John Carpenter has made some impressive films. Halloween (1978) is simply a flawless chiller, still remembered and emulated. I’ve already reviewed The Thing (1982), which is both suspenseful and has an alien that’s truly alien — a rarity for film and TV, which generally prefers putting a bumpy forehead on an actor. Starman (1984) is a warm-hearted and inventive science-fiction film, and Big Trouble in Little China (1986) an unpredictable, tremendously fun popcorn action film, provided you don’t want it to meet many expectations — it’s a bit of a unique mix.

That last film took a beating from critics who declined to get caught up in the fun. It did fairly poorly at the box office, and reportedly resulted in Carpenter deciding he’d no longer make films for Hollywood studios.  They Live (1988) takes a somewhat bitter but pointed stab at the money-hungry, suggesting that the greedy capitalists out to put profit ahead of the planet are in fact heartless aliens in disguise, and you can find them out simply by looking around with specially treated sunglasses. The main character puts a monkey wrench in the works but is shot in the process and lies back to relish giving the aliens the finger as he dies. The film would be heavy-handed, but it manages to be a lot of fun along the way.

In the Mouth of Madness suffers from taking itself a little too seriously, by contrast, as well as not deciding what it wants to be about. Sam Neill plays John Trent, an insurance fraud investigator hired by a publisher to find out what happened to Sutter Kane, an immensely popular horror author — he disappeared and so did his latest manuscript. It’s an intriguing beginning. And there’s no need to spell out the comparison to Stephen King, though unfortunately one character does. A flashback to Trent making a man squirm because of a fraudulent claim has little connection to anything, and feels oddly situated in the film. There’s one (that’s one, folks) effective scene, as Trent drives to the obscure New England town where he might find Cane — we see a young man on a bicycle ahead in the middle of the road, but at first can only make out the flash of the headlights on his reflectors. The car passes the man, and Carpenter captures the second that the man and car are next to each other, the boy looking over with a strange, disconnected expression before fading into the darkness and glow of the tail-lights.

Not long after this, the madness presented begins to have only one form: seeing everyone as a demon, from police officers to charming little old ladies.  A demon with an axe (they’re oh-so fond of the axes) runs out into the street to stop, look at Trent and say “Fuck you!” It’s hard to imagine who wrote that and then sat back to say excellent, good dialogue. Trent finds Cane (sort-of) as the madness and chaos increase, and it’s either that Cane has written a new manuscript that drives people mad, or Cane now writes the entire world through the sheer force of fandom and popular belief, or demons have possessed Cane and are using him as a doorway, or… something. Maybe the demons just wanted access to this dimension for all the axes lying around. Trent tries to drive out of town but suddenly finds himself driving back into town, and we’re treated to this about four times. There are a few lines of pseudo-intellectual dialogue, such as the suggestion that if many more people were mad, sane people would be in the minority. Well, yes — sure. Finally, in the last few moments the film seems to throw out everything done up to that point, in favour of something that maybe kind of supports one theory, but could also be a whole new one.

In a way, it’s a film loaded with ideas, but given the jerky nature of the narrative, it feels like the film simply can’t decide which one it wants to pursue. In subtler moments there’s a lot of potential, but it’s thrown away in favour of someone trying to get through a doorway with an axe, or something meant to be similarly alarming. And a flashback to something more than Trent making another man squirm might have helped me care about the character. I really don’t think I’m declining to be caught up in the fun, as some critics have done with Carpenter (and by fun I mean suspense, the development of an idea), it’s more that there simply isn’t that much fun in this particular runaround.

John Carpenter’s The Thing was inspired by both a film and a novella: as a youth he saw The Thing from Another World (1951), a film inspired by Who Goes There, a science fiction novella by John W. Campbell. In telling the story of an isolated outpost in Antarctica that discovers a buried alien organism, the 1951 film opted for a guy in a suit as the monster, and it’s perhaps fair to say they had no other options available at that time. Carpenter apparently loved the film, but wanted to return to the original idea about a shape-changing organism that, given time, could imitate any living creature through a hideous process of absorption — and even the smallest particle of it could strike out. If the organism were to succeed in getting away from the outpost to infect a city, the rest of the world would follow from there. Needless to say, this heightens the tension considerably, compared to a tall guy in a suit lumbering around smashing things.  

Beginning with a heartbeat-imitation score by Ennio Morricone, the 1982 film is an excellent production: tightly written, with good performances from both the supporting cast, and lead actor Kurt Russell. Years before CGI effects, the wildly imaginative stuff invented for the film scared the living daylights out of me as a child, and remains etched in my brain. Time has dated the film a little, in terms of how shocking it is, and it’s fair to say the film puts little or no time aside for characterisation, but a solid supporting cast helps immensely here, and insures a certain level of believability. Quite simply, audiences had never seen anything like it in 1982, and it remains a solid and chilling suspense film. The imaginative and shocking effects may have threatened to become the centrepiece of the film decades ago, but today viewers are more likely to notice other details, like the careful shots set up by Carpenter that imply someone else might be watching the character on display.

The Canadian film Pontypool may have arrived decades later, and after dozens of films have made it increasingly difficult to shock audiences, but it neatly sidesteps the entire issue — what’s wildly original here isn’t the effects, but the ideas behind this psychologically gripping film. And again, solid performances give the whole thing a credibility it would not otherwise have. Tony Burgess adapted his original and hugely enjoyable novel Pontypool Changes Everything into a screenplay for director Bruce McDonald, who handles it in a skillful, understated way. At a radio station in Pontypool, Ontario, DJ Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie), his producer Sydney (Lisa Houle) and assistant Laurel (Georgina Reilly) begin getting conflicted, increasingly strange and horrific reports about local disturbances.

There’s enough left to the imagination here that it could be theatre, or radio drama, but as a film it also works remarkably well. I don’t want to give away the original and utterly creepy directions the film eventually goes, but I’ll say that it’s another epidemic film, and though it’s something of a zombie film, it doesn’t even really need the z-word. Highly recommended, but avoid online reviews that gleefully give away far too much. I only hope more Canadian films will be produced that make budget nearly irrelevant, in favour of  highly original scripts.

Watch a teaser clip here.

An underrated comedy-drama, Nicholas Cage stars as a Chicago weatherman who does his best to predict unpredictable weather, even as he tries to deal with the odd and unexpected emotional currents in his own life, and those close to him. Michael Caine plays his award-winning writer father who knows President Carter, and appears to have lived a flawless and stoic life, for the most part. Living up to that isn’t easy, particularly when your marriage has fallen apart, and people will chuck a taco at you on the street for getting the weather wrong. Both Cage and Caine are excellent, in subtle and understated performances — it could have been a disaster if they’d gone over the top, but reigned in, they’re both believable and likeable people. As David Spritz, Nicholas Cage manages to relate that he has a good heart, even as he’s capable of being self-centered and petulant from time to time. As if to demonstrate the kind of negative karma his remarkably easy yet frustrating job generates (he reads the weather, without actually doing the work to predict it), the film flashes to a disatisfied middle-aged couple saying things like “What kind of name is Spritz,” and “I don’t like his face.” As much as this can be taken as an example of our tendency to make self-satisfied snap judgements, it illustrates the kind of negativity Spritz is swimming against, making us want to root for him all the more. As his father, Michael Caine could easily have turned in a performance that made the character impenetrable, or he could have barked his lines, overdoing the idea he’s intimidating — and certainly a lesser actor would have done that — but his character stands there looking at his son, completely bewildered, asking “Why would someone throw a frosty at you? And what is a frosty?”

Aside from an excellent supporting cast, the film has a lot of style and even manages some exquisite moments and beautiful shots. It’s a film that apparently did quite poorly at the box office, maybe because at first glance it doesn’t look like anything terribly special, and certainly it’s only in the last ten minutes the film manages to reward to viewer for sticking it out through some very difficult and awkwardly funny moments, but the trip is undoubtedly worth it.

Watch the trailer here.

At 78 years old when this film was shot, Clint Eastwood is a blazing-eyed, elderly version of the persona he has reproduced from time to time since A Fistful of Dollars (1964). Directed and co-produced by Eastwood, it’s an interesting film before the first frame has been shown, simply because it feels like an attempt to give his long acting career a coda, of sorts. 

The film itself has mixed results — as Walt Kowalski, a permanently grumpy veteran that dislikes all the different ethnicity in the neighbourhood, Eastwood can make “Get off my lawn,” sound like a death threat. But as Kowalski starts to get to know the neighbours and develop something of a community around him, it becomes clear some of the supporting cast of younger actors don’t seem terribly comfortable in their roles. The film could’ve been a joke, but it isn’t thanks to Eastwood’s solid central performance — it’s a shame some of the other performances are so wobbly. The writing is a little wobbly too. All the material about how some of the younger generation lacks reverence and appreciation (particularly in the Kowalski family) struck me as valid, but the film is overly heavy-handed about it. The central themes are clear – that beneath ethnic differences and the turmoil of certain daily struggles, we sometimes have far more in common than we think. And yet, there’s a scene that feels like something leftover from a Dirty Harry film, a scene where Eastwood is able to easily diffuse a situation, but only because he’s armed. It’s a contradiction at the heart of many American films, but it seems a little more pronounced when the main character is a gun-wielding 78 year old man.  In short, the film mixes heartwarming moments with head-scratching ones.  

Eastwood has had a fascinating career.  Aside from the films he directed, he’s among thos actors that became an American icon. Dirty Harry (1971) is a stylish and entertaining film, but also very conservative at heart — at it’s core it knocks the pesky civil rights that get in the way of a good cop blowing away someone that deserves it, and there’s even a scene that manages to suggest it’s common sense for police to shoot first and ask questions later. Generally a supporter of Republican politicians, Eastwood endorsed McCain in the recent presidential election. And yet, this is the man who directed the award-winning Unforgiven (1992), where as aging gunfighter William Munny, he has the lines “It’s a hell of a thing killing a man. You take away everything he’s ever had, and everything he’s ever gonna have.” And in A Perfect World (1993) also directed by Eastwood, there’s a quick scene of a rifle that seems designed to make the viewer hate it, considering the character that was just killed.

Perhaps it’s just fair to say Eastwood is… complicated. It’s a career that almost seems to unintentionally represent a nation accepting, but then beginnng to reconsider its attachment to guns. Even aside from the gun issues, there’s the much-admired car as central image, at at time we’re finally increasingly aware that sustainable living will be key to our survival. It may not be entirely fair to impose all this on the film, but I can’t help but think of it. Gran Torino is a curiously transitional early twenty-first century film: nostalgic even as it’s progressive, sincere but dated. Judging by the reviews on amazon and elsewhere, Americans loved it. What the rest of the world might appreciate about it is that it could be the final acting bow from a man with a remarkable career. And maybe everyone recognizes somehow that it’s a film about how the country is changing, or needs to change, even if it stars a man who grew up in a very different America.

Loosely based on Hamlet, but set in the Japanese corporate world, The Bad Sleep Well is one of the films by Akira Kurosawa that doesn’t appear to be as celebrated as some others. The director is a legendary one — Kurosawa made thirty films that have had a far-reaching influence in the film world, including various Samurai films I’ve found particularly memorable. Seven Samurai (1954) about a small band of samurai deciding to defend a village from bandits was translated into gunslingers and remade as The Magnificent Seven (1960), even as Yojimbo (1961) was remade as A Fistful of Dollars (1964). The Hidden Fortress (1958) is a film George Lucas acknowledges as an influence — there’s a scarred villain who wears a mask, a princess, and a couple of bickering harmless men caught up in the narrative would eventually be translated by Lucas into R2D2 and C3PO.

The film has a handful of remarkably intense performances as Nishi (Toshiro Mifune) investigates the death of his father, an apparent suicide from the seventh floor of the construction corporation where he worked. During his investigation there are no literal ghosts, but he does corral one passive, nervous participant in the affair to saunter out and make appearances after he’s believed to be dead. The performances are almost over the top, but don’t quite go too far, instead managing to convey the intensity of shifting alliances and uncertain times.  The score mixes powerful, dramatic music with strangely chipper music that seems oddly inappropriate during dramatic moments. The settings in the film manage to include both current, living corporate environments and the industrial desolation left behind.  

The trailer remarks “This towering masterpiece is a must-see for today’s public,” and while I’m not quite sure I’d use those terms exactly (and that’s a hell of a statement for a trailer that precedes public reaction to the film by two weeks) I do think it’s an impressive and timeless film, and an engaging one despite a two hour, thirty-two minute running time. Kurosawa is undoubtedly a director who created films that have remained relevant whatever subject he tackled. The end of The Bad Sleep Well may be a subtle and quiet one (and in that sense at least, isn’t much like Hamlet), but it’s also a remarkably powerful ending.

Imagine a character with such relentless good luck even a hired assassin can’t put a dent in his day. Nobody understands why, he just seems to be at the epicentre of good luck somehow. The X-Files TV series had some great stand-alone episodes, probably stories that are among the best ones I’ve seen on television. At the same time, the series fumbled the romance between Scully and Mulder — it was as hesitant and slow-moving at the ongoing, increasingly convoluted conspiracy plot that seemed to devote entire episodes to Mulder and Scully poking around a warehouse with a flashlight. To complicate matters in the last few years of the show, David Duchovny became part-time on the series, and producers had to introduce two new agents, Doggett and Reyes (Robert Patrick and Annabeth Gish) to carry the show. The new actors did an admirable job of being real, likeable and interesting, but took a backseat (and with all hell breaking loose, don’t even get a farewell scene) in a fairly muddled 2-hour finale that sees Duchovny return, and once again hammers away at the conspiracy story. After an entire TV series, it seemed as if the producers didn’t know how to properly resolve the conspiracy, or do anything other than take one step forward and two steps back, resolving a few things even as other questions are raised. Whatever happened to Doggett and Reyes, fellas? Hello?

Perhaps it’s better that The X-Files: I Want to Believe simply ignores all this, in favour of a film that’s also a stand-alone story, and could almost be about any retired agents coaxed back into service, not Mulder and Scully. The film begins with at least fifty agents marching in a straight line, all stabbing at the snow in search of a body part, though an priest — his long white hair loose in the wind — is capable of racing ahead to fall on the spot where the body part can be found, buried in the snow. Billy Connolly plays Father Joe Crissman, a priest who believes God sends him his visions. At the same time, he’s a priest defrocked for pedophilia. It’s an interesting quirk in the writing — give a character an appalling characteristic, and then challenge the viewer to believe he might also have visions from God. It isn’t the only examination of belief in the film — the central villain passionately believes in what he’s doing, and there’s a subplot with Scully deciding what to believe in an entirely different matter — a subplot that ends the film in an unexpectedly touching moment. In fact, I think it’s fair to say that in a way, the entire film builds up to her one word answer to a simple question before the credits roll.

The TV series had always handed Mulder evidence and took it away — Mulder sees an alien body, the viewer sees an alien body too, but government conspiracy lackeys take it away by the end of the episode (and they even get the videotape!). This film takes a different route, declining to present any absolute evidence about Father Joe either way. The conspiracy story in the TV series became tiresome because it didn’t amount to much more than a long game of hide and seek, but Frank Spotnitz and series creator Chris Carter have written a story where the viewer gets to decide, this time around. In an almost courageous move these days, chases and shootouts are kept to a minimum in favour of style, and story. And yes, this does mean the film is a little slow. Certainly, it could be a little shorter. Certainly, it didn’t need a scene where Mulder and Scully wait in a hallway to be admitted to a meeting, and there are a few scenes of awkward, expository dialogue. But I was pleasantly surprised with it by the time the credits rolled, accompanied by a new remix of the X-Files theme. My only complaint happens to be because I took time out to watch the TV series over last few years — couldn’t they have had two lines explaining what happened to Doggett and Reyes? Or even one line: “We’re running a restaurant now, we’re fine!”

“You cannot mesmerize me, I’m British!”  It’s a little hard not to enjoy Peter Cushing in this low-budget but fun adaptation of At the Earth’s Core. And while the story by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875 – 1950) is yet another thinly veiled older story about white people parachuted into a situation to set it straight, or naturally dominate somehow (much like Tarzan of the Apes), some of the humor manages to offset this antiquated idea. In a film designed for children, Cushing plays a Victorian scientist who tests out his Iron Mole drilling machine along with his American financier friend, played by Doug McClure. On arrival, they discover a human population that’s too fragmented to form a proper rebellion against enslavement by the Mahars, telepathic vulture-creatures, though on first arrival they’re chased by a tremendous monster which is really just a guy in a chicken suit.  Cushing plays the passionate professor well here, and more or less revives what he did for Dr. Who and the Daleks (1965) and Daleks Invasion of Earth, 2150 A.D. (1966), two films that were produced the previous decade as a result of the immense popularity of Doctor Who, and the brief Dalek craze. But it hardly matters, the important thing is that Cushing is as adept at humour as he is playing less erratic, more dignified characters. His Dr. Who is often overlooked in histories of the program because his stories are bonus remakes of a couple of the TV stories, and they have their own continuity. But it hardly matters when they’re colourful fun as well. Drop any child in front of the second of those two films in particular, and they’ll be… well, mesmerized.  

Looking at his career as an actor, Cushing is a rare actor — a little like that person in high school that was popular and talented, but didn’t care much what crowd he hung around with. He was talented enough for anything, but in decades of horror and fantasy films (beginning with films like Horror of Dracula, 1959) never turned in a performance that made it appear he was bored or doing anything less than trying to create a believable character. The same can be said for Christopher Lee, reunited with Cushing for The Creeping Flesh. In fact, the two actors made over twenty films together. Here they play brothers competing for prestige and financial success — Lee runs an asylum, and Cushing is a scientist who brings a remarkable skeleton back from an expedition. Not only is the skeleton unique in appearance, it appears to be  able to grow flesh and regenerate when something as simple as water is poured on it. The Cushing character is likeable, but not perfect, and it is revealed that when he reluctantly sent his wife to the asylum, he hid it from his daughter, telling her instead that her mother was dead. The character repeatedly states that he only wanted to protect his daughter, but remains resolutely stubborn about it, and after a few more misguided decisions the retribution the creature brings makes a certain amount of sense, though only in the unforgiving context of horror films. The Lee character is worse, but predictably enough by the end the creature is revived and walking the earth, and though it’s open-ended as to exactly what this will mean for humanity, maybe that’s all the creature does wherever it goes — tip the balance in favour of a morally unsatisfying result.  

These aren’t even career highlights for Cushing. In the 1970s, he’d go on to play a supporting role as a villain in Star Wars (1977) and introduce himself to a whole new audience, and a new generation.

American writer Charles Bukowski said he preferred spending time with broken people — he found them much more interesting. So far, director Darren Aronofsky has demonstrated his own fascination with broken people, though I admit Requiem for a Dream (2000) left me cold. The film had some great performances, but felt heavy-handed and overly simplistic, so that the final statement doesn’t amount to much more than the title, little more than “Well, no point in having a dream.” It’s an artistic statement that isn’t to be found in a lot of more commercial films, but still a sentiment that can probably be found in a lot of high school poetry.  

The Wrestler is a very different film. It avoids telling the story of a broken man in quite so direct and heavy-handed a fashion, with a great central performance from Mickey Rourke. He appears to have been somehow destined for this part, given that he acted, left acting to test himself (as he puts it), in the ring for a period of time, and appears to have gone through some immensely difficult experiences, requiring reconstructive surgery for his face at one point. In other words, as Randy “The Ram” Robinson, he’s both an actor and someone that can invest the role with personal experience, for the performance of a lifetime. The film borrows a documentary feel for some scenes, as we follow Randy down corridors, through the staff room and into the deli where he works for a little extra cash, in a scene that parallels his odd birth (and rebirth) over and over again down aisles into the stadiums that provide the only real love he receives in the  form of audience screams, cheers and chants. There may be something false about it, but at least it feels to him it’s the only unadulterated appreciation he gets. Marisa Tomei is also excellent as a potential love interest for Randy. A scene in a bar demonstrates these characters are getting on  a little, given that they declare their love for eighties rock, and that the nineties sucked (and of course, it’s nearly ten years since the nineties). But though it’s believable, the relationship doesn’t peak in interest until near the end, when Randy needs to start making some choices.  

Just as important as the performances, director Aronofsky takes more time with one character (unlike Requiem, which covers multiple characters), and fleshes out Robinson as a character with limited means, but still in search of a happier life and the dignity he knows he deserves. The wrestling scenes can be hard to watch for all the blood, but I think it’s actually the scenes at the deli that flesh out the character a lot more, showing how happy and even playful he is in the right set of circumstances, and how miserable when life seems to conspire against him, or when he knows he has tripped himself up. By the time he jams a thumb in the meat-cutter, he’s a fully fleshed out character who prefers a sharp  dose of real pain to the dull ache he knows his life has become. I hope Aronofsky continues to do a thorough job of establishing the dignity his characters could have before he takes it away — it makes all the difference in terms of involving the viewer. The final shot of The Wrestler is one that stayed in my head for days, as did the rest of the film.

A remarkably under-appreciated Western — it isn’t even in my handy-dandy 1570 page movie guide — I was originally attracted to this film for the simplicity of the title as well as the cast. It features Jack Palance as a reformed gunfighter and Anthony Perkins as his son.  Palance plays Jacob Wade, interested to start a new life with a son he didn’t raise, provided former enemies will stay away, and a town somewhere will actually let them stay.  Palance is both understated and excellent, and Anthony Perkins so mellow as his bitter, abandoned son it seemed a little like he was just proving he’d memorized his lines. But in a stark, beautifully shot, black and white film understated performances work better than overblown ones so as not to distract from a quiet, simple and beautifully told story.

There’s even a fairly obvious, beautiful but elusive symbol for happiness quite literally charging through the film infrequently, along with great shots of actors (or possibly stunt people) galloping at full-speed through the landscape with such rousing music it made me want to buy a flippin’ horse.  

Watch Jacob Wade make contact with his son again here. The movement Perkins brings to the scene is so languid it manages to be slightly puzzling even as it suggests he’s drunk, and depressed. And the music isn’t overdone — it registers with the viewer, but declines to do anything more than remain mournful, even after the one moment of action in the scene.  

I’ve been given the impression a lot of Westerns were produced in the fifties, but this one deserves to be among those remembered — it may have the kind of closure you predicted from the early moments, but it’s still a remarkably satisfying and well-crafted film. Unforgiven (1992) with Clint Eastwood won four Academy Awards, telling the story of a man who leaves a peaceful life of retirement to become a gunslinger again, for reasons that don’t seem terribly valid by the end of the film. The Lonely Man got there first, though it tells the story the other way around. It’s a film that deserves better than to be discontinued on DVD.

Not to be confused with New Moon (or The Twilight Saga: New Moon), somewhat irritatingly released in the same year, Moon is a low budget but remarkably well made science-fiction film directed and co-written by Duncan Jones. 

The premise is quite simple: one lonely, slightly disturbed man (Sam Rockwell, in a great performance) is the sole employee stationed on the moon, key to supplying the earth with most of its power, even as he begins to hallucinate and finally runs into someone else who may or may not be there. There’s no way to explain more without ruining the film, but it’s safe to say solid direction, interesting ideas, a great score and central performance keep it from playing out like an overly long Twilight Zone episode, so that a simple story justifies the  97 minutes. Between the strange, magnetic images director Jones conjures for the hallucination scenes and the music by Clint Mansell, there are some captivating moments — and that’s only the beginning of this intelligent film.

The style does borrow from films like Outland (1981) and 2001 (1968), but if the end result is something original, who cares? Moon is worth the trip, and even manages to look impressive despite a budget of five million dollars.