War Horse

Steven Spielberg's new live action offering is a mixed bag. More syrupy than an IHOP breakfast, War Horse has enough striking scenes to make it worth watching.

Devon farmer Ted Narracut (Peter Mullan) buys thoroughbred horse Joey at an auction. His son Albie (Jeremy Irvine) bonds with the horse and gets him to plow the family fields, foiling the dastardly schemes of landowner Lyons (David Thewlis). When World War I breaks out, Ted sells Joey to the British army, and the horse goes through a nightmarish odyssey. Joey serves successively as a British cavalry horse, an ambulance driver, the pet of a French girl (Celine Buckens) and her doting grandfather (Niels Arestrup), and a German artillery horse, somehow managing to survive each encounter. At the Second Battle of the Somme he escapes captivity and reunites with Albie, now serving in the British army. But will the badly injured horse survive?

Steven Spielberg has never shied away from sentimentality, but War Horse takes it to an almost-unbearable extreme. The first half-hour is an assembly of obnoxious cliches: precocious kid, broken-down father, long-suffering wife, underdog horse, a mustache-twirling landowner demanding rent and an impossible goal to save the farm. No emotional scene is unaccompanied by ennobling lighting and pompous John Williams music, least of all the Gone With the Wind-inspired finale. John Ford and Frank Capra would blanch at this emotive excess.

Once this preliminary nonsense is disposed of, War Horse gets a lot more interesting. Writers Richard Curtis and Lee Hall provide an episodic structure, allowing Joey (and the audience) to meet a cross-section of vividly-rendered personages. Spielberg takes the war content seriously, showing the Western Front as a repository of suffering and waste. Civilians are displaced from their homes, families separated, soldiers killed at random. Animals like Joey are cruelly worked to death, even more disposable than their human counterparts. Even his miraculous escape from No Man's Land might not save him.

Spielberg's direction is handsome, contrasting idyllic shots of the Devon countryside with the ugliness of war-torn Europe. If he goes overboard in spots, he shows a more sensitive touch in other scenes, especially the extended sequences with the French girl, and a scene where British and German soldiers team up to free Joey from barbed wire. The quiet human scenes are more effective than the overwrought "arty" bits.

The battle scenes are shot in approved Hayes Code fashion, with the gory details tastefully obscured. My favorite bit is a cavalry charge gone disastrously wrong, with a beautiful shot of riderless horses hurtling through the German lines. The large-scale Somme battle is less inspired, with a tracking shot blatantly stolen from Paths of Glory.

Newcomer Jeremy Irvine is boringly guileless and weepy, allowing Joey to steal their every scene. The supporting cast is better. Emily Watson and Pete Mullan shine as Albie's hard-luck parents: screw the kid, these two deserve a movie of their own. The best characters come in the war scenes: Tom Hiddleston and Benedict Cumberbatch as British cavalrymen with anachronistic views of warfare, Leonard Carrow and David Kross (The Reader) as a pair of ill-fated German soldiers, and best of all, Celine Buckens (surprisingly uncutesy) and Niels Arestrup.

Whether War Horse is appealing depends on one's temprament. It's grandly cliched and sugary enough to kill a diabetic, but these qualities make it comfortable viewing. The "old-fashioned" label certainly applies; I leave it to the viewer whether that's good or bad.

All That Heaven Allows

"I don't think this is a very flattering picture, Rock. I mean, the lack of color fails to bring out the flannel's true potential."

The last two films watched in our film class, Blonde Venus and Stella Dallas, were not films I had a great deal to say about. Blonde Venus was pretty dull and formulaic, Stella Dallas entertaining but rather forgettable I thought, Barbara Stanwyck's performance notwithstanding. So it is with great pride that I return to my once-weekly film class column with a film decidedly worthy of note: The Deer Story!

Oh wait, it's All That Heaven Allows: A Deer Story. Mea culpa.

Cary Scott (Jane Wyman) is a widow living in a small town. She is pretty much resigned to her lot in life, with her kids fully grown (and golly gee, they sure are swell at annoying the shit out of everyone in the audience!) and a few friends at the exclusive, gossipy Country Club. But this was before she paid attention to Ron Kirby (Rock Hudson). Yes, Ron Kirby. The quintessential Man's Man. Studly, handsome, secretly gay and always wearing flannel shirts, he's many degrees removed from the high-society types she usually hangs with. Cary falls in love with this younger, flannel-wearing Stud Muffin who is the rugged manly type who doesn't talk much, reads Henry David Thoreau, lives in a shack in the woods, and is so in harmony with Nature that he not only wears flannel (the epitome of Manly Toughness) and pets wild deer, but shoots geese as well. Unfortunately, he's not a member of the Upper Class, and he's younger than Cary, so when she begins a relationship with him, everyone in town from the fuddy-duddies to her obnoxious cildren take issue. Cary drops him like a hot potato as a result, only to find that sacrificing her love for her community ain't all it's cracked up to be. Then there's some contrived, gushy ending which is supposed to make us feel happy and warm, but then makes us laugh so hard our appendixes explode. Er, or something like that.

So, here is a Douglas Sirk film. With a name like Sirk, you've gotta make Crap!

Actually, this is my first Sirk movie, although I've heard a great deal about them beforehand. And boy, I was expecting a cheesefest, but this exceeded my wildest possible imagination. Nowhere in the recesses of my quite imaginative mind, the one who used to watch Days of Our Lives on a daily basis and who willingly sat through 4 Leprechaun movies and The Sound Barrier, could I have ever imagined the Hell wrought by Mr. Sirk.

Here is a movie, quite frankly, that drips syrup out of every frame. Overwrought emotion. My irrational paranoid fears about diabetes are given extraordinary credence after watching this movie; it was so syrupy sweet that my pancreas just died on me. (Which means this may be the last entry for this blog ever. Come back guys, I was just making a tasteless joke.) It's not even the cheesiness that bothers me, really. It's the way the film is made, making everything so bloody obvious to the audience - spelling it out every letter for us. It's not enough to have a broken vase show up fixed - you have to talk about it (and then break it again, and then fret about how much effort went into it before it was broken). You can't have people put down without having them then talk amonst themselves. And certainly you can't have them break up, have Cary experience the emptiness which has occurred from this, and want to go back to him, without having her explain all this to the audience. I mean, really. The only good that comes out of all this long-winded exhortation is the cinematography with its wonderfully florid, exaggerated, almost surreal color palette. Either Sirk is a master satirist, or he's assuming that his target audience were rock-stupid. Maybe both.

The characters are even more fun to think about. Cary is like Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter, only without the accent. And the depth. And the humanity. And the intelligence. And the... Okay, she maintains a bit of dignity, thanks to Ms. Wyman, but she's still a cypher no matter how you slice it. At least she has a sliver of humanity compared to Rod, who as played by Rock Hudson is a wooden stump. He may be hot but he can't act any better than the star of a Coleman Francis film - at least not here. No matter how many tough, manly attributes you wish to give him, he's still just a line on a script. The hysterically obnoxious gossipy associates barely rate a mention, except to say that they're the most realisitic characters in the movie. I've known enough horrible people in elementary and high school to know that bitch Mona is a very frightening reality.

Oh, but her children. Son Doug is just a jackass, pure and simple, who feels that something has come between him and his mother - not Rod, but the door that is quite literally in between them on the camera. (Gee, Mr. Sirk, thanks for making literal that metaphor at the same time you are talking about it!!!) And then, at the end he ditches her for a job in Iran. See, this is what being a good parent gets you: you sacrifice your one true love for the sake of your children, and your son runs off to do wet jobs for the CIA. Nice.

As for daughter Kay? At first, with her thin figure, long brown hair, and dorky glasses, I thought she looked like a mousy Sabrina-era Audrey Hepburn, but after listening to some of her never-ending stream-of-consciousness rants about Freudian psychology (as my friend Troy Steele would say, "What.") in an irritating voice, I realized who she reminded me of...

Okay. Imagine that spouting off Freudian psychobabble for an hour and a half. Yikes.

And then there's that damned deer who pops up at the end. I mean, really, what can you say to that? The entire class laughed at the deer, who conveniently pops up to be backgrounded during our leads' reconcilation. If all we wanted were deer, we'd have watched Bambi instead. I'm sure it's a symbol of romance or Ron's rugged MANLY! nature persona, but it's also stupid. And cheesy. But don't take my word for it:

So, is this movie really that corny, or is it actualy a brilliant satire, a scathing mockery of these very sort of films? I hope it's not out of line for me to say that Revisionist Critics need to get a grip on themselves and stop masturbating over how "original" they are for coming up with such concepts. Because really, they're just being thick clods. For yes, I do truly think that Douglas Sirk intended this movie to be that stupid. You can do melodrama and make it interesting, so I choose to believe that Douglas Sirk just plain sucks. I'm simply too tired to consider other possibilities. Besides, if that were true, I'd have to throw this whole review out and start from scratch, wouldn't I?

(Note: I'm classifying this a bad movie simply because it sucks. I'd worry about pissing off a reader or two, but as there aren't very many around as of yet, I'm sure I'll sleep soundly giving it such a classification.)

Rating: 4/10 - Avoid

GARBAGE DAY!

The cast of Silent Night, Deadly Night II becomes increasingly desperate to escape the film.


Well, the other day I watched Hitchcock's The Paradine Case, a fairly boring courtroom drama with Gregory Peck oddly cast as an Englishman. I had thought of writing a review of that - it would only be natural - but I already reviewed Madeleine this past week, so the idea of reviewing a boring courtroom drama seemed, shall we say, undesirable. Why review a mediocre movie when I could review an utterly atrocious one?

No, this review will be my first excursion (for this blog) into one of the most underappreciated arts: the love of, and appreciation for, really, really, really bad movies. By bad, of course, I don't simply mean banal blockbuster trash like 300 and Transformers, or even middle-of-the-road films that don't quite achieve what they set out to do. I'm talking about movies that are so mind-crushingly stupid, insipid, intelligence-insulting, ridiculous and cheesy that you can't help but laugh your ass off at them. I will concede it's a decidedly acquired taste. Anyone can like a decent-to-good movie, and most people can at least enjoy a great movie, even if they can't or don't appreciate it. No, the true connoisseurs are those who love bad movies. I can't say that I enjoy all "bad movies" the same way - I love Manos: the Hands of Fate, but despise Snakes on a Plane, for instance. I don't know if it's a sign of open-mindedness to embrace every bad movie, or a lack of discretion. But I enjoy my bad movies like, well, not fine wine, but mediocre chocolate: I eat it until my pancreas shorts out and I develop diabetes. (I'll assume that no diabetics are reading this blog, and thus that I'm not offending anyone.)

There are a lot of movies in this category I'd like to write about, from the hilariously inept Leprechaun flicks to the insipid, insulting Billy Jack franchise, to any number of other films parodied by the late, great Mystery Science Theater 3000. Indeed, I'm sure that I'll get around to these old favorites in the not-too-distant future. But yesterday, seduced by a now-infamous Internet meme, I tracked down and watched perhaps the worst movie of all time - yes, worse than The Trial of Billy Jack - on YouTube - 1987's much-maligned slasher film/camp classic Silent Night, Deadly Night 2.

The original Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984) was a controversial (among those fuddy-duddies who care about such things) slasher flick about a kid who witnessed a psychotic Santa Claus killing his family, grew up in an orphanage run by a sadistic Nut Nun, and himself donned a Santa suit before going on a killing spree of his own. Not exactly in good taste, but the movie was worth a few laughs - albeit, not necessarily of the intentional kind. However, it doesn't even approach the depths of laughable terror spawned by its sequel.

The sequel is in large part a recycling of the first movie. And by recycling, I don't mean simply that they recycled plot elements or situations. No, literally the whole first half of the movie (save some bits of narration) was lifted from the original!!! That's right, 40 minutes of an 80-minute movie is footage completely recycled from another movie. That's strike one. (Although, the film does engage in a bit of cleverness by having Ricky and girlfriend watch the first movie in a theater - but that's well after the first forty minutes have ended.) The movie's remaining storyline is simply a random series of events as Ricky (Eric Freeman), the brother of the first movie's antagonist, goes on a seemingly random killing spree, shooting people for wearing ugly football jerseys or mixing their plastics with their paper. None of this makes any sense, although the film belatedly decides that he is to exact revenge on the evil Mother Superior (leading to a hilarious chase scene and showdown between Psycho Santa and cripple knife-wielding Nun). I mean, I would have to be on pot to make up a plot description like that. That's how you can tell it's very, very real. Let me just say, I had a very bad case of the flu last February, which led to lots of insomnia and bizarre, indescribable fever dreams. It's as if someone tried to film these dreams, but their camera broke, so they hired a six year old to write a screenplay based on verbal descriptions, and then shot it on a budget of $6 with a camera phone. And then they lost that and made this movie.

Perhaps the best thing about the film is its lead actor, giving a performance surpassing even the great Tor Johnson in Beast of Yucca Flats. Eric Freeman inspires giggles every time he opens his mouth, giving perhaps the most hammy, over-the-top performance in the history of humanity (including elementary school plays, Indian rain dances and Daniel Day-Lewis ranting about milkshakes). He makes William Shatner look like Paul Scofield. It's a real treat to watch, as he swallows the scenery whole and chews over such great dialogue as "FUCK OFF!... Doc.", "It sounded like some squirrel getting his nuts squeezed!", and my personal favorite, "You tend to get paranoid when everyone around you gets DEAD!" Honest to blog, that's the real dialogue, and if I quote Juno again feel free to cane me mercilessly. (Not that he needs such dialogue, mind you. Freeman is able to make a line like "I don't sleep!" into the equivalent of Lady Macbeth's "Out damned spot!" rant) You can't make this shit up. You can't get much weirder than that... Oh, wait. Never mind. There might be a few exceptions.

Nah. Just wait until you scroll to the bottom of this review.

It's really, really hard to pick out a "best" scene, because the whole movie - even the flashbacks to the first movie - is so bad it inspires laughter. Not just a snide grin or a chuckle, but hysterical, gut-busting, "Normal View"-inspired laughter (that one's for the MSTies in my audience). Even the footage culled from the first movie is pretty funny - death by antler? A little kid decking Santa Claus? The over-acting silent black guy at the beginning? The annoying heckler in the movie theater singing along with the film's theme song? Death by umbrella? It's gold, Jerry, GOLD! Perhaps the most ludicrous (and thus hysterical) scene is Ricky's infamous killing spree, where an argument with his girlfriend's ex leads to a completely random massacre of an innocent suburb. The scene builds on top of itself, every moment more absurd than the last, from electrocuting Boyfriend with jumper cables to strangling Girlfriend with a car antenna, to shooting a poor man's Barney Fife with his own gun, shooting a car which flips over, lands right-side up, and then blows up (from the inside, it must be noted, not the engine - maybe it was being driven by James Coburn coming home from the set of Duck, You Sucker!), and of course, the moment that everyone remembers:

To those who've seen it, there needn't be anything more said about this movie.

For my part, I'll say just a mite more. This is the best movie of all time, if judging by the sheer number of yuks a minute. Not even The Ruling Class, His Girl Friday or even Prince of Space approach this level of humor. If you feel so inclined, the entire movie is on youtube. Why not give it a whirl? If you're reading this review, it's not like you have anything better to do.

Rating: 0/10 quality-wise, 100/10 for camp value