“She Who Must Not Be Named” and I went to the movies this weekend with mixed results. I hadn’t seen a good horror film in a long time; and The Descent had lots of positive reviews; and it was by the same guy who did Dog Soldiers, which I had sorta enjoyed; and it was supposed to be really, really scary; and it was about spelunking, something I had done a bit of back when I was young. Well, we cut a deal. “She” agreed to accompany me to see a horror film and in exchange I would go with her to a film of her choice the following day.
The Descent is not bad for a horror film. It scrupulously follows all the tropes of the genre, investing them with just enough differences to distinguish it from a host of other attractive young people in peril flicks.
And what distinguishing marks would those be?
Glad you asked!
Well, for one, it’s set in a cave and, at least for a while, takes advantage of the claustrophobic setting. But there are problems. At various times in the later stages of the film characters are required to run full-tilt away from danger through dark passages. Anyone who has spent much time in a cave, as I have, knows that just doesn’t work. The reason? Think stalactites…, head…, ouch! An experienced caver would have exploited the limitations on movement associated with crawling through dark narrow passages with a horror near at hand, and I kept expecting some such horrific situation to materialize, but it never did. Instead we have running through dark passages. Oh well!
Some have argued that modern horror films are really feminist statements. Usually at the end all the men are gruesomely dead and one lone strong female survives, bloodied but triumphant. Moreover, the surviving female usually follows a developmental course from weakness to strength, from passiveness to assertiveness, over the course of the film. There are obvious narrative reasons for this – killing off the strongest characters over the course of the film heightens the audience’s sense of peril and having weak characters discovering previously unsuspected reserves of strength and competence appeals to the nerdy fanboys and girls. The Descent follows this tried and true formula to a point.
SPOILERS – But there are differences. Here, all the characters, weak and strong, are young women. Over the course of the film, as her comrades are chomped, the weakest of these gradually becomes strong until near the end only she and the strongest girl are left to face the oncoming hordes of cave critters. It is at this point that the film suddenly swerves into melodrama.
Throughout the film interactions among the girls expose an underlying tension. The strongest girl had carried on an affair with the weak girl’s husband (who died at the beginning of the film). In addition the strong girl, acting in panic, had fatally wounded one of the other girls and left her for dead. Only near the end of the picture does the once weak, now strong girl discover the extent of her friend’s betrayal.
This sets up an interesting climactic situation. At the end the weak and the strong girls are alone facing impending doom. Will they cooperate to escape or will the weak girl take advantage of the situation to wreak revenge on the bitch who slept with her husband and abandoned her friend to die, even at the cost of her own life?
The ending of the film is controversial. There are two versions – one for the British audience and one for the American. Both are unsatisfying, if only because of a loopy detour into “Grudge” territory. But they create controversy and thus serve the film-makers’ purposes.
Leaving the theatre “She” said, “You told me it was going to be scary. It wasn’t!” Ultimately that is what matters. The Descent was well made, competently acted, had modern monsters [swift, swarming, screechy ones instead of the silent, lumbering, implacable ones of my youth], and introduced some unique elements into a tired formula, but in the end it didn’t do what horror flicks are supposed to do. It didn’t scare us.
Now for payback.
“She” decided that we would go to see Miami Vice. There’s something she seems to like about Colin Farrell’s dark brooding eyes and sulky mein. I was agreeable. I used to live in
And mindless it is.
The plot is episodic and at times incoherent, but things move fast and there isn’t time to stop and wonder about the inconsistencies. And the main plot points are clear. Go-fast people zoom around in go-fast boats and go-fast planes, visiting various exotic and ominous locales to meet various exotic and ominous characters with whom they have uber-macho staredowns. The heroes are endangered and escape, women are imperiled and saved, buddyness is questioned and reaffirmed, heists are pulled off, things go boom – lots of things go boom -- blood spatters, and bad guys get their comeuppance. Who cares if it makes sense? That’s not the point.
The acting…, well there’s not much to say about it. Farrell, playing Sonny Crockett, is impassive, more broody than cool, Foxx, playing his partner, Ricardo Tubbs, is smart and intense. There is no depth to the characterizations though. They are both empty men, filling empty roles. There may be a deep point here – because of the danger with which they live they are social isolates -- but that would seem to be just an afterthought.
Both our heroes and the women they bed are suitably macho. There is a lot of testosterone flowing here, even in the female characters. The villains are suitably dastardly and ominous [drug lords and white supremacists], bureaucrats are inept and arrogant. There is a lot of zooming around, dark chases, staredowns, macho posturing, a spectacular shootout… you know, standard Mann stuff, none of which requires any real acting.
The most interesting character in the film is Gong Li. She spends the early part of the film looking inscrutable as a hard as nails “businesswoman,” but to Sonny Crockett she’s familiar territory – a woman, and therefore eminently screwable. He puts the moves on her and on a long interlude in
One minor irritant is the fact that much of the dialogue is unintelligible, delivered rapid fire by actors with a variety of heavy accents, often descending into drug-world patois. This, I suppose, imposes a degree of verisimilitude for a film about the international drug trade, but the viewer is often left wondering “what did he/she say?” But it doesn’t really matter, because the dialogue is superfluous. The audience is led…, actually dragged, through the story. There are no surprises in this film. Plot points are telegraphed well in advance and we always know exactly what is going to happen next.
So let’s recapitulate – incoherent and episodic plot, unintelligible dialogue, cardboard characters, trite melodramatic situations, action, action, action. This, my friend, is the new international cinema. The producers are a Dutchman and an American educated in
This film is designed, as were the old silents, to bridge cultural barriers. Sophisticated dialogue, realistic characters, and narrative complexity, because they are usually culture-specific, get in the way of marketing the product globally. What is needed is something what will be instantly recognizable to audiences in LA,
Miami Vice relies on trite conventions, stylistic exaggeration, it eschews significant dialogue, foregoes narrative coherence in order to present highly-charged, simplistic vignettes. It is cotton candy for the generic viewer, with no more intellectual content than a video game, which it often resembles.
Vice plunges the viewer pell-mell into an exotic, sexy, dangerous, thrilling, milieu, filled with go-fast people and boats and planes and drugs. It no less than the old TV show is more a state of mind than anything else. Vice is a shallow film, dirty entertainment with absolutely no intellectual content – cheap thrills designed to tickle the visceral pleasure nodes of shallow people, a minor vice in and of itself.
I liked it.
No comments:
Post a Comment