The Last Exorcism – Review

January 8, 2011 14 Comments

The Last Exorcism

Directed by Daniel Stamm. Starring Patrick Fabian, Ashley Bell, Iris Bahr.

The success at the box office of a film like “the Last Exorcism” can only prove one thing: there’s still a great hunger for horror out there… and it doesn’t matter if it’s good or not. There have probably been worse films but this takes the crown as the biggest letdown of them. For a short
moment I really thought the film could have become one of the defining horror of the decade, but, sadly, the things that are wrong with
it, mainly in the last act, are SO BAD that somehow they manage to ruin everything and eventually plunge this film into the “pit of catastrophe”, despite some good performances ere and there.

In order to prove my point I am going to have to spoil the hell out of it, so if you haven’t seen it or
you’re planning to waste… erm.. sorry, I meant “to spend”, 90 minutes of your precious life watching it, then stop reading right now.

“The last Exorcism” is actually a clever spin on the usual exorcist fare, but more than that it is the latest entry into that much exhausted “found footage” genre started off by Blair Witch 12 years ago (My God, has it been that long already?) .

The film is produced by Eli Roth who in the last few years has created a name for himself, with titles like Cabin Fever and the infamous Hostel, for pushing the boundaries of taste and gore. This time the “shock factor” is kept down to a minimum, which is what makes the first part of the film quite intriguing and succesful. Because of its premise the film manages to put to rest right from the start the ever-ending question of a type of mockumentary like this (Blair Witch Project, REC, Cloverfield and Paranormal Activity): why would the characters keep on filming, despite everything that’s happening? Would they actually been filming that instead of running away or saving their butts? It’s the sort of thing that usually annoys the hell out of me and pushes our suspension of disbelieve to absurd levels. In this case the plot requires the cameraman to actually film everything that’s going on.

A disillusioned evangelical minister, after years of performing exorcisms, decides to be filmed for a documentary exposing the fraud of exorcisms, proving that they do not really exist and it’s actually all in the heads of the people who think they are possessed… So far so good. The whole beginning of the film actually made me hope for something quite good: a new and intriguing take on the seen-before theme of exorcism.

However the film fails to keep it real by constantly breaking the rules of “mokumentary”, by having reverse angles, by adding sound effects and,
worse of all, a cheap music score underneath which goes for the cheap jumps out of your seats. Am I watching something which is
supposed to be real, or just a cheap heavy handled, tricksy, manipulative piece which doesn’t really care for its integrity but just wants to make me jump every time somebody goes “booo” on the screen?

It is a real shame, because I really thought this was working up to a certain point. And finally, a couple of words about the ending of the film, which is one of the most awful ending I can ever remember. It is so bad that it actually makes you forget all the good things you’ve seen up until that point.

I haven’t yet met a single person or read a single review that hasn’t actually mention how terrible it is!! How can that happen? Either they got cold feet and changed their mind at the last moment or they must be really stupid to even think for a moment that the audience could buy into something so stupid. They wanted to do a “Rosmary’s Baby” type of twist, without realizing that Rosmary’s Baby actually builds up for two hours towards the revelation. This one feels just like a last-minute turn.

In a way  “The last Exorcism” is the type of film that doesn’t really work for any kind of audience: the avid horror fans will get disappointed by the lack of “action” and “gore” (the marketing campaign is incredibly misleading!!), the people who like good storytelling and good twists (the Sixth sense fans) will hate its clunky turn and awful ending. All the others people who never really liked horror films will find no redeeming feature in this either.

The DVD and BlueRay has just come out and it’s packed with Special Features including 3 types of commentary tracks. It will be interesting to know if we learn anything more to explain how such bad ending was conceived. If anyone has listen to those commentaries or seen the many special features available, please let me know. I am not giving a single extra dime to Ely Roth.
5/10

 

OTHER RELATED REVIEWS:

Let Me In

Shutter Island

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Four Lions – Review

January 5, 2011 14 Comments

Four Lions (2010)

Directed by Christopher Morris. Starring Kayvan Novak, Nigel Lindsay, Riz Ahmed

Chris Morris is probably not a very well-known figure outside of the UK. The English comedian, writer, actor and director is famous in his own country for his controversial radio programmes and television sketches.

Four Lions is his first feature film but it does suffer from that feeling of a made-for-TV type of product, both in its look, its format and its construction. It is essentially a series of sketches some of which are more successful than others, but as a whole it’s not as strong and coherent film as it wants to be.

Apparently it was originally rejected by both the BBC and Channel 4 as being too controversial, and you can easily see why. The plot tells of a group of inept suicide bombers and it’s clearly a subject anyone would normally stir well away from, especially in a comedy.

“Four Lions”  is undoubtedly provocative and certainly quite a brave film, unfortunately that doesn’t necessarily make it a good one and in the end you can’t help feeling a sense of superficiality to the whole thing: it is an honorable but failed attempt.

The main problem is to do with its comic depiction of his main characters  which veers not just toward the parody but the slapstick. This clownish approach makes it all a little bit too over simplistic and doesn’t ring quite true as it probably should.  It’s hard to believe that somebody like Omar, the main character (Rix Ahmed, the only actor worth watching in the whole film) would actually  decide to “work” or even just associate himself  with anyone so stupid like all those people in his group.

What Chris Morris is trying to do is to make the terrorists look like regular guys, likeable people and not just real monsters. However by treating them like silly idiots, it diminishes the message of the film and any emotional response  the audience could have towards them. So one side you have touching (and yet uncomfortable) scenes like the moment where Omar tells the story of  his version to the “Lion King” to his son. On the other hand you get moments which could be straight out a Mr Bean sketch, undermining everything he’s done before and, above all, our suspension of disbelief . These two “styles” don’t necessarily glue together as a film.

I didn’t find the comedy very funny at all (call me sad, but I don’t think I laughed once)  and because of these incongruous way of telling the story, nor I found the film as moving as it was probably trying to be.

On the technical side of things, it’s all done rather on cheap and it shows. There’s nothing remarkable about the photography, the music, or any of the technical aspect of the film, which makes me doubt whether this should have ever been a cinema experience at all.

Furthermore, the thick Sheffield accent and constant British references could even limit its worldwide appeal.

In the end it all comes across just as a brave but very superficial exercise and it’s a real shame because this could have been something quite different, almost life-changing.

5.5/10

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Still Walking – (Criterion Collection) Review

January 1, 2011 3 Comments

STILL WALKING (2008) 

Directed by Hirokazu Koreeda. Starring Yoshio Harada, Hiroshi Abe, Yui Natsukawa.

This is definitely not going to be everyone’s cup of tea, but by the end of it, I found it incredibly rewarding.
Japanese director Hirokazu Koreeda might be a slightly niche taste, but he had already struck a chord with me with a little film back in 2013 called “Like Father Like Son”, a film which I absolutely adored (and I urge you seek out!). Ever since then I think I liked every single one of his films. “Nobody Knows” killed me to tears. And the latest of which, shoplifters was nominated for all sorts of awards (including the Bafta and the oscars) and then won at Cannes 2 years ago.

“Still Walking” is a small, intimate, charming family drama done with the lightest touch and the most naturalistic approach. Yes, some might find it slow, but this is one of those films that stays with you, long after the credits have finished rolling.

The film clearly aims to capture how people relate to each other within a family environment. Particular attention is given to the family’s daily routine and the small details.
With my “western eyes” I found some of the details of Japanese “normal country life” absolutely fascinating and almost mesmerising: all the business of taking off the shoes, or the pouring of water over the tomb stones makes it all look like a complete different world, but then things like the ordering of take away sushi or the little boy mixing sodas in the same glass gives it a strange sense of familiarity.
Some of it does feel a bit too indulgent (The preparation of the food for example seem to go on for quite a long time) and take you away from what’s really the key of the story: the interaction between all the characters, which is where the film really excels.

The plot revolves around a man visiting his elderly parents for the 15th anniversary of his brother’s death.

Koreeda is a master of building a scene that seems absolutely normal but hides something completely different underneath. It’s as if the picture told you something and the dialogue something else…
People sit around the table, eat their food, make small talk: everything seems normal in the gentle summer breeze as the static camera frames the action in almost unedited sequences and then all of a sudden comes a line of dialogue (sometimes even off camera) that makes you see everything in a complete different light

As the film unravels the audience gets closer and closer to each member of the family, starts to hear their thoughts and feel their pain and at the end, the fact that it was a Japanese family is pretty irrelevant.

 

7.5/10

Still Walking (Criterion Collection)comes out on February 8, 2011

SPECIAL FEATURES:
  • New high-definition digital transfer, approved by director Hirokazu Kore-eda and director of photography Yutaka Yamazaki
  • New video interviews with Kore-eda and Yamazaki
  • Making “Still Walking”
  • Trailer
  • New and improved English subtitle translation
  • PLUS: A booklet featuring a new essay by film critic Dennis Lim and recipes for the food prepared in the film

OTHER RELATED REVIEWS:

Rabbit Hole

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Scott Pilgrim vs. the World – Review

December 26, 2010 4 Comments

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World 

Directed by Edgar Wright. Cast: Michael Cera, Alison Pill, Mark Webber, Johnny Simmons, Kieran Culkin, Ellen Wong, Jason Schwartzman

After the disappointing box office on its release (Only $11 million in the first week in the US) “Scott Pilgrim…” is coming out on DVD and BluRay , hoping to find an audience and become of one those cult in the years to come, without being confused by the similarly themed “Kick-Ass” or sidelined by the massive “Inception”, in fact according to Wikipedia it became the top-selling Blu-ray on Amazon.com during the first day it was available.

To be honest I was one of the few who wasn’t quite taken by it, even when it first came out. I thought it was witty, original, fast, inventive and on the whole quite fun for the first 40 minutes. However after a while it begins to feel a bit stretched. 2 hours are definitely too much for what’s essentially an excuse to see people fighting as if they were on a video game. Even the eye-popping visual effects, however flashy (including the use of funny captions on the screen that make it all look like a comic) out-stayed their welcome and the novelty wears a bit thin.

The movie is based on the graphic novels by Bryan Lee O’Malley, and manages to capture their mood and quirkiness quite closely, however, as we all know what works on paper doesn’t necessarily work on film. What starts off as a touching and imaginative depiction of the romantic travails of a twenty-something kid, pretty quickly becomes a rather indulgent affair and starts to feel very long.

The story (if we can call it that way) is about Scott Pilgrim, a bass guitarist, who is in love with the girl of his dreams, Ramona Flowers, but in order to win her heart he has to defeat her “seven evil exes”. Yes, seven of them!! That was the number in the original comic version, I must confess that but after watching the film for about 1 I remember thinking to myself “Oh God, Scott has only beaten the 2 of them!”.

The makers try their best to give a different feel to each of the fight sequences and cram the film with enough appearances from more or less famous actors, but for me that wasn’t enough and by the time I got to the very last fight I just couldn’t wait for it to finish.

It is obviously aimed at the so-called wired generation and people who grew up on Nintendo and PS stations (as opposed to people like me who grew up with Intellevision and Atari consoles), but considering the short attention span of that target audience, it get the feeling that it might be a bit tiresome even for them.

I wouldn’t trash it completely. There are some inspired moments (the Universal logo at the front is one of them), Kieran Culkin’s turn as the gay flatmate is excellent (and makes you wish there was more of him) and the special effects are all top class, most of the pop culture and video games reference are quite clever, it’s just a shame that its irreverent tone loses its edge by being som faithful to the original story. I think the film would have gained something by getting rid off a couple of the “exes”

6.5/10


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Alice in Wonderland – Review

December 12, 2010 4 Comments

ALICE IN WONDERLAND (2010) 

Directed by Tim Burton. Starring Johnny Depp, Mia Wasikowska, Helena Bonham Carter

On paper this movie is something which had all the potential to be the movie of the year: Tim Burton’s visionary genius re-imagining one of the most fantastic and imaginative stories ever.  Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen. Mia Wasikowska (from the wonderful “In Treatment”) as Alice herself. Special Effects extravaganza in 3D. And a never-ending list of great actors and  actresses lending their voices to all those loved characters from our childhood. I would have said “count me in!” anytime!!! And yet, this ended up to be possibly the biggest turkey of the year!

It’s not really an awful film, but knowing what this could have been like, it just leaves you really disappointed.

How could it have happened?

In a way it reminded me of Steven’s Spielberg’s Hook, one the (few) big missteps of his career. In that movie too Spielberg had made the terrible mistake of messing with a classic story: for example we had a grown up Peter Pan going back to Neverland. Here Alice has grown up too and forgot everything about Wonderland which is now a run down place with a Gothic feel, typical of any Tim Burton’s movie. Well, that would probably be all right, except that Burton, by updating the world really managed to take the wonder out of “Wonderland”.

Tim Burton’s film is essentially a sequel/re-imagining of the Lewis Carroll without all the joyful surprises, the sense of discovery and  fun of that book and more crucially, without a single good original idea! None of the liberties the makers took seems to work culminating with fight scene with a dragon at the end  of the end which seems to belong to a different film altogether. And (big spoiler here… watch out) what’s point of all that going to China at the end? What a mess!

There was another Disney’s movie back in the 80s called Return to Oz, which made the same mistake and used the same device of having Dorothy going back to Oz only to find it all changed and half-destroyed and now look almost like a kind of post-apocalyptic landscape where everything seem to be covered in ash. However in that film the story and the characters were so compelling that somehow they got a way with it, in Burton’s Alice in Wonderland all the characters are so annoying and only just half-sketched that it’s hard to care about any of them. In fact it seems like their accents, make up  and CGI enhancements have replaced their personalities.

Michael Sheen‘s White Rabbit appears a couple of times and is probably the most confusing of them all, since it relies on your knowledge of the character from the previous incarnation of the story to make any sense of it. Where is he going? Why is there at all? What’s his point? is he there to help Alice or the Queen? Stephen Fry‘s Cheshire Cat and  Alan Rickman‘s Blue Caterpillar are just as superfluous to the story. Once again, it all feels rather over-blown, over-crowded with characters.

And finally Johnny Depp who’s impersonation of the Mad Hatter is the most annoying of them all and possibly one of the actor’s worse performance of his career . Now, I really used to like Johnny Depp, but it seems that in the last few years he’s only been playing the same over-the-top character over and over again. His Mad Hatter seems an extension and a mixture of his previous “mad characters”: there’s a little bit  from Tim Burton’s previous creations, from Willy Wonka in Chocolate Factory,  to Sweeney Todd and even his previous Edward Scissorhands but there’s also lots of reminders to Jack Sparrow from the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, and hints from The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Is Johnny Depp playing the same character over and over again? What happened to the sweet, restrained and understated performances of his early work like the beautiful What’s Eating Gilbert Grape and Donnie Brasco? And most awful of them all Anne Hathaway‘s take of White Queen, who’s mannerism is just as annoying as her eyebrow. It might have been all intentional (in which case, even worse) but it was certainly a very bad choice to have her acting like that.

Helena Bonham Carter‘s impersonation of the Red Queen is one of the few redeeming factor in the whole film and the scenes with her are probably the highlights in an otherwise flat and misjudged series of sequences. Though even her bizarre creation becomes a bit tedious after a while.

Even the special effects (which by themselves are top class) are so diluted in the poor story that somehow failed to strike a chord and surprise us. Not to mention the use of the 3D which is probably one of the poorest use of it I’ve seen this year (together with “Clash of the Titans”). I guess it has to do with the fact that the movie was actually filmed on 2D and then retrofitted (I am not quite sure whether this is the right term for it) afterwards. This is a technique that not only doesn’t work but also brings a bad reputation to 3D itself (I keep on hearing a lot of people complaining about how bad 3D is, but they’ve only seen Clash of the Titans of Alice in Wonderland,  and they believe that’s what 3D really is).

Just a quick word about the music score: yes, it could have been good, if only they had work out where to use it, as opposed to ending up having music throughout the whole film, thus diminishing the effect that music should have. Overblown is once again the word that comes to mind.

I wonder what this film could have been like if maybe Tim Burton had made it, without Disney behind his shoulders. But as it is, on the whole, this mish-mash of Disney and Burton doesn’t really hold together and it proves once again that Tim Burton is the “director-that-could-be-great-but-rarely-really-is”.

5.5/10

OTHER RELATED REVIEWS (or, you’d better watch something else, instead of this)

Toy Story 3

Tron: Legacy

Back to the Future

 

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