Three Films Make A Post: Carrol Jo Hummer--A working man who's had enough!

White Line Fever (1975): I know that this film by Jonathan Kaplan about an independent trucker played by Jan-Michael Vincent taking on the long-haul version of The Man has quite a few admirers. However, for me, the mix of traditional trucker exploitation, hicksploitation humour and earnest working class “Organize!” doesn’t really quite come together. Taken alone, every given scene is a perfectly fine example of its given genre, together, they result in a film of wildly fluctuating tone and uneven pacing that really would have needed to decide where it wants to put its emphasis.

Kill Me Again (1989): This is the first of now quality TV director John Dahl’s neo noirs after his time as a music video director, a series of films that would lead to at least two absolute classics of the genre. For its first two acts, this is nearly on its way to that status as well. Dahl uses his slick and polished style and the desert sun to perfectly replace the play of shadow and light of the classical noir, letting his characters go through variations of classic tropes that get enough of a twist to feel new. Val Kilmer (before he apparently started to believe that the main job of an actor is to sabotage the movie he is in), his then wife Joanne Whalley and Michael Madsen fit into this surface bright noir world perfectly.

Alas, the film breaks down nearly completely in the final act, with too many implausibilities even for a noir, and a bad case of random plot twist syndrome.

The Dry (2020): While I respect it and its approach, I can’t say I really enjoyed Robert Connolly’s adaptation of Jane Harper’s novel as much as I’d have liked too. There’s certainly a great sense of the dry Australian outback it takes place in on display, and the film also makes the book’s flashback structure flow much more organically than its source.

But for my tastes, the film is a bit too distanced from the crime(s) and the people at its heart, using a clinical look on its characters and their travails that makes it difficult to empathise with them, packing little emotional heft despite being about things of great emotional weight.

Deliver Us from Evil (2014)

Like The Conjuring, this is “based on true events”, so watch out for demonically possessed serial killers and consult your local Catholic priest, I guess. Also, watch out which writing on what walls you read.

Anyway, tough cop Sergeant Sarchie (Eric Bana) and his obviously not long for this world self-declared adrenaline junkie partner Butler (Joel McHale) – who for some reason carries two combat knifes on the job - are having an even worse time than is usual in their jobs. There’s a series of violent crimes committed by a random assortment of people. The perpetrators don’t all fit too well into the usual scheme of normal people just losing it, and their behaviour reaches the point where “crazy” isn’t really the best explanation for their deeds anymore anymore. A family complains of the supernaturally caused noises in their cellar; and Sarchie who always had a curious sense for coming trouble now starts to have visions connected to these seemingly disconnected cases that just might be more than mere hallucinations.

Something really bad might be going on in the city’s dark streets, and formerly junkie priest Mendoza (Édgar Ramírez) might just be right with his dark mumblings about demonic possession. Of course, it’ll take a bit for Sarchie to believe this, and he himself just might be bringing more of his work home than can be good for his family.

As you know, Jim, I’m not a fan of possession horror movies but when a film is as well realized as Scott Derrickson’s Deliver Us from Evil, I am willing and able to get over myself and enjoy it, even though this particular film contains the even less well-loved element of the lapsed believer coming back into the fold because DEMONS(!).Clearly, that godhood isn’t one for subtlety. At least, unlike with The Conjuring, the relapse into religion makes psychological sense for Sarchie, and the demonic possessions as realized by Derrickson are creepy enough to convince me this is a man acting sane towards an insane world instead of one creeping back into psychological childhood. It does of course help that the film goes out of its way to portray Mendoza, our personified religious authority, as flawed and human as any of us, and does even – without outright stating it – make a convincing case as the priest for a vessel through which the powers of his godhood flow and not the one actually owning and controlling them. And while I don’t share in its theology, I really appreciate the film taking its time and space to integrate these things into the actual plot and not treating priests and exorcisms either as a deus ex machina (ha!) or some kind of superhero. This does also feed into making the main characters convincing and their doubts and suffering much more relatable by it, even if you don’t buy into their religion, or many of the tenants of the plot, at all.

Not surprisingly given my predilections, I don’t think the Christian mythology the film uses is as creepy as the mostly made-up one from Derrickson’s fantastic Sinister but the film is really good at convincing the audience to be in the presence of actual supernatural Evil instead of some quipping asshole that pukes green stuff because that’s what happened in The Exorcist or that someone who does that whole floating in a ceiling corner rigmarole as taken from The Last Exorcism.

There’s also the simple fact that Derrickson is just plain great at staging horror scenes, using clichés in the best possible manner, which is as a common ground between himself and his audience on which he can build whatever horrific image he has in mind. And, he does have quite a few of those in mind, often easily reaching the point – at least for me – where things truly become disturbing.

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In short: Hanna (2011)

(I'm keeping the plot pretty vague today to avoid unnecessary spoilers.)

In a house in the snowy woods somewhere far away from civilisation live Erik (Eric Bana) and his seventeen year old daughter Hanna (Saoirse Roman, who will turn out to be able to project wonder and frightening coldness in equal measure). Apart from the rules of survival in the wilderness, Erik has taught his little girl an astonishing number of ways to kill someone quite dead, all in preparation for the day when Hanna will have to come out of hiding and tangle with the world of spies.

Hanna - without question also driven by the sort of youthful unrest one develops when one has never met anyone beside one's father and knows large parts of the human experience only from an encyclopaedia - decides that the time is now, and begins an odyssey that'll take her some decisive steps on the way to growing up.

Hanna will have to survive the unhealthy interest of CIA agent Marissa Wiegler (Cate Blanchett) in her, learn a few things about her family's and her own past, and will do a bit of violence to quite a few people in the process.

Joe Wright's Hanna is a pretty darn odd entry into the books of the modern spy film. At first, it has all the hallmarks of being a movie deeply indebted to the semi-realist school of the genre that culminated in the Bourne trilogy, as if somebody had planned to milk the idea of "Jason Bourne as a strange teenage girl". But the further the film goes along, the clearer it becomes that any form of realism, be it semi or complete, is not at all what the film's aiming at. Sure, the film's action sequences stay inspired by Bourne's ways, everything else, however soon mutates into an often dream-like mix of quite unexpected elements. Allusions to the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm abound, and Hanna's travels (or is it a quest?) lead the film into places where the spy movie, the fairy tale, and the free-form strange mix into one of the more unexpected films about a teenager growing up.

Somehow, Wright still manages to keep what could be a mess of metaphors being a highly satisfying movie. Usually, I'm not the biggest fan of films this obviously in love with their own - often quite obvious (Cate Blanchett stepping out of the mouth of the big bad wolf, etc) - metaphorical systems. Hanna, however, manages something pretty special. It takes its metaphors and not just presents them to its audience with a shout of "look how clever I am!", but really makes them dance and live as parts of a world its audience watches on screen. This is the sort of film where it feels natural and not unnecessarily artificial when one of the characters begins whistling a motive from the Chemical Brothers' (surprisingly excellent) soundtrack.

There's something special about a film that manages to flow as beautifully as this one, that can picture a brutal action sequence, the silent sense of wonder Hanna shows for the outside world, the panic she feels from the information overload, and the strangeness of Morocco and Berlin (like any place, strange in their own ways) as part of the same continuum of movement and rhythm.

As should be obvious by now, I'm pretty much in love with Wright's film, seeing as it does mix various of my favourite cinematic things (spies! movement! music! fairy tales! irreality! female ass-kickery!) in a perfect way, but really, it's the sort of film that is so heavily in need of being experienced first, and talked about second, that all I can say about it seems insufficient.

 

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