The Perks Of Being A Wallflower (Stephen Chbosky, 2013)

In the 1980's, John Hughes came along and gave a generation of kids an iconic voice that many of them believed understood them. Hughes, at his best, was warm, funny, insightful and at the very least, had a grasp on the kind of confusion and sense of isolation that accompanies many kids through adolescence and all through high school.

It's understandable, in thinking back on his films, that they were as popular as they were with middle class kids who essentially had their whole lives ahead of them and for whom high school quite possibly was the hardest time in their lives. There were certain problematic cultural and social aspects to his films, but from a story and artistic standpoint, given how well he did tap in to those less enjoyable aspects of adolescence, the largest problem with them was that they were ultimately fantasies. They tended to present a kind of epic victory, which only coincides with reality on the most rare occasions. The real victories for most people who experience adolescence as a very painful period of existence, are much more subtle, and many of them only come later, after the pain of the initial experience has dulled somewhat and we can gain some perspective on that experience, what it taught us and what happens when we choose to shape how it effects who we become.

The Perks Of Being A Wallflower, is in many ways a much less superficial and fantasy generated John Hughes film. It's a much more honest film, that doesn't look away from the ugliest aspects of being an adolescent or that it's an extremely complicated period in life in which the more horrible aspects of human behavior and social interactions begin to come crashing down and threatening to create the parameters in which one may define themselves for the rest of their lives. It doesn't attempt to ignore the fact that it's a period of new freedoms, and with those freedoms sometimes come emotionally bruising and horrifying discoveries. It's an honest and, dare I say it, beautiful film, in that it's also not completely overtaken by those darker aspects of its story. The good, great, bad and ugly are all given equal attention, and become undercurrents, instead of signifying moments on which the entire plot turns. None of them is so particularly dominant as to define it as a whole. It is at the same time a somewhat hopeful film, but without having to resort to outright fantasy and the kind of epic victory Hughes installed at the end of basically all of his films.

The Brothers Bloom (Rian Johnson, 2008)

Storytelling is an art and film making is an illusion with storytelling as one of the aspects of that illusion. When the two come together, it becomes something that reaches a height beyond which either could by themselves. Brick, the first film from writer/director Rian Johnson took the usual structure and tropes of a noir and put them in a high school movie. It was done with essentially no money and it is, without doubt, the film to which the latest incarnation of Joseph Gordon Levitt's career can be attributed to. It's fun in the great way old noir could be, tense in the way old noir could be and for those who saw it, was the announcement that there was a deeply talented young writer/director with a promising career ahead. If you haven't seen it, it's definitely worth a viewing.

His second film, The Brothers Bloom, does very much the same thing Brick did. Instead of using the noir tropes and structure though, this time he's using basic ideas and structure of a con film. Instead of taking all of those things and putting them in a high school movie, this time he's taking them and putting them in a romantic comedy. That description isn't something completely unusual. We've seen that film a number of times before, and they're so often mediocre that if I were reading it, I'd probably just roll my eyes and move on. Rian Johnson takes those elements and brings out the best in them to end up creating a truly entertaining, intelligently sentimental, emotionally effecting, but not corny or sappy while also being a metaphorically interesting film.

Compliance (Craig Zobel, 2012)

I spent my late teens and early twenties doing my best to sift through the pantheon of horror films that were both "must see" and "watch at your own risk." If it was something that was either considered one of the masterworks of the genre, a film that added a new dimension to it or changed the course the genre had been going, I was trying to see it. At the same time, if a film been deemed to have absolutely no social value, to be inexplicably offensive, to be an attack on everything a civil society should be, I was doing my best to get my hands on a copy, even if it was just borrowed. My VHS collection, when those were actually the preferred home viewing method, wasn't unimpressive to a well schooled horror fan. Like so many other budding cinephiles and horror geeks, I took pride in the fact that I could recite the years of release, directors, producers, stars and inane trivia related to many of the more obscure trash horror films released between 1953 to what was then the present. I didn't understand it as such at the time, but I was using film as a way to begin to gauge what the society I lived in found to be worthy of reverence and what it found to be unacceptable when it came to art and free speech.

I've seen some disturbing shit in movies. For a time, I thought there was some kind of psychological or emotional strength gained from sitting through a film that was little more than punishment. I might not have actually been wrong about that, but I still wasn't exactly right either. What it produced seems to be a pretty deep well of tolerance for what gets created, produced, screened, marketed and what have you when it comes to the creative arts. Especially with things that are actually created to shock or to produce revulsion or distress in the audience, I have never come to the point that I've said, "They shouldn't have been allowed to make that." I certainly feel there are films which have no business being made, but even those tend to be as related to the obviousness of their commercialism as it is for the outrageous and shocking aspects of another films content. I'd rather I Spit On Your Grave exist before Battleship any day. Hit the jump to find out why, and what relevance this has to Compliance.

Lawless (John Hillcoat, 2012)

Lawless is saved from being a boring, lifeless gangster movie by it's performances. Tom Hardy, Guy Pearce, Jessica Chastain, and yes, even Shia Lebouf succeed in creating a fun, entertaining, not very substantial entry into American film industries favorite genres, gangster/outlaw cinema. 

Tom Hardy is quickly headed toward being regarded as one of the best actors of his generation. He's taken on a number of roles that differ in significant ways and succeeded in making them all memorable, genuine and unpredictable. He does it again playing Forrest Bondurant, the leader of the bootlegging Bondurant clan during Prohibition. Based on a true story, chronicled in Matt Bondurant's novel "The Wettest County in the World", Hardy manages to create an enigmatic, charismatic stillness as the center of the films events. Shia Lebouf is definitely the films lead, but Hardy's character is really the heart of the story.

Red, White and Blue (Simon Rumley, 2010)

Let's get something straight from the very beginning. Red, White and Blue is not, at all, what it's synopsis might lead you to believe it is. It's not that the synopsis is in any way wrong or misleading, but more that writer director Simon Rumley has found a way to take that basic story and turn it upside down, inside out, then stuff the viewer inside of it and shake it all up with unremitting fury.

In mainstream studio cinema, there are certain tropes everyone recognizes and understands. Good guys make sarcastic remarks, things blow up, the bad guys get their due. It is what it is, we all know this.

Independent cinema has it's own tropes, but since most of us have spent the majority of our lives becoming intimately familiar with them, we don't always recognize them as readily. The idea of a story being built around a coincidental "intersection of lives" is indeed one of the independent film communities favorite tropes. The lives intersecting here are the "Red", "White" and "Blue"on the poster image. The result of that intersection is what the movie is about, and it goes through a few phases before it reaches it's climax, a third act that was distressing and engrossing.

This had to be an independent film. I rarely say that, but in all honestly, I can't see this film ever being made by a major studio and actually succeeding in finding it's way to release. For any audience which is easily offended or is sensitive to many of the cultural taboos that studio films purposely avoid, they wouldn't make it through the first third of this film, much less to the point where that degree of "indecency" in the films first act begins to make any real sense. The first act contains a few scenes of relatively graphic sex. It's hard to say much about it without giving too much away, but it's definitely meant to provoke a response from the viewer. It's not graphic in the violent sense, but it does present sex in a non-traditional way and it's really frank about the degree to which sex is kind of awkward and visceral, and not at all the glamorous act so often portrayed on screen. There are three different sex scenes in the first fifteen minutes of the movie, and that number of them, combined with their overall tone and atmosphere make them extremely discomfiting to watch.

Credit should be given to Rumley on this though, it's a bold decision. The majority of films (and basically any class or text about writing fiction will tell writers to do this) begins in a way that is designed to make the central character(s) sympathetic. It's supposed to get the audience to root for the protagonist or at least to see them in some light that will make it possible for the audience to root for them, to like them and sympathize with them as the film or story progresses. Rumley more or less ditches that whole idea immediately. Amanda Fuller's Erica (the red in the poster) is not an immediately likable character, to put it mildly. Fuller succeeds in making her character completely believable, and ultimately understandable by the end of the film. It's a role that definitely took some courage for any young actor to tackle, and she pulls it off extremely well. In those first few minutes there is the threat of Rumley being a condescending jack-ass who hates his characters and has constructed an obvious, hammer the audience in the head with the message movie. I was getting close to bailing out and turning it off. There isn't a variety of film I dislike more than that one, whether I agree with the general idea or message being put across or not.

Thankfully, Red, White and Blue changes tracks when the second central character is introduced, and those first few minutes of the film begin to fall into what appears to be another context. It's a genuine evolution of the relationship between these characters that begins to show Amanda Fuller's character, Eric in a new light, but also succeeds in presenting Noah Taylor's Nate (the blue in the poster) from a few different perspectives as well. What's clear as that relationship begins to emerge is that these are two extremely, tragically damaged people. Having succeeded in creating those first fifteen minutes of uncomfortable viewing, Rumley takes the discomfort in a different direction completely here. It begins to touch on and realistically portray the kind of interpersonal dynamics that these two characters would necessarily have in the evolution of that relationship, and it's hard to watch because of just how badly they navigate it. Noah Taylor is an actor many people would recognize, having had smaller parts in a number of well known films, but he's unrecognizable here. On top of that, he's fantastic. I didn't connect him with his other roles until I sat down to write this review, and when I did, I was honestly blown away. It's probably good that he isn't recognizable, because few people would probably guess the actor in those parts in those other movies was capable of what he pulls off here. The depth of intensity he portrays here is a thing of beauty. Like John Hawkes in Winter's Bone, this could be a real emergence for an actor that has been criminally overlooked. As the relationship between Nate and Erica progresses, it began to look as if the film was going to start relying on the well worn cliché of damaged people wandering an ugly, unsafe world and finding safety, comfort and love in each other. It doesn't. This isn't that movie either.

Just when it seems the film has settled into becoming the kind of recognizable story most audiences seeing it are going to expect, it changes track again. This time, it changes it's focus almost entirely, and begins to follow our third character, Marc Senter's Franki (the white in the poster). It's questionable as to whether or not Franki is quite as damaged as Nate and Erica certainly seem to be, but at best, he's a bit of a slacker and kind of lost. As his story progresses though, we're seeing him become the kind of damaged person that Nate and Erica are, and probably even more so. Senter does a good job with Franki's journey, and he conveys a combination of both vulnerability and a vague aire of being just about to reach the edge of complete desperation.

Fifteen minutes into the movie, I had no idea where it was going. Forty-five minutes in, I still could not have predicted it was going to come to the climax that it does. The thing worth respecting about all of that though, is that by the time the film does actually end, it doesn't seem false. It's not a "trick" or "gimmick" ending. By the time the film ends and the credits start to roll, it makes perfect sense. It's also not the kind of "perfect sense" in which it all just seems too neat and simple either. There were a number of different places where this story could have gone in a completely different direction.

Probably the most interesting thing about the film though, is that it ends up where it does, and all of that makes as much sense as it does because this isn't a film about people who are achieving some kind of victory at it's climax. It's a film about the mistakes very broken people make, and how those mistakes play out in their own lives and the lives of others. There is no hero here. There are three protagonists, and all three of those characters are also the antagonists. All of it makes logical sense in the context of who the characters are, and with the narrative this film is telling, that's quite a feat.

In a strange way, even as the last twenty minutes of the film are the only depictions of violence (some of which takes place off screen, and that which takes place on screen is actually both a part of the characters and integral to the overall success of the story), it's a film that really is about the question of how exactly we decide what we call violence. Why do we refer to one thing as violence, and a different act that is as damaging to a human being (in a way that is physical, but not in the conventional understanding of how we discuss physical violence) isn't called violence? All three of these characters do things that are beyond the pale of what is considered acceptable human behavior, and those acts all have serious consequences for other people. While definitely not being the kind of behavior the audience is going to condone, in the context it's presented, all of their actions make sense given what we know about the characters as well. The beauty of it being that because they are three dimensional characters, not just one dimensional caricatures, it never comes across as an empty attempt at shock or a necessary plot point to drive the story forward. It makes sense because of who they are, and from that perspective it makes it harder to judge them quite as harshly.

Red, White and Blue isn't a film for everyone. It's bleak, uncomfortable journey into the unfortunate circumstances surrounding the very understandable mistakes of three people who are damaged in tragic, heart breaking ways. What it is not is predictable tripe that any well tread movie goer is going to have a solid handle on in the first twenty minutes. It's both an extremely unconventional horror film and a deeply unsettling drama, without the normal melodrama so often found in films that try to achieve that synthesis. It's an unexpected little gem that manages to subvert expectations in ways that are completely organic and true, and to also be a deeply human story that succeeds in asking intelligent questions without being paternalistic, preachy or patronizing. Simon Rumley has succeeded in creating a very strong film with a subtle hand at storytelling and sure hand at the technical aspects as well. He'll be someone to watch in the future. You can catch this one on Netflix "Watch Instantly", but if you decide you want to own it (as I think I have), come on back and use the link. It's deeply appreciated.

Contagion (Steven Soderbergh, 2011)

I was not sure what to think going into Steven Soderbergh's latest film. I think Traffic was a really enjoyable film, that suffers slightly from the level of it's ambition. It was performed and directed beautifully, but by trying to cover almost every possible angle through which one could possibly see the War on Drugs, it was just too much, and one or two of the story lines ended up seeming underdeveloped, and therefore, unnecessary. It's the kind of mistake or problem I like to see a film make. I'd rather see a film be overly ambitious and fall short some than be exceedingly successful in it's mediocrity. So, I've always given Traffic the benefit of the doubt.

Of course, Traffic isn't the only film Soderbergh has made. There were those three little movies with George Clooney and Brad Pitt, Oceans something or Seas something. There was also the first movie, Sex, Lies and Videotape, which in it's own weird way prophesied the coming of reality television, the video blog and other bits and pieces of contemporary culture. Soderbergh has made a ton of small independent films as well, even since he's become the kind of director who can get Brad Pitt, George Clooney and Matt Damon on the phone anytime he wants and can get studios to give him large sums of money to make his films. He's taken the "I make one for me and then I make one for them" model of a director's career to a new level. There's no question that the guy is incredibly talented, but I was a little bit worried that Contagion, a drama dealing with the outbreak of a hypothetical virus and examining society's reaction from almost every conceivable perspective might suffer from some of the same failings that Traffic did. I wasn't prepared to cut him quite as much slack this time either, since it's ground he's already covered.

Contagion is a solid thriller/drama, all around. The direction, performances, cinematography, and score are all very good. My only complaint about the film is essentially that the stories of many of the people we follow could be entire films in themselves. I think that given the scope of this film, the writing is very good overall, and the thing is, I want to see more of it. The best example I have is Jude Law's character. He plays a blogger who is on top of the contagion from it's first public appearance. It's an interesting character and his motivations aren't completely clear at all times. There are definitely some questions about why he's doing or saying certain things, etc. But what we see of the character by the end of the film makes sense, and fits very well in the world they've crafted within the film, which does in many ways mirror our own world very well. The thing is, I want to see an entire film about that character. I want to know how he's gotten to be who he is at the beginning of the film and see him take the entire journey to where we see him at the end of the film. In a way, I think that would have been more interesting than the small disparate pieces we get by taking such an overarching approach to the story.

Lawrence Fishburne plays the head of the CDC, and I have to say, it's great to see Lawrence Fishburne playing something that doesn't in the slightest resemble Morpheus from The Matrix. He's a phenomenal actor and for a little while there, any character that had any shade of Morpheus was getting thrown at him. This character is most definitely not the super-guru Morpheus was, and it gives Fishburne the chance to flex some of the more subtle, emotionally mature muscles that roles like that denied him. I'd even like to see an entire film focused solely on his character. What exactly does it mean to be the head of the CDC in the midst of a major pandemic? What toll does that take on a person, what strengths does it give them? There's a whole lot there that I think could be really interesting, especially in the hands of someone like Fishburne. He does a great job, and his character is one of the centerpieces of the film, but it still doesn't really convey the toll it's taking on him, personally, and by the end of the film, it's clear there is going to be one.

The one I'd probably most like to see though is an entire film dedicated to Matt Damon's character. He plays a father and husband whose wife returns from a trip to Hong Kong, complains of not feeling well, and within a few hours goes from having flu like symptoms to being dead. He ends up being immune, but the daughter that is left with him might not be, and the rest of Damon's storyline is about what he's doing to try and keep his daughter safe, etc. Soderbergh doesn't make the film extremely graphic, but there is some stuff in there that is pretty disturbing not because it's graphic in nature, but because of how true it rings and what it really suggests about society and the nature of humanity in general.

In the end, when I think about the film, that's really the only thing about it that seems to fall short at all, but at the same time, it was a little flat for me. I'm attributing that sense of it being a little flat to the fact that by going for such a widespread perspective, the film doesn't give the audience enough time with any of the particular characters to really develop a connection with them. I do recognize that by making a film like this, that's something a film maker decides to do. I don't think it detracts from the degree to which the audience is invested in the urgency of the story.

I think my main criticism of this film could have less to do with the actual film than with the overall media environment into which it's thrown. Contagion successfully attempts to establish a level of realism that is one of it's biggest strengths and possibly it's ultimate downfall. Given that we're living in an age of constant media bombardment and that the entirety of our media is preoccupied with disaster and death and that nearly everything, whether deservedly or not is presented to us as being overwhelmingly urgent, I don't know that anyone could make a film about this subject matter, steeped in the degree of realism that this one is and have it be as emotionally and psychologically effective as it probably should be.

If I really consider the possibility of a contagious disease something like the one depicted in the film were to crop up somewhere and start taking the kind of effect it would, I almost think the majority of the country and probably the world would be both terrified and completely numb to it at the same time. In the film, the societal consequences of the virus are relatively dire. I somehow just don't think we'd get upset enough about it for that to happen. Mind you, it's not that I think it wouldn't be a big enough deal to get upset about, I just think we've spent so many years now with one dire emergency (real or manufactured) after another that we'd more or less just kind of see the news coverage and say, "Meh. That sucks." Sure, we'd take precautions, wearing masks and gloves, washing our hands much more often etc., but all in all, I think we'd probably just keep going to work, buying sport utility vehicles, and living our daily routines as much as was possible.

I'm not saying that cooler heads would prevail either. I'm just more or less saying that Americans have lost the capacity to know when to freak out when we should. It's not even that we've lost the capacity to freak out altogether, because I don't believe that either. I'm more or less saying that we tend to freak out about stuff that has no real meaning and in the end, doesn't really matter, and when there are things that have consequences, have real meaning and do matter, we tend to get overwhelmed and just go about our routine, hoping someone will take care of it. I also can't really be completely convinced that there wouldn't be an overwhelming percentage of our "leaders," be they political, social, economic or religious who wouldn't see something like this as a golden opportunity to cement their positions as "men/women of the people" for the foreseeable. I mean, let's be honest here, there would be a whole rash of religious figures coming out of the woodwork to say a contagion like the one depicted in the film is punishment from God for a whole grab bag of sins and iniquities, which is almost a subliminal suggestion to those people who believe those charlatans that we all deserve to die. I don't think people who on some level believe they deserve to die are going to get quite as upset about something like what the film presents as they probably should, and in this country, that is not a small number.

So, the degree of realism the film achieves might actually work against it. At least it did for me. One of the most disturbing sequences I've seen in a film in a long time took place in another film dealing with an "infection" of the populace. In Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later, Cillian Murphy's character Jim wakes up in a hospital after England has been ravaged by an infection. When he stumbles out of the hospital, the streets of London are utterly deserted. That was deeply disturbing to me. A huge, silent London. It wasn't realistic (as many people have pointed out), because given the nature of the infection depicted in that film, there would have had to have been bodies all over the place. But there weren't. There were no bodies, no people, no animals, nothing, just London, one of the world's great city's, completely silent and utterly deserted. That disturbed me. There are a few scenes in Contagion which touch on the idea that people wouldn't be going on, so there were nearly empty streets etc., but nothing in this film was quite as effective as that one moment in 28 Days Later. I know they are completely different films with completely different objectives, but I'm suggesting this because Danny Boyle's choice (in part due to budget constraints) to step away from the steely realism much of the rest of his film relied on worked perfectly and helped create a really iconic moment. Contagion, because of the degree of realism it chains itself to never produces any moments like that, and really, much as I imagine a real world would react to the situation it presents, becomes a well produced, technically strong film which doesn't really suffer any gaping holes in it's quality, but is still more or less forgettable. If it were the real world, and we were struck with a contagion like this one, chances are very good that within fifteen years, it would be forgotten in every way except for science textbooks, lecture halls, the occasional news cast and the private pains of people who'd lost loved ones. I'd go so far as to say that in our actual real world, it wouldn't take long at all before a great many people were using the entire incident as a way to create an entire industry of more panic, more urgency, misplaced blame and accusations in order to enrich themselves.

In truth, I guess what I'm more or less saying is that as bleak a situation as Contagion suggests, the real world is an even bleaker, darker place, and the film suffers because it glosses over that. And in that, it's unfortunately extremely standard.

13 Assassins (Takashi Miike, 2011)

Takashi Miike's films are often an acquired taste. His portrayal of graphic violence and sexuality, combined with his love for unusual narratives driven by even more unusual characters has made him a cult favorite here in the States. Miike is a film maker who has made a reputation by holding nothing back and by approaching every taboo with the gleeful attitude of a rebellious teenager giving the finger to the high school principle. His skill behind the camera, and his prolific output are nothing short of amazing though, and those talents have earned him the kind of respect other film makers who approach the same subject matter and portray it as graphically are consistently denied. He has succeeded in taking what is often considered exploitation and turning into both what his audience craves and what critics still consider "art". It's no small accomplishment.

Still, he has so far been pigeon holed as a genre/exploitation director, especially here in the States where our faux cultural sensibilities tend to be offended by the celebratory tone Miike tends to embraced when presenting the most graphic material. 13 Assassins proves beyond the shadow of any doubt that Miike is more than a one trick pony and that he not only makes great films for an audience that appreciates his brand of balls to the wall, no holds barred cinema, but that he can hold his own with any film maker (living or dead) that is considered a more "serious" artist. To put it bluntly, 13 Assassins is a great fucking movie. Period. Full stop. It's not a great cult movie. It's not a great action movie. It's not a great drama. It's a great movie, all around, incorporating pieces of things Miike has shown he's capable of before, but this time putting them front and center.

13 Assassins has a place among the great samurai epics in film history, from Ran to Seven Samurai to Samurai Rebellion to Yojimbo and so on. It succeeds in telling a compelling story using interesting, intelligent characters and a visual style that is spectacular in it's simplicity. It suffers from neither the weepy, syrupy, over baked emotional manipulation often at play in even the more successful dramas, and also succeeds in that it avoids the pitfall of having a cavalcade of wooden, emotionless drones performing feats of action movie heroism which are devoid of anything but empty spectacle. It is earnest, straight forward, and impossible to take your eyes off of. The small, quiet dialog scenes are as mesmerizing as the action.

The film benefits from a cast that misses nothing, making every scene worth the seconds it takes to tick by, giving the audience believable, strong characters who feel more as if they are the result of a piece of non-fiction research than a fictional writers imagination. They simultaneously seem to have their own full histories while also being completely spontaneous in each moment. They don't all share the same amount of screen time or importance in the story, but none of them ever feel as if they've been tacked on to add some dimension that would otherwise be missing from the story or the other characters.

By the time the action begins, it's already been established that these are characters who have dedicated their entire lives to the discipline of the samurai code and have spent that time both in practice and studies. When the film's big action set piece takes off, there are no feats of superhuman strength or ability, no wire work or C.G.I flying. It's a group of men who have spent their lives preparing and planning for a moment like this one, and because that's been so well established, everything in the scene is believable and because we've spent the time we have with these actors portraying these characters so well, it has weight and meaning. It's not just a blood and guts spectacle. Miike doesn't spare us many of the gory details, because he's Takashi Miike and he never shy's away from the gory details, but again, it's not the kind of scene that highlights the effects or the gore. It's always about these men and this story, and because of that, it is spectacular.

Takashi Miike has made a full fledged samurai epic of the variety which hasn't been seen in decades. In many ways, it's a lean story. There's no love interest here. There's no modern sensibility to the characters attitudes or actions. There's no hidden subtext or allegory about the modern age. There's definitely a subtext about power and the ugliness it breeds in humanity, but it's a universal idea that could belong in any age. It's that quality, the utter indifference to traps and cliche's of modern storytelling that makes 13 Assassins a humming, churning steam engine of cinematic beauty. In 1954, Akira Kurosawa set the standard for samurai epics by making what is arguably one of the greatest films of all time, Seven Samurai. Miike hasn't made a film that is equal to that, but he's done what might have otherwise been considered impossible by getting in the ballpark.

I highly recommend this one. Get your hands on a copy, soon. It's available via Netflix Watch Instantly, but this is one I'd suggest watching on Blu-ray if you're internet speed isn't up to carrying full 1080p HD. It's shot with such a natural beauty that it's worth waiting a few days to see it in it's full glory. I'll leave links for purchasing the DVD and Blu-ray below. I'm going to pick this one up for my personal collection, immediately.

The Rite (Mikael Håfström, 2011)

In recent years, there's been a spate of new possession films. A few have been fun, entertaining films with some seriously chilling moments (The Last Exorcism, being an example), other have been well made enough, though lacking in any good scares (The Exorcism of Emily Rose, which at least took a new approach) and the rest of them have been downright terrible (Blackwater Valley Exorcism, The Possession of David O'Reilly, Exorcism: The Possession of Gail Bowers).

The Rite doesn't really fit any of those descriptions. It was relatively entertaining while I was watching it, so I can't say it was terrible. I wasn't sitting there counting the minutes until it was over, and clocking in just short of two hours. At the same time, the minute it was over, the flaws in the film were jumping to mind like a possessed virgin getting splashed with holy water. Granted, there are a few sequences in this film that actually work well. The problem is those sequences aren't connected by the kind of character development it would have taken to make the film work, and there are some narrative elements that just don't make any sense when you consider them.

The best thing this movie has going for it is Anthony Hopkins. The man can be a towering example of what is great and majestic about acting as an art form and a profession, which is nothing to thumb one's nose at. If we're going to be honest with each other though, he's made some horrible movies. He's made a few classics as well, which is why he is Sir Anthony Hopkins, and one of the most recognizable names in the world. In this film, he's unfortunately saddled with a character the script doesn't really tell the audience enough about for them to get a full sense of who he is or why he is who he is, which in a film dealing with possession and the fate of the immortal soul, is pretty important. Sir Anthony makes the best of things though, and there are definitely a few scenes where the brilliance he can summon are glimpsed. The effect of putting this caliber of actor in this role is that the small, quiet important moments outshine the scenes that should be the equivalent of gate crashing your consciousness. It's essentially emotionally backwards. There a moments in the film where I really wanted to love and respect this character, but they are immediately thrown under the proverbial narrative bus, because the film is hurrying along to it's next plot point so the audience doesn't consider the fact that some of what's being presented to them doesn't make sense in any world, even the world the film is trying to create. This film does give me hope that Anthony Hopkins has a few incredible performances left in him if he's given or takes scripts that are interesting and well written enough to allow him to be the more relaxed and extremely warm actor that he can be.

The sad thing is that it has a really strong opening. The first twenty minutes to half hour had me. It's not shocking to reflect that ninety-five percent of the films character development takes place in that time. The problem is that it's all one character, and the other characters who become central to the narrative don't show up until the film is already in a hurry to slap you with it's next plot point. There's a surprise scene in the beginning of the film that gave me some real hope that we might be about to take the kind of bumpy, uncomfortable ride I hope to get from horror films, especially supernatural horror films. Unfortunately, my good will was wasted on what more or less devolves into non-sense. There are central plot elements that either aren't explained enough to make sense in the world the film is trying to immerse us in, or worse, they're just thrown in there to keep things moving because they somehow tangentially relate to the other events in the narrative.

When the super natural is central to a film's narrative, there is a relatively fine line to walk. The writer and the film makers have to be able to develop the "rules" or the reality of the world they're creating without over explaining and getting into the kind of horrid exposition that completely kills narrative pacing. At the same time, they can't be so lazy as to just say, "it's the super natural, so of course it doesn't make sense." A writer or film maker might be able to get away with that if they specifically choose to never even allude to something resembling "rules" or a reality for the narrative that is somehow different from the one in which the audience lives in on a daily basis. Find me that film, where the writer and film makers pull it off, and I bet you've found something that is in the least interesting in it's ambition. This film seems to be completely lacking in any ambition, except possibly to get Anthony Hopkins on screen trying to out Hannibal Lecter himself for twenty minutes.

The other thing that succeeds in making this film unsuccessful, and pretty unsatisfying when reconsidered, is the lead actor. I'm not familiar with Colin O'Donoghue from anything else. That's usually not a problem for me, but in this case I didn't even have familiarity to fall back on. A million things can go wrong in the production of a film, which is why we get so many really bad movies every year. This seems to have been either a horrible case of miscasting or a director who just wasn't able to get a good performance out of his lead. Don't get me wrong, he's not terrible. There was never a point at which I sat back and marveled at the horrendous nature of the performance I was watching. But an hour into the film, I didn't really care about his character very much at all, and I wasn't really interested in what he was doing, why he was doing it or anything. Again, this could be a failure in the writing (which, I find a distinct possibility) or any number of other things, but it doesn't change the final result. The film makers spent the first twenty minutes of the movie on developing this guys character, and twenty minutes after that, I just didn't care anymore.

The film begins with him explaining to a friend (we're led to assume it's his best friend) that he's decided to join the seminary to get away from the family business. His father is a mortician, and he's old enough to be helping out these days. I can't blame him for trying to get away. The only explanation given for choosing seminary as that escape route is "In my family, you're either a priest or a mortician, and that's it." He further explains to his friend that he'll at least be able to get a four year degree, and then he can always choose not to take the vows to become a priest. Fast forward four years, and our boy is done with his undergraduate degree, and writing a letter to the equivalent of college headmaster to explain that he's not taking his vows, he lacks faith etc. Our intrepid young hero is then told there's a new program at The Vatican which is supposed to be training a new generation of exorcists, and Mr. Head Priest has always thought he'd be perfect for it, not to mention that the seminary can legally call his four year scholarship a student loan if he doesn't take his vows. And off he goes to Rome.

I think there could be some really good material in those class rooms and that training. Exactly what does The Vatican do to train an exorcist? How do they handle questions of modern psychology in relation to possession etc.? A few of these ideas get grazed, but none of them really land on the bulls eye. There could also be an entire movie of some value in understanding how Anthony Hopkins character comes to be the "unorthodox" priest our young skeptic is sent to, basically in order to cure his skepticism. "Unorthodox" in Hopkins case seems to mean "has many cats living in the courtyard outside of his living quarters, because nothing else here seems all that unorthodox as it relates to either Church teachings on exorcism and possession or films dealing with exorcism and possession. Then Alice Braga gets introduced as a third character in the film, and really, that's all there is to her. They may as well have decided to forgo giving her character a name at all and called her either "third major character" or "pretty female character meant to slightly suggest sexual tension." Then there's all the possession, exorcism, faith versus doubt stuff. It's thin. It's really, really thin. And really, this is more a religiously toned drama than a horror film. Yes, there are some of the requisite scenes of demonic possession etc, but they're not very scary and the sense of threat to the characters isn't great enough to create the sense of ever present dread the subject matter should suggest.

When it's all said and done, I can't really recommend seeing this film in theaters. If I'd have found myself with an afternoon free, and nothing to do, I'd be looking at this as a harmless distraction that filled a few hours of time. I wouldn't have been bothered by seeing this on Netflix or some other variety of rental, because at that price, it would have been worth it. It's not worth full ticket price at a theater though. This is one of those that I'm kicking myself for because I know there are a number of good films out I could have devoted that time and money to. I still haven't seen 127 Hours or The King's Speech and I can basically rely on them being well made, even if they don't quite live up to the Oscar hype. The Rite is the kind of completely vanilla film that results from either a complete lack of ambition to make something of real quality or too many cooks spoiling the broth (as so many studio films suffer from). I can see the skeleton of a good film in there, but it would have to have been thirty to forty minutes longer in order to flesh out the characters and the reality of this presentation of the super natural and it probably would have had to have a different lead.

If for some reason you feel you have to see this in theaters or you've found that if I dislike something you are almost guaranteed to enjoy it (there are reviewers out there whom I feel that way about) you can find the showings near you on Fandango. If you completely disagree with my review or you just want to be swell you can pre-order The Rite [Blu-ray] or The Rite on DVD at my Amazon store. Maybe the book from which the movie is "suggested" (and yes, the credits actually said suggested) is more interesting, The Rite: The Making of a Modern Exorcist, and you can grab that from the Amazon Store as well.

If you're one of those crazy kids who doesn't like to have you're time wasted, but can still enjoy possession/exorcism films, snag a copy of any of the following:
The Last Exorcism [Blu-ray]
The Last Exorcism
The Exorcism of Emily Rose - Unrated (Special Edition),
The Exorcism of Emily Rose (+ BD Live) [Blu-ray].

There's also a film based on the same case that Emily Rose was, that takes an extremely different tact on the material, but is still very good: Requiem. And of course, there's the mother of all exorcism films, the one, the only, the classic: The Exorcist (Extended Director's Cut & Original Theatrical Edition) [Blu-ray], The Exorcist