Podcasting Them Softly

This film is utterly poisonous. It’s totally cruel and it’s in love with the fact that it’s cruel. It’s happy to be mean, and it doesn’t care if you don’t like it. Neil LaBute’s first film, In the Company of Men, is still more than likely his best. This is a movie where two seemingly nice guys simultaneously romance a naive, deaf woman, with the express written plan to drop her like a sack of potatoes, thus destroying her as a person. Rarely do you get a glimpse of cinematic treachery on a level that this film provides. Some of this film is dangerously funny; portions of it will make you sick. It made a star out of Aaron Eckhart and it led to a fabulous chacter actor career for Matt Malloy. Stacy Edwards breaks your heart – it’s such a gutsy performance. LaBute’s extremely pessimistic worldview was on full display here, and without spoiling everything, you should know that this is a worldview where bad people often times come out on top. LaBute’s plain but subtle visual style gave off an icy, emotionally remote vibe that extends to the themes on display. I can remember being absolutely in awe of this movie as a high school senior; it’s the first film I reviewed for my school newspaper and it’s the movie that really spurred on my interest in discussing film in the written form.

Released in 1973 and featuring an absolutely fantastic screenplay by Robert Towne, The Last Detail found Ashby doing some of his best mixing of comedy and drama, with results that are piercing and at times brutal. Starring Jack Nicholson and Otis Young as two sailors who are tasked with escorting one of their own (Randy Quaid, fantastic) to a military prison in New England, The Last Detail is one of those amazingly observed character studies that’s wholly interested in human behavior and how the bonds of friendship are tested in ways that the characters could never expect. The three men have all sorts of adventures along the way to their destination, and the final act involves some decisions that are as smart as they are sad, because you fully believe in the story and the people who populate it. Towne adapted the screenplay from the 1970 novel written by Darryl Ponicsan, which would became famous for a copious amount of “F-bombs,” and which would solidify Towne’s status as one of the premiere screenwriters of his generation. Shot in muted tones with a naturalistic sensibility by the great cinematographer Michael Chapman, the film has a terrific sense of time and place, with Ashby’s understanding of tone and pacing in full effect. Nominated for three Academy Awards (Nicholson, Quaid, and Towne), the film would become a critical and commercial success, and would also find Nicholson winning Best Actor at The Cannes Film Festival. Now available on Blu-ray from Twilight Time.

When I left the theater after seeing The Raid, I said to myself that it was the best action movie I had seen. Nothing could prepare me for how intense and focused that film would be, and it made me excited all over again to be a lover of action movie cinema. When I left the theater after seeing The Raid 2: Berandal, I was nearly in tears, not because I was sad, but because I was overly ecstatic, as I had seen something that actually bested what the first film had accomplished. Within the realm of the shoot-em-up action thriller, I have never seen anything as unrelentingly amazing as The Raid 2: Berandal, and my guess is that I won’t see anything better than it until director Gareth Evans delivers the third chapter in this extra-assaultive series of films. Out of all of the genres that one can pick from, the Action Film is easily my favorite. More than most types of cinema, it exists to exhilarate and to transport, and when in the hands of a master like Evans, the results are nothing short of extraordinary. This film completely and utterly eviscerates the competition; American movies pale in comparrison to this blood-drenched effort. There’s nothing else that even remotely comes close to matching the cumulative level of bad-assery that you’ll find in The Raid 2. It’s two and a half hours of punching, shooting, maiming, garroting, car-chasing, slicing, dicing, hammering, base-ball-batting, kicking, and shanking. And yes, if you can believe it, there’s more plot to choke a horse, with developments that make sense, and a fully sympathetic lead character you entirely root for.

Picking up mere moments after the obscenely bloody events of The Raid, this sequel ups the ante in every regard — characters, plot-lines, set-pieces, and the overall level of lunatic abandon when it comes to the mind-blowing action sequences. You’ll see one of the very best car chases ever captured by cameras in The Raid 2, and you’ll also see the single most vicious and bloody one-on-one fight that I could ever possibly imagine. Honestly – after the stuff done in this film – I’m not sure what else needs to be attempted with this sort of thing. But leave it to Evans to try, as he’s currently working on The Raid 3. This is legendary action cinema, taking cues from genre masters like John Woo, Takashi Miike, and Paul Greengrass, mixing an undercover-cop-in-prison narrative ala The Departed with classic tribal feuds straight out of a Japanese Yakuza picture. Iko Uwais is a living legend, and the same can be said for Yayan Ruhian; these guys ostensibly have zero limits and are willing to go above and beyond what’s physically expected from a human being. The Indonesian setting makes for an exotic backdrop for all of the insane bouts of mayhem, with the impossibly agile cinematography covering all of the action from the most eye-popping angles possible. This is a movie where you feel every punch, hear every bullet whizz past your ears, and every single scene seems to have been designed to top the last. This is outstanding action cinema that will be very, very tough to beat.

There’s a considerable appreciation to be had for a solid, mostly intelligent genre exercise such as Mike Flanagan’s HUSH. Sometimes, smart and inspired is enough, and ever since his well-above-average debut (ABSENTIA), Flanagan has been hard at work giving his audience just that and something a little more to boot. There are almost zero pretensions to be found in this short, simple, efficient, and surprisingly clever home invasion yarn; it’s merely a welcome addition to a familiar (often to a fault) genre that doesn’t really aspire to reinvent the wheel so much as it does to have its fair share of fun breathing new life into it by challenging conventions and expectations in near-equal measures.

A deaf writer alone in the woods with, save for a couple neighbors she’s quite friendly with, only her thoughts as company is terrorized one night by an intruder (John Gallagher Jr.) whose motivations are certainly more ambiguous than his identity – this is the simple but convenient logline of Flanagan’s film if there ever was one. Immediately, the viewer is thrust into the unique world of its protagonist, only to be taken out of it as soon as the assailant makes his presence known, and for the remainder of the run-time we are (mostly sonically) taken in and out of these two respective points of view. It actually sounds LESS ambitious on paper than it is in execution, though this ends up being one of the film’s most striking features.

Kate Siegel turns in commendable work as the heroine, who we learn from the back of one of her published novels has been living with her particular ailment since the age of 13, and sharing writing credits with Flanagan himself seems to have provided the proceedings with a refreshingly non-self-congratulatory female touch. HUSH empowers its protagonist without practically begging the audience to sympathize with her plight, which registers as something of a surprise in today’s cinematic landscape, and the narrative doesn’t rely on the usual slasher idiocy to remain constant (the film not really exploring the motivations of the intruder doesn’t strike me as idiocy so much as a desire to keep things interesting); instead, the mistakes made by Siegel’s Maddie Young are for the most part logical and notably human given the situation she finds herself in. A bit of naivety on the part of this particular character is believable, and the scribes have a grand old time building up both her external and internal worlds only to creatively break them down as they go on into the night.

The manipulation of space here is also most impressive. A single-location thriller is like a strange and dangerous dance, but it’s one that Flanagan seems comfortable to temper with, and for good reason. His visual language is thoroughly immersive, following the majority of Maddie’s more urgent actions on Steadicam, bringing to mind the Italian Giallo without the expected flashiness (the lighting set ups here are evocative and appropriate, but never invasive). The soundscape is also genuinely effective – and with such minimal dialogue it’s got to be – but even more impressive than the film’s technical achievements are its confrontations with cliché. Flanagan displays a certain obsession with Maddie’s material possessions and seamlessly integrates a certain number of them into her fight for survival. For example: an exceedingly loud fire alarm with bright flashing lights introduced in one of the earliest scenes is brought back in a creative way later on – and there’s even a fairly clever subversion of the old lost pet trope. Even a sequence in which the voices in Maddie’s head run through the various escape routes throughout the house is ultimately justified by the aforementioned information delivered via book jacket, though it at first serves to catch the viewer off guard when they least expect it to.

While overall, Flanagan isn’t aiming for anything more than a film that amounts to precisely the sum of its parts, there’s something to be said for it getting there in the end with such a thoroughly organic grasp on form. It’s clear from the get-go, and from his debut (I regrettably missed OCULUS but intend to fix that ASAP), that Flanagan has a lot of love for the horror genre and wishes only to contribute in positive ways to its future whilst injecting it with much-appreciated intimacy and emotional honesty. HUSH is the kind of taut home invasion thriller that the world could certainly use a little more of – that being one which understands that sometimes the only way to truly progress is to not make a big deal out of doing so, to raise awareness for genre issues of importance (in this case, strong female representation in horror is a big one) in a quiet, coherent manner. Ultimately, it makes for surprisingly thoughtful and consistently engaging Saturday night-type viewing; a film that is significantly more interesting in its technique than in its conception. Keep a look out – it may just sneak up and surprise you.

 

Somewhere in Movie Heaven, there exists a double bill with Richard Rush’s The Stunt Man and Paul Mazursky’s Alex in Wonderland. I’ve seen this film a few times now, and it’s never not entrancing or fully engrossing. Released in 1970, this was Mazursky’s eagerly awaited follow up to his hugely successful Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, with the story centering on a movie director named Alex Morrison (Donald Sutherland, incredible), who is stressing out over what to do next after his first movie was a huge success. Sounds a bit like reality for Mazursky, no? Co-written with Larry Tucker, Mazursky used his second feature as a venting and homage session, crossing his real life insecurities as a filmmaker with the age old narrative conceit of an artist struggling with a crisis of artistic conscious. He even cast himself as a Hollywood producer (in one of the film’s best scenes), further upping the satirical spin to the picture. Federico Fellini and Jeanne Moreau also made cameos which boosted the wink-wink inspiration factor, with Mazursky and Tucker even explicitly referencing 8½. The heady narrative dabbles in the past, present, and possible future, with thematic nods to cinema history in general explored all throughout, while the script constantly tackled the almost impossible balance that artists face between family life and “the biz.” Ellen Burstyn played Alex’s put-upon wife while László Kovács handled the varied, dreamy, and always interesting cinematography. This is a seriously cool movie that gets better each time I revisit.