At one point in Murder by Numbers, the latest uninspired thriller from director Barbet Schroeder, a character says, “I enjoy taking indefensible positions and creating an argument for them.” I’m glad I don’t have a similar penchant, because writing a favourable review of this film would be very difficult indeed.
Technology and horror have always gone hand in hand. Every invention or advance inevitably causes an initial tremor of apprehension to ripple through society like a shudder, and one of the best ways to gauge the severity of that tremor is by the way filmmakers react to it. In the 1950s, when it was clear that the atomic age had arrived, “big bug” pictures like Them! started appearing. With the dawn of the space age came movies about hostile alien invaders, sometimes brought back by our own rockets. More recently, a new subgenre has started to emerge: call it the media-age horror film. In the best of these films (like David Cronenberg’s Videodrome and John Carpenter’s They Live), the most seemingly mundane media technology—from TV and videocassettes to print and billboard ads—is used to both conceal and propagate the most sinister schemes imaginable. The worst of these films generally prove that it’s as hard to make horror from the Internet as it is to make money from it. In The Ring, a media-age horror film if ever there was one, the humble VHS tape becomes a Pandora’s Box of apocalyptic horror. Unimpressively directed by onetime TV-commercial maker Gore Verbinski, the film succeeds thanks to a great premise and the strength of what Verbinski’s cinematic influences contribute to it.
If someone besides David Fincher had directed it, Panic Room would have been neither suspenseful nor surprising. That’s because there’s nothing suspenseful or surprising in the film itself. The suspense comes from wondering what the notoriously audacious Fincher will do to shock us out of our complacency; the surprise is that he never takes us outside the confines of the thoroughly conventional.
The film stars Jodie Foster as Meg Altman, a recent divorcee who moves to a huge New York brownstone with her young daughter, Sarah (boyish Kristen Stewart). Thanks to the wealthy previous tenant’s paranoid tendencies, the place is equipped with a state-of-the-art “panic room,” an impenetrable metal stronghold complete with video surveillance, intercom, and a separate phone line. But wouldn’t you know it, others are aware of the apartment’s vacancy, and they want the part of the previous occupant’s fortune reputedly stashed in the panic room. On Meg and Sarah’s first night alone in their new home, three would-be thieves come calling, leading to a standoff that pits the women’s scrappy intelligence against the men’s greedy determination.
There’s something odd that happens to me whenever I find myself at the mercy of a good suspense director: I can’t help smiling. It happens when I watch early Spielberg movies like Duel and Jaws, and it’s worse when I catch a Hitchcock film; by the end of Psycho, I’m grinning as grotesquely as Norman Bates himself. I’m not sure if it’s the result of critical distance meeting the unabashed pleasure that comes from dangling on the suspense hook, but whatever the case, I caught myself doing it several times during Signs, the latest supernatural thriller from Sixth Sense suspense-meister M. Night Shyamalan. While the woman beside me cringed and covered her eyes in delighted apprehension, I was sitting there with a goofy grin, revelling in Shyamalan’s particular genius for making people do exactly what she was doing.
Ever since the Cold War ended, international espionage thrillers have been noticeably lacking in Russian bad guys (or “evildoers”, in Dubya’s parlance). This power vacuum has clearly left Hollywood filmmakers in a bind—Arab terrorists apparently aren’t suave and sophisticated enough to provide a suitable nemesis for a lantern-jawed American superspy, and the Chinese are still a few years away from becoming the next Communist superpower. Happily, the people behind The Bourne Identity have come up with an ingenious solution: take one of Robert Ludlum’s Cold War-vintage bestsellers, throw out everything but the title and a smattering of premise, et voila! Someone at the studio even thought to make Ludlum an executive producer, no doubt to prevent him from taking out a full-page ad in Variety decrying the hack job. Not that Ludlum would do such a thing; he’s been dead for over a year. I guess being a big-budget filmmaker is like being a counter-spy for the CIA—you can’t be too careful.
See this movie, and you’ll believe a man can catch a fly! Okay, so it doesn’t have the same appeal as Superman‘s famous tagline, but maybe that’s the way it should be. After all, since his first appearance in the comics (in Amazing Fantasy #15, way back in 1962), Spidey has been an oddball, an outsider, a teenager struggling not only with the standard problems of his age group, but also with the fact that super-powered archvillains like the Green Goblin, Doctor Octopus and the Lizard were constantly lining up to take another shot at killing him. The only thing he had in common with the godlike Superman was a dorky alter ego with an alliterative name. But that’s always been part of his phenomenal popularity. Here was a super-hero kids could relate to: a bright, immensely likable guy with amazing powers—who still had to put up with his asshole boss at work, and still had to watch the jock get the girls at school.
Those who lost sleep puzzling over Christopher Nolan’s last film might want to stock up on tranquillizers. Like last year’s brain-scrambling Memento, Insomnia finds the director playing knowingly with the conventions of film noir. But where Memento was a deliberate and brilliantly structured nod to the plot complications and red herrings of classic detective fiction, Insomnia gives us what can best be described as daylight noir. Deft, clever, stylish and atmospheric, it isn’t just another summer thriller; it’s the work of a director who combines the raw talent of his generation with the old-world craftsmanship of film noir masters like John Huston and Alfred Hitchcock.
The film stars Al Pacino as Will Dormer, an L.A. detective who is sent with his partner Hap Eckhart (Martin Donovan) to a remote Alaskan town to solve the beating death of a 17-year-old girl. The locals are skeptical, except for young and eager Ellie Burr (Hilary Swank), a new officer who has studied Dormer’s most famous case. Unfortunately, Dormer’s impressive track record has also brought him under the scrutiny of Internal Affairs, which threatens to derail his career and set a lot of scumbags free.
There’s been a lot of debate and controversy about human cloning, so George Lucas’s timing couldn’t have been better. With his second installment of the Star Wars series—or fifth, depending on how you look at it—Lucas has settled the issue once and for all. If Attack of the Clones is any indication, we can expect our clones to be incredibly beautiful but kind of dumb, energetic but ultimately empty.
Few directors in the history of film have had so much influence based on so little output as the French pioneer Jean Vigo. Born in 1905 to militant anarchist parents, Vigo lost his father early in life and spent much of his youth in hospitals and boarding schools. After attending the Sorbonne, he began work in the growing film industry and eventually bought a camera of his own. This led to his first two projects, the short films À propos de Nice (1930) and Taris, champion de natation (1931). In both films, Vigo imprinted an innovative and original style on ordinary subject matter. In 1933, he wrote and directed Zéro de Conduite, a scathing semi-memoir about a revolt at a French boarding school. The film was banned in France, and Vigo was accused of being “anti-French.” A year later, he completed his first feature-length film, but the Gaumont studio recut it without his advice or consent. Jean Vigo died just two weeks later, at the age of 29.
When Bram Stoker wrote Dracula back in 1897, he turned the age-old vampire myth into something sexually repressed Victorians could really sink their teeth into—an irresistible, sexually dangerous, darkly romantic seducer whom women couldn’t help but invite into their bedrooms after dark. Bela Lugosi may have created the indelible screen image of the Count in the 1930s, but as Bauhaus have famously observed, Bela Lugosi’s dead. Since then, it seems like every era has gotten the vampires it deserved. In the sexually licentious ’70s, Udo Kier’s pallid, beleaguered Count in Blood for Dracula couldn’t find a pure-blooded virgin anywhere; by the time The Lost Boys hit the screen in 1987, the bloodsuckers looked like members of a hair band, and the fearless vampire killers were the Two Coreys. Now, in the age of boy bands and coquettish pop virgins, we have Queen of the Damned, a vampire movie in which the vampires are so defanged, they’re as sexually dangerous as Justin Timberlake and Britney.