The A.V. Club - The New Cult Canon

New Cult Canon ends with the end times of Michael Tolkin’s The Rapture

Scott Tobias — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0500

“In one way or another, I have been waiting for the apocalypse all of my life.” —Opening line, Roger Ebert’s review of The Rapture

What if the crazies are right?

In the 20-plus years since Michael Tolkin’s The Rapture was released, the crazies have been wrong about the apocalypse, which has missed more dates than Guns N’ Roses’ Chinese Democracy and My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless follow-up combined. (And just as those albums eventually came out, the world will end on its own time.) But Tolkin shows interest neither in the possibility of End Times nor in post-apocalyptic fantasies of the serious (The Road, Time Of The Wolf) or escapist (Knowing, 2012) kind. His exceptionally provocative drama, somehow distributed by New Line, not only allows that the world will end, but grants that it will end precisely how a group of born-again Christians say it’s going to ...

My Own Private Idaho is a personal statement and a River Phoenix memorial

Scott Tobias — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0500

“There’s not another road anywhere that looks like this road—I mean, exactly like this road. It’s one kind of place. One of a kind, like someone’s face. Like a fucked-up face.” —River Phoenix, My Own Private Idaho

It’s been 20 years since River Phoenix’s death, and Gus Van Sant’s 1991 road movie My Own Private Idaho is still almost unbearably sad to watch. It isn’t just that Phoenix’s charisma and promise are on full display, though Idaho ranks alongside Running On Empty and Dogfight among his best roles. It’s the way Van Sant’s script leaves Phoenix in a state of constant vulnerability, like a turtle without its shell. At times, his character’s narcolepsy—in which he suddenly, unpredictably falls into a deep sleep—feels like a narrative contrivance, an ongoing deus ex machina calibrated to pivot the story ...

John Woo’s Hard Target added signature flair to a generic Hollywood premise

Scott Tobias — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0600

“If you understand me, just grunt.” —Jean-Claude Van Damme, Hard Target

Among cult-movie enthusiasts and Hong Kong action connoisseurs—one and the same, really—director John Woo inspired a reverence in the late ’80s and early ’90s rivaled only by Chow Yun-Fat, the tremendously cool leading man Woo molded into an icon. Back when I was part of a programming group for the Tate Theater, a repertory house on the University Of Georgia campus, we booked Woo’s The Killer entirely on faith, and the trailer alone drew oohs and aahs from the audience—which later filled the 500-seat theater to capacity during its two-day run. In films like The Killer, A Better Tomorrow, Bullet In The Head, and Hard Boiled, Woo succeeded in isolating sequences like the big shootout that ends Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch and protracting them into a slo-mo ballet of blood squibs, pyrotechnics, and ...

Zoolander refuses to let satire interfere with its inspired silliness

Scott Tobias — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0600

“I care desperately about what I do. Do I know what product I’m selling? No. Do I know what I’m doing today? No. But I’m here and I’m going to give it my best shot.” —Owen Wilson, Zoolander

A minor gag toward the end of Ben Stiller’s 2001 oddity Zoolander epitomizes the film’s virtues—and Stiller’s, too, when his offbeat, wild-swinging style finds purchase. Time magazine reporter Matilda Jeffries (played by Stiller’s wife, Christine Taylor) is under terrible stress, having orchestrated an elaborate scheme to uncover a fashion-industry conspiracy to assassinate the prime minister of Malaysia. Her hope rests on a pair of dim-witted male models whose frustrated attempts to simply turn on a computer have resulted in an homage to the apes in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Sensing she needs some relief, Matilda’s faithful research assistant swoops over with an ...

Pump Up The Volume offers a punk twist on the John Hughes formula

Scott Tobias — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0600

“Sleep tight, Mr. Serious. Maybe you’ll feel better tomorrow.” —Christian Slater, Pump Up The Volume

Beloved though he may be, especially by Gen-X nostalgists weaned on his work, there’s a cynicism at the core of John Hughes’ work that was always mistaken for empathy. In his mid-’80s heyday, before his career drifted off into Home Alone sequels and kid-friendly slapstick, Hughes had a talent for generalizing teenage angst so broadly that his films seemed to speak to the teenage experience. Even if teens couldn’t identify precisely with jocks, nerds, princesses, and burnouts, those banners stretched enough to make it feel like Hughes was speaking to them. As Pauline Kael once wrote of Hughes’ The Breakfast Club, “The movie is about a bunch of stereotypes who complain that other people see them as stereotypes.” Most of his films’ emotional authenticity comes from troupe members like Molly Ringwald ...

[REC]’s use of confinement makes it a paragon of the found-footage genre

Scott Tobias — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 00:00:00 -0600

“We have to tape everything, Pablo. For fuck’s sake.” —Last line, [REC]

It took a long delay for the genre to take hold after The Blair Witch Project, but the “found footage” horror film has become the dominant form of the past five or six years—and, accordingly, the one greeted with the loudest groans as its clichés have festered. [REC] and Quarantine ([REC]’s Hollywood carbon copy), Cloverfield, the Paranormal Activity movies, The Last Exorcism, Apollo 18, The Devil Inside, V/H/S, The Bay: That’s long list for a few years, and together they mark a fascinating time for horror, when the cheapness and compactness of shooting on digital corresponded with the ease of YouTube-ready self-documentation. Technology has become both a tool and a terror, something that’s made filming (unbounded, on multiple cameras, with few limitations on movement) simple and cheap while opening up ...

The New World reshaped an American origin story in the style of its creator

Scott Tobias — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 00:00:00 -0600

“A world equal to our hopes. A land where one might wash one’s soul pure. Rise to one’s true stature. We shall make a new start, a fresh beginning. Here, the blessings of the Earth are bestowed upon all.” —Capt. John Smith, The New World

“We’re born to die. Our remains seep into the water and soil and feed the trees.” —Matt Zoller Seitz

Watching a Terrence Malick film means being reminded that we live in the natural world, much as we try to sculpt it, obfuscate it, or merely take it for granted in our everyday lives. This has been true since Malick’s 1973 debut feature Badlands situated a Bonnie And Clyde-style crime thriller within the heartland’s arid expanses, and it’s been truer with each successive film, as he’s continued to shed the conventions of narrative, moving toward a more purely ...

Memento’s puzzle structure hides big twists and bigger profundities

Scott Tobias — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 00:00:00 -0600

“Don’t believe his lies” —Memento

I first saw Memento at a public screening at the 2000 Toronto International Film Festival, well before Christopher Nolan was a known quantity, much less the semi-reclusive maestro behind The Dark Knight trilogy. What stands out about the screening—other than the bolt-from-the-blue excitement of seeing an as-yet-unheralded masterpiece—was the Q&A session with Nolan that followed. Generally, festival Q&A sessions are acutely embarrassing forays into the trivial or creepy, with people either asking obscure and irrelevant questions, launching into rambling soliloquies that never coalesce into questions, or simply offering everyone a window into their madness. Memento was different: They wanted Nolan to recount to them, in specific detail, what they just saw—to pick up the shards of plot points, twists, and temporal convergences that were still swimming around in their heads. Could there be a more perfect reaction to a ...

The People Under The Stairs attempts horror-satire but fails in its execution

Scott Tobias — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0500

“May they burn in hell.” —Wendy Robie, The People Under The Stairs

Many critics—myself among them—tend to comb through horror movies looking for political subtext or metaphor, sometimes because it’s clearly present (see Romero, George) and sometimes because assigning some meaning to these films forgives a lot of the gruesome mayhem they put out into the world. Wes Craven’s debut feature The Last House On The Left may be the ultimate litmus test in this regard: If you like it, it’s a harrowing reworking of Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring, informed by the unadorned images of violence and torture coming back from the Vietnam War. If you don’t, it’s a crude, pitiless, despicable rape-revenge tale that presents the assault and murder of two young girls with a near-pornographic gaze. For the record, I fall in the former camp, and present as evidence ...

How the Wachowskis’ craft saves Bound from being a sexploitation film

Scott Tobias — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 00:00:00 -0500

“I’m not apologizing for what I did. I’m apologizing for what I didn’t do.” —Jennifer Tilly, Bound

In the wake of Basic Instinct a few years earlier—and the wave of Shannon Tweed “sexy thrillers” that followed—it was hard to take the sexual politics of the Wachowskis’ 1996 debut feature Bound too seriously. Other than the evident craft that the first-time filmmakers brought to their neo-noir, how much of a difference could there be between Bound, a film sold on the steamy love scenes between Jennifer Tilly and Gina Gershon, and the “edgy” softcore of Tweed’s Indecent Behavior or Madonna’s Body Of Evidence or Deborah Kara Unger’s Whispers In The Dark? This seemed like lipstick lesbianism of the ruby-red variety, the sort of classed-up exploitation that was being sold every other week to a male audience. Any relationship to how two women actually ...

12 Monkeys is hard sci-fi with a soft center

Scott Tobias — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 00:00:00 -0500

“The movie never changes. It can’t change. But every time you see it, it’s different because you’re different. You see different things.” —Bruce Willis, 12 Monkeys

In his superb recent novel 11/22/63, Stephen King follows a man who travels back in time to stop Lee Harvey Oswald from assassinating John F. Kennedy and thus change the course of modern American history, from the Vietnam War to whatever fates, consequential or petty, the flaps of a bazillion butterfly wings might yield. Yet the true villain of the book isn’t Oswald but the “obdurate past,” some vague yet uncanny and overwhelming force that protects the future from being rewritten. The bigger the hoped-for alteration—and none could be bigger than a watershed event like the Kennedy assassination—the more obstacles are thrown in its hero’s way. The only real pleasure this knockabout time traveler gets ...

Lonely Island’s Hot Rod is strangely funny (and often just strange)

Scott Tobias — Thu, 16 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Throughout Saturday Night Live’s existence, especially during the lean years, there’s been an ongoing question of whether the format serves the tremendously gifted people who cycle in and out of the cast. In the tortured process of winnowing down sketches and performing them live, something often gets lost; even good concepts can seem worked-over and airless, and the ones that hit are driven into the ground. In the decade after Wayne’s World took off, Lorne Michaels’ attempts to capitalize on popular characters led to some of the decade’s worst comedies: Coneheads, A Night At The Roxbury, Superstar, The Ladies Man. (Michaels was not involved with It’s Pat: The Movie, but it had that same unmistakable spirit of desperation.) It’s not just that these characters couldn’t get laughs for more than five minutes at a time; they were also hamstrung by conventional plots and ...

A critical movement saved Margaret from burial; here’s why it deserved a second chance

Scott Tobias — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 00:00:00 -0500

“My dear Tavy, your pious English habit of regarding the world as a moral gymnasium built expressly to strengthen your character in, occasionally leads you to think about your own confounded principles when you should be thinking about other people’s necessities.” —George Bernard Shaw, Man And Superman

The story of Margaret, Kenneth Lonergan’s wounded yet triumphant follow-up to 2000’s You Can Count On Me, has been told many times, with good reason—it’s the rare case when critical advocacy has made a direct, tangible difference in the life of a film. This happens in less-tangible ways all the time, especially with true independent films, which rely on good notices to compensate for a shortage of promotional resources. But the groundswell of support for Margaret—and the many bounties that resulted, culminating in a longer and significantly more satisfying cut on DVD—accomplished something much harder by ...

The Korean horror movie The Host finds humor among mayhem

Scott Tobias — Thu, 05 Jul 2012 11:00:00 -0500

“You are dimwits, right to the end. I’ll see you in hell.” —Bridge-jumper, The Host

Whenever Bong Joon-ho’s great monster movie The Host comes up in casual conversation, the first thing mentioned is usually the audacious daytime special-effects sequence, as a mutant sea creature flips out of the Han River and starts terrorizing the populace. But my favorite moment comes a little later, when the Korean military has opted to quarantine the survivors, for fear of some mysterious virus. An officer wearing a full hazmat suit storms into a gymnasium full of survivors—many of whom are mourning their loved ones—promptly slips and falls to the floor, then springs back up again, scanning the room as if nothing had happened. It’s just a pratfall: It doesn’t advance the story, it reveals nothing about this character (whom we never see again), and it disrupts the grave ...

Weird Al’s UHF is uneven, but that just made it ahead of its time

Scott Tobias — Thu, 14 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0500

“Joel Miller, you’ve just found the marble in the oatmeal. You’re a lucky, lucky, lucky little boy. You know why? You get to drink from… THE FIREHOSE!” —Michael Richards, UHF

For a generation that came of age in the 1980s, the music and videos of “Weird Al” Yankovic—and to a much smaller, but still significant extent, the 1989 comedy UHF—were a gateway to absurdist comedy, gently bridging the gap between kid-friendly silliness and jokes that are much further afield. A child weaned on Police Academy sequels or, say, the appalling robot pimp in 1984’s The Ice Pirates could have no trouble giggling at song parodies like “Eat It” or “I Lost On Jeopardy,” but might come to appreciate, however unconsciously, Yankovic’s songcraft or the peculiar places his lyrics could go. There’s nothing estranging about Weird Al’s sensibility in the least, yet there ...

Vampire’s Kiss features one of Nicolas Cage’s best, most out-of-control performances

Scott Tobias — Thu, 24 May 2012 00:00:00 -0500

“You’re a very bright girl. That’s why I know today, by God, is the day you’re going to find that Heatherton contract.” —Nicolas Cage, Vampire’s Kiss

A performance like Nicolas Cage’s gonzo turn in the brilliant 1989 black comedy Vampire’s Kiss—and this is true of many Nicolas Cage performances—raises the question of what good acting really means. Take accents, for example. As Peter Loew, a womanizing New York literary agent, Cage isn’t identified as British. But some kind of accent comes out of his mouth anyway, flickering in and out like a fluorescent bulb, and nearly impossible to pin down. The most likely explanation is that Cage imagined Peter as a fop of the first order, the type of ivory-tower Manhattanite whose exalted sense of privilege naturally leads to a hilariously affected manner of speech. But let’s just say, for ...

The horrible, hilarious violence of Ichi The Killer

Scott Tobias — Thu, 03 May 2012 12:00:00 -0500

There’s probably no good way to ease into the films of Takashi Miike, at least in the days before the prolific genre maestro started varying his extreme cinema provocations with offbeat experiments like the splatter-musical The Happiness Of The Katakuris or Sukiyaki Western Django. But I’ll never forget the odd sensation of seeing my first Miike, Ichi The Killer, at the 2001 Toronto Film Festival, where promotional barf bags were handed out in a cheeky effort to calibrate expectations. Though I rarely walk out on movies, the scheduling conflicts at film festivals make it easy to bail on one screening to make another, and the first 15 minutes of Ichi The Killer tested my flight-or-fight instinct like no other movie I can recall. It was purely a visceral response: How much more of this mayhem could I physically handle without, well, reaching for the barf bag?

Let’s ...

Hackers may have been of its time, but it was also ahead of it

Scott Tobias — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0500

“This is our world now… The world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud.” —Loyd Blankenship (a.k.a. The Mentor), “The Conscience Of A Hacker”

The mid-’90s were a rough time for filmmakers—or for cultural commentators of any kind, really—to speculate about the Internet and where it was going both technologically and socially. Would we wander through the Internet somehow, playing spy games in the virtual reality of Disclosure, with its pointless architecture and cumbersome data mitts? Would ordering a pizza online turn us into flannel-ensconced shut-ins like it does Sandra Bullock in The Net? Or would this thing be so sinister that merely turning on your computer might lead you straight to Dee Snider’s SearingGasPainLand? So before anyone laughs at the cyberpunk edginess of Hackers—which should not be forbidden, because much of it is hilariously dated and silly—keep ...

Cabin Boy

Scott Tobias — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0500

“Come on over here, honey. You’ve managed to charm me with your moronic innocence.” —Ann Magnuson, Cabin Boy

Many of the strangest, most misbegotten studio films of the last 20 years have been comedies, perhaps because middle-aged executives have no comprehension of what the younger generation finds funny. They’re low-risk/high-yield enterprises: If finding the next Wayne’s World means peeling off a few million for oddities like Freddy Got Fingered or Pootie Tang or Kids In The Hall: Brain Candy, it’s a gamble they’re willing to take, even if they don’t understand precisely what they’ve agreed to produce. How likely is it that a boardroom full of suits busted up after reading scenes where Tom Green slings a newborn baby around by its umbilical cord or thwacks a sexually aggressive paraplegic in the legs with a bamboo cane? More likely it was a ...

Dead Alive

Scott Tobias — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0600

“No one will ever love you like your mother.” —Mum, Dead Alive

The trajectory of Peter Jackson’s career—from the homemade slapstick gore of Meet The Feebles, Bad Taste, and Dead Alive to the refined studio spectacle of the Lord Of The Rings trilogy, King Kong, and The Lovely Bones—has been a case study in how special effects have changed, if not necessarily improved. Back when he was cobbling together those hilarious little creature features in New Zealand in the late ’80s and early ’90s, all the money and expertise in the world wouldn’t have given Jackson the resources to render the films’ stop-motion and puppet effects in CGI. And who would want to do that, anyway? By the same token, the Helm’s Deep sequence in The Two Towers has a level of pixelated detail that wouldn’t be possible in stop-motion—and who would want ...

Observe And Report

Scott Tobias — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0600

“I believe every man has a path laid out before him. And my path is a righteous one.” —Seth Rogen, Observe And Report

“Now I see this clearly. My whole life has pointed in one direction. There never has been any choice for me.” —Robert De Niro, Taxi Driver

There a scene early on in Jody Hill’s Observe And Report where Brandi, a make-up counter floozy—we never see her signature, but there’s an implied heart over the “i”—has just encountered the flasher who’s been terrorizing the mall parking lot. As a small scrum of co-workers gather to comfort her, in dashes Ronnie Barnhardt, the cropped head of mall security, flanked by the rent-a-cop flunkies who revere him like General Patton. Brandi is the girl of his dreams, and here is the damsel-in-distress moment when his strength and authority can finally win her over. (As he ...

Dazed And Confused

Scott Tobias — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 00:01:00 -0600

“When I was making it, I was horrified, because I was reliving my past point by point. I’d be on the set and I’d look around, and I would be back in 1976, a freshman in high school again. And those weren’t necessarily good memories. I was revisiting sorrows and horrors. I was making it from a distance, so it perhaps came out more positive than negative, but it’s not all fun and games.” —Richard Linklater on Dazed And Confused

Richard Linklater’s Dazed And Confused tanked badly when it hit theaters in 1993. Blame any number of factors: a nascent distributor (Gramercy Pictures) that had the backing of a major studio (Universal), but not the resources; an episodic structure that culminates in nothing of life-changing consequence; and ironically, a no-name cast that was actually chockablock with future movie stars like Ben Affleck and Matthew McConaughey ...

The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, And Her Lover

Scott Tobias — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0600

“Try the cock, Albert. It’s a delicacy, and you know where it’s been.” —Helen Mirren, The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, And Her Lover

Peter Greenaway has always been a man out of time, an arch classicist who’s nonetheless forward-thinking about what cinema can do. Of the objects of his contempt—and there are so many, you should presume you are one of them—the staid refusal of cinema to evolve beyond mere storytelling is foremost among them. What’s the point of having this relatively new medium if so few are interested in advancing it? (Typical quote, after declaring Martin Scorsese “old-fashioned” and comparing him to D.W. Griffith: “We’re still illustrating Jane Austen novels—there are 41 films of Jane Austen novels in the world. What a waste of time.”) For Greenaway, this restlessness can be a kind of perversion: After his 1989 arthouse ...

Diggstown

Scott Tobias — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0600

“Do you know the difference between a hustler and a good con-man? A hustler has to get out of town as quickly as he can, but a good con-man—he doesn’t have to leave until he wants to.” —James Woods, Diggstown

“It’s better to burn out than to fade away,” as Neil Young says, and in the realm of critical perception, there’s no better example of this than director Michael Ritchie, who might have been as exalted as Hal Ashby had his career ended at the same time. From the late ’60s to the mid-’70s, Ritchie went on a tear that was nearly as impressive as American contemporaries like Francis Ford Coppola or Robert Altman: 1969’s Downhill Racer, the first of two collaborations with Robert Redford, about the tolls of being a single-minded champion; 1972’s Prime Cut, a Lee Marvin-Gene Hackman gangster movie with ...

Anaconda

Scott Tobias — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0600

“Buenos noches, beautiful.” —Jon Voight, Anaconda

Cult movies generally imply some active engagement on the part of the viewer. These are films that are often unsuccessful or misunderstood, and thus need to be sought out and championed, passed around a network of like-minded friends or revived for the midnight/repertory circuit. This is how commercial catastrophes like Donnie Darko or Pootie Tang get a second life, and it affirms the cheering notion that great (or at least singular) movies will find an appreciative audience someday, even if it’s many years down the road. Such are the thoughts to which cinephiles cling when they confidently declare that the crippled little orphan they’ve adopted will one day be worshipped as a towering Adonis.

Anaconda is not that kind of movie. It was modestly successful at the box office. It is utterly conventional and often merely perfunctory, even by the standards ...

The Human Centipede (First Sequence)

Scott Tobias — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 00:01:00 -0500

“[muffled cry]” —The Human Centipede

At political conventions, they call it “red meat.” In the lead-up to the night’s keynote address—or, in the case of Sarah Palin ’08, the keynote address, too—a succession of speakers are brought on stage to fire up the audience. This is not a time for soaring language or elegant turns of phrase, but searing-hot rhetoric, served to an audience that eagerly scarfs it down, even if it ultimately clogs the arteries or poisons them with salmonella. Same thing goes for about half the slate at Midnight Movie sections like the (excellent) one at the Toronto Film Festival: Between servings of Argento or Miike or surprises from audacious newcomers, red meat is usually what’s on the menu. And while the crowd might roar their terrible roars and gnash their terrible teeth, all that laughing and screaming is thin validation for the movie ...

Black Dynamite

Scott Tobias — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 00:01:00 -0500

“Fiendish Doctor Wu, you done fucked up now.” —Black Dynamite

Shameful confession: It took me some time to catch up with Black Dynamite, co-writer/star Michael Jai White and director Scott Sanders’ inspired send-up of blaxploitation movies. Though word was positive on balance—critical consensus pegged it as a clever film that overstayed its welcome, even at 84 minutes—two related thoughts kept me from rushing out during its very brief stay in theaters. One was that blaxploitation spoofs had been done before, to fitfully amusing returns, in I’m Gonna Git You Sucka and Undercover Brother. The other was that the genre was too easy a target, since so many elements—the afros, platform shoes, and pimp coats; the Z-grade incompetence of the filmmaking; the scripted street lingo; the air of hyper-masculinity; the half-hearted “revolutionary” bent—were poised on the edge of self-parody. Who needs a blaxploitation parody when ...

Shaun Of The Dead

Scott Tobias — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0500

“Look, I don’t care what the telly says, all right? We have to get out of here. If we don’t, they’ll tear us to pieces, and that is really going to exacerbate things for all of us.” —Simon Pegg, Shaun Of The Dead

Much like a contagion spread through, say, gnawing on someone’s arm or feasting on brains, zombies plagued the ’00s, beginning with the lightning-quick super-zombies in 2002’s 28 Days Later and metastasizing from there. Before the decade was over, we were treated to zombie epidemics (I Am Legend), zombie sheep (Black Sheep), zombie strippers (Zombie Strippers), found-footage zombies (Quarantine), zombies as metaphor for the Iraq War (Land Of The Dead, 28 Weeks Later), zombies as metaphor for FlipCamera narcissism (Diary Of The Dead), the zombie apocalypse (Zombieland), and the zombie excuse for getting Milla Jovovich in that short red skirt (the Resident Evil ...

Inside

Scott Tobias — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0500

“I want one.” —Beatrice Dalle, Inside

How much is too much? That’s a question that’s gone through my mind both times I’ve seen Inside (A L’Intérieur), an exercise in French extreme cinema that I find enormously skillful and repulsive in roughly equal measure. As a rule, I’m reluctant to draw any hard lines on what horrors are beyond representation, because I recognize how subjective that can be. For example, I find the trailer for 2012 far sicker in its bloodless apocalypse fetishization than anything I’ve ever seen in “torture porn” genre, but clearly that opinion isn’t shared by the legions who gave a pass to the former while routinely turning up their noses at the latter. Yet the moral and visceral triggers that send viewers diving under their chairs—or huffing out of the theater altogether—are often unique to them, and ...

Zodiac

Scott Tobias — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0500

“Do you know more people die in the East Bay commute every three months than that idiot ever killed? He offed a few citizens, wrote a few letters, then faded into footnote.” —Paul Avery, Zodiac

There may be arguments over which David Fincher film is the strongest—the existential noir of his endlessly imitated serial killer movie Seven, the plugged-in portrait of modern masculinity in Fight Club, the Rashomon-like complexity of Facebook’s origins in The Social Network—but there’s no question which is the most Fincherian. That would be Zodiac, his 2007 recounting/reinvestigation of the unsolved Zodiac killer case that gripped the San Francisco Bay area in the late ’60s and early ’70s, then tapered off as the trail went cold. All the qualities associated with Fincher—his dictatorial command over every aspect of the production, his Kubrickian habit of forcing his actors to do dozens ...