Case 39 (2009)

I don’t normally go for supernatural thrillers very much. I just don’t like mysteries that are explained away by ghosts, demons and those who hang out with them. I like my murdering psychos to be exposed as flesh and blood villains with secret pasts that explain their crimes .You know, like in Scooby-Doo.

Case 39 is very much in the supernatural category, but I picked it up anyway, knowing only it was about a creepy kid, and who can resist a creepy kid movie? Not me, evidently.

Renée Zellweger plays Emily, a dedicated social worker. She has zero social life and is severely overworked. In fact, she has all of 38 open cases, that is, until her boss hands her yet another file. Case 39.

It concerns the Ferlands: mum, dad and 10 year old Lily (Jodelle Ferland). Lily’s teachers say she is displaying signs of abuse so Emily is dispatched to their gloomy old house (is there another kind?) to investigate. The parents sure seem weird but, as Emily’s boss rightly points out, weird does not necessarily a child abuser make. With any lack of evidence, she is forced to drop the case even though her instincts tell her otherwise.

Luckily, she gives the girl her home number just in case, and is able to come to the rescue after Lilly’s parents decide to stuff her in a burning oven one night. Monsters, right?  But how come they have five deadbolts on their bedroom door…on the inside?

With parents in jail, Emily temporarily fosters Lily who is so far all sweetness and innocence. But soon, she starts playing mind games with her psychologist and Emily’s friend, Doug (Bradley Cooper). (“Don’t apologize. You’re a grown-up… it’s embarrassing,” she reprimands him.) And one of Emily’s other young clients commits a horrible crime after apparently receiving a call from Lily.

There is not much good or bad you can say about Case 39. It is a path well traversed and yet, it is not a too bad an example of the genre. It moves along at a really good pace and it delivers just enough thrills (to me, alone in a dark room) to please, without traumatising.

Zellweger is her usual good, squinty self although I am not really sure what she is doing in a B grade horror in the first place. The real standout is a young Ferland, who does a great job in getting you to loathe a pretty, little girl.

For another comme ci, comme ça, creepy kid movie, see my review of Joshua.

As God Commands (Come Dio Commanda) (2008)

I am a big fan of Italian author Niccolo Ammaniti and have read every one of his books that’s been translated into a language I can read (regrettably, Italian is not one of them). As God Commands is based on his latest novel, The Crossroads and I was super excited to see it was on at this year’s Italian Film Festival.

Ammaniti’s Italy is not warmed by the Tuscan sun, nor does it feature romantic gondola rides in Venice, beautiful women in the Trevi Fountain or any other iconic tourist or film images that most non-Italians associate with Italy. The characters in As God Commands live in a bleak, industrialised provincial town, where there is little sunshine, real, or metaphorical. Poverty, dissatisfaction and social inequality are the norm.

Cristiano is thirteen and lives hand-to-mouth with his dad, Rino. Rino has a giant swastika on his bedroom wall, works as a labourer part time and sits in front of the TV drinking beer, full time. However, he is not completely devoid of charm and the father and the son are strongly devoted to one another, living in fear that Cristiano will be taken away by the social services.

The only other person in the pair’s lives who means anything to them is Quattro Formaggi, Rino’s mentally disabled friend. Quattro Formaggi, so named after his favourite pizza, is in love with an American porn star and spends his time building a nativity crib made up of toys and figurines, in his living room.

On a cold, wet night, nasty stuff happens that pushes Cristiano to do unthinkable things out of love and loyalty to his father.

Ammaniti specialises in black comedy which he uses to satirise and comment on the contemporary Italian society. He can be very dark, even downright morbid, but also whimsical, quirky and most of all, laugh-out-loud funny. He is also the master of plotting, you never know where he’s going to take his characters but you can’t wait to find out.

All of these qualities feature prominently in The Crossroads, but not many have made it through to the movie adaptation. The humour is completely gone as are the secondary characters whose exploits added further storytelling layers and richness to the book. All that left is the basic plot which makes As God Commands, a competent but otherwise unremarkable drama/thriller. For me, knowing exactly where the plot was going to go, it was also slightly boring and the heavy subject matter with no comic relief is a real downer.

This has been said before, but do skip the movie and read the book. Or, check out I am not Scared, a much better film adaptation of an Ammaniti novel.

Wanted (2008)

It’s been a very long time that I felt so repelled by a movie that it made every cell in my body scream with an urge to switch it off, to get away from it, to make it stop insulting my senses. Wanted made me feel that way.

By his own admission, Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy), is a bit of a non-entity. He works as an account manager at some generic firm and gets walked all over by his boss, girlfriend and supposed best mate. One day in a convenience store, he gets picked up by Fox (Angelina Jolie), who explains that Wesley’s long lost dad has just been killed. Turns out, papa was the world’s greatest assassin and the man who killed him is now after Wesley. After trashing half the city and causing deaths of countless extras in a shoot up and chase scene, Fox takes him to the headquarters of the imaginatively named, Fraternity.

We learn that Fraternity is an ancient organization of assassins, founded by weavers (yes, weavers) to rid the world of evil people. How do they know who to assassinate? Why, bad peoples’ names are coded into the threads of woven fabric. Um, so like who puts the names in the thread?  Faith, says Sloan (Morgan Freeman) the leader of the organisation. And like, what happens if the Fraternity doesn’t off people as the thread tells it to? Evil people are then let free to conduct evil deeds. Do not question the fabric!

Moving right along. Wesley agrees to be trained by the Fraternity in order to hunt down his father’s killer but mostly to escape his sad-ass existence. The training involves daily bashing, knifing, humiliation and general torture concluded by a bath in some wax-like substance which speeds up the recovery process. But fear not for the meek Wesley, for he ends up stronger and a better person for it. He even learns to ‘curve the bullet’. (You know how lame, conventional shooters only fire bullets in a straight line? The members of the Fraternity do a shoulder thing and their bullet curves to hit a target hidden behind an object.)

Wanted doesn’t simply celebrate violence. It fills a bathtub full of it, jumps in and smears it all over its body in delight. You hear the phrase “violence porn” bandied around a lot by hysterical people, intent of “protecting the children”, and I think I finally fully understand what it means – it is this movie described in just two words.

Visuals which should have been stunning are naff, unnecessary and annoying. Every second shot is shown in slow motion and accompanied by an audio track of a thumping heart beat. Why? Camera following a speeding bullet in reverse to its source? Seen it before in much better films.

But, if Wanted is insulting to your eyes and ears, it’s nothing compared to how insulting it is to your intelligence. It seems to be going for a Fight Club style message but it is the antithesis of that movie. No brains, no humor and oh, did I happen to mention how the Fraternity picks its victims? Yes, the thread.

I have long ago learn that Morgan Freeman and Angelina Jolie will prostitute their names and acting skills in all kinds of trash but I have seen most of James McAvoy’s  efforts and they have ranged from very good (Penelope, Becoming Jane) to brilliant (Atonement, The Last King of Scotland).  Wanted murders that record with a spray of curved bullets to its head.

The TV Set (2007)

How did this movie evade my radar so completely until now? And I pride myself on my decent size, up to date, movie radar. Anyway, thank you Quickflix for bringing it to my attention, guess your recommendations engine is occasionally spot on (I am still disturbed that you think I’d like Little Man, though).

During the opening titles, The TV Set informs us how the pilot season works in LA. Networks commission scripts, a handful get chosen to be made into pilots and even fewer of those see the light of day on prime time TV. This is the story of one such pilot, The Wexler Chronicles, a show about a lawyer returning to his home town after his brother’s suicide.  Its creator is Mike Klein (David Duchovny), who’s partly based the show on his own life and envisages it as a thoughtful comedy drama. The network folk see it as ‘a little bit of Ed and a little bit of Northern Exposure’. So far so good, but as the pilot goes into production, more than one creative difference emerges between the writer and the money bags people.

Mike’s nemesis at the network is Lenny (Sigourney Weaver), an exec whose reality TV show Slut Wars is a major ratings hit.  By her own admission, Lenny finds originality a bit scary and she likes to submit all the network pilots to her 14 year old daughter for assessment.  She and other suits at the network are not so crazy about the whole suicide angle. Can’t the brother be in jail and the mother dies? That is soooo much less depressing.

Casting is also an issue. Mike likes a theatre actor with a bad hair and a beard. He is understated, droll, perfect for the lead role. Lenny prefers Zach (Fran Kranz), who is charming but has only two methods of line delivery: over the top Chandler-esque or depressing.

Meanwhile, executive Richard McCallister (Ioan Gruffudd) has been imported from the BBC to give the network’s shows some clout but his instinct, which is to support the writer, is hindered at every turn.

Oh, how unkind and merciless this movie is to the US TV industry. It mocks it and satirises it and it’s just so deliciously funny.  Sure, you could say some of what’s depicted in The TV Set is absurd, exaggerated and that some of the characters are just cheeky caricatures, but is it really that far removed from reality? What is Slut Wars but a more honest name for America’s Next Top Model or The Bachelor? And if this is not how the majority of TV shows are really made, than how do you explain cookie-cutter mediocrities like NCIS and The Big Bang Theory? Or that crime against humanity, The Hills?

Alas, I will not be preaching about how all television is bad for you and how everything on it is eroding your intelligence because I don’t subscribe to that belief. But, the truth is, a lot of TV shows are designed by committee (composed of greedy, talentless people), catering to the lowest common denominator and they deserve to be satirised and ridiculed. If nothing else, seeing this movie will make you appreciate the good stuff even more because you’ll see how hard it must have been to get the likes of Mad Men and 30 Rock made in that kind of an environment.

The Painted Veil (2006)

It’s the 1920s and Kitty (Naomi Watts), a flighty, self-willed English socialite is no longer a spring chicken and a bit of a burden to her family. Painfully aware of this, she impulsively marries Dr Walter Fain (Edward Norton), a microbiologist based in Shanghai.

Penelope (2006)

Once upon a time, the rich, blue-blooded Wilherns were placed under a nasty curse after one of their cad sons got a servant girl pregnant and promptly dumped her.  Her mother, the town witch, wowed that every girl born into the Wilhern family from there on would look like a pig, until someone of her own kind accepts her and grows to love her for who she is (or words to that effect).

Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town by Paul Theroux

I don’t read much travel writing because it makes me feel a little bad. Bad, in a ‘why am I reading about this amazing place, why aren’t I there?’ kind of way. So when I do, I choose my material carefully. This mostly involves staying well away from the “how I cured my mid-life crisis in Tuscany/Provence” books and sticking to the proven favourites like Bill Bryson and Paul Theroux.

Dark Star Safari is Theroux’s most recent travel book, describing his 2001 trip, pithily summarized by the sub-heading: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town. Basically, Theroux traversed Africa from top to bottom in an unhurried pace, using rickety buses, cars, trains and even a canoe to get around. If you know one thing about Africa, you know it is not the kind of place where this is routinely done. It’s difficult. It’s dangerous. Some might say, it’s asking for trouble. As experienced and retold by Theroux, it’s all that, and much more.

This journey was a sort of a homecoming for Theroux, who believes he was shaped into an adult in Malawi, where he worked as a young teacher with Peace Corpse in the 60s. His affection for Africa is obvious from the start, as is his dedication to researched, beautiful and (very) opinionated prose.

Theroux’s traveling style is a Condé Nast Traveler antithesis. He’s determined to stay off the beaten path as much as possible which actually proves quite easy. Beaten paths – literal and metaphorical, are so rare in places he visits, his only options tend to be improvised routes that involve riding on top of trucks or hitching rides with strangers.

He expertly and vividly describes all of his destinations and along the way inserts slices of history to give context and inform. But, most importantly, he talks to everyone he comes across. And I mean, everyone. Nuns, prime ministers, former political prisoners, ship captains, farmers, writers, teachers, prostitutes, shop keepers, all open up to Theroux with their stories. Sometimes harrowing, sometimes inspirational, often both – it is these honest personal histories and commentary on Africa by Africans, that shape the book’s core and make it such a gratifying read.

Another thing I love about Theroux’s writing is how much of himself he puts in it. Opinions, memories, personal revelations are weaved throughout the book, painting a tangible picture of the author. Of course, you can never know how much of it is the real Theroux and how much is authorial manipulation but seeing how he doesn’t always comes across that flattering, I suspect it’s mostly the real deal.

He is worldly, engaging, well-researched, philosophical and happy to candidly describe awkward faux pas and transgressions he finds himself part of. On the other hand, he does sometimes appear as a pompous intellectual, frequently back-slapping himself for roughing it when all these other saps, as he sees it, parachute in and out of Africa for their safaris. He also has a wicked sense of humour, verbally assassinating many who were just asking for it.

Do I want to go to Africa as a result of reading this book? It’s certainly no travel brochure. It seems if you’re going to go to Africa, you can either go in luxury which strikes me as incongruous and providing a false experience of the place or, you can rough it like Theroux did and frankly, I don’t have the guts or the stamina for it. Until I find an acceptable middle ground I am happy to observe it from afar.

One thing it does make me want to do is read a lot more Theroux.

The Bet (2006)

Will (Matt Newton), a young Sydney stockbroker, makes a friendly bet with his banker buddy Angus (Aden Young) over who will make more money in 90 days with 50K starting point. Will comes from a working class background and feels he has something to prove to the born with a silver spoon in his mouth, Angus. Adjudicating the bet is their mutual friend, Benno (Tim Richards) who gives Will a bit of a push in the guise of some insider trading (‘If I were you I’d keep an eye on such and such pharmaceutical company’ etc).  Will’s new girlfriend, Tory (Sibylla Budd) is not amused especially since as a lawyer, she’s involved in the business affairs of that same pharmaceutical company.

With a plot like that, I was expecting something along the lines of The Bank or at least, Risk, two good Aussie corporate thrillers. Wrong. 

From the simple and promising opening premise, the plot evolves into an increasingly tedious collection of twists, most of which made little sense to me, partly because my knowledge of (and interest in) the stock market is rather lacking. Corporate takeover, shares plummeting, buy/sell ….yawn, yawn, yawn.

Characters are all shallow bores, inhibiting their shallow little world of yuppie pubs, harbour apartments and high class strip joints. I am aware that that Sydney exists but it ain’t the city I know, nor do I care to.

All along, the stylish cinematography is continually punctuated by a pointless counter of the days passed in the bet and an annoyingly intrusive violin score.

Worst of all, in the end, The Bet turns out to be more of a drama (a boring one in which I don’t care in the least about what happens to the protagonists) than a thriller, which was not what I signed up for.

Bashing our film industry has become a bit of a sport lately and I am not interested in indulging in it. I have always supported local films, passionately and indiscriminately back in the late 90s (when I actually entertained crazy notions of becoming a filmmaker myself), much less so a decade on. My enthusiasm has slowly wanned, lessened by too frequent disappointments (see this review) and too infrequent elations (Romulus, My Father). But, I will keep watching and will keep supporting, it’s my one concession to blind patriotism.

Meanwhile, I suggest you give The Bet a pass and check out these movies, still fondly remembered by me from my teenage love affair with Australian films: Doing Time for Patsy Cline (1997), Kiss or Kill (1997), Thank God He Met Lizzie (1997), Love And Other Catastrophes (1996), Children Of The Revolution (1996)…

Cassandra’s Dream (2007)

There’s a line that goes something like this: “Pizza is like sex. Even when it’s bad, it’s still pretty good”. Well, that is how I feel about Woody Allen films. I’ve seen pretty much everything he has ever made and I’d be hard pressed to find something that I at least didn’t like a little bit. Mostly, I love it (make that, I luuurve it, I loave it, I luff it).

Admittedly, a lot of his recent efforts have not been on par with his golden years but so what?  For someone so amazingly prolific (one film a year) he is bound to drop the standard occasionally, and when the original standard is so high, it’s forgivable. 

In Cassandra’s Dream, set in London, we meet Ian (Ewan McGregor) and Terry (Colin Farrell), two nice, working class lads desperately aspiring to make some decent money and climb the social ladder a step or two. Their mum says Terry is the “sporty one” while Ian is “the brains” which seems a fitting description from what we can gather. Terry works as a mechanic but frequently likes to test his luck with the horses and poker. He is in a happy, long term relationship with a nice waitress. Ian has been loyally helping at their dad’s restaurant but is keen to get into the hotel business, if only he had the funds. He is also fervently pursuing a glamorous young actress, quite aware he is way out of his depth there.

Enter uncle Howard (Tom Wilkinson). A self-made millionaire, plastic surgeon to the Hollywood’s rich and famous. The family has always relied on him for financial help, the boys and their mother quite happily, the father with resentment.  Uncle Howard is wiling to help again – bail Terry out of a major gambling loan and finance Ian’s hotel deal. But first, he has a favor of his own to ask. I won’t reveal the details, let’s just say, it’s nowhere near in the same sphere as a simple cash loan, and it puts the brothers in the middle of a serious moral dilemma.

This is not a film most people would associate with Woody Allen (it’s not funny) but fans will know he’s been in this crime and moral dilemmas territory before, most recently in Match Point and most famously in Crimes and Misdemeanors. He seems to be fascinated by this idea of how far people are willing to go to secure their own happiness and what happens after they’ve gone too far.

This again, is not amongst Allen’s best work but it’s still enjoyable enough. It’s suspenseful, well-acted and quite thought-provoking. I know I didn’t say what the brothers’ predicament is, but trust me, you are bound to mull over, however briefly, what you would do in their place once you see the movie.

Awake (2007)

At the start of Awake, we are informed that every year 700 people wake up during surgery. It’s called ‘anesthetic awareness’. As in, they are under full anesthesia, can’t talk, move or communicate in any way – but they can still hear and crucially, feel everything that is going on around them.  It’s frankly, a petrifying concept, but how do you build a good thriller around it?

Hayden Christensen plays Clay, a super rich young man living in his late father’s shadow. He lives with his slightly overbearing mother (Lina Olin) whom he adores. He has also recently gotten engaged to the beautiful Sam (Jessica Alba), whome he adores even more, but for various reasons he hasn’t told mum about it. Clay has a serious heart condition which means that every day he is waiting and hoping for that all important call informing him that a suitable donor heart is ready for transplant. When the time comes, Clay wants his good friend and doctor, Jack (Terrence Howard) to perform the surgery, even though mamma has her own cardio specialist on stand by.

Well, you can guess as much that Clay will be the one who gets to experience the horrors of anesthetic awareness at some stage in the film, but I think there is no way you can guess what happens after.  I didn’t, and I won’t tell you either. Suffice to say, a third into the film, after you have been puzzling over where it was all going for some time, there is a major twist. A twist so wicked (in all meanings of the word), that everything that comes after cannot possibly live up to it. But, Awake is still a hack of a thriller. I was completely engrossed by everything on screen, freaked out (in a good way) by the surgery scene and totally sidelined by the unexpected turn. Yes, everything after the twist is a bit silly and improbable, and in some other movie this would very much matter. Here, it really didn’t bother me.  

That’s all I’m going to say about Awake. The less you know, the better experience you’ll have watching it.