Clay Achin'

Year: 2015

Director: Guillermo del Toro

Cast: Mia Wasikowska, Jessica Chastain, Tom Hiddleston

Run Time: 1 hour 59 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Guillermo del Toro is such a visionary that his name is spoken with hushed tones in optometry circles. His Spanish language films are characterized by a lush etherealism that starkly contrasts with the frequent brutality of the “real” world. The genre he creates in his films like the widely renowned Pan’s Labyrinth and the tremendously underrated The Devil’s Backbone is utterly distinct and can only be described as horror fantasy.

And then he made Pacific Rim. Now, I’m not saying that del Toro’s American films are bad, but they certainly lack that ineffable quality that defines his foreign works. However, this Halloween saw a near perfect marriage of the disparate halves of his career: the gothic ghost romance Crimson Peak combines the best of his Spanish aesthetic and the narrative paucity of his Hollywood flicks.

Generic ghost stories are real. This much I know.

In Crimson Peak, Edith “Not Peter” Cushing (Mia Wasikowska) is a young American writer. She’s penning a novel that’s not a ghost story, but a “story with ghosts,” a dangerous portent for the thrill-seeking teenyboppers in the audience. She falls madly in love with Sir Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston), a mysterious stranger who came to her father in search of funding for an invention of his, to be used to plumb the depths of the red clay mine beneath his English manor. 

After her father’s untimely death by murder, she marries Sharpe and is whisked off to live with him in England, along with his hawkish and brooding sister Lucille (Jessica Chastain), much to the consternation of her suitor, Dr. Alan McMichael (Charlie Hunnam, again cruelly forced to adopt a stilted American accent despite the fact that three-quarters of the film tajes place in his native Britain).

The Sharpe manor, Allerdale Hall, is in a startling state of disrepair (much like the Sharpes’ finances). The entire property is sinking into the clay mine, and liquefied red clay bleeds from the walls as leaves and debris cascade continuously from the holes in the ceiling. Pretty much immediately, Edith begins seeing CGI ghosts who warn her of a terrible secret hidden within the house.

[SPOILERS] It doesn’t NOT have something to do with Tom Hiddleston’s bare ass.

If you tossed Jane Eyre, The Haunting, The Devil’s Backbone, Flowers in the Attic, and The Turn of the Screw into a blender, you’d come up with a story that is almost, but not quite, entirely like Crimson Peak. It’s fundamentally predictable, so much so that the dialogue could have been “lorem ipsum, etc…” and be just as effective. It’s just a heap of thinly veiled metaphors delivered in Masterpiece Theatre accents slathered liberally over a routine gothic mystery.

Crimson Peak is just a pile of gently steaming boilerplate. That is, if you’re watching it with your eyes closed. The narrative might be peaky odds and ends, but the storybook environment and pure stylistic enthusiasm blast through the picture like a mighty geyser. After less than a minute, you feel like you’re watching the film while strapped into one of those Clockwork Orange viewing devices, unable and unwilling to peel your eyes away from the screen for even a moment. Handfuls of popcorn are missing your mouth completely and about sixty percent of your fact is slick with misapplied Chapstick, but to look away for even a second would be tantamount to rank betrayal, like Eve biting into the apple.

Crimson Peak is much like 2013’s Stoker in that it takes a well-worn family drama and transforms it into a sumptuous visual feast. And Mia Wasikowska is there. It has its imperfections, like some CGI-laden ghosties that probably have beers after work with the pixelated monstrosity from Mama, wacky transitions that might have impressed at the Johnson Family Annual New Year’s Slideshow Barbecue 1998, and an obnoxious font that announces locations with the garish lettering of a local mini-mart, though thee are but the pettiest of complaints.

Except for that ghost thing. More on that later.

The audacious style of Allerdale Hall and its ensigns is like an architect enduring a bad comedown from his first acid trip. There is beauty and splendor in the manor’s decrepitude, pulling designs, colors, and shapes from a dark place far beyond the human imagination. The walls are slimy, shimmering visions of flowing red clay, a bloody brilliant element that gives the house sickly life and informs the color scheme of every set. Red never dominates a scene, but it punctuates every moment with vivid splashes of color. And the constantly fluttering stream of leaves and snow through the Hall’s blasted-out ceiling completes the property’s impression of constant, surreal, gorgeous motion.

Equally sumptuous is Crimson Peak’s sound design, which begs to be heard in theatrical surround sound. The sense of Allerdale Hall as a living, all-encompassing space owes a great deal to the efforts of its audio technicians, who create a richly textured portrayal of not only what’s in the house, but where it is at all times.

And let me tell you, if I come across this place in real life, I would not be included on that list of what’s inside. Woe to their local milkman.

Guillermo del Toro’s brutal realism also makes its way to Crimson Peak in some gruesome sequences that achieve the difficult ideal of hyperreal fantasy. There are no over-the-top head rippings or de-limbings at play here. Every gory moment is an intimate, personal horror that gets under your skin and flays you from the inside out.

It’s just pity the story containing all these stunning elements is so milquetoast. I wouldn’t say that what Crimson Peak needs is more ghostly action (del Toro has conclusively proven in Devil’s Backbone that he is capable of deftly handling a ghost story where the spooky supernatural presence is far fro villainous.), but there is a certain lack of luster to Edith’s visitations. This is frustrated even more by the fact that the phantasms could be lifted from the plot entirely without making the slightest mark on the film.

Plus, the ghosts themselves, while boasting stupefying designs, are rendered silly by too much FX processing. The buildup to any haunting (when actual physical objects are being manipulated) are far more intense than the cut-and-paste apparitions that follow. The ghosts are far from the only thing to be afraid of, so this isn’t a film-busting flaw, but it’s hard not to feel slightly disappointed by the ghosts’ lukewarm portrayal.

Boo Hoo Hoo…

Speaking of portrayals, Jessica Chastain swallows her role whole, swooping around the manor like a majestic heron. The rest of the cast is also suitable, though a wonky accent yet again unmoors Charlie Hunnam. Oh, when will producers stop being cruel to him?

At the end of the day, Crimson Peak is a film worth experiencing. Is it for teen Halloweeners looking to get their hearts thumped? Certainly not. Is it for haunted house fans looking for their next great classic? Unfortunately, no. but is fit for people who deeply, truly love the art of cinema? That answer would be an emphatic yes.

TL;DR: Crimson Peak is a gothic romance that values style over substance.

Rating: 8/10
Should I Spend Money On This? Don't go in expecting intense scares, but if you see it you absolutely must do so in the theater.
Word Count: 1245

Barking Up The Wrong Tree

Year: 2011

Director: Terrence Malick

Cast: Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain, Sean Penn

Run Time: 2 hours 19 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

There are two schools of thought when it comes to viewing most arthouse films. There's the "this movie changed my life," and the "this movie ruined my life." I hate to go against film student credo, but I tend to fall into the latter category more often than not. Sure, I like myself some Jean-Luc Godard from time to time, but I will always grab American Pie from the stack instead of 2001: A Space Odyssey. That's not even a contest.

Maybe it's because my film analysis skills haven't fully developed yet. I will concede that that's a possibility. Or maybe it's because some films are so unbelievably pretentious that their intense need to prove something to themselves chokes out their narrative landscape. Enter The Tree of Life.

Terrence Malick's 2011 film is a remarkable effort that heroically strains to push the envelope and fill itself with Important Meaning, in the process giving itself a hernia.

Actual footage of the universe not giving a crap.

Insofar as The Tree of Life is "about" a story rather than a series of theological ephemera, it is mostly about middle-aged Jack (Sean Penn) remembering his boyhood in Waco, Texas (his younger self is played by Hunter McCracken). Living with his brothers under the stern rule of their unloving, taskmaster father (Brad Pitt) and guided by their ethereal, caring mother (Jessica Chastain), they... do some things. 

It's basically Boyhood with less narrative drive and more pit stops for quasi-evangelical soliloquies. As the family goes about their daily lives (and exactly how many films do we need about white dudes coming of age in Texas?), the film explores its overarching themes of choosing the path of grace over the path of human nature, the idea of how a loving God could allow bad things to happen to good people, and the motif that Terrence Malick is the goddamn best living director on the planet, no contest, look at him go.

When he's not preening in the mirror, he briefly looks back at the action to shout "More ambiguity!" then retires to his trailer with a bagel, leaving the camera on an extended shot of some rocks, or maybe a mysterious light blob.

OK, fine, maybe I'm being facetious, but still.

I will give this to The Tree of Life: It's one of the most visually ambitious motion pictures I've ever seen. The mostly handheld camera bobs and sways, inhabiting the space of its world with a kinetic urgency and, in one truly memorable moment, peering into a doorway while following the mother down the hallway. In this way, the camera adds meaning to the actions around it, exploring the world that the characters inhabit rather than necessarily being tethered to them.

Where the power of this style wanes is in the filmmakers' frequent use of jump cuts to the same angle, which assuredly hold some private meaning to Malick himself, but mostly look like they're feebly trying to disguise a lack of decent coverage. The frequent cuts to black also contribute to the film's jittery, overwhelmingly distracted aesthetic. It's very challenging cinematography, and a little to drunk on its own sense of artistic purpose to be truly watchable.

And for better or for worse, The Tree of Life explodes the very idea of narrative cinema. Exhaustively extended visual and spiritual symbolism abounds, to the point that the narrative hardly sticks to one's mind for lack of earning itself any decent screentime. In one dangerously long sequence obliquely depicting the creation of life, the film sloughs off its characters, slams Lady Gaga music video aesthetics into a 2001: A Space Odyssey framework, tosses in some Turok-reminiscent CGI dinosaurs, and culminates in what seems to be a bafflingly laborious Planet Earth episode.

Well, at the very least it's the easiest paycheck Brad Pitt has ever gotten.

In one scene, the children jump around in the cloud of gas as a truck sprays DDT up and down the suburban block. Considering that this film is heavily based on Malick's own childhood, this might actually explain a lot of the imagery.

This "pictures first, questions never" style holds a lot of meaning for some people, but I am unfortunately not one of them. It's frequently tedious and occasionally beautiful, but always inscrutable. Jessica Chastain holds her own as character that's more metaphorical construct than human woman, but Sean Penn is utterly wasted in a useless bookending role, and Brad Pitt is no more and no less than what he needs to be.

The Tree of Life might hold the answers of the universe for all I know, but as a piece of narrative cinema, it is bankrupt. If you're the type who like to crack open your skull and pour some trippy arthouse cinema right down your mind hole, go for it. But if you're an American Pie guy/gal like me, skip it.

TL;DR: The Tree of Life is an overlong, overheated arthouse flick with some admittedly beautiful imagery.

Rating: 4/10

Word Count: 856

Here's The Kickoff

Happy Super Bowl, everybody! Although it would be uncouth of me to reveal my psychic powers on such an important day in sporting history, your jaw is gonna drop when the Seahawks win and you realize you read it here first.

For those of you (like me) who are merely impartial commercial observers who couldn't care less what the outcome of the game is, here's a couple mini reviews to help you pass the time.

The Lost Boys

Year: 1987

Director: Joel Schumacher

Cast: Jason Patric, Corey Haim, Kiefer Sutherland

Run Time: 1 hour 37 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

The Lost Boys is less successful as a vampire film than a snapshot of the excessively fabulous, mildly homoerotic, glittery electronic culture and fashion of 1987. Directed by Joel Schumacher of Bat Nipples fame, who could expect anything different?

Brothers Michael (Jason Patric) and Sam (Corey Haim) have just moved into the seaside city of Santa Carla (played with great distinction by Santa Cruz) with their mother (Dianne Wiest). Michael falls in with a biker punk crowd led by David (Kiefer Sutherland) and it's a legitimately tough question as to which aspect of his personality is more terrifying - the fact that he's an undead creature with a thirst for human blood or his bleached blonde mullet.

Because Michael is a dude who doesn't even unpack his suitcase before he starts lifting weights (As a matter of fact he doesn't even go upstairs. He just walks in and starts pumping iron in the living room.), he is irresistibly drawn to this buff and charismatic leader. Ostensibly he wants to join the group due to his attraction to Star (Jami Gertz), the sole female member, but it's quite obvious that he can't resist a man with a mane.

Also the tossed off love scene between Michael and Star reeks of post-production reshoots to give the character even a tiny glimmer of heteronormativity. This is a boy who drinks some of another man's bodily fluid (blood, you sicko) and becomes an uncontrollable thirst monster as evidenced by his newly pierced ear and leather jacket.

And though there is a plot in there somewhere, it mostly takes the backseat in favor of a sparkly explosion of 80's signifiers. With most horror films of this decade, there are some laughable pop culture moments or outfits, but The Lost Boys is literally comprised of them. We're talking Dynasty and Flying Nun references. We're talking Rob Lowe posters in a young boy's bedroom. We're talking a pre-insane Corey Feldman playing a young vampire hunter. We're talking a soundtrack that sounds like Cyndi Lauper after eating a bad burrito.

We're talking severe homoerotic tension between literally every single set of actors, even the ones who play brothers. Michael and Sam can only talk with their faces two inches apart, practically shouting into each other's mouths.

I rate it lower because the vampire action is lacking somewhat (although anyone who has seen the film's finale might beg to differ), but as a campy 1987 time capsule of the absurd, this film is number one.

Rating: 7/10

The Help

Year: 2011

Director: Tate Taylor

Cast: Emma Stone, Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer

Run Time: 2 hours 26 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

As much as I may resist it, I have to thank Sergio for making me watch Powerful Drama films. Without him, I'd certainly never have seen August: Osage County, Lee Daniels' The Butler, Mildred Pierce, and countless other esteemed pictures. I also thank him for his infinite patience when I turn into a whiny six-year-old after being forced to sit through a movie for longer than 100 minutes.

And although I don't have much to add to the discussion about the already three-year old period drama film The Help, I did enjoy it for what it was. Also I enjoyed riding down the sloped aisle of the classroom on my roll chair. Seriously though. I may get restless by the two-hour mark but the film wasn't a waste of time.

Emma Stone plays Skeeter, a young journalist who was raised by a black nanny during the time of segregation. As racial tensions begin to rise, she goes behind the backs of her hoity toity friends and interviews their maids (Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer) to get true life testimonials for the book she's writing. You get a shiny nickel if you can guess the name of that book.

Although The Help can't escape a lot of the pitfalls of the genre (White People Solve Racism, the Wise Old Black Character, an undeservedly bloated run time), it makes up for it where it counts. Bryce Dallas Howard shines in an enormously nuanced performance as a being of pure domestic evil, Davis and Spencer pick up most of the weight with their capable hands, the romantic B-plot about pretty white people is shunted to one side (exactly where it should be in a movie with this subject matter), and also Jessica Chastain owning a role that almost went to Katy Perry.

Although I would have loved to see that movie, this casting impacts the film undoubtedly for the better. For an Important film, it's never as dull as its brethren, but the story it tells is a thematically unraveled bastardization of what I hear is a vastly superior novel so as such it gets less points than perhaps it should have.

Rating: 6/10
Word Count: 900