Archive for the ‘ Suspense ’ Category

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call — New Orleans

  • Written by Matthew Parkinson
  • Posted May 17, 2013 at 12:00 am

It’s really difficult to call Nicolas Cage’s character in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call — New Orleans anything other than a “functional addict.” Here is a man who manages to get through the day thanks to several doses of cocaine, vicodin, and marijuana, among other drugs. He’s also a Lieutenant in the police squad in post-Katrina New Orleans, meaning there are a lot of problems to sort out. How he manages to get away with this is something that you have to see to believe.

Cage plays Terrence McDonagh, the addict, whose goal in the film is to solve a murder. Or, rather, find a way to convict the murderer. He’s got a pretty good idea of who the killer is. Finding enough evidence to convict him or her is the main task he is faced with. However, apart from that, he also has to deal with all of the drugs, the crowd that is typically associated with drugs, and some imaginary iguanas, which become the film’s mascot and perhaps most memorable moment. Seriously, the iguanas, and one scene featuring them in various colors and increasingly odd camera angles, are enough to justify watching the movie.

The same is true of Nicolas Cage’s truly spectacular performance. It’s not easy to portray someone constantly on drugs, especially when they’re mixed and matched like they’re various colors and flavors of M&Ms. Here is an actor who can rarely be accused of being subdued, but if you want to see what it’s like to see his over-the-top style work in a serious and compelling drama, this is the film that you need to see. He brings with him the insanity that works perfectly for the character.

Those of you paying attention and know your film history will be aware that another movie called Bad Lieutenant was released in the early 1990s, starring Harvey Heitel in the titular role. The only major similarity, apart from the title, between this film and that one is that there is indeed a bad Lieutenant. The setting, plot, secondary characters, filming style — it’s all different. They each stand on their own merits, and there’s no reason to ignore this one because of Abel Ferrara’s earlier film.

I don’t want to ruin any of the moments in this film, save for the iguanas, because I’ve already mentioned them and it’s not really that important to spoil their involvement. The rest of the absurd situations will not be spoiled here. You simply need to see some of the crazy things that McDonagh gets into during the two hours that Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call — New Orleans is on the screen. You might not believe me if I simply listed them, anyway, as some of this stuff is too crazy to imagine.

However, that’s exactly what makes the film so compelling. The director is Werner Herzog, who has to bring William Finkelstein’s script, somehow, to the screen. He has to show things that most people would never even consider showing on-screen, or even in the mind. This is a film about a man so lost in his addiction, yet so determined to do right, that the two forces have to oppose one another at some point. And when they do come into conflict, it’s masterful just how the film sorts it all out.

The film looks like few others out there, too, as it has been crafted in a way where we go through, presumably, similar situations and sensations to what happens to McDonagh. The cinematography is all over the place, the editing switches between being rapid and giving a take the time to linger, even the color palette varies depending on what’s going on at the time. Herzog is mostly successful at making us feel like we’re experiencing all of the drugs that the main character puts himself through.

If Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call — New Orleans has a major issue, it’s that it can’t quite sustain that type of energy for its entire running time, and at times it drags. Perhaps that was intentional, as the points when it’s not terribly interesting are also the times when McDonagh might only be on one drugs, not four, but some tighter editing at times might have been beneficial if that wasn’t the case. It’s not always the type of the film you can really like or enjoy, either, which I know will be a turn-off for some viewers.

Nicolas Cage and Eva Mendes are also reunited after the awful Ghost Rider, in which they showed they had no chemistry together. Both actors were bad in that film, while this time around only Mendes isn’t very good. She’s marginally better, but she has no range. considering the character she’s portraying is supposed to push past the “hooker with a heart of gold” cliché, but can’t because Mendes isn’t a strong enough talent, she is a detriment to the finished product.

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call — New Orleans is not a pleasant or fun experience, but it certainly is unique, which is something you rarely get with the movies. Thanks to a glorious performance from Nicolas Cage, and a director who manages to take that over-the-top performance and insert it into a serious drama, this is a movie absolutely worth watching, even if it’s just to say you did. Did I enjoy this film? No, but I appreciated it and I definitely think it’s one that you should check out.

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Filed under: Drama, Movies, Suspense

The Woman in Black

  • Written by Matthew Parkinson
  • Posted May 15, 2013 at 12:00 am

You don’t get a ton of ghost stories anymore like the one featured in The Woman in Black. It’s as traditional as you can get, deciding that the scariest things in the world are shadows and objects working without an operator — not gore, guts, and blood. No real twists, very few characters who matter, not a ton of dialogue, and a ghost who is most definitely still kicking, and very angry. And, most of it takes place in an isolated old mansion, only reachable during certain times of the day, due to a tide that swallows the road.

It takes place in the early 1900s, a time in which superstition was often more important to people than logic. Daniel Radcliffe, trying valiantly but failing miserably to shake his Harry Potter image, plays the lead, Arthur Kipps, a lawyer tasked with going through the spooky old house to sort through all of the paperwork before the law firm can sell it. The house is haunted, he sees ghosts, children die in town, and it’s all moderately spooky, at least for a little while, while you’re still trying to get your bearings.

There are a few scenes where Arthur searches around the house, in the dark, with loud noises and scary images happening at every instance. There aren’t a lot of jump scares, which is usually a good thing, and seeing the titular Woman in Black appear in the background for a second and then disappearing the next is definitely creepy. I’m unsure whether or not it’s really terrifying, and I certainly never found myself freaking out, but tolerance levels will vary and it’s effective at being unnerving, if nothing else.

However, you can’t exactly base an entire movie around that. So, as one might expect, the reason the ghost is still on the planet at all has to be figured out and then hopefully solved. The Woman in Black takes a turn for the worse here, as it gets dull and not very scary at all. It doesn’t even really try to be, as less and less of the film takes place outside the haunted house. Learning more about the ghost makes her less frightening, which is especially true once we learn that the only people she affects — at least, on a damaging level — are children.

Of course, that means that Arthur’s son, Joseph (Misha Handley), has to get involved at some point, as that’s the only way that some urgency will come to Arthur. He cares little for the kids of the townspeople, especially after they were so terribly rude to him earlier on in the film. And they don’t tell him why, either, despite the fact that doing so might have prevented him from seeing The Woman in Black in the first place. No, they just stare at him wickedly and tell him to leave. That’s about as ineffective a tactic as you’d guess.

The film is based on a novel written by Susan Hill, and was directed by James Watkins, the man behind the 2008 horror film Eden Lake. Watkins’ earlier film was also quite minimalistic, but was emotionally haunting thanks in large part to its main actors. Here, he has to rely on the emotionless face of Daniel Radcliffe. It the Boy Who Lived wants a career beyond the Potter franchise, he’s going to seriously have to expand his range.

He does not appear scared even once during the film. The most amount of emotion he shows is mild curiosity at what’s going on around him. He stares, empty, at whatever happens, save for a short smile right at the end — perhaps because he realized that he was done working on the film and that he could collect his paycheck and leave. Radcliffe is just so uninteresting in the role that he undermines much of the attempted horror. It never feels like there’s much danger because he doesn’t react to anything spooky.

The Woman in Black plays for just over 90 minutes, but it feels way longer than it is. We go through the same sort of sequence over and over again, and it just gets dull. Many scenes feel extended just to make the film feature length. It’s like there wasn’t enough material to make an actual movie that could be released in theaters for money, so they just doubled the material without making any changes to it, and hoped we wouldn’t notice.

However, I will say that it’s kind of nice for a simple film like this one to come along, devoid of excessive gore or plot twists. It’s straightforward, it doesn’t try to do too much, and it was made on the cheap. Sure, it might not have turned out to be great, but it allows for us to re-live a period in time when this film was more common, taking us back to an easier film watching experience. There’s only one gross-out scene here, while many horror films nowadays are trying to make you puke at every turn.

The Woman in Black opens strong, with a lot of creepy imagery and sounds, but it eventually dies down due to repetition and the direction the story has to take. I can appreciate the intent in a film like this one, but it’s the execution that I had a problem with. It has its effective moments, but it feels far too long in the second half to really be worth your time. And, please, someone take Daniel Radcliffe to an acting coach. If your house was haunted, you wouldn’t feel mild amusement to that revelation.

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Filed under: Drama, Horror, Movies, Suspense

The American

  • Written by Matthew Parkinson
  • Posted May 12, 2013 at 12:00 am

Mis-marketed as a “one last job” action-thriller, The American is a much more peaceful film than the studio might want you to believe. The trailer appears to be set-up; it wants to you to think that, after all of the scenes in the trailer are over with, there’s still going to be a ton of action afterward. In reality, there are only a couple of action scenes, both of which are short. The rest is centered around talking, paranoia, red herrings, and, indeed, one last job — although it only becomes such very late into the film.

George Clooney stars in and produces this film, which is an adaptation of Martin Booth’s novel, A Very Private Gentleman. That’s a more fitting title, considering Clooney’s character, a man named Jack, or perhaps Edward, who ends up hiding out in Italy after Swedish assassins find him hiding out in a forest. He’s an assassin, too, or so we’re led to believe. He works for a man who has connections and can hide him. That is all that we need to know. While hiding, he’s told that there’s a job: He has to build a weapon, and that’s it.

This seems like a simple task, does it not? And for a man of Jack’s caliber, it is. The gun gets made with no issues. By the 45 minute marks, that’s about all that has happened. However, the time has flown by. Scarce dialogue, and many moments of Jack sitting alone, working, have managed to engulf us. At this point, whatever direction the film takes, it’ll be a success. We’ve bought into this character, this situation, and we just want to see where the film will bring him and it.

Where it does take us is on a wild ride, even for a slower paced adventure like this one. Jack meets a prostitute, Clara (Violante Placido), with whom he falls in love. There’s the ever-present threat of assassins who want him dead for … some reason. There’s the possibility of betrayal coming from every corner. And there’s this lonely, solemn man. This is a thrilling character study, which is something you don’t see very often. One or the other, usually, but not both put together. Both elements are present and done very well in The American.

This is a film that rests squarely on the shoulders of George Clooney, who perhaps took the role because it means he got a “working vacation” in Italy and he got to be close to some very attractive women. Maybe he really cared about it, but that’s an invitation that I figure most men would take in a heartbeat. He’s a stoic hero, one whose emotional range is limited, but that’s because he’s always thinking, always looking. He’s a reliable actor who is good here. We believe he could be an assassin on the run.

The American could be described as the “thinking man’s action film,” although that’s still not quite proper considering how little action there is. It does make you think, however, and you must be patient with it. It isn’t going to spell everything out for you, or give you numerous sequences of narration to explain to you why something happened. Even the back story remains ambiguous and unexplained. It’s about the character as he is now, and you have to work to figure out everything about him.

What doesn’t quite work out is the relationship between Jack and Carla. It doesn’t start until after the 45 minute mark, and while it’s well-established that Jack is a lonely, lonely man, Carla comes across as someone who exists to either be the one who double crosses him, or to be a red herring. Their relationship doesn’t feel real, in large part because it only gets a few scenes to develop. They’re key moments, and they’re sweet, but introducing Carla earlier on and building it up more slowly might have made it more effective.

It also might have made it fit in more with the rest of the movie. This is a slow-burner, for the most part, but their relationships takes off like a rocket and stays at that speed throughout, which puts it in stark contrast. Perhaps this was done precisely for that reason — separate it from the rest of the story just by making it progress at a different speed — but that’s all it does. It draws attention to itself and nothing more, and would have felt more organic had it been taken slower.

Clooney has the job of trying to make us think without saying a word. He has to reveal his character to us without much dialogue, and also can’t be terribly emotional; he’s a trained assassin, after all, where logic trumps emotion. Violante Placido has to do little more than look attractive in her part, although there’s some subtlety to her performance, too; she’s not just a pretty face here. She might be hiding something, but she might not. Who knows?

The American is a very subdued thriller. It’s more of a character study than anything else, but it’s fascinating and very intense on top of that. It makes and requires you to think, as it doesn’t reveal any more than is necessary at the time, and sometimes even less than that. It brings you to a beautiful location, and engages you with swift direction — despite the slow pacing — and it contains a stoic, strong, and surprisingly silent performance by handsome man George Clooney, who is as effective here as he ever is.

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Filed under: Action, Drama, Movies, Suspense

Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels

  • Written by Matthew Parkinson
  • Posted May 10, 2013 at 12:00 am

I almost feel as if you need to be on a stimulant to keep up with the second half of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. If you’re not, you might not be able to follow along; that’s the kind of energy that it brings to the table. The first half is just as absurd, but it’s more slowly paced. That’s all set-up, anyway. The real fun of a movie like this is the execution and the aftermath. It’s a heist film with more than two parties involved, leading to some absolutely hilarious situations.

The basic plot involves four friends, one of whom is very good at cards, losing £500,000 and having to come up with it in one week. If not, they lose their fingers, toes, and, eventually, their lives. The one who loses the money, Ed (Nick Moran), also puts his father’s pub on the line. Because, when you deal with gangsters, and you go into debt to them, you don’t get to make up the rules, I suppose. Just so you can appreciate how awesome this movie is, here’s a fun tidbit of information: Sting — yes, the lead singer for The Police — plays Ed’s father, and gets a few scenes to do so.

The rest of the group, consisting of Soap (Dexter Fletcher), Bacon (Jason Statham, in his first film role) and Tom (Jason Felmyng), have to help Ed come up with a solution to their money problem, or else Harry “The Hatchet” (P. H. Moriary) will be at their doorstep ready to chop off body parts. The eventual decision is to pull off a heist — although it’s more like a heist of a heist. They plan to steal from a group who had just stolen from some other people, catching them when (presumably, I guess) they’re most vulnerable.

It takes about half the film for this plan to actually be thought out and then prepared. This half of the film is interesting, but it lacks any sort of energy. It has a lot of characters, many of whom I haven’t and probably won’t introduce because it’ll become overwhelming, but most of them don’t do a whole lot. There’s still a lot of time left before their body parts are put at risk, after all. And with so many characters, we have to at least establish them all in a few scenes before we can put them into motion for the second half.

And what a second half this is. Here is where all the payoff happens, where each scene is filled with so much dramatic irony, so much humor, that they’re all a delight. The characters all matter, simply because we need to know their affiliations and relationships with rival factions, but the situations themselves are the star. Suffice to say the neither heist goes according to plan, and that for the following forty minutes, you’re in for such a joy.

It’s never hard to follow along to the basic idea of things, but to really appreciate Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, you have to be quick. You have to be ready to pay attention, and you need commit to doing so. You need to be functioning on the same sort of wavelength that its writer-director, Guy Ritchie, is on. You don’t linger on scenes or particular moments, because you’ll miss something. It’s a film you absorb fully after it concludes, but enjoy in the moment while it plays.

This is why I mentioned that a stimulant might be beneficial, especially if you try to watch the film after a day at work or something like that. An energy drink or cup of coffee might just perk you up enough to follow along at the same speed it’s moving. It’s perfectly fine to trail behind, and perhaps re-watch it once you have the gist of it, but the second half can be quite the experience the first time around if you’re prepared for what it has to offer you.

There are no problems I can think of with the second half. It’s paced perfectly, everything falls perfectly into place, and even though a couple of the situations are predictable, it surprises you anyway. Sometimes because of the way the scenario you envisioned is handled, and sometimes because it goes in a completely different direction than you predicted. If the entire movie was this well-done, I would have no problem whatsoever with it, and I would recommend going to see it this instant.

However, the first half is slow, and a bit of a trudge to get through, actually. I anticipate this not being as big of a problem on a second viewing, as you’ll know the characters and can appreciate what’s established about them even more, but the first time around it was bothersome. Not a deal breaker, I assure you, and because of how fantastic the second half is, it’s worth sitting through, but considering we rarely focus on individual characters, it’s a bit odd to give us so much time getting to know them each. There are three main teams in the film, and thinking about them that way would have gotten us to the fun stuff much faster.

Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels is a lot of fun once you get past the first 45 minutes or so. The earlier parts aren’t bad, per se, but they don’t even hold a candle to the second half, which is absolutely perfect in pretty much every way. It is filled with so much irony, misunderstanding, humor, and violence — it’s so much fun that it’s impossible to describe it. Go watch this movie just for its second half.

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Filed under: Comedy, Criminal, Drama, Movies, Suspense

Ghosts of Mars

  • Written by Matthew Parkinson
  • Posted May 7, 2013 at 12:00 am

You sort of, kind of, maybe just a little bit have to appreciate and respect a film like Ghosts of Mars. It’s a go-for-broke effort that might fail — spectacularly at times — but because it feels like such an assault on the senses and is never boring, it’s hard to truly dislike it, even if every fiber of your being is screaming at you to hate it. I mean, even though it’s not really a good film, if it keeps you entertained because of many of the choices made by its director — and who’s more interesting than John Carpenter? — then it’s worth recommending, isn’t it?

Most of the story is told in flashback, which is already an unconventional choice. In the first scene, we see a council of people who call in a woman, Melanie (Natasha Henstridge), presumably the only survivor of a disaster, to tell her story. Because of their outfits, we assume it’s the future, although that will soon be confirmed once the story begins. And what a story it is. It’s the one you tell your grandkids. At least, if you manage to survive the whole ordeal, and if you ever have grandkids, which, given the society depicted in the film, is unlikely.

The majority of the film takes place in a small town on Mars. Yes, the red planet. If you didn’t know that was its nickname, you’ll be able to guess it after sitting through this film. The surroundings are red, the first-person shots showing us the world through the eyes of the villains are red — red just flows through this film like air does a vacuum hose. You’ll be sick of the color by the time Ghosts of Mars comes to an end.

Okay, so Melanie and a crew of tough people, including their Commander, Helena (Pam Grier), and “one of the last breeders,” Jericho (Jason Statham), are sent to this part of the planet to pick up and transport a prisoner, Desolation Williams (Ice Cube), back to headquarters. He’s accused of having killed a lot of people, and of having the best name of anyone ever. When they get to this remote area, they find it deserted. Then they find bodies. Then they find crazy people. It’s really a lot of fun.

The titular “ghosts of Mars” are the villains here. They function by taking over the body of a human and turning that person into a deranged creature. Or possibly into the thinly veiled allegory for a Native American — at least, in the way that they were depicted in early Westerns. Maybe that’s giving the film too much credit, but it does give off a Western sort of vibe. Or, it does whenever it isn’t blasting heavy metal at us. Who really knows what Carpenter was going for here? This film is all over the map.

Anyway, the tough guys have to team up with the prisoner in a hope that at least some of them will be able to escape from the town alive. They can’t kill the infected people, as the ghosts just leave the host and find a new one — or are shown to have that ability, but don’t choose to use it in mass slaughters for some reason. They only actually do that when there’s one person killed at a time.

At every turn, Ghosts of Mars circumvents our expectations. That’s not always a good thing, but in more cases than not, it is. You expect certain characters to live, but they’ll die. You expect music that helps build or exacerbate tension? You get heavy metal thrown at you. You want to simply watch a character walk toward another? You get jump dissolves (a variation on the jump cut), which is certainly something you don’t see every day. You expect decent acting, and you get hammy, awful performances given by actors forced to spout some terrible dialogue. Okay, the last one isn’t a positive, but it does at least make the film different.

Where Ghosts of Mars really falls flat is when it promises some bigger concepts and ideas, but then completely ignores them for the rest of the time it plays. It’s made relatively clear that society is not matriarchal, and that the majority of people are now homosexual. Remember that “one of the last breeders” line? Yeah, that seems to be going somewhere — but then it doesn’t, just like any other potential high-minded concepts. Instead, we just get more shootouts.

That’s not to say anything bad about the shootouts. They’re fine. They’re shot well, they’re relatively entertaining, and it’s fun to watch Natasha Henstridge beat the absolute stuffing out of a great deal of infected people. I suppose I just wanted more. I wanted the earlier potential to be reached instead of scrapped. I wanted a director who clearly had something to say actually get the chance to say that, instead of dropping it in favor of what felt like the easy way out.

Ghosts of Mars isn’t really a good film, but it’s consistently interesting and entertaining and contains some things that you won’t often see in the movies. If you have a fondness for the color red, or B-movies set on Mars in which soldiers fight against miners infected by ghosts, turning them into savages in the process — assuming one can be “fond” of this exact setting — then you’ll have a good time. Don’t expect too much from it, though, as you’ll be disappointed if you’re hoping to see a truly good movie, or even one that explores the high-minded concepts it thinks about but never delves into.

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Filed under: Action, Horror, Movies, Science Fiction, Suspense
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