9 (2009)
Grade: B9, who is about the size and shape of one of those posable tabletop mannequins used by art students, has a soft burlap body and a zipper up his middle. His outsize eyes blink like camera shutters, and they take in a world of monstrous terror and haunting mystery.
In the 10-minute version of the animated film that bears his name, 9 and his comrades — who I suppose should be called robots, though they are softer and rounder than the contraptions usually evoked by that word — navigate their surroundings without speech. Now
, at feature length, the main character’s muteness is a temporary impediment, and he finds himself surrounded by eight other numbered automatons, introduced out of order like a row of Sudoku. (The numerologically inclined will note that the film’s opened in theaters on 9/9/09). Some of these figures speak in the polished tones of well-known actors, including John C. Reilly, Jennifer Connelly and Crispin Glover.
Once 2 (Martin Landau) gives him a tuneup, 9 begins asking questions in the voice of Elijah Wood. And one of the virtues of this
9, as of its shorter predecessor (both were directed by Shane Acker, who wrote the feature with Pamela Pettler) is that it does not rush toward answers. Instead it lingers in a strange, sinister and brilliantly realized landscape rich with allusions to the histories of painting, animation, fantastic literature and 20th-century totalitarianism.
It’s a lot to stuff into 88 minutes, along with rattling monsters, hectic battle sequences and a series of debates between 9 and 1 (Christopher Plummer) about the proper response to danger. (1 wants to remain safe, hidden and ignorant, while 9 wants to fight, explore and learn. You can guess who prevails). But even though it grows a little busy at times and concludes with an unfortunate and unconvincing foray into mystico-spiritual mumbo jumbo,
9 shows remarkable imagination and visual integrity.
Combining two well-worn, endlessly fertile science fiction conceits — the postapocalyptic planet and the sensitive machine — Acker has made a parable of technological peril that is both exciting and satisfyingly enigmatic. Though he uses the latest computer-assisted techniques, his aesthetic has a pleasingly creaky, handmade feel, as if his main tools were not a mouse and a keyboard but rather a needle and thread.
The evil machines ranged against the soft-bodied robots resemble collaborations between Rube Goldberg and Hieronymus Bosch. They are demonic things with glowing eyes and ferocious appetites. The motive for their murderous zeal is one of the puzzles that 9, in the midst of struggling for survival, must try to solve.
This movie’s affinity with
WALL-E, another fable of a soulful machine in a blighted, depopulated milieu, is clear enough, though
9 never achieves that film’s lyrical sublimity. Some of Mr. Acker’s influences are easy to spot, from experimental animators like Jan Svankmajer and the Brothers Quay to Tim Burton, a producer of
9. Its look is smoky, dusty and vaguely European, and its gadgets have an analog solidity that suggests the futuristic nightmares of a long-ago time.
9 and his brethren, scuttling through bombed-out buildings like partisans in an occupied city, evading predatory bird- and spiderlike foes and quarreling among themselves, also try to piece together their own history. Their inquiry is both metaphysical — who made them, and why? — and practical: what are they made of, and how does it work? Answers are parceled out in quieter moments and in vivid rushes of imagery that punctuate the fights and flights.
The action is breathless and intense, the ravenous villains are frightening to behold, and the overall mood is probably too dark and anxious for very young children. But every effort to expand the range of feature-length animation beyond the confines of cautious family fare is to be welcomed, and budding techno and fantasy geeks are likely to be intrigued and enthralled.
JENNIFER’S BODY (2009)
Grade: B-Hell is a teenage girl. So observes the narrator of
Jennifer's Body, tongue in cheek — not to mention other bodily regions.
The high school horror-comedy with a decidedly feminist bite stars Megan Fox as the traffic-
stopping title character and Amanda Seyfried as her BFF, Needy.
It is Needy (short for Anita) who narrates the tale of Satanism, ravishment, and revenge in girlspeak courtesy of Diablo Cody, the writer of
Juno. (While Cody's dialogue is endlessly repeatable, every line is delivered as though it has air quotes around it.)
As a horror movie,
Jennifer's Body doesn't fully deliver. But as a comic allegory of what it's like to be an adolescent girl who comes into sexual and social power that she doesn't know what the heck to do with, it is a minor classic.
Cody and director Karyn Kusama (
Girlfight, Aeon Flux) have a lot of fun setting up Fox — seen here in all her glory, with that double-dip bod and triple-dip eyelashes — as the voluptuous vixen too cool for school and too hot for you. As this sexually ambidextrous character, Fox has a lot of fun, too. Her teasing message: I know what boys want — and I know what girls want, too.
Instead of sacrificing Jennifer as the hot chick who deserves to get punished, as girls of this sort routinely are in horror films, the filmmakers present her as one overwhelmed by hormones and male attention. Jennifer is tired of being the campus lust object. She's tired of the limited menu of men in Devil's Kettle, Minn. She's looking for fresh meat.
So, with bestie Needy in tow, Jennifer goes to the local roadhouse to hear an emo band, Low Shoulder, led by Nikolai (Adam Brody), and makes him her lust object. Then hell is unleashed, and Jennifer becomes a literal man-eater. Yes, there's a satanic initiation with a side of chili con carnage.
In a clunky but not unlikable way, the filmmakers play with ideas about female sexual voracity. At first, it is suggested, Jennifer is a nymphomaniac. The way Cody structured the film suggests that a not-very-interesting phenomenon has taken place when in fact it is later revealed that something much more interesting has happened. As the movie progresses, Jennifer emerges as the Jessica Rabbit of horror — she's not bad, she's just drawn that way.
As hottie and nottie, Fox is appropriately foxy, and Seyfried (a genuine beauty) is made to look geeky. These are archetypal characters, to be sure, but Fox and Seyfried are very good in expressing the intensity of teen-girl friendships.
Kusama, a good director of actresses, doesn't establish her own visual style. Instead, she borrows from other directors (
Jennifer's Body pays tribute to many horror flicks, including
Carrie, The Silence of the Lambs, Thelma & Louise, and
Halloween). This makes the film seem derivative when, in fact, it is an original.
PARANORMAL ACTIVITY (2009)
Grade: BThe surprise success of the microbudget indie horror film
Paranormal Activity constitutes one of those pop-culture moments when you realize that mass taste is sometimes better than you give it credit for. This may not be the horror movie of the year—that crown still easily goes to Sam Raimi's similarly themed
Drag Me to Hell—but it's good enough that its unexpected popularity is heartening. In a genre where a fresh mutilated corpse every 15 minutes has become a reasonable expectation, this slow-paced but relentless spooker is refreshingly un-extreme. It comes by its screams honestly, earning them with incremental, at times agonizing gradations of old-fashioned, what's-that-noise-in-the-hallway suspense.
Though it's a retro haunted-house movie at heart,
Paranormal Activity is formally postmodern, departing from the same found-footage conceit as
The Blair Witch Project and
Cloverfield. A title tells us that the families of Katie Featherstone and Micah Sloat have authori
zed the use of the images we're about to see. As it turns out, those are both the real-life names of the actors and the character names of the couple we're about to spend 86 claustrophobic minutes with. Micah and Katie live together in San Diego, in a house that, while not a mansion, is pretty swank for a couple in their 20s: two stories, three bedrooms, a backyard pool. (I'll get back to the significance of their apparent financial comfort later.)
In the first scene, Micah is setting up a home video camera in their bedroom, to Katie's mild protests. They've been hearing some weird noises at night around the house, and Micah wants to prove to her that the creaks and rustlings are nothing but normal house-settling sounds (not that he seems all that confident himself). All night, every night, the camera sits fixed at their bedside as they sleep through a crescendo of unexplainable events. Doors open and close. Chandeliers swing. Bedclothes ruffle. None of this is sufficiently horrifying to run screaming out of the house about, but it's enough to convince Micah to continue with the nightly recording, just in case.
The couple's mutual conviction that the haunting is sort of like a mouse infestation, a niggling household problem to keep on top of, is one of the funnier things about
Paranormal Activity, which doubles, in its less scary moments, as a domestic comedy. Micah trails Katie around with the camera as they squabble and bargain (he for on-camera sex, she for a moment of privacy). As the creepy nocturnal happenings escalate, each proposes a different solution: She wants to call in a demonologist to exorcise the place (an approach that, by this film's logic, seems as rational and sound as getting a yearly mammogram). He wants to consult a Ouija board—not a popular idea with either Katie, her best friend, or the demon itself, who, when the couple has stepped out for dinner one night, sets the offending occult object on fire.
The writer/director, first-timer Oren Peli, bides his time to a sadistic degree, revealing only as much about the poltergeist as we need to know to keep us anxious. Katie has felt followed by an evil spirit since her house burned down in childhood. (Cut to the events of night No. 8.) A psychic she calls in for a consultation refuses to stay in the house. (Cut to night No. 9.) A childhood photograph of Katie—one that should have disappeared in that long-ago fire—surfaces in the attic. (Cut to night No. 10.) The film is rhythmically punctuated by these long, static shots of the couple sleeping, and we come to dread the nights as much as they do. When you're watching time-lapse film of two people asleep in a dark room, it's surprising how little it takes to scare you: The image of Katie getting out of the bed and standing stock-still next to it as the hours fast-forward past is inexplicably unsettling.
That's all I'll say of the minimalist plot, except to observe that, unless I misunderstood the ending completely, the last few seconds are a bit of a letdown. But since
Paranormal Activity has been so widely discussed already—opinion is sharply divided—I'd like to end this review with my own possibly crackpot reading of the film as allegory for the credit crisis. As mentioned above, Micah and Katie live quite nicely for a couple of their age. His job is described only as "day trader," Katie's as "student," and during the 20 or so days of home movies we witness, we never see either leaving the house for work or school. Even if the couple flees the house their overleveraged dollars have bought, Katie's childhood demon will catch up with her eventually, as will Micah's hubris about solving the haunting problem with no help from anyone else. Both of them—especially the day-trading, night-filming Micah—consistently overestimate their own ability to understand and manage the forces that threaten them. And the apparent consumerist complacency of the movie's opening—as Micah fires up his new camera for the first time, Katie teases him about how much it must have cost—soon gives way to a far harsher focus on day-to-day survival. Though it never poses a question more abstract than "Where's that scratching sound coming from?"
Paranormal Activity is all about spiritual and ethical debts coming due. As we watch the doomed couple fall asleep night after night, we ask what the day traders never asked themselves: How long can they keep pretending everything's all right?
A PERFECT GETAWAY (2009)
Grade: BThose who happened to see the big-budget mess
The Chronicles of Riddick five years ago may have sworn off David Twohy's films for life.
The cut that played in theaters was just enough of a bloated, over-caffeinated
Dune-like spectacle to make audiences forget all the nice touches that the writer-director had with dialogue
and action in
Pitch Black. It says something that the two Riddick video games were infinitely better, with the pixelated Vin Diesel's performance in the video game somehow more engaging than the flesh and blood actor in the movie.
A Perfect Getaway is a clever, heart-pounding thriller, and a welcome return to form for the director. It probably has a thousandth the visual effects budget of the Riddick movie, lasting 97 minutes without a single explosion. But the acting is strong and the director sets a bold, interesting pace — at times verging on collapsing the fourth wall between the actors and the audience. It's the type of B-movie throwaway thriller that studios program as secondary films during the summer blockbuster season, but Twohy refuses to just go through the motions.
Much of the credit goes to the actors, starting with Cliff (Steve Zahn) as a screenwriter on a honeymoon with his less adventurous wife, Cydney (Milla Jovovich). A male-female pair of serial killers is offing couples in Hawaii, and Cliff and Cydney meet some prime candidates in the form of two grungy hitchhikers, and a seemingly friendly couple that they run across on the trail.
Even with a somewhat over-the-top final third of the film, the weaknesses will occur to audiences only as they think about the film later. Although a second viewing may clarify some inconsistencies, there are definitely a few actions by the principals that don't make sense once the spoilers are revealed.
The dialogue is sharp and funny, with most of the best lines going to Timothy Olyphant as Nick, a hard-core survivalist type whose brain isn't wired like the rest of ours. Twohy also takes two classic moves from the Wes Craven playbook: He uses Cliff's profession to make fun of the genre, while also letting the audience know it's OK not to take the movie too seriously. (A conversation involving the use of red herrings in movies is particularly spot-on, considering this may be the red-herring-est movie of the year.)
And when the bad guys are revealed and it's time for some kill-or-be-killed action, he allows his protagonists to do more than run and scream and trip over stuff. Before it's over, you might end up feeling a little sorry for the villains.
WEATHER GIRL (2009)
Grade: CEngaging lead performances and snatches of witty repartee help lubricate the creaky plot mechanics in
Weather Girl, a lightly amusing but thoroughly predictable dramedy that plays like a Lifetime made-for-cable production with an R-rated soundtrack. Sitcom vet (and, perhaps more important, co-producer) Tricia O'Kelley makes a winning impression in the title role of what's obviously intended as a star-vehicle showcase. Even so, this indie fim relies more heavily on the bigger names in the supporting cast —especially Mark Harmon of the hit television series
NCIS — to grab maximum attention.
Opening scenes — as wildly improbable as they are undeniably hilarious — depict the oncamera meltdown of Sylvia Miller (O'Kelley), the "sassy weather girl" (as she's repeatedly referenced) of a Se
attle morning TV news show. Long romantically involved with Dale Waters (Harmon), the show's preening host, Sylvia more or less commits career suicide by publicly trashing Dale for his loutish infidelity (and unimpressive sexual prowess) while, off in the control room, members of the snickering production crew — evidently unmindful or uncaring of FCC regulations — allow her foul-mouthed tirade to be aired live.
In the wake of this episode, not surprisingly, Sylvia finds herself unable to land a job at any other Seattle broadcast outlet. So she's forced to move in with her slacker younger brother, acerbic Walt (Ryan Devlin), and take a waitressing job for a demanding restaurateur (a fleeting, funny cameo by Jane Lynch). Sylvia is all the more anxious about being unattached as well as underemployed because, as her best buddies (Alex Kapp Horner, Marin Hinkle) none-too-subtly remind her, she is 35 and counting.
But her friends don't stop there: They also suggest that although Dale behaved atrociously — he cheated on Sylvia with his conspicuously younger co-host (Kaitlin Olson) — he wasn't entirely wrong when he accused Sylvia of maintaining a tight grip on her emotions.
Partly to deflect such criticism, but largely to get herself through a dry and lonely stretch, Sylvia throws herself into a strictly sexual, no-strings-attached relationship with Byron (Patrick J. Adams), Walt's friend and neighbor, a website designer who insists he's "a great rebound guy." Of course, they agree they'll never fall in love, because, hey, he's six years younger than she is, and they really have nothing in common, and she's not looking for anything permanent, and ... OK, so you know where this is going.
Writer-director Blayne Weaver doesn't cover any new ground, but he takes a few clever turns while heading toward the inevitable happy ending. The movie might have been even more effective if he had risked a bit more and pandered a tad less — he and O'Kelley seem reluctant to risk turning off viewers by focusing too long on Sylvia's less attractive but more intriguing qualities.
But O'Kelley and Adams develop an enjoyably edgy/romantic give-and-take, largely because they have some of the film's best dialogue. ("You're sexy," he says, "in a foreign film kind of way, with the angles and the attitude ... ") And Harmon deftly remains one step short of caricature while playing Dale as more clueless than caddish. Other supporting players — including Jon Cryer as a fatuous blind date from hell, and an unbilled Blair Underwood as a TV station manager — are well-cast. The production values are unspectacular, but sufficient.
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