Film Review: Drag Me to Hell (Sam Raimi, 2009)

via Atlas Film
By Daniel Greenwood

This review contains stereotypes.

Snobbery is a difficult game. It’s much like ‘the game’ played out in the Wire, the superlative TV series about a police department struggling to overcome a drugs gang in Baltimore, Maryland. If you’re a music snob, you’re nice to the tax-payer (someone who likes music in itself, will listen to anything, without putting themselves on a pedestal because they like something) but if some m*****f***** steps to you telling you that Glasvegas’ debut record was superior to say Deerhunters’, then you pop that foo’. In this case, ‘pop’ means to either walk away from the antagonist or scythe them down with a pistol-esque glare (slowly, all night, every time they speak).

What about film snobbery? That shit ain’t easy. And in the case of Sam Raimi’s Drag Me to Hell it’s impossible. This movie is for anyone who goes to the cinema because they love the experience, sitting amidst strangers for an hour or two, whilst having their face ripped off by intense surround sound. Sarah Wharton is resident Horror-critic here, but for this layman of the genre it’s a nice place to start. What’s most attractive about this disgusting, loud movie is its wonderful sense of humour. All the scares are executed (loudly) with an appreciation of their stupidity. And at this particular screening each screech was followed with a chorus of laughter.

Stereotypes are abound here, a blonde damsel in distress battling a gypsy pensioner with the devil’s curse upon her. But blondie – Alison Lohman as Christine Brown, Drag Me to Hell’s battered protagonist – is made of steel, and this loans clerk (pining after the vacant Assistant Manager’s desk) takes something of a constant beating. This hiding is the product of a curse put upon her coat button by Lorna Raver (Mrs. Ganush). This after Christine reluctantly declines Mrs. Ganush a third extension on a mortgage loan that’s allowing her to keep her home. Christine’s attempts to impress her boss by standing up to Mrs. Ganush’s plea backfires, so cue a quite extraordinary 5pm brawl in Christine’s car between herself and a satanic Mrs. Ganush.

These mini-battles are numerous, and the appearance of a man-goat’s shadow at windows and beneath doorways is a constant fixture of poor Christine’s downtime. You sense Raimi hinting at suburban fears of breaking and entering, but also of racial boundaries, the horrors of Eastern European mystics (a more sinister, subverted fear of Slavs perhaps). Any film that has a billy-goat possessed at a seance and screaming ‘You fucking whore!’ has to be good. Even better in the way that Raimi carries the amusement of it all. If only hell was this much fun!

And for any deplorable elements of this movie (if taken seriously, which really it shouldn’t be) there’s a guilt-edged point about consumerism at the film’s close. Catherine sells all her electrical goods, her jewellery, attempting to raise cash for the goat-swearing seance to come. It looks like things might be ok for this girl, investing in something spiritual – rather than egotistical like a promotion at someone else’s expense – but damn girl just can’t help huh-self. Perhaps the moral of the story is that if you walk all over the little guys, the phlegmy old ladies, there’s a foul-mouthed CGI goat ready and waiting to barrage you for eternity. This film snob just took note.

Film Review: No Country for Old Men (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2007)

via Atlas Film
By Daniel Greenwood

This review eventually gets monetary.

The Coen brothers’ now infamous No Country for Old Men has perhaps the greatest opening forty-minutes in modern American cinema. It’s not unlike that of No Country’s Oscar competitor There Will be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007). Both movies begin out there on the carn-darn American frontier, the wilderness that Christopher Columbus parked his gosh-darn boat on back in the day. Each opening is slow and seductive, with Daniel Day-Lewis as Daniel Plainview in There Will be Blood digging for oil, and No Country for Old Men’s Josh Brolin as Llewelyn Moss, passing across the land to discover a scene of post-drugs-gang-carnage-warfare. [P.S. notice how only recently does the Western world care about Mexicans dying if it's in the form of a virus that might bother us over here, rather than the hundreds of grizzly, drugs-related killings that make up a far more serious epidemic]. The cinematography that constructs this sequence early in No Country is the spellbinding element. Instead of a constant shot-reverse-shot between Brolin’s stunned-expression!!!1! and the mutilated face of a corpse (Goonies-esque), the Coens allow their camera to linger, and the microphones pick up the buzzin’ flies milling around the feast of rotting flesh both human and canine.

The starkest of images here is Brolin’s Llewelyn happening upon a theoretical Garden of Eden away from the scene of the shoot-out. A solitary tree sits atop a barren knoll, a figure slumped against its stump. Upon closer inspection – and these opening scenes really are a case of closer inspection for both protagonist and spectator – the figure has bled to death, and at his feet is Llewelyn’s very own barrel of oil. Inside the briefcase is a stash of cash which he makes off with, but hidden amidst these dollars is a tracking device. This device directs none other than Satan himself, Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh, on Llewelyn’s trail. Bardem’s performance is a debut for many of us, an introduction to this quite brilliant actor. Here he’s a resigned but quietly deranged George Clooney, kind of handsome in that death is sexy style. But death ain’t sexy. It’s explicitly violent in this country minus old men and the killings are numerous.

Tommy Lee Jones is the sheriff of the frontier (Ed Tom Bell) having to clean up after these pests, and he’s altogether more resigned than Bardem the executioner. Indeed, Bell’s significance is his retrospective role in the film, not as a storyteller, but as the sigh that comes after the fact. Perhaps the film is titled after him, and in a land where violence reigns, what can an old man do but take off his hat and sit on down. The police here are useless, they’re brutalised by Bardem. The concept of police enforcement is undermined by the idea that the only way they could ever actually enforce law is by matching the brutality of the drugs cartels and rogue killers such as Bardem. But it’s also a matter of money, and in No Country for Old Men, money does more than talk – it gets every crazy mother after you – and in the end it gets you killed.

But what is money, really. For those among us who’ve had problems getting even basic employment in the past twelve-months, it’s something we’re not privy to, but are willed by our peers to discuss at length. In one painstaking and baffling advert for vodka that’s currently doing the rounds, its soundtrack claims that ‘money makes the world go round’, against images of cinema-goers kissing the cheeks of ticket sellers. Money, like the internet, is 24-hours. You can get it out at a cash point – if you have some – at 3am in the morning, you don’t have to wait for the bank manager to open his doors the next day. In fact, with a certain credit card conglomerate’s campaign to convince the public (with tongue-mildly-in-cheek) to forget about physical money altogether, finance has become a figment of my imagination. The job you work is worked only on the grounds that you have faith in your employer’s promise to buffer your invisible account with invisible monies witnessed, nowadays, as pithy digits through a smudged and smashed cash machine screen (thanks, Hard-Fi). But, if Joel and Ethan Coen teach us anything, it’s that the banker ain’t the wanker, I am. All the problems encountered with money are there because I choose to participate in an advanced-Capitalist society. Idiot. Though of course No Country for Old Men is far more entertaining and Oscar-worthy than the rant above.

Film Review: Interiors (Woody Allen, 1978)

via Atlas Film
By Daniel Greenwood
This review is depressing (and contains spoilers).

The fun thing about watching a Woody Allen film is digesting it afterwards, chewing it over with the teeth in your head. But many people won’t get to the ‘afterwards’ part of Interiors, a film that is completely overcast. In three years - 1977, 1978 and 1979 - Woody Allen came up with Annie Hall, Interiors, and Manhattan. Holy carp, that’s three films better than any of the trillion some Hollywood directors make. In between Annie Hall and Manhattan, two little charmers, is one great big stinking misery fest. And you know what? I think it’s my favourite.

It’s a film about three sisters - Renata (Diane frickin’ Keaton), Joey (Mary Beth Hurt) and Flyn (Kristin Griffith). These sisters are torn apart by the protracted, messy divorce of their parents. Their mother Eve (Geraldine Page) takes the separation badly. She’s clinically depressed, introduced in a scene early on in the film where she obsesses about the positioning of a table lamp against a certain shade of wallpaper in Joey’s apartment. It’s unnerving to see someone so fragile to the colour palette of furniture. These small incidents are impressed against the harsh truth that her husband Arthur (E.G. Marshall) doesn’t want to get back together with his wife, he wants to marry another woman. Indeed, he does, and this wedding is the grand climax to Interiors, played out beneath the roaring waves of a bitter, Bergman-esque bay.

Renata is a successful poet. Her husband Frederick (Richard Jordan) is jealous of her, claiming her praise of his own work (which the critics ravage) to be lying on her part. The man’s a fool. He’s a drunk and an adulterer, typified by a scene where he pretty much attempts to rape Flyn, the youngest of the sisters, a beautiful and successful actress. But she ain’t happy, furtively snorting cocaine in the garage late into the wedding night. Renata toils with her lifestyle, what does she care if she has some poems left over when she’s dead for other people to enjoy. She’s unhappy with her life, almost oblivious to the small shape of her daughter that seems to flit on the fringes of Interiors.

Allen’s deftest manoeuvre here is his use of sound, the film’s complete lack of music. The only music that’s heard is from a record put on by Arthur’s newly wedded wife Pearl (Maureen Stapleton) - so it’s within the film. It’s quite clever, all the sound is interior. The crashing, early morning waves are terrifying, it’s as if Allen’s layered them over one another, and it gives the effect of fearing the water might come crashing through the screen. The action on screen is unclear and I found myself squirming, edging closer and closer attempting to see what was going on.

You could write a billion-word dissertation on these sisters, every performance is bang-on, every little thing about Interiors is aching and creaking, built on shambolic foundations. In the real world, people can’t get jobs, but here are people with a choice about their lifestyles - people who can make a living from art - forsooth! But man Allen has conjured some desperately unhappy characters in this elegaic, unrelenting piece of cinema.