Movie Review Briefs: The Lords of Salem, Trance and Bert Stern:Original Mad Man

by Tony Dayoub

One basic lesson filmmakers would be wise to learn is not to put their significant others in their movies. There are exceptions of course. Michael Powell was in love with Deborah Kerr, and yet they made two of their best films together, the The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp before their breakup and Black Narcissus many years afterwards. But we're talking about Kerr, who could enchant anyone if she were simply reading the phone book, and Powell, who could film said reading and have us anticipating the next name to be read. None of the directors of the last three films I've seen come within miles of approximating Powell's talent, nor would they claim to. However, a particular kind of hubris can blind artists both high and low. With this group, it' fairly obvious that their movies would likely improve significantly if the relationship between them and their muse were... less intimate? Read on, and see if you agree.

The X-Factor

How X-Men: First Class Made Michael Fassbender a Star

by Tony Dayoub

Just out on Blu-ray and DVD, X-Men: First Class is Matthew Vaughn’s clever 1960s-era spinoff from Fox’s popular mutant superhero franchise. Based on the Marvel comics created by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, X-Men posits a world where the infinite variety of super-powered homo superiors, the next step in human evolution, are being persecuted by the increasingly suspicious homo sapiens — us. Though the initial two films helmed by Bryan Singer (The Usual Suspects) tied the mutants’ quest for acceptance to the same battle being fought by today’s LGBT community, X-Men: First Class backtracks to its most primal disagreement, the one between its two lead characters. Appropriately enough, the movie this time finds its thematic touchstone in the civil rights struggle: telepath Charles Xavier (James McAvoy), like Martin Luther King Jr., believes humanity will only accept mutants through peaceful coexistence, at least as peaceful as it can be when fighting dastardly super-villains like Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon); Xavier’s friendly rival and master of magnetism, Erik Lehnsherr (Michael Fassbender), is closer in spirit to the more militant Malcolm X, who believed coexistence must be fought for “by any means necessary.” Lehnsherr, the man who would be Magneto, is automatically then a far juicier role, and for Fassbender, a star-making turn.

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You Can't Handle the Truth

Historical extras on its Blu-ray edition fail to make the case for The Conspirator

by Tony Dayoub

Just out on Blu-ray and DVD, Robert Redford’s The Conspirator, about the plot surrounding Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, is the American Film Company’s debut feature. Throughout much of the new disc’s extras, the company touts itself as a production house interested in shepherding stories mined from the annals of American history in the most accurate way possible. And while watching the bounty of special features included in the Deluxe Edition Blu-ray disc, an American history nut like me would find ample evidence that Redford’s 2010 film had been vetted by numerous historians. Included are 10 featurettes that dig into specific aspects of the movie, like the production design, costuming, or its main characters. The hour-long documentary, “The Plot to Kill Lincoln,” provides the historical background behind The Conspirator’s inciting incident in exhaustive detail. A viewing of the disc’s main feature, however, proves that if the facts contradict the story the filmmakers want to tell, truth will still lose out to fiction...

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Movie Review: X-Men: First Class (2011)

by Tony Dayoub

Given the decline of the X-Men movie franchise—which peaked fairly early with Bryan Singer's X2: X-Men United (not just one of the best in this series, but one of the best superhero films, period) before ending up in the execrable X-Men: The Last Stand and the disappointing X-Men Origins: Wolverine—one would be justified in choosing to avoid the latest entry sight unseen. But the anomalous X-Men: First Class turns out to be one of the most surprising summer blockbuster hopefuls in quite a long time. The cheesy comic-book costumes glimpsed in the preview hinted that this may have initially been planned as a slapdash film hastened to the box office for fear that studio distributor 20th Century Fox's rights to the series would revert back to Marvel. However, director Matthew Vaughn (Kick-Ass) turns the inherent camp quotient into a virtue, giving us a stylized, period look at the secret history of the mutant group and its origins, at times channeling the espionage-laden eccentricities of the early 007 films.

Blu-ray Roundup: Shock Value

by Tony Dayoub

WARNING: Read at your own risk. This post includes SPOILERS.

I once took one of those screenwriting seminars with Robert McKee. You know, the guy Brian Cox plays in Adaptation (2003). Yeah, that guy is real. And he makes loud pronouncements in life much the same way he does in Spike Jonze's film. Subscribe too closely to his inspiring platitudes and you run the risk of producing a very mainstream commercial script, which I guess is the point since this seminar purports to help you write a script that sells. A lot of his admonitions are common sense, just put in a context which doesn't often come to mind.

One of those bits of guidance involves what he calls "turning." To hold a story's audience, the story must "turn." Frequently. I think screenwriter William Goldman refers to it as the "reversal." Goldman uses an example of it in his fascinating book, Adventures in the Screen Trade. He talks of the scene in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) in which Katharine Ross walks into her home at night to find Robert Redford waiting in the shadows with his gun drawn. She freezes, and he makes some sexually threatening remarks as he orders her to undress. She begins to do so, and there is some phallic business with the gun (stuff that wouldn't play so well today, admittedly). While it is initially disturbing to see our hero behave like a deviant, a lot of this is defused when Ross finally says, "Know what I wish? That once you'd get here on time." The reversal, turn, or twist as I'll refer to it, is what draws you in. And the most masterful directors know when and how to employ the twist to maximum dramatic effect.

Long before M. Night Shyamalan robbed the "climactic" twist of its power by fashioning a career relying on it, director William Friedkin made what has become a cult classic that completely depends on it for the film to succeed. To Live and Die in L.A. (1985) plays like your typical eighties cop thriller for roughly 105 of its tight 116 minutes. Most of it is rife with cliches: a Secret Service agent's obsessive pursuit of a counterfeiter (Willem Dafoe); his questionable methods, dangerous not only to his partner (John Pankow) but to innocent bystanders as well; his unethical relationship with a hot CI (Darlanne Fluegel). If it weren't for the interesting tweaks like the slick Miami Vice-like cinematography by Robby Muller, a surprisingly classic soundtrack by Wang Chung, and Friedkin's often subliminal inserts (as in The Exorcist), the movie would play like warmed over French Connection (1971). But the last minute twist of hero William L. Petersen's demise-by-gigantic-shotgun-hole-to-the-head instantly reframes his character's relentless hunt as the self-centered, addictive search of an adrenaline junkie looking for his next fix. Watch the film again immediately after you finish it, and you'll see Friedkin doesn't cheat. He loads the movie with foreshadowing, but you're so conditioned to accept the way such films usually turn out you ignore all the clues.

The Last King of Scotland (2006) brings its shocking twist in a little earlier. If you know your history, it's no surprise the often congenial Ugandan dictator Idi Amin (Forest Whitaker) is more paranoid than he initially lets on to his Scottish sycophant, Nick Garrigan (James McAvoy). But a dumb affair with one of Amin's wives, Kay (Kerry Washington) serves to wake Nick up to the true danger of Amin while he is perched precariously at the top of Ugandan govenment. After Kay becomes pregnant, and is unable to find a safe way to terminate the pregnancy without Amin's knowledge, she risks going to local tribesmen. Nick is too late to stop her, instead finding her naked corpse, its arms and legs chopped off and sewn back onto the corpse in reverse. The gruesome shot of the body only appears in the film for a few frames, but it is enough to supercharge the movie as it heads towards its conclusion. A little research, however, reveals that the film's implication that Amin butchered his wife is not concrete. Speculation is that she died as a result of the botched abortion, and was dismembered by her lover (another doctor, not the fictional Garrigan) in order to make the disposal of her body easier.

Criterion's newest release, the Oscar-nominated Revanche (2008) by Götz Spielmann, gives us a twist on the twist. Rather than save it for its last act, it is the motivating factor that propels the protagonist into the moral dilemma that occupies the majority of the film. Its early scenes seem to set up a tale of moral compromises involving the Ukrainian prostitute Tamara(Irina Potapenko) and her good-hearted lover, ex-con Alex (Johannes Krisch) who decide to rob a bank in order to escape their bleak life in the slums of Vienna. Though Alex doesn't even load his gun for the robbery, keeping his promise to Tamara to avoid violence, the same can't be said about the cop (Andreas Lust) the couple runs into as they make their getaway. A faulty aim as the cop fires at the getaway car changes the dynamic of the whole film from a banal lovers-on-the-lam story to a meditation on fate, culpability, and coincidence still haunting me over a week after I first saw it.