Warm Bodies

2013 // USA // Jonathan Levine // January 29, 2013 // Digital Theatrical Projection (Wehrenberg Ronnies 20 Cine)

Zombie films are now such a ubiquitous aspect of contemporary pop culture, it’s difficult to believe that a little more than a decade ago the subgenre was in a bit of slump. A mere month after George Romero’s original Living Dead trilogy was completed in July of 1985, the sophomoric goofiness and embarrassing “punk” aesthetic of the Return of the Living Dead franchise rose up to take its place. Occasional bright spots such as Tom Savini’s remake of Night of the Living Dead (1990) and Ryuhei Kitamura’s undead-against-yakuza feature Versus (2000) managed to keep the zombie flame alive during those dark days. However, it wasn’t until 28 Days Later hit the ground running in 2002 that the zombie tale was truly reborn as a borderline-respectable cluster of horror conventions, one that could eventually support lavishly produced hour-long television dramas. This resurrection happened quickly, too, if one can assess the maturity of a trend by events of sub-subgenre fission. Only two years passed between 28 Days and Shaun of Dead (2004), the first post-revival zombie comedy and unquestionably the finest example of the form.

Sadly, the zombie comedy has had a lackluster unlife in the wake of Shaun, delivering one reasonably strong also-ran (Zombieland) and a string of forgettable features that range from the merely dull to the howlingly unfunny (Dead & Breakfast, Boy Eats Girl, Fido, Dance of the Dead, Dead Snow). Writer-director Jonathan Levine’s new film, Warm Bodies is the latest clammy-skinned hopeful in this particular category of cinema, and unfortunately it stumbles far more often than it succeeds.

Adapted from Isaac Marion’s post-apocalyptic “zombie romance” novel of the same name, the film strikes an unusual tone that is somehow both earnest and acerbic. Its narrative is a rather shameless mash-up of warmed-over love story fragments: both Romeo and Juliet and Beauty and the Beast lend their contours to the story. The former work, in fact, is referenced so overtly that the film is practically a zombie retelling of the Bard’s tragedy (with a happy ending!). Warm Bodies presents the bland, star-crossed romance between awkward pretty-boy zombie R (Nicholas Hoult) and tough, sensitive human Julie (Teresa Palmer) in a blithely matter-of-fact way. (R and Julie: get it?) The ardor of their forbidden love is more asserted than illustrated through dialogue or action, and Hoult and Palmer lamentably don’t have much chemistry with one another. Levine’s screenplay dresses up this tale of necrophilic puppy love with doses of tiresome action-horror and equally tiresome science-fiction allegory, but these elements only serve to draw attention to the thin, unengaging romance.

Yet despite the straightforward, shallow stance that the film assumes towards its central love story, Warm Bodies strives to be a satirical riposte to the serious-minded angst of most fictional adolescent romance. The resulting tone is damn strange. While the film never feels phony, there is a smug heedlessness in the way that its winking ridicule is scrawled in between moistened, unconvincing declarations of emotion. To the film’s credit, R’s professions of love are groaned in a gurgling Tarzan pidgin, consistently underlining the vacuousness of the couple’s fairy tale yearnings. However, this sardonic impulse never convinces, if only because the film is never truly bloody-minded about attacking mindless storytelling formulae.

Nonetheless, Warm Bodies does score some critical hits against deserving targets: the leaden longing of post-Twilight young adult lit; the creepiness of male characters in Sundance-bait relationship films; or the rotten, god-awful cliches of mainstream romantic comedy cinema. (One standout gag involves a character putting a screeching halt to the use of “Oh, Pretty Woman” during a Makeover Scene.) Most of the film’s mockery is delivered loudly and unambiguously—often via R’s pointedly ironic internal voice-over—but there are some exceedingly sly moments here and there. When R haltingly insists on the superiority of vinyl over digital music, it’s presented in such a deadpan manner that it’s difficult to discern if the script is satirizing actual music snobs, the Hollywood conception of music snobs, or the lazy use of music snobbery to denote character depth. The film’s humor really only falls flat when it lamely attempts to ape Shaun of the Dead by pointing out the similarities between the pre- and post-undead worlds.

Zombie movie purists will likely find the entire premise of Warm Bodies objectionable on a certain level. The story is predicated on R having retained a sliver of intelligence and emotion within his moldering brain, an idea that flies in the face of the normally strict depiction of the living dead as mindless horrors that are beyond salvation. What’s more, the plot presents Juliet’s love for R as a sort of redeeming contagion, capable of stirring not only her undead boyfriend’s putrid heart to beat, but also the blood of other zombies with whom he comes into contact. While this concept is faintly ridiculous, it’s not self-defeatingly stupid, nor is its contravention of zombie tropes especially bothersome. Works of fiction can, after all, posit whatever rules that the creator wishes, and there’s only so many living dead films that can be made in the unremittingly bleak mode of 28 Weeks Later and [REC]. Far more annoying than the film’s conceit of a curable undeath is its failure to play fair by its own rules. The zombies seem to move slowly, until the plot necessitates that they need to sprint. They can smell human flesh with shark-like precision, but are easily bamboozled by a smear of undead ooze.

These might seem to be the nitpicky gripes of a horror obsessive, but they are indicative of the slipshod quality to the broader story. The filmmakers add a third prong to the human-vs.-zombies conflict in the form of the feral, desiccated “Bonies”: living dead who have become sightless, walking strips of beef jerky. It’s an arguably necessary device in order to maintain a sense of threat even as the less monstrous “Corpse” zombies are being humanized, but it nonetheless seems narratively cheap. There is an obligatory showdown with the Bonies in the film’s final act, during which the spacial relationships between the three factions are so hopelessly muddled that it’s unclear where the hell events are even occurring.

Indeed, the geography of the film’s post-apocalyptic landscape is downright ridiculous at times. R force-marches Juliet from the human survivors’ walled city to the zombie-infested airport in an afternoon, but their later return by car inexplicably takes a couple of days. The majority of the interior spaces are governed by a kind of fractured geometry: subterranean crawl spaces seem to connect to parking ramps, which connect to subway stations, which connect to baseball stadiums, which connect to chemistry labs. This sort of careless disregard for spatial coherence is the marker of a third direct-to-DVD horror sequel, not a theatrical film in wide release (even if it is a February wide release). Ultimately, the biting humor that Warm Bodies occasionally exhibits is not sufficient grounds to overlook either the banal romantic plot or the laxness of the film’s construction.

Mama

2013 // Spain - Canada // Andrés Muschietti // January 15, 2013 // Digital Theatrical Projection (Wehrenberg Ronnies 20 Cine)

[Note: This post contains minor spoilers.]

It’s a tough call as to whether there is a salvageable, halfway-decent horror flick lurking somewhere within the dismal boundaries of Mama, but the film would almost certainly need to be demolished and rebuilt from scratch in order to reveal it. The feature exemplifies quite a bit that’s banal and irksome about contemporary horror filmmaking. There’s the over-reliance on repetitive, lazy jump-scares, a horror “method” that migrated from Asian to Western films well over a decade ago and is now applied with absolutely no sense of artfulness or restraint. There’s the colorless-to-crummy performances, which do not in any meaningful way reflect how actual human beings would behave if placed in the film’s circumstances. (This holds even for the lead actor, the suddenly-ubiquitous Jessica Chastain, who is almost unrecognizable in a short black wig and "rock" wardrobe.) Then there is the film’s worst sin: Its absolute mess of a screenplay, larded with ridiculous dialogue and festering narrative missteps.

It’s a bit of a shame, because there is a nugget of potential in Mama. A great horror film is waiting to be made based on the “feral child” folk tradition, perhaps something akin to François Truffaut’s The Wild Child by way of David Cronenberg. Mama is absolutely not that film, but Argentinean writer-director Andrés Muschietti at least seems to have an appreciation for the disturbing potential of such a story. The film is at its unsavory, discomfiting best when it dwells on the fragility of adults’ efforts to civilize children, and on the arbitrary nature of moral urges that are assumed to be intrinsic to humankind. To the film's credit, it doesn’t blink when it wanders into some harrowing, even downright appalling, places. The first ten minutes of Mama feature an unhinged man who intends to shoot his oblivious three-year-old daughter in the head, and the rest of film offers some comparably unsettling situations. The feature’s climax posits that if a child suffers severe psychological trauma between ages one and five, they may be a total lost cause, and no amount of tender loving care will make them “normal” again. It’s rough stuff, but no one ever suggested that the aim of a horror film is to make the viewer comfortable.

If only Muschietti and his co-writers (sister Barbara and Luther creator Neil Cross) had the discipline to leave out the supernatural elements and explore the chilling possibilities in a story about two little girls abandoned in the woods and discovered years later. That is where Mama seems to be heading at first, as fugitive wife-killer Jeffrey (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) hustles his fearful young daughters Victoria and Lilly into the snowbound wilderness of rural Virginia, and eventually to a remote, run-down cabin. There, Jeffrey’s murderous plans are abruptly thwarted by a sinister ethereal entity (Javier Botet) that materializes out of the shadows. This is about the point where it becomes unfortunately apparent that Muschietti intends to cram a vengeful ghost story into his feral children story—and nothing brings out the unimaginative side of a horror filmmaker like a vengeful ghost story.

Five years later, a backwoods search party employed by Jeffrey’s twin brother Lucas (Coster-Waldau again) stumbles upon the cabin, where it is discovered that the girls are now filthy, scrawny, animalistic CGI effects. Three months in the care of state psychiatrists is evidently all that is needed to restore eight-year-old Victoria (Megan Charpentier) to relatively well-groomed normalcy, but six-year-old Lilly (Isabelle Nélisse) is another matter. Having never learned to talk, she isn’t much interested in doing so now that she’s back in the bosom of central heating and Nick Junior. Standard kindergartner play isn’t her strong suit: when she’s not skittering around creepily on all fours, she’s devouring the black moths that mysteriously proliferate around the girls. None of this dissuades Lucas from his plans to adopt Victoria and Lilly, although his contentedly child-free girlfriend Annabel (Chastain) is less than enthusiastic about the assumption of such a responsibility. And that’s before she learns about the baleful spirit from the cabin, which the girls call “Mama" and which has apparently followed Victoria and Lilly back from the wilds.

The film presents "Mama’s" backstory as though it were an absorbing puzzle whose solution will herald some vital turning point in the plot, but nothing of the sort happens. Most of the second half of Mama consists of Annabel following the breadcrumbs left by child psychologist Dr. Dreyfuss (Daniel Kash), who is in turn a step or two behind the viewer in his understanding of what is unfolding. There’s little in the screenplay that asks for the viewer’s emotional or intellectual engagement, and as a result, the film just sort of muddles along. Annabel mopes about in an exasperated way, Victoria furrows her brow and glares, and "Mama" pops up every seven or eight minutes like a spring-powered Dracula in a cheap funhouse. Even on the most exploitative level, the film flops: Mama is strictly PG-13 violent, and none of the characters are garish or unlikeable enough for the viewer to get a sadistic thrill out of watching them blunder into the clutches of an undead monster. (Annabel’s baffling compulsion to open doors that any sane person would be nailing shut doesn’t prompt much but eye-rolling.)

Narrative problems abound in Mama, which is overflowing with convenient turns, frustrating cul-de-sacs, and a laughable understanding of how social service agencies function. In one particularly egregious case of storytelling fail, a sidelined Lucas receives a plaintive vision from his dead brother’s spirit, in an apparent attempt to draw him back into the story and prod him to assist in the unraveling of "Mama’s" origins. This leads to... nothing. Lucas makes an urgent journey into the forest at night, and is then forgotten until he shows up suddenly at the film’s climax, at which point he is hastily sidelined again so that Annabel can have an obligatory (and ambiguously written) one-on-one confrontation with "Mama".

These sort of plot fumbles are distracting on their own, but the film further annoys with its obnoxious regard for motherhood as the most sacred and worthiest of all human endeavors. It’s unfortunately familiar sexist nonsense, but what’s novel is Mama’s reactionary disdain for Annabel and Lucas’ childless, hipster-lite urban lifestyle. It’s not enough that Annabel is scolded for preferring band practice and bourbon shots to diaper duty, or that her lack of maternal rapport with Victoria and Lilly is portrayed as a deep character flaw that needs correction by dire supernatural means. The film also sneers at the very notion that she and Lucas could raise two children in (gasp) an apartment, one filled with artwork and music, no less. Narrative potholes are one thing, but even a stellar screenplay would have trouble recovering from that sort of clueless classism and cultural contempt.

Gangster Squad

2013 // USA // Ruben Fleischer //January 8, 2013 // Digital Theatrical Projection (Wehrenberg Ronnies 20 Cine)

It is hopefully uncontroversial that even the slightest, most straightforward genre exercise can be a gratifying work of cinema if the filmmakers regard both the material and the viewer with respect. Nowhere is it written that a film (least of all a work of Hollywood entertainment) must say something profound, or that a film laden with cliches must also be a work of high-minded deconstruction or winking satire. Doing just One Thing and doing it exceptionally well can be a deceptively tricky feat, and when a filmmaker pulls off such a stunt, it’s a marvelous sight to behold. (Witness, for example, Sam Mendes’ pitch-perfect Skyfall.) Even a film whose pleasures are almost entirely superficial and fleeting—a puff of cinematic meringue, if you will—can coast for quite a distance solely on charm.

Even by such modest standards, however, Ruben Fleischer's Gangster Squad feels like a listless chore, more absorbed with genre box-checking and wallowing in dull, repetitive violence than with actually engaging the viewer. On paper, the broad outlines of the story are promising: The film is very loosely based on Paul Lieberman’s esteemed 2008 Los Angeles Times series (and his follow-up book) on the LAPD’s secret anti-Mafia task force, which employed mostly illegal means to pursue boxer-turned-mobster Mickey Cohen and other “Eastern hoods” in the 1940s and 50s. Gangster Squad therefore unfolds in what one might call James Ellroy Country: a post-War landscape of housing tracts, glittering nightspots, automotive grime, and Hollywood artifice. This provides production designer Maher Ahmad with a tempting sandbox in which to play, but Will Beal’s crude, predictable script seems to understand the setting mostly through third-hand tropes. It’s a Disneyland version of 1949 Los Angeles, bereft of human habitation or any sense of real mortal peril.

Desperate to stop Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn) before his stranglehold over Los Angeles’ underworld is complete, police captain Parker (Nick Nolte) hand picks the bull-headed Irish-American Sergeant John O’Mara (Josh Brolin) to lead a clandestine squad of cops that will operate without official sanction, department backup, or legal restrictions. Hardened and honorable but not too bright, the WWII veteran O’Mara isn’t so much the Last Honest Cop as he is an undomesticated warrior, unable to back down until his Enemy is defeated. In one of the screenplay’s few memorable touches, O’Mara’s very pregnant wife Connie (Mireille Enos) selects the other members of the squad from the dossiers piled on their kitchen table, reasoning that the men who are watching her spouse’s back should meet her standards of toughness.

The ranks of the unit eventually include an appropriately diverse array of archetypes: Kennard (Robert Patrick), the Old One; Harris (Anthony Mackie), the Black One; Keeler (Giovanni Ribisi), the Smart One; and Wooters (Ryan Gosling), the World-Weary Womanizing One. Kennard’s eager beaver partner Ramirez (Michael Peña) eventually joins group as well, filling the role of the Latino One. Unfortunately, the film’s treatment of these cops is as reductive as it sounds, and as a result, nearly every effort to summon a laugh or a tear lands with a hollow thud. (Patrick’s drawly quips are the only lines that succeed in eliciting a chuckle here and there.) The cynical Wooters is the sole cop character who is allowed an arc, and the event that brings him around to O’Mara’s righteous viewpoint is so bald-faced and repugnant that it is downright astonishing that the filmmakers had the shamelessness to include it.

Once the squad is assembled, the story slogs ahead through a blood-soaked cops-and-robbers war: O’Mara’s team attacks Cohen’s empire with arson, beatings, and summary executions, and after suffering some fatal setbacks, they finally bring down the crime lord himself. Oh, and along the way Wooters falls into bed with Cohen’s slinky moll, Grace (Emma Stone), which adds a wrinkle or two to the Good Guys' mission. It’s rudimentary stuff, which isn’t necessarily defeating, if Fleischer or Beal regarded the story as anything other than an opportunity to gape as cardboard cops and foam latex gangsters spray artfully recreated post-War Los Angeles with hot lead. It’s hollow and cartoonish, and even on a purely adolescent level, it’s not much fun.

It doesn’t help that the actors are mostly sleepwalking through the proceedings. None of the performers but Penn is actively bad, but only rarely is a sense of genuine human emotion permitted to peek through the eye-rolling dialogue. Penn, meanwhile, at least seems to sense that the awful script gives him carte blanche to play Cohen as a sneering, spittle-flecked comic book villain. Nonetheless, for this critic's taste, Penn doesn’t camp it up nearly enough, and the result is just an ugly, unpleasant portrayal that leaves no lasting impression.

Equally unpleasant is the look of Gangster Squad, which seems to have been subjected to a drastic post-production color correction and softening in order to approximate a deranged person’s conception of “retro”. It’s the kind of digital tinkering that can work in fantastical films like 300 and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, but here it’s just distracting, especially given that it is inconsistently applied. In the close-ups during an early nightclub scene, Stone’s skin is so polished and smooth that she looks like a creepy porcelain doll; later, the freckles dusted across her cheeks are permitted to peek through. It’s a nitpicky detail, but it underlines the sensation of slipshod excess that characterizes Gangster Squad: the film feels naggingly like a work in which great effort and expense is expended on not giving a damn.

Not Fade Away

2012 // USA // David Chase // January 3, 2013 // Digital Theatrical Projection (Wehrenberg Des Peres Cine 14)

It feels a bit ungenerous to criticize David Chase’s tale of a starry-eyed, college-age rock group in 1960s New Jersey of hewing too closely to the well-worn narrative formula of the Band Movie. Writer-director Chase, after all, makes pains to portray the tribulations of the fictional Eugene Gaunt Band (later the Twilight Zones) as distinct from those in the conventional rock-n-roll story, at least as depicted by Hollywood. Not Fade Away's adolescent narrator, Evelyn, (Meg Guzulescu) reveals in the opening scenes that her older brother’s band will never Make It. In this, Douglas (John Magaro) and his fellow Stones-worshipping buddies will follow a trajectory that is dispiritingly commonplace—not just among musicians from small-town Jersey, but pretty much all artists. Not Fade Away is therefore a film about disappointment, and about whether fame and fortune are integral to rock’s ethos, or utterly beside the point.

On this matter, Chase’s film is agreeably ambiguous, and the most fascinating moments in the script are those that achieve a delicious balance between straight-faced, simple-minded optimism and vicious satire of that same optimism. The film conveys both fist-pumping approval and eye-rolling disdain at Douglas’ routine declarations of “Rock-n-Roll Will Never Die, Man!” (or some rough equivalent), a pronouncement usually made to his frustrated parents (James Gandolfini and Molly Price). Chase and his performers aren’t always successful at maintaining this conflicted stance towards the rock cliches Not Fade Away employs so enthusiastically, but when the the film works in this regard, it’s heartfelt and darkly amusing.

This is the first theatrical feature from Chase, who is renowned as the creator and producer of The Sopranos. While the film is mostly unremarkable visually (and a bit too murky, lighting-wise), there are some moments of genuine cinematic verve. During a pivotal audition scene, Chase cuts repeatedly between the band’s performance and Douglas’ girlfriend Grace (Bella Heathcote) as she sits listening on the stairs—outside the room, where the arm-candy belongs. The camera pushes in slowly on Grace’s face as drummer-turned-vocalist Douglas pours out his heart in a Dylan-like warble, and her expression is a marvelously enigmatic thing. It at once says, “This song is amazing, and I am hopelessly in love with this man,” and “I absolutely do not want to spend my life waiting around obediently, smoking in the stairwell with the other girlfriends.” Another highlight occurs late in film, as newly-arrived Douglas wanders predawn 1968 Los Angeles in a post-party haze. It’s a fantastically moody sequence, capped by a creepy moment where he wisely turns down a ride from a Manson Family-esque couple. It feels for all the world like a 1970s horror film is twitching insistently at the margins of Chase’s 60’s period piece.

The primary problem with Not Fade Away is that Chase’s affection for musicians and this particular period in American history are so strong that he can’t sustain the narrative and thematic nerve that the story needs. The film is positively brimming with 1960s cliches, right down to the breakfast table quarrels about civil rights and the Vietnam War, and when the film fumbles the sincerity-satire balance, it fumbles hard. Occasionally, the story becomes downright predictable, exasperating, and even boring, as Douglas and his bandmates proceed through their expected arcs, while the adults mutter their disapproval at this whole rock-n-roll nonsense. There is even an obligatory concession to the Dark Side of the ‘60s in the person of Grace’s perpetually dosed, possibly mentally ill sister Joy (Dominique McElligot). The aforementioned Manson couple, glimpsed only briefly, leave a far nastier mark than scene after scene of Joy’s cartoonish, Luna Lovegood eccentricities and drug-fueled unraveling.

Ultimately, the film’s determination to tell an atypical rock saga is more asserted than expressed. The tale of the Twilight Zones is essentially the story told by every Behind the Music episode, save that the group in question never got a recording contract and never escaped the purgatory of friends’ basements and high school auditoriums. Chase at times finds ways to cunningly upend the expectations of this formula, as when the band suffers an apparent Duane Allman-style tragedy that u-turns in a deflating, oddly funny way. In the main, however, the film presents all the usual contours of its subgenre, and without the liveliness that might excuse such excessive reliance on tropes. There are creative differences, naturally, and spats about drug use and women and What’s Best for the Band. Most of the melodrama revolves around cluelessly pompous guitarist Eugene (Jack Huston), who dismisses Douglas’ original songs, misbehaves sophomorically on stage, and pouts when he is (justifiably) supplanted as lead vocalist. This hackneyed dimension to the story is wearisome, and ultimately dispiriting, given that Chase provides glimpses of a far more compelling and courageous take on the grizzled Band Movie template.

Compliance

2012 // USA // Craig Zobel // August 22, 2012 // Digital Theatrical Projection (Landmark Tivoli Theater)

More often than not, the declaration "Inspired by True Events" serves as a marker that the film in question will, in fact, bear little resemblance to reality. In the case of writer-director Craig Zobel's discomfiting, slow-motion thriller Compliance, however, the resemblance is fairly uncanny, at least as far as narrative features go. Zobel revises the setting from the McDonalds in Kentucky where the events actually took place to a fictional "ChickWich" in Ohio. He also changes the names of the individuals involved, and tweaks a few other details. However, in the main, Compliance is a rigorously faithful depiction of the horrifying events that unfolded at the aforementioned McDonald's in 2004. (Zobel evidently had plenty of source material to work from: The whole incident was captured on security tape, and was later recounted in both criminal and civil trials.) This makes Zobel's feature a sort of film à clef, although unlike the usual examples of the form, the people depicted are not public figures, but the ordinary victims and perpetrators of a bizarre crime. That crime was the final, repulsive flourish on one of the strangest telephone pranks in American history, triggering the capture of alleged perpetrator David R. Stewart.

Compliance introduces all of its principals in the first ten minutes or so: Harried middle-aged restaurant manager Sandra (Ann Dowd), shift supervisor Marti (Ashlie Atkinson), teenaged chicken-slingers Becky (Dreama Walker) and Kevin (Philip Ettinger), and Sandra's fiancé Van (Bill Camp), whose significance to the story only becomes apparent later. The events of the films take place over the course of several hours, on a gray, slushy, but nonetheless busy day at the ChickWich restaurant. One of Zobel's apparent additions to the tale: A freezer left ajar the previous evening has resulted in spoiled food. The mistake prompts Sandra to dress down her employes, although she pointedly does not report it to the corporate higher-ups. This little character detail renders Sandra's subsequent behavior marginally less surprising.

Partway through the day, the restaurant receives a phone call from a man identifying himself only as "Officer Daniels" (Pat Healy). He informs Sandra that Becky has been "under surveillance" and that an unnamed customer has accused her of stealing money. At Daniels' request, Sandra hustles Becky into a combined office and stockroom, and there she forcibly searches the girl's purse and pockets. Becky objects in a disbelieving, panicky sort of way to both the accusations and the search, but ultimately complies out of faint exasperation. ("Let's Just Get This Over With" is revealed as the recurring phrase of the film, either stated out loud or implied by facial expressions and body language.) The initial search turns up no stolen money in Becky's possession, so Daniels suggests—reluctantly, of course—that Sandra perform a strip-search of the girl.

Things... escalate from there, but to reveal more would be to rob Compliance of its potency as a thriller, which relies on the indefinite character of the narrative's trajectory. The viewer is not entirely certain where the film is headed, save that it is almost assuredly to a Bad Place. There are ample opportunities for the whole nightmare to be brought to a halt, and part of the sadistic cunning of Zobel's script is how easily these moments glide by unnoticed, only appearing tauntingly in the rearview mirror. It's a mistake to regard Compliance's characters as though they were the dim-witted slasher film Meat, whose foolish behavior can be unfavorably compared to one's own clear-headed thinking. ("I would never have done that...") Zobel doesn't expend energy tut-tutting the errors in judgment (and outright criminal acts) committed by Sandra and the others, nor is he preoccupied with sneering at "Officer Daniels" in self-righteous disgust. The director plainly discerns the story's potential for eliciting an atmosphere of nauseating moral free-fall, and he devotes himself whole-heartedly to the task of crafting Compliance into an unexpectedly evocative, vérité thriller rather than a Grand Statement on the Human Capacity for Evil. (Heather McIntosh's score, filled with long, wandering passages of bells and strings, assists with this ambition quite splendidly.)

This straightforward approach is both a boon and a curse to Compliance, which is ridiculously engrossing for virtually every minute of its running time, but does little that warrants a second viewing. It is, in essence, a one-trick pony, which is not to say that Zobel's methods aren't worthy of attention. The treatment of Compliance's story as a kind of stranger-than-fiction anecdote staged for maximum effect proves to be a gratifying approach. Zobel manages to strike a capable balance between the absurd and the grave in the film's tone, all without doing disrespect to the real-world flesh-and-blood victims behind the tale.

The most distracting elements in Compliance prove to be those that detract from the film's verisimilitude. To wit: One wishes that the film-makers had cast with an eye towards true newcomers. The presence of familiar indie character actors such as Healy and Atkinson (normally a welcome sight) provides a perpetual reminder that one is witnessing a fiction. Similarly, Walker's movie-star gorgeous face and model-perfect figure seem out of place within the film's greasy, creased Heartland setting. Casting nitpicking aside, Walker in particular gives a remarkable, vital performance, quite apart from the gushing about her "bravery" that any nudity-heavy role inevitably elicits. Her depiction of Becky's utter collapse and, eventually, dead-eyed resignation is the film's most singular, stunning emotional node.

ParaNorman

2012 // USA // Chris Butler and Sam Fell // August 18, 2012 // Digital Theatrical Projection (Wehrenberg Ronnies 20 Cine)

Rather unexpectedly, Henry Selick’s kiddie-goth bedtime story Coraline revealed itself as one of the best feature films of 2009: an unassuming masterpiece bursting with sensory wonders, psychological depth, and pitch-perfect storytelling. The film was an absurdly auspicious feature debut for stop-motion animation studio Laika, and it was perhaps unavoidable that their sophomore effort, the zombies-and-black-magic horror-comedy ParaNorman, would prove to be a lesser work. Nonetheless, Laika’s latest film successfully claws its way out from under the long, skittering shadow of Coraline and reveals itself as a marvelous, PG-gruesome cauldron of delights. Moreover, beneath its giddy vibe of dime-store Halloween scares lies an emotional potency that is positively startling.

Certainly, ParaNorman operates in an entirely different register than Coraline, although like Laika’s previous film, its exquisite design has a magical, immersive character that benefits significantly from the tactile qualities of stop-motion. Where Coraline was a bedtime story streaked with mythic nods and Grimm ghoulishness, ParaNorman is much more aggressively satirical. It is not, however, principally a satire of the horror genre, but of the cheap ugliness of contemporary life in general. Writer and co-director Chris Butler sets his tale in the New England settlement of Blythe Hollow, an unrepentantly tacky little town that is spiritual kin to Springfield of The Simpsons fame. The populace is generally dimwitted and self-absorbed, having long ago elected to make a quick buck off its history of Puritan witch-hanging with a proliferation of burger joints and tchotchke shops.

One would think that grade-schooler Norman (Kodi Smit-McPhee), as a zombie movie aficionado, would be at home in a town where the spooky has been rendered banal and kitschy. Alas: Norman possesses a talent for seeing and speaking to ghosts, and while this ability has enabled him to maintain a relationship with his departed grandmother (the marvelous Elaine Stritch), it has alienated him from his living family and peers. His father (Jeff Garlin) and mother (Leslie Mann) react to Norman’s claims of otherworldly socializing with hostility and anxiousness, respectively, while his narcissistic teen sister Courtney (Anna Kendrick) simply sneers and huffs. School, meanwhile, is a gauntlet of ostracism and bullying, the latter perpetrated chiefly by mean-spirited lunk Alvin (Chrispterh Mintz-Plasse). Friends are in short supply, which is perhaps why Norman reacts with bafflement to the genial entreaties of cheerful, rotund schoolmate Neil (Tucker Albrizzi).

Mystery worms its way into Norman’s unhappy routine when his batty, hygiene-challenged uncle Mr. Penderghast (John Goodman) approaches him, offering dire warnings liberally sprinkled with mad cackling. Blythe Hollow, it turns out, is afflicted by an ancient curse that Mr. Penderghast holds at bay through an annual ritual, and it is presently Norman’s turn to take over for his uncle. Naturally, the curse is connected to the town’s legend of the hanged witch, and, naturally, the Real Story is nothing like the sanitized tale presented in the annual school pageant for which Norman and Neil are currently rehearsing. Unfortunately, the under-prepared Norman ends up fumbling his curse-warding duties, and things go pear-shaped awfully fast. Seven remorseless Puritan zombies rise from the grave and lurch towards town, while a storm of crackling black magic begins to gather…

There's quite a bit going on beneath ParaNorman's screwball surface, but the film hangs together remarkably well. Butler and co-director Sam Fell mostly keep the broad, dialed-up comedic horror in the foreground. To be sure, the film makes space for moodier, atmospheric scares and more than a few emotionally wrenching moments. However, ParaNorman's diverse elements cohere that much more effectively because the viewer knows that satirical jabs and wacky zombie gags lie waiting in the wings, ready to shamble onscreen at a moment's notice. Ultimately, the film is attuned to the wavelength personified by Norman himself: the fearless kid who adores the freakish and revolting, and holds very little sacred. ParaNorman gets plenty of mileage out supernatural-related humor, but also out of poking fun the rampant stupidity, gluttony, and propensity for violence in American culture. That's a fairly nasty stance for what is theoretically a family film, and the result feels like an uncanny cross between Idiocracy, Beetlejuice, and an Abbott and Costello monster feature.

The film's phenomenal design reflects its cynical bent: every character is a grotesque, even the ones who are theoretically intended to be “attractive,” such as apple-bottomed cheerleader Courtney, and her latest romantic infatuation, Neil's none-too-bright bodybuilding older brother Mitch (Casey Affleck). Equally vital are the environments, which exhibit a remarkable level of detail—Norman's zombie-themed bedroom in particular is a day-glo wonderland of eye-popping minutiae—and establish a dense, amusingly garish substrate for the film's nightmarish events. The filmmakers even manage to work in allusions to classic horror films without being smug and detached about it. (One particular visual nod to Halloween is quite satisfying, and placed at an entirely appropriate moment.)

At times, it becomes glaringly apparent that ParaNorman's narrative is fueled more by momentum and laughs than by dramatic urgency. The exact mortal threat posed by seven wobbly zombies is never quite clarified, and the characters spend a good deal of time fleeing to and fro without any particular plan or destination. (The fact that the film itself lampshades the silliness of its scenario doesn't prevent the relentless running and screaming from dragging in spots.) Like The Simpsons, however, ParaNorman accomplishes the deft feat of being a mildly acidic send-up of, well, everything awful about America, while also making space for earnest emotional beats. Norman's loneliness is palpable without veering into adolescent miserablism, and the risks he eventually takes for a town that barely tolerates him reveal a selflessness and wisdom that is truly heroic.

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the film is its message, which is both stridently anti-bullying and critical of fear-based reasoning. Moreover, the film ties these two threads together expertly, illustrating that cruelty in the adult world is rooted in the same cultural and personal fearfulness that drives pint-sized bullies like Alvin. Butler and Fell work this theme in sneakily, seeding the early scenes with lines that at first seem like pablum from an after-school special, but are later revealed as key psychological observations that relate directly to the tale of the witch's curse. ParaNorman's poignancy and the surprising gravity of its lessons are driven home with a stunning reveal that occurs roughly at the beginning of the third act. Nothing in any film in 2012—animated or live-action, kid-friendly or adult-serious—has come close to equalling the affecting gut-punch of that moment, and for that alone, ParaNorman is a welcome treat.