A Hip New Reason for Tired Old Slayings.

THE CABIN IN THE WOODS is about four painfully pretty college kids (and one Shaggy) being slasher-slain by zombies at said cabin. Seen it all before, right? But there’s a twist: the cabin is a front for a religious cult, who are in the business of luring college kids to this technologically advanced hideaway and sacrificing them to their insatiable god. Well… at least the movie is trying. Veeery trying…

After an excellent false-opening credit sequence, we meet Bradley Whitford and Richard Jenkins, two office guys in short-sleeved white shirts and ties, around a water cooler. Cut back to – what the teen demo are here to see – a chick in panties, getting ready for a trip to the woods.

The four pretty kids are Chris Hemsworth (THOR), Anna Hutchison (The Slut), Jesse Williams (the Jock) and Kristen Connolly (The Virgin). The fifth wheel is Fran Kranz (The Shaggy). Stereotypes just waiting to die.

In the woods, a falcon flies into an invisible force shield, which tells us the cabin is surrounded by this unseen electric fence. Intriguing…

We quickly discover the ulterior agenda of the office guys, as they command a war room outfitted with banks of computers and monitors, showing… you guessed it – the cabin in the woods. And though they’re quite flippant about their job of monitoring the kids, they speak in more reverent tones of appeasing their bloodthirsty god. Through levers and pulleys that the cabin is surreptitiously retrofitted with, the office guys manipulate the walls and doors to lure the kids to the basement, “then we let them use free will from there.”

It’s an interesting twist on tired old slasher genre. And a peek into what modern religious cults might be doing, considering technological advances. But after the initial jolt wears off, it’s still just murders and screaming and stuff.

A guard in the war room objects to the staff gathering around watching Thor nail the naked Slut, “Do we really have to watch this?” – then doesn’t object to the horrific manner she is murdered two minutes later. I can see where he gets his twisted priorities – his sniveling mindset is the exact mindset of the idiotic Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), who blanch at depicting all things that create Life, but have no problem rating a movie PG-13 that depicts all manner of Death.

CABIN is written and produced by the great Joss Whedon (FIREFLY), so I was expecting a little more. Still, a few good ideas with the final scenes, showing all the monsters of myth kept locked in cages under the cabin – and escaping! And when Thor tries to ride out of the woods – one hell of an unexpected demise! And I guess it’s always a plus when a culty god escapes his subterranean abode to wreak havoc on the Earth.

Which is what happens at the end, so if you’re reading this, you’re one of the few survivors on this desolate Earth.

END

Six Chicks Go Down.

From all reports, I knew THE DESCENT was going to be “affecting.” What I didn’t expect was to end up curled in a corner in a fetal position, gently rocking back and forth, dribbling slightly, and calling my dolly’s name in the darkness.

Six women into extreme sports go spelunking. After an uneventful night in a log cabin in the Appalachians (where the senseless chick-yammering reaches a critical mass), they descend into an unexplored subterranean labyrinth, where a cave-in traps them – and they find they are not alone.

Writer-director Neil Marshall’s THE DESCENT is distressing, disturbing and uncomfortable in all the wrong ways that make it so right. He drags us into the pitch black of our own insecurities and primal fears. Characterization is almost overshadowed by the fact that the ladies must necessarily meet the proto-humans – the Crawlers – in the caverns, but if you pay close attention, there is a rewarding subplot between the two main damsels who, while in distress, do not turn into whiny bitches and stop just short of Ripleys. Their interaction carries all the way to the surprising ending.

Marshall uses many horror conventions to create his tension, anxiety, jump-scares and mindfucks, but instead of becoming cliché, he succeeds with simplicity, and a well-directed cast of unknowns.

High marks to Marshall and cinematographer Sam McCurdy for studiously using minimal light sources, mainly flashlights and flares where possible. In supposedly pitch dark caves, nothing is more annoying than seeing everyone clearly in reflected light sources or backlighting that couldn’t possibly exist in the real world.

The opening act is distressing for the wrong reasons – sure, we have to be introduced to the six girls or we’ll never care for them when the flesh starts flying – but do we have to put up with all this yammering? Chicks yammering vacuously is almost as painful as being disemboweled by proto-humans in an underground cave. If you can make it past this first act, you will be rewarded during The Descent, the claustrophobic suspense never letting up till the last frame – and even then, it will leave you nauseous. In a good way.

The opening scene is a shocker, setting up main girlie, Sarah (Shauna Macdonald) with a tragedy that aids her motivation when the going gets dark and bloody.

A year after Sarah’s tragedy, she gets back on the horse again by accepting an invite to an extreme caving adventure with her fem posse, led by Juno (Natalie Mendoza). Now maybe I watch too much porn, but when I see six hot chicks in a log cabin having a slumber party, shouldn’t the wocka-chicka start pretty soon? One of them wears pajamas that they all poke fun at – payoff: the pajamas are ripped off and massive suckling ensues, right?; one of them walks into the shower – payoff: they’re ALL sharing the shower, right?; one of them wakes up in the middle of the night and looks over the other sleeping fleshpots – payoff: they’re all in the same bed, right? And where the hell was the pillowfight-in-panties scene?

Marshall got the setups right, but missed the payoffs. Maybe take some pointers from Randy Spears?

Then the caving starts and the movie gets serious about its horror status. When they crawl through claustrophic rock passages, where no one can turn around or go backwards, we start to feel the terrifying, smothering weight of the millions of tons of stone above them. And then Sarah, the last in line – gets stuck.

This is without a doubt the best moment in the movie and transitions us from vacuous yammering to primal fear. And our chests clench, as we ask out loud, just to hear our own reassuring voices in the cloying darkness: “Why do people DO these things?”

Poffy’s dolly, Pliffy

While we didn’t get our literal lesbo love-fest, we do appreciate the rest of the movie giving us the metaphor of chicks squeezing their slimed bodies through dark orifices. (And when women grunt in exertion – whether their lives depend on it or not – I”m sure I”m not the only one constantly misinterpreting those grunts.)We have the bone-through-the-shin gag – oh-hooooe! Pain is SUCH a rush!; we have pickaxes through the neck; we have a boneyard cathedral and a stagnant blood lake, and when the girls think they’ve found a way out, the surprising ending will turn your stomach.

No accident Marshall calls it THE DESCENT, as in ‘descent into madness.’

Now where’s my dolly, Pliffy? Pliffy, where are you?… you didn’t go down that bad cave, did you?… Pliffy?…

END

Nolan’s Real Magic.

Godard’s Dictum: The cinema is truth 24 frames per second.
Rejoinder: The cinema is illusion, is lying 24 frames per second.

THE PRESTIGE is everything THE ILLUSIONIST wanted to be – and claimed to be in its trailers – an unholy tale of a magician seeking arcane Real Magic. Overarching the magic, a tale of two men obsessed: one with revenge, one with his art; both obsessions costing each man his life time and time again. And that enigmatic statement will have to lodge in your brain, to fester and flower as it will…

Both THE ILLUSIONIST and THE PRESTIGE are set in 1899 London, but whereas ILLUSIONIST is a whiny bitch that tries too hard to please, PRESTIGE is an egomaniac that criss-crosses veins of intrigue and misdirection, pumping you breathless with half-lies and false truths until its powerful climax. In other words, THE PRESTIGE is the penis to THE ILLUSIONIST’s vagina.

Christian Bale (as cockney as he wants to be) is magician Borden, and Hugh Jackman (as suave as X-Man Logan is not) is magician Angier, friends working as audience plants for an elderly magician, whose female assistant is Angier’s wife (Piper Perabo, from the Julia Roberts School of big-mouth bass masquerading as beautiful women). In tying an incorrect trick knot one night, Borden accidentally gets Angier’s wife killed in a drowning tank, resulting in he and Angier becoming mortal career rivals. Batman versus Wolverine.

Like their alter-egos from other films, Borden (Bale) is the brooding, genius magician whilst Angier (Jackman) is the showman who lives for the quick strike and audience adulation. Borden develops “The Transported Man,” a trick of such ingenuity Angier believes Borden has tapped into Real Magic, despite the advice of veteran magician’s assistant, Cutter (Michael Caine, here playing a kind of Alfred to Borden’s Batman and Angier’s Wolverine simultaneously).

Forbidden Cucumber Magic

Scarlett Johansson plays Angier’s assistant, Olivia, who flits between both magicians as a double-crossing, counter-spying lover and I cannot discern whether her non-believability is because she is “acting” duplicitous or because she can’t act; Much like Vivien Leigh in A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, her false style clashes with all the other real actors; either way, chalk it up to another miscast iPod surfer girl who continues to work in movies purely on the strength of her heaving mammii.

Cutter’s voiceover describes the three stages of a magic act, all quite self-explanatory: The Pledge, The Turn, and The Prestige.

The non-chronological movie itself plays out the three stages, as it Pledges with an opening scene that has us believing Borden has killed Angier in a drowning tank; The Turn takes us deep into Borden’s and Angier’s notebooks, flashbacks within flashbacks showing us Borden, the financially-struggling magician whose incredible tricks are pearls before the swine of London’s working class, whilst Angier thrills the bourgeoisie, making up for half-baked tricks with his showmanship; Borden takes a working class wife (Rebecca Hall) and fathers a child, which stokes Angier’s hatred, until – The Prestige, which, as Cutter narrates, “is the part with the twists and turns, where lives hang in the balance, and you see something shocking you’ve never seen before.”

If you heeded THE PRESTIGE’s opening line, “Are you watching closely?” its myriad mysteries would be laid bare as a Catholic priest’s homosexual sins. But, like all magicians’ audiences, we’re here to be misdirected by the magic.

Neil Burger’s THE ILLUSIONIST made the mistake of creating illusions which were too complex to be real tricks, but THE PRESTIGE goes in another direction, calling upon Science to augment the illusions. As Arthur C. Clarke portended: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Did Tesla invent Bowie
or did Bowie invent Tesla?

And the scientist enlisted by Angier is none other than “the man who invented the twentieth century” – Nikola Tesla, a real life Hungarian inventor, physicist and electrical engineer (played by David Bowie – ha! A real life genius playing a real life genius! – in the first real acting of his movie career, burying himself in the brow-furrowed role). (If it were not for Tesla’s arcane delving into nuclear physics, magnetism, alternating and direct current – yes, Tesla invented AC/DC before Bon Scott and Angus Young – we would not have those blue “bzzzz” things for Frankenstein movies (Tesla coils) which graduated to those crimson-blue-lightning balls (Plasma globes), also invented by Tesla – and duly misused at drunken frat parties the world over since).

At one point, Tesla states, “Exact science is not an exact science.” Though this may sound like ammunition for creationists and other lunatics, it is actually true pertaining to Scientific Method, which never lays claim to absolute truths, rather “transitional truths” – as new information comes to the fore, obsolete information must necessarily be updated or discarded. Science is pliable, provable, practical.

Still, it is ironic that in invoking the effigy of such a great scientist, the movie takes another Turn and actually breaches the bastion of Real Magic, when Tesla (aided by his Igor, Andy Serkis) inadvertently creates a machine that replicates objects exactly. Angier employs this machine onstage (with blue bzzzz’s galore, natch) to recreate Borden’s Transported Man illusion as “real,” appearing in two places simultaneously. The catch is: he must actually murder his replica every time he performs the act – to avoid hundreds of replicated Angiers. Now that’s dark. And disturbingly amoral. And I love it.

After the morbidity of Angier’s chosen path, the movie ramps to an even darker conclusion, with the beauty of this tale’s denouement lying not in its twists but in the manner writer-director Christopher Nolan unties the tale’s own inescapable knots and proves himself the greatest magician of the film as he artfully dodges glaring plot holes and loose ends with his snake-charming sleight of hand.

END

The Reverse Genius Principle.

9) And that’s when we realize we could never be sure of anything to begin with.

8) When Leonard eventually thinks he has found his wife’s killer, eleventh-hour reveals shock us with the possibility that his whole crisis may be nothing more than delusion.

7) Editing MEMENTO must have been like navigating inside Las Vegas hotels with no watch or compass: sex and drug distractions, deprivation of day or night, no signposts or exit signs, and of course, nauseous on cheap shrimp and hairy tequila. Untold credit to editor, Dody Dorn, for shuffling the deck as confusingly as possible, yet weaving the tale as tightly as a sanitarium wicker basket.

6) But every few minutes, the movie twists back on itself, each flashback a segment of Leonard’s life that happened just before the segment we have just seen – and with each flashback, we realize just how wrong Leonard is about who his friends are, his past life, clues to the killer, his quest in toto. By about the fourth paragraph we realize: this piece is running backwards.

5) From Jonathan Nolan‘s short story, Memento Mori, we meet Leonard mid-investigation, slumming it in a cockroach motel, having lost his job as insurance consultant, looking disheveled (as Pearce can do so natchelly), and optimistically on the trail of the murderer; hanging with gregarious Teddy (Joe Pantoliano), and involved with hot bod, Natalie (Carrie-Anne Moss), both of whom seem to be aiding Leonard catch his killer.

…must remember not to forget…

4) Leonard’s last “new memory” was the murder of his wife. During the scuffle with his wife’s killer, a blow to the head caused his memory faculty to shut down. Whether this is truly biologically possible (if you cannot make new memories, how do you even shop for food and water or pay the rent?), for the movie’s purposes, it means Leonard must piece together clues to his wife’s killer through copious notes, tattoos on his own body and Polaroids. But the truth will forever elude him and the clues that lead to the killer are mere wraiths, the products of his own “selective” reasoning.3) The harder you strive for something, the harder it is to grasp. But what you care least about – or that you were never striving for – falls into your lap. Some call this the path of least resistance, but it’s actually called The Reverse Genius Principle. And Leonard – all ephemeral ideas and misplaced action – is a Reverse Genius in full throttle.

2) Guy Pearce is the memory-challenged Leonard, who is trying so hard to move forward – to find his wife’s killer, but unable to create “new memories” to retain info – that he ends up moving backward. Thusly, writer-director Christopher Nolan has crafted a film where the clues to a murder fall neatly OUT of place. Backwards.

1) MEMENTO opens with a killing. We don’t know why. We don’t know who.

END