KagamineLen's Film Reviews

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Yeah, my criticism website is currently under construction. I still haven't decided what my official critic pseudonym is going to be. But here, I'll post a couple reviews of very different films that I have seen over the last week, and seek out constructive input.

Here is the first one, written just an hour ago.

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Maniac (1980)
Grade - 3 / 5

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William Lustig’s Maniac is infamous for its grisly scenes of violence against women. It presents a tunnel-vision worldview, primarily through the eyes of a misogynistic serial killer. It does this so effectively that it has polarized audiences worldwide. Most people can agree that this slice of early ‘80s horror cinema is one of the most genuinely disturbing films of its time.

The world that Frank Zito (Joe Spinell) inhabits is the sleazy underbelly of New York City. The cinematic aesthetics are reminiscent of Martin Scorcese’s Taxi Driver in that respect. Both films center on a psychotic male that is deteriorating in the world he inhabits. In this case, Zito has an Oedipus complex that rivals Norman Bates, which further complicates matters.

The sense of claustrophobia and isolation (maintained so well for the first half of the film) is jarringly broken when Lustig throws in the conventional plot device of the woman who starts to fall for the guy. Naturally, she is unaware that he is a killer until the inevitable climax where he starts chasing her through a foggy graveyard. This love interest has very little personality. Then again, none of the females in the cast have much personality. This is the world through Zito’s eyes, after all.

Zito is such a grungy character for most of the film. Naturally, it is rather surprising that he can present a relatively clean appearance when the plot calls for it. His “love interest” is a professional photographer who specializes in taking shots of female models. He decides to find out where she lives and track her down after she takes a random shot of him at Central Park from a distance. Why she would let him into her apartment under those circumstances? That is never explained.

The film works best when it centers on Spinell’s performance, which is one of the great horror movie acts of the 20th century. It is a real impressive piece of character acting, and I would argue that takes on distinctly insane ways that are different, but eerily similar, to Anthony Perkins’ work in Psycho. The gaudy neon-lit streets of Times Square, the barren alleys and subway stattions, the cluttered shrines to the abusive mother in Zito’s apartment – that is the world where Lustig’s direction feels most at home in. This is a world that does not need a paint-by-numbers central plot, and Zito is a tragic horror movie villain who belongs in a more skillfully constructed film.

Lustig starts off strong and maintains the tension for the first half of Maniac, and he does have many moments in the second half where he manages to kick up the stakes – especially when it comes to the disclosure of Zito’s backstory. However, there are also moments where the focus is lost in favor of plot devices. Plot devices have their place in all films of any genre, but the jarring change of tone between the isolated scenes of the grungy Zito stalking the streets and the scenes with the clean-cut Zito dating the woman who is falling for him is an uneven contrast that reeks of cinematic sloppiness.

The grisly setpieces are full of the usual trappings. The predator’s heavy breathing does tend to increase as he gets closer to his prey. There is a lot of buildup involving the victims catching on that some seedy character is after them, and a few minutes of faux-suspense in the pursuit. It can’t be real suspense, because the audience knows exactly how it is going to end. These moments work in the same way that slasher films do. There is a pornographic zeal in the hunt, and it ends with a climax consisting of a gory killing. This film really is every bit as hateful against women as Zito’s character is.

There is no doubt that Maniac is a unique experience in the world of horror films. When it is in its element, it works brilliantly as a character-driven slice of nihilism. The only real complaint I have here is the uneven tone presented when the scenes with the female photographer start taking center-stage in the film. The final ten minutes work to redeem this with a barrage of intensity, and it does work. But unlike Taxi Driver and Psycho, the warped view of the killer is shared with the film itself. It is one-of-a-kind, and it does have its impressive points. But it certainly is not a commendable production.

Flight (2012)
Grade - 3 / 5

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Without Denzel Washington’s perfectly restrained central performance, Flight would have been nothing more than another run-of-the-mill addiction drama. In many ways, it is exactly that even with his pitch-perfect acting tossed into the mix. There are many scenes where the alcoholic tells one lie after another, even though he is only fooling himself. There are many scenes where he pushes away people who care about him. There are many scenes where he stays sober for a couple of days, only to relapse at the worst possible moments. It makes for a predictable plot, but addicts of any kind who are not in recovery do tend to be predictable people.

Whip Whitaker (Washington) is an expert pilot, who manages to save most of the people on a plane that severely malfunctions. The problem is that he pulled off those heroic stunts with large amounts of alcohol and cocaine in his system. He is about to be charged with six counts of manslaughter because of his irresponsibility, but a gifted lawyer, Hugh Lang (Don Cheadle), comes to his rescue. But Whitaker still continues with his binge drinking, and that goes against the helpful legal advice that everybody around seems to be giving him.

The moral compass in the film comes in Nicole (Kelly Reilly). At the start of the film, she picks up heroin from drug dealers who try to convince her to be the starlet in an anal porn scene. Not long after that, she overdoses when she ignores her dealer’s advice and shoots up heroin that is described to be “Taliban strength”. She meets Whitaker in the stairwell of the hospital that they both end up in after he survives the plane crash. He takes her into his secluded farm property after her physically abusive landlord evicts her, but it does not take long for her to realize that his intoxicated companionship is not much better than what she was dealing with before. Especially when she is taking her own recovery from addiction very seriously.

Nobody in the film doubts that Whitaker saved the lives of many people with his mythical skills as a pilot. The scene that features all of his heroics almost seems like it belongs in a different film, considering that Whitaker spends most of the running time outside of that action-packed sequence in a state of constant inner torment. His own moral compass is malfunctioning because of all of the alcohol he is consuming, and no amount of external denial that he presents to the world around him is enough to help him forget that he knows the ugly truth of his condition very well.

The comic relief sequences with John Goodman (who plays a flamboyantly sleazy drug dealer) also seem to be taken from another film, especially when it comes to a rather tasteless turn of events near the end of the plot. Will putting Whitaker in an even more intoxicated state help him weasel his way out of legal trouble? And audiences are expected to root for him while something like this is happening on the screen? I did not laugh, and I could not feel anything but queasiness while that series of events was taking place in the film. It just reeked of tastelessness.

Then the biggest moral choice that Whitaker has to face in the plot was about as blatantly obvious as making a decision between telling the truth or murdering a litter of kittens by means of torturous mutilation. Director Robert Zemeckis knows how to be blatantly manipulative, that’s for certain.

Zemeckis tried to make a film about the battlefield that is going on in Whitaker’s soul. On one side, there is the overpowering desire to continue living the tormented life he knows, and also to lie his way out of the hole he has dug himself into with the help of his lawyer. This desire is so overpowering that it immediately forces him to reject the other side, which is a desire to cut out the BS and be an honest man. The scene where he tries to attend an AA meeting but walks out while the speaker talks is one of the better moments in the film – it shows that Whitaker knows what is really going on inside himself, but he runs back to his addictions and the denial surrounding them in order to hide the reality from himself.

That premise would have made a more potent cinematic experience if the strokes in the plot were not so terribly broad. This is not the life of the usual alcoholic – this is high melodrama, and the general lack of melodramatic music can’t hide that. It gets so confused that it turns into a thriller where the suspense is in whether or not the junkie and his legal team can effectively con their way out of the massive mess. I would have preferred the film if it spent more time on the battlefield in Whitaker’s soul, as that probably would have resulted in a much less confused production.

Denzel Washington manages to elevate most of the film from its melodramatic ways by giving a performance that is the exact opposite of melodrama. Cheadle and Reilly are also believable in their well-written roles, but the central plot could have used a complete rewriting with almost all of the same characters intact (sorry, Goodman, you gotta split). While Flight invests a lot into being a mature study of a tortured soul, the plot is pure Zemeckis nonsense. That is a damn shame.

Skyfall (2012)
Grade - 5 / 5

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After the stupidity that was Quantum of Solace, my hopes for Skyfall were rather dim. Daniel Craig made a great James Bond in both of his previous performances as the iconic character, but the material he was given to work with was rather shoddy. I am happy to report that director Sam Mendes has managed to overhaul the Bond mythology while paying great respect to its roots. Skyfall gives Bond the same sort of grand and conceptually intelligent treatment that The Dark Knight did for Batman.

Nobody expects a strong character-driven piece of cinema when they enter a James Bond movie, but that is what Mendes manages to deliver. If you are just going into it for over-the-top action sequences and badass heroics, Skyfall also delivers those elements much better than any film in the series since the tank took to the streets of St. Petersburg in Goldeneye. There is also the most believably tormented genius villain that the series has ever had to offer, portrayed by none other than Javier Bardem.

Silva (Bardem) is obviously inspired by Jullian Assange, and that alone should tell you just how sadistic he actually is, given that the film starts with a hard-drive (which happens to contain data of all undercover British agents who are working undercover in terrorist organizations) gets stolen. He threatens to post the identities of five of these agents a week on YouTube. Somehow, I don’t think YouTube paid MGM for advertising in this particular instance.

Bond is fighting the hard-drive thief after a wonderful chase sequence, but then M (Judi Dench) decides to give his field operative partner the order to take a shot at the thief, even though she made it clear that there was no clean shot available. Bond takes the bullet and falls into the water below, while the thief gets away with the precious data. He then spends some time sleeping with anonymous women in shoddy beach huts, and drinking with a live scorpion on his hand while locals in the anonymous island “paradise” cheer him on. He only decides to return after a brilliant hacker manages to trigger a gas explosion in the building of MI-6 – he finds out about this by watching CNN while drinking directly out of the bottle at the same bar the next morning.

Bond returns to M with a natural degree of resentment – she did order the shot that sent him into the waters, after all. The theme of M making tough decisions in order to protect her country is a very pervasive one – Silva certainly does have a lot of his own input on the matter. So does the British Prime Minister, who is angered at M’s failure to retrieve the stolen hard drive before the videos start popping up on YouTube and the undercover agents start getting executed as a result of that. Judi Dench as the female M was merely a gimmick in her first portrayal of the role in Goldeneye. Here, she is given poignant dialogue and a strong sense of duty to England that I never got from any portrayal of M prior to this. She is also as important to the central plot as Bond and Silva are, so it helps that she is portrayed here as being a woman with believable character, instead of the gear-in-the-box character who only exists to give Bond orders.

Bond is also a fully fleshed-out person this time around. Sure, he still sleeps around when he gets the chance, he still is a steely killer, and he still knows the perfect one-liners when the opportunity calls for it. Some light is shed into the mind of a kind of person who would take the kind of work that Bond signed up for. There also is a lot to be said about the kind of person whose sense of duty overrides personal doubts about his employer. To say more than this would be entering spoiler territory.

Bardem’s performance has shades of Heath Ledger’s portrayal of the Joker. There is a neverending well of inner torment that drives Silva to his actions. He is the tragic villain, which is a first for a Bond movie. It also is unusual to see Q portrayed as a teenage computer genius, but then again, the series has always seemed to change with the times. At least this will age a lot better than anything Roger Moore has ever done.