Invasion: (2007. dir: Oliver Hirschbiegel) With vision and style, with both primary (Kidman, Northam, Craig) and secondary (Jeffrey Wright, Roger Rees, Celia Weston, Josef Sommer) casts impeccably chosen, this Body-Snatchers remake nearly succeeds. It stumbles and falls on three counts: too-fancy editing techniques, some credulity-stretching pieces of action (can a ten-year-old boy really jam a syringe full of adrenaline into his mother’s heart? I mean, could he physically do it? I’m asking), and a ham-fisted heaviness in treating the “alleg’ree” (as Jeremy Northam so charmingly calls it in one of the extras). Still, the palette is lovely, and there is a very creepy progression in which the city streets go from being loud and obnoxious to quiet and listening, peopled by humanoids posed with strange, still menace at bus-stops and news kiosks. You fool them by not emoting. (“You’re sweating,” a poker-faced cop tells Kidman quietly. “They don’t do that. They’ll know.”) There’s a chilling, early moment with two little boys playing video games on the front steps. One says, “Something’s wrong with my dad.” The other says, “Mine too,” and they never look up, just keep playing.
Also, the means of spreading the alien contagion is truly disgusting.
Planet of the Apes: (1968. dir: Franklin J. Schaffner) “Take your stinking paws off me, you damn, dirty ape.” Classic lines. Classic images. This one has them all; it's a work of true innovation. Now, in retrospect, the dialogue is a little clunky, the timing a little slow, the simian maquillage sadly dated, but who can look for flaws in an archetypal classic of this stature? I’m not going to give it away, in case you’ve had your head in the sand for the past forty years and have never watched it, but that final image is as stunning as they come, with no music over it, just the sounds of Heston’s jeremiad and the waves crashing up on shore.
*SPOILER ALERT*
Creature from the Black Lagoon: (1954. dir: Jack Arnold) It begins with God creating the universe, and a voiceover explaining how evolution is not incompatible with creationism. I’m serious! Then it launches into some of the Ed-Woodenest dialogue you ever heard, punctuated by native Amazonian red-shirts getting murdered by a guy in an awkward, rubbery, lizard-like suit. Then, about twenty minutes or so in, a beautiful thing starts to happen: underwater scenes which are so well-filmed that one finds oneself becoming enchanted. That same monster who’d looked so absurd out of water is graceful and lovely in it, and the scene in which Julia Adams goes for a swim and the monster falls in love, paralleling her in a gorgeous water-ballet, is a stunner. Later on, the underwater fight scenes are gripping, and I’ll be damned if I didn’t find it utterly tragic, in the end, when that lizard-man’s movements slowed, then stopped, and he began his final, graceful descent into the abyss from whence he’d emerged.
No comments:
Post a Comment