Tag Archives: 2011

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: DETENTION (2011)

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DIRECTED BY: Joseph Kahn

FEATURING: Shanley Caswell, Josh Hutcherson, Spencer Locke, Aaron David Johnson, Dane Cook

PLOT: A serial killer is loose in the halls of Grizzly Lake High, and there may be a connection with events 20 years in the past; only a pair of eye-rolling millennials, uncool vegetarian klutz Riley and popular slacker screwup Clapton, can save the day.

Still from Detention (2011)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: Plenty of movies like to subvert audience expectations by mixing genres and deploying radical shifts in tone. Yet it’s hard to recall a film that pursues these goals with such ruthlessness, rapidity, and thoroughness as Detention. The filmmakers practically carpet-bomb the audience with twists, references, and backstories, producing a tale of such density the only people who could possibly keep track of it all are the men who made it. Detention is a movie that would make Dennis Miller say, “Whoa, Chachi, dial it back with the pop culture smorgasbord.”

COMMENTS: The opening credits of Detention are the essence of the whole film in microcosm: exceedingly clever, with names appearing in every possible location: sneaker brand, chocolate bar, upchuck in a urinal. (The director reserves that last one for himself.) Several have even been thoughtfully chosen to match, like the costume designer’s name stitched on a letter jacket or the sound designer appearing on a fire alarm. The flip side to this visual wit is that the names go by so quickly, amidst so much activity and chaos, that there is precious little opportunity to take the information in. The signal is overwhelmed by the noise, and you feel assaulted rather than edified. This will become a theme.

Even if Detention weren’t determined to be some kind of tonal chimera, it would still be a massive millennial snarkfest. The first five minutes play out as a kind of Clueless-meets-Scream, as a too-cool ice princess outlines the secret to high school success (complete with whip-pan edits and onscreen text) before having her head briskly removed from her body. It’s a whole postmodern vibe, and it telegraphs the desire of director Kahn and co-screenwriter Mark Palermo to pile on the jokes and references like so many hats on hats. But this is just an appetizer. The movie adds characters and plotlines like courses in a fancy meal. After introductions to our heroes, all the other high school archetypes get their turns in the spotlight, including the blond cheerleader, the lunkhead jock, the nerdy sidekick, the tech wizard, the bitter administrator… heck, even the stuffed bear that serves as the school’s mascot gets its own storyline. But Detention finds its own path by layering on incongruous genre elements that stupefy with their appearance. Time travel, UFOs, body swapping, predestination paradox, Cronenbergian body horror, and even a Minority Report-style touchless interface are among the twists and turns that arrive unexpectedly.

It’s tempting to view Detention as a parody or send-up of horror and teen comedy genres, and it does work on that level. But Kahn is such a committed nerd that you have to take all the sci-fi tropes as legitimate ventures into the genre. For all the seeming randomness of each new element, the film studiously connects everything in the end. No matter how arbitrary – a cheesy horror film within the film, a teenager obsessed with the 90s, a legend of a student engaging in sexual congress with a stuffed animal – it all ties into the plot. And cast’s commitment to playing every bizarre left turn earnestly (especially Caswell, who should have found a springboard to stardom here) helps keep you engaged, even as the dense plot pushes you away.

Kahn, an incredibly successful music video director, is excited for the opportunity to try his hand at the big-screen format. (He reportedly provided the bulk of the budget himself.) He’s willing to take his lumps – one student speaks disparagingly of his debut feature Torque, while another snarkily references the coke habits of music video directors – and he puts his experience to work on some appealingly offbeat setpieces. Easily the film’s highlight is a montage of one student’s 19-year-long detention, a one-shot tour backwards through changing fashion styles and popular music of the day. But Kahn also refuses to let a moment be a moment, and every bit of wackiness is decorated with more wackiness, so that there’s no real opportunity to take any of it in. Like a McFlurry with a dozen different mix-ins, it’s undeniably sweet, but dizzying and ultimately too much.

For a film as cravenly derivative as Detention, there’s honestly nothing quite like it. It stands as a fascinating artifact, a celluloid Katamari Damacy collecting genres and tropes and stereotypes into one big stew. It’s a piece of pop art, fascinating to observe even if difficult to admire.   

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“A seriously (and unapologetically) bizarre piece of work… while Kahn deserves some credit for attempting something different within the teen-movie genre, Detention is simply (and finally) too weird and too off-the-wall to become anything more than a mildly amusing curiosity.” – David Nusair, Reel Film Reviews

(This movie was nominated for review by David. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.) 

Detention

Detention
  • Blu-ray
  • AC-3, Blu-ray, Dolby
  • English (Audio Description), German (Subtitled), French (Subtitled)
  • 1
  • 93
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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE WOMAN IN THE FIFTH (2011)

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La Femme de Vème

DIRECTED BY: Pawel Pawlikowski

FEATURING: Ethan Hawke, Kristin Scott Thomas, Joanna Kulig, Samir Guesmi

PLOT: A struggling American writer who arrives in Paris hoping to reconnect with his estranged wife and daughter instead finds work as a night watchman admitting visitors to a mysterious apartment, while commencing affairs with both a young Polish barmaid and a beautiful translator who may be keeping secrets of her own.

Still from The Woman in the Fifth (2011)

COMMENTS: For anyone who is used to seeing Ethan Hawke as an American writer slumming it in Europe in the Before trilogy, The Woman in the Fifth is a real shocker. From the moment we meet Tom Ricks prevaricating in the customs line at the Paris airport, we’re witnessing a much more pathetic, more desperate character than the one who romanced Julie Delpy. Soon enough, we learn some uncomfortable truths about our hero. His wife is decidedly not happy to see him, his daughter is surprised he’s not in prison, and the loss of his luggage leaves him with virtually nothing in the worst part of the city.

Of course, Hawke is the beneficiary of some extraordinary luck. On the one hand, the owner of the flophouse where he winds up is willing to trust an American, accepting that the wayward writer will eventually pay him (and holding his passport until he does). He even helps him out by giving him a job monitoring a security camera and buzzing in dodgy visitors. But despite being down and out, Ricks’ one novel has provided him enough notoriety to get him invited to a fancy soiree where he meets up with the sophisticated and mysterious Margit, a woman who would be perfect—if she was willing to say anything about herself at all.

If Margit seems to good to be true, well, let’s just say that the film agrees. There’s a reason why she’s tight-lipped; without giving anything away, it’s safe to say that there are some commonalities with films like A Beautiful Mind, Swimming Pool, or even Jacob’s Ladder. Yes, this is a movie with twists, playing with our sense of reality and exploiting our inherent trust in Hawke despite his character’s very evident flaws. A good portion of the film is taken up by curiosity over just what is going on, and that turns out to be the biggest misdirection of all.

The Woman in the Fifth is adapted from a novel by Douglas Kennedy, and it seems to have all the makings of an airport potboiler along the lines of Gone Girl or The Woman on the Train. The wild card here is writer-director Pawlikowski, who is deeply uninterested in any of the book’s trashy adornments. The thriller elements start to pile up: we learn that Ricks’ wife has slapped him with a restraining order. There are hints of impropriety that caused him to lose his teaching post. Strange noises come from that room he’s monitoring, and he even spots stains on the floor that look like the kind you’d get by dragging a bloodied body. Following a spat, his neighbor at the inn winds up dead under very mysterious circumstances. Heck, his daughter goes missing. All of this plottiness swirls around, and Pawlikowski genuinely does not care. Most of this will go unresolved, because the main attraction is Hawke and his choice of the reality he will choose to occupy.

For a film whose narrative sets up so much and delivers precious little, The Woman in the Fifth is quite watchable. Hawke gives a nicely calibrated performance as a man who is probably losing his grip but is quite certain he’s in control. He’s balanced well against Kulig’s hopeful innocent, and especially against Scott Thomas’ cool manipulator. By way of example, a scene in which Margit welcomes Ricks into her home for the first time and unhesitatingly surprises him with some digital stimulation could be unnecessary or even crass, but she fixes on him so intently, with the curiosity of a scientist, that it packs the moment with potency. Margit is a small presence in the film, but Scott Thomas makes a meal of it, appropriately taking command of Hawke long after the truth of her identity is revealed.

The weirdness of The Woman in the Fifth may depend heavily on expectations. If you’re looking for the story to pay off its mysteries, it probably feels like a cheap ploy, and may even leave you extremely angry. If, however, you recognize Hawke’s steady march to oblivion as a creation of Pawlikowski’s particular sensibilities (he would delve into further emotional straits in Ida and Cold War), then you’re likely to have a more satisfying watch. Either way, it’s a very different experience from wondering what will happen to the Ethan Hawke character who is destined to miss the last plane from Paris.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The movie seems to exist in some kind of liminal space that feels like a literary device… the story does attain a kind of closure, and even resolution, but it does so in a touch-and-go way that leaves us curiously dissatisfied. It’s like if Hitchcock’s Notorious morphed into Tarkovsky’s Solaris, only not nearly as interesting –- not nearly as cinematic — as that.” – Bilge Ebiri, They Live By Night (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by Janet Rollins. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

The Woman in the Fifth / La Femme Du 5ieme

The Woman in the Fifth / La Femme Du 5ieme
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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: PERFECT SENSE (2011)

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DIRECTED BY: David Mackenzie

FEATURING: Eva Green, Ewan McGregor, Stephen Dillane, Ewen Bremner, Denis Lawson, Connie Nielsen

PLOT: Epidemiologist Susan and chef Michael meet and begin to fall in love, but their romance is complicated by a slowly unfolding global pandemic that methodically strips the human race of its physical senses.

Still from Perfect Sense (2011)

COMMENTS: Hey, remember the COVID pandemic? Wasn’t that a ton of fun? We learned—and perhaps are continuing to learn—a whole lot about how our society would react to a worldwide health crisis, and the answers involve far more skepticism, selfishness, and general ignorance than we might have preferred. So there’s nothing quite like watching a movie in which the protagonists don masks to try and prevent the spread of an airborne virus that is threatening the entire world. Such happy memories come rushing back!

It seems that the cinema was prescient about such things about a decade before we got the real deal. Audiences had recently been treated to the horrors of outbreaks in films such as I Am Legend, Quarantine, Carriers, and (heaven help us) The Happening. One, Blindness, even focused specifically on a health crisis that deprived the populace of one of its senses. And in the year 2011, you had a choice: get a glimpse of the near-total failure of our public infrastructure in ’s thriller Contagion, or deal with the effects such a worldwide disaster would have on a budding romance in Perfect Sense, a love story suffused with foreboding and melancholy.

Diseases often propagate by preying upon our desire to help and comfort one another. But the contagion in Perfect Sense is unusually cruel, by turns capitalizing on our natural inclination to be kind toward one another, then exposing us at our most primal and emotional level, and finally stripping away that which allows us to interpret and enjoy the world. The film finds a particular power in images of the populace as a whole suddenly losing all control and self-possession, overcome by bouts of rage, despair, or even gluttony and pica. In each case, people try to pick up the pieces as best they can, and director Mackenzie and screenwriter Kim Fupz Aakeson envision these victims reaching out to each other to fill the ensuing losses with hope, which is a welcome grace note in a film about the encroaching end of the world. 

The story of this ever-evolving sickness is an odd counterpoint to the more intimate tale of two people who are rotten at love but find each other. Green and McGregor have terrific chemistry, impressive considering they are introduced to us as particularly poor romantic prospects: she’s an emotionally unavailable pessimist and he’s a frictionless cad. They have a genuinely effective, character-driven meet cute, and despite the obvious nature of their jobs—she works with diseases, his job revels in the senses of taste, smell, and sight—they act as worthy avatars for the damned human race. Just as their fellow humans find ways to go on, so do Susan and Michael keep after their mutual attraction, determined to hang on to their story even as the world falls apart.

The central figures in our story are so strong that it can be frustrating when the movie cuts away to share the ongoing collapse of the human race, complete with an omniscient narrator to explain “what it all means.” Unlike it’s cousin Contagion, which juxtaposes personal stories of survival against the global effort to defeat the pandemic, Perfect Sense works best at the micro level, with Susan and Michael navigating the crisis alongside their relationship with their friends and family. (McGregor also gets two reunions of a sort, with a fellow chef portrayed by his Trainspotting co-star Bremner, while his boss at the restaurant is none other than his own uncle Lawson, with whom he also shares a Star Wars pedigree.)

It’s only in the peculiar landscape of Perfect Sense that the closing moments of the film could be considered in any respect a happy ending: the world overtaken by a wave of unreserved euphoria, followed by Susan and Michael realizing the depth of their feelings and racing through the streets of Glasgow toward a heartfelt embrace—at the precise moment that their ability to see is snatched from them. Humanity won’t be long for this world, and all they will have is the sensation of this final, passionate embrace, but they will have that. It’s a dark but oddly hopeful conclusion regarding the one thing we learned for certain during the course of the pandemic: we humans are nothing if not persistent.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Perfect Sense is, to put it bluntly, a weird film… Overall Perfect Sense is a very strange and grim oddity that evokes the wrong reaction.” – Maxine Brown, Roobla (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by Erin. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Perfect Sense

Perfect Sense
  • DVD
  • Multiple Formats, Color, NTSC
  • English (Original Language), English (Unknown)
  • 1
  • 92
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