Catching Up on 2011: Twists and Turns Edition

In Gregg Araki’s Kaboom, Thomas Dekker stars as a college student who harbors a crush on his dumb surfer roommate (Chris Zylka).  He - Dekker, not the roommate - is a troubled guy, trying to figure out who he is and find his place in the world. Chowing down in the cafeteria, he confides in his best friend (Haley Bennett). They chat about the usual college topics: relationships and classes. Their rapport has a lived-in chemistry. They have fun being with each other and, consequently, they’re fun to watch. Around this little R-rated collegiate comedy spins an increasingly paranoid frenzy of plot that includes missing persons, a jealous lesbian witch (Roxane Mesquida), people in animal masks, a flirty party girl (Juno Temple), a doomsday cult, a pot-fueled prophet (James Duval), and the End of the World. It’s a fevered concoction, like a messy, madly uneven collaboration between David Lynch, Richard Kelly, and Diablo Cody. It’s also distinctly Araki, harkening back to the mix of tactile sensual imagery and commitment to heightened cartoonish grotesquery that he was deploying early in his career in wild, scattershot efforts like 1995’s The Doom Generation. He’s dialed back the intensity in the interim and, though it shares the DNA, Kaboom benefits from Araki’s more mature, experienced eye. The film’s no less of a mess, but it feels significantly more considered in its choices, a kind of careful craziness, a kind of tidy disorder to be found. It’s a sexy, vibrant jumble of weirdness and hilarity that is uneven but entertaining right up until its rushed climax that sucks the fun out of it all. To a certain extent, this feels like a deeply strange, very funny, sometimes creepy, often brilliant TV show with one or two seasons shoved into 80 minutes. With a complicated narrative structure of interwoven and overlapping hallucinations, amorous fantasies, drug trips, and bad dreams that culminates (spoiler!) in a literal apocalyptic explosion, the film keeps Dekker at the center, grounding it all. On a plot level it may be crazy and unsatisfying, but the metaphor rings true. To searching college kids floating around in hormonal ennui, the stakes of self-discovery can seem downright cataclysmic in proportions. 

A sturdy ensemble anchors The Lincoln Lawyer, a fairly standard legal thriller, the kind with twists that are only surprising to someone who has never experienced a legal thriller of any kind, not even an episode of Law & Order or a thick, forgettable airport novel. The script from John Romano, from a novel by Michael Connelly, gives Matthew McConaughey a rare suitable role that finds a way to channel his default sleaziness into an actual character. He’s an L.A. defense attorney working out of his car when he’s hired by a rich guy (Ryan Phillippe) who needs to beat an assault charge. The problem is that McConaughey begins to have good reason to think that his client really did brutally beat a prostitute and feels sick about defending him. He thinks his way through the criminal justice system, trying to alternately outwit and work with prosecutors (Marisa Tomei and Josh Lucas), cops (John Leguizamo and Bryan Cranston), an investigator (William H. Macy), and an inmate (Michael Peña). It’s all a slick bore. Now, this might sound like nitpicking, but the thing that most bugged me about this mediocre entertainment were the wobbly little zooms that director Brad Furman would drop into scenes for no apparent reason. A standard dialogue scene would be humming right along and then, zoom, we zip a little closer to the person talking. Sometimes, the zoom would take us back a few inches, just to mix things up. While I’ll admit that it’s definitely a minor stylistic tick and certainly not one that pervades every scene, it’s also indicative of a larger failing of Furman’s. This is a film that feels as if it’s breathlessly trying to become a better movie, but just can’t make it. Every little tick in the style just struck me as an empty gesture, a failed attempt to make the uninteresting interesting.

Michael Kovak (Colin O’Donoghue, handsome and clean-cut in a way that invites easy empathy) is a young man who leaves the family business, a mortuary run by his father (Rutger Hauer), to attend seminary school. Flash forward to just before he is scheduled to become a priest. He’s lost his faith. He’s not sure he believes in God anymore, even (or is that especially?) when he witnesses a freak accident and kneels over a dying woman, reluctantly giving her the last rites. The head of his program (Toby Jones) asks him to reconsider his decision to abandon the church and gets him to agree to a trip to Rome where he will enroll in a class for exorcism training from the esteemed Father Xavier (Ciarán Hinds). Once there, he finds he still has his doubts. Aren’t the possessed simply mentally ill? He’s taken under the wing of a grave master exorcist (crinkled, latter-day Anthony Hopkins) and finds much to test his doubt. This is Mikael Håfström’s The Rite, which screenwriter Michael Petroni claims, in line with a dubious horror tradition, to be suggested by a true story. It coasts a bit too far on its easy pop-psychological pseudo-religious conflict, but has such a tremendously oppressive sense of somber, suffocating Catholic dread that I couldn’t help but be jangled about. The actors are fantastic all, matching the film’s earnestness and solemnity. It’s an essentially standard paranormal creeper, in many ways just shiny trash, but the deathly unsmiling tone of the film, matched with the high production value, especially the sleek cinematography from Ben Davis who photographs Vatican City in gorgeous, ominous ways, creates a tone of overwhelming skin-crawling danger. I fell into the film’s mood, matching its earnest approach with an unexpectedly earnest response. There’s a creeping sense of an invisible, evil spiritual threat that set my teeth grinding and my feet bouncing. It worked on me. Handsomely mounted and scarily serious, the film’s an effective freak-out.

Another New Nightmare: A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET

The main raison d’etre of the Nightmare on Elm Street remake is theoretically the casting of a mid-comeback Jackie Earle Haley as Freddy Krueger, the series’ dream-haunting serial killer. In practice, the great actor has been given significantly less than nothing to do with the role; he settles into a pattern of twitches and growls that are matched with equally tiring glares and stares of the ominous variety. To make matters worse, the changes to the character could have led to a film with interesting ideas to share, if the filmmakers had any clear way of saying them, if the makers even realized the existence of such ideas.

In the original 1984 semi-classic from Wes Craven, Krueger was a serial killer who met his demise at the hands of an angry mob of grieving, outraged citizens. He subsequently haunts the dreams of a collection of teens through the course of the film. Now that’s it is 2010, that’s just too simple a premise, I guess. Now Krueger was a pedophile who was killed by a group of angry parents. Years later, he haunts the dreams of his victims, now teens and young adults. That could be a powerful message for a horror movie; one that casts a stark light on the ways child abuse can leave an intense impact on the victims’ lives, one that says the damage some are capable of committing against the most innocent among us is the real nightmare. But first-time feature director Samuel Bayer and his team are content to leave the idea as a dully formed and dumbly wielded bludgeon of sensationalism in an otherwise dull, painfully adequate horror film.

If you find sudden appearances that are synchronized with loud blats or clangs on the soundtrack the height of scariness, then by all means you will be terrified by this remake which cycles through the memorable images of the original with all the energy of a boring routine and all the imagination of a checklist. The claw in the bathtub? Check. The bulging wallpaper? Check. The soupy carpet? Check. The slow-mo jump rope? The menacing boiler rooms? The levitating girl? The bloody body bag in the school hall? Check, check, check, check. They’re all accounted for, but in worse shape than before.

Craven’s original has a sluggish, dreamlike quality. Watching for the first time, I was never quite sure when we were in or out of a dream. The characters and the threat to their lives are revealed efficiently and creepily and the odd incongruous jolts of creepy imagery are genuinely shocking. I loved the quietly creeping mood of the film that slowly overwhelms. I loved the hall monitor’s sudden transformation, the stairs that melt underfoot, and the unpredictable, shifting Krueger. The remake gets this all wrong. The pace isn’t dreamlike; it’s just sleepy. It’s not creepy or shocking, just rote. Information is doled out in entirely inefficient ways. If I hadn’t seen the original it would have been quite late in the film before I even figured out what the exact nature of the threat was.

It’s a frustration, I suppose. This is a film that couldn’t even hurdle my very low expectations. There’s an attractive young cast who are quite excellent at moping with suitably tired expressions including Kyle Gallner, Rooney Mara, Katie Cassidy, Thomas Dekker, and Kellan Lutz. They are asked to do so little, they may as well be living statues. The movie really lets down its cast and its audience, but above all, the movie lets down Haley, who, from behind ugly, uninspired makeup, is just as unneeded as the film itself.