Detective Kinderman and the square

About halfway though The Exorcist, Detective Kinderman visits Chris MacNeil to ask if her friend Burke Dennings (recently found dead at the foot of the stone steps outside her house) may have visited Regan’s room the night of his death. They sit at McNeil’s dining table and drink coffee. In the room, behind and between them, there’s an open doorway, a black rectangle. A void. As they talk, MacNeil realises with dawning horror that her daughter may have thrown Dennings from the window and murdered him—but she conceals this from Kinderman and offers him more coffee. Upstairs, separated from their polite conversation by only beams and plaster, is the girl, the demon, the creature, the murderer.

I’ve never heard anyone make this observation before—and it’s possible my reading is completely wrong—but whenever I watch this scene I think: the black rectangle is Pazuzu. Or at least, it represents MacNeil’s forcible severance from the world of normal life and normal people. I certainly don’t think the composition’s an accident. I wonder if anyone else has thought the same? There’s no mention of it in Mark Kermode’s book on the film, which surprised me.

So. Thus far I do not seem to be achieving my aim to review every film I see this year. And considering I watch between two and five films a week, my backlog is, er, substantial.

Part of the problem is that I watch a lot of unarguably terrible films (which is just an inevitable consequence of being a horror film fanatic). Another part is that I am JUST SO VERY BUSY building my giant model of the solar system for the science fair. Which is to say: Sometimes I prefer eating biscuits.

It’s clear that I have to either clear the backlog somehow – one line reviews appeal, since there are over forty films to catch up on – or change the rules (and consequently, the masthead). I’ll let you know on the weekend.

Watching films on a tiny screen during a hellish twenty-three hour long haul flight is probably the best way to end up hating them. So consider this an experiment: here are the films I watched on the flight from London to Cape Town last weekend. For the most part the theory held true.

Hancock
Will Smith is an alcoholic, self-loathing superhero who can fly faster than a speeding bullet, but can’t outrun his own loneliness. Aw.
This had promise: I enjoyed it for the first two acts, with the expectation of a satisfying payoff, but then the whole thing just fell apart. The story felt rushed (Oh, so all of a sudden you’re telling me there’s backstory stretching over millenia, but we don’t get to see any of it?)*. That’s problem one. Problem two? Nameless enemies have been trying to kill our heroes for countless centuries. Yet they’re mentioned for the first time at the end of the film, and we never see them. Or do we? I still have no idea. Problem three: the ending is incoherent melodrama which effectively cancels out the moderately edgy Arrested Development-style intertextuality. There was a great idea here. Shame it’s been wasted.

Hellboy II: The Golden Army
Ron Perleman bashes his lobster claw through a series of clearly lesser opponents until the allotted time runs out.
A disappointing follow-up to a pretty enjoyable popcorn movie, though possibly I’d have liked this better on a larger screen, as the joys of this film are to be found largely with director Guillermo del Toro’s fantastical creatures. The plot itself is a disappointingly bare-bones fairytale. Aside from obviously high production values, this feels more like an episode of a TV show – in which little character development is required because we are assumed to be already familiar with the characters – than a proper feature. This seems to often be the case, I’ve noticed, with graphic novel adaptations (perhaps because it’s presumed that the back-story’s known by some of the audience, though a more likely explanation is simple laziness).

How to Lose Friends and Alienate People
English media hooligan
Toby
Sidney Young lands a job at NYC’s glamourous Vanity Fair Sharps Magazine and fails miserably at everything until, of course, he inexplicably succeeds.
I was surprised by how much fun this was, considering the formulaic structure and by-the-numbers romance. The credit for my enjoyment lies entirely with lead actor Simon Pegg, who is such an irresistably likeable fellow he manages to transform one the most repellent people on the planet (Toby Young**, who penned the autobiographical source material) into a lovable loser. Quite an accomplishment.

The Oxford Murders
Precocious maths whiz Elijah Wood goes to Oxford to learn from his favourite professor, but instead gets mixed up with murders, femme fatales, and nonsensical plotlines.
Dear god, this is awful. Just terrible! Midsummer Murders with some preposterous maths voodoo thrown in. How do scripts like this even get picked up? Why, if the characters are world-class maths geniuses, do their professional debates sound like the ramblings of a drunk Davinci Code fan? Avoid at all costs. Also: dumbest ending since Wild Things. Except I love Wild Things.***
___ ____ ____

* I totally wanted a flashback to ancient Persia.Is that too much to ask?

** I’d read that Toby Young bragged of his “negative charisma”, but thought it hyperbole until I saw him interview Charlie Kaufman at the BFI at last year’s London Film Festival. It’s all true.

*** I know I shouldn’t, but there you have it.

The marketing advantage that studios have over other industries is that they can give out free samples of a movie as advertising—promotional material that feels like content. But filmmakers object when a trailer reveals too much of the story, or their best fireball, or their funniest joke. Tony Sella, the Fox marketer, wanted to end his trailer for “The Simpsons Movie” with Homer walking his pet Spider-Pig upside down across the ceiling and singing his Spider-Pig song. “The writers told me, ‘Absolutely not, you can’t use it,’ ” Sella recalls. “I said, ‘O.K., we can not use Spider-Pig, and the theatres will be three-quarters full, and the audience will be tremendously amused when they see it. Or you can have lines around the block, and half the people will be saying, ‘Wait till you see Spider-Pig!’ to the other half.” Spider-Pig stayed in.

I swear I could hear that conversation in my head when I saw the trailer for the Simpsons Movie. Figures.

It was not a significant bullet

The Werner Herzog Q&A at the British Film Institute last  Monday was both exhilarating and revelatory. Herzog first introduced a preview screening of his new documentary about Antarctica, Encounters at the End of the World, and was later interviewed onstage by Mark Kermode.

The interview was one of the best I’ve seen at the BFI. Herzog is a skilled raconteur whose stoicism and grim realism (“I believe the common character of the universe is not harmony, but hostility, chaos and murder,” as he growled famously in Grizzly Man) is tempered by generosity and mischievous humour.  Kermode—the UK’s favourite bequiffed, skiffle-playing, horror aficionado—is an experienced interviewer with deep film knowledge and approachable humanity. There was evident warmth between them (Herzog was shot during an interview with Kermode a couple of years ago, so they’re practically war buddies) that was enjoyable to witness.

I tried to memorise my favourite of Herzog’s comments, but thankfully The Guardian has now published a transcript of the evening. Here are a couple of my favourite moments, beginning with Kermode’s question about the acrimonious relationship between Herzog and his muse Klaus Kinski, and their mutual death threats during the filming of his masterwork Fitzcarraldo:

MK: What did you actually say?
WH: Very quietly, as he was packing his things, I said that he would have eight bullets through his head before he reached the next bend of the river. Which was probably an exaggeration. I would have missed at least three or four.

Later, Herzog explained that he rarely has a chance to watch films as he’s so busy making them:

WH: Two years ago, I think I saw a grand total of two films, both of them very bad, but very healthy because only from bad films I could learn.
MK: What were they?
WH: One I’ve forgotten and …
MK: You only saw two films and you forgot one of them?

WH: Yes, one was a big Hollywood production, but I don’t remember which one it was. The other one was a small Hollywood film, I think it was called The Real Cancun, about young people on spring break. There were eight young hunks and eight young girls, and the only point of the film was who got laid first. It was kind of delightful but it wasn’t such a good film either.

Och, I laughed so hard I hurt myself.

Some films are less than the sum of their parts. Here are the parts of Marc Caro’s mystical sci-fi turkey Danto 01:

For hubristic scientists and space madness, see Soderbergh’s Solaris remake and Danny Boyle’s Sunshine. For amnesiac messiah and heavy handed religious iconography, see the unwatchable French sci-fi turd Eden Log. For claustrophobia and interminably slow pacing see, well, all of the above. For bald murderers incarcerated in a space penitentiary, see Alien III. For Christ-like prisoner who can heal the dying by magically eating their disease, see The Green Mile. For awful greenish colour filter that looks like the camera lens has been fished out of a stagnant pond, see every shitty torture porn film from Hostel onwards. These are not exactly high quality components (actually, The Green Mile ain’t so bad) and you can’t build a Porche from a bucket of rusty spoons.

Ugh, I lack the energy to attempt a synopsis.

Dante 01‘s half-baked script and simplistic production design reek of “low-budget debut feature”, yet this is hardly Marc Caro’s first venture – he made the wonderful Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children in the 90s with Jean-Pierre Jeunet. How, then, has he managed to make a film as terrible as Dante 01? It is a mystery as incomprehensible as the plot of this film, and as uninteresting to solve.