Director: Robert Zemeckis
Writer: Clark Gregg; story by Sarah Kernochan and Clark Gregg
Cinematographer: Don Burgess
Producer: Jack Rapke, Steve Starkey, Robert Zemeckis

by Jon Cvack​

I remembered always loving the first of the film, liking the second third and not at all enjoying the last third. I also remember going back to this movie thinking maybe I was wrong, being disappointed again, and I still I went back to the movie, feeling maybe this third or fourth time was the charm.  Per usual it was received the same.

​Zemeckis would follow this misstep with a similar classical homage with Allied (2016), which is arguably his worst film. For those wondering why they can’t make movie like they used to from the 40s and 50s - whether Hitchcock or Curtiz - Zemeckis offers exactly what you see from the period, but adding more sex, language, and action than you’d usually find. The problem is that their somewhat disjointed plot stands in the way of the characters, in which even the greatest or more elegant camera work or movie stars could never save.

The story is Hitchcockian through and through, involving a wealthy middle aged couple whose daughter has just gone off to college. The mom Claire Spencer (Michelle Pfeiffer) is struggling with the empty nest, especially as she had given her violinist career in order to raise the kid. Left with little to do all day as her famous husband Dr. Norman Spencer (Harrison Ford) spends most of his time in his laboratory, working on his next cutting edge research project. New neighbors have moved in next door and in a Rear Window (1954)-inspired first half (or however long this goes on), after hearing some fights and with some strange interactions with the wife, Claire begins to suspect the neighbor husband has killed his wife.

It’s here that the movie works well, until you realize that it’s all a wild goose chase. Claire confronts the neighbor husband at a party, accusing him of murder, who then reveals his wife and that they were, in fact, just having some marital problems. The issue is that, come the end, when you realize that these characters are never reintroduced nor play any further role from this moment on, you can’t help but feel annoyed that this was just a bunch of empty filler to occupy the two hour and change running time and help prolong the creepiest sections.

Somewhere throughout this paranoia, Claire begins seeing ghosts, verging between what seems like a hallucination to the full fledged supernatural, though at times, I’m never sure where what she was seeing actually resided. The ghosts take the form of a young beautiful girl, which she sees in the bathtub and then in the lake outside their house where she then grabs an actual key from the corpse that leads to some other information later on, leaving you to wonder, if not a hallucination, why she didn’t want to call the police and say she had found a dead body in the lake that she pulled a key from?

This leads to the third leg of the plot, in which she discovers that Norman had an affair with a young graduate student. During the film’s most bizarre scene, Claire gets made up and puts on a sexy dress, seemingly possessed with the hopes of seducing Norman, who sees her eyes even change color. According to Wikipedia, Claire evidently had suppressed the memory of catching the two have sex, though I don’t remember this at all.

It’s here that the film then shifts, as possession aside, Norman later admits to the affair, taking us into the final act in which, given all his research, he couldn’t possibly have the truth revealed, killing the student and now willing to kill Claire. The story descends into a generic thriller as we watch the husband try and kill the wife who we know will come out on top.

The film made me consider the state of classical thrillers the Hitchcock pioneered. In the documentary De Palma (2015), we discover a man who struggled to progress the formula forward. While taking them to their limits in films such as Blow Out (1981), come the 90s, beyond Mission Impossible (1996), it seemed that all of the angles that could be pulled from the classical genre had been explored. He goes so far as to offer a fascinating dilemma he dealt with in being unable to think of new and cinematic ways to keep exploring the genre.

What Hitchcock did so well is make it seem as though a supernatural force was at play when really it was about coincidence or a villainous character deliberation. When first watching Hitchcock back before I was into film, I remember expecting more ghosts and scares. Zemeckis seemed to have a similar idea, opting for more supernatural elements within the format. Unfortunately, what I imagine both Hitchcock and de Palma struggled with was in having an adequate explanation. We never know why Madison’s ghost appears, and it continues its role through the very end, relying on a generic cheating husband/paranoid wife feud which has been long overplayed. While I understand the neighbor function more as a homage, I suspect that if that story was better incorporated into the plot, if not the dominant focus, that the story could have worked much better. It’s a great film up until the final third, worth watching until that point, then becoming one of the more disappointing films you’ll see - at least compared to how strong it started out.

BELOW: A very sexy scene that I'm still a bit confused about 

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Director: Gore Verbinski
Writer: Ehren Kruger; based on Ring by Hiroshi Takahashi and Ring by Koji Suzuki
Cinematographer: Bojan Bazelli
Producer: Walter F. Parkes and Laurie MacDonald

by Jon Cvack

Now that we’re less than a couple years away from finishing out this decade, popular movies from the 00s are starting to take on a more distinctive style. I hadn’t seen The Ring since high school, where it’s terror spread by word of mouth, with many agreeing it was one of the scariest movies they’d ever seen. Still a coward to horror at the time, heading to the theater to avoid missing out on the event took a bit more motivation than usual. While I couldn’t remember my reaction or any specific details, like most I was horrified and kept awake long into the night by the image of the contortionist girl crawling out of the television. I tried returning to the film back in college, unable to  finish it, as by then the film had become parodied and replicated ad nauseam that it fell victim to what happens when transitioning out of any filmic phase - it felt boring and uninspired. The Matrix-like, desaturated greens and blues were adopted by countless other films, across a range of genres, and by the middle of the decade the look was completely played out.

Fifteen years later, the look is now associated with the decade. While the film isn’t perfect, it’s also far from what I remembered and expected, serving as much more a surrealistic mystery film than countdown murder movie. Remembering it as cheap and shallow, I found it smart and complex, whose flaws were apparent, but in no way diminished the narrative. Only able to watch the first half I had that rare experience of wanting to fight through Sunday’s bedtime and my exhaustion in order to see where it was going.

The story involves a mysterious videotape whose origin I didn’t fully understand, discovering that the Wikipedia page doesn’t have an explanation either, forcing me to a Wiki page which explained that in the original film the tape was made by Samara, who after being thrown in a well by her mother and dying after seven days, possessed or developed the power of nensha (aka thoughtography), which allows a person to burn images from one’s mind onto photographs, canvasses, or film. It was a particularly big idea in Japan during the 20th century. It therefore makes sense that The Ring would have such difficulty conveying this fact (if it even tried at all; as I don’t recall any explanation). Unfortunately, when you really think about this shortcoming, you realize how big of a plot hole it is, as we do not in any way understand what brought all this about.

It opens on the film’s most terrifying and popular sequence, involving two girls at a sleepover discussing an urban legend about a mysterious tape made years ago that kills the person seven days after they watch it. One then admits she watched the tape seven days prior, soon getting killed and driving the other girl insane.

A Seattle Journalist Rachel (Naomi Watts) is hired to investigate the strange death, soon coming across the tape, watches it, learns about the seven day limit, and enters into a journey to discover how it came about and who's involved.

Similar to The Blair Witch Project released just three days prior, though arguably beginning with Haneke’s Benny’s Video in 1992, the story provides a fascinating examination of analog versus digital formats. Now that VHS tapes have officially entered into the vintage category, this film captures the format’s death nail. By 2004, VHS sales would essentially be void, dominated by the rise of the DVD. In 2002, they were fractions of home video sales, providing a fitting tool for where an apparition would render their thoughtographies. Aided in the discussion is Rachel’s ex-boyfriend Noah (Martin Henderson) who has his own “A/V” business - which is cheesy to say, but it’s never specified what he exactly does, though he does know how to slow down the playback and print freeze frames, perhaps even speaking to the medium’s overall limitations, both in quality and durability.

It also speaks to the film’s reliance on imagery. Expanding beyond Samara’s infamous crawl from the well is that of the Rachel’s determination to unravel each of the shots from the film, all in an effort to track down the truth and learn about the tape’s origin. The images transcend the infamous Samras crawling from the well, including a black horse, a randomly placed ladder, a shot aimed directly into an old mirror, a strange woman, and a fly that seems to bounce in and out of the frame. While playing like a pretentious student film (and offering the movie's most poorly aged element), each of these images eventually makes it way into Rachel’s reality, with the horse offering the most thrilling sequence, minus a bad CGI effect of it falling off the ferry and into the bay.

While I’ve had problems with surrealists like Alain Resnais and Luis Buñuel, The Ring skirts the limits of patience, providing just enough explanation before heading into meaningless frustration (minus failing to explain how the tape got made). It was exciting to anticipate when and how the elements from the tape would arise in the film, abandoning the sepia tone in favor a the dreary Seattle streets and seasides.

My largest problem involved Rachel’s peculiar son Aidan (David Dorfman), with the filmmakers appearing to be far more concerned with providing their own rendition of the Creepy Kid than plausibility. Looking up his peers, I was shocked to see Aidan topping out Buzzfeed’s ranking of the "Creepiest Kids in Horror Films", beating out everyone from The Omen’s ('76) Damien to Poltergeist’s ('82) Carol Anne. The complete lack of explanation as to why this kid acts so strange toward his mother makes the entire character seem unnecessary, serving no purpose than fitting the archetype. This isn’t to disparage Dorfman’s performance, who seems to deliver each line without a single blink of an eye. Rather, his inclusion seemed based entirely on the eerie concluding scene, in which Aidan reveals that he had watched a copy of the tape, forcing Rachel to make a copy of a copy to start an ostensible chain letter, in which the seven day death is foregone should someone else watch it.

The ending seems deliberately designed for a sequel, foregoing reason and explanation and diminishing The Ring’s position in the horror pantheon. Between the lack of explanation for the tape and strange rules which apply, while creepy in the immediate sense, upon further reflection it makes you all the more frustrated; wishing they could have foregone a few sequences in order to provide some - any - information as to why and how. Nevertheless, it’s a fun film that captures the essence of the decade, and just as other popular horror films from their respective periods didn’t necessarily make complete sense, these shortcoming - while glaring - are easy to ignore in favor of a pretty fun mystery/horror film hybrid.

​BELOW: A great surrealistic which I wish they cut out of before showing the horse floating

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Director: Steven Spielberg
Writer: David Koepp; story by George Lucas and Jeff Nathanson; based on Characters by George Lucas
Philip Kaufman
Cinematographer: Janusz Kamiński
Producer: Frank Marshall

by Jon Cvack

I had put on this film immediately after I finished The Last Crusade ('89). I hadn’t seen TLC in nearly a decade, and the film was even better than I remembered, epitomizing Spielberg’s ability to converge craft of highest order with popular storytelling. Having always heard Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was terrible and made close to zero sense, I took my time getting to this one; not wanting to tarnish the first trilogy. But with TLC giving me hope that Spielberg’s prowess would at least provide some mildly entertaining sequences, I figured I’d put this on and give it go. What I experienced was one of the most heartbreaking moments I’ve experienced with cinema - as this is not just Spielberg’s worst film, but one of the worst sequels ever made, making Lucas’ Eps. I-III feel like Lord of the Rings. This film serves as the antithesis of what Spielberg stands for - relying on a barrage of computer graphics for extraordinarily illogical sequences, and obvious throwback elements to help try and relieve these problems. While with the original trilogy we dealt with magic and religion, this round we’re introduced to aliens, in which Spielberg forfeits any insight into any interesting questions whatsoever in order to provide us with a gaudy CGI fest that only leaves you more upset for how much better Spielberg is when he abandons the practice.

The story follows a Golden Yeared Indiana Jones, whose hair has gone gray, and whose aging body has forced him to slow down. We open in the middle of the desert near Area 51 as a caravan of Russian spies dress as American soldiers in order to invade a warehouse where a strongly magnetized box exists. It was from nearly the opening shot, when we see the two actual American soldiers ask the Soviet spies to forfeit their weapons, when Spielberg cuts to a shot of the commanding officer who then dips to a knee, revealing the half dozen spies with guns behind them, opening fire, as though the American soldiers wouldn’t have seen the strange formation these soldiers were taking while getting out of the cars. I always resent this type of logical forfeiture in order to try and accomplish a cool shot, which it isn’t is. As happens when you watch enough movies for a long enough time, I knew I was in for the long haul on this one.

Indy is then revealed and so is the evil Irina Spaiko (Cate Blanchett) who’s one of the most boring villains ever created, adopting the stolid Russian personality placed within Mia Wallace’s body. I can’t tell you one unique thing Irina does or says, and given what I mentioned in my TLC essay, in which a fucking tank driver was able to become a memorable character, I couldn’t help getting annoyed and fast. Still, I figured maybe this was a slow burn and Spielberg would surprise us. We then enter the warehouse, using gunpowder to try and find a heavily magnetized package, where they throw it up into the air and follow the direction it drifts toward. Eventually they find the box, which contains an alien corpse, and then Indiana attempts to escape and we get our first taste of Spielberg’s dependence on CGI rather than expanding on what he has demonstrably done with highest quality three times before.

Let me pause to state that the primary problem with CGI is that, and the reason I would rather watch old films than many of these VFX-diarrhea machines is because I know that it’s not real. I know that Irina is not really driving a jeep through this warehouse that suddenly is about two miles long, even though it’s supposed to be the warehouse from The Temple of Doom. Time and again we cut to these great wide shots, showing the tens of thousands of boxes, as the car speeds the aisle, while Indiana Jones literally sprints across narrow rafters up across the ceiling, using his whip to swing down onto Irina, who’s still driving. None of this is real. It doesn’t look real, it doesn’t feel real. It’s like a video game or cartoon, in which case I rather just pick up a video game or watch an animated film. I honestly cannot comprehend how filmmakers today still refuse to understand that part of the spectacle for action-adventure films - and what makes them so effective - is that what we’re seeing looks as though it’s actually happening. Time and again, all we get is as much CGI as they can cram into each and every shot, rendering the whole thing completely unbelievable.

Case in point is The Last Crusade, where not once in the entire film was I pulled out because something didn’t look real - with maybe the exception of the blimp’s establishing shot, which looked more like a matte painting and not trying to be the coolest, most amazing complex shot of a blimp ever possibly conceived! The story transports you because we’re seeing Harrison Ford actually hanging from a gun turret cutting into a mountain, or his face being pushed into a tire tread, or an actual tank - even if a model - actually falling down the mountain. There is no magic to seeing an ornate CGI shot. I don’t imagine what the crew must have done to achieve it, or what the actor risked to perform it, or how the director decided to capture it. I just see a bunch of people in a room on their computers working complex software.

BELOW: Somehow driving unimpeded through the middle of a jungle, and it only gets worse
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Director: Lasse Hallström
Writer:Robert Nelson Jacobs; based on the novel The Shipping News by Annie Proulx
Cinematographer: Oliver Stapleton
Producer: Rob Cowan, Leslie Holleran, and Irwin Winkler

by Jon Cvack

There was a movement between the late 90s and early 00s that provided such incredible mid-budgeted Domestic Dramas as In the Bedroom (‘01), You Can Count on Me (‘00), and The Ice Storm (‘97), typically taking place in small towns, featuring a broken family attempting to repair their severed or severing ties, with filmmakers like Ang Lee and Kenneth Lonergan going onto bigger and better things, and Todd Field looking to become one of the all time greats, though failing to provide another project since 2009’s Tom Perotta adaptation Little Children.

I had never read the Pulitzer Price winning The Shipping News, but heard amazing things. Lasse Hallstrom directs the story, who provided the wonderful coming of age John Irving adaptation The Cider House Rules (‘99) only a couple years prior. The Shipping News is equally impressive in craft and photography, but the story seems far too large for its two hour running time, introducing so many characters and plots that by the end it races to catch up and resolve them, leaving you with far more questions than answers, making you want to read the book in order to fill in the blanks, knowing that some of the more fantastical elements simply failed to translate.

The story stars Quoyle (Kevin Spacey) as a pathetically passive middle aged man who suddenly (within minutes) meets the trashy, though sexy Petal (Cate Blanchett), who declares within seconds that within a few hours she would fuck him. In a brilliant montage, we witness the rise and quick fall of their relationship, delivering a baby name Bunny (played by three actresses) along the way. Petal’s interest in Quoyle fades as fast it arrived, with her heading off to local dive bars and hooking up with whatever hunk of meat she happened to seduce, leaving you wondering what she saw in Quoyle to begin with, other than the obvious and easy exploitable man who could give her… something of which I’m not really sure. She takes off with one of the men, taking Bunny and selling her into sexual slavery (or as they call it a “Black Market Orphanage”). If things couldn’t get worse, Quoyle’s parents both kill themselves, though not before leaving a voicemail explaining their action and how disappointed they are in what Quoyle became. As things appear incapable of getting any bleaker, a long lost relative of Quolyle’s, Agnis Hamm (Judi Dench), shows up and invites him to start anew in Newfoundland. 

It’s around this point where the movie attempts to condense far too many characters and plots into the remaining 90 minutes, with Quoyle learning he’s descended from barbaric pirates who use to pillage ships and assault women; Hamm putting Quolyle and Bunny up in a rundown house that’s held up against the strong gales by thick cables; a love interest, Wavey Prowse (Julianne Moore), and her handicapped son; ghosts showing up at the house, and really pushing the limits of story by not really providing any clarity other than it’s not really a ghost, but a man who ties knots in ropes to help relieve a strange curse on the house; Quolyle’s job at a newspaper where he works with the film’s strongest cast, involving Pete Postlethwaite, Scott Glenn, and Rhys Ifans, with Scott Glenn’s character Jake Buggit drowning in a boating accident, laid down at a wake days later, where right as someone provides the final words, he coughs up water, alive, further pushing into the movie into nonsense; a brother who raped his sister Hamm, who she later killed; and even more absurdities that I’m leaving out. If I had only read the synopsis, I'd consider it a parody of the subgenre.

What’s most disappointing is that, for all these elements, the moral of the story (the film version, that is) seems to be that you can’t escape your past, you can only change it, so try and change for the better. Or something. It’s a beautiful movie, and it left me wondering what ever happened to Lasse Hallstrom who, other than a few Nicholas Sparks adaptations and The Hoax ('06), hasn’t really made a movie I’ve heard of since. The camerawork and imagery are so strong, the performances fairly incredible, and yet it all added up into nothing much. Compared to The Cider House Rules or My Life as a Dog, both incredible coming of age stories, this left me hoping he’d return back to these smaller, more intimate dramas, rather than continuing the foray into colorful romance novels. It’s always a disappointment to see such incredible talent fall.

BELOW:  Spacey's character is too pathetic to be believable

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