Reviews

Cases like these are so frustrating. It's like falling in love with a pretty smile, only to find the target of your affection has no heart. I wanted to like this one, because of the idea and because these small productions deserve everyone's attention.

Alas, the imaginative backbone that could have offered remarkable chances in the hands of a skillful writer is turned into a generic mess. Some of this is Keret's fault, too. As you probably know, the story is about an afterlife for those who have died by their own hand. The thing is that the world is just like ours, except even more grey and bland. Our main character ends up on a road trip with his Russian friend and a girl who "shouldn't be there", in search of some sense for the events and perhaps a way to find love again.

The problem is that the afterlife is not the only thing that depresses the watcher: the total unimaginativeness of the (original) story is the second. So much could have been derived from the setup, but the sad truth is that everything of any importance is shown to us during the first fifteen minutes: Joy Division playing in the bar, no one can smile, everyone carries the scars of their death. After this introduction, it all starts going wrong because nothing else connects with the theme; all sorts of goofy things happen, but they could just as well happen in a Charlie Kaufman -movie or in any reality-twisting comedy. The quirky events, characters and items have no context and quickly turn out to be just there to make the world seem a bit stranger. Yeah, there's a black hole under the car's seat. Yeah, Tom Waits sleeps in the middle of the road. Yeah, one of the characters is an Eskimo who speaks only in guttural sounds. None of this matters, and it's not even funny. Later we are introduced to 'miracles', which are just as boring and out of context as the rest of the material. Not only unimaginative, throughout the movie we get many painful examples of bad writing, like the scene where one of the characters just pops out of the blue to tell the main character (and us) what is actually happening. You DON'T DO THIS, especially not in A MOVIE, A VISUAL MEDIUM! Every writer knows this: maybe someone was just too lazy at some point. The ending, otherwise pretty well modified from the book's, creates at least one major plot hole.

The dialog is quite bad and the characters are mostly uninteresting, but some of the blame goes for the actors who seem to spend all the time thinking of their older hits. Fugit is a slightly more depressed version of his William from 'Almost Famous', Sossamon plays the girl from 'The Rules of Attraction', Waits has had many similar roles and Arnett is once again GOB, although it's questionable if he ever plays any other character. The only one with no former references is Shea Wigham, who just goes on to do a really poor man's imitation of Eugene Hutz. Considering that the director knows Hutz personally, it would have been much less painful to give the part to the man himself.

But it was an intriguing idea when it started. Shame there's really nothing to cling on to here.

Some people in the industry are just lost causes. I really have given Shyamalan chances, many more than any other on/off director has gotten. That's because he seems to have pretty solid ideas about giving a movie that special personal touch, which is always an appreciable trait. And because he DOES have ideas that, now and then, are more valuable than your average episode of Outer Limits.

The main problem is just that as a writer, he is horrible, and perhaps because of his "slight" egoism, there seems to be no one to tell him when he crosses the line. I think 'Unbreakable' is his only good movie, and that's because there was a narrative trick that was too simple to be screwed up by what was actually happening in the script (Bruce wasn't the main character!).

This is his second best, I guess. It IS flawed, but has some interesting stuff going on. I actually felt bad for a while for Shyamalan, because the marketing section falsely decided to advertise this as a horror movie - which it is not, as many have pointed out. But that's not the issue here: the idea in this one is all about seeing the structures that build up a society. Terror as a way to control. Tragedy as a trigger for change. Secrecy for 'greater good'. Outcast as a monster. All 'seen' by a blind girl as our lead. Of course the blindness here is just poor symbolism, but it's important that SHE doesn't see. In the end, she still can't be sure if the threat exists. Has the lie lived so long that it has become real?

But it's constructed poorly. Shyamalan wants his twist, so the entire narrative builds just for that moment, and after that, it dies completely. And before that, all commentary is lost because we just want to know the catch. I wonder what it would have been like if WE had known the truth from the beginning? Not scary at all, of course, but maybe a bit more meaningful. Compare, for instance, 'From Hell' the graphic novel to its movie adaptation.

Actors do okay with their paper-thin characters. Shyamalan's use of camera and cuts, which I considered refreshingly original in his earlier movies, is already becoming boring here. Afterwards, in 'Lady in the Water', it's just stupid.

But nice try, anyway. At least here he didn't cast himself as the writer who saves the plot.

I have lately found interest in reviewing movies with great, wasted potential. This is another one, sharing a lot with a 'Wind Chill' that I've written about, too. That movie was about merging the philosophical idea of "eternal return" with a ghost story. It was quite clever in my opinion, but failed because someone wanted all the imaginable clichés to satisfy the masses (that it never reached, 'cause it went straight to DVD).

We have a deep idea here, too. It's basically a struggle between two men and their differing ideologies, two worlds, two metaphysical forces, set in a city that is quite not in OUR world, just a bit "off". So, all in the core of this movie is abstract. It's like a show presented to us by these forces behind the curtain.

On the other side, we have Wood's character who represents fate, order, patterns. He believes he is able to determine the universe, to understand the ultimate story behind the mystery. On the other side, we have Hurt, a Wittgensteinian professor seeing only the uncertainty of "truths" and the freedom of an individual to create his own destiny in an unorganized universe. The battlefield of these two ideas is Oxford, seen as a strange place inhabited by strange people: after centuries of twisting and shaping of physics, metaphysics and mathematics it has somehow turned into a world where special laws of nature work. And everyone is just a bit crazy.

It might basically be about solving a murder mystery, but just watch how everything gravitates around this struggle. All the dialog, about who's right and who's not, in every turn. The men even fight of the attention of the same woman.

But it doesn't work, because there had to be a mystery. They chose the Dan Brown -style instead of Agatha Christie -style. Lots of running, lots of amazing conclusions from simple clues, lots of ado about nothing. It's boring, and really nowhere as smart as these characters should be. You have the minimum number of characters, so it's not too hard to guess the twist(s). The romance sub-plot has way too much emphasis. The ending is almost great, exactly what the idea of the story called for, but the events that lead you there are not.

Staging, editing and directing: good, but nothing special. It could have been, with a bit more wackiness. Actors do basically fine.

Hurt in a Guy Fawkes costume must have been a joke.

This is another case where a small film has a great idea but it's not executed well enough. They interest me. In the end, Wind Chill fails, but it is probably my favorite failure of all time.

Three persons made me see this. First of them was Stephen Katz, another of the writers who was behind the script of the awesome 'Shadow of the Vampire'. Some of that is here, in the blurring realities. Seems to be a smart guy. Second was Clooney as a producer. Okay, he has produced some awful stuff like 'Rumor Has It...', but I was interested that he would take a chance with something like this. And the third was of course the beautiful (and seemingly very talented!) Emily Blunt. But that's just a crush.

The point behind this was to integrate Nietzsche's (and before him, the ancient Egyptians', for example) idea of eternal return to a ghost story. It is great because they match so well: ghosts are all about infinitely repeating former mistakes, a myth created so we'd live a better life; and the horror of the eternal return is that no matter what you do, you just can't "know better", worlds will always follow each other, never overlap, never give any hints on how to change your ways (that's already scary enough to make a horror story!). Except in this case, because now the ghost world and the human world meet. So all that talk about philosophy is important, setting up everything we are about to experience.

The girl is important too, but most of this manifests in the guy. We learn that he has lived his life as a ghost, 'ghosted' the girl for so long, ultimately encountering real ghosts (and finally...). It is because of his choices that they end up in the dark, cold road. It's Nietzsche's hell. Everything repeats there, no one knows how to save themselves. The characters are haunted as much by the way they have lived than by the real ghosts. Religion doesn't help, because it is dead, forsaken.

For me, the emotional center point was when the guy told her how he would do things differently if he had the chance - but it's just a slap in face, cold reminder that nothing can get you out of the cycle... except maybe.

I loved this side of the movie. But somewhere, someone figured that it would be boring, not intriguing enough for horror fans. Then they did the worst thing: throw in the cheap screams, copy and paste them from the stuff that worked years ago. So we get all the clichés and even more. We get hands coming through car windows - we get murder flashbacks - we get close shaves, our heroine crawling away and the bad guy trying to grab her ankle - we get a sudden wake-up-in-another-place/time cut, really stupid if it's out of place (at least Nic Cage wasn't there to yell "GODDMNIT") - we even get a horribly Freddy Kruegerish nemesis (he was burned alive, for Christ's sake!) with lame dialog. It's just sad, after all the build-up, to see it go down in flames. And most of the time you aren't scared at all.

And the scene in the bathroom was probably just a red herring, but that, too, is amazingly out of place. There was no need. Five minutes that could have been used to show something else. Maybe they thought that there had to be something menacing at that point or people would give up. No risks taken. No real power.

Otherwise, everything works. The actors are good: while Ashton Holmes has a more complex character to portray, it is Blunt who shines all the way through. She is not your typical scream queen.

And cinematography is great, even though it's mostly dark. The snow, the ice, the frost, the overall coldness... It looks great and feels just... chilling. I wonder what someone else, aiming higher, could have done with the script.

Alan Pao's Toxic is a pack punching, visually stylished yet highly unoriginal thriller that is nonetheless an enjoyable way to spend a rainy evening, even if it somewhat fails in delivering the main catch of the plot. Instead we are treated some slightly bizarre looking violence and (undeniably beautiful) half-naked women, but in both cases you can somehow feel that the director didn't go as far as it would have been necessary to show the dark side of the story and how hard it is to tell what is real in this abyss.

When a movie wants to mix a mind-boggling mystery, some half-serious shoot-em-up hit-man-action, the dirty businesses of the underworld, couple of spooks in the footsteps of the Japanese horror movies, some truly Lynchian imagery and a surprisingly effective psychological thriller, you might expect a mess. Luckily, Toxic never really falls apart or stumbles in this aspect. The narrative is semi-incoherent, jumping between times and places, but once you get the different levels, it's simple to follow. Maybe even too simple.

It's a shame that the style-over-substance approach in shooting and editing is mostly there to please the MTV-generation. The crazy camera, hostile towards epileptics, is mostly out of place - even as the madness of the character(s) is slowly revealed and reality is played with, it never feels appropriate, more like a camera that would work in a movie about drug-induced hallucinations. The main actors are mostly nobodies and it shows: they don't get how multilayered their characters are or how to show it. Sizemore doesn't get it either, but he's a good thug, has always been. Swain is underused, and the tragedy of her character never really has time to touch you. The rest, including Danny Trejo, Bai Ling and Costas Mandylor, play their regular roles. You know, the ones they always do. Routine.

The biggest problem, however, is the fact that there is nothing here that hasn't been done better somewhere else. In some cases, to death. So it becomes trite. Even the twist-you-didn't-see-comin' is only a slightly altered version of some of the classic twists combined. But it IS done well enough, it IS mostly logical and you don't feel like you've been cheated (like I felt after I saw 'The Sixth Sense' the second time). Little things along the way start making sense. You might actually consider watching it again, to catch all the hints. But you probably won't, because let's face it, the trip just wasn't that interesting.