What's in THE BOX?

Richard Kelly has been working on an odd little resume, but I like that about him. He made his directing debut with Donnie Darko, a deeply strange, but dreamily haunting little movie about a boy who hallucinates (or does he?) an evil giant rabbit. That film flopped, but developed quite a loyal following. As a follow-up, Kelly made the even stranger, and totally insane, Southland Tales, a cluttered futuristic allegory so disjointed and chaotic it’s as if Kelly skipped the main plot and wrote his own fan-fiction for a world only he knows. Nonetheless, some thought it brilliant while the rest of us scratched our heads. Now we arrive at his third feature, an adaptation of a Richard Matheson short story and Twilight Zone episode, The Box and, while it doesn’t quite have the same emotional spark of demented creativity that can be found in Darko, it has its own haunted brilliance about it.

Set in 1976, the movie opens with a suburban middle-class couple (Cameron Diaz and James Marsden) receiving a mysterious package, left on their doorstep under equally mysterious circumstances at dawn. Upon opening the package, they find a box and a note, informing them that a Mr. Steward will show up at 5pm to explain everything. Indeed he does. Steward (Frank Langella) tells them that if they push the button on the box within 24 hours, two things will happen: 1. they will receive $1 million in cash. 2. someone whom they don’t know will die.

This sets up a moral dilemma that is debated (or dithered about, depending on your point of view) for the better part of the first act, following more or less the format of the original story. But Kelly is sowing the seeds for his expanded plot so that, when the decision is made, the movie makes a leap into stranger and stranger territory while still retaining a spooky sci-fi Twilight Zone sizzle. This is the kind of movie that pulls the rug out from under you and then keeps going, finding more and more rugs until you realize you had been standing on more rugs than you could have ever thought possible. Cue the theme music.

The movie is not set in the 1970s just to take advantage of the garish wallpaper and tight bellbottoms, although those accoutrements are certainly present and accounted for. The movie embodies a low-tech terror in the way research must be done at a library, in the way characters can’t communicate quickly, and in the way that, when something really creepy starts going down, there’s not the calming promise of help a mere cell-phone call away. This is a period-piece freak-out that takes full advantage of its setting, but also its subconscious ties to the filmmaking of the time. Kelly shoots the movie with a soft image, lightly grainy with slightly smeared colors, giving the movie a dreamlike feel of stumbling late at night into a pretty good, half-forgotten and half-junky 70s suspense flick. It feels like it would make a great double-bill with something like The Fury.

The performances are nearly perfect (besmirched only by Diaz’s odd accent) for their type, the kind of perfectly bland persons who find themselves more harried and mangy as the story unfurls. There are all sorts of wonderfully cast supporting roles filled by actors who had to have been picked based mostly on their ability to look conspiratorial. Langella projects an eerie calm in the center of the plot, doing things in specific and methodical ways but with his goals obscured to maintain utmost oddity and creepiness. It’s when we learn why he’s doing what he’s doing, through a long expository sequence, that the movie loses some of its effectiveness.

Like Darko before it, The Box doesn’t quite add up its divergent strands of sci-fi subplots and even if they did it would probably be disappointing, but it cruises along with such admirable effectiveness and a shivery haunted quality that it doesn’t quite matter. The movie stirred up my fears, stimulated my heart rate, and jangled my nerves. Even though the movie lets the air out of its balloon a little too early, it still manages to finish strong by turning the finale into a nifty mirror of the first-act’s moral dilemma, crystallizing the central quandary and pushing aside the twisty, complicated plot to shoot straight to the gut. In the end, The Box is a movie of mood and suspense so admirably sustained that it left me smiling while shivering in my seat as the credits rolled.

Note: The Box would make a great third-section to a triptych with The Happening and Knowing. The three recent films, modern B-movies really, have been on the receiving end of sneers and derision from some critics and audiences, but all three have wonderful Twilight-Zone-style hooks that are enjoyably, if a little inconsistently, executed.

The Men Who Stare at Goats (2009)

The Men Who Stare at Goats has a great title and, with George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Jeff Bridges, and Kevin Spacey, a great cast. Unfortunately, it’s a comedy that’s stuck awkwardly between light and dark, soft and edgy. It spins its wheels tonally while also forgetting about narrative drive or thematic development. As a result, it’s merely 90-minutes of watching big stars goof around in a giant sandbox playing true characters, mostly (Clooney, Bridges and Spacey) psychic soldiers trained in a secret Armed Forces project known as New Earth Army. McGregor is just a tag-along journalist (inexplicably shifted from London to Ann Arbor in a pointless case of adjusting the truth) learning about the history of the group, who call themselves Jedi Warriors (cute, considering they’re talking to Obi-Wan Kenobi).

The four men provide the film some modest pleasures. Clooney is good-natured and humorous, as he usually is, here deadpanning dubiously effective combat technique and flatly describing improbable abilities including a “death tap” that killed a man (Instantly? Nope. Eighteen years later. One never knows when the curse of the death tap will strike). Bridges is basically an enlisted Lebowski who indulges in New Age hippie-culture and invents the majority of techniques on display. Spacey has a great few scenes, rolling back his eyes and talking in a funny voice for one scene in which he tries to fake paranormal powers. In another scene he will calmly pass on good wishes to a newlywed couple with the funniest two lines in the movie (Spoiler: “Congratulations. Sorry it doesn’t work out”).

Directed by first-timer, but longtime actor, producer, writer, and friend of Clooney, Grant Heslov, the movie ends up a wishy-washy mess, not as good as it should be, but not as bad as it could have been. The movie’s good-natured enough, but ultimately Heslov can’t muster up enough heft to really start the movie so that by the time it’s wrapping up I found myself thinking “is that all?” It’s a goofy, insubstantial little thing (save for a case of most unfortunate timing with a scene showing an acid-tripping soldier shooting up his base) that just never works. The last scene has McGregor’s reporter typing away, promising to tell the world what happened, then lamenting that his story received little coverage in the media. We’re supposed to sympathize with him, but I found myself agreeing with the media. This story’s a non-starter.

Looking for Scares? Keep Looking. THE FOURTH KIND

The Fourth Kind is two movies, a dumb low-budget horror and its even dumber big-budget remake, fighting with each other. Who wins? I couldn't say, but I do know that it certainly isn’t the audience. This is a howlingly bad horror movie with only two or three scares and those are of the cheap loud-noise variety. The hook is that this movie about alien abductions is peppered with “real” footage and interviews that literally push the glossy picture out of the frame with wobbly split-screens showing the stark contrast between the videotaped “reality” and Hollywood reenactments. Pardon my quotation marks; this is the kind of movie that wants so much to be taken seriously, to make us feel like it couldn’t all be false, that quotation marks are the only proper deflation. I’m fighting silly with sillier.

Milla Jovovich is the lead in the reenactment, as Dr. Abigail Tyler, a psychologist in Nome, Alaska who’s just plain crazy over this whole alien thing. The woman who plays the “real” Dr. Tyler is listed in the credits only as Dr. Tyler which is a shame because she’s giving a better performance. The movie tries to force verisimilitude with little title cards that pop up with the first appearance of a character in the reenacted portions of the film. For example there’s “Elias Koteas, actor” playing a skeptical colleague of Dr. Tyler. A little later we meet “Will Patton, actor” playing Sheriff August, who flips out over the real-world tragedies occurring in his town, including the one nearly effective scene, if you can sift through the kaleidoscope of fake and faker footage shoved on screen, which documents a very real terror of a murder-suicide.

Unfortunately, having the fake and faker footage bounce off of each other constantly makes each look goofier as the movie goes on. If this were meant to be a parody of the stone-faced alien-conspiracy documentaries that the History Channel shows on Saturday afternoons in October, then writer-director Olatunde Osunsanmi is on to something because, after a while, the preview crowd I saw it with sure hooted and howled with each ridiculous turn in the plot. There’s a moment where scary music works overtime while the camera spins around an owl that turns its head to never break eye contact with the audience. It brought the house down. As for me, I got the biggest kicks out of watching Will Patton’s wonderful self-parodying – oh, who am I kidding? It’s terrible – performance as a gruff, no nonsense small-town cop who don’t believe in these gosh-dern alien thangs. He’s a hoot, and so is the movie, when it’s not being frustratingly selfish in its pursuit of Paranormal Activity realism and Drag Me to Hell gloss at the same time. The filmmakers had their cake, ate it too, and then spat it up on the screen.

BOO!

Scaring Up Silver Screen Shrieks: A Halloween 2009 Guide

For those who don’t want to be stuck at home to hand out candy today (or have already partied), the multiplex is a surprisingly good place to rustle up some scares this year. Sure, there’s still a Saw and a remake (The Stepfather), both unseen by me, but there are some good choices out there.

First, there’s the low-budget, big box-office, sleeper hit of the fall Paranormal Activity. It’s not a great horror movie but its low-tech effects are all the more scary for being uncomplicated and eerily convincing. It’s a slow-building freak out that grows steadily more frightening as the stakes are raised and the set pieces get scarier. Every night, the lead couple goes to bed. Every night, something weird happens. Through “found footage” the story unspools, with occasional expository clumsiness and a very stupid Ouija Board time-waster, but mostly with unsettling tension. With hype of the “scariest movie ever” variety, I went into the screening ready to prove the hype wrong. For quite a while I had my arms crossed over my chest while thinking “creepy, but not too scary.” By the last third of the movie I was worried I would chew off my bottom lip. It's still not the scariest movie ever, and it's too unsatisfying to be a great movie, but it's good as a horror experience. The movie plays all too well on an elemental fear of the dark and the all-too frightening question: “what happens while you are asleep?” Sure, buckets of blood are startling, but it has nothing on a scream piercing the darkness, jolting a character out of his sleep. Let me tell you, that scream haunted my ears for days.

On a less intense, but even more entertaining, note there’s Zombieland, a zom-com in the vein of the subgenre classic Shaun of the Dead. This film is a bit less great than that one, but it’s still a raucous haunted-hay-ride of a movie. Four survivors of a zombie apocalypse team up to go cross country. A typically odd mish-mash of character types, the group consists of a macho-man survivalist (Woody Harrelson), a nerdy agoraphobic (Jesse Eisenberg), and a young woman (Emma Stone) and her younger sister (Abigail Breslin). Together, they get in to all kinds of wacky adventures and close-calls, not unlike a normal zombie movie but played with a lighter, nimbler, tone. What prevents the movie from being standard and routine are the marvelous comedic performances from all involved, helped tremendously by an uncomplicated and funny script that sails along at a breakneck speed with plenty of wit and good-nature. First-time director Ruben Fleischer directs with a light touch and an enjoyably creative visual style. Zombieland may not be all that scary, but it’s a blast.

As for Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant, it gets a much more qualified recommendation from me. It’s based on the first three volumes of a book series, and it consequentially feels rushed and cluttered, with almost too many underdeveloped characters for its own good. It’s also a movie that has way more wind-up than pitch, with one eye always on a sequel. However, director Paul Weitz (is he jealous his brother Chris has the Twilight sequel next month?) directs with just enough likable style and his cast, especially John C. Reilly as the titular vampire, young newcomer Chris Massoglia as the titular assistant, and Josh Hutcherson as the budding baddie, is just endearing enough that the movie squeaks by. It’s no great thing, but it was an enjoyable distraction on the lazy Saturday afternoon when I caught the matinee.

Forever Held for Applause: THIS IS IT

I went in to This is It with some skepticism, fearing a rushed posthumous cash-grab hagiography of Michael Jackson. Those fears were unfounded. This is a fun and exciting, moving and haunting film, a behind-the-scenes look at rehearsals for a comeback concert cancelled by the death of its star. The tragedy is not unseemly lingered upon; in fact, it’s only implied to have happened. Instead, Kenny Ortega, the man directing the concert who subsequently took on the task of piecing together the film, has assembled the footage from rehearsals and organized it to give a glimpse of what the concert would have been.

Luckily, Jackson does not appear as a drugged-out shell of a performer. He could still dance and sing, if not quite at the same level he was at in the mid-80s. There's an amazing degree of precision in his motions and control in his voice. He wouldn’t have embarrassed himself, but I couldn’t help but wonder if 50 of these shows would have been too many, given the amazing physicality involved. He’s sometimes saving his voice for the big show, but other times he gets caught up in the moment and sings right out. Many of the numbers, even in this raw unpolished form, raised goosebumps. There's a tender version of "Human Nature," a nearly anthemic "Billie Jean," a goofy fun "Thriller," a fiery "Beat It," and a total blast of "Smooth Criminal," among others. It was going to be a great show.

The movie’s simplicity, its singularity of focus, could easily be faulted. After all, there is no attempt at providing context and only once – in a montage of old Jackson 5 clips that makes the heart sink to once again see the contrast between the precious little boy and the surgically altered man – is there a nod to his career as an artist. And, of course, there is no mention of the various scandals and eccentricities that made him a cable-news and tabloid staple for the duration of his final decade. But all of this is ultimately to the movie’s credit. It’s better off remaining uncluttered, positioned admirably between whitewashing and muckraking. It’s not warts-and-all but it’s not totally uncritical. Ortega, while still remaining respectful, shows enough missed notes, false starts and bobbled lyrics to show that Jackson was indeed a human being. The focus is totally on the music, the performance, the planning. This is an intriguing look inside the artistic process, a look that reveals Jackson and his supporting technicians, musicians, and dancers as consummate professionals, eager and excited to put on a great concert. We never got that great concert, but at least we now have this movie to forever preserve what could have been.

Where the Wild Things Are (2009)

Based on the much-beloved (for good reason) 1963 children’s book by Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are had much to live up to, a fact not helped by the transcendent short film that was its wildly-acclaimed teaser trailer. So it is with great joy, and no small amount of exhilaration, that I can report that Spike Jonze’s film is a gem. It’s a beautiful playground of a movie, wild and rambunctious, scary and sad, fun and funny. It’s not only a great family film and a daringly imaginative piece of filmmaking; it’s also Jonze’s best film to date (and that’s saying something after the wildly creative, but totally inappropriate for family viewing, Being John Malkovich and Adaptation). Here kids, and the whole family, are given a great treat. It’s a moving experience and a wonderfully crafted film.

Jonze, working from a lovingly adapted screenplay by novelist Dave Eggers, shoots the film with a startling specificity, positioning the camera at the level of a child’s point-of-view, following Max (played very well by young Max Records) as he wanders through his daily life. Jonze and Eggers have said that they didn’t want to “make a children’s movie but a movie about a child.” They have succeeded. The camera can be buoyant or frantically hand-held in one sequence, quiet and still in the next, capturing the rhythms of childhood. It’s down to even the littlest things that the film gets perfectly right: the way Max builds his snow-fort in the opening scene, pausing to sneak a taste; the way he sprawls at the feet of his mother (a warm performance from Catherine Keener) while she works, gently pulling at the toes of her socks; the way he is effortlessly creative and loving, or worried, lonely, and angry.

After a temper-tantrum, Max flees into his imagination, finding himself arriving at the shores of a place where Wild Things are. They are massive, fearsome and loveable creatures (perfectly voiced by James Gandolfini, Catherine O’Hara, Chris Cooper, Lauren Ambrose, Paul Dano and Forest Whitaker) who are practically extensions of his personality. Max will be their king, and, difficult though they can be, he will learn to love them. By learning to deal with them, lessons will be learned, but this is thankfully not a story of easy moralizing and empty advice. This is also not a picture-book adaptation that goes overboard with padding out the story with false conflict or unnecessary exposition. (Why did Ron Howard think we needed to see The Grinch as a child?) This is a vibrant, messy, wondrous film with endless charm and invention (not to mention a great soundtrack by Karen O and Carter Burwell).

The world of the Wild Things is a realistically fantastical one, with sweeping landscapes (forest and ocean, desert and cliff) both amazing and foreboding. As for the creatures themselves, they are easily identifiable as the ones from the book, their designs perfectly replicated from the illustrations, but they have a surprising tangibility to them thanks to a marvelous mix of puppetry, suits, and CGI, that gives them a sense of weight and warmth. I felt like I could reach out and run my fingers through their fur, feel the warmth of their bodies, sense the vibrations of their thudding footsteps.

The Wild Things (seemingly more childlike and more adult than Max) have their fun and their foibles, their quirks and the squabbles. The problems and pleasures of these creatures are similar to what we’ve already seen in the life of Max, but it’s not a simple matter of “A” equals “B”, like Ms. Gulch equals the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz. Aspects of personalities and situations are reminiscent, but not identical, to the real world. Max is learning about life through his imaginative play, dreaming perchance to live.

Because of the realistic nature of the fantasy, there’s a small sense of danger, as if Max’s imagination could threaten to take over, yet I always sensed that he was safe, because ultimately he was in control of his own fantasy land, thoroughly immersed in it though he may be. Like Max with the Wild Things, the movie is a journey into another viewpoint. It offers the chance to view the world through the eyes of a little boy. It’s a strong sensation, one that could easily be nostalgic, but Jonze and Eggers don’t tip the film in that direction. They know that to be a child is to be small and without control in a world full of people bigger, more powerful than you. Throughout the film, there are several shots of Max looking at those older than him (his sister and her friends, his teacher, his mother and her boyfriend) and we get the sense that he’s staring into a mysterious world only half-comprehensible, so it’s only natural that, to process his feelings, he flees into another mysterious world with large creatures, one that’s only a little easier to understand but one in which he is king.

Lingering in the Multiplex: Wimpy Gervais, Robo-Bruce

The Invention of Lying comes from the mind of comedian Ricky Gervais (he writes, produces, stars and co-directs) and he has a great hook. What if the human race never discovered lying? At first, the results are hilarious with people dryly pointing out the obvious and sharing innermost thoughts (though why some form of rudimentary manners has also never developed is beyond me). Soon, Gervais discovers he can say something that isn’t (there isn’t even a word for lie) and the comedy moves to a stranger place where he can make just about anything happen because no one has cause to doubt what he says. Unfortunately, even with material this rich, the movie peaks about halfway through, devolving into a depressingly conventional love story that centers around a weak character inhabited by Jennifer Garner. The alternate universe itself becomes tiring, with incessant frankness becoming less tickling and more bludgeoning. To make matters worse, the style of the film’s imagery is nearly suffocating in its blandness. There are some laughs to be found (including one of the funniest scenes of the year) but that just makes the movie’s ultimate failure all the more depressing.

Surrogates is a slick sci-fi mystery from director Jonathan Mostow that takes place in a world where human beings live their lives with little risk due to mechanized humanoid devices that can take their place. But, as is always the case in these kinds of flawless-system movies, something goes wrong. The movie doesn’t chase down the tantalizing implications of its premise as thoroughly as it could have (though, given the barely 90-minute run time, that might have been edited down), but it’s still easily entertaining. It’s the motion picture equivalent of one of those cheap sci-fi paperbacks that can be bought to bring travelers distraction without leaving much impact. The special effects are excellent (especially the weird waxy complexion of the surrogates), as are the well-staged, well-lit action scenes that are often exciting. Plus, after all these years, it’s still a pleasure to see Bruce Willis run around fighting the bad guys. The movie's not at all as good as the similarly-themed Minority Report, but it's good enough for a lazy afternoon.