Cabin in the Woods - it's horror: Buffy style

I've known about this film for a good while now but it has taken me an age to watch the thing. Given that the script was co-written by Joss Whedon I'm amazed it took me so long, normally I'd be all over anything he or the Buffy writing staff generate. Though I still haven't watched Dollhouse, so maybe that's not quite true. Be this as it may, on Friday I finally watched Joss Whedon & Drew Goddard's take on this classic horror trope. You don't have to be a fan of horror to be aware of what I'm talking about. The classic set up is thus: a group of middle class American teenagers drive off into the woods / mountains / wilderness anticipating a fun weekend of inebriation and limited inhibitions. On the way they are warned about some non-specific danger by a weird yokel type but they carry on anyway and eventually encounter some sort of generic evil monster type thing. This is the plot of countless studio productions like Cabin Fever or Evil Dead as well as classic B-movie stuff like Texas Chainsaw Massacre and a whole host more.

100% of this happens in Cabin in the Woods. But Joss Whedon made his name by taking the horror genre in a skewed direction, and he and Goddard keep that up here. The film opens with a couple of men in white coats walking through a research facility having a conversation about some kind of generic experiment and generally shooting the shit. One of these guys is Bradley Whitford (that's Josh from West Wing to you) and so I'm immediately interested but thinking - isn't this a horror film? Then the action freezes and the title of the film flashes up on the screen in huge letters and a blood red font; cut to a group of sexy carefree teenagers preparing for their big trip. This scene sets the film up perfectly, it's a tongue-in-cheek cheesy opening that lets us know we're in for a horror film with a huge dollop of Wheedon-esque wit. The teenagers drive up to the cabin having the standard weird encounter with a local along the way and encountering something even stranger as they approach the cabin itself. They then start to get drunk and 'discover' that the cabin they're staying in has a mysterious basement filled with a cornucopia of mystical gizmos and ancient inscriptions in Latin. Who knows what evil they might stumble across while rifling through this junk? Who knows what horrors they might unwittingly unleash from all this surprisingly-convenient paraphernalia?

When Joss Whedon has done horror in the past he has done it in a funny, witty and sometimes bafflingly simple way. If the boogey man really existed, doesn't it make sense that The Man would be doing tests on it?  Season 4 of Buffy anyone? Such is Cabin in the Woods. The film is scattered with appearances from actors who were Buffy / Angel staples and also stars Chris Hemmsworth who has since gone on to play Thor in the Marvel comics film adaptations. The effects are cheesy but they're obviously like that deliberately, with the emphasis on the story and the comic unreality of what's going on. The overall visual style is to make the film feel like an darkly humorous feature length episode of The Twilight Zone, complete with 'they always come back' and a superbly zany turn of events for the final act.

Fans of Wheedon's work should love Cabin in the Woods (I am and I did). Fans of the horror films should enjoy the comic deconstruction of the fallacies of the genre's common tropes. Normal people should also enjoy the film for what it is, funny and jumpy in all the right places. It's not a particularly frightening watch (only a 15) and the blood and gore that you do see is clearly over-egged to the point of deliberate unrealism. Almost all of the gory bits happen off camera, are implied or are so cheesy as to defy anyone being frightened of them.

In conclusion, Cabin in the Woods is yet another brilliant production from the creative geniuses behind Buffy - directed by Drew Goddard though this time rather than Wheedon. They're going to have to slow down or they'll run out of ideas soon.

Snowtown

Blimey what a depressing film.

Snowtown is set in urban Adelaide in the late 1990s and tells the story of Jamie, his brothers, their mother and a man with whom she becomes romantically involved - John. The setting is one of depression, borderline poverty and assumed joblessness in a society with little hope. John takes on the role of a father figure in this fractured family, his easy-going nature and resourcefulness helps provide a stability and calm to their hitherto chaotic lives. The trouble is that John has a different side to his nature, one that slowly emerges when talking with neighbours and despite its unsavoury nature seems to flourish.

John holds a set of extreme views on how society should react to paedophiles. His views (that they should be killed, tortured, castrated etc...) find a friendly audience in the Adelaide neighbourhood; people are eager to listen to what he has to say and happy too to go along with him, fantasising about what they would do to a 'paedo' in their midst. The trouble with John though, is that he's actually prepared to act upon his big talk, and attack people he thinks are paedophiles, gay, funny-talking, different or simply don't agree with him. From tipping a pile of severed animal heads on to someone's porch to kidnapping, torture and murder, John seems to have no compunction in going after people he sees as different to his vision of societal norm. All the while John is slowly dragging his new family with him - after all, he is the father figure they have never had.

Rated 18 for its violence, Snowtown is a terrifying portrayal of how groupthink can result in the normalisation of extreme opinions and behaviours, the logical extension of which would be people acting out on those opinions. There are several scenes in which people in the community sit around with drinks talking about the various kinds of tortures they would inflict on a variety of deviants if they could get their hands on them. Though that might be only talk, it's the kind of talk that goes on in pubs and clubs all over the nation all the time. The film asks questions about how easily conversation can become violence when society is in disarray, and how when extreme views go unchallenged they can quickly become the norm.

It's a chilling portrayal of a society breaking down and people looking for an enemy within to blame. It's also massively depressing and not for anyone who doesn't want to watch intense scenes in which people are slowly choked to death. In conclusion, it's an interesting subject matter and very gritty but seems to be going out of its way to make everything as grim as possible and so will put a lot of people off.  Not a film for everyone, though its message is one we should all listen to.

Argo - Affleck directs another good film

On Friday evening last week my housemates were all doing their own thing, many of my other friends were away and so I took an impulse decision to cycle up to Winnersh to the Showcase and watch a film I had heard warmly reviewed by Mayo and Kermode in their interview with Ben Affleck the previous week. The film was Argo, the latest directed by Affleck. The cinema was nowhere near full, though the entire teenage female population of East Berkshire appeared to be queueing to see the latest (and last - I'm very pleased to be informed) instalment of Twilight. Plus there were a good number of women who looked old enough to know better really - though it's unlikely they read this blog so it probably wont help if I post this article about the self-misogyny implicit in the Twilight series.

Anywaaay...

...The story of Argo is a dramatisation of the real life rescue of 6 American Embassy workers during the US / Iran Hostage crisis of 1979. When the US embassy was stormed, these 6 managed to escape and found themselves at the Canadian embassy without any Iranians knowing they were there. The Canadians and the CIA then came up with a plan to get the 6 out of the country, a plan that involved a rather audacious cover story. The idea was to invent a Holywood film production, then send a CIA agent to Tehran to pretend that he was the Canadian executive producer on a location scouting tour of the Middle East. He would then give 6 fake Canadian passports to the embassy workers and walk out of the country with them in tow.

It's a story that's so audacious you wouldn't believe it was true, but it appears to be. The fake film - Argo - was brought into being and the plan set into action. Though what happens in the end is a matter of historical fact I wont give it away since you've probably never heard of it before. The real film called Argo - this film - is part historical drama, part action and part comedy in which criticisms are aimed at the Holywood elite, the CIA and the Islamification of the Iranian revolution. The film starts with a short introduction to the USA's involvement in Iranian politics since the 1950s, deftly pointing out that the US was far from an innocent bystander in the events that took place in that nation in 1979. But this is a film that restrains itself from doing any preachy liberal finger-waving, instead telling the story of this unlikely rescue - albeit from an American point of view - while making sure that we know the historical context.

It's a bit silly how they end the film.  The film goes down the ticking time bomb route where at each checkpoint at Tehran airports someone at the CIA / Holywood does something at the very last moment to thwart the Iranian authorities unveiling the true identities of the 'Canadians'.  Though it generates suspense, this stuff never happens in real life - and indeed it never happened in this real life story.  Bit of a shame as all that does is add to the plethora of propaganda out there in film and TV normalising the ticking time bomb spy scenario in the mind of the public - 24 anyone?

Argo is a fun film with comedy, suspense, John Goodman hamming it up, good one-liners and a bit of "Am-er-ica: fuck yeah!" thrown in at the end.  Another bonus was that it stars a bunch of people from US TV series who I've never seen do anything else.  Clea Duvall was the disappearing girl Marcie Ross from way back in season 1 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer; Tate Donovan was Tom in Damages, Victor Garber was Sidney's Dad in Alias - it's a spot-the-TV-actor-athon!

With this and The Town on his CV, Ben Affleck is becoming a promising director.  Also his acting isn't bad either - double plus bonus for him and us alike!

21 Jump Street - Jonah Hill's not bad then

I'm not entirely sure where I've got the impression from that Jonah Hill films are the sorts of films that I should avoid. The only film he's been in that I had actually seen was Moneyball (pretty good) and it's only from films I assume are bad that I get the impression he must be terrible (Get him to the Greek, Superbad). This review is essentially about me realising I had made a mistake in pigeon-holing Hill, and serves as a reminder to keep an open mind about film.

I have no idea why I put 21 Jump Street on my Lovefilm list. When I tell you the plot you might understand why. Jonah Hill (Schmidt) and Channing Tatum (Jenko) play a pair of useless green cops who get sent on an undercover assignment to infiltrate a high school where someone is dealing a new type of drug. Their boss for this assignment will be Ice Cube of NWA fame. Schmidt and Jenko knew each other in school, Schmidt was the classic nerd while Jenko was the classic jock - and they hated each other.  Now they're going back to school together, and who knows - when Jenko has to pretend to be a science nerd and Schmid has to do drama and run on the track they might finally see the world from each others' point of view and grow as people.

Sounds a bit crap doesn't it? Well that's what I would have thought, but someone at some point must have told me otherwise - and I'm glad they did. 21 Jump Street is in fact a funny, tongue-in-cheek slapstick comedy that spends a lot of time making fun of its own genre. Not only making fun of the buddy cop / high school stereotypes it portrays, but also the fact that it's a film adaptation of a 1980s television production. There are a lot of references to this "being done in the 80's" and how people are running out of ideas these days. The funniest bits of the film are the parts where things keep on not exploding. Such as a car crashing into an oil tanker on a bridge which - after several set-up cuts establishing the plethora of cameras waiting to capture the awesome special effect - doesn't explode. As Jenko drives away from the scene at full speed he quips "I really thought that one would explode". There's also a brilliantly observed moment after we briefly see an unlikely threesome at a house party that reminded me of the genius "fucking hell" moment from Father Ted's King of the Sheep Competition.

I'm not going to pretend that 21 Jump Street is entirely devoid of scatological humour, far from it in fact as the IMDB's parental guide points out in mind-bending detail. It includes 123 uses of the word fuck - that's once every 53 seconds. The film doesn't totally rely on that for laughs though, and as such I'm happy to let the moment when Rob Riggle attempts to pick up his own severed penis with his teeth pass as a misjudged scene in an otherwise decent comedy. Next time Jonah Hill writes something, I'll be paying it more attention.

The Shining - a classic at the BFI

On Wednesday evening I took the train into London with a group from work to go to the BFI on the South Bank for a showing of the extended cut of Stanley Kubrick's classic thriller The Shining. Got some food in the Herman-ze-German sausage shop just north of Embankment station, which had some great food and was authenticated in my opinion by the German guys that were with us giving it the thumbs up. I'll go there again.

I first saw The Shining on VHS when I was an undergraduate, over 10 years ago now. So even though I had seen it before I had forgotten a lot of the details and more importantly forgotten just how much of an amazing film The Shining is.

Though it certainly needs no introduction, I'll outline the plot here for completeness. Jack and Wendy Torrance (Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall) have recently moved to Boulder in Colorado after Jack lost his teaching job in Wyoming. Jack takes a job house-sitting the Overlook hotel for the winter, which gets snowed in and becomes unreachable without a specialist snow vehicle. He, Wendy and their young son Danny move there and settle in for 5 months of seclusion, peace and quiet so that Jack can write his book. Before taking the job though, Jack is told that a decade ago a previous caretaker slaughtered his entire family at the hotel and that the seclusion can do strange things to people. At the same time, Danny is having fits and his imaginary friend appears to know things Danny couldn't possibly have knowledge of. It's the set up for a brilliantly-paced ghost story / thriller / horror, one which has entered many a 'top films' list over the years.

There's so much more in The Shining than first meets the eye. There are hints at occult practices and ritual sacrifices from the soundtrack and the visions of horrors at the hotel. Kubrick dangles a variety of possibilities in front of the viewer who is prepared to think about what they're witnessing. There is the possibility that either the hotel manager, Jack, or both knew what was likely to happen at the hotel when he took the job - which then opens up questions as to why he would take the job at all. The final few shots of the film ask further questions about what the hotel does to people; and the question of if what happens there has an otherworldly aspect or is simply the product of human insanity is left open. Then there's the direction. Kubrick effortlessly sets up the space of the hotel without resorting to bland exposition and uses simple techniques to generate a suspense in everything that happens.

Every aspect of the film is outstanding, from the camerawork and attention to detail through to the casting and astonishingly unhinged performances from both Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall. Nicholson conveys an impression of a potential madman teetering on the edge even in the opening scene. At no point does he need to gurn at the camera or scream insanities, just the way he responds to questions with an overly-enforced calm tells us much of what we need to know about a character actively engaged in repressing rage. Duvall plays Wendy as a woman living a life she's desperately trying to pretend is normal. Trapped between Jack's violent potential and Danny's unknown abilities, she's slowly going mad in her own way. The straight horror elements of the film are used sparingly (we see only one death in the whole film) and therefore effectively. When we see inside Danny's visions of twin girls slaughtered and rivers of blood crashing down a lift shaft they are fleeting glimpses punctuating the image of the face of a terrified young boy - rather than a special effect to be leered over.  Proving once again that in the horror genre, less is more.

In conclusion then, it's hardly news that The Shining is brilliant. But it's such a long time since I had seen it I had completely forgotten what an outstanding example of film-making it is. If anyone reading this blog hasn't seen it then you've been making a big mistake all your life. It's currently being shown in its extended US version at the BFI in London - go and watch it!

A Dangerous Method

A very interesting film, though I can't work out why it was made. A Dangerous Method stars Michael Fassbender and Viggo Mortenssen as the psychologists Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud. The film is a fictional account of the interactions that these giants of their field had in the each part of the 20th century. At the time each was developing his own theory of psychoanalysis and looking for people upon which to test his ideas. Both men were convinced that human sexuality has a massive impact on the the study of psychoanalysis, but they differed on the extent to which it is the critical factor.

To turn this into an actual story rather than a tecious back and forth of letters arguing about human sexuality, the film muses upon the posibility of one of Jung's historical protegees being his secret lover. Keira Knightley plays Sabrina Spielrein, a young Russian woman who is brought into Jung's assylum and who is helped to deal with her childhood traumas via the medium of getting spanked by Jung. She then goes on to get a university education and become a prominent psychoanalist in her own right.

So this is another high profile film with high profile cast members that Keira Knightley's in. If ever an actress blew hot and cold in her films then it is Ms Knightley. Maybe this is going to sound unfair to her, or maybe now I've got it into my head I can't get it out, but whenever she's on screen she looks like she's 'doing acting' rather than it coming naturally to her. She's not helped here because her first scene requires her to gurn madly at the camera as the crazy Sabrina while Jung sits behind her trying to diagnose her mental state. Being convincingly mad sounds hard enough for an actor at the best of times, but when it's the opening scene in the movie for someone who's acting skills I'm not convinced by and they're trying to establish the character - it's very very hard indeed. Sure she's trying her best and doing a better job than I could, but I can't get over the realisation that she's an actress playing a role, it's a problem that seriously diminishes the impact of what she's doing, has a negative impact on the character she's playing and the film overall.

While watching the film I had no idea at all about the historical accuracy of what was going on, which prompted me to look things up afterwards. If you watch the film I encourage you to do the same. Jung's interest in psychic phenomena is something I had very little concept of.

Though the film is about an interesting subject matter and has a central trio of characters that form an interesting relationship - the film is nothing more than merely interesting. It's not really entertainment, doesn't really have a story or an arc in the traditional sense and as such I'm not really sure why it's a film at all.  It could easily have been a Discovery channel production. If you're interested in psychology you'll probably get a lot more out of this than I did, or if you're a fan of Mr Fassbender (as I am) it's yet another solid performance from him to enjoy. If you're looking for a film to be entertained by, probably best steer clear.