Review: 'It Follows'
If you’ve avoided the festival buzz for the upcoming horror film It Follows, you might think it’s only treading well-worn ground when, fifteen minutes in, 19-year-old beauty Jay (Maika Monrow) is assaulted post-coitus by her gentleman friend Hugh (Jake Weary), wielding a chemical-soaked rag. This isn’t some amateurish torture porn, however, but something far more creative.
It Follows is the rare horror film that gets nearly everything right. Granted, it would have been hard to go wrong with a premise like this: a sexually transmitted disease and curse that follows its lone victim in shape-shifting human forms with the slow, relentless gait of a Romero zombie.
It’s a thematically rich concept that works beyond its obvious AIDS metaphor. The aptly titled It Follows mines the primal fear of being "followed" to brilliant effect, adding on an original mythos to make the unknowable monster much more real. The monster and the various vessels it inhabits can only be seen by the infected. The curse, the characters find out, will kill the cursed eventually, unless it’s transferred via sex to another victim. If the curse kills the new victim, however, it will come back for the others, so the cursed are never quite out of the woods.
It Follows' greatest asset is that it does what a horror film is supposed to do: It scares the hell out of you, and it’ll probably have you checking over your shoulder for hours after leaving the theater.
Any director worth their weight could spin a solid horror flick around such a psycho-sexualized, paranoiac nightmare, but David Robert Mitchell does his audience one far better and offers more than basic horror. He takes the lessons learned from his first feature—teenage ensemble drama The Myth of the American Sleepover—and transplants them into the horror genre. Unlike most contemporary horror movies, the characters here are more than air-headed placeholders. The scenes of them palling around are more than fluff to pad out the running time. The characters feel real, like painfully accurate embodiments of honest teenage angst, an emotion that neatly ties into the sexual nature of the threat they face.
It Follows has fantastic cinematography, capturing both the grays of decaying Detroit and the dulled pastels of its affluent suburbs with memorable camera movements that emphasize setting and paranoid tension. There’s a timeless feeling to the colors of this world and even the technology—the characters talk on corded land-line phones, but one character uses a makeup mirror e-reader. A stellar score that blends John Carpenter-esque electronic bleep-bloops with more modern noise assaults only adds to the unique atmosphere.
The film falters only rarely, falling into a few typical traps of the genre. The characters don’t always treat it with the gravity they logically should–if you know a presence is constantly stalking you, why don’t you look around every now and then? For most of the runtime, you’ll likely be on the edge of your seat, but there are moments where you’ll want to scold the characters for being so stupid. It takes away from the experience, but not much.
For all the lip service I’ve paid to the characters and the aesthetic artistry, It Follows' greatest asset is that it does what a horror film is supposed to do: It scares the hell out of you, and it’ll probably have you checking over your shoulder for hours after leaving the theater.
It Follows opens today in limited release at Arclight Hollywood.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QX38jXwnRAM
Review: ‘Walter’
Walter exists in a strange sort of limbo, not one between heaven and hell but between Hollywood legitimacy and student film-esque simplicity. Unfortunately, for all the competent editing and the occasional recognizable actor, the actual content of Walter skews far closer to the sour tendencies of the latter.
Our protagonist is the titular Walter, played by Andrew J. West, a character and a performance as bland and unmemorable as the movie surrounding it. Our well-put-together protagonist is a 20-something white male who, of course, provides voice-over narration to lead us through his life, one filled with stereotypes.
To begin with, he works at a movie theater with the unattainable blonde girl of his dreams, Kendall (Leven Rambin), who only becomes an actual character in one scene wherein she holds Walter’s hand and tearfully says, “We’re all broken.” Also populating the perpetually crowded theater are a bemused boss (Jim Gaffigan) and an over-the-top bro rival (Milo Ventimiglia) who spends most of his time insisting he’s going to bang the object of our protagonist’s desires. Rounding out his mostly-non-existent personal life are an excessive worry-wart of a mother (Virginia Madsen) and a comically unhelpful psychiatrist (William H. Macy), who mostly just tells Walter he’s crazy.
And why is Walter crazy? In fact, he believes himself to be the son of God (not Jesus though, he clarifies), tasked with deciding the eternal fate of everyone he comes into contact with. While everything seems well and good for a time, his routine is eventually interrupted by a ghost named Greg who insists Walter decide his fate. For whatever reason, he can’t make a judgment on the deceased—nor can he get Greg to leave him alone.
Even Walter’s apparent insanity is treated more as a quirk than an actual issue, but I suppose that’s keeping in line with its unwavering commitment to white-bread blandness.
Greg’s mostly-uninterested prodding and unlikely connection to Walter’s past soon reveals that our hero has a few demons waiting to be confronted. While the film’s first half consists mostly of sunny, quirky set-pieces and half-jokes, the second devolves into uninvolving melodrama, cycling through non-revelatory flashbacks and hackneyed monologues delivered by undeveloped characters, as Walter’s limited sanity decays in only the most predictable of ways.
The film’s stylistic choices are mostly Sundance tropes that might have seemed interesting twenty years back—Walter wanders through overexposed traumatic memories, says things aloud that clearly aren’t actually being said aloud (“theater six on your right, hell”), and tries to literally outrun his problems.
Genre-wise, Walter could most easily be described as a drama-comedy that toes that line so well it somehow manages to be both unfunny and never emotionally involving. There isn’t anything inherently wrong with the concept, and it could be great in the right hands, but the writer-director team can’t seem to come up with anything really worth saying, except maybe “everyone has issues, so why not face yours and get past them?” Even Walter’s apparent insanity is treated more as a quirk than an actual issue, but I suppose that’s keeping in line with its unwavering commitment to white-bread blandness.
Although Walter is mercifully short, clocking in under 90 minutes, its final scenes left a bitter taste in my mouth that I’m still trying to mentally wash away. Without giving away too much for viewers still intending to seek out the film, I’ll just say it ends with Walter, rejuvenated by a gloriously unhelpful piece of advice, storming through his day and overcoming each and every one of his many problems, until we finally cut to black over a shot of him smiling, hopeful for what the future holds. And I was hopeful too, for a future free of this film.
Walter is now playing at the Arena Cinema Hollywood and on VOD.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iriKbvNKibM
In Praise of the Low-Key Science Fiction Flick
Last year was a great year for science fiction, reaffirming the genre’s place in the mainstream. As always, it’s refreshing to see ambitious sci-fi's like Guardians of the Galaxy, Snowpiercer, and even the severely flawed Interstellar receive their fair share of love in year-end lists alongside typical non-genre prestige pics.
Amidst all this love for science fiction, one branch of the genre continues to go unrecognized and unfairly slighted by critics and audiences alike – a branch I’m calling "low-key science fictions," for lack of a better term, an underserved sub-subgenre that grounds its genre noodling firmly in a mundane world. There are more examples than most might think, but in relation to last year, I’m thinking primarily of The One I Love and Coherence.
Coherence revolves around a dinner party and the uncomfortable romantic dynamics between a few of the friends that are interrupted and eventually worsened by a comet passing overhead causing unexpected space-time ramifications. The One I Love explores a failing marriage, following the couple on a romantic getaway that quickly sours when they meet seemingly perfect doppelgängers of themselves.
In film, science-fiction is so often an escapist genre, whisking entranced viewers to fantastical worlds so far removed from reality. For all its heartstring-tugging and terror-mongering villains, Guardians of the Galaxy is mostly an invitation to jet set around a colorful cosmic world with wisecracking antiheroes. Even a dystopian sci-fi like The Matrix allows viewers to indulge in messianic fantasies of higher purpose by putting themselves in Neo’s place. Snowpiercer is a gloomier take on the genre than most, but the post-apocalyptic setting still allows viewers to distance themselves.
By first establishing a mundane world and then injecting the fantastical element, these films similarly [to Hitchcock] make scenarios that might otherwise feel hackneyed, seem direct.
Coherence and The One I Love allow no such distance—they’re confrontational, allowing viewers to see shades of their world and their relationships before catapulting characters into otherworldly situations. One of Hitchcock’s greatest assets as a storyteller was his ability to inject tension and anxiety into the mundane, proving that any suburban home can be equally as scary as the bleakest of haunted mansions. By first establishing a mundane world and then injecting the fantastical element, these films similarly make scenarios that might otherwise feel hackneyed, seem direct. In an everyday world we inherently understand, we better realize the way such insane goings-on really affect the characters and their relationships.
Like The Twilight Zone – an influence plainly acknowledged through dialogue in The One I Love – both films mix realism with mind-bending scenarios to provoke thought, asking viewers, in no uncertain terms, what would you do? Watching both, I started looking for excuses to distance myself from the characters and their questionable moralities.
Neither film, however, is perfect. Both have some trouble establishing a distinct visual language like sci-fi's with larger budgets might, and The One I Love in particular occasionally sacrifices the integrity of its characters in service of the story—Elisabeth Moss’s Sophie, for example, embraces the surreal situation far too easily to be plausible. While Coherence roots itself in the more fantastic elements of quantum sciences, The One I Love doesn’t bother trying to ground its insanity in science, which is fine, but it sometimes falters in trying to explain how the world it implies exactly works.
Despite their flaws, both films deserved to be seen and generally, they weren’t. Who even heard of Coherence and The One I Love during their limited theatrical runs? Although Under the Skin and Her stand out as notable exceptions, most films within this sub-subgenre go unrecognized in theaters and at awards shows when they’re first released. Studios might not have faith in their discomforting appeals, but these films tend to find their audiences one way or another, as evidenced by the burgeoning cult status for films like Primer. In this humble reviewer’s opinion, it’s high time we see more smart low key science fiction features in more theaters.
Admittedly, there’s always a risk in wishing for more of a certain something in film, but I don’t believe there’s much chance of megaplexes becoming anywhere near as saturated with low-key sci-fi's as they often are with, say, superhero flicks (unless Coherence is rebooted as The Amazing Coherence maybe). In the unlikely event this sub-subgenre even gains the popularity I fancy it deserves, such films should have a longer shelf life than most.
There is, after all, a reason The Twilight Zone endured for so many seasons and continues to resonate with channel surfers decades later. Although most episodes work well within the thirty-minute format, films like The One I Love and Coherence prove that similar stories are well-suited feature length. If they get the chance, they might just resonate decades on like the best episodes of The Twilight Zone do. Given the chance and the viewership, I think films mining the same vein with the same confidence and intelligence could resonate just as long.
On 'Selma' and Separating the Good Biopics from the Bad
Selma, this year’s much-touted biopic of Martin Luther King, Jr., opens on a close-up shot of the good doctor as he self-consciously rehearses a speech in between complaining to his wife about his wardrobe—not on one of Dr. King’s legendary speeches or on some childhood tragedy that inspires his eventual triumphs in civil rights leadership. It’s not a grand moment, but it is an honest one. The film’s intimacy is immediate and enduring.
It’s surprising because, of all the great movies that hit theaters in 2014, perhaps none was easier to dismiss as trash than Selma (okay, maybe The Lego Movie); the reason being that toxic little descriptor—biopic.
It’s a word dripping with negative connotations of cheap Oscar bait and dumbed-down simplification of real-world events and people. These so-called prestige pictures clog smaller theaters and megaplexes alike come awards season—so much so that it’s easy to forget that a biopic can be more than another two hour stretch of stilted idealistic speeches, years-spanning montages, and bad old-age makeup. Recently, films like Selma and 2013’s Lincoln reminded picky viewers like myself of the biopic’s potential.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with biopics, but it’s often too easy to slip into manipulative melodrama when the opening “based on a true story” tag functions like a get-out-of-jail-free card for sloppy storytelling.
Most cinematic profiles of real-life heroes, usually musical or historical icons, are so ubiquitous that they even inspired a merciless parody in Jake Kasdan’s Walk Hard. That film’s primary target is one deserving of ridicule: the Johnny Cash-inspired Walk the Line.
Walk the Line somehow manages to make a rollicking story of sex, drugs, and country music seem tedious. Lifelong conflicts are boiled down into unconvincing dialogue scenes. Montages abound. Johnny Cash comes across as a morose prick, and the film chooses to focus on a romance whose conclusion is inevitable and painfully telegraphed.
Despite typically stellar performances from leads Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon, the humorless film fails at telling a captivating story or capturing the essence of a famous figure’s life. After watching Walk the Line, one doesn’t understand Johnny Cash or his music more, so much as one wonders how and why June Carter could have put up with him.
Trying to cover a considerable chunk, even just a measly decade, of a real person’s life in one film is a fool’s errand for all but the most skilled filmmakers—Mike Leigh, who recently directed artistic biopic Mr. Turner, is among those few. Usually, however, it means trying to apply some cohesive and satisfying narrative arc to a real life—when real life simply doesn’t work that way. Thus, Walk the Line becomes a film about how a simplistic version of Johnny Cash overcomes his drug addiction, guilt, daddy issues and general assholery by virtue of June Carter’s unconditional, if often tough love.
On the other hand, a biopic can more-or-less toss narrative structures aside, like the abysmal Jobs or the recent Stephen Hawking biopic, The Theory of Everything. Again, the film is blessed with stellar lead performances and even a downright decent script that allows the central figure more facets than Walk the Line manages to give Cash. Still, it’s easy to lose interest when watching. The film, though touching at times, devolves into a series of events that happened throughout the course of a man’s life. That’s why we read Wikipedia articles, not why we watch movies.
Selma and Lincoln both gain immediate points by zeroing in on a specific point in their subjects’ lives—the former on King’s march for voting rights through rural Alabama and the latter on Lincoln’s efforts to pass the thirteenth amendment on the tail-end of the Civil War. Although both films are set during pivotal moments of history, they are still only moments. The scope is manageable, and by focusing on just one short period, the films add a thrilling immediacy to history. These are skilled men working against powerful opponents, trying to get big things done now. The implication that death is just around the corner for both is just icing on the cake.
Plus, both films convey a knowledge of what made these men so great. Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King are defined not simply by their character or their families, but by what they do—that is, after all, what made them so great in the eyes of history. The films acknowledge their characters’ flaws and personal issues—Selma’s brief scene concerning King’s infidelity is possibly one of its best—without reveling in them as Walk the Line does.
We understand Lincoln and King in new ways when we see them greasing wheels and twisting arms to accomplish their goals. They become grounded individuals who simply do their jobs really damn well, even when their methods aren’t so black-and-white. That might mean Lincoln exploiting a few Democrats to win votes or King purposely putting his people in harm’s way to make sure the news cameras are on them.
Meanwhile, Walk the Line mostly uses the world of country music to score the plentiful montages and as an inconsequential backdrop for the central love story. The Theory of Everything similarly brushes over Hawking’s achievements in science in favor of examining his deterioration and how it affects his ultimately doomed marriage. The results are moving at times, but the subjects remain elusive. Admittedly, not all biopics have subjects as fascinating or as storied as Martin Luther King or Abraham Lincoln, but the storytelling tricks employed in Selma and Lincoln still hold true.
Let’s apply the methods to Johnny Cash’s story, for example. Johnny Cash is certainly no Lincoln, but wouldn’t Walk the Line have been more interesting if the story was anchored in the early days of Sun studios, when Cash and his fellow soon-to-be superstars struggled to eat while on the cusp of fame that would corrupt them, or during the 1980s, when Cash relapsed while working against his record company and status as a wash-up? Both approaches would examine Cash as an artist and as a member of the unforgiving music-biz—again, what made him famous—while showing drug addiction in less-clichéd contexts. Both would have more immediacy as Cash faces his baser urges and works to eat and to stay relevant, or to become relevant in the first place. Both, most importantly, would have been more cohesive and compelling.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with biopics, but it’s often too easy to slip into manipulative melodrama when the opening “based on a true story” tag functions like a get-out-of-jail-free card for sloppy storytelling. Selma and Lincoln serve as welcome reminders that, when done right, biopics are an invaluable tool for bringing history to life.