reVIEW (27)
THE FORGOTTEN

For those unaware of it, the premise of The Forgotten is an interesting one: Julianne Moore plays a woman with the unlikely name of Telly Paretta, a grieving mother who lost her son in a plane crash some fourteen months ago. One day, she is suddenly told by everyone—including her increasingly estranged husband, played by E.R.’s Anthony Edwards—that she never had a son, that the memories she has of her little boy’s life and death, were all constructs of her mind. Even treasured photos of her son Sam are somehow altered, her boy erased everywhere else except from her memory.
For the first thirty minutes or so of the film, the mind games are enough to keep the audience engaged and curious, but when Telly makes an astounding leap in logic, the story bungles its way into X-Files territory, complete with shadowy operatives apparently working for the government, and never quite recovers from the fatal misstep.

Though it could be argued that Moore chose to do The Forgotten because of all the maternal angst and inner strength she gets to sink her considerable acting teeth into, it boggles the mind why actors of the caliber and talent of Gary Sinese and Alfre Woodard chose to appear in the film, given the glaring flaws in the script itself. It doesn’t help any that director Joseph Ruben is notorious for helming lackluster thrillers like the Julia Roberts-starrer Sleeping With The Enemy, or The Good Son with Macauley Culkin and Elijah Wood.
I can’t even say The Forgotten’s failure is because the material is now inherently hackneyed, given that the X-Files Moment has come and gone: Alex Proyas dealt with much of the same themes and subject matter in the astounding Dark City, in a much more fantastic, yet much more emotionally-satisfying way.
What’s more, the manner in which the film ends does nothing to resolve the primal quandary: the problem is still hanging over everyone’s stupidly smiling face once the credits roll. And the ultimate triumph of Maternal Love over the sinister machinations of Them rings so hollow, I can still hear the echoes nearly half a day after I’ve seen the film.

Having mentioned Maternal Love though, the film does seem to display a feminist streak, in that the two main female characters played by Moore and Woodard, are the ones more readily open to accept the fantastic, improbable explanation, as opposed to the male characters, who are either slow on the uptake, totally inept, or outright collaborators.
I think part of the problem is the fact that there is no apparent reason why Telly is immune to the process. Is it because she’s a woman? Surely other women underwent and succumbed to the forgetting. Is it because she’s a parent? But other parents forgot their children as well. Is it (as she underscores in a line of dialogue towards the film’s end) because she is a mother? But again, surely other mothers were made to forget too.
So Telly is apparently an exceptionally strong-willed mother. But what made her so? What events in her life contributed to these characteristics? What is Telly’s psychology? The script doesn’t give us anything to work with on that score.
So we are asked to identify and sympathize with Telly because she is a mother in pain trying to convince everyone else of her sanity, proof that grief is not a sign of weakness, or worse, madness. Fine. Given Moore’s acting chops, that’s the easy part of the deal. It’s all the other stuff that comes along with The Forgotten that’s difficult to swallow.

In the end, the motivation for Them seems almost dismissive, as if to say, We can give you the barest skeleton of a reason, but that’s okay; we’ll just give you another scene of Telly remembering Sam, thus proving her pure, unwavering love for him. Or worse, We don’t need to outline the motivation here since you’ve seen all the motivation for this sort of thing from every single X-Files episode in existence, from back when Mulder first met Scully.
And though I could commend the filmmakers for the naturalistic approach to the fantastic elements of the plot, I choose not to, since that decision didn’t help in raising the credibility of the material one iota: the film is as hard to swallow now as it would be if it had pink laser beams and vari-colored lights pinwheeling through the night sky. (Though seeing Telly on a flying bicycle with Sam might have been an amusing sight.)
The best I can say is, if you’re a Julianne Moore fan, then maybe you should see The Forgotten.
Stress on the “maybe.”

(The Forgotten OS courtesy of impawards.com; DVD cover art courtesy of amazon.com.)

(The above review was originally published under the title, “Best Forgotten.”)

PERFECT CREATURE
(Review)

It’s been awhile since I’ve seen a largely satisfying vampire movie, but Glenn Standring’s visionary Perfect Creature has broken that particular drought.
Set in an alternate future where disease is rampant due to early genetic tinkering by the alchemists, the centuries-long alliance between humanity and the Brothers (a more highly evolved branch of Homo sapiens with pointy canines; it’s the sort of story where we never hear the “V” word) is suddenly put in peril when Brother Edgar (Leo Gregory; Tristan + Isolde) begins killing humans, apparently something that has never been done since the Brothers first came into the world.
Standing in mad Brother Edgar’s way are Brother Silus (the man who would have been Wolverine, Dougray Scott, seen recently on Desperate Housewives and soon in the upcoming Hitman), who is being groomed to take over leadership of the Brothers, and Lilly (Saffron Burrows; Deep Blue Sea and, more recently, in Fay Grim: review in Archive June 2007), a human police officer haunted by her past.

What will strike audiences first about Perfect Creature is the wonderfully imagined setting, one of those retrofuturist cities where zeppelins soar the skies. The look and atmosphere is largely Victorian England, but there are elements taken from other time periods as well, some as late as World War II. The film’s look is reminiscent of everything from Terry Gilliam’s Brazil to Alex Proyas’ Dark City, and yet, is something that is particularly its own.
But what ultimately gives the setting its ring of truth is how well-thought out the milieu is. Standring clearly spent time in developing this world, mapping out its social and religious (and to a lesser extent, political) environs. There was the same sense of tremendous forethought that went into Kurt Wimmer’s Ultraviolet. (Say what you want about Ultraviolet’s plot—or the lack of it, actually—but it’s a world that had its rules laid out pretty impressively.)

The world of Perfect Creature is one where religion and science never really split, where humanity has the Brothers—who are portrayed as an interesting mix of priests and guardian angels—to watch over them.
Dougray Scott, who adopts a constant air of a cold, observant superior, does a commendable job as Brother Silus. The beauty here is that you never get the sense of any haughtiness in his superiority. Silus is simply so much better than a mere human, and though he is acutely aware of that difference, he is also sympathetic to the human condition. Scott also manages to temper his performance with a predatory undercurrent, giving the impression that Silus could very well snaps bones and rip flesh apart, but chooses not to because he has vowed to be a protector.
And while Silus is the narrative’s Michael, Edgar is most definitely Lucifer. A brilliant geneticist who works to save his own race from possible extinction—a Brother hasn’t been born in nearly a century; a female Brother has never been born at all (all Brothers are, in effect, mutant offspring of normal human females)—Edgar falls prey to the madness in his blood, and by his actions, dooms the peace between humanity and her unearthly children.

As a film, Perfect Creature plays as a fascinating hybrid of a number of cinematic strains (the serial killer film; the epidemic film; the vampire film; the future dystopia film), and yet ultimately, plays out as none of the above. Just as its look, Perfect Creature is its own particular animal.
And though Edgar’s final fate may border on anti-climax, and the film’s final twist border on deus ex machina, Standring does leave us with a world ripe for revolution, and this is one of those rare moments where I actually do want to see a sequel, if only to get another chance to dive back into this engrossing milieu.

(Perfect Creature posters courtesy of upcominghorrormovies.com & black-magic.co.nz; DVD cover art courtesy of amazon.com.)

reVIEW (11) 
SAW

With Saw IV set to open this Halloween, I thought it a good idea to resurrect this review, which was previously published in 2004 under the title, “The Big Blood-Drenched Picture.”

jigsaw n : a machine saw with a narrow vertically reciprocating blade for cutting curved and irregular lines or ornamental patterns in openwork
vt : to arrange or place in an intricate or interlocking way in the manner of the parts of a jigsaw puzzle
adj : suggesting a jigsaw puzzle or its separate pieces

James Wan’s Saw is the cinematic equivalent of a bear trap (to borrow an analogy from the film); once it begins, those rusty, razor-toothed jaws snap shut, and there’s little else you can do but sit riveted to your seat till the bitter, bloody end.
What if you woke up to find yourself chained to a pipe in a decrepit bathroom, without knowing who put you there, or why?
From this seed, the twisted and gnarled script of Saw—written by Leigh Whannell, who plays Adam in the film—grows.
And it turns out to be one of the best, most intense, and most involving English-language horror films made in quite a while.

An excellent marriage of content and technique, Wan’s directing style, modern and yet not too MTV for its own good, complements the non-linear script written by Whannell to a tight tee. In much the same way that the David Goyer-written script for Alex Proyas’ Dark City emulated the structure of a spiral (a central image of the film), Whannell’s script is a jigsaw puzzle, referring to a central story element of Saw. The plot is structured in such a way that events and revelations are parceled out to us like puzzle pieces, for us to feverishly plant in place, as we attempt to make out the big picture. And, deviously, Whannell and Wan give us pieces that can fit into their slot in more than one way, so our perception of the big picture can change in an instant.

Now, a short lesson: the difference between a plot twist, and a plot flip.
A plot twist is a sudden curveball in the story that you don’t see coming: the apparent good guy who turns out to be a baddie; the seemingly innocuous neighbor who turns out to be a government agent. Plot twists in recent films are (spoilers!!!): exactly who the sacrifice is in Darkness, bringing to light just how wise the titular evil really is, or the fact that there is no Totenkopf in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, merely the video ghost of Sir Lawrence Olivier playing God-in-absentia, as his clockwork creation continues to run through its programmed agenda. There is also the last-second revelation that Beatrix’s child is still alive, at the end of Kill Bill Volume One.
A plot flip is a single event or revelation in the story which results in a total re-evaluation of everything that came before it, a pivot point in the story which requires you to see the whole tale from a different perspective. A very popular plot flip is the ending of The Sixth Sense, which forces you to see the whole film in an entirely different light. There is also Neo’s awakening from The Matrix into the real world (though this occurs early on in the film’s running time), or the pair of flips in Janghwa, Hongryeon (A Tale of Two Sisters).

The wonderful thing about Saw is that it has twists and it has flips. Usually, a film will either have a bunch of twists, or one flip; it’s rare that a film will contain both. (The Village is another recent film that displays its fair share of flips and twists.)
In Saw, the twists and flips are sudden and savage, malevolent Jack in the Boxes that spring out with a demonic howl, leaving in their wake a stunned sense of revelation, as we stand in ever-widening pools of blood, for a few precious moments too shocked to move, lest another come leaping out of the darkness (which it sometimes does).

Now, two films Saw has been compared to since its release are The Blair Witch Project and Se7en, Project merely because of Saw’s low production cost (reportedly less than $10 million), Se7en because of its mood and content.
Se7en seems the more valid of the two comparisons, though I will say this: Saw displays genuine malignancy and unease, as opposed to the faux dress-me-up-in-moody-dimly-lit sequences of MTV malevolence that characterizes Se7en.*
While The Blair Witch Project is the resounding triumph of marketing over content, Se7en is the victory of style over substance.
Saw, for better or worse, is the real thing; it’s the Se7en I wish Se7en had been.

Premiering at the Sundance Film Festival last January to sold-out screenings, Saw is currently enjoying box-office success in the US. Clearly, Saw has hit a nerve, and audiences are twitching and screaming and grimacing, fingers slipping on blood-drenched pieces, as they try desperately to put the puzzle together before the clock runs out.

* Just to be clear: I'm not saying Se7en is a bad film. Not at all.
But I strongly feel that whatever's good about it, is all thanks to David Fincher. What I'm saying is, remove Fincher's style from the equation, and there doesn't seem to be too much in Andrew Kevin Walker's script to differentiate it significantly from any other random religion-obsessed serial killer thriller.
Meanwhile, I feel that there's enough in Whannell's script that, even if it had been helmed by a director less inventive than Wan, that the resultant film would have still been an effective one. 

Parting shot: Saw is intense horror, and quite possibly not to everyone’s tastes. A good barometer would be Se7en: if you found that agreeable to your cinematic palette, chances are, you’ll appreciate Saw.

(Saw OS’s courtesy of impawards.com.)