Tag Archives: Romance

Capsules

CAPSULE: DEAD AWAKE (2010)

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DIRECTED BY: Omar Naim

FEATURING: Nick Stahl, , Amy Smart

PLOT: Haunted by the memory of a car crash, a lonely funeral assistant fakes his own

death. Tracking a mystery mourner, he finds himself tangled in intrigue while suffering from bizarre, piecemeal flashbacks from his discordant, seemingly supernaturally influenced past.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  While Dead Awake captures our imagination at first with ominous flashbacks and peculiar visions which emphasize details in a way that foreshadow profound significance, none of these clues pan out to reveal an extraordinary plot.  The method of revelation builds interest in previous events that turn out to be not very mysterious once we are let in on their meaning.  Worse, at about the halfway point, the story becomes a derivative, conventional chiller.

COMMENTS:  The setup:  Nick Stahl plays sullen, skulking  funeral director who stages his own death to see if old friends will arrive at his funeral.  When an enigmatic young woman comes to mutter cryptic utterances over his “corpse,” he follows her and has some unusual misadventures.  In the meantime, he flirts with an ex-girlfriend who also came to his viewing, unlocking a cascade of strange memories and guilt about some mysterious, previous tragedy that broke them apart.  Eventually, we find out how both women are connected to  Nick’s past and to his haunting recollections.

Sounds like the makings of a real whiz-bang chiller-thriller, right?  Wrong!  What a massive disappointment. I was expecting something clever, brooding and supernatural like Dark Corners, and that’s how Dead Awake starts out. There is a mysterious car crash, a mortuary attendant faking his own funeral, a mysterious griever talking in riddles, indications that half the characters may be dead and not know it, and eerie flashbacks wrought with hidden symbolic meaning.

The non-linear plot, dark tone and twists and turns made me think I was in for a real doozy of a story.  And then the film peters out.  The flashbacks reveal no great mystery, the symbolism turns out to be arbitrary and empty, and real ideas are replaced with melodrama, over-acting and a grandiose musical score that is more fitting of a sweeping historical epic.  The score seems calculated to try to fool the viewer into thinking he is watching something more important than he really is (it didn’t work).

The movie wraps up with an unlikely stretch of a “climax” (more of an anti-climax) and a corny, happy (more like sappy) ending with a lame and very mild twist that opens up a bunch of plot holes.

I paid money for this???  I swear, no more poppy juice and Colt .45 before I read DVD jackets at the video store.

I saw that Nick Stahl was in this and so far, I have seen him in three other movies that turned out to be artistic, independent, and pretty good, so I took a gamble.  Mind you, Dead Awake is not a bad movie.  It doesn’t smack of major studio schlock.  The problem is that is promises to be so darned intriguing and then drops the ball, almost as if a writers strike led to someone with no imagination completing the script from the halfway point.

Rose McGowan, formerly a delicious woman, looks just . . . awful, post plastic surgery.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“A poorly structured and even more poorly shot mixture of a gothic suspense thriller with a vanilla romance filmed in Des Moines, “Dead Awake” never comes close to springing to life.”–Mark Olsen, The Los Angeles Times (contemporaneous)

Dead Awake trailer

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: MAKE-OUT WITH VIOLENCE (2008)

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DIRECTED BY:  Deagol Brothers

FEATURING:  Eric Lehning, Cody DeVos, Leah High, Brett Miller, Tia Shearer, Jordan Lehning

PLOT: A young man finds one summer love with the reanimated object of his desire.

Still from Make-out with Violence (2008)

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: Skillful blending of genres combined with a premise of genuinely romantic necrophilia make this movie 100 percent weird, without being over-the-top.

COMMENTS: Patrick and Wendy are best friends for life. He is crazy. She is dead.

When Patrick finds Wendy reanimated, he attempts to remedy his unrequited love for her. Pursing his obsession, his existence spirals into the uncanny.

Thinking, creative-minded viewers will be entranced by this peculiar, arty atmosphere tale. Not a horror movie with conventional thrills and chills, Make-Out With Violence is an unsettling story about love triangles and living death. Dreamy cinematic sequences blend into contrasting scenes of horror and the grotesque.

Brothers Carol and Patrick love best friends Addy and Wendy respectively. Wendy loves Brian, Brian has a fling with Addy, Addy gets jealous when Carol makes eyes at her friend Anne, and Wendy is dead. Dead, and inexplicably reanimated.

Wendy went missing the spring of her senior year. Never found and declared dead the summer before college, she is discovered in a field by Carol.  Undead, but in a semi-catatonic state, Wendy is mostly unresponsive.  Because she was so well liked and admired by all who knew her, Carol and Patrick are compelled take her to the home of an out-of-town friend where they attempt to care for her.

As the summer waxes, then wanes the brothers and their friends pursue their love interests. Carrol dates Addy. And well, Patrick “dates” dead Wendy, both siblings taking time out to tend to her as if such an endeavor is perfectly normal.  All goes well until their love triangles cause them to break their pact of secrecy and Addy finds out about Wendy, with macabre consequences.

Good acting, pleasing photography, and a gentle, artful soundtrack complement wholesome, likable characters, and a dreamy, sepia-toned, perspective on youth and summer. The overall effect makes the cinematic experience like a rosy look back at our idealized impression of golden meadows and free spiritedness of the 1970’s, interspersed with creepy, repellent sequences of undeath.

Make-Out With Violence is a different kind of horror movie, definitely not for a mainstream audience. This film is a well produced, conventionally assembled movie with a truly bizarre plot. It will appeal to fans of mood films such as 2007’s One Day Like Rain, who will find Make-Out With Violence to be infinitely more lucid and coherent.

I am including the trailer below against my better judgment. Whoever put it together should be shot. It fails to adequately convey the essence, tone and substantive impact of the film, making it look like a Generation-X teenage movie, which it is not.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…invests in spacey horror tropes one moment, plunges into absurdist adolescent angst the next and begs questions every step of the way, but just about holds together with its strong compositional sense, killer atmospheric lighting and wall-to-wall music track… the offbeat rhythms of the pic’s non-pro cast cranks up the film’s bizarre intensity.”–Ronnie Scheib, Variety (contemporaneous)

Make Out With Violence trailer

Capsules

CAPSULE: ONDINE (2009)

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DIRECTED BY: Neil Jordan

FEATURING: Colin Farrell, Alicja Bachleda, Alison Barry, Stephen Rea

PLOT: An Irish fisherman scoops up a girl in his nets one day; is she actually a selkie?

Still from Ondine (2009)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  It’s not weird (that’s not a spoiler; weird is an aesthetic choice, and the movie might not be weird even if Ondine is a selkie).

COMMENTS:  Neil Jordan has gone weird from time to time (The Company of Wolves, The Butcher Boy), but even when he’s not being totally bizarre he’s often at least provocative (The Crying Game).  It’s therefore strange to see him helm a movie that plays it so safe, that aims so squarely at a middlebrow arthouse crowd who only ask for picture postcard vistas and enough painfully dramatic soul-searching to make the happy ending seem well-earned.  Starting with the myth of the woman from the sea who falls in love with a mortal man, Ondine breathes in magic, but exhales mere quality.  The cinematography by Christopher Doyle captures the quaint beauty of an Irish fishing village and the majesty of the surrounding ocean (often shot on overcast days so that the sky and the sea share a uniform blue-gray tint).  Performances by the principals are also top notch.  As Syracuse, the on-the-wagon alcoholic subsistence fisherman with a sickly daughter, Colin Farrell projects ancient guilt and sadness: this bedraggled, sad-eyed ex-rake never looks more at home than when he’s in a confessional.  Polish beauty Alicja Bachleda has an otherworldly sensuality that serves her character well; she goes swimming in sun dresses, then lounges in the sun like a seal with the wet clothes clinging to her.  Young Alison Barry does fine in a role we’ve seen many times before: the sad outcast kid whose belief in magic teaches the adults in her life a thing or two about the power of hope.  As for the script, in its mechanics, it’s hard to criticize (though I would have killed off a different character).  Jordan’s writing provides proper character depth and ties up loose ends cleverly.  The film’s overall narrative strategy, on the other hand, isn’t as easy to cozy up to.  It starts as a slow but pleasant drama with the ambiguity about Ondine’s true nature driving the tale, then wanders around in some melodramatic side alleys before resolving itself with a thriller conclusion that drains the magic out of the film.  The film also has a technical issue: for Americans, at least, the dialogue can be hard to make out due to the authentic Irish brogues and low conversational sound levels.  Stephen Rea, in particular, is indecipherable when he hushes his voice; I couldn’t turn the sound up loud enough to make out what he was saying.  Overall, it’s easy to see how someone could be briefly charmed by Ondine, but it’s hard to imagine even the most romantic soul being enchanted by it.  It’s more of a movie to flirt with than to take home to bed.  It seems like the kind of classical, meditative, risk-free story older filmmakers tackle when they want to make sure they are being taken seriously as artists—but it’s that very self-seriousness that makes what emerges a minor work.

“Ondine” was a 1939 play by Jean Giraudoux about a water nymph who falls in love with a knight.  Tales of women from the sea falling in love with mortal men are a common motif in fairy tales.  The film Ondine adapts Celtic folklore about the selkie, a seal who can shed her skin to become a beautiful female and mate with mortal men.  The same legend formed the basis of John Sayles’ 1994 independent arthouse hit The Secret of Roan Innish.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…works best when it stays within the blurry in-between space separating the everyday world from that belonging to story-time flights of fancy.”–Manhola Dargis, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

Capsules

CAPSULE: NEVER LET ME GO (2010)

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DIRECTED BY: Mark Romanek

FEATURING: Carey Mulligan, , Keira Knightley,

PLOT: Kathy,Tommy and Ruth grow up at the pleasant but isolated Hallisham Academy in a fictional Britain that never was; they fall in and out of love with each other and grow up to discover that the purpose of their lives has already been set for them.

Still from Never Let Me Go (2010)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  It’s not weird, though the mix of genres is unprecedented.  The premise is speculative—it would be science fiction had it been set in the future instead of an alternate past—but the execution is conventional, laid down with a Merchant-Ivory-ish gravitas.

COMMENTS: I’ll respect convention and won’t give away the “spoiler” for Never Let Me Go, despite the facts that 1). the trailer reveals it to the observant viewer who has seen a couple of key B-movies from which the premise is derived, and 2). the mystery surrounding the children of Hallisham Academy is divulged about twenty minutes into the film. Point 2) is key, because this movie works not by slowly revealing twists and secrets, but by keeping us watching in horror at the ironic inevitability of the children’s unfolding fate. Locked away from the outside world in the comfortable but disquietingly totalitarian Academy, the kids make up horrible stories about what happens to disobedient children who leave the grounds (dismemberment and starvation); their myths about their own fates persist into adulthood, but the audience always understands that they are doomed even as they cling to desperate hopes.  One of the biggest problems with the film is that it lacks background detail; viewing things entirely from the perspective of the trapped children, we never get enough of a sense of the larger society and its skewed politics and ethics, and are left to raise a lot of issues for ourselves. Too many questions about this Brave Alternate World are left unanswered (primarily, why our protagonists go so gently into that good night, hardly struggling against their fate). The love story is predictable, but that doesn’t make it any the less emotionally affecting, thanks to some great performances. Carey Mulligan, a rising star, carries the film with an often heartbreaking performance: smarter and less prone to illusion than her companions, the despair starts to register in her eyes just a few moments before it reaches Garfield or Knightley’s.  She also cries on cue, including a doozy that rolls down her face and ends up hanging off her chin for a second or two.  Garfield, currently being groomed to be the next Spider-Man, is acceptable as the awkward and occasionally unbalanced male love interest, and Knightley is pro as the seethingly jealous and gently vindictive third point of the love triangle. Kudos go out to the casting director for signing a trio of child actors that are not only fine thespians, but are also almost perfect genetic models for their grown-up counterparts. The cinematography is pleasing, sometimes poetic, with lonely fields and deserted beaches lit by soft golden glows. Despite its effective mood of melancholy, however, the film never really takes off. Director Romanek seems self-conscious in adapting the famed literary property. He’s so careful to be respectful, restrained and tastefully subtle so that the film will come off as “serious” and “important” that the tale fails to live and breathe.  (Having the lead character deliver the obvious moral in a closing monologue—just in case viewers missed the script’s Oscar-caliber metaphors—was a bad decision).  The end result is a story that sends the viewer out mildly depressed, rather than existentially shattered. Despite not quite achieving its full potential, Never Let Me Go still a good choice for the arthouse patron jonesing for a flick with Brit accents, teardrops, and no car chases.

The film was adapted, with the author’s blessing and oversight, from Kazuo Ishiguro’s acclaimed novel.  Ishiguro’s main weird movie connection is that he wrote the original screenplay for The Saddest Music in the World, although director Guy Maddin and his writing partner George Toles significantly surrealized the British writer’s scenario.  Director Mark Romanek’s previous feature was One Hour Photo (2002), an offbeat psychological thriller that cast Robin Williams way against type as a creepy, delusional photo developer.  His first, hard to find feature Static (1985), about a worker in a crucifix factory who thinks he has found a way to take pictures of Heaven, is reputedly quite weird (thanks to L. Robb Hubbard for reminding us of that last point).

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…an alternate universe that exudes some of the creepy calm of Wolf Rilla’s great English science-fiction flick Village of the Damned, but also the gloomy romanticism of Keats and Shelley.”–Steven Rea, Philadelphia Inquirer (contemporaneous)

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: THE APPLE (1980)

The Apple has been promoted onto the List of the 366 Weirdest Movies ever made. Comments are closed on this post, please visit the Certified Weird entry to comment.

DIRECTED BY: Menahem Golan

FEATURING: Vladek Sheybal, Catherine Mary Stewart, George Gilmour

PLOT: An innocent pair of Canadian folk singers/lovers split up when the female falls under the spell of a Mephistophelean pop music promoter in this “futuristic” (set in 1994) musical fantasy.

Still from The Apple (1980)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: How do you solve a problem like The Apple?  This science-fictiony musical satire/religious allegory is an obvious attempt to cash in on the camp credibility of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, but with the disco sensibility and glittery production values of Xanadu (also made in 1980).  The results are spectacularly uneven: the bizarre costuming, choreography, and psychedelic production numbers are actually pretty good in their deliberate excess, the songs range from annoying to quite hummable, and the rushed, out-of-nowhere messianic ending is an unforgettable cinematic disaster.  With RHPS already taking up a spot on the List in the “fantastical outré musical” category, I’m not sure that this similar (but less entertaining) movie is worthy of making it on the first ballot.  It’s more of a second tier midnight movie; but I wouldn’t rule The Apple out altogether.

COMMENTS: The Apple pulls you in many different directions: you’re never quite sure whether to tap your toes, roll your eyes, drop your jaw, or bring up your lunch. The plot, which mixes old MGM backstage musical themes with the Faustian corruption of show-biz innocents and a touch of dystopian literature, is familiar and easy to follow; it’s the production numbers that strangify things. The easiest way to simulate the insanity of The Apple is to take a track-by-track guided tour of the film.

“BIM’S on the Way.” (Representative lyric: “there ain’t no shame…”).  A full scale glam rock concert anthem, complete with dozens of backup singers, flashing multicolored lights, a disco ball, and a sheep-like chanting audience armed with green glowsticks, as two pop stars in sequined skullcaps screech out a propaganda ode to their corporate sponsor (B.I.M. Continue reading LIST CANDIDATE: THE APPLE (1980) →