feelings taken out of my head and printed on paper, and it feels good to get them out. I expect to continue writing well into my future. The main things I will be writing are my own screenplays and ideas for my movies that I want to direct, as I want to write the majority, if not all, of my films. Aside from writing movie scripts, I wouldn’t mind writing a book or two in the future, and I would really like to publish short stories that I write. I would love to publish the ones I’ve written now, but they only deserve to be in things like The New Yorker and not “The Athens Mag for Kiddie Stories,” so I’ll wait until I can achieve something like that. For now, I need to finish Balloon, and next I will begin work on The Sleeping Lifeguard and the Drowning Girl.