The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996)

A couple of years ago, Samantha Caine (Geena Davis) was found with amnesia. Today, she’s a mild-mannered school teacher, a suburban wife and mother, and seems very happy with her lot.

Alas, a couple of things happening at now put a stop to her happiness. Her old personality starts to surface after she gets a good hit on her head in an accident, and her old self clearly wasn’t a very nice person, trained in all the arts of the movie spy assassin. Which turns out to have been exactly what she was when her old associates start trying to kill her after having seen her on TV in a small town Christmas parade (as you know, all Shane Black films are bound by law to take place around Christmas). At the same time, the last private detective Samantha hired to find out who she was before her amnesia, the decidedly shady Mitch Hennessey (Samuel L. Jackson), finds some actual clues to her past. After Samantha, who is in truth called Charly, has fought off a first assassination attempt, she and Mitch go on a road trip together that will culminate in a lot of violence but will make clear who Samantha really was.

Put two lovers of excess in cinema like director Renny Harlin and writer Shane Black together, and you do indeed get a pretty excessive film. There’s violence I was really surprised a mainstream action film in the mid-90s got away with, there are explosions, there are so many people killed by our protagonist it’s difficult to describe this aspect of the film as anything but cartoonish. However, all this excess is based on what is to my mind probably Black’s most interesting script. It does of course contain his usual shtick about how horrible life and people are, but he’s exploring these ideas through an at first and outside of the action scenes very noir-ish and clever set-up that also concerns not just Samantha’s search for identity but also asks questions about what “identity” might even mean, and how fluent what we call our personalities are even when amnesia doesn’t come into play. Where did “Samantha”’s ethics come from exactly when she was birthed from the brain of a ruthless killer? This intersection of identity and ethics is also of interest to the film when it comes to Henessey, a guy who is as much of a con-artist as he is a private eye now, but who finds himself drifting back towards the better man he once was at the same time Samantha is going back towards the worse woman she was.

That exploring this through a big loud American action movie with conspiracy elements actually works as well as it does is a little wonder. But then, it also happens to be a fun and highly accomplished big loud American action movie delivered with all the excessive panache Renny Harlin (at this time still the second-best Hollywood mainstream action movie director after John McTiernan) is best at. But, perhaps because Harlin happened to be married to Davis at the time and really wanted to let her show off her considerable abilities after their curious pirate movie flop together, and clearly respected Jackson’s perfect rendition of the struggling private dick, he’s also giving the actors ample space to shine even when they are not murdering anyone. Add the horde of well-known faces and character actors (honestly too many to count) and you have yourself quite a bit of substance beside the explosions.


Really, my only actual caveat when it comes to The Long Kiss Goodbye is the set-up of a couple of its final action scenes where the wheels of the plot mechanics become so visible, it’s impossible not use the word “lazy” to describe the construction there. Fortunately, you’re not going to be able to hear me complain over the sound of stuff exploding.

Past Misdeeds: Ironclad (2011)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

Warning: if you need the movies you watch not to run roughshod over actual history, you'll probably need to keep away from Ironclad, or die of annoyance.

It's 1215 in the Kingdom of England, and King John (Paul Giamatti chewing scenery like a true champ) is quite displeased by having been pressed into signing the Magna Carta. So displeased, in fact, he imports a group of Danes under their Captain Tiberius (Vladimir Kulich) into the country to help him take the baronies he just made peace with truly back into his loving arms.

But a small part of the former rebels led by Baron William D'Aubigny (Brian Cox) and Archbishop Langton (Charles Dance) are willing to even hand the crown of England to the French king Louis to keep John out of power. The French, however, will take their time. Who wants a crown delivered on a silver plate, right? Because of the French dithering, their cause could be lost before it even truly begins if John and the Danes are able to take the strategically important castle of Rochester, which controls access to large parts of England.

Our rebels are a bit low on bodies at the moment, so it falls to D'Aubigny to take a troop of seven men he gathers in the traditional manner of such films, and who are played by people like Jason Flemyng and Mackenzie Crook, to the castle to help protect it together with the minor garrison its actual lord Reginald de Cornhill (Derek Jacobi) can - not exactly happily - muster. D'Aubigny's trump card, though, will be Templar Thomas Marshal (James Purefoy!), a man who may have been traumatized by the Crusades but who is still the best at what he does (which, as you can assume, isn't very nice).

Soon, John and his Danes arrive at Rochester and a siege ensues. The fighting and screaming and nearly dying of hunger is only interrupted by various discussions about the worth of faith and oaths, as well as the mandatory love story: Marshal and Reginald's wife Isabel (Kate Mara) - a woman too independent to be happy in her time and place - fall for each other hard.

As I already warned, if you go into Jonathan English's (a rather ironic director name taken in this context) Ironclad hoping for respect for historical facts, you'll be struck down with some kind of fit sooner or later; this is, after all, a film taking place in 1215 that ends with the French king Louis (who was actually a prince by the time anyway) holding the crown of England, which is not a thing that happened, and, curiously enough, also not really a historical fact that needed changing for the film's story to work at all. Though it has to be said that the film does, on the other hand, show an interest in a degree of historical veracity beyond historical fact, so the middle ages in Ironclad's England are appropriately poor, cold, muddy, and the populace's education leaves something to be desired. I think the easiest way to ignore the film's historical failings is to treat it as a - rather excellent - sword and sorcery film without the sorcery. Just pretend this takes place in Engelund, and the king's name is Jim, and all problems are solved.

If you are one of those people unable to do that, though, you'll probably also be quite annoyed by the film's treatment of its characters. Everyone's psychology works more or less like that of people in a movie made in 2012, with little regard taken for what we today assume to be the specifics of the medieval mind. Personally, I don't mind this too much. I'm generally doubtful when a film turns historical figures into aliens, because I doubt human psychological and emotional needs have changed all that much during the course of history, but rather our consciousness of them and our way to express them has.

Anyway, the film's rather open approach to history also results in something I find rather believable, and definitely one of the three elements I like most about it. Namely, Ironclad's willingness to treat its female lead as an actual human being with a degree of agency. The film is never confusing Isabel's position and meagre rights in life with her actual inner life and her capabilities. Isabel is still, alas, neither hero nor actual centrepiece of the film, yet Ironclad shows a respect for her and interest in her that can't be taken for granted in this sort of historical adventure movie, particularly not a contemporary one where stating historical veracity often rather seems to mean "putting the women in their places".

The second element of Ironclad I find particularly noteworthy is of course James Purefoy, for James Purefoy is an actor who is evidently improbably awesome in whatever role he is cast in, putting charisma and effort in whether a film and script deserve them or not. What is true in general is also true here. Actually, the rest of the cast of predominantly British character actors are no slouches either (particularly Kate Mara and Paul Giamatti), but, you know, James Purefoy!


Finally, Ironclad is also just very, very good at the main thing it sets out to do, creating gory, exciting and slightly repellent battle scenes which from time to time feature a bit too much of the old shaky cam but make up for that by their sheer blood-spattering power. These scenes are quite a thing to behold and are in fact so convincing they leave no doubt in a viewer's mind that twenty men can hold off one thousand enemies in a siege. Which is exactly the sort of thing I like to take away from my medieval adventure movies. Hail King Louis of England!

The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016)

Tommy Tilden (Brian Cox) owns a morgue in some small county in the USA. He’s also the local coroner, clearly a diligent and experienced one, working together with his son Austin (Emile Hirsch), who is staying on as his dad’s assistant more because he can’t bring himself to leave his old man, who is still not really coping with the death of his wife two years ago, than because he loves the work.

This night, the local sheriff (Michael McElhatton) brings trouble to their door in form of a female unidentified corpse (Olwen Kelly). The titular Jane Doe was found half buried in the cellar of a family home whose other inhabitants have died under mysterious circumstances. How the young woman came to be there nobody knows, nor is the cause of her death at all apparent – she looks as well-preserved as any corpse you’ll encounter (he said, expertly).

On the outside she does at least. As the Tildens will discover during the autopsy, on the inside, Jane Doe is suffering from all manner of horrible injuries. Impossible injuries for that matter, for there’s no way her inside could look like it does and her outside not showing any of it. While the coroner duo puzzle over the corpse and what they find in it, strange and increasingly threatening things start happening around them. It’s as if their Jane Doe is much more then just a creepy corpse.

The Autopsy of Jane Doe is not exactly the film you’d expect André Øvredal to direct after the brilliant POV horror/fantasy comedy Troll Hunters. It is a very different film both tonally and formally, yet it shares with the previous one its director’s calm control over his material and a precise focus on what’s important for the film at hand.

Formally, The Autopsy is nearly classicist horror, taking the autopsy gone wrong scenes we know as set pieces from quite a few other films and turning them into a full movie that decides not to follow a lot of horror rules established in the 80s. So there’s barely a body count – making the deaths that do happen all the more emotionally important – and while this isn’t a film that’s showing nothing of its supernatural threat (there’s a bit of the red stuff for sure, some might argue even a bit too much in the finale scenes), Øvredal prefers to use things that are heard but not seen, shadows in the corner, and the audience’s minds.

He’s rather brilliant at this, too, using the small cast and the few rooms the film takes place in to create a palpable affair of dread, isolating his characters and turning their normal surroundings into a place of horror for them (while still keeping the irony in mind that the characters’ normal surroundings would certainly strike parts of the audience as anything but). The escalation of the situation is nearly perfectly timed as well, developing slowly but not so slowly anyone should get impatient.

One of the film’s greatest strengths is how cleverly it uses Tommy’s and Austin’s relationship and their character background not only to make them relatable to an audience (which is always well-meant but a very basic thing to do) but really makes what makes them tick important to the way they relate to the supernatural goings-on. Even though there’s a thematic and metaphorical relation between Jane Doe and the Tildens, and more importantly to the way they react to her, The Autopsy never falls into the habit of only seeing its supernatural threat as the metaphor. So this is very much a film about pain, what it does to people for worse yet also for better, and how we attempt to take on other peoples’ pain, but it is also a film about two guys fighting a supernatural threat that deserves quite a bit of compassion. Which is just the way I like a horror film to handle this sort of thing.

I’m not terribly fond of the film’s final act, though, for in the last few minutes, the plot stumbles into a needless array of horror film conventions that doesn’t really feel of a piece with what came before. I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if that most terrible of monsters, the focus group, had struck there again.

Still, a bad minute or fifteen are by far not enough to drag down a film this accomplished and clever, so The Autopsy of Jane Doe is still one of the best horror films I’ve seen last year (and 2016 had quite a few good to brilliant ones).

In short: Manhunter (1986)

Before Anthony Hopkins chewed the scenery as Hannibal Lector, there was this Michael Mann adaptation of Robert Harris’s first novel featuring everyone’s favourite cannibalistic psychiatrist/psychiatric cannibal (in a minor role). Brian Cox gives a rather more laidback Hannibal (in this case named Lecktor), because on the psycho side, Manhunter is mostly the show of Tom Noonan as Francis Dollarhyde. Noonan goes for a performance that finds the wounded in the grotesque and the horrible, making Dollarhyde relatable as a terrible human being because we can still see his humanity in his monstrosity. In a way, Dollarhyde reflects William Petersen’s Will Graham who has wounded himself by having to become the grotesque and the horrible to understand it.

Plotwise, after about three million post Silence of the Lambs films, Manhunter does look rather quotidian, with Graham basically having all the problems all movie profilers have (whereas real life profilers, going by the books they write when they retire, mostly seem to suffer from badly inflated egos and a concept of their own importance you don’t need to be a cosmicist to find ridiculous), Dollarhyde’s peculiar obsessions looking downright sensible compared to the nonsense many of his later colleagues will get up to, and a lot of dialogue sounding very much like the psycho procedural movie version of “yada yada”. However, there’s not just Noonan’s strong performance to carry the film but also Michael Mann’s peculiar sensibilities as a director. Never has the plot been written that Mann will not turn strange through an emphasis on atypical plot beats, and the staging of scenes in highly stylized and individual manners.

In this case, Mann has decided to bury his characters in horrifying modernist architecture and the colour white, suggesting that a lot of what’s wrong with these people is caused by an overabundance of white light.

The Anomaly (2014)

It’s the near future, when cells and tablets will be semi-transparent and people really love blueish glowing things. PTSD-suffering ex-soldier Ryan (Noel Clarke) suddenly finds himself in a van next to a shackled boy (Art Parkinson) who tells him something about having been kidnapped by men in red masks. Ryan unshackles the boy and flees with him, the kidnappers in hot pursuit. However, it’s clear something more strange than “just” lost time is going on with our protagonist. For one, one of the kidnappers (Ian Somerhalder) seems to have Ryan’s cell number, and for two, there’s a red mask in his pocket.

Before things can become any clearer, Ryan loses consciousness and again awakes in circumstances he can’t explain, again close to the kidnapper with whom he seems to be on very friendly terms, and clearly after enough time has passed for him to grow a beard. That’s not the last time this sort of thing will happen to our hero, and it will take a bit until he – as well as the audience – will find his bearings. It is, not to get all spoiler-y, not a good situation he’s in, and it’ll take quite a few desperate acts for him to get out of it again. Maybe he’ll even have to go into the world saving business.

By now, it’s pretty obvious that Noel Clarke – The Anomaly’s director, lead, and writer of “additional material” whatever that means – has ambitions to be a bit more than the guy who played a semi-companion on Doctor Who and did minor to medium parts in various indie and genre productions afterwards. I suspect a part of the motivation here might be that it’s still difficult for actors of colour who aren’t very very lucky or incredibly talented – if not both - to get actual straight up leading parts, and a good way to change that is to make films of one’s own where the degree of creative control is certainly higher than for an actor without too much clout. Which sounds like a good plan to me. Unfortunately, until now, I wasn’t convinced I as a viewer would get any movies I find actually worth seeing out of it.

That’s changed with the film at hand. Sure, The Anomaly is a pretty typical low budget SF/action film with quite a few of the expected clichés – the improbably helpful prostitute, the evil rich men, the Ugly American spies, and so on – but it’s a generally well made one that uses its set-up in clever and inventive ways, taking the conceit of Ryan only ever having about ten minutes time to get anything done and his foes realizing this and working against it to keep the pacing well up, with no wasted second. Consequently, the film feels very tight, keeping to the rules it has set up for itself and then making the most out of the opportunity to make a movie where all connections between scenes have to be made by audience and main character alike through inference. I’m actually not sure this approach would work with less generic characters than those we encounter here, for the film’s main gimmick just doesn’t lend itself to this complexity in characterisation, and instead of a film about a man acting quite heroically in a highly stressful situation and punching and shooting other people a lot we’d get one about a guy looking around confusedly while barely comprehensible things happen around him.

And though that could go down well with the art house crowd – and on a patient day, with me – that way perhaps an interesting SF film about the nature of identity and memory lies, yet also complete commercial disaster. So instead, we have a film that fits the “clever low budget genre movie” description to a T, and that’s fine with me too.

Apart from its general cleverness and tightness – and that would be more than enough for me to appreciate and recommend The Anomaly – there are other elements here I find worth praising. First and foremost, I love the economical way Clarke presents the near future this takes place in as the near future, putting exactly as much FUTURE SCIENCE in as his budget allows, with a good understanding of the appropriate signifiers (see-through stuff! blue glowing stuff! a freakish skyline!) and no attempt to do more than he can actually afford to show.

Knowing how much one can do on a budget and what the important elements are one needs to show or suggest to keep the plot – and a film’s future - convincing for what one wants and needs it to do is particularly important in a film like this. In fact, I’m convinced what kills a lot of budget SF action movies isn’t so much that they are a bit generic, but that they don’t seem to understand when and where they need to put telling details into their worlds to make them look just convincing and living enough. Nobody, well, nobody who actually likes movies like The Anomaly, expects a realistically believable future – what we expect is a future we can believe in as the background to whatever punching and shooting the film has to offer. If there’s a bit more to it, like it is here, that’s just all the better.

However, before I oversell The Anomaly, I have to point out its biggest weakness. Although Clarke is generally a competent contemporary director (that is, a director who knows and uses comparatively state of the art tricks but doesn’t overdo them so as to not make his film unwatchable with all the shaking, the whooshing and the yellow and teal), he is at his weakest in the action scenes, as a director as well as an actor. In most of the melee fights, he utterly overdoes that thing where a movie stops for second or so to then speed up a little, supposedly to help the audience appreciate the physical impact of a punch (or in this case, of every third punch anyone lands), and to hide that nobody involved is a very practiced screen fighter. In practice, it just looks a bit tacky, and instead of hiding the lack of screen fighting prowess of Clarke and Somerhalder, it rather emphasises it. Whatever happened to stuntmen? It’s not catastrophically bad, but it does drag the film down from what could be excellent to good, leaving a curious bit of incompetence in a film that is anything but otherwise.

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On Exploder Button: Ironclad (2011)

Remember how eeeeevil King John lost the English throne to Louis of France in 1215? Well it sure happened in someone's Crusader Kings 2 game, so it might as well make its way into a historical adventure movie.

But fret not, friends of medieval people with swords, and of James Purefoy, if you can ignore silly little things like historical fact, Ironclad has a lot of good to offer. What kind of good, I'll relate in my column over at Exploder Button.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,american movies,german movies,reviews,adventure,action,james purefoy,brian cox,kate mara,derek jacobi,paul giamatti,other places

Exit Humanity (2011)

The end of the US Civil War marks the beginning of the zombie apocalypse, at least in Tennessee, where Exit Humanity takes place. Six years after the beginning of that particular end, veteran Edward Young (Mark Gibson) returns from a hunting excursion to his cabin in the woods to find his wife a zombie and his little son gone.

Edward begins to roam the area around his home until he finds the kid, also as one of the walking dead. After Edward kills has killed him, he at first tries to kill himself too, now that everyone he loved and everything he believed in is gone. But a not quite successful attempt at that, and the look at a picture of a waterfall many days of travel away that gave Edward hope all through the war changes his mind. Before he'll die, he wants to throw his son's ashes into the waters to give him at least some semblance of peace.

On his travel there, Edward meets a man named Isaac (Adam Seybold), whose sister Emma (Jordan Hayes) has been abducted by former General Williams (Bill Moseley) for his pet "doctor" Johnson (Stephen McHattie) to experiment on, the witch Eve (Dee Wallace), and just possibly reasons to regain his own humanity.

Whenever I think a certain sub-genre of horror movies has finally reached the point of oversaturation, that nothing of further interest can be done in it anymore, a movie like John Geddes's Exit Humanity appears and actually manages to be a fantastic zombie movie at a point when such a thing seemed increasingly improbable to me. Exit Humanity also manages to be yet another excellent entry among the growing number of horror westerns.

What makes this particular film so special are a handful of things. Most obviously, there's the film's unhurried pacing that isn't caused by the typical indie horror problem of a script that's burying its core themes and plot in boring minutiae, but really is what the film's mood and its characters call for. There are long and important scenes of Mark Gibson alone with nature that are quite a bit more exciting than anyone could have expected. Geddes knows when and how to end scenes (another of my indie horror pet peeves is that too many directors don't seem to know how to do that at all), which slow moments to show because they are important for an audience to understand the characters, and which dramatic moments not to show.

Exit Humanity is a handy reminder that the quality and rhythm of a movie are determined as much by the things one leaves out (we never get to see Edward killing his undead wife, for example, but only witness the aftermath) as by those one includes. I was also very impressed by Geddes's ability to provide the film with a sense of place and time, making impressive use of the landscape of Ontario that may not be strictly authentic as a portrayal of woods in Tennessee but feel real and alive to me; the rather lavish (and free as in beer) nature of the landscape also provides Exit Humanity with the best enhancement of its bleak yet hopeful mood a film could hope for.

Additionally, the director makes two decisions that sound horrible on paper, yet in practice work out very well. Showing some of the film's more dramatic sequences in pretty rough animation may be a budgetary decision (or it may not be), but it's a decision that just works, giving these moments a quality of the mythical or the nightmarish that is perhaps more effective than just another action scene would have been. Strangely effective directorial decision number two is to have large parts of the plot and philosophical musings of Edward being narrated by the off-screen voice of Brian Cox. I generally hate off-screen monologues, but - again - Exit Humanity's mostly just works. Cox has just the right voice for the monologues he's given, and the film seldom falls into the trap of only telling its audience the things it is already seeing. The primary reason for the voiceovers may be to fill in some gaps in the plot, yet his voiceovers don't feel like an inorganic stop-gap; in fact, it's hard to imagine the film working as well as it does without them.

The acting is Exit Humanity's final trump card. The well-known actors in smaller roles (a traditional element in independent horror movies) are doing a fine job here, with nobody just slumming for a cheque for a day's work (so no Michael Madsen). The true stars are the lesser known Gibson, Seybold and Hayes though. The trio go through the film's more difficult moments with grace and style, always keeping their characters from becoming the horror movie clichés they could have been in less capable hands.

Technorati-Markierungen: canadian movies,reviews,john geddes,mark gibson,jordan hayes,adam seybold,brian cox,dee wallace,bill moseley,stephen mchattie,horror,western,zombies