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Colin Carman

~ Jane Austen Scholar & Culture Vulture

Colin Carman

Tag Archives: summer blockbuster

Review: “Fright Night”

20 Saturday Aug 2011

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

alpha dog, anton yelchin, austin powers, bromance, christopher mintz plasse, colin farrell, craig gillespie, david tennant, dracula, edward scissorhands, fatal attraction, fright night, glenn close, horror, illusionist, imogen poots, las vegas, monsters, muriel's wedding, nosferatu, role models, russell brand, sexuality, summer blockbuster, terminator, tim burton, tom holland, toni collette, true blood, twilight, vampires

“Sucker Lunch”

GRADE: B (RENT IT)

GARLIC? CHECK. HOLY WATER? CHECK. Wooden stake?  Check.

The power to resist the black Irish wiles of actor Colin Farrell as the vampire-next-door?  Not so much.  Farrell is surprisingly well-suited to the role of Jerry, a seductive bloodsucker who, like the Las Vegas housing development in which he suddenly appears, drops out of the sky and into his neighbors’ necks.  As the film makes plain, Vegas is a regular Mecca for our fanged friends: it’s another City that doesn’t sleep and chockfull of transients.  The opening aerial shots of a colorless community of townhouses in the Nevada desert – think of the homogenous rows of homes in the Tim Burton classic “Edward Scissorhands” (1990) – immediately establishes a sense of vulnerability.  It’s only a matter of time before something dark and demonic turns this Pleasantville upside down.  Enter Colin Farrell stage-left, or is it stage-fright?

I’ve been thinking about Dracula’s eyebrows lately.  For an academic article I’m preparing on the hair of nineteenth-century literary monsters, I focused on this description from Bram Stoker’s genre-generating classic, Dracula (published on May 26, 1897):  “[Count Dracula’s] eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the nose, and with bushy hair that seemed to curl in its own profusion […] The general effect was one of extraordinary pallor.”  Farrell’s got the bloodless pallor and Groucho Marx brows to play the part perfectly.  He’s Nosferatu with a six-pack.

From northwestern Romania to Sin City, from the Count to an average-joe like Jerry whose sexy surface masks something truly sadistic underneath.  A bloodsucker with a quotidian name like Jerry is, of course, played for laughs in the teen-friendly “Fright Night,” but it’s Jerry’s kids (the kids of Hillcrest Bluffs, Nevada, that is) that make this horror-fest feel fresh and intermittently funny.  Principally, there’s Charley (played by Russian-born Anton Yelchin of “Terminator: Salvation” and “Alpha Dog”) who is pursuing a new friend group, and a new girlfriend named Amy (Imogen Poots), at his high school.  He’s finding his childhood friend Ed Lee (the perfectly cast Christopher Mintz-Plasse of “Role Models”) hard to shake, and like a gay teen version of Glenn Close in “Fatal Attraction,” he keeps showing up at inopportune times, threatening to expose his nerdy past if Charley won’t hunt vampires with him.  He seems to say: I won’t be ignored, Charley.

This is the endearing core of the script, and though Ed doesn’t last long (at least amongst the human realm), he is one half of a teenage bromance seldom seen on screen.  Ed’s sexuality may be an adolescent question mark, but when he succumbs to Jerry in a swimming pool, feebly holding a crucifix in the air as if that’s gonna save him, Farrell moves in, holds him in his arms, and says: “You were born for this.  It’s a gift.”  If you’re like me and can’t abide the “Twilight” series and its sentimentalization of virginity, try HBO’s hit series “True Blood” (now in its fourth season) on for size.  You’ll never look at vampire narratives, so ubiquitous these days, and not remember that vampires are thinly veiled metaphors for sexual otherness (gay, lesbian, trans, fill in the blank).  It unsurprising, then, that when Charley and Ed fight to the death later in “Fright Night,” Ed holds his former friend tight and says: “Is this good for you? I’m feeling pretty homo right about now.”

Every Hollywood cast should be so lucky as to have the amazing Toni Collette (as Charley’s mom, Jane) around for just-add-water credibility.  Sure, she went mainstream in “The Sixth Sense” after the camp classic, “Muriel’s Wedding” of 1994, but she returns to the undead themes that made her big back in 1999 and with winning results.  Charley and Amy stand back as she flirts unabashedly with Jerry (gardening in a Brando-esque tank top) and confesses “I’ve had man troubles.  I’m not getting suckered again.”   Another notable cast member is Scotsman David Tennant as a Midori-swilling Vegas illusionist named Peter Vincent.  His performance is an obvious satire of Russell Brand (aka Austin Powers 2.0) and it gives the movie some teeth.  Charley comes to Vincent for advice on how to kill vampires, saying “I know what you do is an illusion.”  Tennant replies: “By illusion, you mean bullshit.”  Pause.  “Fair enough.”

Based on the original 1985 film written by Tom Holland, the retooled “Fright Night” (directed by Craig Gillespie and re-written by Marti Noxon) will entertain you right up until its slightly limp last act.  The film peaks after a car chase with a terrified Charley, Jane, and Amy running from Jerry, but once Toni Collette is hospitalized, “Fright Night” flatlines.   It’s not Farrell’s fault, nor is it his numerous costars’.  The problem lies in the fact that, by 2011, we’ve seen it all before.  Vampires have never been more en vogue and that’s because, like the mafia (Hollywood’s other favorite preoccupation), they operate invisibly amongst us, recruiting and romping in blood.  By now, we hardly need to be told that what happens in Vegas decays in Vegas.

Review: “Rise of the Planet of the Apes”

06 Saturday Aug 2011

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

allen ginsberg, animals, frankenstein, james franco, john lithgow, mary shelley, other, patrick doyle, revolution, rise of the planet of the apes, rupert wyatt, san francisco, science fiction, summer blockbuster

“Orangutangulous!”

Movie Review: “Rise of the Planet of the Apes”

Grade: B+/A- (SEE IT)

THE FACT THAT star James Franco (“Howl,” “Milk”) is currently studying British Romantic literature at Yale University in pursuit of his PhD – what’s next? Anne Hathaway as college chancellor? – may help to explain his initial attraction to the script for “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” (2011), a  prequel to the “Planet of the Apes” franchise which will have you saying to yourself: Go monkey, go!   After all, it’s in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), that Romantic caveat of a classic which more or less spawned the entire science-fiction genre, that Victor Frankenstein describes his laboratory as that “workshop of filthy creation.”  What gives “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” its chill (and genuine thrill) is that the pharma-medical lab at the film’s center is anything but filthy.  Instead, the scientific headquarters known as Gen-Sys look like a state-of-the-art facility: sleek and silvery countertops, Plexiglas cages in which primates pace and occasionally scream out, Franco (as Will Rodman) in an immaculately white lab coat.

The glossy exterior of Gen-Sys belies what goes on behind (sliding and keypad-operated) doors: primates are routinely tested and tortured in pursuit of a cure for Alzheimer’s.  The drug restores memory in humans and turns primates into Super-Simians.   Rodman’s own dad, Charles (played by a befuddled looking John Lithgow) is himself an Alzheimer’s sufferer and another guinea pig for his son’s trials.  Therein lies the film’s recipe for disaster: just as Will is boasting to Gen-Sys’s investors that he and boss (smooth operator David Oyelowo) have found the cure, an ape known as Bright Eyes busts out of its cage and through the window to a board meeting only to be shot dead by security.  Bright Eyes leaves behind a baby chimp whom Will smuggles out of the lab and names Caesar.

It’s a portentous name, Caesar, and until he finally realizes the dictatorial power of his moniker, we’re left waiting for Caesar to rise and rule a maligned race of apes just dying for a leader.   With the help of Will’s panacea for Alzheimer’s, which he steals from the kitchen fridge, Caesar crosses the Rubicon into San Francisco and starts a revolution.  Who knew the City by the Bay had an incompetently run monkey house sitting on its borders like a ticking time bomb, and that silverback apes, looking for spears to throw at cop cars, could pull parking meters out of sidewalks like they’re picking daisies? In a film really about the horrors of captivity, this George is more furious than curious.

Director Rupert Wyatt (“The Escapist”) maintains a breezy pace as Caesar’s insurrection gathers speed and force.  One notable scene is set on Will’s street where drivers and pedestrians alike stop, mouths agape, to see something amazing:  scores of monkeys swinging through the trees above in a gathering storm.  The standoff on the Golden Gate Bridge is truly something to behold; one would be hard-pressed to think of another confrontation on film between ape and mounted policeman (ape: 1; S.F.P.D.: 0).  Though “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” delivers the exploding helicopters and car chases we expect from a summer blockbuster, Wyatt also maintains a thoughtful plea for animal liberation.  Sympathy was central for the Romantics, especially Mary Shelley whose Creature in Frankenstein longs for someone to sympathize with his plight, and the traces of that creed are still visible in Caesar’s all-too-human cries for freedom and non-violence.

The most affecting revelation in Frankenstein is when Shelley’s monster, with his “dull yellow eye,” confesses to his crimes, saying: “I’m malicious because I’m miserable.”  His motivation all along was the simple, childlike desire to be loved and needed, but looking the way he does, humans only reacted with fear and horror.  This is more or less the point of Wyatt’s eco-positive parable, “Rise of the Planet of the Apes”: all monsters are man-made just as every futile attempt to contain the animal other via zoos and laboratories ultimately backfires.  So long as we continue to oppress all other species, the threat of their violent takeover will remain both a fear and a fantasy.

As a modern-day Frankenstein’s monster, Caesar wants to lead a bloodless revolution – he even stops his monkey underlings from killing humans indiscriminately – but it’s just not in the cards, especially in a Hollywood movie.  It’s telling that his only line in the movie is “No,” which he utters to the surprise of his inept jailers in the ape house.  If you’re listening, Patrick Doyle’s pulsing score will stay with you until you reach the parking lot, but it’s the final image of Caesar finally in his element, free (for now) in the treetops overlooking San Fran, that will enliven you long after.

For my review of Franco as poet Allen Ginsberg in “Howl,” see:

“A Movie Based On a Poem”

(Review of “Howl”) in the _G&LR_

http://www.glreview.com/article.php?articleid=316

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