You've Become a Real Populist!
Sep. 8th, 2008 12:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
handful_ofdustThat was what my unabashedly Commie adult friend Len Doncheff told me once, after I let slip that I'd seen Con Air ten times and From Dusk 'Til Dawn twenty times in the the-ayta. And maybe it's true, because last week I saw Alexandre Aja's universally shit-on Mirrors and quite liked it, while this week I was halfway through Paul W.S. Anderson's Death Race, turned to Steve and muttered: "Was every person who reviewed this high? Or am I just that stupid?"
If you want, you could call both films "good [, for] trash" and have done with it, but I'm not sure I'd even add that much of an easy-out qualifier. I enjoyed them both...Death Race more, though not by a lot. So if you didn't, you can probably stop reading right about here, before I go into some of my observations (lj-cutted for spoilers):
A) The central conceit in Mirrors' back-story is a truly interesting one, and not a twist I've ever seen used before. By this I don't mean so much the idea that mirrors are creepy, or that something malign could use them as a conduit to our world, to spy on and manipulate us into destroying ourselves, as how that malign force got into the mirrors in the first place, and what it wants. There's a terrible pathos in the concept of someone genuinely thinking that mirror therapy could cure schizophrenia (and I know I've seen photos of similar set-ups from the same time-period, because it's imminently 1950s thinking--real Bell Jar bullshit), as well as a real horror in the idea that the doctor involved might have thought he'd succeeded (for a while), and subjected other sick little girls to it.
B) The department store set itself had some of the best set-dec I've seen since Session 9, a glorious parade of decay and creep. I loved the interior design, which had an Art Nouveau/Art Deco grandeur--in the changing-room scene, I kept getting distracted by the fact that I could identify the dominating mural as a revisioning of an engraving by Jan de Tooroop. Later, I wondered why all this was still intact enough five years ago to go up in flames, after almost thirty years of being open for business, but Steve suggested that the store might have just celebrated a massive anniversary in a way that involved resoring all the original design furbelows. Ah, interstitial logic! How I love you.;)
C) As ever, the stuff most reviews and fan-response had flagged as particularly "over the top" really wasn't, unless you genuinely didn't want to engage with the characters or give a shit about what happened to them at all. I love how everyone fixates on Kiefer Sutherland's first response to this threat to his family (run into the store! Slug the mirrors! Try to break them! SHOOT them!) and not on his second, considerable smarter response (use his cop-skills to find out what the fuck they want, and give it to them). Granted, this second response does involve wonderfully Jack Baueresque set-pieces like Kiefer kidnapping a nun at gunpoint and wrestling a possessed zombie, but there ya go. (I myself was very jazzed that they acknowledged she wouldn't simply explode on contact after re-possession, and would therefore have to be dealt with.)
D) Biggest problem: The final fillip. This is not abnormal in today's horror movies. OTOH, it's the least ridiculous hand-from-the-grave Aja's come up with thus far--Haute Tension, anyone?--which gives me hope. It also keeps with an oddly happy ending overall, since nobody's "dead" per se, and the mirror world isn't so bad (aside from being reversed...confirmation that the entities were trapped between worlds throughout, literally in the mirrors). Maybe he can now find his "other" family, once he gets over the shock, and be pseudo-happy.
E) I have less to say about Death Race, but will concentrate first on Joan Allen's performance. Instead of being wildly disproportionate (as advertised, especially by the moron who said she should "give her Oscar nominations back" just for being in the film), it is in fact extremely restrained, cold, precise. Big, yes, in an operatic way--Turandot as Captain Bligh/Evita, maybe--but not half as over-the-top as some minor performances, like the ecstatically corrupt sidekick one given by the guy who plays Jason Isaacs' little brother on Brotherhood. The most-quoted line ("Now we'll see who shits on the sidewalk") is, in fact, supposed to be funny; it's bad swearing under pressure by a person who usually never swears. I found it hilarious and oddly endearing.
F) And now, let's talk about that insanely silly ending. While I agree with greygirlbeast that the "real" climax comes right after Ian McShane's final line, I still had rollicking fun watching that last minute and a half, which spun out as though Anderson had allowed himself to write fixit fanfic for his own screenplay, then shot and slapped it on. Tyrese and Statham, shackin' up in Mexico! The girl shows up (just to prove they're not gay, or at least Statham's not), with a hot car! The baaaaaby! Statham's dorky narration provides the cherry on top of a teetery, sugar-shock cake. Aaaand...we're out. A little reassurance, great soundtrack blast, a fine time had by all.
And no, BTW, I haven't ever seen Death Race 2000. Guess what? Not everything Paul Bartel did is gold, and if I'd wanted to, I'd've seen it by now. Thank you, fuck on through.
So yeah, I'm a populist, albeit within an extraordinarily narrow range. Sue me.;))
If you want, you could call both films "good [, for] trash" and have done with it, but I'm not sure I'd even add that much of an easy-out qualifier. I enjoyed them both...Death Race more, though not by a lot. So if you didn't, you can probably stop reading right about here, before I go into some of my observations (lj-cutted for spoilers):
A) The central conceit in Mirrors' back-story is a truly interesting one, and not a twist I've ever seen used before. By this I don't mean so much the idea that mirrors are creepy, or that something malign could use them as a conduit to our world, to spy on and manipulate us into destroying ourselves, as how that malign force got into the mirrors in the first place, and what it wants. There's a terrible pathos in the concept of someone genuinely thinking that mirror therapy could cure schizophrenia (and I know I've seen photos of similar set-ups from the same time-period, because it's imminently 1950s thinking--real Bell Jar bullshit), as well as a real horror in the idea that the doctor involved might have thought he'd succeeded (for a while), and subjected other sick little girls to it.
B) The department store set itself had some of the best set-dec I've seen since Session 9, a glorious parade of decay and creep. I loved the interior design, which had an Art Nouveau/Art Deco grandeur--in the changing-room scene, I kept getting distracted by the fact that I could identify the dominating mural as a revisioning of an engraving by Jan de Tooroop. Later, I wondered why all this was still intact enough five years ago to go up in flames, after almost thirty years of being open for business, but Steve suggested that the store might have just celebrated a massive anniversary in a way that involved resoring all the original design furbelows. Ah, interstitial logic! How I love you.;)
C) As ever, the stuff most reviews and fan-response had flagged as particularly "over the top" really wasn't, unless you genuinely didn't want to engage with the characters or give a shit about what happened to them at all. I love how everyone fixates on Kiefer Sutherland's first response to this threat to his family (run into the store! Slug the mirrors! Try to break them! SHOOT them!) and not on his second, considerable smarter response (use his cop-skills to find out what the fuck they want, and give it to them). Granted, this second response does involve wonderfully Jack Baueresque set-pieces like Kiefer kidnapping a nun at gunpoint and wrestling a possessed zombie, but there ya go. (I myself was very jazzed that they acknowledged she wouldn't simply explode on contact after re-possession, and would therefore have to be dealt with.)
D) Biggest problem: The final fillip. This is not abnormal in today's horror movies. OTOH, it's the least ridiculous hand-from-the-grave Aja's come up with thus far--Haute Tension, anyone?--which gives me hope. It also keeps with an oddly happy ending overall, since nobody's "dead" per se, and the mirror world isn't so bad (aside from being reversed...confirmation that the entities were trapped between worlds throughout, literally in the mirrors). Maybe he can now find his "other" family, once he gets over the shock, and be pseudo-happy.
E) I have less to say about Death Race, but will concentrate first on Joan Allen's performance. Instead of being wildly disproportionate (as advertised, especially by the moron who said she should "give her Oscar nominations back" just for being in the film), it is in fact extremely restrained, cold, precise. Big, yes, in an operatic way--Turandot as Captain Bligh/Evita, maybe--but not half as over-the-top as some minor performances, like the ecstatically corrupt sidekick one given by the guy who plays Jason Isaacs' little brother on Brotherhood. The most-quoted line ("Now we'll see who shits on the sidewalk") is, in fact, supposed to be funny; it's bad swearing under pressure by a person who usually never swears. I found it hilarious and oddly endearing.
F) And now, let's talk about that insanely silly ending. While I agree with greygirlbeast that the "real" climax comes right after Ian McShane's final line, I still had rollicking fun watching that last minute and a half, which spun out as though Anderson had allowed himself to write fixit fanfic for his own screenplay, then shot and slapped it on. Tyrese and Statham, shackin' up in Mexico! The girl shows up (just to prove they're not gay, or at least Statham's not), with a hot car! The baaaaaby! Statham's dorky narration provides the cherry on top of a teetery, sugar-shock cake. Aaaand...we're out. A little reassurance, great soundtrack blast, a fine time had by all.
And no, BTW, I haven't ever seen Death Race 2000. Guess what? Not everything Paul Bartel did is gold, and if I'd wanted to, I'd've seen it by now. Thank you, fuck on through.
So yeah, I'm a populist, albeit within an extraordinarily narrow range. Sue me.;))
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no subject
Date: 2008-09-08 04:50 pm (UTC)But as a person who has actually seen the movie, did you you think the department store looked an awful lot like the one in The 12 Monkeys?
no subject
Date: 2008-09-08 04:52 pm (UTC)