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Shared Darkness

A Communal Life in Film, Examined

Daily Archives: October 24, 2011

The Skin I Live In

Eminent plastic surgeon Dr. Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas), ever since his wife was horribly burned in a car crash, has been interested in creating a synthetic skin with which he could have saved her. After years of boundary-pushing research he finally cultivates an inflammable epidermis, and sets out to test it on a human guinea pig. Assisted by his longtime, live-in housekeeper Marilia (Marisa Paredes), Ledgard painstakingly performs dozens if not hundreds of skin grafts on a mysterious woman (Elena Anaya), who’s clothed in tight tan body stockings and kept locked away in his Toledo mansion, not unlike Rapunzel. When Marilia’s estranged, fugitive son Zeca (Roberto Alamo) talks his way into Ledgard’s house, it sets in motion a chain of lethal events, which is then interspersed with material from six years earlier, shedding further light on the full nature of Ledgard’s personal tragedy with his wife and daughter.

The Skin I Live In is a movie at once artful and demented, the sort of blend one can’t imagine a lot of filmmakers attempting, let alone pulling off as engagingly as director Pedro Almodóvar does. Loosely based on a novella by Thierry Jonquet, Almodóvar and Banderas’ first teaming since Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! is a little puzzle-box gem of clinically constructed perversity. Some might describe it as tonally schizophrenic or less than the sum of its calculated parts, perhaps feeling a bit tricked by being lured into a psychological horror film whose full-blown depravity takes a while to develop, like a Polaroid.

That criticism, however, doesn’t give due credit to Almodóvar’s orchestration. The filmmaker delivers twists but then toys with audience expectations, and more fully plumbs the psychology of said twists, in often uncomfortable ways, by taking them to warped, quasi-logical extremes. Many of the film’s commingled major themes are familiar — betrayal, loneliness, secrecy, vengeance, sexual identity and compulsion — but they are offset by Alberto Iglesias’ wonderful score, exquisite sets, and characteristically lush production design and costumes, all of which counterbalance the darkness of the material. The result is a Skin one can’t quite imagine anyone other than Almodóvar feeling quite as at ease in. (Sony Pictures Classics, R, 117 minutes)

Frat House Massacre

Because he knows the subject matter well (err… horror films of a certain era, not frat houses or actual massacres, per se), it seemed like a good idea to give FOSD Telly Davidson a crack at reviewing Frat House Massacre. His take appears below:

There’s a popular if crude term for putting one’s guy friends above temporary, whiny girlfriends: “Bros before ‘hos!” In Synapse Films’ newly released “director’s cut” of Alex Pucci and screenwriter Draven Gonzalez’s micro-budget slasher Frat House Massacre, almost every character fits into one category or the other. And if nothing else, this picture definitely puts the “slash” in slasher.

As always with a late ’70s horror film (the movie is set in 1979), we start with a tragic “accident” that prefigures what later goes on. In this case, a car crash sends the slightly younger of two brothers, Bobby (Rane Jameson), into a chronic vegetative state — not needing life support, but comatose and non-responsive (a la Sunny von Bulow or Ariel Sharon) for months. Meanwhile, his brother Sean (Chris Prangley) is starting his college career, and tries to pledge to fraternity Delta Iota Epsilon, which he soon finds lives up to its nickname (as in D.I.E.), with horrific hazings and deadly basement initiation rites at the hands of status-conscious sadist frat prez Mark (Jon Fleming) and his creepy, ambiguously gay and voyeuristic sidekick, Tim (Andrew Giordiano). Strangely, no adult teacher or authority figure ever seems to notice the caravan missing student bodies from this Satan’s School for Boys.

Bobby and Sean’s parents died a few years earlier, though they’ve been looked after by a neighbor, a kind and caring black woman named Olivia (Georgia Gladden), who is like an island of dignity in these surroundings, and the only truly likeable character in the picture. After witnessing one hazing/initiation that went too far, Sean finds that he’s the next item up for bids on the incredible torture show. But just as he’s being killed, Bobby starts to awaken from his coma. Once recovered, Bobby starts school the next semester, and sure ‘nuf, suddenly some of the king bees of Delta Iota Epsilon start “DIE-ing “at the hands of a mysterious slasher. Could it be that Sean is the killer — possessing Bobby’s body to getting revenge on his own death? Has one of the frat boys turned on the others? Or is there an outside killer loose operating for past associations and motives of their own?

You don’t have to be Sigmund Freud (or even Michael Musto) to see that this movie has a White Collar or Starsky & Hutch level of gay subtext (writer Gonzalez is a specialist in gay horror), with buff young men, shirtless and in skimpy underwear, being waterboarded, whipped, stabbed and beaten as other near-nekkid young guys root and cheer and beer-shower, when they aren’t masturbating while watching each other have sex with hot sorority chicks. (And really, how many men’s fraternities are “Deltas” instead of “Alphas”, anyway?)

Understandably, given its budget constraints, the movie has built-in limitations that could be forgiven if enough style and substance were present. The film’s bright (if low-fi) digital photography and videotape-like look is a sharp contrast to the grindhouse dinginess and $1.98 film processing of the drive-in days that the movie purports to tribute. While no one will ever confuse He Knows You’re Alone or Don’t Answer the Phone or Black Christmas with a Terrence Malick picture, those movies actually got some cinematic mileage out of their low budgets. Here, where everything is brightly lit and the Blair Witch handheld camera is the staple, it works against the film’s natural aesthetic.

More “fatally”, though, the movie doesn’t really know how to draw out any longstanding suspense, as we meander from one murder set-piece to the next. While the killings are brutal, they are a far cry from the shock suspense and clock-ticking Grand Guignol of the (big-budget) Saw/Seven/Bone Collector/Final Destination school of cinema. Even more to its fault, the film has no discernible ability to build prolonged suspense leading up to most of the killings. The movie practically announces each murder up front, and the victims are likewise “disposed with” in every sense of the word. Maybe the filmmakers thought that bumps in the night and shadows in the dark and obscene phone calls and other drawn-out tricks and treats were old hat — but then again, they are making a retro movie. Rent Halloween already!

The DVD features dual audio commentary tracks (one with Pucci and Gonzalez; the other with crew commentary, something which more big-budget movies would be uplifted by adding for the DVD), plus deleted scenes and a “making of” spot that conveys the real charm of this film and others like it — “Hey guys, let’s put on a slasher film!” Technical specs are 1.78:1 aspect ratio and Dolby digital 5.1 sound, in a typical Amray package. Music by Goblin veteran Claudio Simonetti adds some level of “giallo” cred (although nobody’s going to comfuse this one with Deep Red.) To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. D (Movie) B- (Disc)

Puss in Boots

A winning vocal performance by Antonio Banderas — a zesty, winking turn that jibes with the persona he has chosen to embrace especially for American audiences, that of an exotic, comedically accented “other” — anchors the swashbuckling animated family adventure Puss in Boots, a peppy, character-rooted romp that thankfully abandons some of the more frenzied and forced in-joke references of the Shrek series, which first introduced its main character.

Stylistically, Puss in Boots embraces some of Tex Avery’s manic sensibilities (a character leaving a shadow cut-out of himself when crashing through a barrier, for instance), and is cheekily self-aware without being postmodern; various chase sequences are superlative examples of action animation, meanwhile, goosed up even further by the movie’s stereoscopic 3-D presentation. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Paramount/DreamWorks, PG, 90 minutes)

Jim Loach Talks Oranges and Sunshine, Famous Father

For his narrative feature film debut, Oranges and Sunshine, director Jim Loach chose to tackle a sprawling tale of warped governmental policy, spanning three decades and involving the forced deportation of British kids to Australia. Almost as shocking as its narrative — which tells the story of literally tens of thousands of children, and the terrible abuses they suffered after in many cases being told that their parents were dead — is the fact that it is hardly known in the United States, where tales of adolescent mistreatment and murder are typically seized upon with a white-hot tabloid fervor, grist for the mill of the 24-hour cable news channels. I had the chance recently to speak to Loach one-on-one, about his movie, his leading lady Emily Watson and, yes, his famous filmmaker father. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the interview.

El Bulli: Cooking in Progress

For the first six months of the year, renowned Spanish chef Ferran Adria closes his tiny restaurant elBulli, overlooking Catalonia’s Costa Brava Bay, and works with his culinary team to prepare for the next season. (Or did — the amazing restaurant has now shuttered permanently, set to re-open in 2014 as only a culinary center and institute.) El Bulli: Cooking in Progress, a rather elegantly simplistic and hands-off exploration of food as avant-garde art, spotlights this unusual process, and cooks up all sorts of elemental yearnings in the tastebuds of viewers. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Alive Minda Cinema/Kino Lorber, unrated, 108 minutes)

Oranges and Sunshine

Oranges and Sunshine is re-affirming evidence that not every remarkable true story a remarkable film makes. Based on the book Empty Cradles by British social worker Margaret Humphreys, the movie tells the story of its crusading subject, who worked to uncover one of the most shocking government-sanctioned scandals of modern times — the forced deportation of many thousands of children from the United Kingdom to Australia.

Both overall and scene-to-scene, though, the film exudes a just-fine feeling of dutiful emotional string-pulling, and nothing more. It commits no great and cringe-worthy offenses, but neither does it ever really get its hooks into an audience, and make them in a lasting way truly feel either the shock or heartbroken compassion its story should elicit. Mostly, though, Oranges and Sunshine is a “message movie” told in staid, blocky fashion, as if already edited down, content-wise, for a Hallmark-style TV presentation, and the lowest-common-denominator audience that medium occasionally implies. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Sony Pictures Classics, R, 105 minutes)

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