Review: Deadheads and War of the Dead at TADFF

I went to Toronto for, among other things, the Toronto After Dark Film Festival, run by the ebullient Adam Lopez. They were kind enough to screen You Are So Undead Saturday night. It was Zombie Appreciation Night -- two bucks off if you're a zombie! -- so a sizable chunk of the audience were duded up in the their dead best. And their best was very good indeed. A fair number of them wouldn't have looked out of a place in a zombie movie.

So our sexy little vamps were sandwiched between two zombie movies.

DEADHEADS is a goofy, fun zombie romantic comedy. Mike Kellerman returns to consciousness in a freezer three years after dying. There's a zombie outbreak going on, so it takes him a little time to realize that he, too, is dead. Just, he's a walking and talking zombie.

And he wants to get back to the girl he loves. He's just unsure how it will go, him being dead and all. Fortunately, he quickly attracts a wingman, also talking-dead Brent Guthrie, who won't let him let himself down. Soon they're driving across the country, with badass government agents in hot pursuit.

What makes this movie work is the characters. Sure, there's action and slapstick and snappy banter. But this movie has heart. Mike and Brent are a great odd couple. The government agents are all fun, from the convict who's trying to win his freedom, to the obnoxious macho killer with the most ridiculous sideburns anyone's seen since 1895, to the huge moaning zombie, "Cheese," that the guys have decided to bring along as a pet.


WAR OF THE DEAD is an exuberant mess. It's a World War Ii zombie war movie. There's a bunker where the Nazis did secret experiments on Russian soldiers, and now there are Nazi zombies running around. There's enough zombie shooting for any Call of Duty: Black Ops fan. It's impressive how much production value you can get for a million euros in Lithuania. Nice camera work, nice set design.

What there isn't is much of a story. There's a plot all right. It's 1941. Inexplicably, an American platoon (I thought we weren't at war till December 7?) is fighting alongside Finns (I thought they were German allies?) against Russians (I thought they were our allies?) to find and destroy a secret Nazi bunker in Karelia (Russian territory till September 1941). There's some sort of German scientist who's made these odd little mechanisms with gears, that ultimately turn out to be nothing more than odd little keys. There's a girl who may or may not have been involved with the experiments. There's a young Russian soldier, an American captain and a Finnish lieutenant who's not telling everything he knows, and never does.

And there are lots and lots of Nazis, especially undead ones.

It would have been nice to have a theme. Or a main character to root for. Maybe then I would have cared how it came out.

I'm not sure about the point of doing a zombie war movie. Zombies are among the least impressive of the undead. (Like, 2d6, tops.) They're scary if you're armed with a cricket bat. If you've got a tommygun and enough ammo, they're not nearly as dangerous as actual German soldiers, who were pretty deadly.

Nice music, though. And nice production values. And the audience seemed to enjoy it.

The Cave

By accident, we watched THE CAVE (2005), a cheesy movie about some professional cave divers who run into monsters in a cave. Lisa thought people had said good things about it, but she was in fact thinking about THE DESCENT (also 2005), about five women who run into monsters in a cave. The two movies share the same territory: a half dozen or so people go down in a cave, are trapped by a cave-in and have to find their way out. And there are blind, subterranean monsters who can see in the dark.

THE CAVE has monsters designed by Patrick Tatopoulous (STARGATE), a lot of underwater footage, huge sets, multiple environments. It starts in the Yucatan for no real reason, and then goes to Romania. (For once, Romania being shot for Romania, yay!) It feels like a big budget movie, except for the lack of name actors. After director Bruce Hunt has fun with everything being dark that doesn't have a flashlight on it, he abandons that so he can light up his lovely sets. There are barely any characters to speak of. There's the Leader, there's his brother The Hunk, there's the Babe Scientist (I never get tired of Lena Headey), there's the Reckless Dude, there's Reckless Babe, and there's an Older Scientist. But none of them have very much to do except react to their bad situation, and sometimes be brave and heroic. You could swap their characters for any other characters and the script would still play. It's really a movie about monsters in a cave.

THE DESCENT feels like an indie movie. First of all, there's the interesting decision to cast all women. The movie starts with a tragic accident that lays the emotional foundation for the story. They're trapped without hope of rescue for a character-based reason, not an external reason. That provokes resentment, a sense of grievance. One of the women can't be trusted. Some of the women are cowardly. The movie is about how these women react to a terrifying threat. The cave is cool, but they would be interesting to watch in a different terrifying situation.

In THE DESCENT, the monsters are just as goofy looking as in THE CAVE. (Some day I'd like to see a movie in which the monsters are sleek and beautiful. You know, tigers are beautiful. But if you're in an environment with a tiger, you're in serious trouble.) But director Neil Marshall keeps them mostly in the dark. As, you know, they would be, in a cave.

So THE DESCENT is frakking terrifying. And THE CAVE is just something that will kill 97 minutes of your time on Earth.

The Woodsman

THE WOODSMAN is a deeply felt, deeply disturbing movie about an ex-con child molestor trying to go straight after 12 years of jail. Kevin Bacon is the child molestor. Kyra Sedgewick is the woman who falls in love with him.

It's deeply disturbing because the movie is sympathetic to a guy who's still attracted to underage girls. It's interesting because director Nicole Kassell trusts the viewer to make the most of Bacon and Sedgewick's extremely subtle and underplayed moments on screen, and Kassell and playwright Stephen Fechter's script trusts the viewer to make the most of dialog that says the minimum directly.

Movies this underplayed sometimes bug me; sometimes it like a cop-out. The director doesn't want to tell the audience what to think, but winds up not telling the audience what the story is. But with material this alarming, it's probably wise to avoid anything that's the least bit showy for fear it will be exploitative. I mean, this is a movie where we're wondering all along if Bacon's character -- who we're meant to root for -- is going to backslide and we're going to have to watch him molest another girl.

I found the movie hard to watch, in a good way. I'm not really scared by monster movies. But the protagonist in this story is somewhere between hero and monster in a very human and convincing way; and that is far scarier. Check it out.

The Kids Are All Right

We watched THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT, a drama about a family with two moms, Annette Bening and Julianne Moore, whose daughter turns 18 and goes looking for her biological dad, played by Mark Ruffalo.

I didn't think I'd like this. The hook seemed a little too pat. But it's a really keenly observed movie. The characters are very carefully drawn. They are among the most real-feeling characters I've seen in a movie in a long time. Annette Bening does a brilliant job of playing an unsympathetic career woman. I came to hate her even though her crimes are just in the way she puts people down, judges them, and acts superior to them. And then she won back my sympathy. It's brave for an actress to play someone unlikable, and brave to give such an understated performance: another actor might have broadened her performance to make sure the audience got it. I thought she deserved an Oscar nomination for it, but it's the kind of non-flashy performance that rarely wins.

Kudos to writer-director Lisa Cholodenko, who also proved in her film HIGH ART that Ally Sheedy wasn't just a Brat Packer.

Career-O-Matic

Rotten Tomatoes can now graph a director or actor's movies according to their critical ratings, showing a kind of career directory. So you can see M. Night Shyamalan getting worse and worse, or Woody Allen getting gradually worse... hmmm, well, theoretically the average director gets better, but Famous Directors seem only to get worse. (Possibly because they no longer have to listen to anyone. See Lucas, George.)

Anyway, fun to play with....

Cineblographer

Cineblographer liked YOU ARE SO UNDEAD:

Vampires and romance are two things that the Twilight franchise has yet to combine successfully in its first three installments. You Are So Undead, however, riotously spoofs the horror genre with this clever take on a girl’s first time. You’ll laugh just as hard as you did when Edgar first sank his teeth into Bella. The only difference is that this film by Canada’s Alex Epstein is funny because it’s supposed to be.

NETWORK

We watched NETWORK, which I hadn't seen in decades. Now it seems prescient. Paddy Chayefsky predicts reality TV, Fox News and Glenn Beck.

It's fully of chewy, operatic dialog; no wonder Aaron Sorkin loves it.

One thing I noticed was how well-constructed a story it is. In 1976 it was hard to imagine someone could stay on the air ranting and raving. It would have been easy to say "his ratings are good," but how do you plausibly get to that point? So everyone in a position to shut him down gets a strong personal reason not to shut him down, until he's too big to shut down.

Talk about big-deal screenwriters: Chayefsky gets authorial credit. On screen it's "Network by Paddy Chayefsky" followed by "Produced by" and "Directed by." Chayefsky actually had script protections built into his scripts. Anyone know how he got those?

The Ghost Writer

"I'm coming perilously close to acting."
"I know, me too!"

I just watched Roman Polanski's tedious pseudo-
thriller THE GHOST WRITER. It fails in several elements of its story.

SPOILERS, obviously.

[Update: and by SPOILERS, I mean I am going to recount the entire story, k? But if you haven't seen it already, this will save you two hours of your life.]

The idea is that Ewan MacGregor ("Ghost" because we never know his name) is hired to rewrite the memoirs of the former British Prime Minister, Adam Lang, played by Pierce Brosnan. The previous ghost writer, Lang's right hand aide, Mike McAra, was found up washed up on the beach, presumed drowned by falling off the ferry his car was found on. Meanwhile Lang is under pressure because he's been indicted by the International Criminal Court in the Hague for being involved in the "extraordinary rendition" of terror suspects, and is in danger of being extradited.

So first of all, I'm having trouble believing the movie, because I don't believe Britain would turn over any former PM to the Hague for the crime of giving orders, and I don't even believe that Polanski believes that either, given that the US failed to extradite him from Switzerland for drugging and raping a 13-year-old, and one extends rather more courtesy to political leaders than to artists.

Ghost suspects that McAra was murdered, because the currents were wrong for his body to wash up on the beach, and a local saw flashlights on the beach -- a local who since has fallen down the steps and gone into a coma.

Ghost immediately tells Lang's wife, Ruth, who gets upset and then sleeps with him.

Ghost discovers odd bits of evidence that McAra knew something. That something turns out to be that, while a student actor at Cambridge, Lang hung out with another student who is now a professor whom a random web page on the internet accuses of being a spy for the CIA. So the obvious conclusion is that the former Prime Minister of Britain is a CIA stooge.

Now being followed by guys in a mysterious car, Ghost ditches his own car on the ferry to lose the guys, sneaks back onto the mainland, and gets a room at the ferry terminal, I guess because that's the last place you'd look for a guy who just ditched his car on the ferry.

Ghost finally does something sensible, and calls Lang's nemesis, the British foreign secretary who's just had Lang indicted, Richard Rycart. Rycart meets him, reveals that McAra had leaked him documents to implicate Lang, and asks Ghost to go back and confront Lang with a tape recorder, I guess in the hopes that Lang will break down and admit everything on tape that he has previously murdered people in order to hide.

But Lang is shot dead by a peace protestor. (Heh.) Ghost writes up his book. It's a big hit. But then he realizes that if you put together the first words of all the chapters, it reads "Lang's wife Ruth was recruited into the CIA by professor Paul Emmett."

So, naturally, he writes this up on a page, folds it up, and has it passed to Ruth. Then he runs off, and is hit by a car.


This movie is a great example of how an impressive director can make an utterly preposterous story seem half good. The movie is full of atmospherics -- cars driving in heavy rain, beaches in the dark, that sort of the thing. The performances are lovely. The music keeps encouraging us to believe that this is all very scary and important.

And yet it is utterly preposterous. And the story is crap.

A story is (a) a compelling character (b) who has an opportunity, problem or goal (c) who faces obstacles and/or an antagonist (d) who faces jeopardy (e) and can win stakes.

(a) Ewan MacGregor's character is a bland hack known for writing celebrity autobiographies. He doesn't necessarily want the job, but $250,000 is interesting to him. There's no reason we should care about him. He's not particularly interested in the truth. He's interested in finding personable details to flesh out Lang's banal memoirs.

(b) Ghost's opportunity is to make $250,000 by rewriting a 600-page memoir inside of 2 weeks. He quickly drops this goal, because inside of a day or two he is roaming around the island in the rain talking to random people about Mike McAra's death.

So that's obviously not the driving force of the story. It must be his problem: that Mike McAra, a man he never knew, may have been murdered.

But if he really believed that, what is it in his character that makes him dig more? A desire to be killed as well? A devotion to the truth? Pathological curiosity? Any of these would be interesting, but neither is his character. If he actually had a character, that could explain it. But he doesn't have one.

(c) Obstacles / antagonists: never really defined. Mysterious people who drive around in cars.

(d) Jeopardy: presumably, that he will be killed if he finds out the thing that got McAra killed. But he never takes this very seriously, because tells Lang's wife he thinks someone had McAra murdered, then tells Lang's wife he thinks she's a spy. He also drives around asking people about McAra's death, and confronts Lang's old professor buddy, who he has every reason to believe is part of the conspiracy.

Man, if I thought someone I was working for was CIA, or Mossad, or Mafia, or KGB, I would do my job, keep my head down, and get out. And if I was the sort of person who couldn't resist snooping, I wouldn't talk to anyone.

Of course it's all very cinematic to have Ghost running around asking questions and telling people what he knows. But it is the job of the screenwriter (and the director who's guiding him) to give him legitimate motivations for being so bloody stupid, or coming up with a clever way to do it safely.

And incidentally, if after all that, Ruth was really CIA, and murdered McAra, then Ruth's behavior after Ghost tells her he thinks McAra was murdered is inexplicable, since she makes absolutely no effort to find out exactly how much he knows, or to prevent him from learning anything else.

(e) Stakes: er, what, exactly? If he is successful, he can expose the former Prime Minister of Britain as a murderous CIA stooge. This will embarrass a lot of people, but I'm not clear how it helps anyone, since he is no longer Prime Minister, and is already being indicted for war crimes.

Later, it's that if he is successful, he can expose the former PM's wife to be a murderous CIA stooge. Except he doesn't really want to expose her, he just wants her to know that he knows. Because ... why? I don't know. Polanski makes a big deal of that little slip of paper being passed from person to person until it reaches Ruth Lang... but so what? Ghost has no actual evidence. He has no credibility as a journalist -- he's a ghost writer. And he has signed a confidentiality agreement. So if he talks, Lang's wife will bankrupt him.

Moreover, on a slightly abstract level: Lang has been in government all along. If any PM became a US poodle -- whether because he was CIA or his wife was, or because he just couldn't get a decent cheeseburger any other way -- everyone would sooner or later know it. The voters could turf him out. His party could turf him out. His party could refuse to go along with him. The PM can do very little without the consent of his party. So if the British people, and Lang's party, kept him on as PM, then they obviously wanted him to be a US poodle. And then where's the conspiracy?


Of course, the elements of story aren't everything. In a genre movie, you have to deliver the genre goods. A great horror story with no horror fails; and there are some horror movies that succeed with very little story, because they deliver a lot of horror. But THE GHOST WRITER fails to deliver here either. It's a thriller with very little suspense. No oh my god will he be caught. The lamest of slow-motion car chases. Much of the movie is moody scenes of rain and fog.

Ah, yes, the rain and fog. There is a great deal of this. It seems to rain nonstop, and everyone either walks or drives around in it.

There is also some lovely acting. Ewan MacGregor has almost nothing to work with, but Pierce Brosnan does some really fine work as a politician behind the scenes. Kim Cattrall makes you completely forget a certain sexhound publicist she has been known to play. And Olivia Williams is spectacular as the wife.

Yes, the acting and the camerawork is lovely. But the story is a mess. The main character has no character. He does things that no reasonable person would do, without any real motivation to do them other than he's in a Roman Polanski movie. The movie betrays its own jeopardy, and the stakes are muddy.

In other words, it's a director's movie.

Is this another failure of the auteur system, where a director with a big enough name no longer has to answer to anybody, and winds up with ridiculous plotholes in his movies? (See Lucas, George.) What was the presumed audience for this?

And for bonus points, class: if they handed you the script to this turkey, told you they weren't sure about it, and asked you how you'd rewrite it, what would you tell them?

FYI

I thought you might be interested in my blog called 'Carolina Flicks' that features films and filmmaking in the Carolinas. As part of this blog I have some software I wrote called ShotList Manager that is free and helps make shotlists.

Carolina Flicks
ShotList Manager

Y'all feel free to check it out and report back!

Hacks

Rex Reed trashes Factory Girl in the New York Observer:

Clumsily directed by an amateur named George Hickenlooper, Microsoft Word–ed with five-and-dime psychology by three hack writers of no importance, and edited with a Cuisinart, I doubt if it would have been considered slick or glam-sham enough to hold even Warhol’s interest in the days when he stuck the label of high art on everything that popped out of a Polaroid.

This isn't at all fair. Not that I've seen the movie, or will, but George Hickenlooper (whom I apparently went to college with) is by any stretch a veteran director. But more importantly, the writers are not hacks.

Hacks are writers you can count on to turn in a screenplay with a by-the-numbers plot; clear first, second and third acts; a love interest; and likeable characters. They are writers who do not experience writers block because they have disabled their critical faculties. You will not get a brilliant screenplay out of a hack. But you will always get something you can shoot.

Hacks hack it out. They always deliver. That's why you hire a hack. Like a cabbie, they get you there.

No, what the writers of Factory Girl are, in fact, is something else. Based on their credits, they seem to be producers.

It's risky for producers to work on their own projects, I think. Not because producers don't have writing talent; some of them do. They also often have superb critical ability. The problem is that any writer loses perspective on his own work that only time can restore. It is exactly the producer's job, though, to have perspective: to know what's good about a script and what needs fixing, and either motivate the writer to fix it, or fire the writer and hire someone else who can fix it. The problem is, the person who's supposed to guide the writer now is the writer. And who's going to tell their producer that their writing isn't perfect? (Unless, of course, they have a good writing partner.) Based on the horrible reviews that Factory Girl got, it seems like these producers lost perspective on their own work. They should have hired some hacks!

Incidentally, I think the same caveat applies to writer-directors. Many directors are superb writers; but they run the risk of deluding themselves that their scripts are brilliant, because no one wants to disagree with the director. Woody Allen's best work, I think, came from when he was still working with Marshall Brickman. Usually it's a director's job to guide the writer. When the writer becomes the director, he needs to find someone who can stand up to him and guide him. Because who's going to tell the director that his script is no good? It can be a writing partner or a more powerful being such as a studio exec. (George Lucas had to listen to Alan Ladd, Jr., at least for his first few movies.) But you need someone. Or, a lot of time.