SLIFF 2013: Cold Comes the Night

2013 // USA // Tze Chun // November 15, 2013 // Digital Theatrical Projection (Landmark Tivoli Theatre)

One of the most appealing aspects of the noir genre is its sheer simplicity. Only a handful of vivid, well-worn character types are usually necessary: the world-weary antihero, the dame in distress, the icy killer-for-hire, the high-strung snitch, the underworld kingpin. The appearance of a single, destabilizing factor is often all that is needed to incite such fallen souls towards a unavoidable and usually lethal collision. That factor can be almost any unexpected element, such as a freshly unearthed secret or the sudden death of a keystone character. However, for his sophomore feature, writer-director Tze Chun employs the genre's most reliable wild card, a big pile of cash.

Elsewhere, Cold Comes the Night—and what a deliciously Chandler-esque title that is—pursues some intriguing variations on noir conventions. The screenplay by Chun, Oz Perkins and Nick Simon combines the down-and-out protagonist (usually male) and the enigmatic woman-in-need into a single character. That individual is motel manager and single mother Chloe (Alice Keys), a worn-out survivor in a slushy New York town battered by economic decline. Keys recently appeared in Star Trek Into Darkness, but fortunately, Cold Comes the Night permits her a more substantial role than a sex object for a leering Starfleet captain. Chloe is a compelling and conflicted protagonist, visibly enervated by a young life that is already heavy with hardship. Keys' portrayal leans too strongly on Chloe's ferocious, almost amoral devotion to her daughter Sophia (Ursula Parker) at the expense of a more rounded characterization. Still, working-class female antiheroes are enough of a novelty that it is intriguing just to watch Chloe react to familiar crime thriller scenarios.

Mother and daughter dwell in an apartment attached to a fleabag motel known as a nexus for prostitution and drug dealing. Between changing sheets and scrubbing toilets, Chloe spends her time sparring with Social Services and warding off her infatuated ex Billy (Logan Marshall-Green), a crooked local cop. Chloe's already-tough existence turns into a nightmarish ordeal when she crosses paths with Polish criminal Topo (Bryan Cranston), a bagman on his way to deliver a bundle of shrink-wrapped U.S. cash to a Québécois crime lord. Due to a series of misfortunes and Coen-worthy fuckups, the legally blind Topo has been stranded at Chloe's motel and stuck with a dead driver, impounded vehicle, and missing package. He decides that his least-bad option is to take Chloe hostage to provide a pair of eyes for his time-sensitive errand. The woman at first consents out of pure terror for her daughter's safety, but Chloe is accustomed to scraping and clawing for any narrow advantage she can find. Eventually she talks the stone-faced, ruthless Topo into giving up a slice of his fee in return for her assistance.

Unforeseen developments and old-fashioned bad luck seem to stymie Chloe and Topo at every turn, as tends to occur in fiasco-rich crime fables of this sort. The pair eventually discovers that Billy has swiped the money and stashed it in his own home, which complicates things, given that the corrupt cop still has a throbbing (and misogynistic) obsession with Chloe. The story is ugly, savage stuff. Whatever criticisms one has of the film, Cold Comes the Night does not pull any punches. The one sacrosanct character in the tale is Sophia, who is threatened by Topo but not subjected to direct, overt violence. Depending on how one looks at it, this either indicates that Chun and his co-writers have at least a shred of humanity, or that they lack the courage to tell a truly scorched-earth story of moral depravity.

Cold Comes the Night has one glaring narrative problem, and it comes slamming to the forefront in the third act, not coincidentally when Marshall-Green's portrayal of Billy veers from "charming but volatile asshole" to "bug-eyed, rambling lunatic." Although there is a rationale within the story for the character's sudden breakdown, the switch is so jarring and Marshall-Green's performance is so over-the-top that the entire film is dragged kicking and screaming into unintentional hilarity.

Although this is an unfortunate and terribly distracting flaw, it's not one that defeats Cold Comes the Night. In most respects, the film is quite a viscerally engrossing and formally polished work. Cinematographer Noah Rosenthal and production designer Laurie Hicks capture the environs of wintery New York state in all its gray, sodden glory, and the score by Jeff Grace conveys a fitting, doleful mood with a slightly embittered edge. However, the motel setting feels like a missed opportunity: the filmmakers fail to exploit the spatial potential of the the dingy, adjoining, nearly-identical rooms as was done so effectively in the likes of Psycho and No Country for Old Men. In fact, the action that occurs at the motel rarely strays beyond Chloe's apartment.

Holding the proceedings together is the pairing of Keys and Cranston, who quickly establish the dynamic of a fearful prisoner and cruel warden, and then work for the remainder of the film to twist the relationship this way and that. Cranston is not doing anything he hasn't done before, but he does it with an unexpected restraint and cold-bloodedness in this film. (There is barely a whisper of Walter White's boiling resentment in Topo.) Most crucially, while the gangster is more textured and sympathetic than the standard Bad Guy, both the screenplay and Chun's direction make it clear that Cold Comes the Night is Chloe's tale. Ultimately, the questions that concern the viewer are whether she will survive the film's bloody events, and, if so, how battered she will be in body and spirit when she escapes into the night.

Insidious: Chapter 2

2013 // USA // James Wan // September 14, 2013 // Digital Theatrical Projection (AMC West Olive 16)

[Note: This post contains spoilers for both Insidious and Insidious: Chapter 2.]

Director James Wan’s unexpectedly distinctive and skin-crawling 2010 feature Insidious established one of the high-water marks of mainstream American horror cinema in recent years. It did so not by creating anything especially original, but by assembling a cluster of familiar genre elements and narrative beats into a nonetheless unnerving and memorable ghost story. Most essentially, Insidious is just a damn creepy film, packed to its cobweb-cloaked rafters with uncommonly effective jump-scares, unsettling (if not terribly surprising) plot reveals, and a pall of dread that descends like a clockwork death-trap.

Insidious’ potency derives most conspicuously from Wan’s facility for crafting old-fashioned scares, which also owe a significant debt to the razor-sharp editing by the director and Kirk M. Morri, as well as the production design by veteran concept artist Aaron Sims. Sims’ work in the film generally foregrounds simple but striking characters and objects over fussy, Burton-esque phantasmagorical window dressing. Singular details such as the searing crimson visage of the Lipstick-Faced Demon (Joseph Bishara) or the gasmask-like contraption donned by medium Elise (Lin Shaye) prove more indelible than the somewhat anonymous houses (one musty, one modern) where the film’s ghostly events unfold. This bent to the design ends up dovetailing quite gratifyingly with the narrative focus on personalities and birthrights rather than the genre's usual emphasis on the voodoo of place.

Insidious also accomplishes a lamentably rare feat in the annals of horror filmmaking, in that it depicts characters who generally behave as actual people might when confronted with events of escalating supernatural bugfuckery. The spectral campaign of terror waged on the Lambert family by the entities that cluster around oldest son Dalton (Ty Simpkins) might unfold according to head-scratching haunted house logic, but the Lamberts and their allies are recognizably human in their responses. Wan and scripter Leigh Whannell mostly confine the film’s comic relief to ghost hunters Tucker (Angus Sampson) and Specs (Whannell himself). This allows the rest of the cast to play their reactions straight, albeit with a dose of horror flick hamminess in the cases of Shaye as Elise and Barbara Hershey as grandmother Lorraine. The effect is dire but darkly satisfying, like a funhouse drained of its escapist sense of mirth. Unlike William Castle or Sam Raimi, Wan doesn’t betray his relish for the viewer’s screams, which isn’t a Bad Thing by any stretch. Horror cinema needs more filmmakers who can acknowledge the hackish qualities of the genre and fulfill the fundamental money-for-scares exchange without necessarily winking at the audience.

Narratively speaking, Insidious has one serious speed bump. Prompted by a plea for help from a desperate and plainly guilt-wracked Lorraine, Elise arrives during the film’s second act to explicate both the family's hidden backstory and the rather twisty supernatural mythology that Wan and Whannell have devised for their tale. It’s an arguably essential pitstop on the route to Josh’s (Patrick Wilson) climactic rescue of his son from the spirit world (sorry, “the Further”), but it seriously disrupts the rhythm of the film, notwithstanding the presence of two exceptionally frightening scenes during this stretch of the story. (Those would would be Elise’s scribbled vision of the Lipstick-Faced Demon and the subsequent nerve-wracking seance sequence). It’s a bit like the toll that the viewer has to pay in return for preceding sixty minutes of boo!-packed craziness, which is terrifying in part due to its inexplicable character. This isn’t to say that the later exposition robs the film of its power, as the conventional wisdom about Insidious seems to have unfortunately concluded. If anything, the revelation that there is an otherworldly logic to the film’s occurrences makes for a much more absorbing story, but there’s no way around the fact Lorraine and Elise’s long-winded monologues disrupt Insidious’ cinematic momentum.

Which brings us to Insidious: Chapter 2, a work that was not in any sense necessary or inevitable given the first film’s bleak, smash-cut ending. Lo and behold, however, Chapter 2 proves to be quite a pleasure, both as a compelling continuation of the Lambert family’s story and as a damn fine horror feature in its own right. The sequel’s screenplay is a solo effort from Whannell, although he shares a story credit with Wan, and it’s a solid step up from the first chapter for one conspicuous reason: the absence of that dreaded late-film break to explain what the hell is going on. Granted, Chapter 2 still has its share of exposition, but Whannell sprinkles it more evenly through the film, ensuring that the viewer’s understanding of events is being advanced even as the scenes of horror unfold. Over on the left side of this spookhouse ride, long-suffering mom Renai (Rose Byrne) and to a lesser degree Dalton are terrorized by malevolent forces from the Further. To the right, Lorraine, Tucker, Specs, and Elie’s old confidant Carl (Steve Coulter) scurry around performing supernatural detective work. It’s not quite that clear-cut in practice, as some of the film’s best scares involve the latter group, and Renai’s ethereal encounters hold some vital clues. However, it’s a helpful way to conceive of the film’s structure.

Let’s back up: the prelude to Chapter 2 takes place some 24 years before the events of the first film, and depicts events to which Lorraine and Elise previously alluded. Responding to a fearful nocturnal appeal from fellow medium Carl (Hank Harris), Elise (Lindsay Seim) arrives at the home of doctor and single mom Lorraine (Jocelin Donahue) and her supernaturally sensitive son Josh (Garrett Ryan) in order to sniff out the ghostly presence that seems to have attached itself to the child. Once Elise puts Josh into a hypnotic trance, the boy guides her to the parasitic spirit, which proves so malevolent that Elise hastily concludes that the only safeguard against it is to completely mind-wipe Josh’s prodigious skill at astral projection. The Chapter 2 prelude is appropriately creepy, although far less elegant than the simple, mysterious roaming-through-a-dark-house sequence that opens the first film. Nonetheless, it establishes the sequel’s overall approach, which builds on the events of the original Insidious with remarkable fidelity, doggedness, and eccentricity. It’s an uncommon thing to witness in the realms of horror cinema, which is fairly notorious for sequels that arbitrarily disregard franchise continuity. The exception to this principle is the Saw series that Wan and Whannell themselves initiated and was eventually devoured by its own ridiculously convoluted plot.

The now two-film Insidious franchise has so far avoided this fate, in part by relentlessly foregrounding the first rule of horror cinema: Be Scary. Fortunately, Chapter 2 is just as chilling as its predecessor, and, if anything, is much more relentless about its rhythm of ominous lulls and white-knuckle shocks. The slow burn of the first film was a part of its pleasure, but it would have made little sense to attempt to replicate it in Chapter 2. Both the characters and the returning viewer understand the rules of the Further and are keenly aware of the malicious spirits that lurk there, so a different approach is needed, one that creates another level of esoteric lore in which to wade.

Chapter 2 picks up on the same night on which the preceding feature left off. The sequel’s first present-day scene consists of a slow zoom in on an police interrogation room, as a incredulous detective (Michael Beach) questions Renai about the events that left Elise strangled to death in the Lambert family’s living room. It’s an immensely gratifying shot, perfectly in keeping with the franchise’s sensibility of horror-tropes-plus-realism. It’s also arguably Byrne’s best scene in the whole film. Her tearful, exhausted manner is far more effective at taking the viewer back to that night than the flashback that elaborates unnecessarily on what exactly happened in the thirty seconds or so after Insidious’ concluding smash-cut. Eventually the Lambert family is released from custody, and the whole clan moves in with Grandma Lorraine until the police allow them back into their house.

Naturally, eerie phenomena start happening the moment that the family is settled, with most of the stranger sights and sounds seemingly focused on Renai, although pretty much everyone has a hard time of things. Lorraine spots spectral figures lurking in the halls, Dalton’s dreams are bedeviled by taunting voices and corpse brides, and Josh starts talking to himself and generally acting super-creepy. Meanwhile Tucker and Specs begin going through Elise’s personal effects, which leads them and a suddenly resurfaced Carl along a trail of breadcrumbs, and eventually to a disturbed (and long-deceased) man named Parker (Tom Fitzpatrick).

To their credit, the characters all suspect fairly quickly what has happened: the thing that returned from the Further in Josh’s body is not Josh at all, but the veiled crone that has haunted him since his childhood. This entity didn’t receive much attention in the first film, which featured a bevy of strange spirits but ultimately centered on Dalton’s entrapment by the Lipstick-Faced Demon. To a significant extent, the entirety of Chapter 2 plays out as Whannell’s response to the inevitable question, “Hey, what was the deal with that old lady?” Using this as the launching point for an whole film might seem a bit wobbly, if not an outright instance of authorial wankery. However, Wan and his performers do a fine job of keeping the tone and mood consistent with the previous chapter, and thereby heightening the sense that this is an actual sequel and not just a riff or a tangent. That said, there’s a gratifying bit of punk anger to the whole thing, as though Chapter 2 were a middle finger to viewers who found Insidious’ unanswered questions nagging. The filmmakers essentially pick one mystery from the first chapter and follow it down the rabbit hole, ultimately unearthing more questions than answers. Whether the individual viewer will find this fascinating or maddening may ultimately be a matter of personal taste, but the filmmakers certainly can’t be accused of coasting on or retreading their prior work.

This isn’t the same as completely disregarding what has gone before, of course, and Chapter 2 revisits quite a few elements from the first film. These aren’t so much callbacks as reminders of plot points that the viewer may have forgotten. Oh, that’s right: Renai is a pianist and composer. Oh, that’s right: Dalton is not just an astral projector like his father, but really goddamn good at it.  Horror cinema has set a pretty low bar in this respect, making it strangely fulfilling to see a sequel where the filmmakers plainly re-read the earlier script before setting down to pen a new one. (What a concept!) The only truly indulgent callback is the sequence where a Further-delving Josh intrudes unseen on a scene from the original film, Back to the Future Part II-style. This unnecessarily soft-pedals a twist that any sensible viewer can puzzle out based on other clues—Josh can visit different times through the Further—and it adds nothing of value to the original scene.

Undoubtedly, touching upon a few familiar landmarks has value given that Chapter 2’s plot goes off in such a daft and knotty direction. The revelation that the veiled old woman that has tormented Josh for over two decades is actually the ghost of cross-dressing serial murderer Parker is fairly left-field, recalling The Exorcist III’s shoehorning of the Gemini Killer between the lines of the 1973 original. Just as weird is the disclosure that Chapter 2’s real villain is not Parker at all, but his unbalanced and hilariously manic mother, who forced a female identity on him as a child and ultimately goaded him into his crimes from beyond the grave. It’s hard to say whether all of this amounts to a cunning homage to Psycho, Sleepaway Camp, and Mommy Dearest, or just trans-exploitation (or both!), but it’s sure as hell isn’t typical.

The strange trajectory to its story notwithstanding, Chapter 2 ultimately sinks or swims on its merits as a device for delivering scares, and in this respect it’s arguably superior to its predecessor. Insidious has an intensely moody first half, but it does dawdle here and there on the domestic drama of the Lambert household. This isn’t a flaw per se in the original film, as characterization and scene-setting is theoretically needed before the oogie-boogie nuttiness really kicks in.  Still, when the films are laid alongside one another, it’s apparent that Chapter 2 is comparatively remorseless with its shocks, hitting its stride early and keeping up a steady stream of subtle shadowplay, spine-tingling tension, and full-bore, shrieking madness.

If nothing else, Chapter 2 allows Patrick Wilson to descend into seething, menacing Jack Torrence mode. The Parker-possessed iteration of Josh is downright unsettling, and far afield from the faintly thick-witted Josh of the first film (“Me?”) or the weepy, sideburned Ed Warren of Wan’s tedious The Conjuring from earlier this year. The seriously nasty, teakettle-chucking, door-bashing brawl between Josh and the rest of the Lamberts is one of Chapter 2’s highlights, and a example of how the franchise approaches horror conventions from a slightly more gritty, believable angle. Just as stellar is Josh’s hair-raising confrontation with Carl, who with stomach-flopping dread rolls his spirit-talking dice to divine what object the other man is holding behind his back.  The viewer (and Carl) knows exactly what letters are going to come up on that roll (K-N-I-F-E), and yet the moment is one of almost unbearable tension. It’s emblematic of all that the Insidious films get right: we know what is coming, we fear it, and we can’t look away.

[Post-Script: Overblown accusations of glaring plot-holes are already flying against Chapter 2, but here's the only one I can't really shake: Why did the forensics not reveal that Josh was the one who strangled Elise? It's an ineffective bit of misdirection, and as far as I can recall, the film never follows up on it.]

Spring Breakers

2012 // USA // Harmony Korine // March 31, 2013 // Digital Theatrical Projection (Landmark Tivoli Theater)

Spring Breakers is a downright perplexing film. From a purely formal perspective, it is a quite handsome work, as cinematically impressive as anything writer-director Harmony Korine has created. In fact, it is far more striking to the eye and ear than its insipid, irksome story calls for, which makes it difficult to dismiss the film’s arresting aesthetic. In a sense, that aesthetic is all Spring Breakers has going for it.

There are plenty of elements to admire on the film’s glistening surface. There’s the gorgeous cinematography by Benoît Debie, who gives the nocturnal scenes a neon- and fluorescent-lit griminess that recalls his work on Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible and Enter the Void. There’s the spellbinding and chronologically jumbled editing by Douglas Crise, which cribs unapologetically from the works of Michael Mann and Terrence Malick to create a sense of dreamy reverie (or nightmarish dissolution) around particular sequences. There’s the mesmerizing sound design, with its buzzing, repetitive use of narcotic voiceover and its relentless punctuation of smash-cuts with gunshots and racking pistols slides. There’s the superb score by Cliff Martinez and Skrillex, which shifts smoothly between mournful waves of ambient sound and sweaty 140 BPM aggression.

However, beneath all of these enticing visual and aural components, the film presents a vacuous story about very stupid people doing very stupid things for reasons that never make much sense. Doubtlessly, Spring Breakers is the most lovely film ever made about vacationing bikini-clad undergrads who are enticed (with only a little prodding) into the criminal underworld.

The women in question are Faith (Selena Gomez), Candy (Vanessa Hudgens), Brit (Ashley Benson), and Cotty (Rachel Korine), who together attend a bleak, anonymous Middle American college campus. The four are short on cash and desperate to flee their dreary surroundings for the spray-tanned bacchanalia that is Spring Break in Florida. Candy, Brit, and Cotty formulate a plan to rob an all-night greasy spoon with water pistols in order to secure their escape to warmer climes—although the three conceal this scheme from the comparatively straight-laced, church-going Faith until after the fact (Faith... get it?). Wad of ill-gotten gains in hand, the coeds are then off to the Sunshine State to indulge themselves in all the Spring Break excess that can be had by straight, attractive, college-age women. (Which, it turns out, is quite a lot.)

Eventually, the days-long streak of hedonism comes to a screeching halt when the women are caught up in a police raid on a cocaine-fueled hotel party. The girls are broke, but their bail is unexpectedly paid by a leering hip hop artist and up-and-coming drug mogul named Alien (James Franco), who assures the ladies through his dollar-sign-studded silver grill that he has no ulterior motive (*oily chuckle*). Faith prudently gets the hell out of Florida at this point, but the remaining three girls shack up in Alien’s opulent beachfront abode, which boasts a poolside white grand piano, a television on which Scarface plays on an endless loop, and a truly ridiculous arsenal of firearms and martial arts weapons. In short order, Alien has talked his playthings into working as his pink-masked accomplices in a war on rival kingpin Archie (Gucci Mane). Or did the women talk him into it? Increasingly, it becomes apparent that the borderline-sociopathic Candy and Brit have no intention of ever returning to their former life of glum cinderblock dormitories and yawn-inducing history lectures.

If all of this seems fairly inane and even tedious... well, it is. The clash between Spring Breakers’ exploitative content and arty style is so glaring that the whole film just ends up feeling miscalculated and broken. Dissonance between form and content can make for a fascinating work in the right hands, but Korine is utterly uninterested in utilizing that dissonance in any meaningful way. Admittedly, the film does acknowledge the ludicrousness of the criminal antihero narrative by repackaging it in a gaggle of dim-bulb party girls. And, truth be told, there are flashes of coal-black humor here and there. One highlight: the girls’ voicemail messages to their family, which are overflowing with gushing descriptions of Spring Break’s distinctive, wholesome magic—in contrast with the out-of-control, licentious reality. It’s not exactly subtle, but the girls’ words are so ludicrously gooey and breathlessly disingenuous that the irony is pretty damn scrumptious.

Such moments are rare, however. The film’s fundamental problem is that it doesn’t really function on any level save the most lurid. Certainly, it doesn’t work as a satire of anything that is truly deserving of rhetorical savagery, and where worthy targets are concerned, it tends to pull its punches. The film is ambiguous with respect to Spring Break as a cultural phenomenon, for while Korine’s screenplay seems to recognize the staggering idiocy of the whole thing, it never takes an outright scolding stance. At times, the film even seems envious in its depiction of the celebrants’ beer-spattered, pot-clouded, hyper-sexual hijinks.

Perhaps most annoyingly and predictably, the film doesn’t offer any substantive engagement with sexism—or if it does, its criticisms are so obfuscated by the camera’s ogling of the female form that they might as well not exist at all. Spring Breakers is empowering in the crudest sort of way: by pressing handguns and assault shotguns into the hands of pretty white women. (Never mind the film’s excitement at the sight of those ladies cold-bloodedly exterminating countless Scary Black Men. Likewise the film’s almost oblivious use of lazy racial stereotypes.)  It doesn’t seem to occur to Korine to expend his energies on little things like characterization, since that might distract from the bloodshed and sex appeal. Of the four female leads, only Faith is given any well-defined traits, in that she is the Christian and the sole woman who displays a reasonable wariness regarding Alien’s intentions. Cotty is generally portrayed as the most libertine of the four, and Candy and Brit as secretly ruthless and cruel, but that is about as much character detail as the film will allow in its female protagonists.

This dearth of characterization is not merely a matter of a problematic attitude towards gender, but of the film’s vexing mismatch between style and content. If a filmmaker is going to create a scuzzy, lurid crime thriller which is set in Carl Hiaasan country and looks and sounds like a hybrid of Badlands and Heat, it damn well needs the kind of forceful script and performances that can support such a chilly, oneiric approach. Neither Korine nor his actors rise to the occasion in this respect, and the result is a film that feels almost shamefully hollow.  While Spring Breakers mimics a work of nuanced psychological portraiture or a sardonic statement about American values, it’s really just a crass wallow in female objectification and over-the-top violence. There’s nothing wrong with a crass wallow from time to time, but artful crassness requires a nimbleness and sophistication that Spring Breakers is wholly lacking.

The Croods

2013 // USA // Kirk De Micco and Chris Sanders // March 19, 2013 // Digital Theatrical Projection (Wehrenberg Ronnies 20 Cine)

It’s probably unavoidable that any discussion of Dreamworks Animation’s The Croods will reference Hanna Barbera Productions’ seminal Boomer Era television series The Flintstones. Both are built around a nearly identical high concept: a pointedly anachronistic depiction of a Paleolithic nuclear family. Still, aside from this superficial similarity—and an affection for creaky jokes about a oafish husband’s loathing for his irascible mother-in-law—the two works share little in common. How the The Flintstones ever came to be regarded as a iconic children’s show is still a bit of mystery: It was, at bottom, a retrograde domestic sitcom, and seems to have left an impression on the pop cultural consciousness primarily due to its lame geological puns and dinosaur-appliance sight gags. The Croods, meanwhile, is a fairly straightforward middlebrow comedy adventure feature. As with Dreamworks’ previous theatrical film, The Rise of the Guardians, its visual design is undeniably wondrous, but The Croods is ultimately undermined by a bland and muddled story.

That story concerns Eep Crood (Emma Stone), a wily adolescent cavegirl who scurries across the prehistoric landscape like a bubbly, unstoppable bobcat. Eep dwells in a cave with her overprotective father Grug (Nicholas Cage), doting mother Ugga (Catherine Keener), dimwitted younger brother Thunk (Clarke Duke), baby sister Sandy (Randy Thom), and salty old Gran (Cloris Leachman). As Eep explains in a animated cave-painting prologue, her clan has outlived their less fortunate Stone Age neighbors by following Grug’s fearful rules to the letter. Those rules entail pummeling potential food sources with rocks, fleeing in terror from anything unusual, and cowering in fear in their hidey-hole after dark. Naturally, Eep chafes under her father’s watchful eye, longing for something more meaningful than mere scrabbling survival.

During an illicit nocturnal foray from the family den, Eep runs headlong into nerdy-yet-hunky solitary caveboy Guy (Ryan Reynolds), who is quite advanced compared to the Croods, what with his “shoes” and “fire”. The anxious Guy claims that the known world is on the brink of a cataclysm, and before long he is alternately following and leading the family towards the fabled land of Tomorrow, which will allegedly offer sanctuary from the looming apocalypse. This, of course, does not sit well with the prideful and reactionary Grug, who until now has managed to keep his little tribe safe from the Paleolithic’s myriad terrors by staying put and doing exactly same thing every day.

Inasmuch as The Croods has a fundamental conflict, it is the tug-of-war between Eep’s yearning for fresh experiences on the one hand, and Grug’s paternal compulsion to keep his family out of harm’s way on the other. It’s not exactly an original hook for a story, and the fuzziness of Eep’s longing just draws attention to how much her character resembles a generic sketch of every Disney protagonist ever. Compared to the emotional elegance and complexity of the parent-child relationship depicted in last year’s Brave, the Eep-Grug antagonism is crude, sitcom-level stuff. There is even a wincingly unfunny scene in which Grug haplessly attempts to ape Guy’s cerebral ways, in a variation on a hackneyed “Dad tries to be cool” sequence.

Still, there’s something appealingly geeky about the way that The Croods frames the generation gap within a cartoon prehistory context. In the same way that Dreamworks’ How to Train Your Dragon can be viewed as a myth about the domestication of animals, The Croods is a cockeyed, allegorical take on the triumph of Homo sapiens sapiens in a hostile world. It’s utterly ahistorical and not developed with any seriousness, but the theme of emergence from benighted, animalistic terror into the realm of language, culture, and creativity is always close at hand, even when the film is otherwise preoccupied with wacky critters and slapstick hijinks.

Despite such glimmers of intriguing potential, the screenplay by co-directors Kirk De Micco and Chris Sanders is arguably the film’s most glaring weakness. The Croods simply can’t figure out whether Eep or Grug is the Real Hero of the story. Eep is the narrator, and initially the film provides every indication that is a well-worn tale of adolescent rebellion, wherein the plucky teen discovers her potential while also learning that Family Is What Matters. But wait! Somewhere around the 65-minute mark, the film’s primary viewpoint unaccountably and indisputably shifts to Grug, and thereafter the The Croods spends most of its remaining running time establishing the depth of his paternal affection and self-sacrifice. Dual perspectives and storylines aren’t a defeating quality, of course, but The Croods doesn’t resemble a feature that aims to equitably depict the psychological journeys of both father and daughter. It just feels like a film that forgot what the hell it was doing and decided to do something else.

As with most of the more action-oriented Dreamworks films since Kung Fu Panda, the artistry of The Croods’ design is undeniable. The film refrains from doltishly scrambling the paleo-history of Earth—no dinosaurs and cavemen coexisting here—and instead leaps enthusiastically into out-and-out fantasy. The Stone Age landscape that Eep and her family inhabit is not a cartoon version of the past, but rather a wondrous, almost Seuss-like fictional world of twisted terrain and freakish life-forms. Despite the film’s flaws story-wise, it’s damn amazing to look at. The filmmakers pile on bizarre creature, landforms, and natural phenomena with the gusto of veterans who truly appreciate the potential of their digital canvas. The film features some eye-popping use of deep focus, and the anamorphic widescreen has never felt more essential to the studio’s creations than it does here.

Unfortunately, the character designs aren’t as easy on the eyes as they are in Panda, Dragon, or Guardians, and they occasionally veer into outright ugliness or uninspired rejiggering. The feline antagonist that bedevils Eep’s family in the first act draws a bit too strongly from Tarzan’s Sabor—although it has a nifty resemblance to a great horned owl from certain angles. (Similarly, Sandy looks like an exact cross between Pebbles Flintstone and The Incredibles’ Jack-Jack Parr.) It’s Eep that invites a truly conflicted reaction in the viewer. Her triangular silhouette—topped by scarlet Roseanne Roseannadanna hair—is truly arresting, and there’s something quite cool about a teen heroine who boasts a rugby’s player’s body. In certain shots, however, Eep’s features look downright unpleasant, more of a squashed caricature than a character. Then, ten seconds later, she looks for all the world like an adorable Raiders of the Lost Ark-era Karen Allen. It’s terribly disorienting.

The Croods is first and foremost a cartoon action comedy aimed at kids, and it’s packed with all that one expects of that genre in 2013: zany, hyperkinetic set pieces; animals that mug shamelessly for the camera; and copious gags involving characters being brutally smacked around to no lasting injury. It’s effective and inoffensive in this respect, but fairly forgettable. Nimble and modestly fun, certainly, but by the dizzying standards set by The Adventures of Tintin and Dreamworks’ own Panda films, it’s tame, disposable stuff.

The most distracting element to the whole package is Alan Silvestri’s music, which isn’t bad so much as it is schizophrenic. The opening hunt sequence is scored to a strange but attention-grabbing track that’s part half-time march and part Isaac Hayes funk—evoking, of all things, the anonymously groovy action soundtrack of a Quinn Martin television movie circa 1972. Unfortunately, the score tends to switch gears jarringly: first to classical bombast, and then again to saccharine sweep, and then yet again to the manic energy of a Technicolor musical. The score’s sheer unwillingness to settle on a tone—combined with the unfulfilled promise of that early eccentricity—leaves an unfortunately disjointed sensation.

Jack the Giant Slayer

2013 // USA // Bryan Singer // February 23, 2013 // Digital Theatrical Projection (Wehrenberg Des Peres Cine 14)

[Note: This post contains spoilers.]

Jack the Giant Slayer poses the eternal question of mediocre cinema: Is it preferable for a film to be uniformly bland yet serviceable, or to be teeth-gratingly bad with the occasional bright spot? Big-budget genre films in the post-Lord of the Rings era—or the post-X2 era, depending on one’s tastes—seem to be ground zero for this conundrum. Filmmakers appear to have drawn all the wrong lessons from Peter Jackson’s epic trilogy, littering their sorcerous and superheroic features with extravagant design and frenetic battle sequences, as though these components were a substitute for characterization or plot. The results have either been middling or outright terrible.

In the latter category of awful but fleetingly impressive films is last year’s Snow White and the Huntsman. Between its nonsensical story, desultory tone, and stale Grimm conventions, Rupert Sander’s debut feature is a straight-up mess. Granted, it does have Charlize Theron vamping about in some dazzling costumes, and a handful of striking bits: Snow’s acid-trip flight into the Dark Forest; an army of menacing obsidian automata; a butterfly swarm assuming the form of a stately stag. None of these elements even remotely redeem the film’s offenses, but they at least provide some ephemeral pleasures in a feature that is otherwise a wall-to-wall endurance test.

In contrast, Jack the Giant Slayer is at least nominally successful at the bare-bones task of presenting a digital effects-packed update to a classic fairy tale. Director Bryan Singer’s PG-13 retelling of the English story “Jack and the Beanstalk”—mashed up with the Cornish legend “Jack the Giant Killer”—is an inoffensive work, mildly entertaining yet thoroughly conservative from a formal and cultural standpoint. It will probably be forgotten in a year, but the bar has been set so dispiritingly low for live-action fantasy lately, it somehow feels like a success that Jack is not a complete train wreck. That's damning with faint praise, perhaps, but such is the state of cinema in 2013.

In an aggressively ugly computer-animated prelude, the film lays out its mythology. In ancient times, an order of monks created a strain of enchanted beans, which in turn spawned a colossal vine that stretched into the clouds. The monks had hoped to use this beanstalk to access Heaven, but instead established a link to the sky-kingdom of Gantua, home to a race of cruel and savage giants. The creatures descended the stalk and marauded across the earthly kingdom of Cloister, terrorizing the populace and devouring their livestock. Eventually, Cloister’s king fashioned a magic crown that enabled him to dominate the giants. Once he had ordered the brutes to return to Gantua, the beanstalk was chopped down in order to sever the giants’ access to Earth. (It bears repeating that this prelude is a singularly hideous sequence, not only by the high standards of animated flashbacks in other recent fantasy films—Hellboy 2: The Golden Army, Kung Fu Panda 2, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows: Part 1—but by the standards of 1996 video game cinematics.)

The rest of the film is essentially just a live-action retread of this tale, only louder, longer, and less unsightly. The same events occur with minor variations: the beans are rediscovered, Gantua and Earth are rejoined, the giants rampage through Cloister, and the power of the enchanted crown eventually wins the day. Nearly every jot of the story is a fantasy cliche, but the film is neither exuberant nor arch enough to qualify as a spiritual successor to the gee-whiz fantasy films of the mid-twentieth century, such as The Thief of Baghdad and Jason and the Argonauts. It just goes through the motions, occasionally with verve and wit, but more typically with the uninspired dutifulness of a production that has $195 million to burn through on extras, sets, costumes, and visual effects.

The noble-hearted hero of this tale is Jack (Nicholas Hoult), a peasant heartthrob who devoured legends of the Gantuan giants as a child and still longs for adventure. The film’s obligatory plucky princess is Isabelle (Eleanor Tomlinson), who yearns to wriggle from King Brahmwell’s (Ian McShane) doting but strict expectations, which include marrying her off to the kingdom's scenery-chewing, transparently treacherous steward, Roderick (Stanley Tucci). During a market day at Cloister castle, Jack crosses paths with Isabelle, and it’s love at first sight—or so the film asserts, although there's little evidence of it onscreen. To Jack's consternation, the king' Guardians, led by the dauntless Elmont (Ewan McGregor), appear suddenly to whisk Isabelle away. Shortly thereafter, an anxious monk presses a pouch of beans into Jack’s hand with an admonishment: never, ever get them wet.

In one of those oh-so-convenient fairy tale plot turns, Isabelle flees the castle that night and takes shelter from a thunderstorm at Jack’s mud farm. The peasant boy and princess engage in some gooey, nervous flirting until a raindrop moistens a mislaid bean and an enormous vine begins—*ahem*—growing uncontrollably. (To the film’s unexpected credit, the ribald subtext to this scene is played completely straight and never commented upon, making it far more effective and subtly amusing that it has any right to be.) Isabelle is carried up and away to Gantua by the towering beanstalk, while Jack is left behind, neatly setting up a standard-issue princess rescue mission. King Brahmwell orders Elmont and the Guardians to ascend the stalk and retrieve his daughter, and gives permission for both Jack and Roderick to join the quest, to the soldiers’ annoyance.

Things go pear-shaped before the rescuers have even surmounted the stalk, and everyone except Jack is eventually captured by the Gantuan giants. Now that the path to Earth has been regrown, the titans’ cunning two-headed general Fallon (Bill Nighy and John Kassir) intends to lead his people to King’s Brahmwell’s doorstep on a mission of vengeance. These plans are altered somewhat when Roderick shows his true colors and produces the fabled enchanted crown, which he uses to seize control of the giants and launch his own war on Cloister. Meanwhile, the king despairs that the giants will strike before Isabelle is rescued, and so he reluctantly commands that the stalk be hacked down. (This is a monumentally stupid decision given the size of the plant and the foreseeable effect it will have on the countryside when it topples. Still, it’s not half as stupid as waiting until the last second to flee the area, which is exactly what all the unwashed Middle Age looky-loos do.) This proves to be only a short setback for the giants, as Jack has carried the remaining beans to Gantua, and the enchanted stalks are apparently capable of growing down as well as up...

There’s quite a bit more to the story than the above summary conveys, but it hardly matters. The narrative is really just a scaffolding for the expected fantasy adventure components: searches, confrontations, chases, escapes, and a climatic, chaotic battle involving siege weaponry and enormous creatures. On this score, Jack the Giant Slayer delivers, although the film is more of an unremarkable diversion than a compelling work of escapism.

Neither Singer nor his usual cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel—who two years ago provided such a visual jolt in Drive—do much that could be regarded as cinematically distinctive. Likewise, the production design by Star Wars prequel veteran Gavin Bocquet is appropriately lavish, but almost anonymous in its storybook predictability. Cloister is all Disney gloss, while Gantua is all Mordor grime, and both are swallowed up by the carelessness of the Once Upon a Time, England-but-not-really-England setting. Depending on the scenery or costume element in question, Jack could take place anytime between the twelfth and the nineteenth centuries. This is not normally a problem in fantasy films, but Jack awkwardly reveals in its final moments that—surprise!—Cloister was really England all along, and the giant-controlling crown was eventually forged into the present-day Crown Jewels of the United Kingdom. At which point any self-respecting Anglophile will be tempted to give the film the finger and walk out.

In most other respects, however, the film plays fair with its rules, presenting a fairly snappy plot that hustles from Point A to Point B without tripping over its own feet. The screenplay by Darren Lemke, Christopher McQuarrie, and Dan Studney maintains a sense of overpowering menace around the giants, and finds all sorts of engaging ways for the human characters to stymie the brutes without resorting to one-on-one physical confrontations that the giants would doubtlessly win. (The film's one fudge on this matter occurs when a couple dozen humans somehow manage to hold a drawbridge shut against the might of a comparable number of giants. How exactly does that work?) True to his folkloric roots, Jack defeats his foes by cleverness, not by transforming into a sword-wielding, giant-slaughtering demigod. This approach almost makes up for the film’s musty conventionality. Most predictably and gallingly, Isabelle is not given much to do after she is spirited away to Gantua, at which point the filmmakers seem to forget her previously established itch for independence. It’s a frustratingly retrograde story in many respects, particularly given that it’s been less than a year since Brave’s sneaky audacity.

It doesn’t help matters that Tomlinson fails to make much of an impression, as do most of the other cast members: Hoult is pretty, McShane is stern, McGregor is droll, and all of them are generally forgettable. Nighy’s voice work should be a pleasure, but Fallon so closely resembles his iconic turn as Davy Jones in the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels that the effect is distracting. Tucci sneers, struts, and waggles his eyebrows in an amused way that doesn’t so much convey malevolence as shout, “Can you believe I’m getting paid for having this much fun?” As Roderick, he alone seems keenly aware that he is a character in a fairy tale, and while Tucci’s performance matches almost nothing else in the film tonally, it’s at least enjoyable to watch. (This also means that Jack becomes far less interesting when Roderick suddenly perishes at about the 70-minute mark.)

Ultimately, what salvages Jack the Giant Slayer from middlebrow dullness by a narrow margin is not its acting, design, or storytelling, but the sheer formulism of its breathless, thunderous thrills. Singer’s no-frills, earnest presentation of boilerplate fantasy action, super-sized for contemporary multiplex viewers, possesses a kind of adolescent simplicity. Like a roller coaster that one has ridden a dozen times, it offers a soothing kind of excitement, but no genuine surprises or risk.

Side Effects

2013 // USA // Steven Soderbergh // February 13, 2013 // Digital Theatrical Projection (St. Louis Cinemas Chase Park Plaza)

Squint a little, and one can discern a resemblance between Steven Soderbergh’s 2011 global pandemic thriller, Contagion, and the director’s latest and (allegedly) final film, Side Effects. Both features were written by Scott Z. Burns, who injects a conspicuous dose of public health relevance between lines of urgent, jargon-laden dialogue. Where Contagion aimed to highlight the anemic state of the world’s infectious disease countermeasures, the new film draws attention to the inescapable reach of psychiatry and Big Pharma in contemporary life. Production designer Howard Cummings and Soderberg—who, as usual, serves as his own cinematographer—employ a similar visual scheme in both films: subtle low and high angles, liberal use of shallow focus, and a palette that alternates between chilly blues and sickly yellows. Both features make good use of Jude Law’s affinity for conveying peevish, overweening characters, although his role as psychiatrist Dr. Jonathan Banks in Side Effects is more ambiguous (and more prominent) than the opportunistic, activist blogger he portrayed in Contagion.

There the resemblance between the two films ends, however. Contagion’s novelty as a scientifically literate pop entertainment conceals a remarkably one-dimensional film preoccupied with presenting a Cassandra-style warning of real world pathogenic catastrophe. On its surface, Side Effects appears to be a similarly shallow work, little more than a cluster of murder mystery tropes given a glossy, cold-blooded Soderbergh makeover. In this respect, the director’s new feature actually has some strong similarities to his underrated Haywire, a film which also shamelessly traffics in genre formulae. Side Effects is to legal, medical, and psychological thrillers what Soderbergh’s 2012 film is to the cloak-and-dagger action picture. Granted, there is nothing in Side Effects that comes close to the apex of Haywire’s visceral, voyeuristic pleasures: Gina Carano and Michael Fassbender in a protracted, barehanded fight to the death. Still, there is a kitschy appeal to the former film’s corkscrewing story, which borrows plot elements from a dozen episodes of Law & Order and wraps them in the garish outlandishness of a Brian de Palma feature.

The bloody smears and footprints glimpsed in Side Effects’ opening flashforward shots point to a looming calamity, although the viewer’s suspicions are at first directed towards an act of self-harm rather than murder. To wit: New York graphic designer Emily Taylor (Rooney Mara) suffers from severe and presently untreated depression, a condition that has been aggravated by her husband Martin’s (Channing Tatum) recent parole from a white-collar prison sentence. Following a suspicious car wreck—in which she appears to have deliberately accelerated into a parking garage wall—Emily comes to the attention of Dr. Banks, who swiftly places her on a regimen of prescription antidepressants.

Unfortunately, the leading pharmaceuticals afflict Emily with crippling side effects, among them vomiting, sleepwalking, and panic attacks. Banks reaches out to his patient's previous psychiatrist, the velvety Dr. Siebert (Catherine Zeta-Jones), and she urges him to place Emily on a breakthrough drug marketed under the trade name Ablixa. In short order, Emily is enjoying a sudden and significant upswing in her mood, and Banks is coaxing his other clients into an Ablixa study...in return for generous compensation from the drug manufacturer. For a moment, everything is going splendidly for both psychiatrist and patient, and then the floor drops out: Emily’s sleepwalking returns in spectacularly violent fashion, and Banks finds himself in a police interrogation room being peppered with awkward questions about his treatment methods and professional judgment.

Where the story goes from there is best witnessed first-hand. Even so, what makes Side Effects intriguing is not the fine contours of its double and triple cross-packed plot, but the ways in which Soderbergh and Burns upend expectations regarding how such thrillers are typically presented. Emily’s apparently pharmacologically-induced break corresponds to a slight shift in the film’s focus, such that it begins to favor Banks’ point-of-view rather than his patient’s. The back half of Side Effects unfolds in a manner consistent with countless cinematic tales of legal gamesmanship and media frame-ups, with Law playing the part of the unwitting dupe who must outwit malevolent chess masters in order to clear his good name.

However, even this familiar premise is given a cynical bent. The expected moment when Banks sees the light and his goals align with those of justice never truly arrives. The psychiatrist remains a full-fledged antihero to the end, obsessed with proving not merely that his suspicions are correct, but that he is more cunning and ruthless than his opponents. He is ultimately an unsympathetic protagonist, a preening prick whose arrogance is both the cause of his downfall and also his most significant well of strength. An argument can be made that this is an alienating way to present the story’s ostensible Good Guy. Nonetheless, it’s an approach that dovetails neatly with Side Effects’ broader depiction of humankind as a self-absorbed species battered by conflicting urges and pressures. In this respect, the film is the airport paperback cousin to Soderbergh’s frigid, elliptical tragedy The Girlfriend Experience. Side Effects conceals its nihilism behind a paper-thin upbeat ending for Banks, but it works to illustrate throughout its running time that people are fearful, backstabbing bastards at bottom.