Orphan - is this a horror film?

I seem to be talking about horror films a lot with people at the moment, no co-incidence then that I decided to watch one of the DVDs that my Mum leant me at Christmas on Monday evening - Orphan.  Crucially this is not to be mixed up with El Orfanato, the Spanish-language gothic ghost horror from a few years back set in an orphanage.  Orphan is a more recent American production, in which a couple (Kate and John - played by Vera Farmiga and Peter Sarsgaard) adopt a young Russian girl Esther from a local orphanage.  Kate and John are like any couple; they have their share of skeletons in the cupboard but they love each other and they love their kids.  Their third child died in Kate's womb, and she suffers from recurring nightmares in which she relives the horrific night in the maternity ward when she found out.  She also is a recovering alcoholic, and John has cheated on her in the past.  Skeletons in the closet indeed.

So Esther turns up at their house and because of the poster for the movie you know that she's up to no good.  She immediately does a bunch of weird things, including trying to hurt some of the other kids, painting weird pictures and deliberately disrupting this already less-than-perfect family.  She gets up to a bit of maiming and killing too, but I'm not sure that any of this put the film in the horror genre.  In fact, looking back over the whole film it's difficult to see why it's billed as a horror at all.  It's more like a weird X-Files episode or something out of the Outer Limits.

The opportunity to do horror is there though.  Kate and John's youngest daughter is deaf and the family all talk together in sign language, something that I was rather hoping would become a plot point, or at least the set up for some sort of horror set-piece (maybe she can see something horrible happening but can't speak to warn anyone?).  But that doesn't really happen, which is a shame as it feels like a waste of potential.  Kate and John are both very well-defined characters, which is pleasing in an age of effects-laden movies with terrible protagonists.  Though this is probably down to good acting rather than good scripts, and it's wasted since when the family unit breaks down later in the film the events start to feel very unlikely very quickly. Again it feels like the script writers missed their own potential.

It's because of these things that the film feels like a disappointment.  I was promised a horror film, but I didn't get one.  Even in spite of that there's was a lot of promise in this thriller; a good set-up, good background and a set of nicely-drawn characters; but in the end it all sort of fizzles out into a bit of a chase with some knives and guns.  Especially after the big reveal of what Esther really is, I just sat there thinking "Really? Is that it?".  After that point in the movie it falls a bit flat, and the final scene lacks resolution and fades to black when there really should have been some sort of epilogue.  Overall, it would be very harsh to say this was a bad film.  But don't expect much in the way of scares, and expect to be underwhelmed by the 'twist'.

Charlie Chaplain: Modern Times - Just 1 to go now...

As part of my ongoing project to have seen all 50 films in the IMDB top 50, I last night watched Charlie Chaplain's classic silent film Modern Times.  This is a film that was made in 1936, using mostly silent techniques in an era when the silent movie industry was already dead in the water.  Chaplain of course was an actor and writer who helped define the silent era, and so it would make sense to think of him being most resistant to change.  However as we shall see, rather than being a floundering throw-back at the end of a dying era, Modern Times in fact makes clever use of both silent and audio techniques to tell a moving and funny story.

Before we get going on this though, time to put my cards on the table - I have never seen a Charlie Chaplain film before.  This is some of the reason why it has taken me so long to get around to finishing off the IMDB top 50 - only the Chaplain films remain.  I have to say though that I was completely taken aback by how much pure entertainment there is in Modern Times.  It's a genuinely funny physical comedy, with slapstick and cabaret-style routines.  It's also politically significant.  Set in depression-era USA, the film tells the story of The Tramp (Chaplain's archetypal every-man character) and how he loses his job doing back-breaking repetitive work on a production line.  He then gets unwillingly caught up in industrial action and thrown in jail for being a ring-leader.  Upon realising that jail might be easier than getting on in the modern industrialised world, The Tramp then embarks on a series of attempts to get work that inevitably end up with him back behind bars, whilst at the same time trying to save the soul of a young vagrant woman living rough on the streets.

There are so many good things about this film.  The sets are awesome, especially those huge machines in the factory.  The physical comedy is genuinely funny and the way it is captured on screen is impressive.  The part at the start where The Tramp gets pulled through a system of cogs must have actually been done by Chaplain squeezing through a set of moving wheels, plus Chaplain's gibberish song at the end highlights what a great physical performer he was.  The use of low frame rates speeded up for modern projection emphasises the slapstick of what's going on.  The use of sound in the film is historically significant and works as a thematic device too, in that sound is only used by machines, screens, people in power and only by The Tramp when he can't be understood.  It confirms the theme of alienation, and that normal people feel isolated from the wonders of industry and fast pace of the modern age.

As if this wasn't enough, then there's film history to enjoy.  There's a moment when a ship is launched to sea, an effect that was created by what looks like the projection of a launching ship on a screen behind Chaplain - a laughable effect in the modern age of course, but it's just a crude version of what they do with green screens.  This is also generally considered to be the last film of the silent era, meaning that Charlie Chaplain got the last word on a mode of cinema he was instrumental in defining.  Overall it's enjoyable on just about every level possible, a real joy to watch.

With this under my belt, I only have Chaplain's City Lights to go in order to round out the IMDB top 50.  It'll be top 100 next...

La Jetee / Sans Soleil - French + Science Fiction = Weird

Caught up on a couple of classic films last weekend.  La Jetee / Sans Soleil is a double bill consisting of a science fiction short (La Jetee - The Jetty) followed by a much longer semi-documentary that takes an unconventional journey through East Asia and Central Africa pulling together various themes of humanity, nature etc (Sans Soleil - Without Sun).

La Jetee is apparently the inspiration behind Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys.  It tells a short time travel story using almost entirely still back and white images and a voice-over to narrate the tale of a grim post-apocalyptic future in which a man is selected for experimentation to turn him into an unwilling Sam Beckett.  The hope being that he will be able to go back and save the future from itself.  Though this might sound a bit pretentious, it's only 25 minutes long and it absolutely works as a story and film.  No matter how pretentious or dull it might sound, I think everyone can sit through 25 minutes and decide for themselves.  I would be surprised to discover an open-minded person who wasn't at least able to admit La Jetee is worth watching.  I thought it was great.

So on to Sans Soleil - a very different prospect.  Since it follows on from La Jetee on the DVD I was kind of expecting more of the same, I could hardly have been further from the truth.  I've not yet had a chance to look online to find out why the films are presented as a double bill, but it's not obvious.  I was initially blind-sided by Sans Soleil's apparent new age bullshit.  As a viewer, you are treated to footage and images of life, humanity, nature, the world, war, the east, the west, Africa, all accompanied by a voice over providing musings upon life, love, people etc.  Heavy stuff.  After 20 minutes I paused the DVD and had to go for a break.  People occasionally accuse me of being pretentious about films, but this was too much for me even.

But there's a but coming up.  The first thing I did when I went back to my DVD was to switch the language from French to English - no point watching a documentary in a foreign language just for the hell of it.  From that point on things seemed to get better.  Maybe it felt less pretentious and worthy in English.  Anyway, I sat through the remaining 70 minutes with much more ease as I settled into the idea that I should open my mind up and allow the footage and voice-over to challenge certain axiomatic truths that the world has taught me.  I am aware of how pretentious this sounds - but this is what happened, and I found it overall an enjoyable experience.

I think that perhaps a film like this carried more weight in the early 1980s when it was made, when travel for the far east was less possible for ordinary working class people in the western world.  Perhaps 30 years ago it was easier to sell that concept; but I've been to Japan, and I got smashed singing YMCA in a karaoke bar.  I've been to China too; and even though I did watch sunrise from the top of a holy mountain, I also saw insane inequality and experienced suffocating smog created by cities growing far faster than the environment can cope with.  In a lot of ways they aren't that different to here.

None-the-less though, La Jetee is an excellent short science fiction film, and if you're able to put aside anti-pretence prejudices for a couple of hours then Sans Soleil might surprise you.  Maybe.  Just maybe.

The Bay - a shit student film

Every time I watch a slightly rubbish horror film I wonder how I found out about it in the first place.  I know I get a lot of my film recommendations from renowned trash-horror fan Mark Kermode, but when I watch a horror film they normally have trailers for other horror films and so I think I get drawn in by them too.  I can't remember which of these methods caused me to put The Bay on to my DVD rental list, but I need to find out so I can exact vengeance upon it.  The Bay is one of the least scary, least gripping and least interesting 'horror' films I have seen for a very long time.  And I watched Don't be Afraid of the Dark just last month!

I'm getting bored just thinking about the premise of The Bay.  There's a small town on the US eastern seaboard where a reporter is telling us via Skype call that something bad happened.  It is now 3 years after the event, the government hushed it up and she's trying to get the message out.  Over the next 80 minutes we are going to listen to her narrate a bunch of 'found footage' from the day of the crisis.  All implausibly filmed, all implausibly available to this one reporter, all drained of any drama because we know she's going to survive.  Imagine one of those filler episodes of the X-Files from the later series - it's like that but without any proper actors or wit.

The town has a chicken factory that is probably breaking rules on GM food and waste disposal, and the mayor of the town is probably involved in some kind of backroom handshake deals with the factory owners, and this deal probably means that something bad will happen.  The end.  There's footage from some marine biologists who died some weeks before.  There's footage from various police cameras of weird goings on.  There's footage from a couple who are out on the bay while everything kicks off.  There's footage from skype calls between the local hospital and the federal disease control centre.  All of it is mashed together and voiced over to tell a very predictable story about corporate wrong-doing that results in environmental disaster.  The acting is occasionally terrible, effects cheesy (one character even points out that a picture looks like it has been photoshopped) and the ending just sort of happens leaving no suspense, no mystery, no whodunnit, no nothing.

It's like a student production in which they had a half-way interesting idea but didn't really do any script editing and then ran out of motivation to finish it half way through.  The film is littered with flashbacks to stuff it already showed us, with slightly different voice-overs that try to put a new slant on what we already saw, but it just left me thinking about how uninteresting it is to watch this found footage the first time - let alone multiple times.  Seriously - don't bother.

Filth - filthy shades of grey

Based on an apparently unfilmable book by Irvine Welsh, Filth was released last year to somewhat muted responses by the general public.  Seems that for some reason the story of a misanthropic bent Edinburgh copper didn't excite that many people in the British film-going population.  To be fair, I didn't have any great urge to go and see it in the cinema either.  The trailer was pretty quiet on what the film was actually about, instead it focused on the various levels of corruption, debauchery and violence that a scattered throughout the life of our main protagonist - detective Bruce Robertson (James McAvoy).

Bruce Robertson is a terrible person.  He is a bigoted misanthrope detective on the Edinburgh police force who gets his kicks out of ruining other peoples' lives while trying to get a promotion.  He is constantly pining for his now-departed wife, and clearly struggles to deal with a number of psychological problems dating back to his youth.  It is this man's world that we are dumped into at the start of Filth, specifically his attempts to secure the promotion by back-stabbing everyone else who might get in his way.  In the meantime, he is making obscene phone calls to his best friend's wife and doing the bare minimum to do his job - which is to investigate a murder that happens in the film's opening scene.

The film is set in the middle of the malaise that is modern Scotland (and my extension the rest of the UK).  In a world troubled by vested interests, drug abuse and sometimes violent pornography, it is perhaps unsurprising that many - like Bruce - can see no salvation for humanity and react with appropriate disdain.  McAvoy plays the character with some glee, in a way that makes him deeply unsympathetic and at the same time vulnerable and interesting.  Whatever you want to think the film might be implying about life in contemporary Scotland, it's a very entertaining film that's funny and extremely dark.  It's a great watch.

Having now read more about the book, I think that the screen writer has done a very good job of capturing a lot of that in this film adaptation.  The film uses monologues from different characters, uncertain points of view, dream sequences and psychotic episodes (or are they real) to paint a mysterious picture of Robertson's world and mind.  The film ends in quite a different way to the book, a way that portrays Robertson in a much more sympathetic light.  Perhaps that's a bad thing as it gives the character an out that he doesn't deserve.  Perhaps its a good thing as it reminds us that concepts of good and evil in people aren't really as black and white as some might want to believe - it's all about the shades of grey.  Filthy shades of grey*.

* feedback on this pun isn't needed - I know it's rubbish, but it's all I've got.