Prisoners

A misconception I often see made about movies is that their worth is based upon their ability to be enjoyed. I respectfully disagree. A movie's worth is based upon its ability to make you feel something. Prisoners is not an enjoyable film. It's bleak, uncomfortable and uncompromising. You're not supposed to enjoy it. It intends to make you feel the way a parent does when faced with the reality that their child has been abducted: lost, helpless and filled with directionless rage, and it does this very well in every department but the narrative. It's smart, but it's so busy jumping between smart topics that it fails to resonate with any of them. Prisoners is hands-down the most expertly crafted episode of Law and Order I've ever seen. It was a wild ride, but I'll have forgotten all about it by next week.

Prisoners questions what a person will do to reclaim someone that they love. In the first fifteen minutes, the young daughters of two Pennsylvanian families disappear. The prime suspect is the mentally-disabled, RV-driving Alex (Paul Dano), but Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal) is unable to compound any evidence on him and is forced to let him go, at the behest of Keller (Hugh Jackman), the father of one of the girls, who begs him to keep Alex in lock-up for one more day. When the judicial system fails him, and with his statistical knowledge of mortality rates when it comes to child abductions, he takes the law into his own hands by kidnapping and torturing Alex for the location of his daughter. As the days creep on, neither Keller nor Loki get any closer to the girls, and we the audience watch a small, rural American neighbourhood eat itself alive in defeated grief. Feel-good romp of the summer, folks!

God's pretty important to everyone in Prisoners. When there's a cross hanging from almost every rear view mirror, with Loki going so far as to have one tattooed into his hand, you know you're dealing with a town that's pretty good at keeping the faith. You'd think then that these would be some pretty decent, good-hearted people that believe in universal love and forgiveness, right? Well, it seems almost everyone in this town is just using God as a way of shirking responsibility. The film opens with Keller reciting the Our Father before teaching his son how to shoot game. Fair enough, he's apologising for the death he is about to cause but acknowledges its necessity so his family may eat. But later in the film, he has Alex boxed up in a shower. He's rigged the hot water system so there's only two temperatures: freezing and scalding. He drops to his knees and starts reciting the Our Father again, but stops when he has to forgive those trespassing against him. His blind belief aside, he doesn't actually know whether Alex abducted the girls, or whether he even knows where they are. The responsibility for Alex's well-being lies upon his head at this moment, but that's too heavy a burden for Keller. So he quickly scores some absolution so he doesn't have to feel bad about it. Later in the film, when the serial abductor is finally revealed, she claims her multiple crimes to be a Holy War against God for allowing her son to die of cancer. In making children disappear, she forces parents to become faithless to get back at the deity that took her child from her because grieving was too difficult. No-one in this town is willing to accept responsibility for anything, and for most of them it's because there's a book that tells them they don't have to. 

As well as religion and responsibility, Prisoners deals with a third theme: futility. As soon as it began, I felt trapped. I felt claustrophobic and helpless, like a rat stuck in a maze constructed without an exit. How appropriate then that the serial abductor's MO is placing children into a pit with a book of mazes, allowing them to leave once they've completed all of them - an achievable feat if it weren't for the last one being unsolvable. Huge praise to cinematographer Roger Deakins for creating a visual feast that made me feel utterly devoid of hope. Claustrophobia exudes from every frame: it was filmed in an aspect ratio lower than most films today, the Pennsylvania location is a bunch of close-together, similar-looking houses surrounded by dense forest and many camera angles consist of either extreme close-ups, shots angled upwards from a hole or external shots of people in boxes, be they offices, bedrooms or basements. It works thematically, too. Revisiting the opening scene, as soon as it begins you know that the deer is dead. You're just left waiting for the deer to be aware of it. That bleeds into the rest of the film. You know, without a doubt, this cannot end well for anyone. Keller may get his daughter back, but he's going to have to answer to his own abduction of Alex. The girls may be found, but there will be long-lasting psychological impacts to the horrors they were subjected to. Keller sums it up best when he says, "Pray for the best. Prepare for the worst." You spend the film holding onto hope that there's a happy ending on the horizon, but deep down you know that's just a childish belief and you've already reserved yourself into defeat. 

Ultimately though, Prisoners jumps so erratically between these different ideas that I was left wondering what the point of it all was. Is America's reliance on God ultimately a crutch? Are we doomed to self-destruction until we can stand up and accept responsibility for our own actions? Is the downfall of society a township's widespread misinterpretation of the "How To Not Be A Cunt" handbook? The answer's probably all three, but its frustrating for a film so strung up on criminilasing irresponsible people to cower in the corner when questioned and say, "Not my problem." You can tell this screenplay desperately wants to be told it's clever, and it is, but it hasn't yet graduated from the school of crime show writing, and it's here that my problem with crime shows becomes apparent. When you're only given 40 minutes to hop into the mind of a criminal, you don't have time to do any more than scratch the psychological surface before it's time to make way for next week's serial masturbator. Prisoners has 150 minutes, and it still doesn't get there. When you give serious thought to the criminal and their motive, it makes the film seem kind of...goofy, not to mention some of the gargantuan plot holes. But at the end of the day, we come back to my opening paragraph. A film's worth is measured on its ability to make you feel something. Prisoners succeeds in that, with all of its flaws. It can go home, head held high, knowing that Criminal Minds only wishes it was this good.

Gravity

Talk with me about movies and eventually the subject of 3D and my total disdain for it will surface. A lot of people said they felt the same way until they saw Martin Scorsese's Hugo. I wouldn't know; I saw it in 2D on DVD and didn't feel like I'd missed out on anything. As far as I could tell, the movie was brilliant without it. There's no denying the technology is impressive, however, and maybe if I'd seen Hugo at the movies I'd be singing its three-dimensional praises like I'm about to do for this movie. It seems what we're seeing now is the end of the Star Trek: The Motion Picture era and the beginning of the Wrath of Khan era. The tech demo is over. Now the artists can start playing with it, and next up to bat is Alfonso Cuaron with Gravity. I'm going to get something out of the way really quick: I loved Gravity. Bear that in mind as I say two things I never thought I would about a film that I loved:
1. You will only ever watch it once.
2. You will have wasted that one chance if you don't see it in 3D on an IMAX screen.

One of Gravity's greatest strengths is its simplicity. It's hard to be this simple, to strip away all temptations of deeper character complexities so that the audience may immediately empathise and identify with them. It's very important that the audience has this connection straight away in Gravity, because when Sandra Bullock's Ryan is cartwheeling through infinite space, we're supposed to be in that suit with her, wondering how the fuck we're going to survive this. Ryan is an impossibly rigid professional rookie on her first space walk who focuses unnecessarily on her job because she's haunted by the death of her daughter. George Clooney's Kowalski is an impossibly charming seasoned veteran on his last space walk who's never gotten over the view of Earth and likes listening to country music in his helmet. Ground Control is an impossibly warm and familiar voice on a routine space walk played by Ed Harris, the same Ground Control voice in Apollo 13 and The Right Stuff. We know people with these personalities, some of us may even be these people, and it's through that familiarity that we immediately impress ourselves upon them. You'll never stop and say, "They'd never do that" because the characters have zero complexity; they're driven completely by the compulsion to survive, which is exactly how you'd like to think you'd be.

On top of survival, Gravity deals with themes of rebirth. The death of Ryan's child resulted in a type of death for her as well. She confides in Kowalski that when she's on ground, at night she drives endlessly and listens to any radio station she can tune in to, so as to tune out her grief. She swallows herself in work so that she never has the ability to acknowledge mortality. Put simply, she's dead on the inside. And it's only when she's faced with the very real possibility of her own death that she realises her (and our) desire to survive. And so when the satellite is beset upon by the field of space debris ten minutes into the film, Ryan overcomes her emotional death by being born again. The evidence is everywhere: Kowalski somehow colliding with her after she tumbles way out into space, the way a single sperm in a few hundred million finds the egg, Ryan floating in anti-gravity and curling into the fetal position as she boards the ISS, finally back in the womb, even her going through labour as the landing pod hurtles down towards Earth, bringing her once again into the brave, new world. But perhaps the greatest example comes at the film's conclusion, when Ryan emerges from the pod, into water. She reaches land and, overwhelmed by the gravitational pull, can't even push herself up. She literally learns to crawl again, before she can walk.

So now that all of the pretentious theming discussion is concluded, we can start talking about the heeps sik graphix. Gravity could have been set anywhere. Alfonso Cuaron made a fucking genius decision to put it in space. When you're dealing with that much negative space (pun always intended), any foreground element is going to seem like it's coming out at you. When you pair that with what technology is capable of today, you're finally achieving those "GOSH! WOW!" moments you saw in those old, cheesy 3D movie ads. I'm unashamed to say during a scene where debris was rapidly colliding with objects and flying towards the camera, I flinched. A lot. But where Alfonso Cuaron truly excels with this is that he doesn't let the 3D just be a gimmick. It becomes an essential component to the emotional connection we have with the film. When Kowalski sacrifices himself, realising he and Ryan are going to float away into space if he doesn't release the tether holding the two of them together, he slowly recedes into the distance, forever a stark white spot on a black canvas. He's there. He's just right there, and it never feels like if we didn't just reach out a little further that we couldn't save him. But we can't, and neither can Ryan, and the visual effect makes it hurt that much more. Another brilliant example comes later, when Ryan has finally made radio contact with someone only to find they're unable to understand English. Language barriers are broken however, when Ryan hears the cries of a baby and the barking of a dog. Together, they bark and howl as Ryan resigns herself to death and allows the oxygen to be drained out of the pod. She begins to cry, and her tears collect into a single sphere that lifts off her face and into the foreground, taking the camera's focus and frosting up in front of us. I'm crying as I type this; it was a stunningly beautiful little moment achieved only by 3D.

Gravity reminded me a lot of Jaws. Apart from one direct reference, at its core I see them as very similar films for this reason: they're both about human beings struggling to survive an environment that is simultaneously familiar and alien. Most of Jaws takes place on the ocean. We're surrounded by it, it's very much a part of our existence, but we're completely out of our element in it. We're slower and unable to breathe in it. On the ocean, we're the inferior species to the shark. We desperately want to think we can survive the ocean though, and when we do, we feel like we've been born again, like our existence has been validated. In Gravity, the shark is replaced by the debris field. Completely unbiased and unforgiving, it hurtles around and around the Earth's circumference, wreaking havoc on whatever falls in its path every time it comes around again, just like the shark. But we're human. We're out of our element, but we're human. This life has meaning. We can get through anything. We're strong. We're survivors. We're The Goddamn Batman. Right? The credits for Gravity started rolling. I exhaled deeply and leaned forward. As I did, I realised that my hands were adhered to the arm rests, my back was sweating and the only thought running through my head was, "I made it." That's a pretty good endorsement of this film. It was an exhilarating, unbelievably tense, life-affirming examination of human survival that I will never watch again.

P.S. I couldn't find a place for it, but an all-too-brief heaping of praise has to be given to the sound design. The trailers would have you believe Gravity was going to ignore the audial restrictions of space, but that is not so. Space is silent, and we only hear environmental sounds through the vibrations that would be heard inside of the character's suits. As a result, drama is intensified through the soundtrack, an incredible ongoing instrumental score that occasionally sweeps into an overbearing cacophony as the film calls for it. Truly, it has to be heard to be believed. 

Kick-Ass 2

Kick-Ass wasn't too bad. I'm referring to the film and the comic. Both took an honest and darkly funny look at the logistics of a superhero in our reality, and both did a pretty good job of it. They diverged paths a bit - the film injected a little bit of Hollywood heart where the comic was content to keep everything dark and ugly, but that just comes down to your personal preference. The problem both had though was that they stretched the reality of the situation just a bit too far. I bought it, but at the back of my head I couldn't shake the nagging feeling that the whole thing was coming dangerously close to imploding on itself. Because superheroes can't exist. A guy doing shit like this would be dead in a day - something the movie states itself. So how can the stakes possibly be raised for Kick-Ass 2? Well, they can't really. But the movie tries, and therein lies the problem: it tries to be more realistic, it tries to be more sensational, it tries to be more serious and it tries to be more funny. And it succeeds at none of them. A scene where a teenage trained killer is brought to her knees by high-school bullying is followed by a scene where she gets revenge by making a chick projectile shit across a cafeteria floor. Get me the fuck out of here.

Where Kick-Ass asked the question, "What would happen if superheroes really existed?", Kick-Ass 2 follows that up with, "What about a supervillain?" McLovin, still upset about his dad being launched out of a high-rise by a rocket launcher, desperately wants to destroy Kick-Ass and everything that he loves, but unfortunately lacks the physical strength and attention span to take care of that himself. So he uses his enormous wealth to amass a team of professional psychotics and serial killers from around the world to do it for him. Meanwhile, at the Hall of the Super Best Friends, the events of the first film have inspired a city to put on lycra and be idiots too, and Kick-Ass finds himself involved with a team of superheroes, featuring among them an ex-mafia goon, two parents hoping their exposure can get them some information on their missing son and Kick-Ass's best friend. Yep, these nice guys are going to go up against some of the world's most well-trained, cold-blooded killers. MEANWHILE, AT THE...SOMEWHERE ELSE, following the death of her father, Hit Girl has promised her new adoptive dad that she's done with her butterfly-knife twirling ways and she's going to be a normal teenager. An easy enough task, if it weren't for the fact that one high-school girl contains more venom and evil than any entire mob organisation. Hit Girl quickly finds herself way out of her depth, and unable to shake the feeling that she's just running from the person she really is. Somehow these three separate, bloated and unfocused storylines blindly stumble into one another for the film's climax and I then got to go home.

I'm going to be one of those people that roll their eyes, take a big self-important pause and say, "The book was so much better." Here's the thing, though: I didn't really like the comic, either. But they both try to accomplish the same thing, and the comic did a much better job of it. Because basically, what's the realistic representation of a supervillain? Evil. Pure evil. The comic takes that idea and flies off with it into the stratosphere, jumping headfirst into incredibly dark waters with a manic grin. The movie takes that idea and dips its toes in before deciding it's too cold, diving headfirst into the much more comfortable spa instead. Let's run a quick checklist. In the movie, Fogell robs a shop owner because he wants to go viral with the security footage. In the comic, he murders him. In the movie, when his team kill a hero, one of them asks whether she should also kill the dog locked up in a cage, to which Fogell replies, "Jesus Christ, I'm not that evil!" In the comic, he shoots the dog because it's the only living thing in the room he has any power over, and its head is fixed to the hero's body. In the movie, the supervillain team murder a bunch of police while Fogell beats and attempts to rape Kick-Ass's girlfriend, failing to because he can't get an erection (funny stuff!). In the comic, he asks for directions from a group of children before gunning them down, shoots everyone he sees on the streets, kills Katie's parents and rapes Katie, while his team massacre more people in the neighborhood and all police that appear. I'm not saying it's good. I'm saying it delivers the message effectively. If the filmmakers were afraid to go this far, they shouldn't have even started down the path.

The other big problem Kick-Ass 2 has is that it suffers the reality implosion I was talking about earlier. The comic does too, but as I've already established, it knew that from the beginning and adopted a totally different tone to compensate. The film tries to have its cake and eat it too. I found myself wondering the entire movie why McLovin didn't just get one of or all of his supervillains to find Kick-Ass and shoot him in the head. Or why, when the final battle did come about, his supervillains didn't just gun down the melee-wielding heroes. I didn't have these problems with the comic, because it threw reality out the door from the first panel, allowing sensational, disgustingly sick evil to reign in its stead. The film still desperately clings to reality, and thinks the turn of events can remain the same in the process. Another example comes about two thirds of the way through the film. Kick-Ass's dad claims to be Kick-Ass so his son doesn't get arrested. McLovin finds out his identity and has his dad beaten and hanged in his jail cell, sending a picture of the murder to his phone. Kick-Ass breaks down - he can't even find the words to tell his friend what he's looking at - and drops to his knees, sobbing. Within ten minutes of that, he's dressed in his super-suit along with all of his super buddies fighting Fogell and all of his super buddies, cracking jokes and throwing punches with all of the confidence in the world. There's no consequences to anything in this film, it's just a set of schizoprhenic moments. Within ten minutes he forgets all about the brutal, cold-blooded murder of his father because the movie doesn't know what it wants you to feel. So feel everything, but do it quickly!

I'm not completely negative about this flick, though. At it's core, I did enjoy it, with all of its flaws. I really appreciated Hit-Girl's narrative arc; it was a genius idea having a trained killer face the unfathomable horrors of high school. There's an amazing scene that follows her being victim to a brutal prank, one that leaves her, for all of her mental and physical strength, crying helplessly at the foot of Kick-Ass's bed. He embraces her and tells her how in awe of her resolve he always is. The person I saw the flick with leaned over to me and said, "Ah fuck, I hope they don't kiss." I replied, "They won't. Their relationship is stronger than that." Because it is. They need each other on a much deeper level than a Hollywood romance. They are both, in different ways, a father to each other. And then the movie ends with them kissing. Goddamnit. My favourite part of Kick-Ass 2 was the cheesy family photo of Nic Cage that hangs in Hit-Girl's gym. He struck the perfect balance of reality and sensationalism the first movie went for - he was a loving father trying to raise his daughter the best way he saw how: teaching her how to slaughter criminals. It's an approach the filmmakers could have either doubled down on for the sequel, or thrown right out the door. They could have had heart shine through the darkness, or good engulfed by evil in its purest, most maniacal form. Instead they tried to have both, got neither and lost everything. But nobody will notice if there's a diarrhea joke, right? Right?

Now You See Me

About 90 seconds into Now You See Me, I leaned over to the person I was watching it with and said, "I hate this already." No, hear me out. Jesse Eisenberg was playing Jesse Eisenberg, standing in the middle of the street performing a card trick to a large group of people. His ability to talk like a tommy-gun translates well to playing a magician, as a large part of a magic act is being able to charm the audience so as to control them. As the cameraman refuses to sit still, swooping and ducking and weaving like an amped-up four year old, Jesse Eisenberg tells a pretty girl to pick a card. He spreads the deck out and asks the pretty girl if she can see her card. She cannot. "That's because you're looking too closely. And what have I been telling you all night? The closer you look..." Right on cue, the crowd shouts back, "THE LESS YOU SEE!" as the camera swoops up into the air and the lights on a skyscraper reveal the 7 of hearts or whatever the fuck it was. The crowd goes nuts. Jesse Eisenberg sneers and pimps away. Was it even her card? Doesn't matter. Was I not supposed to think this was a very basic magic trick in which he had already gotten an electrician to set the reveal up and just used suggestive gestures to get the pretty girl thinking of the 7 of hearts? Doesn't matter. As far as the movie was concerned, in 90 seconds it had just shattered my brain. It's a dangerous line you walk when you think you're smarter than your audience. It's even more dangerous when you're a fucking moron.

Now You See Me has actors playing characters, but their character's names are just a necessary formality. This movie is about Jesse Eisenberg, Isla Fisher, Woody Harrelson and Mini James Franco, four people who work in magic brought together by an unknown magic mastermind who gives them the tools to perform a trick in which they stand in Las Vegas and rob a bank in Paris. Money rains down on the crowd, the camera swoops across financial benefactor Michael Caine and The Four Horsemen's stupid smug faces and I guess I'm supposed to be mesmerised. Enter Mark Ruffalo and Melanie Laurent, two clashing-head cops brought together to solve the whodunit and fall in love. They enlist the help of Morgan Freeman, a cynic who makes a living ruining magic on television, but darn it all, he just can't crack how these kids keep stealing shit. It's almost as if it's...magic? Or he's just as fucking stupid as everyone else in this movie.

One of the most effective tools a magician has is reality. The amazing thing about actually bearing witness to a magic trick is that you know it can't be real, because magic isn't real, and yet you can't deny you just saw the magician who's been in the tank of water for the last three minutes spit out the exact same card the dude in the audience signed and gave to other magician. You're left in total awe, wondering how they did it, because your mind is unable to resolve what just happened. Do you want to know how they did it in Now You See Me? IT'S A FUCKING MOVIE. The first big trick The Four Horsemen perform is the aforementioned bank heist. What I didn't mention was that they sent a man through space and time to the vault in Paris. So much of the scene is devoted to him hopping in the gigantic device they have on stage, strapping on the cheapest, goofiest looking piece of headgear I've seen in a big budget production and vanishing when the device compresses and closes on him. It's insult to injury when the CGI is so painfully obvious. It's even worse when Morgan Freeman says "Oh no no no, they didn't really transport him. It was an illusion!" No. Fucking. Shit.

The difference between Ocean's Eleven and Ocean's Twelve was that in Ocean's Eleven, you were in on the joke. You got to bomb along with The Super Rich Friends Club as they tricked and stole from Not So Rich Andy Garcia, laughing at how silly and poor he was. In Ocean's Twelve, The Super Rich Friends Club was laughing at you. The whole movie was an experiment in how much the audience can be told "Look at how much smarter than you I am", as if for some cosmic reason, that's why people go to the movies. I don't know about you, but I go to the movies to be given a few obvious puzzle pieces concealed well enough that when I put them together I feel clever. I don't go to the movies to be told, "We were going to steal this, but then we decided not to, but then this guy said he was going to, so we decided we were going to again, and then we stole it by making him think we stole it when we actually didn't, but while he was thinking that we didn't steal it, we stole it. Except we didn't. You dickhead." Can you guess which of the two I think Now You See Me is? Towards the end of the film, The Four Horseman start pulling off increasingly-escalating feats that are supposed to seem almost superhuman, and during the film's climax, everything they did is explained with smug dialogue and swooping camera angles. I'd have been piecing together my blown-apart mind if I hadn't long before been saying things like, "Well, that was a mirror" and "Yeah, they used a body-double like they did in that earlier trick" and "I get it. I fucking get it. If I say you're super duper smart, will you just end and leave me alone?"

The only characters in Now You See Me I felt anything other than blind hatred for were Mark Ruffalo and Melanie Laurent. Ruffalo spends almost the entire movie becoming increasingly infuriated with the self-indulgent, elitist fuckheads he's surrounded by, that can't do anything other than say how much smarter than him they are. He's almost driven to violence more than once, and even begins doubting Melanie Laurent's loyalties, when she's the only other person in this smarmy universe that isn't an asshole. Honestly, the biggest mystery in this film is how he managed his self-control long enough to not just shoot Jesse Eisenberg in the face and say, "THERE. NO MORE MAGIC. PROBLEM SOLVED. FUCK OFF." I genuinely felt for him. At least, I did, until it's revealed in the last five minutes that he was the unknown magic mastermind who brought The Four Horsemen together so that he could get revenge on Morgan Freeman for driving his father to magic-induced suicide after he debunked one of his best tricks. ...What? Congratulations, Now You See Me, you finally got me. Though it wasn't because it was a twist I should have been able to see coming but didn't, or because all of the pieces were there in front of me, so I got a double whammy of being blown away by the revelation and feeling smart because I could then see exactly how it came to be. No, it was because it was a twist that made absolutely no fucking sense at all. It turns out Mark Ruffalo's an uppity cunt like the rest of them. I don't know, if you like sitting down and having a dumb person tell you how dumb you are for two hours, then Now You See Me will rock your world. Me, I'm going to go watch some Penn & Teller.

The Conjuring

There's a scene in the original Saw where one of the characters is snapped out of sleep by a strange noise. He fumbles at the light switch for a while before realising the power is out. As it always is, the batteries in his torch are dead and so the only source of illumination he has available to him is the split-second flash he gets when he takes a photo with his camera. He navigates through his pitch-black apartment, jumping at every disfigured, household object that emerges from the dark before he hears a noise come from the closet. He slowly moves the door, until it's wide open. Whatever is in there has been staring at him, unmoving and unknown, for a good ten seconds before he clicks the shutter button. The light goes off and we catch a second's glimpse at the monster before it screams and runs at him. In a film much more focused on being a well-written, smart murder thriller, it's a terrifyingly effective horror scene, and one that would happily sit in a Top 10 Scariest Movie Moments, should I ever create one. Since then, James Wan has gone on to make quite a few horror flicks. He made Dead Silence, a longer and slightly more mature episode of Goosebumps. He made Insidious, a love letter to the fun-loving spookiness of Poltergeist. And he's now made The Conjuring, a love letter to the holy fuck shit-your-pants terror of Poltergeist.

One of my favourite things about The Conjuring is that there are no cynics. There's no token asshole who exists just to sneer and say "There's no such thing as ghosts, doofus!" so the story can justify why they don't just say "Yeah, alright" when the ghost tells them to fuck off. The tormented family of The Conjuring can't bail, because their finances are tied to the house. They didn't know about the series of murders before their arrival because Rhode Island state law prohibits realtors from releasing that information. But more importantly, when the calm, level-headed man of the house sees and hears genuine terror from his daughter, he gets the Ghostbusters in whip-fucking-smart. And it's those Ghostbusters that this movie's actually about. Did you know that back in the 70s there were two rock-star demonologists named the Warrens, one of whom was the only Vatican-certified exorcist to not be ordained, who checked out the Amityville house? Yeah, me neither. This flick is loosely based on their real experiences with a family tormented by a scraggy old dead woman and her prankster dead son. It's a genius move that I'm surprised to have not seen in more horror movies: if we come to know and care for the superheroes and they start to get scared, what does that say about the evil they're up against?

I fucking love horror. It's one of, if not my favourite genres of film and as such, it's also the genre I'm most snobbish about. Paranormal Activity (hear me out) didn't scare me when the ghost accidentally ran into a wall and decided to make the sound resonate so it would seem intentional. Paranormal Activity did scare the shit out of me when the female protagonist was ripped out of her bed and dragged down the hallway screaming and clawing at the floor, trying to escape the unseen entity. Of course, fear is 100% subjective, and I'm totally aware that some people find the Mr. Magoo Ghost really very spooky, and that's fine, but for me, it's not scary, but startling. Real horror isn't switching the lights off when I'm walking down a hallway, jumping in front of my face and shouting "FUCKIN' BOO WAAARRGHHH." Real horror is presenting me with an image so astonishing, so terrifying, so...horrific even, that I can't jump at it, because I'm frozen in fear. Those are the images that get under my skin and prevent me from sleeping. And The Conjuring got me fucking good a few times. I'm not going to spoil the fun, but there's a scene involving a game of hide and seek and another involving laundry that gave me chills and have been burned into my brain. The smartest thing Wan does here is employ the best trick in the horror book - sometimes, something is scarier the less you see of it - and takes it one step further: sometimes, something is scarier when you don't see it at all. Many scenes employ a beautiful level of restraint and silence, so that rather than keep you jumping and filled with anxiety, it may keep you frozen and filled with dread. Take note: this is what makes a horror movie memorable.

Next to the scares, the two most integral elements to a horror flick are characters and camera. In Halloween, the relationship Laurie shares with her friends feels real, not overblown and full of stereotypes, which makes it all the more tense and harrowing when these likable people start falling prey to Michael Myers. In The Conjuring, there's no suburban drama bubbling under the surface of paradise or suppressed familial hatred that jeopardises their safety in a time of peril. This is a large family that loves each other very much, being protected by a husband and wife that exude warmth and affection, and it's these attributes that makes the scary things happening to them all the more scary. As for the cinematography, holy shit. You can ask the person I saw this with: I squealed when a long zoom tracking shot was used. John R. Leonetti deserves a massive cuddle for shooting a film that understands the power and potential for terror that grace and stillness can provide. Just like Insidious too, his eye for framing is unbelievable as well, lending as much weight to the film's most terrifying shots as the monsters themselves. Clapping hands will make you shit yourself. 

So, in case it's not yet apparent, I really, really dug The Conjuring. There's a few things I haven't yet praised it for, such as its balls to the wall awesome soundtrack (The Zombies and Ryan Gosling's music project Dead Man's Bones? FUCK!), its almost total lack of CGI (read my Evil Dead review if you haven't yet for a rundown on my love for practical effects), its location (somehow, the location scouts found a spooky as hell old American home, with a twisted up dead tree and a black lake out back), and its loving nods to Poltergeist (including the TV static and two goofy characters that show up to help the exorcists), but ultimately, that's just sprinkles on the ice cream. All up, it's a beautiful, restrained, scary-as-all fuck tribute to the great horror films of the 70s and 80s, and in a world where a studio will make millions from Paranormal Activity 18: Loud Noises and...I Don't Know, Fuck You, it's nice to see they can make just as much from a real movie. Thank fuck for James Wan.

The World's End

A quick disclaimer: I usually don't bother with spoiler warnings, but this is a movie that kept some of it's bigger secrets hidden away, and I'm going to talk about all of them. If you don't want the magic spoiled, wait until you see The World's End before giving this a read. Hell, I'd prefer it if you did.

One of the biggest problems people will have with The World's End is that it's not Shaun of the Dead or Hot Fuzz. And they'll be right. The World's End is not Shaun of the Dead or Hot Fuzz. But let's be honest: Hot Fuzz was not Shaun of the Dead. And Shaun of the Dead was not Spaced. It's been 14 years since Spaced, 9 years since Shaun of the Dead and 6 years since Hot Fuzz. Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost are much older than they were when they started The Blood and Ice Cream Trilogy. How could they possibly catch lightning in a bottle again? It's easy: they couldn't. They're not who they once were, so they made a movie about not being who they once were. If Spaced, Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz are about getting older, then The World's End is about being old. Oh, and body-snatching robot aliens.

The World's End opens with Simon Pegg's Gary King cheerily recounting the greatest night of alcoholism he and his four friends shared; a twelve-stop pub crawl when they were beautiful teenagers with the world at their fingertips. "I thought that life couldn't get any better than this. And you know what? It never did," King proudly states, as it's revealed he's regaling this story to an addiction support group. Not the brightest way to start a film. Gary decides it's time to get the band back together and give the "Golden Mile" another crack. The problem is, while he's stayed rooted in the free-wheeling, devil may care attitude of his youth, all of his friends have come to terms with the dangerous consequences such a life carries and have moved on to promotions, families and fitness instructors. This won't stop Gary, who's less concerned with seeing his old friends again and more concerned with indulging his alcoholism in company that allows retention of his arrested development. Their triumphant return to their hometown of Newton Haven isn't quite the loving welcome Gary was hoping for. Nobody seems to recognise him, all of the pubs have been swallowed by corporate franchising and the youth look upon his attitude and demeanour with total apathy. "Perhaps we're not the local legends you thought we were," says Nick Frost's Andy. It seems that way until Gary accidentally decapitates a teenager in the toilets, popping his head off like a Ken doll and shooting a blue, inky substance all over the toilet walls. It turns out that most of the town's citizens have been replaced with replica robots, in some sort of intergalactic merger designed to eradicate humanity's uglier traits. Does this revelation give Gary King the wakeup call he needs to realise the selfish, self-destructive path he's dragging his friends down and force him to call off the 'Golden Mile' so that they may focus on getting out of town alive? Not even a little bit.

Now, I can talk about how this film is funny. Because it is very, very funny. But I was just as affected by and would rather discuss the equally as prevalent serious side The World's End presents. Because I like a comedy that can make me cry; good humour has to come from relatable experiences, and life is never just the laughs. Gary King comes very close to being an irredeemable dick. He lies about his mum's death to convince Andy to join the drunken reunion, he hastily changes the subject when the conversation strays from drinking and when everything goes to shit, his top priority is finishing the 'Golden Mile'. It starts out funny, if a little bit pathetic, but as the movie continues, it starts to become much darker. Why is Gary so intent on finishing this arbitrary, adolescent activity? We are watching a man who is so unbelievably desperate to recapture the false former glory of his youth that even an alien invasion doesn't sway him from that determination. Andy sees this from the start ("We're not your friends, we're your fucking enablers"), and it's his relationship with Gary that is the most emotionally complex and rewarding in this film (as it always is with Pegg and Frost). Something's clearly been driven between them, more so than the others, and about two thirds of the way through, we find out that sixteen years ago, Gary had a drug overdose and Andy, four times over the limit, totalled his car trying to drive him to the hospital. Gary woke up and took off into the night, leaving Andy to nearly die. He doesn't drink anymore, against Gary's oblivious behest, and when he realises Gary was lying about his mum, he's almost overcome with hate. But when Gary takes off to finish the mile when a clear exit out of the city is in their reach, it's Andy who resigns to the fact that he has to follow after his best friend. Because he knows this man, he loves him, and he can see where he's going. And where it's going to end. When Gary eventually reaches the final pub, a pint has already been poured for him. He's about to take his final first sip when Andy smacks the glass out of his hand. They begin to fight, and all of their demons come spewing out. "YOU'VE GOT YOUR PERFECT LIFE," Gary screams. "THIS IS ALL I HAVE LEFT." Andy reveals that he doesn't; his wife left him, and he's trying to get her back, but he knows he won't win. It's not enough for Gary, who tries to have that last drink again. Andy throws him back, Gary's sleeves come down and we see the bandages wrapped around his forearms. He wasn't in a rehab clinic at the beginning of the film; he was in a hospital. "It was never as good as that night," he says, tears in his eyes. "You don't have to do this," Andy implores. "Yeah," Gary says, hand on the lever, glass at the ready. "I do."

Previously in the film, Rosamund Pike's Sam says, "Not everything's about that night, Gary." "Isn't it?" he replies. What does it take for someone as blindingly self-destructive as Gary to change his lifestyle? It's simple: the end of the world. When he pulls the aforementioned lever, he and Andy are lowered into a cold, metallic chamber. A big, bright light appears and, with the smooth, sultry tones of Bill Nighy, it explains that what they've become privy to this evening is the result of nearly a decade of intergalactic espionage; a merging operation to get Earth on track socially with the rest of the galaxy. Advances in telecommunications are their biggest present to us: making us more robotic and disconnected from each other, but hey, at least we're not pissing in the streets anymore! What follows is an unbelievably hilarious and razor sharp argument between the "big lamp", Gary, Andy and Paddy Considine's Steven, in which the drunken fucks point out all of the flaws inherent with this grand scheme: none so much as the fact that everyone in the town bar three people resisted and have since been replaced with robots. The three guys drunkenly berate the luminescent alien ("Why don't you hop in your rocket and fuck off back to Legoland, you cunt"), until it can't stand any more. "Just what is it that you want?" it politely asks. Beautifully quoting Primal Scream's Loaded, Gary says "We wanna be free. We wanna be free to do what we wanna do. And we wanna get loaded. And we wanna have a good time. And that's what we're gonna do." The alien relents. "Yeah. Fuck it," it says as it switches the lights off. Unfortunately, in switching off, it also releases a massive EMP explosion that sets the world back to the Dark Ages. They are literally left to their own devices. Their individual fates are covered in a very brief epilogue, but what happened to Gary? With young robot versions of his four friends, he roams the wasteland looking for water (not alcohol) and slaying robot racists. I'll admit, this threw me a little. At first, I wasn't sure if this hurt or helped support everything the movie had said about Gary preceding it. But then, I came to this conclusion: a man like Gary King can never change who he is fundamentally. When he's willing to attempt suicide because he doesn't understand the concept of growing up, that's a tough shell to break out of. But if there were two things he did well, even if it only applied to a few years of his life, it was being a leader and being a rebel. He rebelled against growing up, he rebelled against life, he rebelled against an all-powerful spacial entity and now he's rebelling against the new world the apocalypse has wrought: one that doesn't accept robots. And there's a whole mess of those robots looking for some leadership.

Early on in The World's End, Eddie Marsan's Pete encounters the bully who made his life a living hell when he was a child. Their exchange? He asks Pete if he can use a vacant stool. "The worst part is he didn't even recognise me. It's like all of that torture meant nothing," Peter says. Of course, the real reason he didn't recognise him is because he was a robot, and later on, when Peter's had much, much more to drink and gets lost in the forest, the bully appears again, and offers a hand, to apologise for his actions when they were younger. When Gary, Andy and Steven catch up, Peter is savagely beating him into the ground. "Come on mate, it's not worth it!" they implore. "YES, IT FUCKING IS," Peter roars back at them, tears streaming down his face as he throws the last punch and breaks open his head. It's a brutal, gut-wrenching scene that gave me chills and made me cry. And then it made me laugh, uproariously, when in the following shot Pete is running at the robot with a large tree branch in a fantastic throwback to a Fawlty Towers episode. And to me, there's no better summary of The World's End than that. Edgar Wright and Co. have created an utterly beautiful commentary on adulthood, friendship and addiction that somehow also manages to socially satirise the human race in the most affectionate way possible and bring an end to their genre-drenched legacy. As repetitive as I know I'm beginning to sound, it made me laugh just as much as it made me cry, but I think the reason I keep saying that is because I'm struggling to find the words to say just how much these movies mean to me. The list of what I truly treasure in this world isn't very long, but The Blood and Ice Cream Trilogy is most certainly on there. They are a fucking triumph of modern film-making, and the day I get to show them to my children will be as monumental to me as the day my father took a fourteen-year-old me to see Shaun of the Dead.

The Wolverine

I hate Hugh Jackman. I hate that he doesn't think he's better than me, but is in almost every way. I hate that he can sing, that he can dance, that he can be the first man in Hollywood to offer Jennifer Lawrence a hand up when she falls at the Oscars, that he can strap a pair of balls to his chin for a shit movie and everyone forgives him because he's such a nice hunk. Oh, and I hate that he can play one of the best comic book characters to exist like a fucking champion to the point where he can be in a movie for all of five seconds and it's hailed as the best part, that he can get away with a "Well, at least he was in it, heh heh. That's our Hugh!" when his first standalone movie is such a goddamn travesty, and that it doesn't stop him from getting another. I hate Hugh Jackman. I hate that I love him so much. And I hate that The Wolverine comes so fucking close to delivering the movie he deserves to play that character in. 'So fucking close' doesn't always win the race, and The Wolverine trips up in it's final act and falls flat on it's face, letting First Class, X-2 and X-Men jog briskly past it. But hey, at least it beats The Last Stand, which is still on the ground at the starting line, running circles around it's head shouting, "Woopwoopwoopwoopwoop!"

The Wolverine kicks off an indeterminate amount of time after The Last Stand. Yeah, they're pretending that still happened. Logan's not dealing with killing the woman he loved that well. He's off in the American wilderness somewhere, sharing a patch of forest and a strained relationship with a bear. He regularly dreams about laying in bed with Jean, who acts as both sympathiser and tormentor, sometimes in the same conversation. His clear and obvious need to "just fucking get over her" manifests itself when an old and dying friend from Japan named Yashida sends an errand girl to see if he'll come over to say hooroo. Upon arrival, Yashida reveals he's worked out a way to remove Logan's powers and impress them on himself, effectively curing his nuclear radiation poisoning and allowing Logan the thing he wants more than anything else: to die. "You don't want what I have, bub," Wolverine grunts, and goes to bed ready to head home the next day. That night, he's infected with a parasite that wraps around his heart and prevents his body from healing, a fact he doesn't discover until he's shot five times the next day. And so begins a tale of murder, corporate espionage, the yakuza and a gigantic adamantium mecha-samurai that teams up with a bald snake lady who spits on people. One of these things is not like the other.

The first two thirds of this movie were surprisingly good. Even really good every now and then. The film's opening blew me away: a chilling and brutally effective recreation of the bombing of Nagasaki that sets up Wolverine's friendship with Yashida. Another highlight was a point later in the film where Yashida's granddaughter, Mariko, lies in bed with Logan. She tells him about her grandfather's bedtime story: the story of the Wolverine. A magical protector unable to be killed, he watches over her family and keeps them safe. And it's within those two scenes that we find the film's biggest strength: in a larger X-Men film, Wolverine is just the coolest of the cool. In this film, he is alone. He is legend. Which is something that carries all the more weight when he's suddenly made mortal. Now he's just a man with six swords against the Yakuza. This leads to some incredible action set-pieces, such as the exhilarating bullet train roof sequence, in which Logan and a Yakuza member desperately try and slash at each other while also trying to avoid low-hanging signs and such by dislodging their blades and jumping into the air. Hands-down though, the best example of this comes at the end of the film's second act. Logan works out that the reason he's been protecting Mariko from the Yakuza is because her father, Shingen, ordered the hit so as to prevent Mariko from becoming the heir of her grandfather's company as stipulated in his will. After performing surgery on himself to remove the parasite sucking on his heart and dying for a little bit while his regenerative powers kick back in, he awakes just in time to catch the down-swinging blade of Shingen; drunk, insane, decked out in samurai gear Shingen (don't ask why). What follows is an unbelievable sword fight: Shingen furiously slashing at Wolverine, who either blocks or allows himself to be cut, because fuck it. At one point, Shingen sticks the blade through his chest and out the other side. Wolverine twists his body to snap the sword, flexes and pushes the blade out. Shingen is finished. Wolverine looks like he's about to gut the fucker. He pauses. "You tried to have your own daughter killed," he growls. "Live with that." Ten out of fucking ten. He walks away from the man defeated. Unable to live with that, he runs screaming at Logan, sword held high. Logan turns at the right moment and sticks his claws through Shingen's throat. I could have cheered. Movie over, right?

Sadly, movie not over. Some executive must have gotten cold feet over the idea of an X-Men movie with only one mutant and demanded that someone, anyone, get chucked in to give Logan a supernatural run for his money. So they scraped the bottom of the barrel and pulled out Viper. When I said earlier "a bald snake lady that spits on people", that wasn't hyperbole. That's literally her role in this film. She spits on people, they get pimples and die, and later she's dead until she hisses and sheds her skin, losing her hair in the process. Her other ability? She's immune to all poisons. A formidable opponent, if at any point during the movie she was ever in danger of being poisoned. Oh, and there's the mecha-samurai, too, existing only to keep Wolverine in mortal danger with its adamantium blades and to fuck the story. It turns out it's not a robot, but the previously thought dead Yashida in disguise. Seems he was a bit miffed that Wolverine wasn't willing to give up his gift, so he figured the best course of action was to spend an exuberant amount of money to create a gigantic robot that's only real use was hacking his claws off with the sword and sucking out his bone marrow with a drill. Spared no expense! It's not enough for this to just be a weak ending though, it has to go and ruin all of the good stuff preceding it. Wolverine saved this guy's life in Nagasaki, and he was so in awe of this ronin that he offered his sword to him and made him legend. Until the possibility of everlasting life and power came along. Poor Yukio having the scummiest fucking family ever. But it's not just the impact on the story that makes this last act so bad; it's the fact that it's so unbelievably out of place. Wolverine spends most of the movie mortal, risking his life fighting humans wielding swords and guns to protect Yukio, before regaining his powers to take down the most dangerous of them all. And then a robot. It's like finishing No Country for Old Men with a game of Super Smash Bros.

Ultimately though, the worst thing is that the stuff I liked about The Wolverine wasn't even that great. It was just good. Adequate. Competent. This is what gets me excited about summer movies these days. The best I can hope for is something that just ticks the boxes. It's not unrelentingly violent and schizophrenic for the sake of being dark and edgy, it's not racially insensitive for the sake of moral protection, it's not bad for the sake of being like the bad thing it's referencing. It's just...there. And then it fails to even do that. A perfectly good movie ruined by the fear that Wolverine can't just fight humans. That he can't just be an interesting character we can relate to; someone unable to ever receive rest from his demons. Someone whose abilities are such an unbelievable burden that he wishes weren't his, because of the subsequent unquestionable obligation to use them to protect people. People he'll inevitably have to watch die. No, you can have a bit of that, but then he's got to punch the bald snake lady before she spits on everyone! I don't know, maybe I just expect too much of movies. Then again, fuck that. I'll do what I want, bub.

So I've got a little something different prepared for you blessed few today: a second opinion from both the most good looking dude I know and perhaps the only person who reads further into films than I do: my good friend Jeremiah Smith! He was keen to put his own two cents in and has done a bang up job tearing this flick to shreds. If you dig his style, let me know and I'll try and get him in on more in the future!

The Wolverine and I go way back. From the awesome 90’s animated series, to a stack of comics, and eventually the live action X-Men films. So, I'd like to think that I have a pretty good idea of what Logan's deal is. But after the release of the The Wolverine, apparently I was totally wrong, and the Hollywood people know better (yeah, its gonna be like that). Being marketed as 'the Wolverine movie the fans have been waiting for', I can't help but feel a little bit abandoned. The Wolverine doesn't cut it.

The film starts strong, with an opening flashback sequence that reminds me a bunch of the opening sequence of the original X-Men movie (both of them WWII related). And like the first film, I'm getting hints of a truer version of Logan's disposition (and he hasn't even murdered anyone yet). We're off to a good start, keep it up and we have a Wolverine movie. 
A dream sequence follows, and in some clumsy dialogue with the ghost of Jean Grey, Logan expresses he made a vow to never hurt anyone again. Awesome, a chance to build some tension and to push Logan to his limits - hints of the Old Man Logan comic. I'm still invested. Hobo Logan wakes up and wanders the Canadian wilderness. He encounters some ignorant assholes and they hurt a bear. This would usually mean trouble for these D-bags, but Logan made a vow. He's gonna have to handle this in a different way, or walk awa- oh wait, the claws are out. "Sorry Jean" is expressed without any semblance of remorse. We're losing Logan and I'm losing faith. We're about 12 minutes into the movie.

A Japanese girl walks in with a katana. She says things and scenes change. She and the Wolverine are now in Japan. Exposition; pay attention, you need to know the dude practicing sword fighting can sword fight. The only way this could be lazier writing is if there was a voiceover, or onscreen titles that pop up. Logan reconnects with an old Japanese dude Yashida, and they have a pretty interesting conversation. Mortality, atonement, honour: these themes are on the table now. I'm reminded of a deleted scene from X-Men, in which Logan is letting Rogue know she's not alone by telling her he can't show her the scars from all the times he's tried to kill himself. He wants out, now more than ever with Jean haunting him. I'm listening again. But Logan says no. Um, what? A chance at a normal lifespan, to age, to love without fear of outliving his partner, to atone for all the carcasses in his wake. At the very least a chance for some tension in the film. I realise what I'm watching. I'm checking out mentally.

The Wolverine is a huge tease. Those themes I mentioned earlier? It doesn't matter if you don't remember, because they don't re-enter the film. We get bullet train fights and Yakuza hit-men and corporate BS instead. We get a jacked-up version of Walter Matthau (Grumpy Old Logan) and a giant robot samurai and plot holes and a bald snake lady. And ninjas. I'm sure it looked good on paper (literally, it is a comic). It’s the most frustrating thing about this movie: you know they know better because they laid it all out for us, and then pissed it away for some shallow bastardisation of a much-loved character. See, Logan is, in essence, a tragic character. He will outlive everyone he gets close to. The dude is quietly grieving 24/7, so don't disturb him or he'll get pissed. Innate to this dude is sadness, not rage. Enough with the rage. But that's all the studios want from Hugh Jackman, it seems. And I have much love for Hugh; he's pretty solid (anyone that saw The Fountain would agree), but a couple of thousand-mile stares and a sad face every now and then would help the audience believe that Logan is carrying the weight of 200 years plus of shitty living. He did it in X-Men awesomely. But they want the raging beast, and so do some fans, which is fine. But don't put a badass in an M rated film. The guy with claws in a samurai movie doesn't cut off a single limb (or lose any). Blade is laughing at him.

 
The Wolverine movie I was hoping for was a more traditional samurai film, something patient and deliberate and a character study of a genuinely interesting and tragic character. Instead, this film is the tragedy. With the studios taking a 'risk' by ditching the X-Men moniker, The Wolverine had the potential to reboot the character in a standalone film, and to totally blow the audience away. I wanted something that respected the audience as well as the character and some well-placed action to break it up. It had the potential to be the Skyfall of comic book movies. The 12 year olds that love this stuff - they have their Wolverine movie. Who are we kidding - they have four of them.

There is a scene in The Wolverine where we see Logan shaving himself with a razor. He has claws, I can't imagine Logan ever using a razor, let alone shaving that regularly. They got him all wrong. I haven't seen Logan since X-Men, and I need him to return before this character gets any staler. They're beating a dead Wolverine and he’s refusing to die. But they have to pump these out before Hugh gets too old to convince us he's not ageing.
 
Notably bad dialogue:

Logan: Don't hurt my friends!

Some Japanese dude: What...are…you?
Logan: I'm the WOLVERINE!

Logan: Go fuck yourself, pretty boy.