horrorfest 2013's truly compatible double feature: amer and berberian sound studio

Amer: (2009. dir: Helene Cattet & Bruno Forzani) One of the many recent nods in the direction of Argento, a man who must be building up to a Lifetime Achievement Oscar, this is one of the most interesting. Very nearly sans dialogue, it is an examination of one female's internal erotic life, divided into three parts: we see her first as a small girl enduring a sort of Argento-colored nightmare, partly her own construction and partly inspired by sex and death and possible witchcraft around her, then in the budding beauty and burgeoning threat of adolescence, and again as a woman. The camera stays so close to her that her imaginings and nightmares are often indistinguishable from the external world, or anyway intermeshed with it. We see the traumas which shape her sexual neuroses and conflicts, then how they ultimately play out. It is an extraordinarily sensuous experience, and its final chapter, in which she returns to the dilapidated mansion which had been her childhood home, echoes not so much Argento as Polanski's Repulsion.

Berberian Sound Studio: (2013. dir Peter Strickland) A gentle, straitlaced English sound engineer goes to Italy to work on a horror film in the 1970s. A story of alienation building towards madness and told greatly through audio effects, its fascination is similar to Amer's, as they both channel a certain mesmeric effect through disorientation and shapeless sense of threat. Toby Jones is very good as Gilderoy, the Englishman in question, thrust into Existential Angst amidst uncouth Italians, his obvious vaunt-couriers being Gene Hackman from the Conversation and Blow Out's John Travolta. Or, again, there's an uncanny resemblance to Polanski's Paranoia ouevre, in which the hero finds himself alone and without foothold as he slowly slips away from sanity.

horrorfest 2013 evening five: a triple feature

Simon, King of the Witches: (1971. dir: Bruce Kessler) This, it turns out, is not a horror film at all. Simon is a hipster at the turn of the Aquarian Age. He lives in a storm drain, and so goes for walks during rainstorms. He makes a living selling charms and talismans to rich, young ne'er-do-wells, but he is a true magus, and his continuing work is to find his way into the realm of the gods, not as a supplicant, but as an equal.

The extraordinary thing about this low-budget (shot in three weeks) film is that it is so entirely free of any kind of formula. It rose up from the craziness that is Hollywood at a time when everything was chaos, and nobody really knew what would sell, so interference by the moneymen was at an all-time low. Ostensibly written by a soi-disant magus, its magicks are rooted in real-life lore (although Simon commands a ridiculously high rate of success in his spells and curses), unlike the Buffy/Harry Potter fluff which passes these days.

Andrew Prine (habitue of Westerns, horror films, and television across several decades) imbues his line readings with a necessary intelligence, --a chore, since much of it is written from so esoteric a perspective (and with sufficient sixties-bound lingo) that a lesser man at a less adventurous time might balk at the task. His presence is also sufficiently earthy to ground the story, lending credence to its terrestrial humour (a love-charm which results in a perpetual erection; a ceremony by a rival witch, played by Warhol posse-member Ultra Violet, involving a goat licking a human skull).

It's not scary, and it's not trying to be. The ending is interesting: it's got a cleverly psychedelic, pre-climactic scene in which Simon experiences the vision which foretells the outcome. Actually, that IS the climactic scene; the realization of it is only denouement.

*SPOILER ALERT*

Summer's Moon: (2009. dir: Lee Demarbre) The first hour is dreadful, a clunky re-imagining of the Collector. In fact, this movie can be described by other movies whose parts it resembles (some Frailty, some Killer Joe energy), as it never finds its own particular cohesion or personality. Tough, lovely Summer (Ashley Greene) has run away from home to find her father, whom she's never met. Once in the old man's hometown, she hooks up with a charmer who, after the romantic evening, chains her up in his "garden" alongside another fast-fading beauty and a collection of high-cheekboned skulls. (Mom helps out with his hobby, by the way, because she's in his sexual thrall.) It's all fairly cockamamie until about an hour or so into the proceedings when Stephen McHattie shows up, the Grand Old Patriarch of this Serial Killer Clan. McHattie's an actor with the kind of glorious kick that brings a struggling plot into zestful life, but, alas, even he is not enough to save the thing. And it's not that the other actors are bad; they're not. They're just stuck in a contrived situation which never springs to life.

All the Boys Love Mandy Lane: (2006. dir: Jonathan Levine) This is the one where the teenagers go to party at a remote location and get bloodily knocked off, one by one, in retribution for their degeneracy. Or, possibly, for wanting and/or envying Mandy Lane, the nice girl who goes along with them.

Yeah, you think you've seen it before, but this has better production values, better acting (Amber Heard and the guy from Hell on Wheels), a good twist, and, oddest of all, a decent script, which leaves things unspoken and gives us high school characters believable enough that it's hard to hang around with them. Like lovely young girls with body issues that make them so vulnerable they feel they have to do anything to fit in (give a blowjob to restore a boy's wounded vanity, shave their pubes, jack a guy off in the back seat, dull the agony with drugs). It's almost painful to watch, and then they get killed for it. There's a melancholy to it.

not a good film, but watch it for this

Baba Yaga: (1973. dir: Corrado Farina) Italian soft-softcore BDSM culled from a popular comic book series called Valentina. This is a movie about high heels and manacles, but only just. Is it shocking? Titillating? In retrospect, it seems quaint and absurd, and Carroll Baker is stiff and out of her element as an aging femme fatale.

Watch it for: a snapshot of hipster Milan in the '60s.

The Girl Next Door: (2004. dir: Luke Greenfield) Teenage boy sex fantasy with better than average acting about a gorgeous, nice, innocent porn star who throws over her sinful life of fanciness and evil to love a dork in high school. Sheesh.

Watch it for: Timothy Olyphant as a low-life porn producer. He makes perfect choices, bringing humor and intelligence to a character who really probably deserved none. Every intention, every shift of tactic, is subtly but perfectly communicated. I emphasize: this movie did not deserve him.

the Interpreter: (2005. dir: Sydney Pollack) Not anywhere near good, this political thriller involves Nicole Kidman (as an interpreter for the U.N.) overhearing an assassination plot, and Sean Penn (lifeless and sans chemistry with La Kidman) as a U.S. Secret Service guy trying to stymie the plans.

Watch it for: about halfway in, there's a wonderful suspense sequence involving a bomb on public transport. It's so good that nothing after it, although we still have half the film left, ever comes close to rousing similar emotion again.

The other thing is Kidman's wonderful voice. She's employing a South African accent and her lower register, lower than "throaty", a full-on chest-voice, and she sounds amazing.

moral lessons from star trek: the original series

Camus once said, "Everything I know about morality and the obligations of men, I owe it to football." I, on the other hand, didn't have football until too late in the day to make much of a difference, and have often claimed with equal parts flippancy and despair that my own moral compass was shaped by Hollywood, Shakespeare, and Star Trek. This last, in particular, while rich in subconscious depth, is generally simple in structure and each episode can therefore be boiled down to one or two simple moral lessons.

Here are some things I learned in childhood (some of them no doubt leaving scar tissue extant on my psyche to this day). Note how often the same moral is repeated in multiple episodes, as if for emphasis, or to indicate thematic obsession.

Man Trap: Salt is important. Also, ex-lovers are not always to be trusted.

Charlie X: Teenagers are not to be trusted with superpowers.

Where No Man Has Gone Before: Neither are adults.

the Naked Time: Jung was right; the Shadow material we each suppress packs a mean wallop when released.

the Enemy Within: Within the Shadow lies our energy. An effective commander must own a powerful dark side (incorporating, in Kirk's case, his sex drive, cowardice, penchant for Saurian brandy, and a weird tendency to wear too much black eyeliner) alongside the "good", both ruled by an overriding intelligence.

Mudd's Women: A woman is responsible for her own level of pulchritude.

What Are Little Girls Made Of?: Human emotion rules the universe, waiting to highjack even robots. Also, ex-lovers are not always to be trusted.

Miri: Chasing immortality is fatal hubris, and growing up is hard.

Dagger of the Mind: Emotion breeds violence, a cage is a cage, and a mind wiped clean is an unbearable loneliness, the sort of loneliness of which a man can die.

the Corbomite Maneuver: An apparently hostile opponent might in reality be a super-being who is testing you, a sort of cosmic Zen Master.

Menagerie: Reality is not always the best life-choice.

the Conscience of the King: One can evade the consequences of one's own sins for only so long. On a related topic, the offspring of fascist dictators are often unstable, sometimes psychotic.

the Balance of Terror: A true sense of honor is a living thing, and must be ever ready to shift and change to remain vital, always resisting the mortifying influence of iron-bound rules and dogma. As a sad corollary, honor is difficult to maintain amongst Romulans.

Shore Leave: Be careful what you wish for.

the Galileo Seven: An effective leader must use both halves of his brain, drawing on both logic and instinct.

the Squire of Gothos: Children are not to be trusted with superpowers.

Arena: You can jerry-rig a crude but effective cannon using sulfur, saltpeter, charcoal and diamonds; a television studio must have better resources than that, however, to fashion an effective lizard-man.

Tomorrow is Yesterday: A man's worth cannot be gleaned from his resume.

Court Martial: A computer is not to be trusted when a life is at stake.

Return of the Archons: Any holy-looking, supernatural being is up to no good, a computer is not to be trusted with absolute rule, and freedom is not easy, involving both sacrifice and hard work.

Space Seed: Creating a race of superhumans is tantamount to placing our fate in the hands of a cabal of arrogant bastards who view us as inferior and are strong enough to make our lives hell. Don't do it.

A Taste of Armaggedon: It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we might let it drag on like an endless chess game.

This Side of Paradise: Ex-lovers, even possibly physically unrequited ones, are not always to be trusted, and a Garden of Eden is always booby-trapped. Best revelation: Spock has a first name, but we would not be able to pronounce it.

the Devil in the Dark: Sentient, intelligent beings do not necessarily look like us.

Errand of Mercy: On the other hand, superhuman entities may look like us just as kind of a temporary favor, out of politeness. Also, don't force your help on someone if they really don't want it.

Alternative Factor: The angel with which each of us endlessly wrestles is ourselves, and there is everything at stake.

the City on the Edge of Forever: Sometimes a simple act of goodness and mercy can have the severest possible consequences, and the best intentions can lead to victory for the dark side. Also, even an unknown person's impact on history can be massive.

Operation: Annihilate!: The weapon which kills the parasite in your system may be entirely harmless to yourself. The corollary: wait until the lab results come back before you put Spock into the isolation chamber under the blinding white light.

Amok Time: A primordial swamp of seething id-sensuality is swarming beneath the placid Vulcan demeanor. In other words, Spock is very sexy.

Who Mourns for Adonais?: Any holy-looking, supernatural being is up to no good. In fact, man has evolved to a point at which gods are not only unnecessary, but vaguely embarrassing.

Changeling: A mechanical entity imprisoned in its own logic is no match for human cleverness and wile.

Mirror, Mirror: It is easier for a civilized man to impersonate a barbarian than for the barbarian to pretend to civilization. But really as a child the moral I took away was this: we all have an evil twin in an alternate universe, and Spock's is really sexy.

the Apple: Every Garden of Eden is booby-trapped, and no civilization, however apparently content, is vital if it is merely existing to service, and be fed and supported by, a ruling god or god-like machine. Such a god is to be destroyed and a Protestant ethic of hard work and good, healthy procreation within the proper heterosexual bounds are to be imposed from without if necessary.

the Doomsday Machine: Sometimes the monster must be destroyed from within.

Catspaw: Your senses may be lying to you; all of this might be illusion. Also, the human experience of sensation is the most powerful attractant in the universe and all aliens succumb to its succubus call.

I, Mudd: The adamantine fortress of robot-logic is no match for the sheer trickster power of human whimsy. Also, once the master is addicted to services rendered, the servant becomes the master.

Metamorphosis: Interspecific love involves sacrifice (on the female's part, naturally), but is not necessarily hopeless.

Journey to Babel: An effective commander must not let his personal loyalties override his duty to his ship, Vulcan father-son relations are hardcore problematic, and there's always some mercenary spy trying to throw a fatal wrench into the works of any peace-talk.

Friday's Child: A society calcified by its notion of honorable death and the worship of strength is doomed unless it can also learn to nurture its weak and care for its sick. Also, Klingons are cheaters and liars and not to be trusted.

the Deadly Years: Getting old bites, and fear can save your life.

Obsession: We are all haunted by ghosts from the past, guilt being the most detrimental to clear judgment in the present. Heeding intuition is crucial for a commander. Best revelation: Spock's blood is green because his hemoglobin is copper-, rather than iron-based.

Wolf in the Fold: An entity which feeds on fear makes an expert serial killer.

the Trouble With Tribbles: A bar fight is sometimes a lot of fun, and Klingons are cheaters and liars and not to be trusted.

the Gamesters of Triskelion: Slavery is bad, and a civilization built on it is doomed to fall unless it adapts.

A Piece of the Action: The Prime Directive is a brilliant idea, but really not generally workable. Somebody's always going to leave some random book behind and inspire a cargo cult.

the Immunity Syndrome: In a multi-specied Universe, a distinction between which is virus and which infected can be murky. A secondary, but more intriguing, moral lesson is that we are all connected on a deep, empathic level, and that the ever-logical Vulcans are the ones who have sense enough to understand that denying this is mere arrogance.

A Private Little War: Providing arms for South Vietnam to match the communist-provided arming of North Vietnam is a fool's game.

Return to Tomorrow: A species with superpowers can only be trusted if it voluntarily chooses to transcend the physical realm. Corollary advice: don't let even the nicest alien take over your body.

Patterns of Force: Nazism is a bad idea on any planet.

By Any Other Name: Human emotion is the most powerful force in the universe, like a trickster just waiting to highjack all species, knocking them right off their high, anti-human horses.

Omega Glory: War leads to armageddon and Charlton Heston's jeremiad at the end of Planet of the Apes.

the Ultimate Computer: A computer is not to be trusted to run a starship. ("Open the pod bay doors, HAL.")

Bread and Circuses: A society built on slavery is bound to fall, but some take longer than others.

Assignment: Earth: A television network will shamelessly abuse a hit series in a gross attempt to jump-start another, obviously inferior, one.

Spock's Brain: The idea that women might rule a civilization without male guidance is utterly absurd. The corollary: men without women live brutal, unkempt lives; women without men are ditzy and ineffective. Therefore, heterosexual balance is the duty of every planet. Also, setting up a computer to rule your civilization is sheer laziness when you should be out there fighting and procreating with the males. Awesome line reading: "Brain and brain. What is brain?"

the Enterprise Incident: No amount of lying or deception is impossible (or, indeed, morally inexpiable), even for a Vulcan, as long as it is done in the name of patriotic service (in this case, to the Federation). Best moment: the Vulcan Death Grip (in reality, only a clever permutation of the Vulcan Nerve Pinch).

the Paradise Syndrome: Hubris breeds a fall. Also, a computer is worthwhile only so long as it is tempered and maintained by living intelligence.

And the Children Shall Lead: Any holy-looking supernatural being is up to no good and should not be trusted. And, yet again, children are not to be trusted with superpowers.

Is There No Truth in Beauty?: Interspecific love is difficult but not always impossible.

Spectre of the Gun: If you don't believe in it, it can't hurt you.

Day of the Dove: Laughter is the opposite of anger.

For the World is Hollow, and I Have Touched the Sky: The Dominant Paradigm is not necessarily based in truth. Also, a computer should not be trusted to rule over humans.

the Tholian Web: An effective leader must use both halves of his brain, drawing on both logic and instinct.

Plato's Stepchildren: Nobody is to be trusted with superpowers. Also, a civilization built on slavery and extreme social stratification is bound to fall.

Wink of an Eye: A sterilized species may attempt to mate interspecifically, sometimes to the detriment of the stud race, and usually beginning with Captain Kirk. Interesting fact: greatly accelerated, humanoids are invisible and sound like insects.

the Empath: There is a certain amount of cold sadism implicit in scientific research.

Elaan of Troyius: Diva supermodels of the most annoying kind still hold inexplicable power to enslave males, and growing into adulthood is difficult if everyone does what you say all the time.

Whom Gods Destroy: If you have two apparent Kirks, the one who values the safety of the Enterprise over his own is the real mccoy. Also, crazy people should not be trusted with shapeshifting powers.

Let That Be Your Last Battlefield: Racism is based on logical fallacy and delusion.

Mark of Gideon: Overpopulating your planet is a terrible error. Every population must have its predator, even if that predator is only a disease.

That Which Survives: Although continuing with some of the long-running themes (a computer is only to be trusted under the supervision of a living intelligence, and human emotion is so strong a force it threatens to conquer even computer projections), Spock is here taught that he can indeed effectively command a starship using only his left-brain logic, so long as he is working in tandem with people he trusts who are in touch with their own instincts (in this case, Mr. Scott).

the Lights of Zetar: A man in love is inefficient, but love is so powerful a force that it can mean the difference between life and death.

Requiem for Methuselah: The human condition incorporates "a little ugliness from within and without," the avoidance of which is folly. Also, the agonies, ecstasies, and mysteries of love are so powerful that even a robot can be destroyed by them. Best moment: although the episode itself is certainly no great shakes, its end moment, with Spock's last choice, is extraordinary, and indicates a whole new level of personal development in both his friendship with Kirk and in coming to terms with the puzzle that is humanity.

the Way to Eden: A Garden of Eden is always booby-trapped, ex-lovers are not always to be trusted, and the sterility of technological advancement can breed malcontents who rebel against it. Although there is a kinship between Vulcans and hippies, there tends to be something disturbingly manipulative about hippies; do you reach me, Herbert?

Cloud Minders: A society built on slavery and extreme social stratification is bound to fall unless it adapts.

the Savage Curtain: Good guys and bad guys are often indistinguishable on the battlefield.

All Our Yesterdays: We all carry within us the primitive underpinnings of the id, a primordial soup of caveman passions at whose mercy we ultimately exist. Even Spock.

Turnabout Intruder: I hated this one so much that I've only seen it once or twice, and not at all for many years. I remember the moral being that ambitious women are psychos, but you could argue for a more radical reading, that a woman can be driven mad by the chauvinism inherent in Star Fleet's hiring practices.(*) Also, ex-lovers are not always to be trusted.

(*) Back when I was working in record stores and was consistently "tested" by male coworkers concerning feminist ideology, one of them said that Nichelle Nichols had come out in an interview defending the sexy uniforms with, "Maybe in the future, women will be able to wear miniskirts if they want to without defending the choice," to which I (with some frustration) reply that the micro-mini was obviously mandatory, since women never wore anything else, and nobody had bad legs, which tells me that Star Fleet was hiring on a standard of calf-definition rather than ability where women were concerned.

horrorfest 2013 evening four: a coppola double feature

Bram Stoker's Dracula: The first time I saw it in the theatre, I loved it, thought it enormously sensuous and engaging. The second time I saw it, I hated it, thought it overblown, fatally lacking in subtlety and really embarrassing in parts. The third time I saw it, I loved it. Et cetera.

I've watched it enough now to know what to expect: a sort of Dark Theatre of Kabuki Histrionics, and I really love it. Coppola has taken the essence of Dracula, stayed reasonably true to an admittedly flawed book, while transforming the Count into a Romantic hero and the story itself into a Gothic love story. (Gothic love stories always end in death for someone.) Gary Oldman in the lead and Tom Waits as his Renfield handle the Kabuki aspects extraordinarily well (Waits' performance, albeit a minor one, is sheer genius). Anthony Hopkins (Van Helsing) we all know loves galloping over the top in performance in bold and sometimes hamfisted ways, and Richard E. Grant finds new ground with his morphine-addicted, love-addled Dr. Seward. Keanu Reeves is an easy mark for critics, with his less than satisfactory English accent (Winona Ryder's goes in and out, as does her performance, veering from lovely moments to the truly awful), but, perhaps from self-knowledge, Reeves avoids the hysterical almost entirely, choosing to stick within the bounds of the staid and stoical English bank-clerk.

Still, there's a thing Coppola does very well: he smooths over the rough edges of the acting with editing. In fact, the whole thing is so sensuously lit, photographed, and edited (and the sound, too,--wonderfully sensuous sound design) that it all flows together like a morphine dream. The minute details are marvellous: the Transylvanian mountains are filled with rings of blue flame, shadows move independently of their originals, rats as well as Dracula himself defy gravity by crawling upside-down. The Freudian aspects are not neglected, quite the contrary: witness the lustful glint in the eye of Lucy's fiance (Cary Elwes, quite good in an understated role), for instance, before he pounds the stake into her heart.

Another thing it captures and communicates extraordinarily well is that sensual hyperventilation girls experience when just about to embark on their sex lives.

It's another bold endeavour from Coppola, and, for my money, a crazed and original success, and it has a place high on my list of Top Ten Vampire Films. (Yes, I really do have such a list.)

SPOILER ALERT

Twixt: Remember that Johnny Depp movie, Secret Window? No reason you should. How about that Charlotte Rampling movie (sorry, film), the Swimming Pool? Again, no reason you should, except that it had as I recall a little of the steamy Gallic thing going on which might have stuck with you. These are films which belong to the "I don't know what I'm going to write about, so I'll write about a writer with writers' block and how it all comes out swimmingly in the end" genre, an inexcusable genre, absolutely the worst of the worst. A big, blatant cheat in every respect. (*)

This is one of those. The script is about as good (and by that I mean just mediocre enough to keep you sitting in your chair) as that of Secret Window, and although Coppola provides some interesting (and random, and pretentious) visuals, nobody's going to call this one a success. Part of the failure is due, I think, to the very groundedness of Val Kilmer, so practical and earthy and drolly mischievous that it seems impossible to project him into a fantastical realm. (OK, I haven't seen Willow. There are reasons for that.)

It tries to occupy that rarefied air of the Night Sea-Journey, a very select and difficult genre which includes the Machinist and Jacob's Ladder, works which travel back and forth between levels of dream and reality and (when such a story is successful, which is seldom) you're unsure which is which until it's made clear in the end. It's hard as hell to pull off well, few do it, and this one doesn't come close.

The best things about it are Tom Waits' opening narration (what a creepy and lovable treasure that man is) and Ben Chaplin's Edgar Allen Poe, convincing in spite of the script. Outside of those guys, we have a smattering of poor-man's Twin Peaks (quality along the lines of, say, Wolf Lake), with your typical small town enshrouded by an age-old tragedy (religious man abuses then dishes out the laced koolaid to a bunch of kids in an ill-conceived attempt to save them from becoming vampires), a town where all time happens at once: as the clock tower with seven faces indicates that it's seven different hours simultaneously, the action flows between the fifties, the late 1800s, and modern day, not so much seamlessly as without seeming to care whether or not we buy it.

It doesn't matter, really. You won't care. You have characters like a moon-bathing, Baudelaire-quoting Goth-King who runs a decades-, possibly centuries-old, gypsy-camp for Siouxsie Sioux wannabes across the river and who may or may not be a vampire. He reminded me of characters I found compelling when I was fourteen. In the end, there are sufficient enjoyable set-pieces (eccentric old sheriff Bruce Dern plying the Ouija Board, braces snapping off the teeth of a revivified little-girl vampire as she prepares her bite, a contrived piece of Lynchiana when Kilmer's writer finds the boarded-up hotel open for business and has a faux-Peaksian exchange with the keeper of the clock-tower and his folk-singing, vampire-hating wife. Ridiculous, but you can relax into it) to keep you watching.

(*) My boyfriend points out that 7 Psychopaths must belong to this genre, as it shares the subject matter, but that one escapes the label of Liar and Cheat because it plays straight with us about what is fiction and what is not.

horrorfest 2013 evening three: three good ones from this year

*SPOILER ALERT*

the Purge: (2013. dir: James DeMonaco) A fascinating idea for a non-supernatural, slightly sci-fi horror film, no doubt inspired by "the Return of the Archons", itself a fascinating moment in the first season of the original Star Trek. In an alterna-America, the "new Founding Fathers" have cleansed the land of crime by designating a single twelve-hour period every year as "Purge Night", during which time cops and hospitals all close up shop and crime runs rampant and unpunished. Although it never reaches its potential, it's interesting enough to keep you watching. This is the kind of role I love for Lena Headey (I'm ambivalent about Cersei Lannister, both as written and as portrayed), beginning with mere elegance and expanding into a tough humanness, a journey reaching its sublime apotheosis with her morning announcement, "Sit down! I said nobody else is fucking dying tonight!" Also, it seems I no longer dislike Ethan Hawke, which I did, with some vehemence, for many years. (It was Reality Bites that did it. And that Hamlet? ye gods.)

Byzantium: (2012. dir: Neil Jordan) Jordan has a talent for fantasy. For all its oddness and flaws, my favorite film of his has always been the Company of Wolves. Here is a new vampire story, equal parts modern world and beautiful, mythological old world (or, more cynically, equal parts Let the Right One In and Interview with the Vampire). There are enduring images: the strange stone hut amidst the flowing waters where one meets one's doppelganger, one's death and resurrection into blood-drinking immortality, all in one instant, for example. The film owns an extreme pulsation of dark female sensuality, mostly due to Gemma Arterton and the love which the camera bears for her. The bad guys are a brotherhood of bloodsuckers who, for reasons both classist and sexist, spend centuries hunting after a mother-daughter vampire team (Arterton and Saoirse Ronan). Jonny Lee Miller, unforgettable as a different kind of vampire, a soldier and a cheat who loves placing innocent girls into whoredom and passes on his fatal syphilis as a means of revenge, throws himself with tireless relish into the hideousness. The similarity to Let the Right One In mostly shows up in the burgeoning relationship between the eternally-sixteen-year-old daughter and her pale, sickly, teenaged beau. I don't like the way Jordan does action scenes, but there aren't many of those, and the filming of the old world, and the ease of movement between old and new, suggesting the timelessness of vampire existence, is lovely.

the Grabbers: (2012. dir: Jon Wright) An Irish remake of Tremors (with a little Gremlins thrown in: witness the scene of the monster-cubs terrorising the bar), only the beasts come from outer space via the ocean and feed on human blood. Alcohol, it turns out, is toxic to them, and drunken hijinks ensue as a tiny island town tries to survive the night of rainstorm and monsters. Richard Coyle is here, and he is lovely, but the music is intrusive and the drunken Irish whimsy approaches John Ford levels, which is too rich by far for my blood. That, however, is a personal quirk, and there is much to be said for this eccentric capriccio.

horrorfest 2013 evening two: dr jekyll and mr hyde

(1931. dir: Rouben Mamoulian) The really marvellous part about pre-code films is fully embodied here: that wonderful, irreplicable ambience of heavy sensuality combined with unfeigned innocence which only seems possible in hindsight. A film like this literally could not be made today, even one set in an appropriate historical era. Jekyll's proud and entirely proper chastity (a word which bears today a certain taint of sexual taboo, alongside jealousy and frigidity) would be untranslatable onto celluloid today without an accompanying and apologetic hint of psychological disorder from childhood trauma, or at least a clearly-stated bias on the part of the filmmakers against sexual repression.

Fredric March offers up a forthright and bold performance, giving us a Jekyll who, with Vulcanian logic, sets about solving the bedevilment of his illicit lust for Miriam Hopkins through purely scientific means, by using chemicals to separate out his basal, troglodyte instincts and leave the superior man intact to live a good, faithful, and fruitful life. But, as Captain Kirk will find out in "the Enemy Within" (apologies: I've been immersed in Star Trek lately, and, like the Mahabarata, it's amazing how some episode or other applies to nearly everything you run across in life), the one cannot live without the other, and the shunned shadow is where our strongest energies abide.

Technically, the film is stunning. There is no trace of March in his Hyde, none at all. He is completely obliterated through a combination of genius maquillage and bravura physical acting, for which March deservedly took home his first Oscar. (The slow and convincing transformations were achieved through use of color schemes and filters which would not show up on the black and white film.) Karl Struss' camera tricks are sometimes strikingly modern and effective, sometimes intrusive and clumsy, but the shots of the laboratory are lovely, done with care and agility.

And let's have a word about the unjustly forgotten, or anyway under-remembered, Miriam Hopkins. An actress with lithe facility in both comic and dramatic roles, her work with Ernst Lubitsch alone enshrines her amongst the greats: both Design for Living and Trouble in Paradise can claim places among the best films ever made, and she stands with easy grace at the center of both. As the prostitute whose crush on Jekyll instigates all the trouble, she owns the flesh appeal of a Harlowe and is fully, tragically human.

horrorfest 2013 evening one

Near Dark: (1987. dir: Kathryn Bigelow) I can't imagine a Top Ten Best Vampire Films list that didn't include this one. The 80s were tough; there was a lot to work against. Every movie had a New Wave synth-track by the likes of Giorgio Moroder or Vangelis, for a start. Often it's a huge bummer, but here the Tangerine Dream music works as a sort of mesmeric glue holding the piece together. Bigelow is young and you can see the flaws, but they're not important. They're not what you come away with. You come away with Bill Paxton, possibly in his best moment ever, revelling in the bloodshed in the "finger-lickin' good" bar massacre. And Lance Henriksen, that fantastic face photographed to perfection, his arm draped over a pay-phone, watching. And Adrian Pasdar and Jenny Wright, both impossibly sexy, as the star-crossed lovers.

Possibly the most important thing, a thing few if any other movies have ever captured (or, indeed, attempted to capture), is the quality of lives these eternal bloodsuckers lead. It is a frenetically-paced, claustrophobic existence lived in ramshackle motel rooms and stolen vehicles with blacked-out windows, driven by constant dread of the sun. These creatures are on an endless journey, like sharks, constantly moving, constantly feeding, coming back around the same bends of the highway to encounter fleeting glimpses of ancient memories. "I get back here once every fifty years," Henriksen's ex-Confederate soldier tells a motel clerk who thinks he recognises him. "Make a reservation for me."

These creatures don't get to pick their companions. Turning a human vampish is easier than killing one: "he's been bit but he ain't been bled," Jenny Wright's May tells her compadres, who now have a new vampire to train. The overarching sense with which we are left is that the vampiric life is a small, frightened, and exhausting one, without respite except in obliteration.

By any standard, in the realm of vampiric lore, this is a necessary film.

Sword of Doom: (1966. dir: Kihachi Okamoto) It's an unabashed "B" film, but every bit as enjoyable in its way as Harakiri or the great old Kurasawas. Tatsuya Nakadai is the sociopath samurai who leaves chaos in his murderous wake. The cinematography and editing are still great, but the story is not completely told. For instance, we never see the outcomes of two confrontations to which we are building up for a long time: the samurai's showdown with the Mifune character, which we assume he wins, since Mifune appears in ghost-form at the end, or, indeed, with the ostensible hero, who has been training throughout the movie for his fight with our anti-hero. Weirdly, it doesn't matter. Nakadai's beautiful face is like a photographer's dream: his haunted eyes, and the unmistakable reverie of bliss after he's accomplished a well-executed kill, are breathtaking. The horror comes in the creepy, Grand Guignol ending, when the ghosts of his victims return to drive him mad, leading into the end-battle, complete with spurting blood and severed limbs, when the psychopath samurai takes on pretty much the whole army. The choregraphy of all its fight scenes is graceful and melancholy and hypnotic.

Lifeforce: (1986. dir: Tobe Hooper) A mid-80s Golan & Globus B-epic based on the psycho-scifi novella the Space Vampires by Colin Wilson, it's certainly a failure, but an interesting one. Although Wilson is a phenomenologist whose works were crazily formative for me, his fiction has always tended towards the bullyingly misogynist, with an edge of cold viciousness which only those old-time intellectuals could muster. At its basis, this is a gender-reversed Dracula with a toe dipped into space-operatic Aliens territory, only these otherworldly predators suck your life-force away, rather than your blood. (You can see above how great the special effects are.) It's got bad dialogue, rampant fear of women, a whole covey of wonderful British actors (Peter Firth, Michael Gothard, Frank Finlay, Patrick Stewart), badly clunky editing, and not much direction at all, as far as I can see. These actors tend to travel from the po-faced and bored into hysterical convulsions while seeing very little of the spectrum in between. Really, it feels older than the 80s; it feels like it came from decades previous, which it rather did, since the source material was first published in 1976. Possibly because of the actors involved, it feels a bit like we're watching a lingering hangover from the Carnaby Street party. The end-battles, however, take place amidst a London that is burning, its denizens become maddened life-sucking zombies, and these scenes feel prescient, foretelling our own era of CGI-exact destructo-visions of the White House, Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower, ad nauseam.

Hysteria is the word for it: a masculine hysteria from the id, but too over-manipulated to ring true. The She-Vampire at the heart of the maleficience has pulled her flawless female beauty straight from the subconscious of the astronaut who found her, and so, as the image of his personal anima, must die with him in the naked embrace which Hollywood so loves. It feels like somebody read a lot of Jung, then spewed his own fear-fantasy out onto the page and tried to twist it around so that it sounded sort of official. (I'm not saying it's necessarily Wilson at fault; it's been a long time since I read the book. It might be screenwriters Dan O'Bannon of Alien genius and Don Jakoby of Arachnophobia renown, but let's lean towards Wilson until someone does the research.) Really, the misogyny is ludicrous: the main astronaut, attacking the woman currently embodying his anima, explains to the nearby official, "Despite appearances, this woman is an extreme masochist. She wants me to force the information from her. She wants me to hurt her." Oh, well, then, by all means, have at it.

lightweight fare

The Thomas Crown Affair: (1968. dir: Norman Jewison) Featherweight story counting on its surface charms to pull it through: its soundtrack ("Windmills of my Mind", a massive hit at the time), its "edgy" editing style (Hal Ashby goes crazy with the geometrical shapes), and the magnitude of the individual charismas of and purported chemistry between its two megastars (McQueen and Dunaway). The chemistry is lacking, they largely left the charismas at home, the story is absurd, the editing style distracting, and most pop songs sound dated after forty some-odd years. Mostly you watch McQueen's playboy distract himself (gliders, dune buggies, polo, Sotheby's, pouting girls with foreign accents, arranging multi-million-dollar bank heists) and then enter into a pretty dull and unconvincing relationship with Dunaway's insurance sleuth (plagued by a costumer who must have hated her. Check out the continuing parade of terrible hats) who's trying to bring him to justice. Even my boyfriend, a big McQueen fan who felt genuine jealousy over that glider, said, "That might have been the most uninteresting movie I've ever seen."

The Curious Dr. Humpp: (1969. dir: Emilio Vieyra) Had Ed Wood and Russ Meyer collaborated, in Argentina, on a remake of Eyes Without a Face, using a budget of about twenty-five bucks and a case of beer, the result might have looked something like this.

Easy A: (2010. dir: Will Gluck) Comedy daunts me. For every good one you find, you have to slog through another fifteen that either suck or offer at best one or two laughs.

But here, at last, we have it! A well-written, well-acted, well thought out, unified comedy! Never having been a John Hughes fan back in the day, imagine my amazement to find such joy and satisfaction in the old high-school-coming-of-age comedy-package. In addition to being inspired by the Scarlet Letter, that compact yet tedious novel through which we all had to slog in school, Easy A is a kind of tribute to all those high school movies from the '80s, but it's so much better than they were. First of all, Emma Stone is so relaxed, un-vain and with such perfect timing that she could carry to success a far lesser script than this one. Patricia Clarkson and Stanley Tucci (who must be married in real life, because it seems like they've made about a hundred movies together) are beyond perfect as her parents, and Penn Badgley (who?) is the exact fit to be that secret crush guy, the guy who's so cool that he's uncool, the one she'll end up with.

Also, as is so crucial in a high school comedy, the music is just about perfect.

Absolute thumbs up, with no reservations. It renews my faith in comedy, and not a moment too soon. I was about to give up.

the brilliant sami frey, a lawman with a past, and a bad hamlet

*SPOILER ALERT*

the Little Drummer Girl: (1984. dir: George Roy Hill) This is easily my favorite film from a le Carre story. The Oldman Tinker Tailor is a better film, almost perfect, in fact, but I love the Drummer Girl like you do a redheaded stepchild, the better for all its flaws. Most of the shortcomings lie within its time: the music (Dave Grusin), Diane Keaton's massive-shouldered, big-plasticked costumes and jewelry, not to mention her mullet, and the slow, schmaltzy scene transitions, all these things and more reek of the eighties. Keaton is miscast as a young theatre actress (too old, and with a truly appalling attempt at an English accent) but in the end carries a good role well enough to serve, with a few really wonderful scenes, including one when she tries and fails to go back to parlour-room comedy after living the life of a spy. As in the Deadly Affair, one of the best parts of this film is the glimpse it gives into English theatre, peopled by the likes of a young Bill Nighy.

I saw it in the cinema when it came out. It was the first I ever saw of Klaus Kinski, and, more importantly, Sami Frey, whose late-arriving double-role he performs with jaw-dropping skill and subtlety. If I were making a list of my favorite cinematic performances of all time, Frey would be on it for this.

the Law and Jake Wade: (1958. dir: John Sturges) It starts with a bang: a jailbreak for a cynically amusing sociopath played by Richard Widmark (an actor who lovingly drew up all the maps of cinematic Cynically Amusing Sociopath territory. My favorite line, drolly underplayed, after shooting two men: "Those guys sure picked the wrong time to walk in"), including an enigmatic relationship between him and his rescuer (Robert Taylor). The second unit long-shots are beautifully framed, but the rest of it descends quickly into that stagebound, pedestrian dialogue one has wearily come to expect from the TV-influenced Westerns of the fifties and early sixties. This movie sports all the symptoms of the spoilage: bad television writing in the middle, with one of the lesser characters given cheap dysfunctional familial motivations, little bonding between characters, and largely shot on soundstage in medium shot.

Only Widmark has any charisma, and the girl (Patricia Owens) is just annoying. DeForest Kelley plays one of the outlaw gang, and again I cite the general rule-of-thumb: if an oater's got an actor from Star Trek in it, it's probably not very good. I'm not saying one is a direct result of the other, just that you can usually count on a mysterious and synchronicitous correlation.

The hide-and-seek shootout in an old ghost-town at the end is nice, with no music or excess noise to distract. Here's the way to do it: watch the beginning and the end, and skip the hour and a half in between.

Royal Deceit: (1994. dir: Gabriel Axel) It's a Danish movie about the origins of the Hamlet story, which is a fine idea, except that it's done in English with British actors, and any time somebody takes one of Shakespeare's stories and rewrites it, let's face it, it's not going to be as good. What you get are actors like Helen Mirren and Christian Bale running around embodying Gertrude and her infamous son while NOT speaking Shakespeare, and the contrast is both jarring and disappointing. Also, it's badly directed (no doubt this poor fellow's first venture in directing in English, often a thing which leads to dismal failure), with poor timing, over-idealized scenery, and over-sentimental music, none of which helps.

This is one of the movies on Bale's road to stardom, but he's far better in Little Women from the same year.

the lords of salem: it's the women who matter

(2013. dir: Rob Zombie) This may be the first truly gynocentric horror film I've ever seen: most of the characters, and all the characters who matter, are women. Villains, ostensible hero, intended victims, all women. It's not spoken in the script, but you come away with a sense that within the vast, metaphysical reality of this film, it's the women who are fighting, hip-deep in the blood and muck and quagmire of the things that matter, life and death and the consequences of the war amongst angels in heaven, while the men live superficial, dancing existences in a sort of lightweight, parallel existence. There are male characters, and they feel true and three-dimensional, and they try to help, try to get involved, but ultimately their efforts glance shallowly off the sides of the true action and they can do nothing but helplessly observe. Even the original witch-killer who kicked the whole plot into whirring motion, you could argue he did very little. Yes, he burned a coven of witches, but here they still are, centuries later, while he is worm-food, long past. As one of the witches (there is also a strong sense that every woman in this film, whether she knows it or not, is a witch, and not in some sleazy, she's-a-spider-and-lured-me way, but a witch of immeasurable, untapped power) points out, destiny gives you some room to maneuver, but your fate was written in stone long before your lungs ever filled with breath.

This is the first horror film I've ever seen that never once uses female nakedness, which is plentiful here, for titillation. Nakedness is, rather, a stripping away of the false trappings of society, and a necessary state for the birthing and blooding and mudding and murdering that is involved in the metaphysical war which is their true work. Zombie gives aging actresses strong roles to play, women of an age at which you never hope to see them playing anything but powerless and dotty: Judy Geeson (10 Rillington Place), Dee Wallace (the Howling, Cujo), Patricia Quinn (Rocky Horror), Maria Conchita Alonso (Running Man) and, most notably, Meg Foster, who was all over American television in the '70s, with her astonishingly beautiful, strange-looking eyes. Now she looks amazing, a true crone, with a fantastic, otherworldly voice and as strong a presence as ever as the original coven's Master-Witch, Margaret Morgan.

Most obviously an offspring of Rosemary's Baby and Ringu, it reminded me several times of the Tenant, with its claustrophobia and the horrible sense that insanity is encroaching and there is not a thing you can do about it. It really ought to be seen in a cinema, in a bounded, inescapable, darkened room, so that its creeping atmosphere can close slowly around you. As I watched it in my living room, I felt guilty whenever I paused it to answer the phone or get something to drink, aware that I was cheating, not allowing the spell to weave its full course. Sit still, if you can, while you watch it.

some very short reviews

The Monk: (2011. dir Dominik Moll) Only Vincent Cassel could play this role. It's why they waited these two centuries to make the film(*). Only he has the intensity which can slide credibly from inspired holiness into depravity with the twitch of a few muscles.

This is a slow and lyrical translation of one of the original Gothic novels. It was the author's visit to Geneva and his reading from the book which inspired both Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein and her husband's circle of friends in their dark musings during what has come down to us as The Haunted Summer of 1816.

* Addendum: It turns out that Franco Nero played the role in 1972 in Greece and Paul McGann in England in 1990. Until this moment I never heard of either one, so I'll get back to you when I find them.

Kiss of the Damned: (2013. dir: Xan Cassavetes) Cassavetes is a director to watch. This one is so gorgeous, so stylish and smooth, so flawless both visually and aurally, that you almost forget it's wrapped around one of the most pedestrian scripts ever written about vampires, a genre not renowned for its erudition.

It owes a great deal to Daughters of Darkness, possibly a nod to Argento as well.

Sex, Lies and Death (Sexo, Mentiras y Muertos)(2011. dir: Ramiro Meneses) Strangers on a Train transported into some bizarro Latin soap opera world where all women are lesbians, and all lesbians are smokin' hot and dress like street hookers. A truly strange endeavour, but not particularly interesting beyond any titillation it might afford.

Avalanche Express: (1979. dir: Mark Robson) This was Robert Shaw's last movie, and what a stinker. It's badly shot, badly edited, and it uses ugly colors. The dubbing is horrible: this is Robert Shaw without Robert Shaw's voice, and it's mortifying. Partway in, I thought they were going to pull a Seagal/Russell Executive Decision on us, getting rid of the ostensible hero prematurely, but it was a fake-out. The movie would have been far more interesting had they done it.

In fact, the most interesting thing about it may be Joe Namath in a secondary role. Wrap your mind around that.

a classic study in misogyny, a failed noir, a ridley scott trainwreck

Carnal Knowledge: (1971. dir: Mike Nichols) At last I see it! Brilliantly shot, brilliantly edited, this is one of those early pieces of genius by the wunderkind, whip-smart team of Mike Nichols and Sam O'Steen. The subject matter is tough and controversial, but it's not misogynist; its study is misogyny, rather, and the psychology of misogyny among thinking men, a whole different ball of wax. M*A*S*H (the movie, from the same era) is far and away more woman-hating than this. This, in fact, has such fully human women in it (even Rita Moreno's prostitute, who has only one brief but very important scene) that the only hatred in it comes from the characters, not at all from the film-makers, which makes all the difference.

All my life I have suffered under a delusion that Candice Bergen was wooden and stilted in this, her tenth film but arguably her first important one, and I am delighted to find that completely unfounded. She is wonderfully vulnerable and true and unguarded while playing a stoical, thoughtful, slightly wooden co-ed. There's a unique and unparalleled scene in a bar where the camera stays firm on her face while Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel are making her laugh uncontrollably, a fabulous, extended shot which tells us more about why they both fall in love with her than any amount of exposition would. Her performance is overshadowed by Ann-Margret's Oscar-nominee as a woman cursed with extreme sex appeal and, of course, by Nicholson, because who could compete with him back then, back when he actually cared and worked hard?

The ending might feel a little like a cheat, but really I think that's just our surprise that the Nicholson character, who seems so fully alive, fights so successfully against becoming a fully-grown adult that in the end we are a little disappointed that he is, ultimately, shallow.

SPOILER ALERT

Blue Gardenia: (1953. dir: Fritz Lang) The more I see of the fifties, the more awful they seem. It was a good idea: a gynocentric noir about a nice girl who takes a date with a cad in a moment of weakness after her heart is broken by her absent soldier beau. She wakes up hungover amidst shattered glass to find the cad (Raymond Burr) has been murdered and everyone, including herself, assumes she is the killer.

It's familiar Lang territory, but the societal bindings within which women had to live in the American fifties were so constrictive that he is given no room to explore or move around when the protagonist is no longer male. Edward G Robinson can suffer romantic weakness over Joan Bennett (Woman in the Window, Scarlet Street) and we are fascinated to watch him flail in his trap because he has freedom to make choices, usually bad ones, even as the walls close in more tightly around him. Anne Baxter, restricted to good girl behavior, can only sit quietly, panic, and eventually lay herself meekly at the feet of the man (Richard Conte as the amoral and undeserving reporter who becomes fascinated with her) whom she trusts will save her. It's not very interesting, and it's not Baxter's fault.

Conte solves the mystery with a ridiculous piece of good fortune (the only clue is a record which was playing during the murder. He goes to the record store where it was bought, et voila! the murderess is the clerk), Baxter and Conte "fall in love" without any interesting dialogue or chemistry, and it's all a frustrating dozer except as a symptomatic study of the hideousness of that decade in this country.

Prometheus: (2011. dir: Ridley Scott) It's a general rule that any time you hear someone say, "The special effects were great!" about any movie, you can bank on it that the rest of it sucked. (This all-encompassing truth was revealed to me when the fourth Star Wars came out and that's all anyone could say about it. To this day I have not seen that lame piece of marketing, nor will I, despite having had some kind of spiritual awakening during the first one when I was thirteen.)

So, with that understanding between us, let me say that the special effects in Prometheus were great! If you disregard the fact that special effects should exist to enhance the telling of a story, and not to draw attention to themselves. Is somebody ashamed of their screenplay, perhaps?

It's loud and it's gross, as opposed to scary and real, which is what the first Alien movie was, remember that classic? Still scary, after all these years. And, much as I hate The-Director-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named, in its sequel, Aliens, the soldiers knew how to explore a cave, unlike these folks, who aren't really scientists and soldiers, they just play them on TV, and not very well. Charlize Theron (whom I adore) is largely wasted; Kate Dickie is completely so. Idris Elba manages to shine some in a secondary role as the rough and tumble captain, as, of course, does Fassbender, who is a god among men, and those two are easily the best things about the film. In fact, had they spent all their time following David the Robot (Fassbender), the movie might have been as interesting as the trailer they put out in advance of the film in which David introduces us to his world. Ah, the clarity of hindsight.

And, OK, why do you cast Guy Pearce and then bury him in old-age makeup, which always looks false, if you're never going to make him young again? This thing is packed with stars and up-and-comers, and it doesn't help. The shocks are gross-outs, not scares. Mostly you get a lot of pseudo-rape imagery alongside a metric ton of bodily fluids. The best part, easily, is in the beginning, when we're just hanging out with David.

It's Scott's fault. Over and over, he sacrifices the old-fashioned but still worthy pursuit of the Making of Sense to Grand Guignol. In some cinematic pursuits, that works. In this one, the word trainwreck comes to mind.

manassas, a sweaty courtroom, and an ancient, pissed-off shaman

Gods and Generals: (2003. dir: Ronald Maxwell) This is somebody's favorite movie, I'm sure of it, someone for whom the War Between the States is as real today as it was 150 years ago, and I respect that. Most of us, though, will find it overlong and a little tedious, employing too liberal a dosage of swelly music. It can be summarized as somber, earnest speechifying by very good actors, punctuated by protracted (and probably very accurate) battle re-enactments. You can find here all your favorite quotes by all your favorite Civil War heroes (Robert E Lee pausing long enough to say the thing about it being well that war is so terrible, or, my favorite, Stonewall Jackson's dying words about crossing over the river and resting beneath the shade of the trees.) Nobody can argue with the performances, though, and the over-serious, thoughtful and sentimental way of speaking, although strange to our ears, rings true for the time. This is Stonewall's story, mostly, and when Stephen Lang (an actor who never stops amazing me) takes off his hat and starts to pray aloud, it is as genuinely stirring as it is alien to our modern cynicisms.

Civil War enthusiasts will want to hang on every moment, but most of us benefit from keeping the fast-forward button close to hand. If you speed through the first five seconds of every scene, generally a long, establishing shot, a sweeping pan of the next battlefield or an extended view of a crowded parlor with a young lady playing piano, and then again some through the thicks of the battles, you can cut this epic back by a much-needed half-hour.

A Time To Kill: (1996. dir: Joel Schumacher) Self-righteous claptrap intertwined with sentimental hogwash, but every now and then they get a moment just right and it almost sends a shiver down your spine.

Much as I hate to admit it, this failure does not rest at Joel Schumacher's door (like all his myriad other failures): he did his part just right. It's old-fashioned in its presentation, old-fashioned in a good way, perfect for the story, which is courtroom melodrama in which the villains are heinous and the heroes are spotless. (Patrick McGoohan is a piece of perfection as the judge.) It's the script that's mostly the loser. With its repetition of charged emotional exchanges, it put me in mind of soap opera, like when they have to re-live the heated conversation they had last week for any viewers who missed last week's ep. The characters are shallow, and only a top-notch cast, clear down the line to the smallest supporting roles, gives it the leg-up to make it watchable.

Schumacher creates a world we can experience with all our senses: this is a South where you can feel the heat, smell the sweat, you can taste the sensuality between the leads. The colors are saturated so it feels like an old-time movie, and the editing goes right along with that, never drawing attention to itself. Seriously, though, Grisham (or whoever) should be ashamed of himself, writing soppy, melodramatic dialogue like this.

the Manitou: (1978. dir: William Girdler) Ah, the cheeseball horror films of the seventies. This has something in common with the Fury, the Car, the Brood (although none of the best things), and it wants to have something in common with the Exorcist, but you can't say that with a straight face. The thing it has most in common with, in fact, is the original Star Trek series. It has Michael Ansara (Kang from "Day of the Dove"), the big-assed lizard from "Arena", an overblown score by Lalo Schifrin that could easily have whumped up over the top of Captain Kirk overacting, and the same set-builder, as far as I can tell. When the "manitou" (a 400-year-old spirit of a powerful medicine man) is about to erupt (from the neck of a randomly-chosen woman) into the world, the whole floor of the hospital goes ice-cold, and it looks way more like Star Trek than the Exorcist, with all the cheap badness that suggests (ie: styrofoam icicles instead of seeing people's breaths).

This is about the epitome of an MST2K movie, and should be approached as such. I think Susan Strasberg got cast because of a strange facial anomaly: when she screams, it appears that her mouth is larger than the rest of her face. And that's as good a reason as any for a movie like this.

spring breakers: swinishness in neon pastels

(2013. dir: Harmony Korine) I know we're supposed to assume there's a metric ton of ironic humor here, but that doesn't mean you're going to laugh.

Questions of morality aside, can we all agree there's something creepy about a guy whose life-work involves surrounding himself with kids and convincing them to strip off and party for the camera? The Message of the Film seems to be that "Spring Break Forever, Bitches" is an ultimately unsatisfying motto by which to live. Korine uses it as a rough equivalent for (and therefore a condemnation of) the American Dream, but mostly he just wants to show us two hours of an unrated version of MTV's Spring Break. And it all feels (creepily) like just an excuse for him to exist at the epicenter of a big, naked party.

The movie starts out as a sort of girl-bonding thing, while the four chicas are getting pumped up to go to Florida, and terrorising diners in a local greasy spoon to get the money for it, but once Franco steps onboard, he hijacks the project. In a good way, I mean, because he's a good actor. The downside is that he's one of maybe two in the cast who can improvise effectively for longer than five words at a time, and the bulk of the film is improvised. The result is a lot of deadly dull dialogue, and Korine repeats this dialogue (his sound design is like a party dub remix, get it? It's Spring Break, y'all!) over the tops of subsequent scenes, sometimes several times and for no good reason, dialogue which was, and let me repeat this for emphasis, truly dull the first time around. Apparently some of these actresses were once innocent kid-actors: hence, irony. I didn't recognize them, so I don't know about that, but that's an outmoded trick. Remember Lisa Bonet? She was a Cosby kid until Angel Heart. Miley Cyrus, anyone? Justin Timberlake? Christina Aguilera? Most of the famous innocents veer wildly into the dark and dirty zone, because how else do you grow up? It's the only way to wash away the pong of the mawkish goo.

The important point is that unless you're particularly interested in youthful hedonism, or want to jack off, "Girls Gone Wild" can be simultaneously boring and depressing. He's got an interesting visual sense, Korine (albeit annoyingly pastel. I get it: we're in Florida. Flamingos and Margaritaville and Miami Vice. It's still annoying), and his ASS is downright SAVED by whoever is editing the thing (Douglas Crise. Good work, dude. Without you, nobody would have paid this movie any mind at all), but it's all built up out of endless, mindless set-pieces: "OK, everyone get in the pool and fire off your guns." "OK, everyone do coke off this naked chick's torso," or my actual favorite: "OK, all the girls get into your bikinis and pink ski masks, bring out your baddest-assed weaponry and gather around the piano by the pool, where Franco is going to sing a Britney Spears song." But, mostly, it's "OK, everyone jump up and down and holler and pour beer over each other as salaciously as possible. It'll be so fucking awesome."

By the film's end, all the girls have decided, --ridiculously, in two cases,-- that "being a good person is the most important thing, mom," and they all want to forget the trail of spent weaponry and dead bodies and go home to the old pink-curtained bedroom with the teddy bears on the bed. What?! It's got to be ironic, because it can't be anything else, but it just reads as a clumsy way to finish a film he didn't know how to finish.

To those of us who are long in the tooth, youthful hedonism feels slightly embarrassing, maybe indicative of a lack of imagination. It is of course possible that this perspective makes it impossible for me to relax into the spirit of the thing, but what I come away with is this: a story that is not interesting, pallid dialogue, a too-obvious message, unfunny humor, and unengaging characters.

That said, my co-worker and I have been having a good time today randomly punctuating conversations with a soft and sinuous, "Spraaang Breeaaak!" like the ones that Franco gives.

the human face when its mind is being changed

That's part of a quote from David Thomson, a fellow with whom I have issues, but not on this matter: he says it is the best special effect in all of cinema, the human face. If you look hard at your favorite film moments, you'll find that most of them pull their vitality from the expression on a human face as it reacts to something. The moment when Indiana Jones pulls the gun on the guy with the swirling sword would be nothing at all if it weren't for the look he gives afterward, the look and the shake of the head. In the Sixth Sense, there's Bruce Willis when the ring rolls away from his wife's hand. Cary Grant when he sees the portrait in an Affair to Remember. Maybe even Luke Skywalker while he loses a hand but gains a father.

One of my favorite sequences in cinema (although the film is strange, with extremes of high and low) is in Jonathan Glazer's Birth, when Nicole Kidman's character is sitting at the ... what? it's either the opera, the symphony, or a ballet. I think it's the symphony. Anyway, the camera is unmoving, trained on her face as she sits in the audience watching this highfalutin' performance whilst inwardly suffering terrible emotional upheavals. And Glazer lets us watch her wonderful face during this emotional earthquake for over a minute. It's a magnificent thing.

Kidman, in fact, is one of my favorites in this respect. I can think off-hand of at least two moments in other films in which an unspoken emotion just barely grazes her face, so quickly that no other character sees it, but it communicates an emotional tonnage to us. In To Die For (a truly great film which would have lodged Gus Van Sant among the best directors of his day even if he had never followed it up with anything else), there is a scene in which her ambitious weather-girl is looking to make contacts at a conference, and a sleazy, pompous elder in the field (George Segal, perfectly cast) convinces her that sleeping with him is her best way forward. The dark disgust on her face, mingled with a sort of fierce compliance, is stunningly good. (But Kidman is stunning all the way through this movie. She really already had a firm hand on her craft, even at that early stage.) More recently, in the less successful the Paperboy she has a similar moment: she has been putting all her energy into stoking up a long-distance sexual fire with John Cusack's behind-bars sociopath. Once he's released and storms into her house and locks her roommate outside, the shadow which passes across her face as she realizes the good part, the fantasy part, is over and now there is only the devil to be paid his due, is another perfect moment.

So here are a few of my favorites, moments when a subtle emotion crossing a well-trained face inspires subterranean tremors across the breadth of a film.

Christopher Walken in Skylark: The barn is burning down and everything they own with it, this in the midst of a terrible drought. He is stoical, his wife is crying on his shoulder, there is nothing left to do but watch it burn. We see the flames reflected in his eyes and on the skin of his face. He allows himself a single moment of emotion, a slight twitch of the head and momentary glance to the side, communicating rebellion against the unfeeling gods who could allow the catastrophe, yet simultaneously a sense that he would expect such from life.

Michael Fassbender at the end of Shame: There are marvellous bookends to the film, scenes on the tube. In the first, he is flirting wordlessly with a married woman. He tries, with a strange ferocity, to follow her off the train but loses her in the crowd. The mirror-scene at the end is on the same train, he is spent and exhausted and shattered after all he has been through, and there is the same married woman, unchanged, ready to flirt some more. The look on Fassbender's face is one of the most stunning things I've ever seen on film.

Christian Bale in Flowers of War: He was fine in this, it was a fine movie, with the perhaps inevitable flaws. (It's such a dark episode in history, the treatment of women during the Japanese occupation of China, it must be nigh on impossible to avoid plunging into melodrama and sentimentalizing, and it does, it does plunge.) Bale does a creditable job during his drunken antics and with the more toned-down heroics, but his one really shining moment comes unexpectedly: the courtesans come to him to say that two of their party have escaped back to the cathouse to fetch supplies (guitar strings and earrings). Bale's character is in love with the chief courtesan, but his moments of courage are few and far between, and death is rampant outside the gates. He takes a conflicted moment before he says, "And you want me to go find them?", and in that moment his face reflects a shifting series of thought and emotion which I think is unique to him and a wonderful conveyance of truth; I think no other actor would have chosen it, and it is utterly perfect.

Bale in 3:10 to Yuma: I still haven't seen the Fighter. It's not that I doubt its worth, and it's not that I think I'll find Bale undeserving of his Oscar; it's that I dislike Oscar's tendency to be seduced by histrionics instead of subtleties. Me, I'd have given Oscar to Bale for this old Western. There's one scene in particular, when he's readying to go on a dangerous mission, arguing with his wife as he does, speaking in hushed tones so the rest of the posse in the parlor will not hear his humiliation that she no longer respects him as a man. It's heart-rending, and only one of many moments of subtlety that are, I suspect, more impressive than all the blood and thunder of Dickie Eklund.

Walken in 7 Psychopaths: You could pick any of thirty or forty movies, really, and I could probably find a superlative Walken moment. This one's got the scene at the hospital. The Walken psychopath knows that the Woody Harrelson psychopath has just brutally killed his wife, and is looking for him. He sits down opposite the killer in the hospital waiting room, and stares at him until the Harrelson psychopath starts to make awkward conversation. Watch Walken's face, through this entire exchange. The changes that happen in his eyes. He is a god walking around among men.