I do not have a whole heck of a lot to say about Contagion, but that is mainly because it is so well-packaged that it does most of its speaking for itself. First, you take a ridiculously powerful cast (well, it’s also extremely large, so I guess the dilution might make it a merely powerful cast, but then again, through the powers of homeopathy, it may instead be the strongest cast imaginable), then you put them into a terrifying script where an unknown disease is running rampant through pretty much the whole world. But it’s not like The Stand, because instead of proceeding to tell a religious story, they tell the story of how the world might really look in such a circumstance. Sure, it wasn’t a horror movie, but it was tense and dramatic all the time. But it was also really damn scary.
Tag Archives: thriller
Hidden (2009)
Leave a reply
You know what Hidden reminded me a lot of? Well, okay, I don’t either, so give me a second to figure it out. I mean, I know, I just can’t remember the title yet. But it was the Russian movie from the first Horrorfest[1] where the lady gets trapped in physical manifestations of her past (or psychological manifestations of them that are sufficiently convincing to serve the same purpose) when she returns home, the place that of course you can go to again, contrary to the proverb. You just shouldn’t.
Anyway, this movie is Norwegian instead of Russian, but the primary concept where the main character comes back home and weird things occur? Yes, that. In this case, there’s a murder mystery, identity confusion, ghost manifestations, and almost certainly more things? The truth is, I was fuzzing in and out after about the first third of the movie, so I got a sense of it, but the specifics remain locked on the disc, forever out of my reach. Oh, well!
[1] Oh, right, The Abandoned.
Oldboy
This movie night thing I mentioned, it seems to be real. At least, I’ve already been to it again and seen another movie, which is a pretty good sign. Then again, if it burns brightly and flares out, I won’t be offended by that either. In the meantime, it gives me the chance to catch a few things I missed or wouldn’t have known to look for, and in a setting where I can focus on my thoughts and perhaps give each film its due. (Horrorfest kind of kills me each year when it comes around, for true. At least next weekend, I can maybe take notes or even dash out a quick review between each entrant to the festival?)
But enough of that, it’ll be focus enough when it gets here. The night’s movie was Korean, which I assume to mean South Korean since there was no point at which the Glorious Leader was praised, nor did he descend upon a golden rainbow to render judgment or justice. Oldboy follows the tale of a gravelly-voiced narrator who, in diction rife with significant pauses[1], tells a tale of his horrible fate. He was kidnapped off the street, stuffed into a sealed-up hotel room, and kept there for fifteen years. He spent this entire period going gradually insane and/or training for his shot at revenge, with a side dose of tunneling his way to an exit. But on the very night that he broke through the wall into open air, he is suddenly released and given the wherewithal to divine and then hunt his antagonist in a brutally disturbing game of cat and mouse.
Or the whole scenario is a total mindfuck. Or both! All I can say for certain is that it was too engaging to turn away, and I don’t mean that in the train wreck sense.
[1] So, I’m sure this was dubbed instead of filmed in English, and it’s kind of unfair for me to judge a movie based on something that isn’t the original version. All I can say is this particular dub artist made the role his own, whether by entering the original voice or choosing a new one.
The Roommate
The Roommate was one of those movies where you absolutely knew what you were going to get, right? Sure, there are all kinds of thriller sub-genres, but once you start narrowing down, the plot is going to start getting predictable. If you’re in an obsession thriller, such as Fatal Attraction, and you see a small fuzzy animal somewhere around the main character? Prepare to cringe. And if you’re in a lesbian obsession thriller[1], such as Single White Female, and you see a boyfriend somewhere around the main character? Prepare to cringe about that too, although probably not in the same way. Because, seriously, and with all due respect to Steven Weber, but I feel worse about the bunny.
Not that knowing what you’ll get is a bad thing. Sometimes, it lets you take the time to appreciate the performances all the more when the plot is devoid of surprises. Take our obsessor, Leighton Meester. You might appreciate the dead stare she affects when she is angry, but that’s nothing half as creepy as the bloom of hope in her eyes every time she thinks she’s done something that this time will finally, finally get the obsessee to understand that she’s been right all along and this really is the way things are meant to have been. Of course, sometimes knowing what you’re getting leaves you with the time to ask too many questions, too. It’s always an interesting thought exercise to determine how the police will react to these events. Will there be enough witnesses for her to feel comfortable explaining what happened? Must she run away, her life forever shadowed by the tragedy even though she won? And this type of movie never addresses those questions, so if it leaves you with the time to ask them, and you can’t come up with satisfactory answers? Well, I at least think that’s a bad sign. Probably great numbers of people won’t ever mind, though.
That’s cool, I’m sure I’m wrong sometimes too, so no reason to beat them up about it.
[1] I hesitate to narrow the field in that way. It’s not that the characters in obsession thrillers necessarily want sexual relationships with the objects of their obsession, and it’s certainly not like that is the prescribed way for the obsession to start. It’s just that once the obsession exists, there is always always a sexual element to it.
Unknown (2011)
My favorite show that you’ve never heard of[1] was called Nowhere Man. It aired on UPN in like 1996 or something? It was about a photographer who took the wrong picture, and in between entering and exiting the bathroom at a celebrity event, his entire history is erased. From the internet such as it was then, from public records, from the apparent memories of his family and friends. And the plot was pretty much him finding people who could help in one way or another, piecing together the whys and wherefores of his fate in an attempt to either undo it or at least get revenge by exposing whatever they so desperately wanted hidden. And, okay, the problem that conspiracies always have is how much easier it would be to just cap an ass, especially since it could be done at the same time as he’s being erased, right? But that doesn’t matter, because the concept is way way too cool to nitpick about.
Thusly Unknown, in which Liam Neeson has a four-day coma caused by a taxi wreck, only to discover that he has been completely replaced. Does the biotechnology conference he was scheduled to attend make this a corporate espionage story? Does the Saudi prince backing said conference make it a terrorism story? Does the seemingly airtight proof that both he and the man who has stepped into his shoes simultaneously have make it a psychological identity story? Does the fact that he’s Liam Neeson make it an explosive action story? These are questions with which I was largely uninterested, and that is because of Nowhere Man. Nobody knows who he is except him, and he has to find a way to prove it, right? Then yeah, those other questions don’t matter anymore; I’m in.
[1] There was also Profit on Fox, which aired for three(?) episodes, making it about equivalent to a full season on UPN’s first year of existence, in my estimation. But those two are definitely my favorites that fit the criteria.
Salt (2010)
I saw Salt on Wednesday, but between my punishing workload and the unexpected discovery of lots of new spam here, I have been too busy to actually talk about it. Which is sad, as it was a pretty entertaining film that seems to have flown under everyone’s radar. See, there’s this CIA agent, Veruca Salt, and she is interrogating a Russian walk-in when he names her as the lynchpin of an unlikely plot to assassinate a visiting foreign dignitary. This sets off an action-filled sequence of events designed primarily to keep the audience guessing about what’s actually going on and who is on what side. I’m not ashamed to admit that my early guesses about who was for sure a bad guy, based mostly on the company he kept, were not accurate. Because the plot was convoluted enough to keep secrets from start to finish, without ever being entirely ridiculous.[1]
There was, I should note, one particularly bad scene. I wasn’t looking for a Bechdel moment, because, action movie, right? So when Ms. Salt climbs through a window into an apartment occupied by a school-aged girl (during some escape or other, you understand) and they have a brief conversation, I was duly impressed, above and beyond Angelina Jolie[2]’s asskickery in general. Up until the substance of that conversation turned out to be about the girl’s homework and Salt’s response of “I hate math.” At which point I cringed way, way more than if the test had not been passed in the first place. Or, for that matter, if she had not otherwise been such a strong, self-reliant character.
But gender politics aside, awesome movie!
[1] I mean, there was one coincidence that stretched the bounds of likelihood, but the flick moved fast enough to keep me from thinking about it at the time.
[2] She plays Salt, you see.
Law Abiding Citizen
Law Abiding Citizen is, in addition to being a frequently good movie, kind of a comparative sociology experiment. So there’s this guy, and his family gets killed in a home invasion. Then later, DA Jamie Foxx cuts a deal with one of[1] the two invaders because he doesn’t think the case is strong enough to get both of them. Later still, the guy whose family got killed puts together the best revenge package imaginable.
Anyway, sociology, right? This is true in a few ways. Firstly, it marks a clear divide from what I’m going to call a generation ago, in the ’70s. Back in those days, when Charles Bronson’s wife and daughter were raped and/or murdered, he would never have even let the law get involved in the first place, and the audience would have been with him the whole time, no matter what he did. Of course, Chuck would never have gone after innocent people, so that’s an important possible distinction. Also, though, I learned something important about audience dynamics. It seemed to me that the moment when people finally turned against the guy, saying his revenge had gone too far, was when he killed the cute blonde chick. I know that the media has already demonstrated this sociological tidbit, but seeing it in live action and furthermore knowing the writers had planned to evoke the audience turn? Little bit weird to realize it this fully.
By and large, it’s a decent flick. Marred by some unfortunate (and worse, wholly out of place) sexism, but if you leave that scene out of it, you’ve got a pretty great combination revenge flick and tension thriller. If I knew how I’d feel about it without having actually experienced the plot, I’d watch it again.
[1] The worse one, though in fairness he probably could not pick who would make the deal?
A Perfect Getaway
I had a fundamental misunderstanding about this movie that completely changed its makeup for me. Luckily, I would say the change was for the better. A Perfect Getaway chronicles the fates of three couples on vacation in Hawaii who, while hiking in the largely unpopulated wilds of Kauai, are constantly dogged by rumors of a man and woman who gruesomely murdered a pair of newlyweds in Honolulu just days before. So, what I thought I went to see was a horror movie, in which the couples face a gradually hopeless game of cat and mouse against the killers. Instead, the movie is a suspense thriller in which each couple suspects the next of being the harbinger of their doom.
I think that’s the most I can safely say, suspense thrillers being what they are. I will add that our main characters shine pretty brightly, Steve Zahn continuing his [largely successful] quest to transform a supporting actor’s looks and general air into a leading actor’s success using nothing but his talent, and Milla Jovovich successfully portraying a bubbly, vivacious, and merely moderately attractive leading actress with talent you would not suspect her knockout looks to be capable of. (If you found that sentence nauseating and impossible to get through: they were good!)
Lost and Delirious
My latest Netflix movie is Lost and Delirious. And I’ve watched it, which was a positive experience. Yet I have been staring at this mostly blank screen for the majority of the day. I think it’s that my opinions are too many and too contradictory. In short, the chick from The O.C. is sent to an all-female boarding school, where she becomes roommate with a pair of seniors, one hard-nosed and feminist, the other vivaciously popular. At first, it looks like one of those coming-out-of-the-shell stories in which Mischa Barton would have been the main character embarking on her journey toward personhood. Then, at the end of the first act, it veers sharply into one of those obsession thrillers in which our purported main character mostly serves as the audience’s window on the action when it is revealed that her roommates are engaged in a sexual relationship.
And I think it could have made a fine obsession thriller too, except that it couldn’t make up its mind to commit to that. For every scene in which a new boyfriend is about to die in a sword fight and simply isn’t taking it seriously enough yet, there are three in which someone screams and runs out of a room / across the school lawn. And it’s not like that’s unrealistic high school obsessive behavior; it’s that the swords and the pet falcon are, and after it was hinted that I might get that movie, it became the one I wanted. Still, what was left behind was good stuff. Surprisingly good acting from a variety of very young actresses, modernly relevant sociosexual politics, not terribly many overwrought or thematically pushy scenes. And, y’know, sword fights.
Taken (2008)
So, you know how in Europe, there are all these unscrupulous Albanians and Serbians and other Iron Curtainers running around kidnapping people, for the purpose of letting them be tortured to death or else sold into sexual slavery? Here’s a thing that I maintain would be a bad idea: being one of those people, and kidnapping Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn’s daughter. I mean, if he were allowed to be angry and have thoughts of revenge. So, Sith Master Qui-Gon Jinn, I guess is what I mean. Also, he and Jack Bauer probably hang out over beers, sometimes.
I predict this is enough information to tell you whether you’ll like Taken. In case you’re on the fence, don’t forget that Liam Neeson cannot help but lend pathos and gravitas to every role he plays. It drips off of him like sweat off some guy named Keith.