Daily Archives: October 3, 2007

Cursed

Film Reviews

What with it being the month of Halloween, I figured I’d get re-linky (apologies, Will Smith) and stuff the archives here and there with a few reviews of (ostensibly) scary movies. Ergo, this refreshing of poor Wes Craven’s Cursed, only slightly redacted from its original publication in Screen International. To wit:

The release date of 2005 tells one side, perhaps the
official one, to Cursed, the new
werewolf picture from Dimension, the in-house genre arm of Miramax that
revitalized the modern horror landscape with the self-aware yet scary Scream pictures from what now seems like
eons ago. Almost every frame of its being, however, tells the other side of a Cursed story — of a troubled and shelved production (it shot in
2003) stitched together and reanimated as an awkward, unconvincing entry in the
PG-13, jolt-and-shock, teen disposable income sweepstakes. The result is
spectacularly and unremittingly awful.

Christina Ricci
stars as Ellie Myers, a talent booker on The
Craig Kilborn Show (one of several signs of the movie’s datedness, since Mr.
Kilborn is no longer on television) whose newish boyfriend is party planner
Jake (erstwhile Dawson’s Creeker
Joshua Jackson). Ellie and her younger brother Jimmy (an unappealing Jesse
Eisenberg), a bookish high school wallflower, get into a car accident with
Becky (Shannon Elizabeth).

All three are then attacked by a vicious, hairy and
mysterious creature, but Ellie and Jimmy survive, only to then have heightened
senses and a strange (and presumably new) predilection for chewing on raw bacon.
As Jimmy reads up on werewolves and faces down a coterie of gel-haired bullies
that actually do things like slap books out of his hands and lob a steady
stream of homophobic insults his way, so Ellie does her best to ignore any
symptoms of hirsute change and instead cope with a weirdly insistent and
abrasive publicist, Joanie (Judy Greer). Spurred on by a bizarre confession
from Jake, Ellie finally acknowledges there might be something to Jimmy’s
supposition that they’ve been “marked by the beast.” Things come to a
head at a Hollywood club opening where all parties meet,
under a full moon of course.

If the narrative synopsis sounds vague and confusing, it’s
because Cursed doesn’t have a
cohesive plot; the film in theory takes place over the course of two nights,
but the re-conceptualized story places scenes up against one another that find
characters behaving in nonsensical, contradictory ways. The relationships
between certain key characters are never wholly and accurately defined. The
roles of the aforementioned Elizabeth and singer-actress Mya have seemingly
been whittled down from plot-device supporting players to essentially cameos,
and Jackson’s and Greer’s parts figure to have been drastically reconstituted
and tailored to fit new-fangled conveniences.

A herky-jerky, movie-like mass, Cursed moves hastily and inexorably forward, but like one of those
wooden-track rollercoaster rides that induces more aches than thrills. A
picture of this conspicuous popcorn type shouldn’t have you checking your
watch, but Cursed stumbles so badly
with its irrational, illogical plotting that it feels interminable, and it’s
quite a shock at the end to discover only 95 minutes have passed. The esteemed Rick Baker provides some decent practical
creature effects, but these are easily cancelled out by wretched and laughable
CGI that rob the werewolf scenes of any beastly scares. “What doesn’t kill
you makes you stronger,” goes the old saying. With Cursed, though, all but the most hardcore and generous (read:
uncritical) genre audiences will be praying for an end to their lycanthropic
misery.
For the full original review, from Screen International, click here.

Richard Shepard’s Party Politics

Interviews

There’s no cool intellectual sheen or pretense to filmmaker Richard Shepard. Meeting for an interview in the bar of a Beverly Hills hotel, he’s whip-smart but instantly sociable, and he retains the raw
enthusiasm of a college kid just talking movies — minus any of the
manic geek factor awkwardness that can shade conversations with
similarly effusive filmmakers, like  Quentin Tarantino. His is a laidback personality that’s somewhat at odds with the stamp of
intensity most usually associated with authorial moviemaking. Age and
experience, however, have taught him important lessons. Unlike many a
headstrong, would-be indie wunderkind, the early 40-ish Shepard knows
facile entertainment can be an entrée into something more
intellectually and emotionally substantive.

Richard Gere),
who reconnects with his former cameraman Duck (Terrence Howard) in
post-war Bosnia, the scene of his nationally broadcast meltdown five
years prior. Now stringing for a variety of low-rent international
outlets, Simon convinces Duck that he knows the whereabouts of Bosnia’s
most wanted war criminal (Ljubomir Kerekes), a brutal former Serbian
commander known as “The Fox.” Along with rookie reporter Benjamin
(Jesse Eisenberg), a recent college graduate and the to-the-manor-born
son of a network vice president who’s been handed a tag-along ticket to
this reconciliation coverage as a means of getting his first
international “merit badge,” Simon and Duck embark on a dark and
dangerous mission that takes them deep into hostile territory, where
The Fox is still a hero of the people. Along the way they uncover a
tangled web of international complicity that seems to help shield a
killer and ethnic cleanser supposedly being sought at the highest
levels of government.

Though it takes place in Bosnia, and not during wartime, some parallels between The Hunting Party and the mysterious, now six-year search for Osama bin Laden are undeniable. Shepard is obviously a political animal — speaking not of his specific
views, but his grasp of the birds-eye interconnectedness of policy,
rhetoric and state action, both public and covert — and in interviewing
source writer Anderson and all the other journalists who comprised his
coterie, as well as officials from the UN, NATO and the Hague, Shepard
began to get a more complete sense of the black comic potential that The Hunting Party
offered, of an interesting story with definite relevance to today. “We
all say that we want to catch war criminals, and yet the biggest one,
Osama bin Laden, hasn’t been caught,” Shepard says. “And maybe it’s
because we’re not really looking. And if so, why wouldn’t we really be
looking?” For the full feature interview, from FilmStew, click here.

Sean Penn on The Late Show

Ephemera, Musings

I caught Sean Penn on The Late Show last night, decked out like the extra Reservoir Dog in a white shirt, black suit jacket and tie. He was low key and at his most gloriously disheveled; I swear, looking at this guy makes me immediately want to destroy every comb, brush and mirror in sight. It’s a look that somehow really works for him.

Penn talked in erudite fashion about Into the Wild, and the real-life Chris McCandless’ trip-the-soul-fantastic journey, saying that we live in “a comfort-addicted society,” which is an interesting turn of phrase that I don’t believe I’d heard before. David Letterman tried to make Oscar small talk, looking back on Penn’s Mystic River victory, but Penn kept his reminiscences brief, noting that “any social gathering of more than five people, without alcohol” makes him uneasy.

Interestingly, the typically politically-averse Letterman then segued into Penn’s recent trip to Venezuela, asking why he went there. Penn’s classic response: “I felt almost invited to go by Pat Robertson when he encouraged the assassination of Hugo Chavez, because I always can assume that whatever he says, it ought to be the opposite.” When Letterman went on to say that he’d heard Chavez was “wacky,” Penn paused and offered forth a perfectly hollow smile before replying, “If people have oil under their ground, they’re called wacky.”