Afterschool (Antonio Campos, 2008)

Here is one of the most refreshing and compelling directorial debut's to come along in quite awhile. Antonio Campos was only 24 when he directed (from his own screenplay) Afterschool, the prep school drama that has drawn him comparisons to heavyweights such as Gus Van Sant, Stanley Kubrick and Michelangelo Antonioni, among others. Told mainly in carefully composed static shots, often with the action contained to the periphery, Afterschool gives us the story of Rob (Ezra Miller), a distanced, affectless tenth grade student at Brighton, an upper crust New England private school, who spends his spare time watching viral videos online and putting up with his cocaine addict/dealer roommate (and likely best friend) Dave. At Brighton, an extra-curricular course is required of the students, and instead of going the popular sports route, the meek and introverted Rob decides to join the video club. One day, while shooting some footage in an empty hallway for class, Rob inadvertently captures the drug overdose and subsequent death of the Talbert sisters, twins from a well-to-do family. Instead of calling for help, Rob leaves the camera in place, walks over to the sisters, and cradles one in his arms as she takes her final breath. No points for guessing that - Surprise!- Rob now finds himself the center of the latest online viral video.

Afterschool is fascinating for myriad reasons, but the central point of dramatic interest seems to be Rob himself. The main question being, why is he so frighteningly unaffected by everything? Is he merely the latest casualty of the YouTube generation, desensitized and alienated from his surroundings, conditioned only to respond to moments of "purity", moments that capture something "real"? One of the best sequences in the film plays off this notion, as Rob sits down with the school principal to view a tribute video he's been asked to create for the deceased twins. However, instead of the sappy over-sentimentalized piece expected of him, Rob creates a patchwork of "real" moments as he sees them, moments of people expressing pity, disgust, or even complete indifference towards the twins. An interview with a friend of the girls shows that he didn't even really know them, and was distanced by a kind of awestruck worship. Moments, in other words, that you would never regularly see in a video of this kind. At another point in the film, Rob, armed with his video camera, grabs his girlfriend by the throat, emulating a violent porno he watched earlier, and we get the impression that his obsession with online videos can no longer simply be contained to his consciousness.

It's only with a final, fleeting moment of shock and realization that we truly see what Afterschool is going for, and it's a startling, haunting sentiment that Campos has no reservations expressing. This is a film to watch and absorb, not only for its deeply engrossing story and sleek, distinct visual style, but also because of what it has to say in regard to the age of gluttonous, unprecedentedly accessible media we live in, and the effect it could have on an already solipsistic-prone demographic. If Afterschool is any indication, Campos is a major talent, and I certainly look forward to seeing what he will provide us with next.

ivansxtc. (dir. Bernard Rose, 2002)

Bernard Rose's 2002 feature ivansxtc. (based on Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich) begins with the funeral of Ivan Beckman (Danny Huston), talent agent extraordinaire. We see the news of his passing from cancer ripple through the agency he worked for, and while everyone was clueless as to Ivan's medical condition, no one seems surprised nor particularly phased by his death. His clients are informed, and they too can muster only the slightest of mournful responses before it's back to business. And as everyone scrambles to pick up the pieces, we wait with baited breath (or growing impatience in my case) for the inevitable flashback showing us what kind of human could have left behind so much success, have met such a sad end and still inspired this much curious indifference.

We soon get our answer. Ivan, as they say, lived in the fastlane. As his story begins, he is on the verge of signing one of the biggest actors in the country, the obnoxious Don West (Peter Weller). After Ivan successfully closes the deal, he and West hit the town for a night out, and we get our first glimpse of many into the wild life he led, which includes every hard-partying cliche in the book (even the renowned line of cocaine snorted off an attractive blonde's genital area). At work the next morning, he is greeted with a standing ovation from his entire office, and a Variety headline celebrating his acquisition. And just as it seems that life can't get any better, as so often happens in the movies, life throws him a curveball. His doctor wants him to come into the office immediately. A chest x-ray taken at a recent appointment shows an ominous spot in his lungs, and all signs point to cancer, which is soon confirmed with the massive amounts of blood Ivan begins coughing up in the mornings.

And now here is where the film finally takes off and becomes compelling. First off, Danny Huston is absolutely brilliant. As Ivan, he exudes a real charm and likability behind the slick Hollywood veneer, but also a profound sadness that becomes readily apparent as we soon realize that for all the clout and attention Ivan receives, he doesn't have a single genuine relationship in his life, and no one to confide in. As the graveness of his condition becomes impossible to ignore, Ivan makes the decision to plunge headfirst into excess of every kind, as he watches his last days fly by in a chemically induced haze. Here is a man who had the world by the balls his entire adult life, and who now, presented with a situation entirely out of his grasp, crumbles with disturbing ease. The toughest scene to watch involves a pair of hookers Ivan hires, and what begins as a drug fueled orgy quickly turns into a session of soul baring for Ivan, who finally breaks down in front of these two girls, who can only stare at this lonely, withering soul helplessly, and offer hollow sentiments while they attempt to get the fuck out of there as fast as they can. The next morning, Ivan is rushed to the hospital and will never return home.

The film has a distinctly verite style, which works mostly in its favor. Ivan is utterly fascinating and heartbreaking to watch, and the documentary-like feel of his scenes have a raw, honest urgency to them. Huston is so good that it creates an entire other problem for the film; the rest of the acting is almost across the board awful, and the scenes without him are simply painful to endure. All of Ivan's associates and clients are played as petulant, reprehensible caricatures, and I found myself rolling my eyes at their over top behavior and exaggerated performances numerous times. Luckily these people remain on the periphery of the story for the most part, but still, we get it, Hollywood is filled with self-serving, opportunistic sleazebags, let's move on please. My advice would be to skip the pointless first twenty minutes, the funeral segment and all of that. It's boring, drags on way too long, and will even make you mad at its inclusion when you reflect on the fact that you were unnecessarily denied Huston's magnificent performance for nearly a quarter of the films running time.

It should also be worth noting that, in addition to the Tolstoy novel, ivansxtc. was based off the life of Hollywood agent Jay Moloney who, like Ivan, seemingly had it all. He represented some of the biggest stars in the world and dated some of the most beautiful women, before his cocaine addiction cost him his job and eventually led him to take his own life. It is worth keeping this in mind, as Huston undoubtedly drew upon the addiction-driven desperation and loneliness that surely played a hand in reducing Moloney's promisng life to merely another Hollywood cautionary tale. ivansxtc. is certainly rough around the edges, very rough in some instances, but has some profound things to say about mortality, addiction and loneliness, and is anchored by one of the best performances of the 00's.

Black Moon (dir. Louis Malle, 1975)

Black Moon is a chimerical, hallucinatory concoction from French director Louis Malle. Malle's work includes, among many other notable films, the ultimate conversation movie My Dinner With Andre, which I cite for a very specific reason. Andre is one of the quaintest, most economically sound movies you will ever come across; a feature length display of good old fashioned conversation between two friends enjoying a fine dinner, each others company and the simple pleasures of the spoken word. Now, if you will, traverse the cinematic panorama to its other side. On this side of the landscape, oblique paths twist in on one another. Plots hover in the air and trail off, shapeless objects dripping acid. Phantoms abound, and it always seems to be cloudy. You are now in the land of Black Moon. Meet Louis Malle, cinematic trekker. His versatility is not to be denied.

In only the very loosest sense of the word is a "plot" present in Black Moon. It involves a young woman named Lily (Cathryn Harrison), who is on the run in a world where a literal war between the sexes is taking place. Overcast skies fill the screen as Lily stumbles upon a group of women in army drags beating a male prisoner around and laughing. Male soldiers gun down defenseless women in the streets, their army tank looming in the middle of the road like an over sized reaper. Lily flees from both scenes with equal fervor, and soon finds herself in a strange forest where she sees a few odd things, among them an overweight unicorn and a herd of naked children chasing around a massive pig. She follows these harbingers to a lonesome house, and from here the strangeness gets turned up quite a few notches. In this house dwells a loony old lady in a bed (Therese Giehse), babbling incoherency and trying to communicate on an old radio. Odd animals of all shapes and sizes and linguistic talents roam around the manor, as do a silent young man and woman (Joe Dallesandro and Alexandra Stewart) also named Lily (yes both of them). The couple appear to care for both the old lady - a disturbing breastfeeding is included - as well as the children, and their erratic behavior is alternately compulsive and calculated as they communicate with Lily in the barest, most abstract of ways as she tries to figure out the puzzle that is this mysterious situation she's found herself in.

There are indications throughout the movie that all of this is taking place in the head of Lily. The highly coincidental names of the silent strangers aside, there are a few instances where Lily is engaged in an activity with the strange animals and children, only to have the camera cut to a point of view showing her all alone, her behavior suddenly taking on a psychotic tint. Indeed, the inclination while watching Black Moon is to approach it in the same vein as something like Mulholland Drive or Repulsion, as an abstract and/or allegorical treatise of a disturbed woman slowly losing her mind. However the movie ultimately comes across as such a hodgepodge of symbols and ideas (it invokes- among other things - Alice In Wonderland, Tristan & Isolde, Garden of Eden mythos, medieval imagery, Alchemical symbolism etc.) that it feels ultimately futile to attach any significance or psychological underpinnings to the images presented. This borderline freeform melange is certainly interesting and occasionally fascinating, but it's madness never quite gels into a whole as interesting as its parts.

In many ways, Black Moon also plays out as something of a grab bag of elements from other surrealist masterpieces that Malle has clearly drawn from. The wordless opening 15 minutes, with its stark open roads, background war noises and images of quiet, left behind fires simmer with an apocalyptic quality that is clearly an homage to Godard's Weekend; the cast of random animals sauntering in and around the house with more moxie than its occupants recalls Bunuel's The Exterminating Angel; and the extraordinary house, a character itself, with its strange, ghoulish inhabitants and untold secrets feels like a relative of the house so important to the mystery at the center of the great Rivette film Celine & Julie Go Boating. That one of the names given a writing credit on the film is Joyce Bunuel should come as no great shock.

Malle is clearly indulging himself with Black Moon. He is having fun throwing this assortment onto the screen while simultaneously paying respect to those whose own creations inspired it, and what the movie lacks in resonance and coherency it makes up for with a charming, unabashed exhibition of imagination and appreciation. It also feels like an extremely personal film from Malle, the exorcism of a distinct creative impulse bred from the verve of the Nouvelle Vague movement and a thirsty, exploratory movie mind. It didn't surprise me at all to learn that the house and property used in the movie belonged to Malle himself. It'd be tough if you didn't know better to peg Black Moon as the director's work, but sure enough, there he is in every frame.

Ten Halloween Treats

If you are like me, then that distinguished period of time every year starting around mid-October and lasting through Halloween evening brings with it, aside from the obvious indulgences of candy, costumes and parties, the opportunity to immerse yourself in your favorite horror films for days on end. It is in celebration of this that I present you (in chronological order) ten excellent horror films that may have slipped under your radar for one reason or another:

The Seventh Victim (dir. Mark Robson, 1943)

Producer Val Lewton's masterpiece is this menacing, moody offering starring Kim Hunter as a student who must abandon her Catholic schooling to embark on a search for her missing sister in a dreary Manhattan infested with devil worshippers, ominous shadows and things that go bump in the night. With an incredibly bleak conclusion even by today's standards, The Seventh Victim generates the type of movie experience that sticks in your head for many days.

Night of the Demon (dir. Jacques Tourneur, 1957)

As he was so often apt to do, here Tourneur takes a smallish budget and fairly hokey plot and spins out of them an eerie and effective example of minimalist horror. Dana Andrew stars as Dr. John Holden, a psychologist and supernatural skeptic who, after the suspicious death of a colleague, finds himself in way over his head with local cultists and supposedly only a few days to live. Curse of the Demon, as it was renamed when released in America, has 15 key minutes trimmed out, so be sure to get the Night version if you seek it out (which you obviously should).

The Innocents (dir. Jack Clayton, 1961)

Clayton's brilliant adaptation of Henry James' s equally brilliant novella The Turn of the Screw is not only my favorite horror movie of all time, but also the most genuinely unsettling one I've ever seen. Deborah Kerr gives her greatest performance as the new governess of a lonesome and (possibly) haunted country mansion, watching over the two children who live there. Is the place truly haunted by the ghosts of its sadistic sex-crazed former employees? Is Kerr possibly projecting her own sexual frustrations and inadequacies onto the children? The Innocents weaves its Freudian themes in spellbinding fashion, leading to a controversial ending that is all at once frustrating, cathartic and utterly terrifying.



Kwaidan (dir. Masaki Kobayashi, 1964)


Quite possibly the most gorgeous horror movie ever made, Kwaidan (based on the writings of Lafcadio Hearn, a 19th century Japanese folklorist), is an anthology of four tales, expressionist in nature, with horrors that for the most part lie dormant yet throbbing just below the surface, giving the film a pervasive, indelible sense of dread. Each segment is a visual marvel, filmed using meticulously crafted sets with vibrant, popping backdrops, adding up to a dreamy and ethereal experience.

Cuadecuc-Vampir (dir. Pere Portabella, 1970)

This otherworldly piece of surrealism from Spanish experimentalist Portabella was cobbled together using documentary footage shot during the making of Jesus Franco's innocuous Count Dracula. Using high contrast b&w film stock and plenty of gothic imagery (making it somewhat of a distant cousin to Dreyer's Vampyr), Portabella sketches his own haunted version of the Dracula story, layering it with his unique sense of humor to create something strikingly original.



Tourist Trap (dir. David Schmoeller, 1979)


One of the weirder horror movies you're likely to come across. I saw this when I was younger and it's stayed with me ever since due to the completely offbeat yet undeniably creepy subject matter (involving lifelike mannequins) and the deranged, maniacal performance Chuck Connors gives. The story involves a group of teens who go looking for a missing friend and stumble upon a strange museum owned by Connors. A disturbed little sleeper of a movie.



Scarecrows (dir. William Wesley, 1988)


Criminally underappreciated 80's classic is a claustrophobic and tense-filled exercise in using mood and ambiguity to evoke terror instead of hollow shocks and gore. The excellent production values are evident in every shot, especially those where the camera slowly pans in on the uber-creepy scarecrows placidly hitched to their stakes. Look closely...are those damn things breathing? Well crafted and worth seeking out.



Ghostwatch (dir. Lesley Manning, 1992)


This infamous BBC production caused quite a stir when it hit British airwaves and fooled the country in 1992. Essentially a 90 minute scripted drama posing as a documentary special investigating a supposedly haunted house, Ghostwatch utilized well known BBC personalities playing themselves to pull the rug out from under its viewers with a grisly denouement, sparking controversy and even causing post-traumatic stress disorder in some children, subsequently leading to a decade-long ban on the program. Even if knowing it's all fake takes some of the juice out of the experience, this is still an effective and prescient artifact from a time when audiences were a little more naive, and bit just a little harder.



Regarde La Mer (See the Sea) (dir. Francois Ozon, 1997)


This superb little shocker from Frenchman Ozon has been referred to as Rohmer by way of Hitchcock, which is about as good a description as I can imagine. Sasha Hails stars as a young mother taking care of her baby at a beautiful seaside home while her husband is away on business. A mysterious female hiker knocks on the door one day asking to setup her tent for a few days, and what develops after is by turns nefarious, poetic and uncompromising. You'll never look at your toothbrush the same way again.



Silent Hill (dir. Christophe Gans, 2006)


Unfairly maligned upon its theatrical release, Silent Hill was pigeonholed by critics as just another lousy video game adaptation, which it most definitely is not. What it is however is a masterpiece of phantasmagorical imagery and art design that is destined to be rediscovered by future film lovers as an authentically haunting aesthetic experience. Set in a world saturated with fog where ash falls from the heavens like snow and ominous, piercing alarms sound off at a whim signifying something very bad, Silent Hill crafts a masterful, borderline transcendent experience that climaxes with a deliriously extravagant Grand Guignol sequence that few horror movies would have the stones or originality to pull off. And if it occasionally falls into the genre trappings of stock dialogue and plot developments, we can forgive Silent Hill for simply providing us with a world this fully realized and immersive.

Haze (dir. Shinya Tsukamoto, 2005)

One word you will occasionally hear when someone describes a movie is "claustrophobic". Sometimes this can refer to action that is contained to few characters in unsettlingly intimate living quarters (The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, to cite a recently seen example), other times it can obviously mean when a character is trapped in a tiny space, unable to move (scenes in Spoorloos, Kill Bill 2 etc.). And then you have a movie like Haze, which so fully embodies the term and so effectively paints the essence of claustrophobia in all its frozen terror and anxiety-ridden glory, that the horrors seep through the screen and fully into the psyche of the viewer to such effect as to make one feel worthy of an Olympic medal for having simply endured it.

The movie opens up thrusting the viewer immediately into the muck. Our unnamed protagonist (played by director Tsukamoto) awakens in darkness. Now whereas most movies in a scene like this would give our hero something, a lighter or match, to slightly illuminate the screen and provide something of a visual context for both the character and viewer, Haze is satisfied with a momentary patch of light, giving us a brief glimpse at our guys wide, terror-filled eyes before plunging him back into a world of complete darkness, his heavy panting and uneasy sounds saying more than any words could. He feels his way around the narrow corridors of this dark and mysterious place with his limbs as best he can, stumbling into barbed wire and other little traps, inadvertently setting himself up in some extremely cringe-worthy situations (the worst involving teeth and pipes) as he searches for anything at all that will make sense out of the predicament he has found himself in.

If it is not a wholly original concept, the execution is anything but stale. Tsukamoto's digital photography is unrelenting. The first half of the movie (which only runs about 45 minutes total), is primarily filmed in grainy, visceral closeups in near complete darkness. You can never really be sure exactly what you are looking at at any given time. It is disconcerting for sure and frequently frustrating, but make no mistake, Tsukamoto knows exactly what he's doing and his unwillingness to give the audience any piece of tiny freedom or context that our hero is not given feels fresh and admirable in a very committed, mind warping way. To give away much more of the "plot" would be a crime, but I will say that our hero finds that he is not the only person trapped in this place, and efforts to find out exactly what is going on and why give the second half of Haze its shape and focus.

Shinya Tsukamoto is probably best known for his cult series of Tetsuo films, none of which have been seen by me (I am anxious to see them now). If Haze is any indication at all, Tsukamoto has that distinct ability to craft not only a movie (a very good one at that) but an experience entirely unto itself. The most remarkable thing about Haze is that as immediate and intense, as in your face and unyielding as this material is, it still finds the perfect blend of poignancy and meditation on which to end, and it doesn't for even a second feel manipulative in the least. In fact, for all of the darkness and misery experienced, for all of the pain and anxiety felt, it probably shouldn't have ended any other way.