11/23/14: Snowbody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen

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accidental death, Andreas Windhuis, Anton Weber, black comedies, bungled job, Carpathian Mountains, cinema, crime boss, crime film, Detlef Bothe, double-crosses, Eva-Katrin Hermann, Fargo, film reviews, films, foreign films, German cinema, hitman, hostile locals, isolated estates, isolation, Jürgen Rißmann, Luc Feit, Luke Lalonde, Movies, Ralf Mendle, Reiner Schöne, Snowman's Land, Thomas Wodianka, thriller, Tomasz Thomson, voice-over narration, Waléra Kanischtscheff, wilderness setting, writer-director

Poor Walter (Jürgen Rißmann): he’s just screwed up an important job assignment, been yelled at by his boss, compared to an old, broken-down horse and told to just get the hell out of sight. He’s constantly struggling against his younger, more “eager” peers (Anton Weber) and any setback feels like starting from the bottom of the hill all over again. Tired, worn-out and jaded, all Walter wants to do is crawl in a hole somewhere, drink himself stupid and try to forget about how mean the world can be: which of us can honestly say we haven’t been there at least once in our lives? The thing is, Walter is a hitman working for the mob and his botched assignment involved killing the wrong target…for the vast majority of us, I’m assuming the parallel ends there.

Writer-director Tomasz Thomson takes this rather familiar premise and feeds it through the mulcher with Snowman’s Land (2010), a Teutonic take on “hitmen with problems” films like In Bruges (2008) and Fargo (1996). In the process, he comes up with something genuinely entertaining, an ice-cold, bleakly humorous look at the way in which fate flips all of us the bird, at one time or another, and how losing it all is sometimes the only way to come out on the other side.

After getting a tip about an “easy” job up North from a colleague (he’s told that he’ll just be sitting around “building snowmen” all day), Walter heads to the isolated estate of local crime boss Berger (Reiner Schöne), nestled deep in the foreboding Carpathian Mountains: the plan is to lick his wounds, collect an easy paycheck and head back to the city after the heat has died down a bit. While navigating the twisted path leading to the estate, Walter happens upon Micky (Thomas Wodianka), an old “friend” of his. Turns out that Micky is also going to be working the job with Walter, much to his consternation. Within moments of meeting Micky, we get a distinct whiff of “potentially unhinged asshole” and there’s an unspoken tension between the two belied by their laddish back-and-forth.

Upon reaching Berger’s mansion, the duo discover that he appears to be away. They also, to their future detriment, make the unfortunate acquaintance of Berger’s wife, the lovely, uncontrollable Sibylle (Eva-Katrin Hermann). She politely informs the men that “it’s not a hotel” and she’s “not a fucking maid” before telling them that they can go into the living room and kitchen but nowhere else. As she’s about to leave for the night, Micky remarks on Sibylle’s revealing outfit: “Don’t tell me they have a disco around here.” “I am the disco around here,” she shoots back without missing a beat and the message should be loud and clear, by this point: we’re firmly in film noir femme fatale territory here.

Ignoring the lady of the house’s direct orders, Micky (and Walter, by reluctant extension), poke around the empty house and discover, among other things, a giant, gated vault filled with drugs. This, of course, finally jogs Micky’s befogged brain enough for him to realize that Sibylle is the local “drug godmother” responsible for all of the area’s operations: her husband provides the protection and infrastructure while she handles everything else. After a night of drug-taking, dancing and near-sex between Micky and Sibylle leads to her shocking, accidental death, however, the pair’s life is flipped upside down. This, of course, is the perfect time for Berger and his extremely scary bodyguard, Kazik (Waléra Kanischtscheff), to return from their journey: as mentioned, fate is nothing if not a practical joker.

As Walter and Micky find out, Berger is not only a violent, insane and potentially delusional man, he’s also an extremely ambitious one: he plans to develop the inhospitable area and turn it into a tourist destination, much to the consternation of the hostile locals who have been instigating a campaign of sabotage and subversion against his efforts. This, then, is why Walter and Micky have been brought here: Berger wants the two to guard his estate from the vengeful locals until such time as Kazik can come up with a more “permanent” solution. Key point to protect? Why, none other than Berger’s beloved wife, Sibylle, of course! And, by the way…where has his lovely wife gotten off to, Berger wonders, as Micky and Walter sweat bullets.

Stuck between a rock and a hard place, Walter and Micky must carefully navigate around Berger and Kazik, while also trying to avoid the locals, who would just as soon lump them in with the insane mobster. Berger is the most dangerous of individuals, however, a brilliant, paranoid schemer and he already knows that something fishy is going on around his little castle: once he figures out what it is, he’ll be more than happy to give the devil his due.

Between the gorgeously brittle cinematography (DP Ralf Mendle has a deft touch that gives the exteriors an almost fairy-tale quality while playing up the chilly whites and blues in the film’s palette) and the extremely effective score, courtesy of Luke Lalonde, Snowman’s Land is quite the pleasure to watch. Toss in some pretty great performances and a sharp script and Thomson’s film reveals itself to be quite the little sleeper. While it would be a stretch to call the film a “comedy,” by any stretch of the imagination, there’s a gently sardonic tone to the whole thing that helps to smooth across some of the film’s darker edges. One of the most memorable scenes is the one where Berger is about to cut off someone’s toes with an electric carving knife only to have it run out of juice before he can begin his task: sighing, Berger calmly explains that he’ll have to go plug it in and let it charge before he can get back to work…he hopes that his victim will understand and be patient. In many ways, the film’s tone reminded me of the excellent Israeli film Big Bad Wolves (2013), another movie in which men do terrible things yet seem so nonchalant as to render their actions almost mundane.

While all the acting is uniformly excellent (Reiner Schöne makes an absolutely terrifying villain as Berger: the scene where he mercilessly guns down an entire house full of people is a real showstopper), Jürgen Rißmann is definitely the sturdy anchor that keeps the film centered. Walter is an everyman but Rißmann doesn’t play him like a trope or a tired cliché: there’s a sense of authenticity to Walter’s world-weary bearing that manages to cut through the chaos in Snowman’s Land like the clear toll of a bell on a winter day. We like Walter, despite his line of work, and really want him to make it: beyond the opening, everything he does is geared towards redemption and trying to prove himself as someone of worth…can any of us say we would have conducted ourselves differently?

Ultimately, Snowman’s Land takes a familiar plot and twists it into some pretty interesting knots and curlicues. There are interesting hints of bigger issues running beneath the film’s surface, things which make Snowman’s Land a bigger, richer experience: some of the best parts in the film are the ones where our handy narrator gives us the history of the area, explaining that it has, historically, been such a shithole that both Genghis Khan and Napoleon avoided it during their respective campaigns…in other words, just the kind of place you want to turn into a tourist trap. It’s this kind of smart detail that makes Snowman’s Land such an intriguing, fun film, perfect for anyone looking for a quirky crime film, a reason to root for the under-dog or some gorgeous snow-bound scenery.

10/11/14 (Part Three): Mutants on the Rocks

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31 Days of Halloween, Arctic setting, Benjamin Hessler, Blood Glacier, Brigette Kren, cinema, Edita Malovcic, Felix Romer, film reviews, films, foreign films, Gerhard Liebmann, German cinema, global warming, Hille Beseler, horror, horror movies, isolation, Marvin Kren, melting glaciers, Michael Fuith, monster movies, Moritz Schultheiss, Movies, mutants, mutations, Peter Knaack, Rammbock, scientists

Back in 2010, German director Marvin Kren ended up on my radar due to his debut feature, the modest but highly effective zombie film Rammbock. In a field of lackluster, identical products, Rammbock stood out by means of its intelligent script, focus on human interactions versus zombie gore (although there was plenty of that) and some nicely emotional bits that helped to frame the zombie apocalypse in slightly more personal terms. I was instantly hooked and eagerly looked forward to his next production, particularly when I heard that Kren would be tackling my beloved “frozen horror” subgenre. Would this outstanding new filmmaker continue the trend he started with Rammbock and come up with a film that proudly stands shoulder-to-shoulder with Carpenter’s iconic The Thing (1982) or would he fall prey to the dreaded sophomore slump? Lucky for me, it appears that Kren is much more than a one-trick pony: Blood Glacier might not be as good as The Thing but it’s a pretty damn impressive film, nonetheless.

Similar to Fessenden’s The Last Winter (2006), Kren’s Blood Glacier approaches its subject matter from an environmental angle: in this case, the melting of the glacial ice appears to have released a long dormant organism back into our world. In this case, the organism takes the form of blood-red liquid and appears to be seeping from the very ice itself, handily providing us with our title. This organism has the unique ability to genetically combine animals, using stomach contents as a catalyst: if a fox eats a beetle and then comes into contact with the liquid, the resulting mutation will be some sort of beetle-fox hybrid. Inevitably, this leads to such creative creations as an insect-ram hybrid (truly horrifying), bird-insect combinations and some pretty nasty fox abominations (the fox-pill bug creature is particularly nightmarish). Humans are also animals, of course, so don’t think the bipeds are getting off any easier.

As with The Thing, Blood Glacier focuses on a small team of scientists (Felix Romer, Hille Beseler and Peter Knaack) and one technician, Janek (Gerhard Liebmann), who are stationed at the isolated research base, this time somewhere in the Austrian Alps. To make matters worse, a group of dignitaries, including Minister Bodicek (Brigette Kren) and Janek’s ex-girlfriend, Tanja (Edita Malovcic), are scheduled to visit the site and they’re about to walk right into a mutated animal feeding frenzy. When the scientists seem more interested in protecting their potential scientific goldmine than trying to save their unsuspecting visitors, Janek must spring into action and become the hero that everyone needs. As he’ll find out, however, Mother Nature isn’t something to trifle with: Janek and his teammates might just end up paying for humanities environmental sins with their own lives.

While there’s nothing inherently derivative about Kren’s film, it’s pretty impossible to avoid at least some comparisons to The Thing, ice-bound setting notwithstanding. Both films revolve around isolated teams of scientists, both feature heroes who are decidedly rough around the edges and less than ideal leader-types and both films deal with the ramifications of rapid-fire mutations on both humans and animals. Hell, both films even prominently feature a dog, although Blood Glacier’s Tinnie is much more sympathetic than the mutating monster from Carpenter’s film. There’s also a shared sense of cynicism between the films: both end with the notion that the ultimate resolution of the events will be up to the capricious whims of nature…mankind can only affect so much, after all, when we’re merely ants crashing the picnic.

Despite these pretty basic similarities, however, Blood Glacier is definitely its own beast. For one thing, Kren has his tongue a little further in cheek than Carpenter did: while Blood Glacier is the furthest thing from a horror-comedy, it tends to display a rather sardonic worldview, a POV that was also a big part of Rammbock. There’s also the inclusion of the characters of Tanja and Minister Bodicek, which injects a much-needed female perspective into the film. While Tanja also fulfills the role of love interest, Bodicek is just allowed to be a complete and total badass: she gets some of the film’s best lines, performs impromptu surgery (take that, American politicians!), keeps her head at all times and actually seems to give a shit about the common folks rather than seeking to protect only her own, privileged skin. Minister Bodicek is a great character and Brigette Kren brings her to glorious life. Gerhard Liebmann, for his part, is a more than capable hero, even if he’s no patch whatsoever on Russell’s classic MacReady. Liebmann ends up displaying quite a dramatic range in the film, particularly during the rather sad Tinnie storyline, and amounts to a pretty good protagonist.

Using the same cinematographer that he employed for Rammbock, Moritz Schultheiss, Kren comes up a similarly rich look for Blood Glacier. As with any film like this, the creature and special effects are a pretty pivotal part of the overall experience and, for the most part, Blood Glacier doesn’t disappoint. The creature designs are suitably icky and often quite ingenious (the insectile rams are just short of amazing), although they don’t always hold up in close-up: what looks more homogenous in a medium shot tends to look rather cluttered and ill-defined once we can see the particulars. Ultimately, however, this doesn’t really become a deal-breaker: the effects in The Thing set a new industry standard, so it makes sense that Blood Glacier would have a problem topping them. The Thing also dealt almost exclusively with practical effects, whereas Blood Glacier’s creatures are mostly CGI, which tends to produce a very different visual effect. Nonetheless, Blood Glacier’s SFX are miles beyond similar films and the film, in general, looks great.

As someone who absolutely idolizes The Thing, I was expecting Blood Glacier to be a competent, if less than revelatory, successor to Carpenter’s classic. While there were a lot of parallels to the ’80s landmark, however, Blood Glacier proved to be a thoroughly captivating film in its own right and a great entry in the “frozen terror” subgenre. At this point, Kren is two-for-two, so he’s officially made his way onto my “Must See” list for future productions: here’s to hoping that the burgeoning horror auteur keeps finding new and interesting ways to mess with old horror conventions. Watch this on a double-bill with The Thing, pour yourself a hot toddy and while away the frigid winter hours. And remember: stay away from the red snow.

 

1/11/14: Chills, Thrills and Groans

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adventures, animated films, B-movies, bad movies, computer-animated, Daniel Craig, dark comedies, Edgar Wright, experimental film, Film, Film auteurs, Funny Games, German cinema, home invasion, hullaballoo, Indiana Jones, Michael Haneke, misanthropic, Nick Frost, Party of Five, SImon Pegg, Steven Spielberg, strange families, suspense, The Adventures of TinTin, The Butcher Brothers, The Hamiltons

Our quest to catch up now takes us to this past Saturday for another triple header. On this particular day, my viewing selections were tempered by the fact that I needed something to wash the taste of Funny Games out of my mouth: hence, the segue from that to Spielberg’s Adventures of TinTin. Now THAT’s the kind of counter-programming more festivals need to do!

Oy vey…talk about suffering for art…We’re all familiar with feel-good cinema: those gauzy, sweet, brightly colored bits of film fluff that usually posit nothing more challenging than a stubbed toe or a willfully spunky ingenue to shake things up. In a world that’s become increasingly cold and hostile, feel-good cinema can be the equivalent of a warm fire on a cold day, returning the essential humanity to an inhumane species.

Michael Haneke pisses all over feel-good cinema before burying it out in the desert. If the word “misanthropy” is defined as meaning, “the general hatred, distrust or disdain of the human species or human nature,” then Mr. Haneke may be one of the premiere misanthropes working in film today. Whether dealing with severely damaged, violent individuals (Benny’s Video, The Seventh Continent, The White Ribbon), the horrors of a violent society invading the sanctity of the home (Funny Games, The Time of the Wolf) or the erosion of life and love (The Piano Teacher, Amour), Haneke has never met a subject to dark or depressing to tear into. Despite his seeming disdain for people, Haneke has had a surprisingly successful career, achieving enough acclaim with his original 1997 version of Funny Games to warrant his American remake ten years later and culminating in Best Foreign Film and Best Actress nods for his most recent film, Amour.

I admit that I got to the Haneke party a little late, not jumping in until the remake of Funny Games. As a big Tim Roth fan, I took a chance, based on his presence, and was rewarded with something rather nasty and unpleasant. Nonetheless, I was intrigued and spent some time touring his back catalog, eventually arriving at his original version of Funny Games. Needless to say, I remember being thoroughly disturbed by the film and promptly sought to put it behind me. Flash forward many years and a lazy Saturday morning seemed like a perfect time to revisit the film and see if it still held any power. Short answer? Yes.

For those not familiar with the story, Funny Games is, ostensibly, a home invasion film. Three members of a family (parents and young son) are vacationing at their lakeside cottage, next to several other cabins and friends. The family is well-to-do, educated (while driving, they play a game of “Name that classical music concerto” and seem like nice enough people. Upon arriving at their cottage, they notice that their next-door-neighbors appear to be entertaining guests, a pair of young men dressed in tennis outfits. When one of the men appears at their doorstep to borrow some eggs, the family become trapped in a seemingly never-ending nightmare of violence, humiliation, torture and…well…funny games.

Part of the terrible, feral power of the film comes from how well-made it is. Rather than feeling (or looking) like a quickly dashed together bit of exploitation nastiness, Funny Games is an art film through and through. The opening, featuring an aerial view of their car driving through winding mountain roads, instantly reminds of Kubrick’s similar opening to The Shining. The film has a cold, clinical look that recalls Cronenberg’s early bio-medical chillers. The acting, particularly from the evil young men is impeccable and, at times, downright heartbreaking. The film has a terrific grasp of tension, feeding out just enough line to keep you hooked, then snapping it back ferociously when needed. Scenes play out for much longer than seem necessary, the camera rarely cutting once things start to get crazy. Unfortunately, watching the film is still about as much fun as getting buried alive.

If its possible for a film to be considered “mental torture porn,” than Funny Games would be the undisputed king of that ring. Although there is violence in the film, most of it occurs off-camera, leaving us to merely view the results. The horrible humiliation and psychological torture that the pair put the family through, however, is almost impossible to watch. During an excruciatingly long scene where the pair force the mother to strip down to her underwear in front of her family, I found myself asking the all-important question, “Why?” Not “Why are the bad guys doing that,” since the world is full of truly sick individuals but “Why are we being forced to watch this in such detail?” Like Pasolini’s Salo, Funny Games is a film that not only shows you the shit on the floor but proceeds to rub your face into it. Haneke doesn’t just want to make you aware of the evil in the world: he wants to make you suffer it, too.

Were Funny Games just a streamlined, brutal, unflinching home-invasion thriller, it would be a memorable film. Haneke, however, has something else up his sleeve. At one point, the lead psycho, Paul, is standing in front of his partner, Peter. He turns and winks directly at the camera, although our understanding is that Peter is there, off-camera. This makes sense, of course, all the way up to the point where Paul turns and directly addresses the audience, asking us if we think the family has been through enough. At once, we’re not just spectators but accomplices: if we didn’t want to see the family suffer so much, we’d quit watching and let them off the hook. No film, especially fringe and extreme films, can exist without an audience. In one fell swoop, Haneke indicts horror and exploitation fans, asking the all-important question: how normal is it to want to witness suffering? As a lifelong horror fan, I didn’t much care to answer it. Thanks, Michael: see you again when I’m feeling slightly too upbeat.

As a remedy for the massive feel-bad vibes presented by Funny Games, I turned to an old master of the feel-good film: the inimitable Steven Spielberg and his recent computer-animated feature, The Adventures of Tintin. I originally avoided the film due to the computer animation (I’m much more of an old-school animation fan) but I figured that only Spielberg could give me the 10ccs of food-times needed to wash away Haneke. Turns out, I was right.

Right off the bat, imagine my immense excitement when, during the fabulous credit sequence, I notice that Peter Jackson is producing the film. Alright…that’s interesting. Not half as interesting, however, as the fact that Joe “Attack the Block” Cornish and Edgar “Cornetto Trilogy” Wright wrote the film. That’s right, boys and girls: two of the best comedic horror/sci-fi writers in the biz collaborated on the script for a Spielberg film produced by Peter Jackson. Essentially, there was no way this would be anything but one big love letter to classical film and it did not disappoint.

Once I actually got into the film, any concerns about the animation style melted away: the animation was actually so realistic that it was easy to imagine this as a life-action film, versus a cartoon. In fact, there are so many visual and narrative nods to the Indiana Jones films that this almost felt like it inhabited the same world. The scene where Snowy pursues TinTin’s kidnappers through a busy street reminds me immediately of the Cairo chase in the first Indiana Jones film, right down to the way in which the pursued item is constantly kept in the same frame as the pursuer, despite their distance from each other: simply genius.

In all honesty, there were too many highlights in the film to count. The battle between Haddock’s ship and the pirate ship is absolutely stunning, perhaps one of the coolest nautical battles I’ve seen. The final duel with construction cranes is amazing and made me wonder why no one ever tried that in the past (hint: probably because it’s impossible). The voice acting, whether from Daniel Craig as the bad guy or Simon Pegg and Nick Frost as the bumbling Scotland Yard duo of Thomson and Thompson, is top-notch and TinTin, Captain Haddock and Snowy make one hell of a team. Massively fun and technologically impressive, I can easily compare The Adventures of TinTin to Wes Anderson’s animated The Fantastic Mr. Fox. Both films showcase outstanding filmmakers boldly going where they (technically) haven’t gone before.

I’m not sure that mere words can do justice to the sheer awfulness that is The Hamiltons but I’ll try. Imagine, if you will, a torture porn version of Party of Five featuring hammier actors than Troll 2 and The Room combined. Intrigued? Let me finish. The family that we’re stuck with for almost 90 minutes features a stereotypical moody, whiny teen boy, complete with always-filming video camera; a straight-laced older brother that holds down a job, is polite, smart and kind, so is obviously a closeted homosexual; a twin brother and sister that chew through scenery like ravenous warthogs when they’re not busy sucking face and disgusting the audience with the most assinine, ridiculous display of incestuous union since whatever Troma film took on the subject; and a supernaturally strong, feral, beast of a kid brother that looks like…a normal kid.

On top of these obnoxious characters we get a story that blatantly rips off We Are What We Are before becoming something else (read: equally shitty) entirely, a primal-scream breakdown that must be seen to be believed and the actual line “I’m getting awful tired of your hullaballoo,” delivered with as much earnestness and integrity as the actor could manage when being asked to deliver something so obviously Shakespearian in origin.

But am I being a little too mean? Isn’t all of this a bit harsh for a film that probably just wants to be considered a decent little horror film? Absolutely not. The pair of idiot filmmakers behind this call themselves The Butcher Brothers and have already created a sequel. They must be stopped by any and all means necessary, before The Hamiltons becomes the truly shitty franchise that it threatens to become. If we do nothing, we may soon wake up in a world where the Butcher Brothers may continue to create unchecked, turning the world into the goofy nightmare land of Branded.

In short: I’m getting awful tired of their hullaballoo.