Tag Archives: thriller

The Cabin in the Woods

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It looks like I waited more than a week to see The Cabin in the Woods, which simply isn’t true. (It also looks like I haven’t read a book in more than a month, which, well, yeah, that’s true. What is wrong with my life?) It’s just that I had other stuff I needed to write about first, and on top of that I have of course remained incredibly busy with my new job. But this review marks me as all caught up again, which is on the one hand relieving and on the other tragic. I’ve only seen two movies in quite a bit more than a month, obviously no video game time to speak of, I’m drowning in books I want to read (not that the one I’m reading is bad, it’s just way too long)… I fear I am not type-A-driven enough for this number of hours per week.

That or I watch too much TV. Of course, if I didn’t, I may not have been sufficiently obsessed by Joss Whedon to run out and watch his horror movie on opening day, nor to hope but ultimately fail to watch it again prior to the review. Because, there’s a lot to watch. I fooled myself into thinking the previews unfairly gave away plot details, but it’s not true. The opening scene of the movie reveals just how much of a rabbit hole you’ve stumbled into, and all but dares you to figure it out before you hit the bottom. In case you need more of a plot summary than the none I’ve given so far, I’ll just mention that five college friends plan to spend a weekend at a cabin in the, um, woods, after which horror ensues. But I bet you already knew that? And yeah, everything else is wildly spoilerful and goes beyond a cut.

Well, except this: if you like like horror as a genre, and especially if that’s the kind of thing you’d say out loud? You must see this movie. (If you don’t / wouldn’t, it’s still pretty worthwhile. The only reason not to go see it is if you can’t stand to see on-screen gory violence, because, yes, that’s gonna happen.)

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Haywire

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When the credits rolled on Haywire, I immediately felt kind of dumb for not having already realized it was a Steven Soderbergh movie. It just filled that obvious space in my head, the moment I knew. Not that he writes a lot of action, but when he does, it is exactly this kind of kinetic, stylized to the point of nearly being its own character, loudly impactful action. And certainly the characters are all Soderberghian ciphers, begrudgingly giving up any hint of motivation that you do not fill in for yourself. And the plot is I think Soderberghian too, in that it is easily summarized in one line that doesn’t exactly belie hidden depths, even though they exist. Upon reflection, I’m not sure why I like his movies. On paper, it seems like I would hate every one of them, but somehow they’re always engrossing. I should try to figure that out sometime.

Oh, as for the one line plot, there’s this awesome spy chick who gets burned (a la Burn Notice the TV show, obviously, but with a completely different mentality) and then goes on a hunt through every person involved in her last mission, including her superiors, to find out why and take her revenge. …okay, technically that was more than one line, but I bet if I were the kind of person who was actively interested in terse editing, I could have trimmed it down.

Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol

The bad thing about the new Mission: Impossible flick is that the plot felt occasionally rushed. I’m not talking about one of those things where reviewers say, despite being paid actual money by actual media organizations to have no other job besides sitting in a dark room with popcorn watching magical images appear in front of them and then talking about those images, that they were confused because the plot of the movie was too hard to follow.[1] There was definitely no point where I said, “Wait, what, they left something out!” I’m just saying that, now and again, you could tell that there was room for more backstory and it had been squeezed out. (I am thinking here specifically of Bogdan, who was really given nothing to do except have a goofy smile and be a plot catalyst; but that is not the only example of what I mean.)

The good thing about Ghost Protocol is you don’t have to care about any thin areas in the Pattern, because everything else was in fact really pretty cool. Was the mission actually impossible? Pretty much! Was the gadgetry really cool? Yes, yes it was, and on top of that it was involved in an unacknowledged-by-the-dialogue running joke that I will not spoil because it has plot implications. Did Tom Cruise smirk his way through the whole movie? I mean, obviously he did since that’s what he has done in every movie he’s ever been in[2], but it’s not like his smirk is off-putting, and it conveys a whole range of emotion beyond general punchability. Which when you think about it makes him an incredible actor. And the rest of the cast had generally good chemistry, and character development beyond ‘helps Tom Cruise do the Impossible’. So I’m saying, there’s very little not to like here. But none of these are the reason I’d recommend the movie.

Go see it in IMAX, because just about every action scene is put together in a way to showcase the immensity of that screen, and frankly very few IMAX films that come out have that particular sensibility. It was close to as good as a nature documentary, in those terms. And it had rather more explosions per capita than a nature documentary generally does, so you can see how this would be a win-win. IMAX or not, though, I wish more action movies were put together on this scale. Big is not a necessary thing by any means, and look no further than Die Hard before you consider disagreeing. But it should happen more than it does, is all I’m saying. Most of these kinds of movies are not designed to be small, but they’re filmed that way anyhow.

Okay, digression over. Review, too.

[1] Not that I’m bitter.
[2] Maybe not Eyes Wide Shut. Maybe.

Drive (2011)

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Drive is going to fill one and possibly two niches this year. It will be the best movie that many people never bother to see, and it will also be the best movie that many people saw accidentally, expecting it to be a cheap Transporter knock-off. In either case, it will almost certainly be underappreciated. There’s this guy, played by Ryan Gosling, who seems to be drifting through life at a huge remove from everyone else. While they are hiring him to be a getaway driver, or clumsily mentoring him[1], or paying him for movie stunts, he just seems to observe it all, sometimes with a slightly bemused smile, more often laconic and blank-faced. Which is a pity, because those rare smiles give a window into his inner life that implies more pure joy than most characters convey with reams of dialogue and spontaneous jigs.

But when an accident of geography entangles him in the lives of his pretty, world-saddened neighbor, her son, and her imprisoned husband, well… I don’t want to say much, since you already know that he’ll be in for the drive of his life, or else what a terrible name for a movie. I guess it’s like this. If that sounds like a set-up for the client-of-the-week section of an episode of Burn Notice, it should. But the fallout is a lot less like Michael Westen’s always slick solutions and a lot more like the 1970s era cinema that inspired Quentin Tarantino. But, okay, do you know what Drive is the most like? I hesitate to say this, because it will so easily be construed as less than high praise, but, it reminds me of nothing so much as what someone could have easily written as the plot progression of a mission arc in a modern Grand Theft Auto game. Mostly imprintable anti-hero? Check. Conflicts with cops and other criminals alike as events spiral out of control? Check. Sympathetic characters humanizing the proceedings? Most definitely.

I’m not surprised by the Fresh Air reviewer who said it was the darling of Cannes this year. Movies like this just don’t get made anymore, and lucky us that someone failed to realize it.

[1] Enough good can probably not be said about Bryan Cranston, so I will not try harder than I just have.

Bellflower

You know that movie where everything goes wrong in the worst possible way, and it’s a really funny movie, so you call its genre black comedy? What do you call the genre when that happens, but it’s not even slightly funny, a little bit? Because Bellflower, named for the street on which its events take place, may be one of the grimmest movies I’ve ever seen. (I rule this not a spoiler, even though it’s the kind of movie you should go in knowing as little as possible about, because of how the first minute or so of footage does nothing but show consequences that will be forthcoming.) On an eponymous street somewhere in what is probably the Valley part of Los Angeles, there are these two guys who are building a flamethrower (among other things) in order to be prepared for the inevitable post-apocalyptic future, in which they plan to wander the earth as, if you will, road warriors. And then they make friends with these girls, and then…. yeah, that’s about the point where I have to stop.

Don’t rule it out out of hand just because I said it was extremely grim. It is, don’t get me wrong, but you’ll be thinking about it (not its grimness, but the whole) for a long time after it’s over. Well, that’s not absolutely fair, most of my thoughts have been from a psychological angle, and if you don’t think those thoughts, I guess you possibly won’t be after all? Oh, I will say this one more thing, though: it is definitely not a date movie, regardless of how accurate my “romance” tag is.

Contagion (2011)

MV5BMTY3MDk5MDc3OV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwNzAyNTg0Ng@@._V1__SX1859_SY893_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.

Hidden (2009)

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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

MV5BMTI3NTQyMzU5M15BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwMTM2MjgyMQ@@._V1__SX1859_SY893_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

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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)

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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.