Tangled Up In Wires

Over the weekend I saw three movies, two 2009 releases and one 2010, and I thought I’d post some smaller reviews here:

The House of the Devil:

Ti West’s House of the Devil is at once an homage to 1980s horror and something more. Set in Anywhere, USA, the film tells the story of a young girl who agrees to take a very shady babysitting job from a highly suspicious Tom Noonan because she needs the cash for a deposit on her new place. The real joy of the film, at least for me, was in the waiting as West shows a tremendous amount of patience and confidence by structuring the film in such a way that, for over an hour of the film’s 90 minute running time, nothing really happens. Instead, the sense of dread grows and grows until it becomes unbearable. We’ve all spent nights alone in creepy places where every creak and clatter raises a sense of doom, and the genius of House of the Devil is how effectively it evokes that feeling. Well, that and the stylistic flourishes. Everything from the grainy, 16MM film stock to the chintzy score and goofy opening titles evokes early 1980s horror in such a detailed, precise way. I’m sure I’m in the minority, but the part I found the least satisfying was the last 20 minutes or so, when the danger actually presents itself (although the very end is pretty awesome). Its not that what happens isn’t awesome, but that I found the atmospheric horror of the first two thirds to be more interesting, and terrifying, than what followed.

Grade: B+

Cop Out:

Oh, Kevin Smith. After a series of films with diminshing returns (a look at his 2000s filmography on IMDB is like a harrowing trip through the depths of humanity’s worst) Smith decided to change things up by directing a script he didn’t write. This is hilarious because, as a director, Smith is so generic that he provides the best evidence to date against auteur theory. Still, Cop Out had potential, since I am a fan of 1980s cop movies (I thought it might make for a good 1980s themed double feature with House of the Devil) and Tracy Morgan. However, not only is the script not funny and the movie kind of a slog, but Tracy Morgan kind of sucked. The thing about Tracy is that he is mindblowingly good…as long as he can play himself (or a slightly scrambled version of himself) in a role with lots of room to just say whatever he’s thinking of. Here he’s hamstrung by a character who is expected to behave like a normal human being for 80% of the movie. The moments of improv feel forced, and Morgan is jammed into a role that he is ill-suited for, leaving aside his utter lack of chemistry with Bruce Willis. I don’t mean to harp on this one point because Cop Out is inadequate in every single way that a film can be inadequate (including not being so outrageously bad to actually be entertaining), but Morgan’s performance is the only even remotely interesting fail in a film full of it.

Grade: D

Police, Adjective:

A police procedural, with the emphasis heavily on the procedure, Police, Adjective is paced like a Low record, spending most of its two hour running time following its main character through a couple mundane days in his life. Dragos Bucur plays Cristi, a cop who has been following a young kid suspected of drug charges, but doesn’t have proof that he’s up to anything more than smoking some reefer. Still its enough for the police to arrest him and ruin his life, so Bucur does everything he can to stall this from happening. Simultaneously an exploration of the implications of language, an examination of law and order in post-Soviet Romania, and a surprisingly tense police procedural, Police, Adjective is a movie where, literally, nothing happens for minutes at a time. The camera lingers on him for minutes as he eats dinner, spies on the target, or asks his coworkers for favors. But the result is hypnotic, putting the viewer in the same position as the film’s main character and questioning the obtrusiveness of surveillence. It all pays off with a bang-up climax – easily the most tense scene to involve reading definitions from a dictionary ever – and a totally killer last line. Police, Adjective is not easy to get through, but it rewards your patience with a rich character portrait and a subversive glance at government restrictiveness.

Grade: A-