Sinister - tedious horror

Here is a 'horror' film that really doesn't deserve much in the way of attention.  But I watched it last Friday and so I'm going to tell you about it regardless.  At least this way I can pile giant quantities of meh on top of it until everyone forgets it exists.  Sinister is a film about how a crime writer decides to move his house into a house where people were killed in order to get inside the mind of a mass murderer who was never caught and hopefully write the perfect crime novel.  If you've guessed that it'll turn out that he goes mad a la The Shining and tries to kill his family then you'd be wrong.  Something much duller happens instead.

If anyone can tell me what the title of the film actually refers to then please do.  I can only assume it's referring to the style of the film or how people in the film see the actions of our protagonist Elliot (played by Ethan Hawke).  Elliot moves into this new house with his family and immediately discovers a bunch of super-8 film in the attic, super-8 film that includes horrible footage of people being murdered.  How does he find this footage?  Did he know it was there already (cos he finds it very fast)?  Why has he got a super-8 projector lying around?  Why he doesn't call the police immediately?  All extremely good questions.  When a mysterious face starts to appear in the footage (a face that sometimes moves in still images) and odd things start happening around him why doesn't Elliot burn all the footage and get the hell out of there right now?  Because he's trying to write a really good crime novel apparently.  So that means he doesn't give two shits if the whole community hates him, his wife is estranged from him, his son is having increasingly more disturbing fits and his daughter is painting crazy images of death on the walls.  It's all about the novel.

That's right folks, Sinister hails from the 'that would never happen' school of horror.  Not 'that would never happen' in the sense that there is no Baghoul who goes around harvesting children from inside paintings / super-8 film; I mean 'that would never happen' in the sense that people would never act the way Elliot does.  If even half of the crazy shit that happens to him in this film happened to literally anyone in the world, then that person would scream murder and run for the hills.  But Elliot just carries stumbling around in the dark narrowly avoiding ghosts looking for inspiration for his novel.  Nutter.

Now this wouldn't be too bad - after all this sort of stuff happens all the time in the horror genre - but for the use of cheap scare tactics in Sinister offending me.  Yup, I was actually offended that the makers of this movie thought they could get away with throwing a couple of cheap tricks in my face (literally at one point) and thinking it passes as horror.  People going boo! is not horror.  I was actually moderately pleased with the film's denouement as I didn't see it coming until just before it happened, but even that was made crappy by the film chucking one more boo! moment at the screen just before the end credits.  Sinister isn't bad, it's just barely worth the effort to write this review let along spend 100 minutes watching it.  Please don't bother.

Dr Strangelove - Water Fluoridation

I played a game of my new favourite board game the other day - Twilight Struggle.  The game is a strategic encounter that simulates the Cold War.  I won by default as my opponent accidentally started a nuclear war. The end to the game made me think of one of my favourite political satires of all time, Dr Strangelove.  Here's one of my favourite scenes from it, in which General Ripper explains to Captain Mandrake (one of Peter Sellers' 3 roles) how Commies don't drink water because of the monstrous conspiracy of water fluoridation.



As a result of this madness General Ripper is on the verge of kicking off an apocalyptic nuclear war.  I watched Room 237 last night, in which a parade of individuals with a variety of levels of sanity explain their theories behind the meaning of Kubrick's masterpiece The Shining.  Dr Strangelove remains my favourite Kubrick film though, it's encapsulation of the laughable futility of war has yet to be beaten.

End of Watch - Brutal, Interestingly Styled, Gyllenhall

I watched this over the Easter weekend with my folks back in Ilford, it's a film that was released last year to very little fanfare starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Pena as cops on the mean streets of Los Angeles who get caught up in a turf war between various gangs and eventually become targets when they keep accidentally busting the wrong people.  The film follows these two cops as the main characters, but the lives of their families and friends are also detailed - as are the difficult decisions and barriers faced by their fellow police officers.  The film also stars Anna Kendrick, which is important as I'm currently tipping her for future A-list stardom.

The thing that makes End of Watch interesting is the style in which it is presented.  Half of the time it is shot in a sort of found footage style, making use of on-board car cameras and handheld cameras carried by characters, and the other half it is filmed in the traditional way.  The opening sequence of a car chase ending in a police shooting is told entirely from the point of view of a camera located on the dash-board of the police car involved in the chase.  It initially looks like it's going to be entirely in this style as the action then switches post-credits to Gyllenhall's character filming himself in a changing room, introducing him and his partner to the audience.  As we move into the outside world we continue with footage in the style of a police reality TV drama, the idea being that Gyllenhall's character is filming his life as a police officer for some sort of arts course.  Quickly after that though, the film switches to a mixture of traditional camera-work and found footage - sometimes both within one scene.  Then by the end of the film the camera work has largely moved away from the found footage genre, and exists entirely beyond the 4th wall.

So does this schizophrenic use of cameras add anything to the film?  I think it does.  We start out in the classic found footage style, which although we're all used to it adds a little realism to what's going on.  Then as we move slowly into the realm of traditional camera usage some of that element of realism is retained.  The gun battles seem more real and the casual interaction of our two main characters seems less staged or scripted.  It takes a leap of faith to allow the film to do things in this way though, as normally this sort of thing comes about from lazy story-telling.  I think End of Watch successfully tip-toes along the line between believability of plot and playing with way in which films are presented.

In conclusion, the film is pretty good and told in an interesting way, and though the end is fairly telegraphed it still has an emotional kick.  End of Watch deals with some incredibly violent and disturbing themes, and I had to question the rating that it received from the BBFC.  It has a 15 rating despite containing some horrific violence, a lot of blood and disturbing images of human misery.  The BBFC website insists that because there is a clear distinction between the behaviour of the good guys and the bad guys, and that they don't feel minded to rate the film as an 18.  I find this interesting because it goes back to something I wrote in my review of Badlands the other day - that the context of violence is important.  Though Badlands contains very little violence it received an 18 rating in the 1970s (it still gets a 15 now) because the violence is perpetrated by a heroic figure.  In End of Watch, though the police are occasionally violent, they are always acting in self-defence or the defence of others, whereas the sadistic violence is perpetrated by criminal gangs.  This difference in the presentation of the protagonists is what's important.

Trance - Boyle's gone all weird

What an utterly bizarre film this is.  I had what I considered to be a well-deserved lazy day yesterday after officiating in a drizzly and cold Finsbury Park Saturday afternoon, in which the London Blitz beat the Copenhagen Towers 7-6 in the EFAF cup.  Overnight though the weather had turned for the better, suddenly it was dry and sunny and the conservatory was somewhere I could be without a coat on.  I even went outdoors with just a T-shirt on!  Surely summer is soon to be upon us.  To celebrate I went out for a cycle, a cycle to a dark room where they project moving images on the wall.  The only film out at the Showcase in Winnersh that I considered worth my time was Danny Boyle's Trance - so I watched that.

After his involvement in the London Olympics opening ceremony last year added to his Oscar victory a couple of years back, mainstream Britain seems to have woken up to the existence of Danny Boyle.  I'm no Boyle fan-boy, but when I think about how much I have enjoyed the films he has directed I quickly realise that I should be.  His outstanding films include Shallow Grave, Trainspotting, 28 Days Later, Sunshine and of course the Oscar winning Slumdog Millionaire.  Each of these films is a fantastic achievement, linked of course by the unmistakable Danny Boyle style in which images and sounds are used with quick cuts, close ups, odd angles and fast-slow sequences to create something that's visually disconcerting and very effective.  Think of the way he portrays the 'infected' from 28 Days Later with quickly-edited close ups and various noises of muffed terror.  It's the same visual style as he uses in the fantastic chase sequences in Slumdog Millionaire.

Before the start of the film yesterday there was a 30 second message from Mr Boyle telling us that Trance is intended as something of an antithesis to the Olympic ceremony last year.  He told us that the film was shot before the ceremony and edited after it, and that where the Olympics represented something fun and light, this is the dark side.  Fair enough.  Trance tells the story of an art auctioneer-turned-thief called Simon (played by James McAvoy), who narrates the story and tells us about an art heist gone wrong.  Gone wrong because at some point during the heist he gets banged on the head and cannot remember where he has put a£25 million value painting.  His criminal partner (Vincent Cassel) decides to enlist the help of a hypnotherapist (Rosario Dawson) to try to get him to recollect the memories of what happened on the day of the robbery.  And then memories, dreams and reality start to merge as Simon tries to remember what's real.

The Danny Boyle style works well with this kind of stuff, since he uses all his usual tricks to good effect in the sequences when Simon is travelling through his dream-like world.  As far as my enjoyment of the film goes though, that was about the end of it.  The main difficulty I had was that I didn't believe anything that any of the characters were doing; I didn't buy into them and got a bit a bit bored.  The middle of the film gets tangled up in its own details and takes forever to get where it's trying to go.  Then when it does get there none of it really makes any sense.  There are whole sequences of Simon's therapy that could have been cut out entirely, then just when you think they're getting somewhere something else happens that requires yet another hypnosis scene in yet another dark underground disused nightclub.  When we get to the end I simply didn't believe the explanation.  I simply didn't believe in the reality of these characters enough to buy into the so-called twist.

I can see why Boyle says that the film is of the dark side.  There's a lot of graphic and brutal violence, shocking scenes of gore and some full-frontal nudity - all things that were understandably absent from the Olympics opening ceremony last year.  I get the impression that Trance was an outlet for Boyle's dark creative side, an outlet that he desperately needed when he was spending the rest of his time crafting something sugar-coated for the Olympics.  Despite not really getting Trance too much, I am impressed none-the-less that Boyle has made a film is dark and adult as this.  He could easily have strayed into the mainstream and stayed there, but hopefully with Trance he is signalling his intention to stick with his roots outside the cinematic establishment.  Kudos to that.