Danny Boyle’s dreamland
psycho-thriller ;Trance ;elevates ;plot-knotting
mind games ;to a delirious new level. It would be wrong to say
too much about the story’s ever-deepening complications, and
difficult to do so in any case. Let’s just say this:
James McAvoy plays Simon, an employee at a London fine-art
auction house. One day a Goya painting called “Witches in the Air”
– pointedly featuring a man groping about blindly with a sheet over
his head – draws a winning bid of more than $40-million. At just
this moment, a group of what I suppose would have to be called art
thugs bursts into the auction room, led by the decidedly
un-thuglike Franck (Vincent Cassel – throw a sporty scarf on him
and he’d fit right into an Hermès ad). As tear-gas canisters roll
across the floor, Simon grabs the Goya and runs off to hide it
downstairs. When Franck eventually confronts him, there’s a tussle;
Simon gets knocked on the head, and when he awakes from a coma in
the hospital a few days later, he has no recollection of where he
hid the painting.
Then we learn that Simon was in on the theft. And
now that he’s claiming not to recall the painting’s current
location, Franck – after expressing his displeasure in a most
painful way — decides to take him to a hypnotherapist, a woman
named Elizabeth (Rosario Dawson), to recover his buried memory.
Simon wears a wire to her office so that Franck can monitor their
sessions from a car outside. But Elizabeth soon intuits this, and
she soon gets to know Franck, too. And being the movie’s designated
femme fatal, she has a deadly backstabbing agenda of her own.
; ; ;
That’ll have to do. As Simon drifts into his hypnotic trances,
the movie becomes a disorienting swirl of dreams and confusions.
There’s a red car driven by a mysterious young woman, and a room
full of “lost” paintings by Rembrandt, Degas, Manet and Van Gogh.
(These works, recreated here, actually are lost — stolen from a
Boston museum in 1990, they’ve never been recovered.) There’s also
some tricky business with an iPad, a few thoughts about the absence
of pubic hair in classical paintings, and a startlingly blunt
moment of full-frontal nudity.
Is Simon losing his mind? Are we losing ours? Or was Boyle, who
made the movie while planning his spectacular opening ceremony for
last summer’s London Olympics, just heavily frazzled himself? The
film’s original script, by Joe Ahearne, had been turned into a
British TV movie in 2001. Boyle, who had long had his eye on the
property, brought in his longtime collaborator John Hodge to punch
it up. By the time the story reaches its giddy conclusion, we too
have been expertly worked over.
With all of its flashbacks and fakeouts, the movie could be said
to be wildly over-determined, or maybe just silly. But it has
propulsive energy, and a gorgeous look. (Some of cinematographer
Anthony Dod Mantle’s elegant shots are composed like paintings
themselves.) Is it all too much? Maybe. Is that such a bad
thing? ; ; ;
Evil Dead
This exercise in classical
blood-bath monotony certainly does its grisly job, but little more.
Evil Dead is a remake of The Evil Dead, the
micro-budget 1981 horror movie that launched Sam Raimi as a
director and his star, Bruce Campbell, as an enduring cult
personage. The new film tweaks the original story a bit; but while
it offers a full complement of updated shocks, there are no
surprises. What we have here, more than anything else, is a tribute
to a much-admired classic whose arterial tropes have long since
saturated the fright-flick genre. ; ;
Raimi and Campbell, who also collaborated on two earlier sequels
to the first movie, are producers here; directorial duties have
been handed off to Uruguayan filmmaker Fede Alvarez, who drew much
notice with his 2009 giant-robot short, Panic Attack! The
script is by Alvarez and his writing partner, Rodo Sayagues, with
Diablo Cody, of all people, tiptoeing in to impart an authentic
youth-of-today tang to the dialogue. (Props to her, presumably, for
“I just don’t wanna become the Devil’s bitch!”)
The picture begins with a gruesome prologue, which is new. But
then, as in the original picture, we see a group of friends – two
guys, three girls again – arriving at a gloomy cabin in the woods.
The unsuspecting youths aren’t on vacation this time; Mia (Jane
Levy) has come to quick-kick a drug habit with support from her
brother, David (Shiloh Fernandez); his girlfriend, a dithery doctor
named Natalie (Elizabeth Blackmore); his nervous pal Eric (Lou
Taylor Pucci); and a young nurse, Olivia (Jessica Lucas), who has
brought along some meds and a syringe, which will come in handy.
(Arrange these characters’ first-name initials in a certain order
and you get a rather Raimi-esque joke.)
Inside the cabin, once again, is an evil book that’s very much
like the ancient Sumerian relic in the first film, which you’ll
recall was written in blood and bound in human skin. The new tome
is similarly ghastly, and it has a warning scrawled inside: “Leave
this book alone.” Naturally, the scholarly Eric ignores that, and
soon realizes that this foul text is an instrument for summoning
demons. Very quickly the young visitors begin to morph into
cackling, slobbery horrors. Anyone who’s seen the original Evil
Dead will already know all this, and will be hanging around
mainly in hope of fresh new gross-outs.
And there are indeed several. The attack of the killer vines in
a forest is a reprise of a famous Raimi scene, but later there’s a
power-saw-to-the-face shot that’s pretty amusing. And along with
much squirty dismemberment, there’s a drool-soaked scene that gives
new meaning to the phrase “speaks with forked tongue.”
Unfortunately – well, depending on your taste in these things –
there are also a nail-gun assault and a crowbar beating that push
the movie right up to the edge of torture porn.
It never really crosses that line, though. The film’s inventory
of nouveau bloody jolts simply illustrates how far we’ve traveled
down the road of pop Guignol since 1981. And director Alvarez has a
fanboy flair for this stuff. His lurid lighting is dismal in the
grand tradition, and his rejection of CGI in favor of old-fashioned
practical effects allows him to approach vintage cheesiness as a
style, even though it’s no longer a necessity. But he’s constrained
at every turn by the need to replicate a brand-name property whose
groundbreaking days are long past. Gorehounds may flock to this
picture, but will they still be buzzing about it 32 years from
now? ; ; ; ; ; ; ; … Read More
