Making Monsters #9: Hellraiser

When Hellraiser was made in 1987, writer/director Clive Barker and his cast and crew didn't anticipate Pinhead becoming such a popular character. The Cenobites were supporting characters in a a gothic, S&M-laced supernatural story; Pinhead didn't have a name in the script or end credits, and actor Doug Bradley, when given a choice between two roles by his friend Barker, almost went with a moving guy at the beginning because his face would be visible. A lot of credit for Pinhead's rapid rise to horror stardom and Hellraiser feeling like such a breath of fresh air for the genre when it was released can be given to makeup and special effects artist Bob Keen. Keen was responsible for the striking character design of Pinhead and the other Cenobites, as well as the skin-free Frank after his return from the grave and the many grotesque things the Lament Configuration does to those who solve it. At a point when horror was beginning to take a turn towards irony and self-referential humor, Clive Barker approached the genre with respect for its many fantastic and kinky possibilities; Keen was instrumental in bringing Barker's astonishing imagination nearly intact to the screen.

The most impressive effect in Hellraiser is the return of Frank (Oliver Smith) from the grave after his brother Larry (Andrew Robinson) spills a few drops of his blood on the floor of the attic where Frank was torn to pieces by the Cenobites. The sequence was largely brought to life by shooting in reverse, so that blood flows up through the floorboards before two skeletal (animatronic) arms burst through. To pull off the amazing images of Frank's brain, skeleton and organs re-form, Keen created wax models of Frank's insides and gradually melted them, pulling the skeleton apart one bone at a time, then reversing the image. It's a marvelously uncanny effect, backed by Christopher Young's excellent score; in fact, when Sam Raimi basically remade the scene with the Sandman's rebirth in Spider-Man 3, he had Young quote his earlier work. It's a great scene, imaginative and fueled by the simultaneous horror of and attraction to the monstrous that makes Barker's work so memorable.

Making Monsters #8: Day of the Dead

Day of the Dead was lost in the shuffle back when it was released in 1985; in a year filled with great, fun horror movies like Re-Animator, The Return of the Living Dead and Fright Night, it was a downer by comparison and a movie that audiences mostly stayed away from. Its reputation has grown tremendously over the years - it's arguably the most influential of Romero's original trilogy in terms of the current aesthetic zombie movies, video games and the hit series The Walking Dead - and it's grown on me a great deal as well. Its grimy, cynical tone was originally a bit of a letdown after the brightly colored, comic book-influenced aesthetic of Dawn of the Dead. Now, I appreciate it as a series of Socratic dialogues demonstrating how our inability to pull together in the face of our extinction is as much the problem as the zombies themselves; in fact, the scientist characters' guinea pig zombie Bub (Howard Sherman) is one of the movie's most sympathetic characters. Of course, it's not the zombie My Dinner With Andre - the last half-hour is a huge, blood-splattered payback that feels like director George A. Romero and makeup artist Tom Savini taking their collaboration on these movies as far as it can go.

Of all the makeup artists I looked up to as a kid, Savini was at the top of the list. His inventiveness in making zombie epics on a low-budget and his work on Romero's other films (including another I'll write about later in the month) and indie productions like Friday the 13th and The Burning made me feel that it was possible to make a great, gory horror movie in my own back yard. Day of the Dead is Savini's masterpiece; the zombies are in a more decomposed state than in Dawn, and Savini goes wild with their rotting flesh, missing limbs and exposed organs. Once you get past the initial gross-out factor, the artistry on display is amazing; Savini, who drew on his experiences as a combat photographer in Vietnam as a reference for his work, never shies away from the grotesque details of what happens after we die.

The last reel of Day of the Dead, when the zombies break into the underground mine that has served as the characters' fortress and overpower the cast of soldiers, is an orgy of characters being torn limb from limb, most memorably the revolting comeuppance of the film's antagonist, Col. Rhodes (Joe Pilato). Pilato is perfectly hateful as Rhodes, and it's sickly satisfying to see him torn to bloody pieces by the undead - Savini sells the effect of Pilato's head protruding from a prosthetic body with real animal organs and viscera, made extra-gnarly after the refrigerator they were stored in before filming the scene was accidentally left unplugged for the weekend (the extras who willingly gnawed on rotten pig parts for the sake of art deserved some kind of award). It's a terrific ending for people with a certain (sick) point of view, an ultragory grand finale capped off by Pilato's classic delivery of Rhodes' final line: "Choke on 'em!"

Making Monsters #7: The Fury

The Fury plays like a Super Size version of Carrie, director Brian De Palma's previous movie. The story of an ex-CIA agent (Kirk Douglas) whose son (Andrew Stevens) is kidnapped by a shadowy government agency because of his telekinetic powers takes the supernatural hook of Carrie - which was the basis in that film for a more intimate story about Carrie White being tormented to her breaking point - and adds a larger cast of characters, a globe-trotting conspiracy plot, larger-scale action sequences and a full orchestral score by John Williams. The movie was a modest success in 1978, but it remains very underrated and a favorite among De Palma fans for the way he brings his subversive, cynical sense of humor to a popcorn movie. De Palma also uses the bigger budget of The Fury to stage effects sequences, like the complicated rear-projection shot that places Amy Irving (as a young telekinetic woman) in the foreground while her vision of what happened to Douglas' son fills the rest of the frame, that magnify the director's lifelong obsession with the consequences of seeing.

The work of special effects artist A.D. Flowers and makeup artists William Tuttle and Rick Baker (on one of his first studio productions) comes to a literally explosive climax at the end of the film, when Irving's character uses her powers to blow John Cassavetes' villainous secret agent to smithereens. Whereas the exploding head scene in Scanners is a classic example of gross-out, the effect in The Fury is weirdly exhilarating, both because Cassavetes' character is a son of a bitch and because of the hilariously macabre feeling that De Palma made the entire film to arrive at the moment of blowing the godfather of independent cinema into a million pieces. Pauline Kael referred to the ending as "an orgasm," and it's clear that De Palma, who perfected the shock ending two years earlier with Carrie, wants to get his audience off. The effect is simple enough - a dummy rigged with explosives - but the most impressive trick in the scene is one of the most effective moments of misdirection in cinema. Just before Cassavetes blows up, he knocks over a lamp, so that we're distracted at the moment of the switch. It's a brilliant sleight of hand in the service of a fantastically gory magic trick. There doesn't appear to be a clip of the ending of The Fury on YouTube; if you haven't seen it, I can't recommend it highly enough.

Making Monsters #6: The Exorcist

The Exorcist was perhaps the biggest step forward in horror being treated as a serious genre by critics and audiences, largely thanks to the verisimilitude director William Friedkin and his cast and crew brought to every aspect of the film. While it was and remains a very explicit film, its director clearly as eager to goose his audience as any disreputable B-movie director, even its most shocking moments are presented with a clear emphasis on credibility. This is evident in the approach that informed Dick Smith's design of the makeup appliances for the possessed Regan McNeil. Multiple makeup tests that skewed more towards the fantastic, giving actress Linda Blair a more witchlike appearance, were rejected because they looked ridiculous and unbelievable when juxtaposed against the realistic approach of her co-stars' performances. Smith's approach was ultimately informed by the early scenes in Blatty's script of Regan being compelled by the demon to mutilate her body; the majority of Blair's (and double Eileen Dietz's) character design is made up of scratches and wounds that Regan gave herself. Smith's iconic design fit in perfectly with the underlying source of the film's horror, which is not a horns-and-pitchfork devil as much as it is the idea of a sweet, innocent young girl suddenly and inexplicably turning into a vulgar, perverted monster.

After four decades, The Exorcist has barely dated in its ability to freak out audiences. The reasons why are evident in the famous head-turning effect that happens twice in the movie, most memorably during the infamous crucifix scene. It's over an hour into the movie, and the audience has already been assaulted by Regan's sudden profanity and the effects, particularly the thrashing bed that caused Blair real pain, that depict the girl's violent transformation. All hell has broken loose before Regan's head turns 180 degrees and asks her terrified mother, with Burke Dennings' voice, "Do you know what she did? Your cunting daughter?" And the sight itself is so frighteningly uncanny, aided immensely by sound effects artist Gonzalo Gavira (who Friedkin located and hired based on his sound design for El Topo), who added the sound of a cracked leather wallet being twisted over the image of Regan's head turning; the sound design is famously as important to the entire film's success as the makeup and special effects. So we barely register the cutaway, necessary in the pre-CGI days, to match Blair's performance with the dummy necessary to sell the effect. Friedkin and everyone else involved have persuaded us to believe in the reality of the film; we don't see the strings, because we're completely along for the ride.

Making Monsters #5: Eraserhead

Eraserhead, along with a few of David Lynch's other films, often pops up on lists of the best horror movies even though it's not a horror movie as we generally understand the term (and it's actually quite funny from a certain point of view). But while Eraserhead doesn't feature supernatural beasts or a masked killer picking off one horny teenager at a time, it's frightening in a more abstract, existential way, a feature-length nightmare as dreamt by a mysterious technician in space who never wakes up. Eraserhead was Lynch's first feature, the first in a line of movies that explore the darkest aspects of human nature in a way that is as beautiful as it is horrifying. Much of the impact of his films can be attributed to Lynch's very personal approach to filmmaking, both in his gift for seemingly transferring the contents of his imagination to the screen intact and in his direct, hands-on involvment in nearly every aspect of the filmmaking process. Many of his collaborators have shared anecdotes about how Lynch is always eager to solve a problem on set by creating a prop or set decoration out of available materials, or writing the lyrics for "Mysteries of Love" during a lunch break on Blue Velvet when the production was unable to license This Mortal Coil's "Song to the Siren." This was never more true than on Eraserhead, which Lynch shot a little at a time, with very limited money and resources, over the course of four years. It was the typical no-budget situation with a director wearing many different hats, and Lynch's fingerprints are both figuratively and literally all over the movie. 

There's no creepier or more memorable example of Lynch's hands-on involvement than Eraserhead's infamous baby ("They're not even sure it is a baby!"). After his wife bails, nebbishy factory worker Henry Spencer (Jack Nance) is left to take care of this squealing, alien-looking thing with black eyes; the baby's barely-there facial features and squirming, tortured expressions are as creepy to audiences discovering the movie today as they were to midnight audiences 35 years ago. The meaning of the baby and the movie remain elusive - saying Eraserhead is about the fear of fatherhood is a start, but it doesn't begin to explain everything. Lynch is famously reluctant to discuss the meaning of his work; with Eraserhead, he has always refused to explain how he created the baby as well, which has helped it retain much of its power. The thing looks like a crude puppet, but it has a sticky organic quality as well that has led people over the years to speculate that it's made from a cow fetus or other once-living tissue. I Googled "cow fetus" and don't think that's what it is (also, blechhh), but that the idea is even worth fact-checking says all you need to know. Even if the baby is as basic an effect as the models used to bring Kong to life, it retains an unsettling believability; we don't see the strings, we only see a creature born directly from Lynch's and our nightmares. And that's before it gets sick...

Making Monsters #4: Dead Alive

Long before the Oscar-winning, blockbusting Lord of the Rings trilogy astonished the world with the meticulous, cutting-edge effects that brought Middle Earth and many of its denizens to life, Peter Jackson was already a skilled and versatile director of effects-driven movies. The only differences were, instead of his own top-of-the-line visual effects house and large-scale fantasy epics, Jackson was baking makeup appliances in his parents' oven for the low-budget, gross-out horror comedies Bad Taste and Meet the Feebles. For 1992's Braindead (titled Dead Alive in the U.S.), Jackson worked with professional medic and makeup artist Bob McCarron (who would later work on The Matrix and other big-budget studio productions) to bring his ultragory zombie comedy to life. In Dead Alive, milquetoast Lionel (Timothy Balme) struggles to continue to care for his mother Vera (Elizabeth Moody) after a bite from a Sumatran rat monkey turns her into one of the living dead. As Vera infects other characters and the situation rapidly escalates, Jackson orchestrates a nonstop series of bloody sight gags that are so over-the-top disgusting that they become hilarious - he matches the Looney Tunes-inspired slapstick approach to splatter of Sam Raimi and takes it up to eleven. Oh, and there's also a priest who does kung fu.

When the zombies break loose at a house party in the last half hour, the film becomes like the most inventive and lovingly crafted realization of an extremely gifted ten-year-old's most horrifying notebook sketches, culminating in the most hilariously literal, disgusting Freudian metaphor ever committed to celluloid. But before that, we're treated with the movie's showstopper, as Lionel, equipped with an upturned lawnmower, hacks a few dozen zombies to smithereens. It's a pretty straightforward effect - a lot of writhing extras, plenty of prop limbs and organs and fake blood pumped through the lawnmower at a rate of five gallons per second. It's the sheer showmanship that makes the scene so satisfying - it's Jackson taking the zombie movie as far as it can go, a bloodbath that, like a splatter version of Sideshow Bob stepping on rake after rake, takes a gross-out joke past the point of its novelty, until it's completely repetitive and numbing, and then past that  until the sheer scale of the bloodbath achieves a sublime, demented kind of genius. That Jackson just stretched one 300-page children's book into three movies suggests, sadly, that he doesn't have another Dead Alive in him; hopefully, as with some of the best moments in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, his new trio will contain flashes of the gifted young filmmaker who knew how to craft the perfect sick joke.

Making Monsters #3: King Kong

One of the most iconic movie monsters of all time - a beast known and loved by audiences around the world - was an 18-inch model made of aluminum, foam rubber, latex and rabbit fur (two models, actually). Along with an assist from two large-scale ape hands and a large-scale bust for specific effects shots, those two models were responsible for playing Kong, the eighth wonder of the world. That we believe what was basically a crude action figure was a fearsome creature, yet also a character capable of conveying emotions, is thanks to the meticulous attention and time its creators - directors Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack and effects artist Willis O'Brien - put into bringing Kong to life.

Inspired by Cooper's lifelong fascination with gorillas and love for pulpy adventure stories (their previous collaboration was The Most Dangerous Game), Cooper, Schoedsack hired screenwriter Edgar Wallace to realize Cooper's basic premise - a giant ape is found on a mysterious island, is transported to America and terrorizes New York City. Principal photography lasted for eight months due to the painstaking care taken to get the live-action footage just right for composite shots involving optical effects (basically, to blend the 18-inch "giant ape" believably into each frame, not to mention the dinosaur Kong fights to the death). Cooper shot hundreds of setups for sequences like Kong's rampage through the island natives' village to convincingly pull of each effects gag - he was like the Michael Bay, only way better. Many scenes were reshot later into production in order to make them more convincing. At one point, Fay Wray sat in a tree for almost 24 hours to match her reactions with the stop-motion footage of the Kong/dinosaur footage just right. And O'Brien's work on the film went beyond animating Kong; he brought to life an entire mysterious island by combining live-action backgrounds with matte paintings and animation plates that created movement and depth through the entire background. These guys didn't just create a big ape, they brought an entire world to life.

The actual effects techniques they used were old-school even then - they'd been around since the silent era. But even though King Kong has been remade twice, that 18-inch model remains easily as compelling as state-of-the-art animatronics or motion-capture. We can see the seams and imperfections when we watch King Kong now, but all visual effects look dated eventually. What shines through is the care Kong's makers put into his creation - they believed in the big lug, and so do we. As the 1976 remake's producer Dino De Laurentiis famously put it, "No one cry when Jaws die. But when the monkey die, people gonna cry."

Making Monsters #2: Bride of Frankenstein

In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the monster is said to be eight feet tall, with flowing black hair and pale, translucent skin; beyond that, the monster's appearance is mostly left to our imaginations. If, when reading the book, one cannot help imagining the creature with bolts in his neck and a severe flat top, this is a tribute to the enduring power of the work of Boris Karloff and makeup artist Jack Pierce, who brought the monster to life in James Whale's classic 1931 film. Pierce was one of the first big names in makeup effects - after working on silents like The Man Who Laughs, Pierce was the makeup artist on Tod Browning's Dracula, which led to him working on all of the iconic Universal horror characters of the '30s and '40s (including one we'll take a look at later in this series). For Frankenstein, Pierce studied anatomy and surgery before deciding that Dr. Frankenstein would cleanly saw off the top of the monster's head and clamp it shut, after inserting the brain, like a box lid. The effect is obviously exaggerated, but that doesn't make it any less memorable; using grease paint, cotton, gum and other out-of-the-kit techniques, Pierce created one of the most enduring monsters in movie history.

Bride of Frankenstein is a sequel that surpasses the original - it's sharply funny and more thematically complex. And the design of Elsa Lanchester as the Bride is a lesson in how sometimes, with monster makeup, less is more. The look of the Bride consists of pale makeup, raised brows, jagged scars across her throat and her unforgettable hairdo, a Marcel wave over a wire frame, but she's nearly as iconic as Karloff's monster. While many of the effects I'll be covering this month are elaborate show-stoppers, the Bride is a great reminder of the power of suggestion, not to mention an actress who knows how to hiss.

Making Monsters #1: Scanners

Mention the movie Scanners to most people, even those who haven’t seen it, and this will almost certainly be the first scene that comes to mind. David Cronenberg’s 1981 thriller about war between people with telekinetic abilities isn’t one of his best films, but the early scene in which leader of the Scanner rebellion Darryl Revok (Michael Ironside) turns the tables in grisly fashion on a fellow Scanner (Louis Del Grande) during a demonstration is an iconic classic in its own right. The scene is almost unbearably tense as Revok’s target realizes something has gone very wrong and starts to panic, building to an unforgettably gooey payoff as the poor guy’s head detonates in a flash of blood and tissue.
 

                Cronenberg’s films will feature in this series more than those of any other director, and for good reason – he’s universally acknowledged as the master of bodily horror thanks to a body of work that finds fear not in the supernatural but in sickness, mutation and destruction, and this scene is one of the most blunt expressions of bodily horror in his filmography. It was brought to life by legendary makeup artist Dick Smith, whose credits include The Exorcist, Taxi Driver, Altered States and his Oscar-winning work on Amadeus; Smith was also a teacher and mentor to many of the makeup effects artists whose work will be included in the next few weeks. For this scene, Smith created a prosthetic head, filled it with dog food and rabbit livers and blew it apart from behind with a shotgun. The result is an unforgettable image that helped usher in the splatter era of the 1980s. It’s worth noting that this was originally the opening scene of the movie, but Cronenberg decided it was too strong after a test screening and moved it to about ten minutes into the movie (where, clearly, it’s much easier to take). Also Scanners was  a surprise hit that was number one at the box office the weekend it opened; I love that America experienced this moment together.

 

Making Monsters: Horror Movies and the Art of the Uncanny

This October, I've decided to focus on the makeup and special effects that are a huge part of what makes horror movies so gruesomely entertaining. Horror is my favorite genre because it affords filmmakers nearly unlimited reign to exercise their imaginations; this is even more true for the effects artists who bring the many monsters, mutants and specters that populate our favorite scary movies to life. I'll feature a different movie, focusing on a character or scene, every day; this isn't a best-ever countdown, though, just a collection of some of the first movies that came to mind. Some are from state-of-the-art A-list horror movies, others represent the handmade aesthetic of classic exploitation and indie horror. If the list is largely populated by movies from the '70s and '80s, it's because, thanks to the new permissiveness of the era and the pioneering work of my childhood heroes - guys like Dick Smith, Tom Savini, Rick Baker and Stan Winston - those decades marked a high point for the possibilities of creating fantastic horror stories for the big screen.

In fact, today's entry starts the season off with a bang...

Now turn my eyes black.

My mother became a born-again Christian when I was eight years old; while I was an unusually skeptical third-grader, I decided to give it a try with her after a few months and, eventually, went with her every week to a startup Calvary Chapel. Calvary grew out of the "Jesus freak" movement in the 1960s, merging Pentacostal and fundamentalist characteristics with an informal, populist style intended to appeal to those who were put off by traditional church doctrines. Churches such as Calvary, with their relatively independent polity, pride themselves on their non-denominational status and the independent-mindedness this implies, even if they maintain most of the same dogmas and prejudices as any mainstream denomination. This was the strongest impression of the church I got as a child, feeling surrounded by adults who passionately believed they were unique, set apart for a common purpose that would be integral to the future of not only the church but the whole world. As I got older, I realized how many of these churchgoers were recovering from substance abuse, abusive relationships, severe depression and other painful experiences; it seemed like, for them, this sense of being a part of a tight-knit community united in a unique and special purpose was as much of a support as their faith in salvation through Christ. As if their past failures and traumas were preparation for their roles in the great work ahead.

I thought a lot about Calvary Chapel while watching The Master, the audacious and challenging new film by Paul Thomas Anderson. While Anderson's film is largely inspired by the life of L. Ron Hubbard and the early days of Scientology, it isn't really an exposé of Hubbard's controversial religion. While many of the central teachings and methods of The Cause, as it's called in the film, are very similar to those in Scientology - many of the questions posed to its disciples during "processing" were ones I answered when I took a personality test at the Church of Scientology in Boston - it could just as easily stand in for modern religious or secular movements like non-denominational Christianity, self-help doctrines, the New Age movement, est, Landmark, and the Human Potential Movement. It's a film about the new faces of spritual leadership in post-WWII America, our new attempts to find meaning and whether it's possible to thrive without a master. Alternately exciting, perverse, confounding and mesmerizing, it's a distinctly American story that is also the most original American film so far this year.

The face of The Cause is Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), referred to by most of the film's characters as Master, a writer and self-described doctor, nuclear physicist and theoretical philosopher who is above all, as he puts it, "I am a man. A hopelessly inquisitive man, just like you." He's talking to Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), a Navy vet who has boarded Dodd's yacht looking for work and to escape trouble. Quell is an impulsive, violent, sex-obsessed guy - his idea of flirtation is to write a note reading "Do you want to fuck?" signed with a smiley face. Physically and psychically scarred by his experiences in the war and pining for the lost love of his life, Freddie drifts through jobs as a department store photographer and cabbage picker, fighting and screwing and mixing toxic alcoholic concoctions out of paint thinner and Lysol. When one of Freddie's drinks nearly gets a migrant worker killed, he flees and hops aboard Dodd's ship; the next morning, with no memory of the night before, he meets Dodd, who is charmed by Freddie's animalistic nature (and homemade booze) and offers him a job with The Cause.

It's the relationship between Freddie and the Master that is at the heart of the film. Phoenix is terrific as Freddie; as interminable as I'm Still Here was, it was worth it if the experience results in more uninhibited, full-bodied performances like this one. Freddie isn't a contemplative man, but he's not dumb either; he's a creature of pure instinct who soon becomes one of Dodd's most passionate followers; while it's not clear he's even interested in the cause's philosophical tenets, he seems attracted to the promise of being freed from his past by his persuasive new teacher. Many of the film's most fascinating scenes involve Freddie's "processing" and other exercises meant to trigger memories of his current and past lives; these scenes are exciting both for the physical trials they put Phoenix through and through the intense, ambiguous chemistry between Freddie and Dodd. As Dodd, Hoffman is affected, jocular and even a bit mincing; we see early on that the Master's outward geniality barely masks a temper that is as strong as Freddie's. It's clear, as much as Dodd wants to cure Freddie, he also envies his wildness and, it's strongly suggested, may even be in love with Freddie. The language Dodd uses to scold Freddie, calling him a "naughty boy," has been interpreted as paternal, or that of a person speaking to his pet; I also read it as the language of domination and submission, of a master struggling to control the disciple that, he secretly hopes, will overpower and dominate him. It's a magnetically charged battle of wills, and both actors provoke each other into some of their best work.

Dodd tells Freddie at several points that they've met before, that theirs is an eternal struggle, and Anderson and DP Mihai Malimaire use the 65mm format to elevate their relationship to epic proportions. James Cameron is fond of saying that 3D can be as effective with a character drama as with an effects picture; after seeing The Master, I feel the same way about 70mm. While the film contains some gorgeous exterior shots, particularly the recurring image of the vibrant blue wake of a ship, this is a story largely told in close-ups, the clarity and detail of the format bringing every nuance of the performances into striking relief. The bold colors and stunning contrast, coupled with Jonny Greenwood's otherworldly score, give the scenes between Dodd and his disciples a hyperreal quality. The members and practices of The Cause aren't depicted with the kind of savage intensity as the scenes of Eli Sunday and his flock in There Will Be Blood; here, Anderson's approach is more analytical, distant, but heavy with intimations (as with Freddy's sleepy hallucination of a Cause gathering turning into a Bacchanalic orgy) of something darker. This is especially true with Dodd's wife Peggy (Amy Adams), who is suspicious of Freddie from the start and perhaps more fanatical about the cause than her husband; we see her able to use her sexuality to manipulate both Freddie and, especially, Dodd. Adams doesn't have as much screentime as the two male leads, but she's fantastic, dialing down her usual likeable screen presence to marvellously chilly effect. There's a very creepy scene where Peggy gets Dodd off while telling him in no uncertain terms what he can and cannot do, and we realize that Dodd's needs and failures are not far from Freddie's, that it's Peggy who is Dodd's master and, perhaps, the true leader of the cause.

As Freddie rebels against and returns to his master, lurching towards clarity only to regress into sudden violence, The Master becomes increasingly elliptical, blurring the lines between reality and Freddie's dreams and fantasies in ways that hold very interesting implications for the rest of the film. I spent much of the last third hoping that, as with There Will Be Blood, the final confrontation between the two leads would bring the film's intentions into focus. Honestly, that didn't quite happen, although Freddie and Dodd's final scenes together are quite moving. There's the suggestion that Freddie has, in fact, grown in some small meaningful ways over the course of the film, but he's still a puerile skirt-chasing scoundrel. The final scene and closing shot feel right, but I'm not sure why. Has Freddie mastered Dodd? Is he his own master? Is pussy, finally, the only thing worth believing in? These are the kind of questions The Master leaves us with, and it's frankly a bit maddening; while I don't agree with Ebert's assertion that "When I reach for [The Master], my hand closes on air," I do understand how he could feel that way. It's easily the most cerebral movie Anderson has made, and I look forward to revisiting it many times, I'm sure, for answers to these and new questions. I don't agree with the idea that Anderson has only recently grown up as a filmmaker - Boogie Nights and Magnolia are the works of a confident adult storyteller - but it has been fascinating to see him evolve from the wunderkind who, like quiz kid Stanley Spector in Magnolia, seems to be desperate to employ his prodigious gifts to win our love. The Master is the work of a director confident enough to follow his cinematic muse wherever it takes him, even if the journey is idiosyncratic, puzzling and even alienating to much of his potential audience. It's a fascinating chapter in the ongoing narrative of one of the best filmmakers working today, and I can't wait to see where Anderson takes us next.

All-Time Top 100 (2012 Edition)

I was invited to contribute my list of 20 favorite movies to a Muriels/Skandies best films poll, the results of which will be unveiled tomorrow. I intended to share my top 20 here, but of course my thoughts turned to the many movies that didn't quite make the final cut, so naturally, here's my updated 100 list. I've bolded the movies that would make up my top 10 (and look for some thoughts on my favorite movie, The Shining, courtesy of the Skuriels), but I decided to alphabetize the list this time; these are the movies at the very top of the heap, and at that point, it doesn't really matter whether a film is 36th or 74th; I love them all the same. According to Flickchart, I've seen close to 4500 movies, and it wouldn't take me very much effort to make a list of 500 or 1000 that I love; I think most of my fellow movie geeks could easily do the same. But we'll stick with 100, as the whole point of making a list is to make hard choices, boil things down to the movies I really can't imagine life without and, hopefully, start a conversation (hey, did you hear Sight and Sound ranked Vertigo above Citizen Kane?). So here it is, and you can check out the Skuriels' results here tomorrow.

Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Werner Herzog, 1972)

Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979)

All That Jazz (Bob Fosse, 1979)

Annie Hall (Woody Allen, 1977)

Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik, 2007)

Badlands (Terrence Malick, 1973)

Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick, 1975)

Belle de Jour (Luis Bunuel, 1967)

The Big Lebowski (Joel and Ethan Coen, 1998)

Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982)

Blow Out (Brian De Palma, 1981)

Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986)

Boogie Nights (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1997)

Brazil (Terry Gilliam, 1985)

Carrie (Brian De Palma, 1976)

Children of Men (Alfonso Cuaron, 2006)

Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974)

Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)

City Lights (Charles Chaplin, 1931)

A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971)

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Steven Spielberg, 1977)

The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)

Creepshow (George A. Romero, 1982)

Cries and Whispers (Ingmar Bergman, 1972)

The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008)

Dawn of the Dead (George A. Romero, 1978)

Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick, 1978)

Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch, 1996)

Don’t Look Now (Nicolas Roeg, 1973)

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (Steven Spielberg, 1982)

Ed Wood (Tim Burton, 1994)

8 ½ (Federico Fellini, 1963)

El Topo (Alejandro Jodorowsky, 1970)

The Elephant Man (David Lynch, 1980)

The Empire Strikes Back (Irvin Kershner, 1980)

Eraserhead (David Lynch, 1977)

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004)

Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick, 1999)

Fargo (Joel and Ethan Coen, 1996)

The Fly (David Cronenberg, 1986)

The Fountain (Darren Aronofsky, 2006)

The Godfather Part II (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)

Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990)

Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978)

Harold and Maude (Hal Ashby, 1971)

Inferno (Dario Argento, 1980)

Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)

Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975)

Jules and Jim (Francois Truffaut, 1962)

Kill Bill vol. 1 (Quentin Tarantino, 2003)

Kill Bill vol. 2 (Quentin Tarantino, 2004)

Last Tango in Paris (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1972)

The Last Temptation of Christ (Martin Scorsese, 1988)

Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962)

Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson, 2008)

Lolita (Stanley Kubrick, 1962)

Macbeth (Roman Polanski, 1971)

Magnolia (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1999)

The Man Who Fell to Earth (Nicolas Roeg, 1976)

Manhattan (Woody Allen, 1979)

McCabe and Mrs. Miller (Robert Altman, 1971)

Miller’s Crossing (Joel and Ethan Coen, 1990)

Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001)

My Own Private Idaho (Gus Van Sant, 1991)

Nashville (Robert Altman, 1975)

No Country For Old Men (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2007)

Nosferatu, Phantom der Nacht (Werner Herzog, 1979)

Once Upon a Time in America (Sergio Leone, 1968)

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Milos Forman, 1975)

Orpheus (Jean Cocteau, 1950)

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (Sam Peckinpah, 1973)

Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966)

Phantom of the Paradise (Brian De Palma, 1974)

Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)

Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese, 1980)

Ran (Akira Kurosawa, 1985)

Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950)

Repulsion (Roman Polanski, 1965)

Rushmore (Wes Anderson, 1998)

 

 Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, 1993)

The Searchers (John Ford, 1956)

Secretary (Steven Shainberg, 2002)

The Seventh Seal (Ingmar Bergman, 1957)

The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980)

Sid and Nancy (Alex Cox, 1986)

Sideways (Alexander Payne, 2004)

Synecdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman, 2008)

Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976)

There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007)

The Thin Red Line (Terrence Malick, 1998)

The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982)

The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949)

Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958)

True Romance (Tony Scott, 1993)

2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)

Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)

Wings of Desire (Wim Wenders, 1987)

Y tu mama tambien (Alfonso Cuaron, 2006)

Zodiac (David Fincher, 2007)

It's what we do that defines us.

"I believe movies are one of the great American art forms and the shared experience of watching a story unfold on screen is an important and joyful pastime. The movie theatre is my home, and the idea that someone would violate that innocent and hopeful place in such an unbearably savage way is devastating to me." - Christopher Nolan

"Fiction's about what it is to be a fucking human being." - David Foster Wallace

Many of you have likely seen the memes such as the one above that incorporate the profile and iconography of Batman in images meant as a show of solidarity with the people of Aurora, Colorado. I've read several complaints that invoking a comic book character in relation to a real-life tragedy is in poor taste, and that's arguably true, but I can also understand where these images' creators are coming from, and I believe their intentions are earnest and not meant to trivialize what happened. As a country, we grieve for the unimaginable loss the people of Aurora have suffered, but one very disturbed young man's abhorrent actions have touched a nerve in another way. The shooting spree at the Century Aurora 16 was an assault on moviegoing, a basic experience that we all share; it was an assault on one of the few communal experiences we still participate in on a regular basis, our wish simply to get lost in a story and dream together for a couple of hours. Whether James Holmes chose a local screening of The Dark Knight Rises because of some warped identification or because of the promise of a large crowd is beside the point; what happened was a grotesque desecration of one of our most enduring heroic icons. Twelve people are dead, and the news is filled with stories questioning whether it's safe to go to the movies. So whether or not it's appropriate to create images of a grieving Batman, I understand and sympathize with the impulse; as our hearts go out to the victims of this terrible crimes, our collective imagination grieves just as strongly.

I was going to write something very different this weekend. I was going to write about why I haven't written anything about The Avengers and Prometheus, and why the prospect of writing about The Dark Knight Rises is daunting. About the tendency of fanboy culture towards group-think, how quickly one set of reactions to a highly-anticipated genre movie becomes the last word, drowning out any differing views. If one thinks that The Avengers is very entertaining but a bit shallow, or that, for all its problems, Prometheus works as a sort of abstract nightmare precisely because the world it imagines is so illogical, one should be prepared for a fair amount of bullying from a vocal section of the geek community. And I was going to write about our obsession with opening weekend records and Rotten Tomatoes scores, and how these things have contributed to fans' hostility to critics who voice dissent and the general deterioration of film culture. Those things are still true, but none of them matter all that much at the moment. I do hope, though, that the fans who were so furious that Christy Lemire failed to validate their enthusiasm understand now that a negative review is not an attack on the things we love. A damaged human being with an AR-15 - that's an attack on the things we love.

The thing is, all of us that were seemingly born with a love of the movies in our DNA will obsess over, argue about and demonstrate the intensity of our affection for cinema, and we've probably all taken it too far sometimes. This is an important moment to remember how lucky we are to be alive right now - to have the opportunity to experience movies, to share our experiences, to argue and obsess and act like silly fanboys if that's how we want to be, because at the bottom of it, we're all bound by our love for the possibilities of storytelling in the form of flickering images on a big-ass screen. Movie geeks are a big, loud, dysfunctional family, but in moments like this, we can count on each other. And this is obvious but it has to be said - we're not only lucky to be alive right now, we're lucky to be alive, period. Nobody can really make sense of what happened, though it's probably inevitable that movies will be used as a scapegoat for a little while rather than addressing the availability of assault weapons or the state of mental health services or anything that actually matters. We just need to wait it out; it'll blow over as it has before. In the mean time, let's be excellent to one another and celebrate everything we share. It's hippy-dippyish to say that, but fuck it, it's true, and wouldn't it be great if we really learned something from a horrible tragedy for once?

Other film writers and bloggers have said this already, but it's true - please go see a movie soon. Let's not allow fear to corrupt one of the purest pleasures we have in this life, not even for a moment. Buy a grotesquely large popcorn and a vat of soda and have a great time. And if the movie sucks, write a thousand words bitching about it on the internet, because being opinionated snobs is our goddamn right. The next movie you see will probably be better! I'm seeing The Dark Knight Rises Sunday afternoon; it's the first time in my life that buying a movie ticket feels like an act of defiance. Movies are my church, and as another iconic cinematic hero once said, nobody steps on a church in my town. And I know as well as anyone that these are tight times, but after you've gone to the movies, why not donate the cost of a movie ticket to help out the victims and their families? After all, in their excitement to be the first ones to see Batman versus Bane, they could have just as easily been us. We're all in this together, and for all our collective flaws, the ways we show decency to each other in moments pain are what make us great.

Headless eels, gay Marxists and the last temptation of Popeye.

 
I've finally found the time to complete my answers to the most recent movie quiz at Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, this one administered by Sister Superior Clodagh. Who could forget Deborah Kerr's indelible performance as a repressed nun whose world is turned upside down when two crooks on the run from the mob (Eric Idle and Robbie Coltrane) dress in drag and hide out in the convent? Good times. As always, if you've never heard of SLIFR or Dennis' terrific quizzes, I highly recommend checking out both.

1) Favorite movie featuring nuns

The Devils

2) Second favorite John Frankenheimer movie

Seconds (har dee har har)

3) William Bendix or Scott Brady?

Having just been reminded of Kill the Umpire the other day, I'll go with William Bendix.

4) What movie, real or imagined, would you stand in line six hours to see? Have you ever done so in real life?

I've never waited more than an hour or so to see a movie, though I have driven four hours to get to a horror marathon. I might wait six hours for a world premiere, but one of the silver linings of the dominance of multiplexes is that you don't really have to wait very long to see anything these days.

5) Favorite Mitchell Leisen movie

N/A

6) Ann Savage or Peggy Cummins?

Ann Savage

7) First movie you remember seeing as a child

Annie

8) What moment in a movie that is not a horror movie made you want to bolt from the theater screaming?

 The scene in The Tin Drum where a severed horse's head is used to catch eels, then we watch in close-up as a character shakes the eels free and cuts off their heads. Eeaugh. It's a great movie, but I've never felt like revisiting it.

9) Richard Widmark or Robert Mitchum?

Robert Mitchum, of course.

10) Best movie Jesus

Willem Dafoe

11) Silliest straight horror film that you’re still fond of

Prometheus comes to mind.

12) Emily Blunt or Sally Gray?

I like Emily Blunt, but I'm not familiar enough with Sally Gray's filmography to give a fair answer.

13) Favorite cinematic Biblical spectacular

The Ten Commandments. It's sillier than Prometheus, but the visual effects still thrill me.

14) Favorite cinematic moment of unintentional humor



15) Michael Fassbender or David Farrar?

Fassbender. He's probably my favorite actor to break through in the last decade.

16) Most effective faith-affirming movie

The Thin Red Line. Jim Caviezel is a more persuasive messiah in this than when he actually played Jesus.

17) Movie that makes the best case for agnosticism

Birth. We're presented with a rational answer for the film's central mystery, but a lot of questions remain unresolved when the credits roll. It's a great exploration of why we turn to the supernatural in the face of the unknown and how, though reason usually prevails, there are still far more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt up in our philosophy.

18) Favorite song and/or dance sequence from a musical

The Air-otica number from All That Jazz.

19) Third favorite Howard Hawks movie

His Girl Friday

20) Clara Bow or Jean Harlow?

Clara Bow

21) Movie most recently seen in the theater? On DVD/Blu-ray/Streaming?

Theater: The Amazing Spider Man (zzzzz...) On Blu-ray: Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. Still hilarious.

22) Most unlikely good movie about religion

The Gospel According to Saint Matthew. One of the most compelling movies about Jesus, written and directed by a gay, Marxist atheist.

23) Phil Silvers or Red Skelton?

Phil Silvers

24) “Favorite” Hollywood scandal

The cocaine bust on the set of Popeye.

25) Best religious movie (non-Christian)

The Wicker Man

26) The King of Cinema: King Vidor, King Hu or Henry King? (Thanks, Peter)

I haven't seen enough of Henry King's movies to say.

27) Name something modern movies need to relearn how to do that American or foreign classics had down pat

When making a movie about an iconic character, concentrate on making that movie the best self-contained experience it can be, not on setting up the next installment in the franchise.

28) Least favorite Federico Fellini movie

If I were to rank the Fellini movies I've seen, Roma would be at the bottom of the list. But I like Roma.

29) The Three Stooges (2012)—yes or no?

Haven't seen it yet.

30) Mary Wickes or Patsy Kelly?

Patsy Kelly

31) Best movie-related conspiracy theory

The Shining is Kubrick's admission that he helped fake the moon landing.

32) Your candidate for most misunderstood or misinterpreted movie

The Fountain. A lot of critics dismissed its archetypal narrative and visual motifs as "New Agey," when it's actually quite the opposite.

33) Movie that made you question your own belief system (religious or otherwise)

The Last Temptation of Christ. I saw it when I was 12 and found it to be the most moving depiction of Jesus, and the closest to the Jesus I imagined and believed in - torn between his human and divine selves, tempted by nothing more than to live as a humble husband and father, filled with compassion and love for all people. When I thought about how much anger Christians had directed at the film (and how bad most church-approved movies about faith are), I realized that my fellow churchgoers and I were praying to a completely different guy. Between that and the church's positions on sex, gay people and whether man coexisted with dinosaurs, I stopped calling myself a Christian soon after, though I'm still cool with the Jesus that Kazantzakis and Scorsese believed in and brought to life so beautifully.

Yeah, I had to dismember that guy with a trowel. What have you been up to?

 The night before I saw The Cabin in the Woods, I went to a double feature of Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter and Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives at the Brattle. While The Final Chapter has always been my favorite (largely thanks to Tom Savini's makeup work and Crispin Glover's dancing), I was surprised by how much fun I had with Jason Lives. I'd always found its attempt at self-parody lame and overly amused with itself; this was compounded by the way every bonus feature on the DVD underlined the brilliance of the movie's American Express gag, which always struck me as kind of a non sequitur. But seeing Jason Lives with an appreciative audience, especially after the unironic pleasures of The Final Chapter, I realized that the laughs are good natured - the audience's relationship with the slasher formula was knowing but not condescending, and I realized writer/director Tom McLoughlin's jokier version of Jason was basically affectionate. It's a movie about characters that have seen a lot of horror movies but don't know they're in one; as with the characters in Scream, their media literacy makes them no less doomed. Jason Lives isn't the most sophisticated attempt to subvert the genre, but its broadness is part of its charm; I can see now why it seemed like a breath of fresh air in 1986.

I bring up Jason Lives as a roundabout way of saying that metatextuality has long been a part of the horror genre, going back as least as far as Bride of Frankenstein; in recent years, the Scream ripoffs, torture porn and found footage horror have all commented on their own artifice even as they try to sell their "Inspired by Actual Events" faux-verisimilitude to gullible teen audiences. It's in the nature of horror to examine itself; just about every successful scary movie, in one way or another, needs to override our rational resistance to boogeymen in order to work (movies about real-life monsters, serial killers and killer animals and such, are obviously their own thing). So if anyone tells you that The Cabin in the Woods is revolutionary or redefines the genre in any way, don't listen to them. It's not groundbreaking, nor does it have to be; what it is is a very smart, unpredictable and affectionate take on the genre and its many possibilities.

A riff on the "gang of horny teens partying in the woods" premise that has been the basis of countless slashers, The Cabin in the Woods begins, unexpectedly, with office drones Sitterson and Hadley (Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford, both excellent) in a nondescript break room, chatting about child-proof locks. Without revealing much more, the initial pleasure of The Cabin in the Woods is seeing what Sitterson and Hadley have to do with the collection of slasher archetypes - jock Curt (Chris Hemsworth) and his girlfriend Jules (Anna Hutchison), the virginal (kind of) Dana (Kristen Connolly) and her nice-guy potential love interest Holden (Jesse Williams) and likeable stoner Marty (Fran Krantz) - who ignore the warnings of the kind of creepy old filling station attendant that tends to live near cursed cabins like the one they're headed to for the weekend. Director Drew Goddard (a producer on Lost who wrote some of that show's strongest episodes) and his co-writer, geek icon Joss Whedon, have a great deal of fun playing with the slasher format, simultaneously demolishing and celebrating horror archetypes. Though they're poking fun (via their surrogates Sitterson and Hadley) at the repetitive nature of the genre, their obvious enthusiasm for the way horror movies give the imagination free reign is what makes The Cabin in the Woods special. While the movie is frequently hilarious (Jenkins' explosive outburst towards ten-year-old Japanese schoolgirls is a highlight), Goddard and Whedon give the story an ominous foundation that underscores the very primal motivation behind our desire to be frightened.

While The Cabin in the Woods mostly avoids the self-congratulatory cuteness that plagues Whedon's other (admittedly quite clever) work, it does feel a bit like the work of two very smart kids who just took apart their parents' phone to look inside and can't quite put it back together. The undead monsters lurking outside the cabin are framed as one of many interchangable possible threats to the leads; we're never invested in them on more than a conceptual level, and so The Cabin in the Woods is enormously entertaining without ever being truly scary. Goddard and Whedon try to tie the main characters together late in the film in a sweeping statement about the nature of the genre that ignores the many, many horror stories that don't fit the formula it proposes as absolute. And their know-it-all attitude makes the movie's occasional lapses in logic more egregious than they would be in an unironic slasher, particularly the plot device of a big red button that absolutely should and would not exist in the world of this film. It's forgivable, though, especially since what happens when a character pushes said button leads to a climax that is sure to leave any horror fan feeling giddy - I can't wait for the Blu-ray so I can pause specific moments and fully appreciate the level of mayhem on display. The Cabin in the Woods is ultimately the movie many young horror geeks with hyperactive imaginations dreamed up at one point or another, magnificently brought to life. The only question is, who or what is Kevin?


If The Cabin in the Woods tinkers with horror formulas, John Dies at the End blows them to smithereens. I saw Don Coscarelli's adaptation of David Wong's book at the Boston Underground Film Festival (also at the Brattle), where Coscarelli introduced it as "a movie about drugs." That's true, but it's not even the half of it - while John Dies at the End often plays like Ghostbusters as imagined by Hunter S. Thompson, it possesses the same boundless, wildly unpredictable nightmare logic as Coscarelli's Phantasm series, coupled with the straightfaced absurdist humor of his adaptation of Joe Lansdale's Bubba Ho-Tep. Twenty-something slacker David Wong (Chase Williamson) tells journalist Arnie (Paul Giamatti) how an accidental injection of a mind-bending drug known as "soy sauce" set him off on a journey involving ghosts, Lovecraftian monsters, alternate realities and all kinds of weirdness. As David and his best friend John (Rob Mayes) battle meat monsters and attempt to bring peace to a parallel dimension, the movie constantly threatens to turn into an incoherent drug-and-horror mashup, and yet miraculously, it all works wonderfully, managing to say a few insightful things about why people take drugs along the way.

That the movie works is largely thanks to its performances - newcomers Williamson and Mayes are believable as directionless best friends thrown into a bizarre story, and the strong supporting cast includes Clancy Brown as a celebrity paranormal expert and Glynn Turman as a detective who delivers the priceless line "You're wondering why I'm out here today committing felonies." And it's also due to Coscarelli, an unsung auteur who finds in Wong's book a perfect match for his morbid preoccupation. At one point David is trying to make Arnie see one of the film's many creepy creatures; telling him to concentrate, he prompts him to focus on the fact that someday he'll die and either become nothing or cross over to the unknown. With his mind focused on this fact, Arnie is able to see the creature. It's a deeply resonant scene, and it grounds an often very outlandish film. When I asked Coscarelli if the question of what happens (if anything) after death, which is at the center of most of his films, was something he was consciously exploring, he told me that he'd realized after looking back on his filmography that it was a question he was and is always asking before adding, "Hey, aren't we all?" John Dies at the End is still in search of a distributor, but be sure to check it out when it gets a proper release - it's well worth your time.

And then there's Ti West, who is busy proving that there's still a lot of life left in classical horror narratives. West's previous film, 2009's The House of the Devil, transformed a simple concept (Satanists threatening a college-age babysitter in a creepy old house) into a loving homage to '80s horror movies that captured not just the style but the soul of classics from that period. At the same time, West proved that he was capable of sustaining tension to an unbearable degree, displaying the same kind of potential that Roman Polanski showed in his early films. West's latest film, The Innkeepers, is an elegant slow burn, a ghost story made special by its patient, assured direction. Based on the spooky experiences of The House of the Devil's cast and crew when they stayed at the supposedly haunted Yankee Pedlar Inn (where The Innkeepers was shot), the film follows co-workers and amateur ghost hunters Claire and Luke (Sara Paxton and Pat Healy) on the last weekend before the mostly vacant inn closes for good as they try to find proof of a haunting. West takes his time letting us get to know Claire and Luke - they're both endearingly geeky, socially awkward and a little withdrawn, and it's easy to imagine them living happily ever after in a different movie.

It's hard not to love Claire in particular, and when she's embarassed by one of the few guests, an actress and clairvoyant (Kelly McGillis), for her lack of direction in life, we feel for her. West quietly underlines the connection between Claire and Luke's sad situation - about to lose the jobs they're overqualified for, facing an uncertain future, both unable to express their loneliness - and the tragic nature of the inn's permanent inhabitants. It's amazing how we become so invested in the characters that the ghost story creeps up on us; West and cinematographer Eliot Rocket get the most out of the Yankee Pedlar, the inn's empty hallways and dark corners teasing our expectations. West chooses the film's supernatural reveals carefully, but they're delivered with a prankish attitude towards revealing terrifying details in the background or a reverse shot that is worthy of John Carpenter. And the film's most effective sequence, as Claire and Luke explore the inn's basement, creates an overwhelming feeling of dread from a close-up of Claire's face as she describes what she's seeing offscreen. Some horror fans have complained that the payoff is week compared to the setup, but while I'm not opposed to gore or creature effects, it's heartening to know there's at least one horror filmmaker who hasn't forgotten about the power of suggestion. The Innkeepers scared the hell out of me; I can't wait to see what West does next.

Buddy, you're in the wrong place at the wrong time.

This is my contribution to this year's White Elephant Blogathon.

To Live and Die in L.A. announces itself as the quintessential ‘80s action movie in its first five minutes. Secret Service agents Richard Chance and Jimmy Hart (William Petersen and Michael Greene) have just foiled a terrorist attack in a hotel where President Reagan is giving a speech. After throwing a suicide bomber off the hotel’s roof, Hart remarks that “I’m getting too old for this shit.” I don’t know if this is the first use of this line, but it predates Lethal Weapon by over a year. So it may not surprise you to learn that Hart, on the trail of counterfeiter Eric Masters (Willem Dafoe), is killed two days before his retirement, or that Chance becomes obsessed with catching Masters and avenging his partner. This is the stuff of every action movie parody of the last 25 years, but much of the fun of To Live and Die in L.A. is that it doesn’t know how much of a product of its time it is. The film’s heavy use of cop movie clichés before they were clichés and general Eighties-ness dates it, and yet it doesn’t suffer as a result; it’s an enjoyably tense, overheated thriller, very much of its time but still terrifically entertaining today.

The film spends much of its running time underlining the similarities between Chance and Masters, both single-mindedly driven by their work and sleeping with the women they also use for information. In its interest in the connection between criminal and pursuer, and in its flashy visual style, To Live and Die in L.A. is reminiscent of the work of Michael Mann, particularly Miami Vice and his early films (Peterson’s next film would be Manhunter). But director William Friedkin brings to the film a strong sense of location, an eye for idiosyncratic detail and a strong underlying sense of moral ambiguity; the result is a procedural that is equal parts ‘80s slickness and ‘70s naturalism. Much of the film was shot in, real, rough neighborhoods in South Central and East L.A.; as with Friedkin’s The French Connection, the lived-in authenticity of the locations contributes hugely to the believability and suspense of the story. The cinematographer is frequent Wim Wenders/Jim Jarmusch collaborator Robby Muller, and the look of the film is reminiscent of Muller’s then-recent work on Wenders’ Paris, Texas, lighting warehouses, strip clubs and dive bars with hot pinks and greens; it’s a flamboyant film, but still purposefully rough around the edges.

Friedkin sometimes overreaches with the film’s grittiness; many moments are less gritty than coarse or pungent, and it sometimes feels like Friedkin is wallowing in the film’s sleazy atmosphere. The profane tough-guy dialogue often feels both inauthentic and puerile. There are multiple, lingering shots of peoples’ heads being blown apart. And the film’s female characters are one-dimensional sex objects even for this kind of movie – they exist solely to advance the plot, bare their breasts and screw the leads. The crudeness wasn’t a deal-breaker for me, and it does allow for rare equal-opportunity smut in the form of full frontal nudity from Peterson (Gus Grissom’s more of a grower than a shower). But as with much of Friedkin’s work, it does feel like he’s trying to have it both ways, rubbing our noses in it while suggesting a high-minded justification that he never quite pays off. That’s not to say that To Live and Die in L.A., which opens with audio of President Reagan declaring his intention to protect American citizens from new taxes, isn’t commenting on the ultra-materialistic time at which it was made. It’s just not quite as deep about it as Friedkin thinks it is.

Still, Friedkin’s strengths as a filmmaker have always been more formalist than personal, and To Live and Die in L.A. has an impressively nihilistic, postmodern tone punctuated by memorable action set-pieces. The wrong-side-of-the-road chase is justifiably famous, and an earlier foot chase through an airport deserves to be. Peterson is compelling in the kind of role that would make him famous, and Dafoe is mesmerizing as an unusually honest criminal – it’s easy to see why this was a breakthrough role for him. And Friedkin’s lack of interest in predictable structure leads to a climactic development that is pleasurably surprising. And while, if I was Friedkin, I wouldn’t have personally gone with a wall-to-wall Wang Chung soundtrack, I didn’t exactly mind either. It’s a good movie, the second in a row I’ve been assigned for the White Elephant Blog-a-Thon. And that makes me feel twice as guilty about the movie I’ve subjected someone else to this year. Muah ha ha…

Top 10: 2011

Last week I asked my Facebook friends what their favorite 2011 movies were; the unanimous answer was The Muppets. That a reflection on characters many of us grew up with touched a collective nerve makes sense; 2011 was a year of looking back, both out of nostalgia and to understand what our past reveals to us about our present. Two of the Oscar front-runners are celebrations of the silent film era, and the nominees also include movies about World War I, 9/11, the civil rights movement and the Cold War. It's not unique for the Academy to nominate period pieces; what is unique is how many of these movies are preoccupied with what these moments of time tell about where we are today (with varying degrees of success). The most critically acclaimed movie of the year looks all the way back to the creation of the universe to give context to a story that takes place in the recent past and the present. As A.O. Scott put it, "A glance at the nominees for best picture at this year’s Oscars will confirm that the movies, a forward-looking medium tumbling headlong into a digital future, find themselves in a moment of retrospection." Even the films on the list with a contemporary setting, and even those which rely heavily on CGI or digital technology are build on an archetypal foundation that reaches back to 1930s noir, or the paranoid thrillers of the 1970s, or the comedy of discomfort perfected by Woody Allen and Albert Brooks. The language of film is constantly evolving, but the stories are eternal.

Many of the films on my list were low-key affairs in one way or another; a few are downright gentle. Was this a trend in films in general, or am I just prematurely becoming an old fogy? I guess if you see me in line for the opening night of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, you'll have your answer. The hardest part of making a list this year was sorting out the last few slots; there were a great deal of movies that were problematic but still well worth seeing, or movies with modest ambitions that were excellent in their way. And it's very possible that if I'd had the opportunity to see Take Shelter, We Need To Talk About Kevin, Margaret, A Separation and other potentially great movies that never played in my neck of the woods, this list could be very different. Of course, it's never possible to see everything, and it's beside the point to take list-making too seriously. A friend of mine asked me a while ago what is the point of making lists; I guess there isn't one really, except as a snapshot of the things that intrigued me, made me think and moved me over the past twelve months or so. Plus, it's just too much fun to resist.


1. Drive As much as this modern-day L.A. noir owes to filmmakers like Michael Mann and Walter Hill, it's also very much the work of a director with a wholly original voice. Nicolas Winding Refn, making his English-language debut, brings to this story of a stuntman and getaway driver (Ryan Gosling) who gets in dangerously over his head trying to protect the woman he loves (Carey Mulligan) a razor-sharp awareness of what makes his genre archetypes resonate so deeply. At once an examination of the action movie's fetishism of fast cars and big guns, a sort of urban samurai story and an inversion/feminization of its stoic, toothpick-chewing road warrior, Drive is like a synth-pop tone poem punctuated with perfectly calibrated bursts of shocking violence. It's also a masterpiece of filmmaking craft, perfectly acted (Albert Brooks is terrific, and Gosling is so much more interesting now that he's stopped taking himself seriously) and wonderfully stylish in a way that fits perfectly with the story. Refn's the real deal - Drive is the ballsiest movie of the year and a hell of a lot of fun.


2. The Tree of Life A movie that is completely out of step with the time it was made. Terrence Malick's epic meditation on childhood, memory, God and our place in the universe demands to be revisited and given serious thought in an opening weekend-driven film culture that demands we move on to one next big thing after another. But it's pointless to gripe; some films just aren't for everyone, even if they're about everything. But for a movie with a narrative scope that extends from the first moments of the universe to its death, The Tree of Life is remarkably personal, even private. Though this leads to some moments that contain a meaning that perhaps only Malick fully understands, the cumulative effect is cinema's most fully realized depiction of the persistence of memory. Breathtaking in both its ambition and its moments of startling intimacy, The Tree of Life is certainly a challenging and sometimes baffling work. But if you approach it with an open mind and let it meet you where you are, it's a deeply affecting, one-of-a-kind cinematic experience.


3. Shame A close-up examination of the life of Brandon (Michael Fassbender), a sex addict whose life is a perpetual, joyless cycle thrown into chaos by a visit from his vulnerable, emotionally turbulent sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan). While director Steve McQueen's rigid, controlled style had a distancing effect for some, his unflinching and deeply empathetic study of two wounded souls was almost too painful to watch. It's a very explicit film, but never gratuitous or crass - here, sex is an externalization of one character's pain, and it's depicted with maturity and insight. It's a film where a conversation between two siblings watching cartoons - one who is incapable of connection, another with a desperate need to connect - carries a disturbing, almost violent psychological charge. Beautifully photographed against the backdrop of a New York that becomes a sort of melancholy third protagonist, Shame is a hard experience to shake, and the work of a filmmaker capable of profound compassion and grace.


4. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy A film that fits comfortably alongside '70s classics like The Conversation and The Parallax View, Tomas Alfredson's adaptation of John Le Carre's novel shares with those films an understanding of the spy story as a metaphor for truth's elusive, shifting nature. The film's condensation of Le Carre's plot is a labyrinth of mysterious motives, secret allegiances and narrative asides that, once all the pieces have fallen into place, proves to be nearly airtight in its construction. Between this and his previous film, the masterpiece Let the Right One In, Alfredson has proven to be a master of understatement; the film is a triumph of story revealed through subtle accumulating details, anchored by Gary Oldman's marvelously restrained performance as George Smiley, a British agent whose quiet personality hides a fierce intelligence. A triumph of art direction - the film is a maze of cluttered, claustrophobic interiors - filmed through a haze that is seemingly equal parts nicotine and decaying film stock, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is a fiendishly fun mystery, punctuated by moments of pitch-black humor and a perverse sense of what constitutes a happy ending.


5. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo The book's Swedish title translates as Men Who Hate Women, which gets to the heart of why Stieg Larsson's book about a journalist and a hacker tracking a killer of women resonated so deeply with so many readers. The mystery plot is pure pulp, but it's redeemed by Larsson's blunt anger at the many ways women are treated like shit and the unforgettable character Lisbeth Salander, a brilliant, antisocial force of nature who isn't afraid to fight back. Director David Fincher focuses on the strongest and most cinematic elements of the source material, crafting a violent, disturbing, sexy beginning (I hope) of a franchise for adults (frankly, stating that the pretentious, thuddingly literal-minded Swedish film is better is lunacy). Fincher is smartly treats the central mystery as a Macguffin and emphasizes the relationship between Salander (the mesmerizing Rooney Mara) and sexy, feminist-friendly lefty hunk Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig, underrated here). As process-obsessed as all of Fincher's films, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is less about finding out what happened to Harriet Vanger as it is about a budding love story between an abused, alienated prodigy and the first man she could ever trust; taken this way, the ending is positively devastating. And as this is Fincher, it almost goes without saying that it's perfectly shot, edited and scored - one can derive two and a half hours of pleasure just from enjoying the way that Fincher captures the feeling of snow like no filmmaker ever has before. Bonus points for the perverse misuse of "Orinoco Flow."


6. Hugo Scorsese's latest is a walking contradiction, a valentine to the earliest days of silent cinema that utilizes hyper-modern technology to tell its story. That Scorsese embraces and revels in this contradiction is just one reason Hugo is so easy to love - in the scenes of filmmaker Georges Méliès meticulously and lovingly staging his early cinematic sleights of hand, one can trace a line directly to 3D and what it has the potential to be (but rarely is). Here, the immersive 3D effects compliment the beautifully realized world of a train station in 1920s Paris where a little boy named Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield) lives in the walls, winding the station's clocks and hoping to solve a mystery left behind by his deceased father that takes the form of a wide-eyed automaton. Scorsese's typically kinetic, vital filmmaking is used for the first time in the service of a story that is meant to evoke wonder; the result is a $150-million kids' movie about the virtues of film preservation that is every bit as weird, geeky and magical as that description suggests.


7. Midnight in Paris Woody Allen's best film in 25 years is also his gentlest and most sincere. While the film is recognizably Allen's in every way - certainly nobody who knows his work should be the least bit surprised that his version of Oz is a 1920s Paris populated by the period's great artists and thinkers - there are moments in Midnight in Paris that feel like the unexpected summation of everything Allen has been expressing throughout his filmography. When Owen Wilson's writer Gil suggests that a city like Paris, teeming with life and possibility, is a beacon of hope in a dark universe, it took me aback; Allen has found Paris (or Manhattan) to be the answer to the question of where meaning can be found in life, and connecting his existential angst with his romantic view of urban life seems so obvious in retrospect and yet so profound. It's a pleasure to follow Gil on his time-travel journey and hang out with Hemingway, Fitzgerald and the whole gang (I was particularly tickled by Adrien Brody as Salvador Dali), and yet Allen is also perceptive about how the idea that things used to be better is a constant illusion in every period. As with The Purple Rose of Cairo, Allen at once celebrates our fantasies and gently subverts our nostalgia; still, who can help being nostalgic when the past is brought to life with this much wit and warmth?


8. Bridesmaids Besides just being constantly hilarious from beginning to end, Bridesmaids is terrific because its humor comes from a very real and frightening place - getting older, getting poorer and watching your closest friends move on while you're still struggling to get your shit together. While the film is in the improv-heavy mold of its fellow Apatow productions, it benefits from the sturdier structure and fully realized characters that we can identify with even when they're shitting in a sink (maybe not as much then, but otherwise). It's funny because it's true, and the movie mines as many laughs from smaller moments of social awkwardness as it does from the aforementioned sink pooping and other, soon-to-be-classic setpieces like the dueling toasts and Annie's freak-out on the plane. Kristen Wiig has long been the best thing about SNL (along with Bill Hader), and she proves here to be a gifted writer as well; I wouldn't be surprised if this is the start of a large and impressive filmography.


9. War Horse Steven Spielberg's WWI epic isn't gritty and explicit in the way of Saving Private Ryan; based on the young adult novel by Michael Morpugo, it's a fable with a simple but profound anti-war message. The story of a young man (Jeremy Irvine) and his horse separated by war and trying to make their way home to each other is deeply moving and beautifully realized. The staging of the battle scenes is worthy of one of Spielberg's favorite films, Kubrick's Paths of Glory, and the early scenes of life in the English countryside have a lush palette worthy of John Ford or David Lean; this is a beautiful example of deliberately old-fashioned, classical Hollywood cinema. And it's a reminder that, when Spielberg is firing on all cylinders, there's nobody better. I can't wait to share this one with my kids when they're a bit older.


10. A Dangerous Method David Cronenberg's adaptation of Christopher Hampton's play about the rift between Freud (Viggo Mortensen) and Jung (Michael Fassbender) caused by Jung's affair with his brilliant, volatile patient Sabina Spelrein (Keira Knightley) has been unfairly dismissed as a boringly conventional period piece. But while it may contain less strange creatures or unruly bodily fluids than the average Cronenberg film, it's every bit as brilliantly kinky as any he's made, perhaps more subversively so. Sabina, and Knightley's jaw-dropping performance, are as uncontrollable a monster as Jeff Goldblum's mutation in The Fly and the Mugwumps in Naked Lunch, minus the makeup effects. It's the film about the monstrous feminine and how it changed these two men, completely reshaping our understanding of human psychology in the process. It's impeccably acted, heightened by Cronenberg's mastery of the frame's ability to underline our anxieties, and diabolically funny. Bonus points to Mortensen for getting so much mileage out of Freud's cigars.