Things That Go Thud in the DarkTwo new horror films avoid clichs but dont make much sense
~ By ANDY KLEIN ~
An angry extra (Lim Won-Hee) wreaks revenge on a film director in the Cut segment of Three ...Extremes
n the run-up to Christmas and awards season, studios start rolling out all their titles with Oscar potential or at least with what they think of as Oscar potential. And since Labor Day, weve
BOO!
Ha, ha. Got ya there, didnt I? Oldest trick in the book: lull you with something really banal and dull, then suddenly, like, Boo! Works every time .
Oh, it didnt? Well, onscreen it works every time. I guess it doesnt translate to the printed page exactly perfectly like. Oh, well. Happy i can't reading Halloween, party pooper.
It is both the boon and the curse of horror/suspense films that such obvious tricks work on a basically visceral level. The effects of most devices wear off with repetition, but a jump cut and a loud noise will always make you jump, even if theres a big legend on the screen saying, Brace yourself: jump cut and loud noise in 10 seconds with the seconds counting down. Its a purely involuntary, physiological response.
Judiciously used, in a context of genuine psychological horror, it can be of great aesthetic value; but, repeated endlessly as the sole scare factor in a film, it moves out of the realm of art and into the realm of biology. Its the difference between Psycho and Jeepers Creepers, between Halloween and Halloween H2O. The filmmaker may as well be poking the viewer in the eye with a pointed stick.
These devices are simply too easy and reliable and have been increasingly abused by uninspired directors, particularly with the improvement in sound technology and the faster-paced cutting of the last 30 years or so.
So Id like to give props to movies that studiously avoid them like, for instance, Three Extremes (opening Friday) and Stay (which opened last week, without benefit of screenings). Both of these work hard to establish mood and to disorient us in subtler ways. Hurray! Unfortunately, neither makes any real sense.
Three Extremes is an Asian horror anthology with one story each from Hong Kong, Korea, and Japan. The HK segment, Fruit Chans Dumplings, leads off. Miriam Yeung plays Li, a retired actress, whose husband (Tony
Leung Ka-Fai) has an eye toward younger, firmer flesh. To save her marriage, she visits Mei (Bai Ling), a shady cook who is known to make dumplings with the power of rejuvenation.
Now, I dont want to say what goes into these dumplings, but its something that likely wont go down well with
either the squeamish or pro-choice advocates. (Im both, so ewwwww.) The great Christopher Doyle shot this segment, and everything is queasily evocative. And the story makes a good deal of sense until . I mean, major
elements remain unresolved, and what the hell is going on with the final shot? Dumplings is about 35 minutes, and Chan prepared a 90-minute feature version as well, so maybe that explains things a little better.
The longest of the stories, Cut, is from Park Chan-Wook, whose Oldboy remains one of the best films of 2005. Cut is very similar in concept to Saw. (Luke Y. Thompsons review of Saw II, incidentally, can be found in CityBeats Latest Reviews section.) A film director (Lee Byung-Hun) awakens to find himself and his pianist wife trapped on his own movie set by a loony extra (Lim Won-Hee), who threatens to chop off the wifes fingers one by one if the director doesnt commit a horrible act.
As in Oldboy, Park frequently violates reality here, but that still doesnt explain the baffling identity transfer in the final scene so arbitrary that it retroactively diminished my feelings about what preceded it.
Finally, theres Box from Takashi Miike (Audition, Gozu). The insanely prolific Miikes films often have a slapdash look to them, but Box, like Audition, is much technically smoother. A reclusive novelist (Kyoko Hasegawa) remains traumatized by a horrific childhood incident, in which her jealous actions led to her sisters gruesome death. She sometimes sees her sisters ghost, but this may not be a delusion, since her editor who coincidentally looks exactly like her beloved, incestuous father (both are played by Atsuro Watabe) sees it briefly, as well.
Miike jumps around in time and repeatedly blends reality, memories, and dreams, which is dandy, except Im repeating myself, I know it would be nice, at the end, to have a little more of a hint as to whats actually happening.
Ninety percent of Three Extremes is fun, but that fun is compromised by the 10 percent that isnt i.e., the conclusions. One possibility is that the writers, going for the extremes promised in the title, contrived situations so outrageous that there was no graceful way out of them.
Speaking of extreme, speaking of outrageous, speaking of contrived, theres Marc Forsters Stay. Ewan McGregor plays Sam Foster, a psychiatrist who inherits patient Henry Lethem (Ryan Gosling) from an indisposed colleague (Janeane Garofalo, made up to look like living hell). (Henrys last name is presumably an homage to novelist Jonathan Lethem, who explores similar turf.) Henry has announced that he intends to commit suicide in three days, on his birthday. Suicidal patients strike a particularly strong chord with Sam, since he apparently met his girlfriend (Naomi Watts) after her own suicide attempt. (Later in the film, its contrarily suggested that they were already together when she slashed her wrists, but, by that time, nothing makes much sense anyway.)
Everybody starts seeing dead people, and in the background there are often identical pairs (or threesomes) of people with metal briefcases walking in lockstep, and Sam starts to experience the same moments twice, and .
Basically, Forster revels in having an overall framing story that allows him to go crazy stylistically and narratively. It would be a spoiler to say what that frame is, except that by a third of the way through its pretty clear, roughly, that were dealing with a dream or a dying flashback or a scrambled virtual reality or something.
Im a sucker for doppelgangers and identity transferral and time manipulation. Im also a sucker for show-offy cinematic devices, all of which Forster uses and a few of which he seems to be inventing. (Its rare in Stay that we move from one scene to the next with a standard cut or dissolve.) But the ending explanation which is in the mode of Jacobs Ladder and Mulholland Dr. (already invoked simply through the presence of Naomi Watts) and very, very similar to the recent, generally unseen November is not only old hat, but also fails the test for such things.
That is, the ending revelations of Mulholland Dr., the gold standard for justified use of this kind of narrative, make us examine everything that went before in a new light. They enrich the experience and make the weirdness more intriguing. But in Stay there is nothing interesting about the payoff; it seems like little more than a convenient excuse for a director to have fun, throwing a bunch of wild stuff up on the screen.
Three Extremes. Directed by Fruit Chan, Park Chan-Wook, and Takashi Miike. Written by Lillian Lee, Park Chan-Wook, and Haruko Fukushima. With Miriam Yeung, Bai Ling, Tony Leung Ka-Fai, Lee Byung-Hun, and Kyoko Hasegawa. Opens Fri. at the Nuart.
Stay. Directed by Marc Forster. Written by David Benioff. With Ewan McGregor, Ryan Gosling, Naomi Watts, and Bob Hoskins. Citywide.
10-27-05
source:
LA City Beat 
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