The Conjuring

National Lampoon Magazine once featured a “horror movie calculator” or something like that.  I am recalling this from decades ago and I didn’t even buy the damn thing; I just read it standing in the drugstore.  Anyway, it a hierarchy of choices, such as “Monster cannot be destroyed by a) nuclear weapons; b) bombs or torpedoes; c) guns; d) villagers with torches”.  I saw right away that almost all the horror and sci-fi movies I loved could be easily generated by a fairly limited number of such options.  

The Conjuring (2013) certainly could.  Does the action take place in a) a haunted house; b) Tokyo; c) outer space?  Select a.  Are the primary characters a) a couple; b) a family with children; c) a group of potential heirs to a fortune; d) a group of ghost busters; e) criminals hiding out.  Select b and d. 

Despite that, TC is a rocking good horror movie.  It has more than its share of genuinely scary moments and the primary elements of the horror craft are consistent through the film.  I would point out immediately that one of the trailers is very misleading.  It leaves you expecting to see one more mockumentary.  Except for a few brief scenes, this is a traditional film.

The Story ****

In 1971, the Perron family, consisting of Carolyn (Lili Taylor from Hemlock Grove), Roger (Ron Livingston) and their five daughters, moves into an old house.  An escalating series of terrifying events convinces them that they are not alone in the house and that the ghostly presence means them no good.  

The action shifts back and forth between their story and that of Lorraine (Vera Farmiga) and Ed Warren (Patrick Wilson), two veteran paranormal investigators.  We watch as they come to the aid of a family menaced by a genuinely terrifying ventriloquist dummy.  The Warren house turns out to have a room containing the dummy and other cursed objects.  Why not destroy them?  It’s best to keep the genie in the bottle.  They also have a young daughter. 

The two stories weave together when Carolyn Perron enlists the Warrens to come to their aid.  Along with their team, the Warrens unravel the mystery of the cursed house and the land surrounding it.  Armed with that information (along with crosses and holy water) the battle between good and evil is joined. 

The film purports to be based on a true story.  The Perrons and the Warrens are real people and, so far as I can tell, Rhode Island is a real place.  I doubt very much whether anything in the film really happened. 

Acting/Casting *****

The casting was near perfect and the acting very good.  Lili Taylor and Vera Farmiga were equally compelling in vulnerability and fierce resolve.  Patrick Wilson’s portrayal of the ghost hunting Ed Warren is crisply authentic to anyone who has spent some time in small town churches.  He looks a bit like Pat Boone.  The children were all very fine as well, especially Joey King.  

Plot/Dialogue/Mood ****

The film is strongly scripted.  The initial story of the demon doll draws us immediately and effectively into the realm of horror.  The weaving together of the two sets of characters and stories is very effective.  As I watched one of the stories, I kept wondering what was happening to the other folks.  I can’t say that there was any moment in the film that didn’t hold my interest.  

The dialogue was solid, with only a few gaps and frayed threads in the narrative.  The mood of more or less ordinary people facing a steadily increasing menace was consistently maintained. 

The Catholic Church plays a supporting role in the story.  Ed Warren decides an exorcism is warranted but he is not qualified to perform one so he seeks the help of a priest and, in turn, the Vatican.  His deference to Church orders is a small but very robust element in his character and it gives the story an old fashioned feel that is very welcome here. 

Likewise, there is an element of paranormal science in the Warren’s story.  We see the two giving lectures.  In one lecture, Ed tells us that the worst cases proceed in three phases: Infestation, Oppression, and Possession.  First, the demonic presence attaches itself to its targets.  Second, it breaks down their resistance with repeated terror.  Finally there comes possession.  I don’t believe in demons or magic, but I like the idea of such things in fiction and such quazi-scientific demonology makes it feel more authentic. 

Finally, there is a bit of demonology that is worth reflecting on.  Ed Warren explains the difference between two kinds of disembodied spirits: ghosts that once walked the earth as living beings and, he can’t quite say “demons” so says only “the demonic”.  This distinction gets fuzzed a bit in the plot, but it is robust enough to raise a few hairs on this neck. 

Visual Effects/Action *****

The film does well by avoiding contemporary special effects.  The action works by people moving down corridors, crawling through crawlspaces, and falling down stairs.  Oblique camera angles and partially glimpsed backgrounds are the primary visual strategies. 

There are also a number of devices that work beautifully in the context.  One is a hide and seek game that the children play and the mother is enticed into.  The seeker ties a cloth around her eyes and feels for the hiders.  Three times she can all out “clap” and everyone has to clap twice.  I am not spoiling much by telling you that there are more sets of clapping hands available than there should be. 

Summary

It is not impossible for a big studio to make an effective horror film.  This one is pretty damn good.  For thousands of years our ancestors lived in a world populated by invisible, malevolent spirits.  They depended on priests and shamans to protect them.  Whether we have left that world or not is an open question.  One function of horror fiction is to entertain us and perhaps enrich us by bringing the view of our ancestors back into focus.  Sit down with The Conjuring for a couple of hours and see if it is like remembering something you once chose to forget. 

Pacific Rim (2013)

Holy Buckets, but this one was a lot better than I expected.  Given that movie making these days seems to have been reduced to choreographing action sequences (see Star Trek) and allowing for the fact that belongs to that general category of movies in which giant monsters battle giant robots, it’s hard not to award Pacific Rim five out of five stars.  It does a superb job of almost everything that can be expected of such a film. 

Story

The earth is invaded by giant reptiles (Kaiju), which enter our world through a dimensional rift on the ocean floor.  Mankind responds by pulling together and building giant, humanoid robots (Jaegers).  Each Jaeger is controlled by two pilots ( or in one case, a set of triplets) who are mentally linked with the machine and with each other.  After seven years of war, the tide turns against mankind as the Kaiju increase in power and numbers faster than human industry can respond.  A former Jaeger pilot is brought out of retirement to command one of the few remaining machines in a last ditch effort to close dimensional portal. 

Acting/Casting

Charlie Hunnam (Jax Teller on Sons of Anarchy) has the lead role as our returning pilot.  Emotionally wounded but not weakened by the death of his brother/partner early in the war, Raleigh Becket is now paired with Mako Mori (played by Rinko Kikuchi).  Mori carries a heavier set of emotional baggage, having lost her family to a Kaiju attach when she was a child. 

The pairing of pilots is a clever device for keeping relationships neatly sorted.  In addition we get a father/son pair, a Slavic husband and wife team, and the Chinese triplets, in diminishing degrees of exposure.  We also get a pair of deliciously quirky tech nerds (actors Charlie Day and Burn Gorman). 

Finally, Idris Elba gives us Stacker Pentecost, the fiery commander.  If you haven’t heard him declare “Today, we are cancelling the apocalypse” you haven’t been listening. 

All the actors are very well cast, physically and temperamentally. 

Plot/Dialogue/Mood

The storyline is boilerplate fantasy/sci-fi.  Hopelessly outgunned, our heroes must overcome inner demons and mutual mistrust in order to pull off a more or less miraculous stratagem.  Think here of Independence Day, The Lord of the Rings, and The Avengers.  The dialogue is a bit better than you would expect, if not the least bit inventive. 

The pacing and mood, however, are very good.  I found that the sense of desperation was very convincing and built steadily throughout the film.  This owed a lot to the role played by the two tech nerds, who argue incessantly about what is going on and what will happen next.  Of course, they both turn out to be right. 

The real test of this kind of movie is whether it can rekindle some of the same excitement I felt when I was six years old and saw Godzilla for the first time.  It did that. 

Visual Effects/Sound

The special effects were flawless and spectacular.  I doubt whether anything as large as a Jaeger or a Kaiju has ever been thrown into the air on planet earth, let alone the one punch the other out.  The laws of Hollywood physics were scrupulously observed, so the action felt plausible without being fitted out for any thinking.  Along with the sound and the texture of water and fire, everything seemed to be suitably heavy.  I am happy to report that there was not a hint of offensive, Peter Jackson goofiness in the action. 

The interiors of the Jaeger fortress had an iron retro look, a bit like the Nautilus in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954).  Pretty much everything else, including the inside and outside of the machines, the streets of Hong Kong, and the monsters was glowing with red and blue pastel fire.  It was visually delightful, due in part to the fact that the power never went out even when flying giants were scraping the architecture off of whole city blocks. 

An Odd Note (small spoiler alert)

There were a lot of rather blunt references to Independence Day (1996).  We learn a lot about the enemy when one of the scientists mentally interfaces with an alien brain.  For instance, the creatures responsible for sending the Kaiju here are in the habit of plundering whole worlds.  Those same aliens look rather a lot like the critters that Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum waved at from their hijacked spacecraft.  I will stop there, but there is a lot more.  This borrowing is so blatant that is must mean something.  I have no clue, unless it was just lazy theft. 

Summary

There is almost nothing new or surprising here, so I can’t quite give it five stars.  It is certainly four star popcorn fun.  Box office returns seem a bit anemic, which is probably due to the fact that there is so much apocalyptic banging going on in summer theaters that audiences are just worn out with it.  It is also possible that the idea of giant robots sounds too Might Morphin’ Power Rangers.  I note that the Jaeger pilots are called rangers.  That is too bad, because this is the sort of thing you will really like if you like that sort of thing.  I do. 

V/H/S & the brilliance of the small idea

What’s missing in most horror films isn’t the big idea but the small one.  Films with big ideas are great‑Night of the Living Dead (1969), The Blob, Cabin In the Woods‑but they are necessarily rare.  Films with small ideas are rare as well, but there is much less excuse for this.  Horror writers and directors should search for the little ideas that make a character and story genuinely captivating and nurture them with just the right degree of attention. 

V/H/S is a fine little piece of found footage film making that is pretty much a workshop for what I am talking about.  It accepts the usual flaws of the genre: annoying motion, implausible assumptions about people who keep filming while they are running for their lives, etc.  On the other hand, it makes a virtue out of the low budget project.  All the visual effects fit within the realm of the video recorder, which gives them a visceral kick that is almost always lost with CG. 

The film is an anthology of short horror stories.  The context piece involves a gaggle of hoodlums who apparently make a living by harassing people and selling the footage they record as they do so.  They are hired to break in to a house and steal a VHS tape.  One of them watches the tape, on which the other stories appear.  It’s a nice setup.  I got the idea (perhaps it was a product of my own imagination) that anyone who views the tape will end up on the next version of it.  

What makes the film unusually good is that each of the set pieces (with one exception) plays off an exquisite small idea.  In the first story, a bunch of rowdy guys set out to party on the town and hope to end up making a porn film.  Two of them are typical jocks and one is the essential nerd.  At a bar the nerd picks up a very unusual girl who has astonishingly big eyes but who can’t say anything but “I like you”.  She seems to become attached to them, showing up in each subsequent scene though we never see how she comes to be there.  That’s the small idea: the girl who seems to stick around even though she is barely noticed.  The filming here becomes a metaphor for our inattention to detail.  We get glimpses of her body that indicate something very sinister but only fleeting glimpses.   No one pays enough attention until it is way too late. 

Another story is a version of a very familiar one: boys and girls go into the woods and are stalked by a killer.  The small idea here is that the killer flickers in and out of reality, much like the images on the video.  The film makers used the device of video distortion to convey the supernatural power of the killer who can never be caught.  At one point the woman with the camera cries out in frustration: “Why can’t I film you?”  I share the frustration.  I couldn’t get a coherent screen capture of the killer.  He is visible in no single image even if he can be seen more or less as the film rolls. 

In another story, a young woman communicates with her boyfriend by means of a split screen program (Skype?).  We see his face in the lower corner of the screen as she tells him about the poltergeists in her apartment.  What looks like a very common story becomes uncommon by the small idea.  She thinks that something is inside her arm and she starts digging.  This is the most inventive and least predictable of the stories. 

I wouldn’t count this among great films, but it is surely a breath of fresh, if rather bloody, air.  Each story plays with a delicious small idea and tells you just enough and no more.  I really enjoyed this film and I suggest that you will as well. 

Zombieland is a Gas!

Here is a recent post from my SDP blog.  It is a reasonable sample of what you can expect at nekakro.  


SDP has been unwavering on one vital point of public policy: protecting America from the Zombie menace. In fact, our commitment to gun rights is largely motivated by our stern conviction that only an armed citizenry has any chance against hordes of the walking dead.
So, over the years, we have paid attention to zombies in film and literature. In that spirit my colleagues Dr. Schaff and Dr. Grettler accompanied me to Zombieland. I think we all agreed that it was about as much fun as any movie we have seen this year. 

It stars Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Emma Stone, and Abigail Breslin (Little Miss Sunshine). The four are survivors of the zombie plague that has killed nearly everyone, and they are known to each other by their hometowns: Columbus, Tallahassee, Wichita, and Little Rock. Columbus, a nerdy college student who was afraid of everything and could only dream of having a girlfriend, is finally driven out into the world by its near demise. He serves as narrator and gives us a list of rules (#2: always shoot the zombie twice) that is simultaneously hilarious and worth writing down in case the real thing happens. 

Small spoiler: the zombies are pz2 class creatures. They are pseudo-zombies, which is to say, not really dead but living human beings converted into zombie-like beings by a virus. The "2" indicates that they are fast pseudo-zombies, as opposed the staggering speed creatures that once populated the genre. 

The excellence of the movie depends on two things. First, it maintains an almost perfect balance between horror movie seriousness and comic relief. Second, it is chock full of very funny, very original and unexpected lines. Example: "You're like a giant cockblocking robot made by the government," and "God Bless Rednecks! Big trucks and bigger guns."
End of the world movies are very popular. Zombies walk through a lot of them. I don't think there is much seriousness in this movie, though there is at least a vague we only came alive when everyone else died theme, and a weird sort of pro-family theme. But it is consistently delicious.