Cinemonkey

Box Office Report at Motley Fool

Linked here is my weekend box office report for Motley Fool.

 

 

 

Head Case

Based on a small sample of films so far, the 35th annual Portland International Film Festival is one of the most violent in memory. It's not gunplay, but gross, ugly, physical violence of a cruelly imaginative sort. In the British "miserabalist" horror film, Kill List, a man is brutally beaten to death in his kitchen. In Snowtown, serial killers torture a man slowly in a bathroom with hammers. Now, in Bullhead, something horrible happens to a kid.


The incident happens about halfway through the film, so forewarned viewers can sense the approaching event and at least close their eyes. But this terrible art of violence seems much too big for what first time director Michael R. Roskam wants it to represent, though Bullhead did go on to represent Belgium as an Oscar nominee for best film.

Bullhead (Rundskop) concerns one Jacky Vanmarsenille (Matthias Schoenaerts, who pulls a De Niro and bulks up for the role). Jacky is an existential isolate, a 30-year-old single man who runs the family cattle farm with his uncle. A shady veterinarian suggests that the Vanmarsenille family start selling their meat to gangster Marc Decuyper (Sam Louwyck), a member of what the film calls the "hormone mafia." Decuyper is dangerous, and the man behind the recent murder of a cop investigating his enterprise. Jacky, however, not only "beefs up" his cows, but himself as well. He is addicted to steroids, with the attendant physical changes and emotional instability. He is either sullen and withdrawn or RoboCop on a 'roid rage. The criminal element is the complicated jumping point for the rest of the film, which instead inspects Jacky's character, as much as it can from his glum exterior. In addition to Jacky's getting into bed with the devil, and his addiction issues, he's had a lifelong crush on a neighboring farm girl who now works in a shop for women's fineries. She speaks French and one of the film's observational stances is to reflect the tension between Dutch-speaking Flemish citizens and their French-speaking Walloon antagonists.

Jacky's steroid use is apparently meant to compensate for his lack of manhood. As a kid, a bully captured Jacky and crush his balls with two rocks as the assailant's gang looked on, in a sequence that serves as the thrust of the film's second large scale section. This is Jacky's defining moment, and a horrific one, but it's impact seems to get lost in the film's byways of a failing romance, a crime story, and side issues with a pair of moronic garage mechanics. Perhaps Jacky's emasculation is symbolic of Belgium's impotence in the European market, or of European manhood in crisis due to stagnation or the rise of feminism, or whatever – the film is oblique about its meanings, aside from a depressing or despairing opening voice over. What is clear is that the castration, taken both symbolically or literally, is too big an event to keep the narrative from derailing from both narrative and psychological plausibility.

 

Run For Your LIfe

Back in film classes kids had a tendency to make student films about a guy being chased.¹ No explanation, and often no conclusion. A guy running. He leaps over logs, his feet splash through the the edge of a stream, he looks back nervously. Yes,  these films usually take place in a woods somewhere. Someone is watching or chasing, but we never see who it is. Such movies had two virtues for their makers: they allowed latitude for interesting camera angles and swift editing, and they were vaguely "existential" or Kafkaesque.² Tales of man's puniness in the face of higher forces.

Well, these students have grown up and some have entered the film business and what they make are chase films. In the mediocre ones, as usual, it doesn't matter who is chasing whom, it only matters that chasing is being committed. In Safe House, the viewer meets a certain Tobin Frost (Denzel Washington), and in a few seconds he is running for his life. Who is chasing him? Why? Eventually we learn this, but even that solution is vague. Frost has a "file." It will embarrass people. Those who don't want to be embarrassed somehow know about this file and want to get it back. Frost is the anti-hero. He is a rogue CIA agent who turned "traitor" years earlier. His unwilling buddy is Matt Weston (Ryan Reynolds), a CIA safe house clerk in South Africa where Tobin ends up when he has no where else to hide. After a chase from the safe house, a chase through a soccer stadium, a car chase through the streets of JoBerg, a chase through a depressed area, and a final confrontation at a safe house in the country so big it could pass for Trump Plaza, Weston finally learns, with us, what the whole thing has been about, and accepts the torch, so to speak, from Frost.³

The film follows the rules of the genre. No one can wing a running man, no matter how many guns are trained on him. Bad guys always anticipate where the runner will go. Oh, and when an older mentor says, "You know I'm looking out for you," that person is the main betrayer.

A large secondary cast is called upon to stand in command centers and look at oversized NCIS screens and speak spy jargon with a phone to one ear. This cast includes Vera Farmiga in the "Joan Allen" role from the Bourne movies,
Brendan Gleeson in the Brian Cox role, and Sam Shepard in the David Strathairn part. Also on hand are Rubén Blades as Frost's buddy and passport counterfeiter, and Robert Patrick as mid-level spook muscle. All are photographed by Oliver Wood to expose the realistic splotches on their faces.

The pace is swift but strangely enervating. The slow and quiet moments of talk between chases are even worse. In the Bourne films, the slow parts are just as interesting as the rest, but when Safe House pauses, it dies. Daniel Espinosa, a Swedish director of earlier crime films, maintains a reasonable level of authenticity, but soon characters are covered in blood and it devolves into one of those films where sanguinous men are crawling toward each other with shards of glass in their midst. Why are action directors constantly tempted to wound their heroes and make them inactive. I guess it's existential or something.

1 The other type of student movie always began with someone waking up, looking at a clock.

2 At this stage, we should start blending the notions into Kafkastential.

3 Given what happens to the file, Safe House could be called the first WikiLeaks movie, just as Three Days of the Condor was the first Pentagon Papers movie.

 

Rampart of Clay

Though he began as something of a joke, Woody Harrelson has turned into one of the screen's best actors. He has the long, angular face that the camera likes, and has a drawl that Matthew McConaughey must have studied in grade school. He has a sharp profile and an ageless look, and has managed not to let baldness confine him to demeaning oddball roles.

The joke status descended upon him because he had moved from TV's Cheers to starring across Demi Moore and Robert Redford in Indecent Proposal, in which the drawling Harrelson proposed to play an architect. Adrian Lyne's 1993 film is so weird in and of itself – its cast, its differences from the source novel – that a book could be written just on its implications. No one would read it, but the book would be interesting. But a few years later with Natural Born Killers Harrelson began to show gravity on screen, and after The People vs. Larry Flynt he was taken seriously, as a screen cowpoke, a druggie, a comic actor, and documentary narrator. Often he's been the best thing in a movie (2012), and he has shown a remarkable range, from a riveting yet hilarious cameo in No Country for Old Men to kudos for The Messenger.

For Rampart, Harrelson has re-teamed with Messenger's director, Oren Moverman, a writer turned director, and Mr. Moverman makes great hay with Harrelson's look and manner. The film begins with closeups of Harrelson's profile and you realize that we have a new Roy Scheider, who was similarly so lovingly captured on film by William Friedkin in Sorcerer. 

Rampart is a bad-cop film and there have been plenty of those in recent years, from Internal Affairs, to Mulholland Falls, to Training Day, to the series The Shield, to Dark Blue, itself also taken from the work of James Ellroy, as is Rampart. Dark Blue took place in 1992 and Rampart is set in 1999; Dark Blue ends with the start of the Rodney King riots; Rampart is set in and around the time of the Rampart police scandal in Los Angeles. Like Bad Lieutenant, the narrative follows its main character, Dave Brown, around for an undisclosed frame of time, in this case from the period in which he brutally beats a suspect who has bashed into his squad car, to the later resolution of his issues.

Unapologetically racist – he would call it realism – Brown is a tough cop who pushes the rules as far as they will go, drinks heavily, philanders, and so forth, but is not a crook, a pimp, racist, gun runner, or any of the other crimes with which the 100+ Rampart cops were accused. Instead he is a reckless man whose life situation tightens around him as the story progresses. Among Brown's peculiarities is his having kids from two different women who are sisters (Cynthia Nixon, Anne Heche) and who happen to live next to each other. He still lives in back, and at the dinner table solicits sex for the night from each woman seriatim.

Credited as co-writer, James Ellroy seems to be the primary sensibility behind Rampart. It would be a mistake, however, to confuse Mr. Ellroy's story with a howl of protest against the unchecked excesses of the men in blue. Dave Brown bears so much similarity to earlier Ellroy heroes and indeed he returns to them with such regularity that he clearly admires their "don't give a shit what you think" attitude and way with keeping the streets clean. He has penned corrupt cops who he doesn't admire, such as Dudley Smith in L. A. Confidential, but Smith's sin was selfishness not corruption, not having a goal beyond personal enrichment and covering up his crimes. His opponent in that film, Wendell 'Bud' White, is a brute who cares, a hair-trigger machine you turned on when you wanted a wife-beater turned into mush.  Ellroy may be the most mis-understood novelist since Kerouac, and his mixed feelings about New Centurion fascism need to be unpacked carefully from his unmixed feelings about same.

Rampart has a terrific cast, also including Ben Foster (who is also one of the producers, Steve Buscemi, Sigourney Weaver, Robin Wright, Ned Beatty, and Ice Cube. The film was shot on video by Bobby Bukowski and has a sun-baked luminosity that matches the weary, degraded city.¹ Rampart is an excellent movie, difficult to take and complex about its central character, but given great weight by Harrelson's full on commitment.

1 Rampart is a production from Millennium Films, which is also producing the biopic of Linda Lovelace.

Shock Tactics

Critics and publicists are touting The Woman in Black on several fronts: as Daniel Radcliffe's first post-Harry Potter movie, as the rebirth of Hammer Films, as a fine deal for its distributor CBS Films, which bought the distribution rights for $3 million dollars, and which as so far made around $45 million (advertising costs are unknown). What viewers will want to know, though, is if it is worth seeing. In the experience, The Woman in Black is on the one hand classy in that "British heritage" way, and and on the other, boring, with a side trade in child murder.

The set piece of the film is a long sequence in which Radcliffe investigates the tenantless mansion, He wanders silently, slowly through knick-knack cluttered rooms. "Things" move behind him, other "things" make sudden noises. The image is dark, the music ominous. Actors love these kinds of scenes; they are the only character on screen, and the camera is usually held closely on their face. But at the end of this sequence, Radcliff has discovered nothing new, and the audience is asleep.

 

The time is the early 1900s. Cars have been introduced to the English landscape and Arthur Conan Doyle is touting mediums. Radcliffe is (the annoyingly Brittishly or Dickensianly named) Arthur Kipps¹, a struggling, widowed attorney with a son who has been assigned "one final case," to settle the estate of a Mrs. Alice Drablow who lived in Eel Marsh House. The first of the film's four parts chronicles the traditional journey from city to country wherein Kipps is shown hostility by the locals. Kipps is fortunate enough to meet the local rich eccentric Mr. Daily (Ciarán Hinds) who explains to him and to the viewer the lay of the land. In essence, the "haunting" is in ghostly form of a child murderer, her practices affecting also Mrs. Daily (Janet McTeer, currently Oscar nominated for another film), though it takes a while to grasp that information. In the climax, Kipps has returned home, but at the last second the malevolent spirit spirit reaches out and threatens both Kipps and his kid. Suffice it to say that Kipps and Kipps fis go to a better place where they are reunited with wife-mom.

The Woman in Black started out as a novel by Susan Hill (a TV writer), then became a play, and then a TV movie aired in 1989. Why this material has such a hold on the public, if indeed it does, is baffling. It is a concatenation of clichés and predicable shock tactics, with a bogus faith in spiritualism and a debased form of Christianity (we will all be reunited with our loved ones in heaven).

Though publicized as a "Hammer film," it is so legally but in name only. Hammer horror had a particular look and pace, based on the use of the same sets repeatedly and by drawing upon the same small stock of writers and directors. More important, as shown by a dip into books on horror and Hammer by David Pirie and Kim Newman, Hammer never released a ghost story. They trafficked in remakes of Universal horror films and later witchcraft and sexed up vampiratrix tales. In fact, as Pirie points out interestingly, England did not have a tradition of horror films at all until Hammer came along, and Hollywood was left to adapt the stories of Mary Shelley, Stoker, Stevenson, and others. The Woman in Black is more like an uncanny tale by M. R. James, whose "Casting the Runes" was made into the memorable Night of the Demon. The Woman in Black caters to audience expectations, offering nothing new and little that is frightening or unsettling, beyond its contempt for our intelligence.

1 The character's name is different in earlier iterations of the story.

Run, Cyril, Run

Thirty-five years ago, the Portland International Film Festival was born in a small then-new (now defunct) movie theater on SW Taylor, called, appropriately, the Movie House. This was formerly the Women's Club, and the auditorium was at the top of a grand staircase and hidden behind two sets of double doors that annoyingly opened off to the sides of the screen. The lobby was wooden and rustic, and the popcorn was fresh and claimed to be coated in real melted butter. On a folding table in the lobby was a big crock of free Kaukauna Klub Cheese and some Ritz crackers. Ascending the creaking, carpeted stairs one found an additional lobby on the second floor, with wrought iron balconies and a whole lot of mis-matched wooden chairs and couches. Before each film someone did an introduction, standing before the screen, a brief 15 seconds of fame. Sometimes it was the aged overweight hippie who looked like Mr. Natural. Other times it was a small, intense brunette with a bad temper imported from Seattle, the home base of Seven Gables Cinemas, the operator of the Movie House. In fact, everyone who worked at the Movie House seemed to be in a bad mood. Nevertheless, in 1977 Seven Gables introduced the film festival to the city and showed, what, some 80 films. The third festival alone debuted films ranging from Get Out Your Handkerchiefs, Assault on Precinct 13, The Champ, and Pirosmani, to the cinematic record of Robert Vaughn's one-man show F.D.R. A few years later the Northwest Film Study Center, as it was then known, took over the festival and has sponsored it ever since.

This year the festival boasts some 90 films to be shown at eight venues scattered around town. Among its most notable presentations this year is The Kid with a Bike (Le gamin au vélo, Belgium, 2011), the latest film from the Brothers Dardenne.

Typical of the Dardennes, the narrative is simple and begins – and ends – in media res. It concerns Cyril (Thomas Doret), who is confined to a foster home but looking for his father. In the course of his rambunctious search he bumps into a woman who helps him find his bike, which his father sold off after abandoning his son. The woman, Samantha (Cécile De France of Hereafter, High Tension, and Mesrine: Killer Instinct), who runs a small hair salon, agrees to take on the kid for weekends. They have a tense relationship as at first she helps him track down dad (Dardenne regular Jérémie Renier) who wants nothing to do with him, and then bails him out of a crime he commits with a local troublemaker, also done in order to supply some cash to his dad. But woman and child's idyllic time together after that is threatened when the victim of his crime seeks vengeance on Cyril.

This is perhaps one of the Dardennes' most accessible films. As is typical of their films, it is a tale on the run. Though tempting, it is difficult to classify Kid with a Bike as an entry in what Sight and Sound magazine calls "slow cinema," or the new contemplative international style in festival fare, because, like most of their central characters, Cyril is on the go, always rushing and never stopping to rest or ponder his actions. Here, though, his goal is simple (in previous films, the protagonists' goals were as broad as survival in a depressed urban landscape in Rosetta, and as complex as involvement with the Russian mob, in Lorna's Silence). The Dardennes' camera keeps up with these characters, gliding smoothly around a cluttered, dirty, compressed, and chaotic cityscape.

The Dardennes come out of documentary filmmaking and their pictures tend to stand back and watch and let you decide on what  emotions to feel. There is no music to cue you. There is little foregrounding and rarely resolution or climax to the tales. That would be the easy way out. This distancing can be distracting and disheartnening, and to understand the Dardennes' viewpoint on their subjects requires a lot of reflection, a scrutiny of their mise-en-scène, and research into their early docs and later features. That's a lot of work for a film in a festival surrounded by 90 other works. Still, The Kid with a Bike's accessibility – and its Oscar-worthy pairing of an adult with a child – at least provides some entrée in the Dardennes' sensibility. Whether that sensibility has enough variety to warrant the attention it seems to demand would require a book to analyze.

 

Box Office Blues

Here is a link to my box office report at Motley Fool for this past weekend's films.

 

They're All Going to Laugh At You

During a traditional time of low attendance at the start of the year Hollywood releases its – to them – detritus. Chronicle may have seemed perfect material for this time of year because its demographic is strictly high school age males, particularly inhibited males easily bullied and left burning with a desire for revenge, which also seems to be the demographic for most comic book readers.

These elements are blended in Chronicle. The story concerns one Andrew "Drew" Detmer (Dane DeHaan) who has Peter Parker sized problems. His mother is sick and bed-bound. His father is an alcoholic who beats him. At school he is razed and abused. He has retreated further into himself, and as the film begins he has begun filming his life – why is not explained, though one could infer that this person made to feel insignificant wants to leave a record somewhere of his presence, or maybe to record the abuse he has suffered. As in a "found footage" film along the lines of Cloverfield, we meet some of the people in his life, mostly his cousin Matt (Alex Russell), who drives the younger kid to school (Matt seems to be in college, where he is reading Plato and Schopenhauer, whom he likes to quote, perhaps for the convenience of the filmmakers guiding viewers to their theme). At a rave Matt takes him to, Drew encounters Casey Letter (Ashley Hinshaw), who is also filming her life, for her blog. She actually seems interested in him, but Matt comes up and dissipates the moment. Eventually, Drew ends up outside with Matt, and an African-American BMOC named Steve (Michael B. Jordan), who is running for class president. Matt and Steve have found a tunnel in the forest and want Drew to photograph their explorations. Inside the tunnel they find some kind of metallic and illuminated structure.

When Peter Parker is bitten by a radioactive spider, he becomes Spider-Man. When these three lads touch the embedded structure, they acquire the powers of telekinesis. They also all become linked with each other, so that when one of them is "in trouble" the others' noses bleed (I think that's how it works). They can even fly. In the film's second large scale section, the trio explore their new found powers, first with pranks, then to create a magic show that wows the other students, and also, though, in ways that show the danger inherent in their skills. With great powers come great responsibility.

In the film's third large scale section, the friends begin to fall out with each other. But really, only because Drew seems unable to handle success. Instead of enjoying himself, he withdraws inward, and attempts to banish his friends. When one refuses to take no for an answer, a death results. In the film's final section, the narrative turns in the direction that all superhero films stray, toward a battle royale, this one in and above and streets of the city and near the Space Needle (naturally the film was shot around Vancouver, B. C., but also in South Africa). By this point, the film has shifted from Spider-Man to DePalma's Carrie. In an unexpected ending, Drew is defeated, and his remaining friend takes him into the mountains and leaves him there, for Drew has been imprisoned, somehow, within his own camcorder. But that's what happens to comic book villains: they are imprisoned so that they can escape at a later time.

Chronicle has a tight focus. It's about Drew, and tangentially about the other friends. Casey has only a slight presence in the narrative, for this is a boy's film, and not one about teens lusting futilely for the hottest chick in school. In fact, the film may be an exploration of mental illness, and ends up taking a skeptical view of emo attitudes. Drew is creating his own problems. Depressed people tend to see things more clearly, because they brood on them more, or so recent studies suggest. They can see nuances in relationships that others either don't see, ignore, or have a vested interest in not acknowledging. As a consequence, depressed people are subject to accusations of being "defensive," when trying to explain themselves, their reactions, and some of the nuances they see. Chronicle, however, abuses Drew some more. It's as if Neil Labute made the movie.¹

The film's found footage technique abets Drew's solipsistic life. For the most part the film sees only what he photographs. Occasionally extra footage comes into play: Casey's blog footage, security tapes. But weirdly because we rarely see Drew, we know him less. Since he is holding the camera we rarely see him, only hear him. Cinema emphasizes what is seen, not heard (sadly; or rather, the sound is there, but we the viewers tend to focus on the visible). So though the movie is really about Drew it tilts towards being about the friends, those whom we can see. Chronicle gets around this somewhat by showing the other footage mentioned above, and by Drew using his telekinetic powers to make the camera hover in a virtual crane shot, especially in a sequence in which he kills his street's hoods for their money to pay for his Aunt May-like mother's medicine.

Readers may recall the Fright Night remake earlier this year. There the director, Craig Gillespie, and the writer, Marti Noxon, added a component not in the original. It's a theme one finds in life but rarely in films;  the main character high school hero has outgrown his childhood friend, who has remained a nerd while the hero has matured, to the extent of even having a girlfriend. The subject is a motivational sidelight for the film, but could have been the whole subject for a different movie. It's a painful subject, and Chronicle makes passing gestures at it, too. In fact, in a way Chronicle is a movie made by the rejected friend in Fright Night.

Chronicle² (it could have been called Blog) is directed by Josh Trank from a script credited to Max Landis. Mr. Trank has few credits. Some editing here, some second unit there. Most significantly, he directed the interesting mini-series The Kill Point, about ex-soldiers turned bank robbers caught in a hostage situation. It, too, has a thread of a theme about a character drunk with power. Mr. Landis is the son of director John Landis, and has mostly written short films. It will  be interesting to see what themes end up where in these filmmakers' subsequent work.

¹ LaBute is famous for making movies such as In the Company of Men about bullies and their victims in which he reserves his deepest contempt for the victims.

2 It could have been called Blog.

Tree of Death

The Wicker Man was famously called "the Citizen Kane of horror films." It's long-gestating seauel, The Wicker Tree, could be called the Citizen Ruth of horror films.

The reader will recall that The Wicker Man (1973) concerned a Scottish policeman's (Edward Woodward) investigation of a missing child on the isolated island of Summerisle, presided over by Christopher Lee, where the cops learns soon enough that he was the victim of a hoax perpetrated by pagans attempting a fertility ritual. Written by Anthony Shaffer of Sleuth fame, the film was mangled by distributors, buried, and eventually resurrected to acclaim by horror fans for its cleverness and account of clashing faiths. There are books of essays about the film, documentaries about its making and its cult, numerous DVD editions, and an American remake starring Nicolas Cage, whose range as an actor tends toward an extreme that the original's director, Robin Hardy, eschewed in his version.

Though the remake has its defenders, perhaps it was dismay at that remake's liberties and distortions that drove Hardy to return to the subject matter. To do so, he adapted his own novel, Cowboys for Christ (2006), a partial sequel, or at least a consideration of the same themes, to the screen in 2010 as The Wicker Tree.

The plot bears some similarity to Shaffer's with some necessary and ofttimes clever updatings. Two young fundamentalist evangelists from Texas, Beth (Brittania Nicol), a gospel singer, and and Steve (Henry Garrett), her cowboy fiancé, arrive by invitation in the village of Tressock  in late April, where they intend to roam door to door to preach the Gospel. Greeted by the wealthy  Sir Lachlan Morrison (Graham McTavish) and his wife Delia (Jacqueline Leonard), they seem oblivious to the hostile behavior of the citizens. Steve impresses the locals with his "Christian" card tricks, and the village ends up impressed with Beth's singing. Beth is invited to be the May Queen, and Steve to be the Laddie, which requires that he be hunted like a fox by the gentry, only to receive a coprophagic fate for his troubles.

Eventually we learn that the people of Tressock suffer from infertility. There is only one child in the village. The cause of this blight is the nuclear reactor built by Morrison nearby, where radioactive water has seeped into the lower water tablets. Unaware of the real reason, some of the women attribute their inability to have children to serious under-fucking, such as Lolly (Honeysuckle Weeks), who tries to compensate with multi-coupling sessions with the local constabulary. Steve comes upon Lolly one morning as she is bathing in the local river, and she seduces him away from his vow of chastity with Beth.¹ Fans of Ms. Weeks from her role as Samantha Stewart on Foyle's War will see a character very much different from her – and see a lot of her.

Under the misdirecting influence of Morrison, the people of Tressock are sun worshipers, putting their hope in Sulis to save their future. In this way, The Wicker Tree mimics Citizen Ruth by pitting two brands of extreme moral conduct, the chastity embracing young saving themselves for marriage (like the kids in the horror satire Teeth), and the desperate characters whose view of sexuality is less sybaritic than medicinal. Wicker Tree also juggles other aspects of contemporary British life, such as the wildly polarized views on both nuclear power and fox hunting.

The Wicker Tree does not have Wicker Man's surface seriousness that hides a radical humor about single minded advocates at either end of the scale. The film asks us to more or less side with two protagonists who are presented to us as buffoons, not unlike the couple at the center of Rocky Horror Picture Show. Steve is a parody of a Texas "cowboy." Before she was born again, Beth appeared in a Jessica Simpson style CW video that, glimpsed on TV, is so poorly staged as to be laughable in an unintended manner. The film is poorly staged, or blocked, and lapses into low humor.² The village has the kind of heavily manicured and hyper-green grass and clean roads found in Midsommer Murders.

Worse, though, is that some of the situations don't make sense. If the villagers want Beth to be the May Queen, why do they attempt to poison her and turn her into a desiccated statue? If the villagers want Steve to make it to a certain castle so that they can surround him and eat him, why do they cut his saddle so that he will fall off the horse before he gets there? These are just two of numerous plot elements that are either unanswered or don't make sense.

That being said, The Wicker Tree is often entertaining as it grapples with polarizing ideas and extreme beliefs and behaviors, and with the bleakness and nihilism that is typical of horror films lately.

1 In retrospect the scene is poignant, since Lolly is inviting the fertilizing powers of the sun within the very substance that is sterilizing her.

2 There is a scene in which Morrison's man Friday, Beame, is nearly castrated by Beth, and is repaired by a scullery maid in the kitchen. It's the kind of broad accent-driven humor formerly found in the British Carry On series.

Grace Under Pressure

Hemingway might have enjoyed The Grey. The story concerns a man, Ottway (Liam Neeson), returning home from a job around an oil rigger in Alaska shooting wolves. The plane crashes, stranding Ottway and a handful of others in the wild. Shortly, though, the surviving men learn that they are being tracked and hunted by a large pack of fire-eyed wolves. Ottway more or less takes charge and tries to save the men and himself.

The experience tests Ottway in more than one manner. The man was on the verge of suicide just a few days earlier, thrusting his rifle into his mouth a la Hemingway, but backing off at the last second. It's not made explicit at first, but Ottway seems to be despondent over the recent death of his wife. The crash and the taunting wolves test Ottway's will to live, and the movie ends at a moment of profound decision making, though it is left ambiguous (until you stay through the end of the credits). The Grey harks back in many ways to earlier films such as Never Cry Wolf, David Mamet's Ayn Randian The Edge, even aspects of the Stallone vehicle Cliffhanger, but what's interesting about the film is its gestures toward the philosophical underpinnings of the crisis of man against nature and its concentration on character.

The Grey has a cast of dependable character actors (Dallas Roberts, Frank Grillo, Dermot Mulroney) but you can't recognize them beneath the beards and frost so it is almost like have a cast of unknowns. The screenplay is credited to Ian Mackenzie Jeffers, from a short story called "Ghost Walker," and Joe Carnahan, who also directed. Mr. Carnahan has a checkered cinematic career, going from the truly independently made Blood, Guts, Bullets and Octane, a "calling card" movie that I haven't seen, to the intelligent and gritty Narc, which was one of the best movies of 2002. His Smokin' Aces was widely ridiculued but this reviewer liked it a lot, and it was a film that showed early the range of Ryan Reynolds, before that a TV sit-com player. His The A-Team was widely misunderstood and mocked for its betrayal of the physical laws of nature, but in fact there was clarity to the action in defiance of recent trends in cinema (Michael Bay) and an undercurrent of seriousness beneath the defeated mockery of the source TV show. The Grey is a 180 from the comical violence of some of his earlier films. It's a deadly serious existential drama and a fully satisfying adult tale.