Shared Darkness

At first glance, Furnace looks a lot like just about any other anonymous, single-titled, independently produced down-market action thriller, especially given the fact that its cast consists of Ja Rule, Tom Sizemore, Michael Paré and Danny Trejo. It’s got a hearty injection of possessed-machinery-gone-wrong horror, though, making for strong (if wholly undesired) recollections of 1995’s righteously awful The Mangler. Directed by William Butler (Madhouse), Furnace is a mash-up of copped moves, familiar characters and generally underwhelming special effects and execution — a combination which overwhelms the mostly sincere efforts of a game cast.

While investigating a series of deaths inside a maximum-security prison, Detective Michael Turner (Paré) uncovers a nightmare more threatening than the hardened criminals serving time — a group that includes Terrence (Ja Rule) and Fury (Trejo) — or the rogue prison guard, Frank Miller (Sizemore), who runs drugs for the inmates. Behind the walls, you see, lies a supernatural force hellbent on revenge — making for a rising body count that matches the rising temperature.

Furnace claims to be inspired by real events, but the set-ups and the movie’s dialogue, penned by Butler and co-writers Aaron Strongoni and Scott Aronson, are all of the wildly signposted and underlined emotion variety. Production designer Chad Keith does what he can to mask the low budget, but Furnace simply doesn’t have the capital to create a convincing backdrop, and Butler doesn’t downwardly adjust his vision or visual plan accordingly. The result is a movie with a few pockets of watchability, but also some real howler-type sequences.

Furnace comes presented in 16×9 widescreen, with an English language 4.1 surround sound audio track, and is housed in a regular Amray case in turn stored in a cardboard slipcover. In addition to an 80-second trailer for the movie, there are also previews for a quartet of other flicks, and a modest collection of six deleted scenes. By far the best supplemental extra, though, is a collection of cast interviews with Sizemore, Trejo and Ja Rule. The latter two segments run four-and-a-half and 14 minutes, respectively, and feature static interstitial cards indicating the offscreen questioner’s query, like “What is your roll [sic] in the film?” Sizemore’s 17-minute sit-down, though, is truly fascinating, partly because he’s totally candid and honest about his recent legal and substance abuse problems, and partly because he still seems a missed bout of medication or two away from snapping, as when he notes, gesturing offscreen, “There was a time when people would make too much noise, like this, and I’d get angry, but that’s OK…” There’s also a one-minute Easter egg bonus, accessible via the main screen, of the little girl, in crispy make-up, who plays the embodiment of the haunted furnace. For more information on the movie, click here. C- (Movie) C+ (Disc)

Upon its release in 1962, film critic Pauline Kael rightly called The Manchurian Candidate perhaps the most sophisticated political satire ever made. That by turns its frightening, surreal and slyly satirical story holds up — here a bit more so than in Jonathan Demme’s 2004 remake, starring Denzel Washington, Liev Schreiber and Meryl Streep — is a testament largely to Richard Condon’s novel and George Axelrod’s screenplay adaptation. The printed word remains the thing. Of course, director John Frankenheimer’s skill with a scene didn’t hurt either — his staging of the dual tea club/Communist brainwashers garden party remains a classic.

Frank Sinatra’s star turn as distressed soldier Bennett Marco, meanwhile, is much remarked upon, but for me alternately stiff and mannered. (I’d blocked from memory, too, Sinatra’s tiger-fist martial arts rootdown.) Instead, it’s Laurence Harvey, as programmed solitaire player Raymond Shaw, who with his cool, deadpan state anchors The Manchurian Candidate, a film prescient for the manner in which it assays the perversion of the political process. Supplemental features on the film’s special edition DVD are anchored by two 14-minute interview segments with co-star Angela Lansbury and filmmaker William Friedkin, the latter of whom serves here as a loosely historical framer. (There are also two Easter egg tidbits from the special menus screen, accessed by scrolling to the right over the playing card.) Finally, rounding things out is an audio commentary track with Frankenheimer recorded prior to his death, as well as an adulatory, recycled eight-minute interview from the movie’s 1988 VHS release with tidbits from the filmmaker, writer Axelrod and Sinatra. To purchase the movie via Amazon, click here. A- (Movie) B (Disc)

The same reason that I could never be a habitual smoker is the same reason that I wouldn’t make a good big screen vampire.
This occurred to me while watching 30 Days of Night, the latest adapted entry in Hollywood’s favorite source material of the moment, the graphic novel. The film’s
vampires are really inefficient when one gets right down to it. After
all, if it’s blood one craves, why would you puncture a jugular, enjoy
only a quick pint (or less) in orgiastic fashion, and then simply leave
the body? This, to me, seems terribly wasteful — the genre equivalent
of lighting a cigarette and flipping it away or stubbing it out after a
quick, single drag. While 30 Days of Night doesn’t exactly encourage such pause
for thought, the fact that I had time to reflect on such matters is
indicative of how at least somewhat botched a rendering of a great
concept the movie is.

30 Days of Night
unfolds in the isolated northern town of Barrow, Alaska, 80 miles away
from the next closest civilized enclave. Each winter, as the title
hints, the icy burgh is plunged into a state of complete darkness that
lasts a full month. It’s a time of hunkered-down communal survival,
with liquor and beer taps turned off at the local bar in order to temper tempers.
Relishing this
free rein, a group of bloodthirsty vampires, led by Danny Huston,
arrive to take advantage of the situation by feeding on the helpless
residents. It’s up to Sheriff Eben Olemaun (Josh Hartnett), his estranged wife Stella (Melissa George) and an
ever-shrinking group of survivors to do everything they can to
last until the next daylight. If this means going Anne Frank and holing
up in an attic to much bickering discord, so be it.

Penned by Steve Niles (the co-author of the original graphic novel), Stuart Beattie and Brian Nelson, 30 Days of Night is directed, improbably enough, by David Slade, who most recently made the indie two-hander Hard Candy. As in that film, Slade here trades heartily in tight close-ups, though of
course dialing down the color saturation to play up the surrounding
darkness. Early on, this tack suits the material, as the movie is a quickened-pace, Dawn of the Dead-style
re-imagining of pure, streamlined genre material. Vampires
swoop around in quick bursts and speak in a subtitled dialect of
phonetic clicks and high-pitched shrieks; you can see why the town’s inhabitants are crapping their pants. Much more an exercise in
horror than action, the movie dashes through its moral quandary
checklist — a violent attack by an infected kid, the assisted suicide
of another infected person — and gets some of its ya-yas out via the
group assault of a young woman used, to no avail, as bait to try to
lure humans out from hiding.

Diehard
vampire aficionados and source text fans will appreciate much of the
film, and it definitely plays better in the intimate confines of one’s own home, as well as earning points for a bleak ending that doesn’t
try to put an unrealistic shine on things. Still, 30 Days of Night remains essentially a somewhat
shrug-inducing vessel of unfulfilled potential, consisting of solidly
executed attack passages followed by great stretches of relative
tedium, or at least overly familiar genre dawdling (the waylaid
re-supply trip, the infected survivor). The great potential of its concept never takes full bloom,
partially because of wanly sketched supporting characters, but chiefly
because the restrictive conditions of space and passing time are
communicated in such a fuzzy, haphazard fashion.

Housed in a regular Amray case with a cardboard slipcover, 30 Days of Night is presented in 2.40:1 anamorphic widescreen on DVD, with matching English and French language 5.1 Dolby digital audio tracks and optional English, French and Spanish subtitles. Producer Rob Tapert — who sounds a bit like Wallace Shawn, actually — sits for a feature-length audio commentary track with Hartnett and George, a pairing that is good in theory (actors plus a behind-the-line guy) and practice, as they exhibit a warm rapport with one another that stands in stark contrast to the chilly weather on display. Among the anecdotes shared is the fact that Slade originally wanted to cast Forest Whitaker in Mark Boone Junior’s role, and that George is… a former rollerskating derby champion?! Hartnett also points out the scenes in which he is noticeably sick, the result, he claims, of a globe-spanning flight to the film’s New Zealand set straight from another production.

The big bonus feature selling point comes in the form of eight top-notch, behind-the-scenes featurettes, which can be played separately or together, at a total running time of around 50 minutes. Shot in a loose, very off-the-cuff style and compiled in a manner to at least partially mimic the movie’s comic book roots, these segments cover all manner of detail with regards to the movie, kicking off with a look at pre-production, before Slade, Tapert and company decamp to New Zealand and an abandoned equestrian facility to mock up their version of the town of Barrow. The interviews herein are brief, but informative, and well interspersed with edifying information that illustrates what’s being discussed. Stunt coordinator Allan Poppleton talks about wire work on one of the roof jumps in the movie, while — perhaps most interestingly — we glimpse production designer Paul Austerberry’s work with production illustrators and model makers. Though the production shot “day for night” and worked with interiors for as much of its production as possible, an infusion of funds for a car chase and fiery finale dictated five weeks of night shoots (and an accompanying 20,000 cups of coffee!), which is amusingly captured in the last behind-the-scenes segment. Slade, who at one point mutters, “Help me die!” seemingly only half-jokingly, evidences plenty of wear and tear, but really gets into showing his vampires how to strut their stuff, and has nothing but high praise for the talented base of creature performers that the Lord of the Rings series has left in New Zealand. Apart from the aforementioned commentary track, this ample slate of featurettes and the savvy inclusion of a half-hour episode of the forthcoming Japanese anime release Blood+, the only other supplemental feature is a vast collection of preview trailers — mostly genre product like the Resident Evil flicks and (gulp)  the awful-looking Zombie Strippers, starring Robert Englund and Jenna Jameson — but also other Sony films like Across the Universe. C (Movie) B+ (Disc)

Winner of the Best First Feature prize at the Independent Spirit Awards, Rocket Science isn’t jet-propelled, that’s for sure. The very loosely autobiographical narrative feature debut of writer-director Jeffrey Blitz, the helmer of the Academy Award-nominated documentary Spellbound, this criminally under-appreciated little gem from last year is a slow-burning comedy of coming-of-age frustration. Like its predecessor, it’s also a work interested in the weight of words, and the power attached to them — especially by adolescents.



The quick wit of lanky high school introvert Hal Hefner (Reece Thompson, above left) is masked by his stuttering problem, which dooms him to outcast status. Ambitious, hyper-articulate Ginny Ryerson (Anna Kendrick, above right) senses something in him, though, and recruits Hal to the school’s high-powered debate team. A warped romantic awakening ensues, though Ginny eventually manipulates Hal to her own ends, leading him to team up with an older, brilliant dropout — Ginny’s ex-partner, Ben (Nicholas D’Agosto) — in an effort to wow the judges at the New Jersey state championship.

The supporting characters around Hal — from his snarling, obsessive-compulsive kleptomaniac brother Earl (Vincent Piazza), to his fractured mom’s new boyfriend (Stephen Park), the judge father of a classmate — are all terrifically sketched, and the underplayed exchanges with them give the movie the feel of a slowly developing Polaroid; it grows more substantial and rewarding as it goes along. Blitz has a deft touch with dialogue, and realizes that in life, but especially adolescence, everyone is the star of their own story, and motivated by self-interest.

Canted tales of adolescent angst like these are a festival circuit staple (see Thumbsucker, The Chumscrubber, et al), but what Rocket Science most has going for it is its own strong sense of style and identity and a great, inviting deadpan lead performance from Thompson. Tossing aside the typical pat conventions and rigidly defined solitary motivations of such stories, Blitz conjures up a rich world of pubescent bewilderment and ecstatic agony. The flip side of something like Superbad, which presents its young characters as walking bags of surging hormones, Rocket Science doesn’t completely shortchange hormonal hijinks and acting out. (At one point Hal gets drunk and tosses an instrument through Ginny’s window, leading to the hilarious, shrugging mock-confession, “There’s a cello in your house now.”) But it does more fully present the awkwardness and uncertainty that go hand in hand with teenage years, and shows how those emotions as often as not inform impulsive decisions and behavior that, on the surface, isn’t necessarily sexual.

Housed in a regular Amray case, Rocket Science comes presented in letter-boxed 16×9 widescreen, with English 5.1 and Spanish 2.0 Dolby audio tracks, and optional English, French and Spanish subtitles. Apart from a paper insert touting other Picturehouse/HBO Films DVD releases, and a three-minute music video for Clem Snide and Eef Barzelay’s “I Love the Unknown,” the only supplemental bonus feature on the DVD is a 13-minute making-of featurette. While this behind-the-scenes production sketch — including interviews with Thompson, Kendrick, Piazza, D’Agosto and Aaron Yoo, as well as Blitz — is nicely done, and packed with solid information from a cast who, collectively and individually, really get the material, even more from Blitz would have been warmly welcome. To purchase the movie via Amazon, click here. A- (Movie) C (Disc)