¡Qué horror! 2012

Candidate # 31

CHAINED

(August 2012)

Now, for those of you who frequent the Iguana, you might have noticed that I loves me my David Lynch.

“But what about his daughter, Jennifer Lynch?” you may well ask.

Fine.

The Jennifer Lynch Scorecard:

I wasn’t overly fond of her feature debut, Boxing Helena, but I was blown away by her second feature, Surveillance, so much so that it ended up on the ¡Qué Horror! 2009 list.

While I appreciate her efforts on her Bollywood foray, Hisss, that turned out to be something of a mess. (I’m still waiting to get a shot at seeing the documentary of that film’s tumultuous production, Despite the Gods.)

And now, we come to Chained.

In the past year, where, as I’ve mentioned, I’ve seen quite a number of excellent serial killer thrillers, Chained stands out because while it does feature a serial killer (Vincent D’Onofrio, as if playing Carl Stargher in Tarsem’s The Cell simply just wasn’t enough creeptastic serial killer fun for one lifetime), it’s really about the bizarre and twisted relationship that develops between the killer and the nine-year-old boy who he takes into his “care” after slaughtering the child’s mother (played briefly by Lynch’s Surveillance star, Julia Ormond).

There’s a searing disquiet that runs through Chained’s 94-minute-running time that plays far more effectively than lesser productions’ oozing buckets of fake blood and gore.

As with Surveillance, Lynch takes a pre-existing script (this one written by Damian O’Donnell) and makes it her own, tapping into the sordid psyches of her characters, flaying them onscreen, so we’re witness to not just their heinous actions, but also, the tatters and shreds of their motivations.

This is a disturbingly bleak title (all the way up to the haunting end credits roll) that plays almost like a blazingly defiant “Up yours!” to the whole Hisss debacle.

Here’s hoping Lynch keeps on keepin’ on…

(Chained OS courtesy of bloody-disgusting.com.)

THE FALL
(Review)


All right. Full disclosure.
I love Tarsem’s The Cell. It has its flaws, yes, but it’s got a whole lot of amazing, noteworthy stuff going for it.
There’s Howard Shore’s score, there’s Eiko Ishioka’s costumes, and of course, Tarsem’s very particular visual flair.
So it was that in the wake of The Cell, I began to actively track his possible feature film work. There was a moment in time when his name was associated with the then-in development Constantine, though that ultimately didn’t happen, due, in part, to what he fondly calls “this autistic child of mine,” The Fall.
And now, here we are, some four years and 24 countries later (the story behind the making of the film is equally as interesting as the film itself), and that “autistic child” is now ready to receive guests…


Following a haunting opening credits sequence in which many clues to the subsequent narrative may be found, we find ourselves in Los Angeles, once upon a time (or the early 1920’s, take your pick), as the paths of 5-year old Alexandria (an impressively unaffected Catinca Untaru) and injured Hollywood stuntman Roy Walker (Pushing Daisies’ Lee Pace), cross due to a misdirected message.
What follows is a tender friendship born out of necessity, a poignant celebration of the power of storytelling, and a breathtaking display of Singh’s artistry and passion.
Those who may have mistakenly written off the baroque imagery of The Cell as a barrage of hollow, MTV-styled trifles, would be well-advised to seek out the heartbreaking wonders of The Fall.


Helping Tarsem author this astounding piece of cinematic wonder are a returning Ishioka (who first impressed me deeply with her work on Paul Schrader’s Mishima, and then blew me away with her Oscar-winning efforts on Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula), first-time feature cinematographer Colin Watkinson, editor Robert Duffy (who’d also worked on The Cell), production designer Ged Clarke, and composer Krishna Levy (also responsible for the music of François Ozon’s Huit Femmes).
And of course, the central performances of Pace and Untaru, which anchor the narrative in a very human space, giving the film and its fantastic visuals, the beating heart any good story requires.
Many of today’s crop of feature directors with their roots in music videos and adverts seem much too preoccupied with framing the pretty pictures without paying enough attention to the narrative. With The Fall, Tarsem safely joins the likes of Mark Romanek, David Fincher, and Spike Jonze, as directors who are as much storytellers as they are visualists. (Incidentally, Fincher and Jonze are producers on The Fall, “presenting” the film to us, its eager audience.)


With his autistic child, Tarsem took home, not only a Crystal Bear from last year’s Berlin International Film Festival, but also the award for Best Film from Sitges, considered by some as the Cannes of genre film.
The Fall is a moving, breathtaking tale about the unbridled, impressionable imagination of the young, and how reality and fiction can bleed into each other in a child’s mind.
It’s also about stories, as both lifeline and currency. It’s about their mutability and elasticity, of their organic nature; how the listener can shape the story even as it unfolds. How, in the end, the story is as much the listener’s as it is the storyteller’s, and how the listener can, in influencing the story, also influence the storyteller in turn.
It’s a daring and wondrous piece of work, The Fall, and anyone who loves stories (as any film geek should), really does need to see this.


Parting shot: The Living and the Dead’s Leo Bill is here as Charles Darwin, as you’ve never seen him before…
Really.

(The Fall OS courtesy of impawards.com [design by The Arterie]; images courtesy of moviereporter.net and premiere.com.)

PAPRIKA
(Review)

I will freely admit I am not a big anime freak. In fact, I came to anime by way of my being a film geek (and a gaggle of college friends who were big anime freaks).
Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira opened the doors for me, of course, as it did for so many others. But my anime hero is, hands down, Satoshi Kon.
Even since he blew me away with Perfect Blue, Kon has consistently amazed and impressed me with his work: Sennen Joyu (Millennium Actress), Tokyo Godfathers, and the 13-part Moso Dairinin (Paranoia Agent).
Now he’s back with Paprika, and I’m just now picking my jaw up from off the floor.

Paprika opens with a familiar circus gag: a clown unfolding himself from out of a car that is far too small to have contained him in the first place. This is, of course, a visual cue to one of the film’s themes: how something vast like dreams can be contained in the tiny vessels of our minds.
Paprika is about the DC Mini, a groundbreaking invention that allows two individuals to share a common dream. Much like the scenario posited in Tarsem Singh’s The Cell, one person can enter the subconscious of another, and interact, not just with that person, but with his dreaming mind as well.
While a Detective Konukawa—stumped on a murder case he is investigating—is helped by the eponymous Paprika, who enters his dreams to see whether the problem is rooted there, a number of DC Minis are stolen from the company developing the technology. Soon, dreams are used to invade people’s psyches, trapping them in a waking state of delusion and mad ramblings, a chilling precursor to a more widespread epidemic that will threaten the very fabric of reality.

While in past films like Perfect Blue and Sennen Joyu, Kon has mined the idea of fiction intruding on reality (and vice versa) and utilized it as a narrative device, in Paprika, he takes that theme and places it at the very heart of the work.
There, at the dreaming center of Paprika, that theme plays with the other ideas that bubble beneath its animated skin—the parallels between dreams and the Internet; truth that can spring from fiction; dream as film and film as modern man’s repository of dreams—and produces a brilliant piece of inspired storytelling that is the latest gem in Kon’s dazzling body of work.

As with all of his films, Paprika is a visually arresting piece, the dreamscapes on view utilizing motifs from myth, fairy tales, and film (which, of course, serves the same purpose today that myths and fairy tales used to in the past). Appropriately enough, the dreams we get to see in the film are unsettling and disturbing, and Kon rifles through imagery normally associated with children (circuses and dolls and parades) and extracts their inherent sinister qualities to suit his storytelling purposes.

But above and beyond the visual, what probably draws me to Kon the most is his clear love of film and how he draws on that for his anime.
In Perfect Blue, he brought Hitchcock and giallo to the animated film in a razor-edged mindf*ck that constantly shifted between fiction and reality as a J-pop singer trying to segue into acting becomes embroiled in murder. In Sennen Joyu, an aging film star reminisces about her past, her life and her films intertwining to form one long, shining reel of memory. In Tokyo Godfathers (clearly a play on a cinematic tradition that stretches back to the 1936 Western, Three Godfathers), three of Japan’s homeless find an infant during Christmas and become the child’s unlikely guardians.
In each of these anime, film is either a crucial plot element or an obvious inspiration, and it is partly because of this clear love for the medium that Kon’s works play so differently than those of other anime heavyweights like Otomo or Miyazaki. There is also clearly a postmodern bent to Kon’s storytelling that serves to elevate his work even more above the average anime.
What can I say? I love his stuff.

Of course, one could argue that Paprika is not his best work—and I’d agree. But as it stands, Paprika is nonetheless better than your average anime, and is another excellent masterwork from Kon. Certainly worth a look, even if you aren’t particularly an anime geek.

(Paprika OS courtesy of impawards.com; image courtesy of outnow.ch.)