Seven Psychopaths (***)

I am pretty sure of this: Like the alcoholic and aspiring screenwriter played by Colin Farrell, Martin McDonagh, the writer-director of this comedy, came up with the title first. The fictional screenwriter has only a couple of ideas, like one about a Buddhist psychopath, but he also has the advantage of a helpfully nutty friend (Sam Rockwell) and some real-life events to inspire him. Whereas McDonagh, I think, largely made all this stuff up, which shows he has quite an imagination, but also that much of what passes here strains credulity.

As with In Bruges, McDonagh’s previous effort, or even more so, I felt too aware of the attempts at cleverness, though possibly I laughed more anyway. The Ferrell character dreams of creating a movie about psychopaths that’s nonetheless “life-affirming,” and so does McDonagh, I imagine, even though he’s mostly trying to be funny. The story largely revolves around a dognapping ring. Rockwell’s character is caught up in it, and so is another one played by Christopher Walken. Their dognappers’ victims include one of the psychopaths, played by Woody Harrelson. Harrelson’s character doesn’t hestitate to prey on the weak, or to pretend to kill someone just for a gag, but his quest is the return of his beloved dog, Bonnie, for whom his heart melts. So there’s the life-affirming part.

McDonagh does some of the same mixing of creative plotting, oddball characters, and arch dialogue that Quentin Tarantino employs with much less visible patchwork. Nonetheless, it would be difficult to have such colorful actors as Harrelson, Rockwell, and Walken in the same movie and have it be forgettable, or humorless. And, in fact, McDonagh meets his own challenge by coming up with an original conclusion, or a couple of them, actually, that’s dramatically satisfying, though “life-affirming” would be stretching things.

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viewed 10/4/12 7:30 at Rave University City and reviewed 10/5-12/12

Parade (***)

Tokyo is such a densely populated city that it seems like a fair number of the movies I’ve seen set there have this a subtext. Here four roommates, two of each sex, share an apartment, each coming and going and living the haphazard lives of twentysomethings. The movie is divided into segment focusing on each roommate: one who’s fallen for his best friend’s girlfriend; one who spends her time hanging out, waiting for her movie-star boyfriend’s occasional calls and hatching plans to uncover the call-girl ring that might be operating next door; one who’s kind of a wild girl; and one, the oldest at 28, who seems more stable than the others and is the only one shown working. And there’s a fifth roommate, a skinny homeless kid who happily shows up one morning to the confusion of the others. In the course of the film, we find out a little about each character, and they learn a little about each other. If there is a unifying theme, it’s how well do we know the people we know? (At one point, a couple of the roommates speculate on whether the newcomer might be the local serial killer, but his crimes turn out to be more petty.) The film is intriguing, but probably aimless for some tastes. The ending is possibly shocking, open to interpretation, but kind of anticlimactic rather than satisfying. One woman I heard, walking out of the theater, put it more succinctly. “Bunch of looneys,” she said.

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viewed at Ritz 5 [Philadelphia Film Festival] and reviewed 10/17/10

Surveillance (*3/4)

This thriller by director Jennifer Lynch has just a little bit of the wierdness her dad, David Lynch, is known for, but with much less of a surreal tone and a script that goes downhill fast around the midway point. Julia Ormond and Bill Pullman are FBI agents who take over the investigation of a small-town murder spree. Some flashily edited interplay follows with the local cops, who mostly resent the agents, and with the witnesses being interviewed, who include a precocious girl and a wasted couple. But eventually things get way over the top. Typical are a couple of the cops, who spend their days shooting out the tires of passing motorists, then pulling guns on them. We are supposed to believe they can repeatedly get away with this. The mystery’s solution may or may not be predictable, but it’s not especially convincing, or subtle.

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viewed 4/4/09 at Prince Music Theater (Philadelphia Film Festival) and reviewed 5/8/09

The Chaser (***3/4)

Watching this Korean action-thriller makes you realize how many ways there are to do this kind of film other than the ways Hollywood has gotten people used to. The sort-of hero is a surly pimp who does most of the chasing on foot. The killer is an ordinary-looking guy with no special powers or elaborate apparatuses. His victim is a demure-looking prostitute with a young daughter. And the police range from competent to crooked to inept, but most often the last.

There is infrequent but realistic brutality, yet also some humor that does nothing to diminish the parts that are serious and even tender. (A very good music score sets a melancholy mood at times.) I kept waiting for the predictable tropes of the genre to show up, but they don’t. Even though the whodunit is established in the first fifteen minutes of the movie, there’s more real suspense than in half a dozen typical thrillers. The sure-to-be-inferior American remake awaits.

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viewed at Ritz East (Philadelphia Film Festival) and reviewed 3/30/09

Untraceable (**)

Here’s another tale of a serial killer who likes to toy with the police, the novelty being a killer who uses hits on his web site to trigger the mechanism of death. Needless to say, a bullet to the head is not nearly cruel enough, and, just like the tens of millions of viewers who log on to the killer’s site, we get to watch as, among other things, a cat suffocate. Never mind what happens to the people.

Directed by Gregory Hoblit, whose last movie was the fine thriller Fracture, the movie’s by no means unwatchable, thus depriving me of a better oppotunity to use that pun in my pan. Diane Lane, as the widowed computer expert who tries to track the killer, gives a better performance than this exploitation movie requires. The parts involving the killer’s use of programming tricks to conceal his on-line identity interested me. But cheap thrills are the primary focus, and the story devolves into the usual absurdities. The killer, who’s identified halfway through, is ridiculously competent until, like Lane’s heroine, he makes a mistake at the exact moment it becomes convenient for the plot.

Cynical enough to predict that a web site allowing users to participate in torture would in weeks become America’s most popular (15,000,000 simultaneous users!), the movie pretends to deplore the media’s willingness to turn tragedy into entertainment, all the while turning torture into entertainment, and mediocre entertainment at that. At least we are not encouraged to sympathize with the killers, as in parts of the Saw movies.

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reviewed 1/27/08

Saw IV (**1/4)

This movie begins unpleasantly enough, with the autopsy of one John Kramer. Mr. Kramer, known better as Jigsaw (Tobin Bell) to moviegoers, died along with his protegée in Saw III, but only the naive would have thought that meant the end of the series. As his ex-wife (Betsy Russell, seen briefly in the last installment) explains, John planned everything, even anticipating his own death. Or is it that yet another Rube Goldberg of torture devices has carried on his work? Whomever it is, he (or she) has been busy. There are several victims here. The first two are actually shown before the autopsy. A blinded man is chained to another whose mouth has been somehow sealed shut. One has the key, one the lock, and cooperation is not in the cards. If you’ve seen the other Saw films, you’ll know that this seemingly unrelated sequence will tie back into the story much later, and in fact everything here is tied together in a way that probably took a lot of thought on the part of the multiple screenwriters. (They are new, but the director, Darren Lynn Bousman, returns from the last two films, preserving the herky-jerky editing style and reliance on jarring mini-flashbacks to tie everything together.) Even more than before, the events of the last installment are tied into this one.

The main storyline relates to officer Rigg, who is being punished by Jigsaw (or whomever) for being a neglectful husband and having a hero complex. Lots and lots of microcassette tapes, typed instructions, and scrawls on the wall, and watching others suffer accompany his lesson. If you’ve missed these films, Jigsaw’s modus operandi is to teach a moral lesson by engaging the victim in a device from which the only escape involves a harsh variation on Hammurabi’s “eye for an eye” code. None of his devices fails.

Only occasionally does the film seem to want us to sympathize with the killer, as when a rapist must blind himself to survive; in that case the filmmakers are sure to make him obese and slovenly. Immoral simply isn’t enough. There is cleverness in these movies, but still I am repulsed by the idea that their appeal is as fictional snuff films. As an “objective” critic, I’d say that the section of the film in which we learn about Kramer’s conversion into Jigsaw is trite. I think that for those who haven’t seen Saw III, or don’t remember it well, certain aspects of the plot will be confusing, though I suspect it all fits together seamlessly. (It’s only the overall concept that’s ludicrous.) But it makes me wonder, is this really the sort of movie that people really want to see more of? As Jigsaw would say, make your choice.

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reviewed 10/28/07

Zodiac (***1/2)

? In 1969 and into the early 1970s, someone began to kill people in and around San Francisco, beginning with a young couple in the suburb of Vallejo. Working from a screenplay by James Vanderbilt (The Rundown), director David Fincher (Panic Room, Fight Club) tones things down, stylistically, to portray the hunt for the killer, focusing most prominently on a wiry, alcoholic San Francisco Chronicle reporter (Robert Downey Jr.), two city police inspectors (Mark Ruffalo, Anthony Edwards), and a nerdy Chronicle cartoonist, Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), who would go on to write the books that inspired this movie.
+ Unlike the dozens of serial-killer movies that have come out over the past couple of decades, Zodiac is more mystery than thriller. We see the murders attributed to Zodiac shot realistically, but without sensationalism, without music. The search for the killer, not the killer himself, is the focus. Vanderbilt’s script shows the messiness of this kind of investigation, the nonlinearity, the way it can be difficult to weave everything together, and the many red herrings. Zodiac has certain particulars, notably the use of a cipher that helped him gain notoriety, but he’s not as neat and habitual as his fictional counterparts. Nor is the investigation, which involves reporters and police in multiple jurisdictions, multiple suspects, other figures like the handwriting expert played by Philip Baker Hall, and the general public. Fincher weaves all of this irregularity together in a cohesive narrative.
- It’s a function of following the facts, but the story loses a little of its edge when the time frame transitions from weeks to months and years. But, to reiterate, this is more of a detective story, even a character study, than a thriller.
= ***1/2 This detailed drama might disappoint people looking for another Se7en, Fincher’s heavily stylized, fictional serial-killer horror film. It presents Graysmith’s take on the case, never officially solved, but may also disappoint people who want a more definitive ending. At the same time, the subject matter may scare off its ideal audience, one that likes complex stories and characters with frayed edges.

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reviewed 3/8/07

The Hitcher (**1/2)

? Yet another horror remake finds Sean Bean essaying the Rutger Hauer role from the 1986 cult hit. As the title character, he menaces two college sweethearts on a road trip through rural America.

+ Basically what this has going for it is that it’s fairly scary while only moderately gruesome, excepting one key scene toward the end. Bean is aptly non-emotive, and the plot doesn’t rely on the kids being complete idiots, or the cops never being around. There’s even one cop who seems to know what he’s doing.

- That’s not to say the movie shies away from other horror staples. The villain seems to have the tracking abilities of a bloodhound and never makes a mistake except when he encounters the college kids. I mean, even I anticipated the way one college boy gets away when he’s driving and has a knife to his throat. And you have to figure from the premise that either that the Hitcher has killed hundreds of people before in an obvious way and gotten away with it or that he decided in middle age to become randomly, and expertly, homicidal.

= **1/2 I managed to miss the original version back in ’86, but if you seen 2001’s Joyride you’ve seen the same sort of thing done better, with more personality. The last words uttered by the main character are “I feel nothing.” Just so.

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