“It’s Halloween. Everyone’s entitled to one good scare.”

Halloween
Review by Nathan Weinbender

“Halloween” is the essential American horror film. No other movie in its genre has been as influential, as effective, as brilliantly realized.

Very few thrillers have ever been as economical as “Halloween,” and it serves as proof that carnage was not always at the heart of horror pictures. When so many directors focus one what horrible creatures will leap from the shadows, John Carpenter was more concerned with the lurking prospects of the shadows themselves.

“Halloween” was produced for just over $300,000 in the spring of 1978, and it went on to gross nearly $50 million at the box office, making it the most profitable independent film of its time. Why was it so successful? For the same reason, I think, that the haunted house at a carnival is popular—people respond strongly to being really, truly scared, and “Halloween” is very, very scary.

It is also one of the most stylish slasher movies ever, a fact made evident during the film’s opening moments, a long tracking shot that takes on the point of view of a young boy as he stabs his sister to death. Flash forward fifteen years, and the little boy, now grown, escapes from the confines of his mental institution and returns to his hometown of Haddonfield, Illinois, on Halloween day.

The killer (simply credited as “The Shape,” he later became known as Michael Myers), donning a creepy white mask, begins to hack and slash his way through any teenager that gets in the way of his knife. Our heroine is a plucky Jamie Lee Curtis (making her feature debut), who is stuck babysitting two neighborhood kids as her promiscuous friends turn up dead.

On Michael’s tracks is Donald Pleasence, who was Michael’s childhood psychiatrist and knows what he is capable of. “Death has come to your little town,” he tells the sheriff, who brushes off the threats. It’s too late anyway.

Modern-day horror films relish violence and brutality, and so many directors wrongly assume that blatant sadism is automatically scary. Look at the “Hostel” and “Saw” series, in which the stories are constructed around the gruesome deaths, or the woeful remakes of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and “Halloween,” which drain the originals of their tension and practically splatter the camera with viscera.

So many scenes in “Halloween” would be easy to spoil with overbearing music, gratuitous gore or rapid-fire editing (all traits with which today’s moviegoers are no doubt familiar). But Carpenter is a master of his medium, and there are moments in this film that have been constructed so tightly that I can’t imagine them being any more effective.

Take, for instance, the famous moment near the end of the film where Curtis thinks she has killed Michael. Of course, he isn’t dead, and as she cowers in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen, Michael—who has been lying inert on a bed over Curtis’ shoulder—silently sits up. Chilling.

I can think of at least a dozen modern directors that would supply that moment with a musical sting, or would cut to a close-up shot. It wouldn’t be necessary. Carpenter utilizes his camera superbly, and how he juxtaposes the main action in the foreground with glimpses of ominous figures in the background is one of the film’s great successes.

“Halloween” was the film that single-handedly inspired the boom slasher films in the ‘80s, and although it has spawned sequels, remakes, imitations and spoofs, none of them have captured the electricity that Carpenter did here. Most horror films are sledgehammers; this one is a scalpel.

Directed by John Carpenter. Written by Debra Hill and Carpenter. Starring Donald Pleasence, Jamie Lee Curtis, Nancy Loomis, P.J. Soles, Charles Cyphers and Nick Castle. R; 91m.

Two Liv Tyler movies in one day? Count me in!

The DVD Beat
Reviews by Nathan Weinbender

The Incredible Hulk
In 2003, Ang Lee made a noble effort to adapt “The Incredible Hulk” comic book series onto the big screen. The film’s visual style was remarkably good, but the story was dull, the drama turgid and the Hulk itself unimpressively rendered—it looked more like a Lump than a Hulk.

Now we have this sequel-of-sorts, which replaces the cast and director and has been retooled to be more of a straight-up summer blockbuster.

Edward Norton is a substitute for Eric Bana, and he’s a much better choice for the role of scientist-turned-science experiment Bruce Banner. As the film opens, Banner is living in secrecy in Brazil when he’s tracked down by a British mercenary named Emil Blonsky (Tim Roth). Blonsky has been assigned to capture Banner and hand him over to power-hungry General Ross (William Hurt), who has plans to siphon the Hulk’s power and use it to engineer an army of all-powerful superhuman soldiers.

Banner becomes a fugitive, reuniting with his old flame Betty (Liv Tyler), General Ross’ daughter. Naturally, he doesn’t want to be the Hulk anymore, but he’s forced to reconsider when Blonsky, who has been injected with a military-grade serum, has become an equally incredible mutant known as the Abomination.

This version of “The Hulk” is less ambitious than Lee’s version, but it’s more entertaining because of it. The special effects are better this time around, the action sequences have more oomph and the relationship between Norton and Tyler isn’t nearly as gooey.

And if you were curious, this movie finally resolves the mystery of Bruce Banner’s pants, which stay miraculously intact when he transforms into the Hulk: They have elastic waistbands.

Grade: B-

The Strangers
Rather than write a review for “The Strangers,” I’m tempted to simply direct you to a better film it very much resembles, a highly effective French thriller called “Them.”

Both movies begin with the same premise—a young couple in an isolated home is tormented and tortured by a group of masked killers—but whereas “Them” is stylish, scary and unpredictable, “The Strangers” quickly devolves into a depressing and pointless exercise in nihilism.

The young couple here are played by Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman, and as the movie opens, their relationship is on the verge of disintegration. They’re staying in his parents’ vacation home, nestled so deep in the woods that if you were screaming for help…well, you know the drill. A trio of mask-wearing, knife-wielding psychos shows up and tries to slice and dice our protagonists, and what results is basically an extended chase sequence, with the good guys trying to outrun the bad guys and never getting anywhere

“The Strangers” has been made with a lot of skill, and the director, Bryan Bertino (making his debut), wrings a few legitimate scares out of this well-worn formula (there’s one particular shot—Tyler stands remote in the foreground as a masked man steps serenely out of the shadows in the background—that is absolutely masterful).

But once the flash of the opening scenes wears off, “The Strangers” falls back on rudimentary hack-and-slash elements we’ve seen time and time again, and Tyler and Speedman scream and cry their way through sequences that go from terse to sadistic as the script grows desperate for ideas.

Bertino has already mastered the superficial elements of moviemaking—he knows how to edit, score, light and frame a scene for maximum impact. He clearly has a future behind the camera; now let’s find him a competent screenplay.

Grade: C-

It stands for “whatever”

W.
Review by Nathan Weinbender

You never know what you’re going to get with Oliver Stone. He’s a gambler, a conspiracy theorist, a political revisionist, a provocateur. He’s also a hit-or-miss filmmaker, and his movies always carry a certain level of suspense: Will his tendencies to gleefully incite controversy work wonders, or will they blow up in his face?

Stone’s newest picture is “W.,” a biopic about President Bush, and if you were expecting an explosion, you'll be disappointed to know that the movie mostly just fizzles.

This movie works neither as a biopic nor as a drama. It’s too unfocused to be absorbing and glosses over too much pertinent information to be informative. Why Stone crammed such a momentous life story into a tidy two-hour package is beyond me—Bush’s uneasy journey from frat guy to Commander in Chief could easily supply enough material for a ten-part miniseries.

Stone’s portrait of our forty-third president is also curiously indecisive, and it never decides whether it wants to mock Bush or to present him as a martyr, whether it should be a serious examination of his administration or a jokey Mad magazine parody.

It begins in 2002, as Bush (Josh Brolin) and his cabinet prepare to go to war with the Middle East. We’re then transported to the ‘60s, when Bush is a young buck in a Yale frat house, and the film continually jumps back and forth from Bush’s formative years to modern day.

We watch as he struggles to gain the respect of his father, stops drinking and finds peace in Christianity, becomes Governor of Texas and eventually President Elect, and as Dick Cheney, like a contemptuous puppeteer, convinces him to invade Iraq for control of their oil reserves.

Well-known actors are cast as look-alikes for well-known heads of state—Elizabeth Banks is Laura Bush, Jeffrey Wright is Colin Powell, Toby Jones is Karl Rove, Ellen Burstyn and James Cromwell are Ma and Poppy Bush; Richard Dreyfuss is the weasley, calculating Cheney, who hunkers in the corner and flashes cynical grins, and Thandie Newton plays Condoleezza Rice with a crooked smirk that turns all of her cutaway shots into a punchline.

These characters feel like castaways from a bad “Saturday Night Live” sketch. They are broad-stroke caricatures, written to be the sum of their quirks, and they have about as much dramatic credibility as the real politicians’ phony TV personas.

Remember how effective Anthony Hopkins and Joan Allen were in Stone’s “Nixon,” or the resonance and vulnerability they brought to their roles? Or how intriguingly Stone weaved historical fact with possible fiction in “J.F.K.?” None of that happens here.

Maybe it has to do with timing—those films had the advantage of hindsight. “W.” is the first feature film to present a biography of a currently-seated president, and Stone’s attempts to be au courant don’t pay off. Because Bush is still in office, it’s impossible to know what aspects of his presidency will be considered important or historically significant down the line.

Will future generations perceive Bush the same way we do now? What effects will his administration have on them? Will they still be paying off our national debt ten years from now? Twenty years? Will future audiences understand the brief, unexplained re-creation of Bush’s pretzel-choking incident? Will a more comprehensive Bush biopic have yet been made?

But this question still remains: Is the film as fair and balanced as Stone purports? Not really. The script (written by “Wall Street” scribe Stanley Weiser) never attempts to truly understand Bush—it portrays him as a drunkard, a simpleton, a C-student with Daddy Issues, and the analysis never really advances beyond that.

Brolin’s performance is superficial, too. His Bush is a bumbling goofball with hardly any moral code. He asks silly questions like “Is our children learning?” and talks with his mouth full of food. He’s easily manipulated by Dick Cheney, and Laura just smiles and wrings her hands as he spouts off his ungainly rhetoric.

When the movie ends, our opinion of George W. Bush does not change, and we know nothing more about him than we did from the start. The final image of the film—a baseball being lobbed into the air and never coming down again—seems to not only adequately describe George W. Bush but also the movie that has been made about him.

Grade: C

Directed by Oliver Stone. Written by Stanley Weiser. Starring Josh Brolin, Elizabeth Banks, James Cromwell, Richard Dreyfuss, Jeffrey Wright, Toby Jones, Ellen Burstyn, Thandie Newton, Scott Glenn and Bruce McGill. PG-13; 131m.

To the beat of a different drum

The DVD Beat
Reviews by Nathan Weinbender

The Pick of the Week
The Visitor
Earlier this year, “The Visitor” slipped in and out of theaters with very little fanfare. It is now being released on DVD, and it is terrific. It stars Richard Jenkins (most recently seen in “Step Brothers” and “Burn After Reading”) as stuffy, unapproachable English professor Walter Vale. His wife has just passed away, and he returns to his apartment in New York in hopes of clearing his head. He discovers two immigrants, a Syrian man named Tarek (Haaz Sleiman) and his Sengalese girlfriend Zainab (Danai Gurira).

As surprised by their presence as they are of his, Walter reluctantly agrees to let the couple stay with him until they find another place to live. Their conversations ring of contrived courtesy—he considers them a nuisance, they find him distant and unfriendly. When Walter discovers that Tarek plays the drum, he becomes infatuated with the instrument, first taking lessons from Tarek in the living room and eventually joining in with the enthusiastic African men who beat drumsticks against upturned plastic buckets in Central Park.

In an unexpected turn of events, Tarek, who is not legally a U.S. citizen, is arrested and threatened with deportation. Zainab is devastated, and has no one to turn to other than the prickly Walter, who becomes the mediator in the situation, desperately seeking consul from a doubtful immigration attorney. There is tenderness to Walter’s relationship with Zainab, as he finds himself thrust into the position of nurturer, and later with Tarek’s mother (Hiam Abbass).

Jenkins has been a supporting actor for years, usually a face in the background, but this is the first film to put his talents to good use. He is remarkable here, and if the Academy has any common sense, he will be on the shortlist for this year’s Oscar nominations.
Grade: A-

Also on DVD
The Happening
For anyone who once thought M. Night Shyamalan had the potential to become the next Hitchcock, take a look at his newest film, “The Happening,” and have a long laugh. It’s a good candidate for the worst film of 2008, the type of movie that meanders without a sense of purpose or direction for an hour and a half and ends before anything interesting is allowed to happen.

Critics have been advised to keep major plot points secrets, which is likely because audiences would avoid the film in droves if they discovered what it was really about. So, what exactly is going on here? Well, there’s something in the air—is it a naturally-occurring toxin, or a deadly chemical engineered by terrorists?—that disorients humans, takes control of their nervous systems and fills their heads with irrepressible suicidal urges. Our protagonist, high school science teacher Mark Wahlberg, is out to pinpoint the cause of these strange incidents.

Why have the attacks originated in public parks? Why have they only affected cities on the East Coast? Why are large, concentrated groups of people more susceptible to the attacks than small ones? He stumbles upon these with surprising rapidity. It turns out that the planet can no longer sustain human life, and in an instinctual method of self-defense, its vegetation has released a kind of airborne poison that will level the playing field. This revelation results in long, ominous shots of trees and bushes, accompanied by scary music pulsating on the soundtrack.

“The Happening” is a very, very, very bad movie, and Shyamalan’s script is awkward and contrived, written without any semblance of how human beings actually speak or behave. There are the trappings of an effective film here, but Shyamalan approaches it all wrong: This tone-deaf man-versus-nature parable is somber and self-serious when it should be witty and utterly laughable when it should be scary.
Grade: D

You Don’t Mess with the Zohan
Here’s one sorry excuse for a comedy. It’s even a sorry excuse for an Adam Sandler comedy. It doesn’t know what it wants to be or what it should be about, which I suppose could have been forgivable had it been at all funny.

Sandler plays the unmessable Zohan, a Mossad fighting machine who fakes his death and escapes to America to become a hair stylist. Soon, Zohan is working in a salon, and he becomes a neighborhood legend because he shtups his elderly female clients in the back room.

Some stupid storylines converge: Zohan strikes romance with the pretty Palestinan girl who owns the salon; he goes mano a mano with his nemesis, a terrorist called the Phantom (John Turturro); political turmoil between the local Israelis and Palestinians comes to a head; and an Evil Land Developer plots to bulldoze the salon and replace it with a shopping mall.

The screenplay is stylistically befuddled, and that it is credited to three talented writers (Sandler, Robert Smigel and Judd Apatow) is both enlightening and inexcusable—enlightening because it explains the origins of the film’s few fleeting moments of wit, inexcusable because all three men are smarter and funnier than this material suggests.
Grade: D

In the land of the blind

Blindness
Review by Nathan Weinbender

What exactly is the point of “Blindness?” I am at a loss for an explanation. It purports to be a number of things, but it is dreadfully obvious as an allegory, turgid as a melodrama and nearly comatose as a thriller.

The film, based on a novel by Nobel laureate José Saramago, is one of ambiguity. It is set in a city that, as far as we know, has no name. None of its main characters are ever addressed by their names, either. It concerns an epidemic of blindness that has no known origin.

What is the cause of the disease? How does it spread? Is there a cure? Why does one woman seem to be completely immune? We don’t know.

The unaffected woman is played by Julianne Moore, the wife of an optometrist (Mark Ruffalo). When the victims of blindness are rounded up and imprisoned in an abandoned mental institution, Moore hides the fact that she can see.

As more and more people are crowded into the hospital, they quickly resort to “Lord of the Flies”-style barbarism, with one of the wards taking over and becoming the Jacks, while the other, more pacifistic wards become the Ralphs.

One man, the self-proclaimed King of Ward 3 (Gael García Bernal), finds a gun and sanctions the food rations. He demands the other wards hand over their valuables—jewelry, watches, money—in exchange for rations, and once those have run out, he demands women, which inspires the movie’s most unpleasant sequence.

Actually, all of “Blindness” is unpleasant, but it doesn’t have the decency to also be thought-provoking. Its conceits are pretty obvious, as are the routes its story takes, covering the same foreboding ground as every apocalyptic parable since Piggy picked up a conch shell.

This is the third major film from director Fernando Meirelles, whose previous works were the masterpieces “City of God” and “The Constant Gardener.” He uses an interesting aesthetic here—the camerawork is a little off-kilter, the picture is sometimes unintelligible, actors are awkwardly framed, and we sometimes feel as though we’re going a little blind ourselves.

But Meierelles’ ability to create memorable images only emphasizes how weak the story is. It simply isn’t compelling, mostly because it’s so damn impenetrable, and predictable, too. It puts its characters (and the audience) through hell, and it turns out to be little more than the cinematic equivalent of a dog chasing its own tail.

Grade: C-

Directed by Fernando Meirelles. Written by Don McKellar. Based on the novel by José Saramago. Starring Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Gael García Bernal, Alice Braga, Danny Glover and Yusuke Iseya. R; 120m.

‘Choke’ bites off more than it can chew

Choke
Review by Nathan Weinbender

“Choke” is a movie with some very good ideas, but it needed some more—and I cringe as I write this—restraint. I cringe mostly because the film was clearly made with the intention of being cheerfully unrestrained and unapologetically raunchy. It was, after all, adapted from a novel by cult (the ads use the word “incendiary”) author Chuck Palahniuk, whose last book concerned an aging porn queen boinking six hundred men on camera. Prudence be damned!

But the raunch isn’t the problem with “Choke.” It’s the story, which probably worked better on the page, where it had time to expand and breathe. Within the confines of 89 minutes, it feels hurried, precarious, busy, unwieldy.

It stars Sam Rockwell, one of Hollywood’s best working character actors, as Victor Mancini, a sex addict who attends support groups and sneaks out early to fornicate with relapsing prostitutes in the bathroom. He’s on a four-step recovery program, but he can’t seem to progress past that fourth step.

Victor works at a historical reenactment theme park with his friend Denny (Brad William Henke), a chronic masturbator. He’s a frequent visitor at the nursing home where his mother (Anjelica Huston) fades away with dementia, and he imagines the elderly female patients without their tops on. He’s made it with all of the nurses but one, Paige (Kelly Macdonald), who is mousy and soft-spoken and approaches Victor with bemusement.

The movie gets its title from another of Victor’s pastimes, which is deliberately choking on food in posh restaurants and being saved by Good Samaritans who give him the Heimlich. Such a practice is justified, ya see, because by allowing people to save his life, Victor is bolstering their self-confidence. Plus, if he picks his victims right, Victor generally gets sympathy money in the mail.

There are some wonderfully demented bits in “Choke,” but too much of it feels like extra weight. The scenes set at work, Victor’s choking fits and his relationship with his fellow sex addicts could each have inspired their own movie, but here they’re barely explored. The script, written by director and co-star Clark Gregg, tantalizes us with potentially intriguing material (I’d like to know more about the victims that fall prey to Victor’s choking schemes), but it pulls back on the reins before those subplots ever fully take shape.

Rockwell is very good here, smirky and smarmy and sleazy, and he has the perfect off-kilter delivery for the role. How many actors could properly convey the emotions of a man who may be the byproduct of a DNA sample taken from the holiest of foreskins? He breathes life into the material. And Anjelica Huston is simply heartbreaking as Victor’s mother—once a thief and a con artist, now slowly succumbing to Alzheimer’s.

Her scenes with Rockwell are sublime. She no longer recognizes Victor, confusing him with old lovers from her past. Victor plays along, taking on the persona of Frank or Bob. Those scenes, gentle and quiet, are so well-written and so wonderfully acted that they upstage the salacious, crass material surrounding them. They provide the only glimmer of humanity in this otherwise smug, intermittently amusing picture.

Grade: C+

Directed and written by Clark Gregg. Based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk. Starring Sam Rockwell, Anjelica Huston, Kelly Macdonald, Brad William Henke, Clark Gregg, Bijou Phillips and Joel Grey. R; 89m.