Don’t Look Down (**3/4)

Sensuality reigns in this Argentine tale of a stilt-walking, sleepwalking young man whose chance meeting with a slightly older woman of the world changes his life. Or at least his sex life. As the above description suggests, there are a few quirks in both the story and the young man, who thinks his recently deceased father is writing messages in his diary while he sleeps. Death and sex are significant themes, mixing in a way I didn’t quite grasp. However, sex predominates, as the Spanish señorita teaches the young man how to thrust 81 times without climaxing, not to mention such positions as the “Monkey Coiling Around a Tree.” That this Jean Brodie of copulation is played by lovely Antonella Costa helps, since she’s naked in half of her scenes. (Fairly, lead Leandro Stivelman also reveals “Marlon,” the nickname his appendage is given—yes, after Brando—in the movie.) Undoubtedly, this is a cut above the late-night pay cable flicks it comes close to resembling at times. But classy eroticism, light comic touches, and impressive visuals (not merely the sex, but the stilt-walking) don’t completely make up for the lack of any substantial plot.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz East 2 (Philadelphia Film Festival) and reviewed 4/6/09

Ghost Town (***1/4)

If The Sixth Sense had been a comedy, it probably still wouldn’t be much like this. But that’s the idea, anyway. Misanthropic, pudgy New York dentist Bertram Pincus (Ricky Gervais) can see dead people because he was dead, too. Metaphorically, sure, but also, temporarily, during surgery. The city is purgatory to souls with unfinished business, and now Bertram is besieged by them, most persistently by Greg Kinnear’s character, a philanderer who dies cute in the opening sequence and wants Bertram to break up his wife’s (Téa Leoni) new relationship.

So, being an example of what I call the gimmick movie, i.e. the alternate-reality fantasy, Ghost Town must be compared to my favorite example of such, Groundhog Day. I think that’s the best one in terms of exploring all permutations of its premise (reliving the same day over and over), and doing do so cleverly. Now, this is not quite as elegant in its plotting or the way it explores the possibilities of its premise. The ending feels forced. It makes amusing sense that the dead have to wear the clothes they died in, but where are all the old people? Maybe only the young have unfinished business.

But overall the story engages, and there’s a similar sense of romance. Even though it’s the first starring role for Gervais where he hasn’t been the writer or director, it seems as if crafted in mind of his comic persona. Director David Koepp and co-writer John Kamps also collaborated on another fantasy, the underrated Zathura. Time accurately describes Gervais’s persona as “the cringe comedy of unaware arrogance.” In other words, he’s rude, but never smug. He’s too self-absorbed to be supercilious. Wherein lies the humor, as in Gervais’s TV roles on the The Office (the BBC original) and Extras. Gervais is a master of the pained expression. Yet there’s the sweet, but not too sentimental side, to the story; as also with Groundhog Day, it’s a woman who inspires reform. Mostly, this most inevitable transition is natural. Koepp takes the fantastic and makes it seem down to earth.

IMDB link

viewed 8/7/08 (screening at Ritz Bourse); reviewed 9/12/08

Epitaph (**1/4)

A World War II hospital is the setting for this South Korean psychological horror film. The story confusingly shifts from a squeamish young morgue intern to another doctor trying to aid a young girl whose parents died in a car accident, and then to another doctor who suspects his wife of being a ghost. Some of the confusion is deliberate; we are meant to wonder who is a ghost and who is alive. By the end, I understood some of what happened. But, despite some creepy imagery and sounds, and a few genuine scares, I found the film too incoherent to enjoy.

IMDB link

viewed 4/10/08; reviewed 4/11/08; screened at Philadelphia Film Festival

Over Her Dead Body (**)

This is pretty dopey, though not any more dopey than it seemed from the preview I’d seen. Eva Longoria Parker, of Desperate Housewives, plays a ghost desperately trying to break up her former fiancé’s (Paul Rudd) new relationship. He’s gotten involved with the “psychic” (Lake Bell, of Boston Legal) he went to after her death. Yeah, it’s dopey. That would be all right if it was clever too. Instead, the ghostly gal resorts to, for example, making fart noises that only the psychic can hear. All of these people live in brittle world, where softly lobbing keys can hit a vase and cause it to shatter.

Meanwhile, though, the comedy is also trying to be a romantic, not just a series of sight gags. It’s not terrible or anything, but the wacky stuff detracts from the semi-serious side of the story. Parker’s character is so shrewish you wonder that Rudd’s kindly veterinarian was actually going to marry her. A silly subplot involving the psychic’s catering partner/gay best friend (an engaging Jason Biggs) is resolved in predictably phony fashion, and everyone lives happily ever after. In shallow romantic comedies, no one ever has to feel bad for long, even dead people.



IMDB link


viewed 2/2/08

The Grudge 2 (*1/2)

? A sequel to a remake that is, however, not a remake of the Japanese Grudge 2, though it is nonetheless again directed by and written by the auteur of both versions of The Grudge, Takashi Shimizu. Got that? The important thing is that the creepy dead woman and child are back. This time they’ve got they’re sights on Amber Tamblyn, who plays the sister of Sarah Michelle Gellar’s character from the first film. She’s come to Tokyo to figure out what Sis is doing in the hospital, but it turns out that the ghosts are also doing some traveling. No longer confined to an old house, they’re also targeting some girls at the nearby English-language school and a family in a Chicago tenement.

+ Well, no doubt about it, the dead people are creepy. Decreasingly scary, but creepy.

- If the lengthy description above makes it sound like the plot’s complicated, fear not. You won’t fear much, actually, because if you’ve seen the first movie, you’ve seen all there is to fear. Other than the new characters (Gellar’s being just about the only holdover among the living ones) and the new settings, there is precious little to carry the story forward. Over and over, someone is looking at something that suddenly turns into a dead person, sometimes scaring them, sometimes killing them. Tamblyn finally finds the woman who can explain everything, and the woman says, in essence, sorry, you’re screwed. Indeed.

= *1/2 Even fans of the original are likely to echo the befuddled mutterings I heard around me when I exited the theater. I think they were confused by the plot, thinking that there would be one.

IMDb link

viewed 10/14/06 at Moorestown

The Covenant (**1/2)

 ? Descendents of those persecuted in the Massachusetts witch trials possess nearly unlimited supernatural powers that they must keep secret and use wisely. Four high school friends called the “Sons of Ipswich” are the present-day carriers of the powers, and the secret. A villain is able to both appear as a ghostly presence and make insects appear on young women’s bodies.

+ There’s one great idea in the movie. The more the young men use their powers, the more they’re eventually weakened and prematurely aged. The insect stuff is creepy.

- Rather than explore how each of the young men struggles to use his power wisely, the script is content to set up a predictable showdown between a noble hero and an evil villain. The plot isn’t too bad, but the individual scenes seemed more designed to show off the admittedly impressive torsos of its male stars than explore the theme in an interesting way. Overall, there are too many stock elements, with loud music and barroom brawls substituting for excitement. As usual, the high schoolers look too old to be high school students. From a horror standpoint, the scares are infrequent.

= **1/2 I think people who like the mythological aspect of vampire movies, for example, may find some appeal in the idea of a secret society.

IMDb link

The Fog (**1/4)

This is a mostly bloodless (literally and figuratively) remake of John Carpenter’s 1980 film. It retains the same plot of ghosts haunting an island town a hundred years after its founding. The main characters are handsome twentysomethings played by Tom Welling (Smallville’s Clark Kent) and Maggie Grace (Shannon on Lost), although Selma Blair, playing a hip radio deejay, is probably the best known actor. (I liked her character best too, though the boring soundtrack undermines her claim of being a gal of taste.) There are two problems with the movie. First, the whole fog thing? Not that scary. Sure it’d be scary if you knew it was hiding some dead geezer trying to kill you, but, in and of itself, fog’s not that frightening. At least not here. The repeated sound effect, really loud knocking, only helps somewhat.

The other thing is that what the ghosts do doesn’t make much sense. They sometimes kill people with tools, sometimes magically convert them to dust. Considering how long ago they all got wiped out, they’re pretty good at messing with computer monitors as well. Who they kill doesn’t make much sense either, except that they carefully limit themselves to the supporting cast. The barest suspense is provided by waiting to learn exactly what happened. One character meets a surprising fate. My favorite part of the movie was when someone happily reunites with a family member but never asks about the other family member who was with the person. Someone must have shown her the script.

IMDb link

circulated via email 10/20/05 and posted 11/16/13

Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride (***)

I have to admit, I was a bit sleepy and sort of fell asleep during parts of this short (1:18) animated musical, so my rating is kind of tentative. Anyway, it’s a dark fairy tale in the vein of the Burton-produced Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), which with it shares one of its writers. In Burton's world, the land of the dead, shown in various states of decomposition, is literally more colorful than that of the living. Curious that the nervous groom voiced by Johnny Depp (with a British accent) wants to return to the dark Victorian place he came from, although, on the plus side, his fiancée there (Emily Watson) has no holes in her face, and no worm eating her eye socket. This contrasts with her decaying rival (Helena Bonham Carter). The contrasting visual imagery is stunning, the story less so. Longtime Burton collaborator Danny Elfman contributes one of his better scores, though I thought his songs in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Burton's other 2005 film, were better.

IMDb link

circulated via email 9/29/05 and posted 11/18/13

Just Like Heaven (*3/4)

In this silly Reese Witherspoon-Mark Ruffalo romantic comedy, a handsome duo find themselves sharing a San Francisco flat. She shrewishly insists he’s trespassing, while he insists she’s actually dead. Sound amusing? The dumb first half finds him buying stacks of books and hiring ghostbusters (complete with theme music) and such to get rid of her. I noticed one woman a few rows behind me wildly cackling at such lines as “Who put Sponge Bob in the pasta?” The second half goes all gushy but is a relative improvement.

IMDb link

circulated via email 9/22/05 and posted 11/19/13