paul_bowes2003 Reviews

Stealth (2005)

Awful parade of Hollywood clichés and toxic politics

[2/10 · 22 June 2006]

I like films of this type, and I was ready to be entertained by 'Stealth', but really ...

The comments above have picked up the many, many plot holes and character clichés, so I won't bore you by repeating them, but what really annoyed me about this film was the pernicious brand of politics that it peddles. This is real Black Hat / White Hat stuff - don't look for subtlety. Judging by the plot of 'Stealth', the US military nowadays is almost entirely concerned to avoid civilian casualties (how many Iraqi dead now?) and take out cartoon terrorists on the basis of its faultless intelligence information (!).

You may think that this kind of criticism amounts to going after a fly with an elephant gun - this is after all supposed to be a simple action movie with a vaguely sci-fi premise - but there was a good film to be made about the moral implications of the US's love affair with military high technology and its deep reluctance to risk the lives of its servicemen and -women. 'Stealth' isn't it. This is a film so deeply wedded to cliché that it kills off its leading black character simply to give the white male lead a free shot at the female lead. It even establishes Jaime Foxx's character beforehand as a stud and yet has him express no interest in the gorgeous female pilot played by Jessica Biel. Apparently the colour bar is alive and well. Biel's character, carefully established as tough, capable and clever, the equal of her male colleagues, has to be dumped behind enemy lines purely so that she can be rescued by the hero. Everything in the film reeks of a conformist 50s Cold War mentality, with the faceless 'terrorists' replacing the Soviet Russians, American 'traitors' as scapegoats for the failures of American policy, and the gender and colour roles clearly marked out and policed.

The solitary exception to the cardboard, one-dimensional characterisation is Sam Shepard's Captain George Cummings. Shepard is credible as a soldier and commander - the leads are all far too glossy - and his character has some complexity. At times he seems to be acting in a different, better film.

The CGI effects are up to the usual standards, but this isn't even a notable effects movie (Biel's bod is the most arresting effect on display, and that only briefly). And like everyone else, I have no idea why the film is called 'Stealth'.

Wolf Creek (2005)

I wanted to like this but then I watched it

[5/10 · 23 April 2006]

I love horror movies, and I watched this with high hopes. Perhaps I should point out from the beginning that I'm 48, not 18 - i.e., I've seen a few films made before 'Star Wars'.

'Wolf Creek' is OK. You probably won't feel you've wasted your money. But really - is this supposed to be groundbreaking stuff? I remember seeing 'Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue' in around 1978/9. I was 21, and it was the first horror movie I'd seen in which everybody died: hero, heroine, cop, innocent victims, anyone who happened to be standing around. At that point I hadn't seen the Romero flick on which it was based. It was shocking because the benchmark was Hammer horror, in which the monster (vampire, werewolf, etc.) was always destroyed at the end, and the good people triumphed. Poetic justice. 'Morgue' belonged to the world I actually lived in, in which good didn't always win out.

'Wolf Creek' picks up the serial killer ball and runs with it by suggesting that i) the killer gets away with it, and ii) the innocent die or are blamed for the crime. Radical. Not.

I can't suggest what you should watch if don't find 'Wolf Creek' frightening. It isn't particularly bloody, if gore is your thing; apparently we're supposed to find its nihilism-lite sufficiently scary. Unfortunately we're not allowed to understand the moral point of anything we see. We are supposed to sympathise with the lead characters because they're scared. It doesn't work like that.

Try Miike's 'Izo' or 'Ichi the Killer'. Try Romero's 'The Crazies'. 'Wolf Creek' is a vague memory of something that once had the power.

Time of the Wolf (2003)

Thoughtful and disturbing post-apocalyptic scenario

[7/10 · 20 December 2005]

I won't bother to duplicate other comments here - suffice it to say that I saw the film in the cinema, it held the (British) audience, and I thought it was excellent. I have no axe to grind re: Haneke, since this is the first film of his that I've had the chance to see. I'll be looking up the others.

I do have a few remarks to make in the light of some of the negative comments posted here.

If your benchmark for movie greatness is the pace of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, or you require buckets of explicit gore, or explosions at five minute intervals, or you cannot survive in a cinema without a rock soundtrack, or you are not prepared to engage with credibly complex characters, simply don't bother to see this film - you will find it unbearably slow, quiet and boring. The opening credits, for example, pass in complete silence. A few short scenes that take place in complete darkness are soundtrack-only. Much of the film has a washed-out, bleached look that is the antithesis of the blockbuster. This is not 28 Days Later or even a Romero flick - though The Crazies comes close to an American take on a similar idea. This is not a movie made with a teenage dating audience in mind.

I suspect that that this film will be more resonant for European than for American audiences, but if you want to see a director and a great ensemble cast try to convey the disorientating reality of social breakdown - and the necessity of acts of imaginative reintegration - with slow-burning intensity but without resort to melodrama, this is well worth your time.

The Exorcist (1973)

Landmark film greatly weakened by the passage of time

[6/10 · 30 November 2005]

I won't bother to repeat what others have said about the impact of this film in its time. Some of the things that were strengths then are still strengths now. 'The Exorcist' was one of the first films of supernatural terror to feature a committed cast of first-rate professional actors and a very strong script that took its story seriously. Friedkin's direction, the relatively slow pace, and the clarity and restraint of the cinematography and almost subliminal soundtrack work as well as they ever did. For example, Friedkin makes effective use of silence and very quiet sounds instead of smothering everything in the pounding rock soundtrack that has since become the norm. The special effects, however, are primitive and largely unconvincing, and many of the most 'horrific' moments simply don't work for an audience conditioned to a far higher standard of realism. (For this viewer, thirty years on, some of the most frightening things in the film were items of Ellen Burstyn's wardrobe.)

The biggest problem, however, is that 'The Exorcist' is now a victim of its original popular success and subsequent inflated critical reputation. In the thirty years since its appearance, the film has been plundered mercilessly, with the result that almost everything that made it distinctive at the time has since attained the status of cliché. By the time the film re-emerged it had inevitably lost much of its aura of originality. This accounts for some of the impatience of the younger audience with the film; the rest follows from disappointment that 'The Exorcist' simply isn't, in 2005, 'the scariest movie of all time'. If you can watch it without preconceptions, it's still a good and serious movie, and one every fan should know. Watch it back to back with 'Constantine' and ask yourself whether the old guys didn't know a thing or two.

Ménilmontant (1926)

Superb example of silent film making

[8/10 · 14 November 2005]

Although the film is excellent in all its aspects, the best thing about 'Menilmontant' is arguably the central performance by Nadia Sibirskaia; her acting during the episode in which her character is contemplating suicide is extraordinary. The story is simple to the point of cliché but given a surrealist edge by the framing acts of unexplained violence. The film gathers depth and resonance as it proceeds. As with all of the best silent films, one is not conscious of the 'absence' of the spoken word.

I would happily recommend Kirsanoff's film to any newcomer to serious film making of the 1920s. It is notable for its restraint in portraying powerful emotions. In the version mentioned below, the film is enhanced by a deeply sympathetic score (not always the case).

I saw this film on the Kino Video DVD 'Avant-Garde: Experimental Cinema of the 1920s and 1930s - Films from the Raymond Rohauer Collection' (2 disks, K402 DVD). Black and white silent film with musical accompaniment. 37 minutes running time. This collection, which I recommend, includes another, shorter film by Kirsanoff, 'Brumes d'Automne', in which Sibirskaia makes another memorable appearance, and which confirms Kirsanoff's talent.