8/1/15 (Part One): Watching the Watcher

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Austin Wintory, automatic writing, best friends, cinema, Dark Summer, dramas, film reviews, films, flashbacks, Grace, Grace Phipps, hackers, horror, horror films, house arrest, Keir Gilchrist, Maestro Harrell, Mike Le, Movies, obsession, online stalking, Paul Solet, Peter Stormare, possession, seance, spells, stalkers, Stella Maeve, suicide, supernatural, teenagers, unrequited love, Zoran Popovic

David (Keir Gilchrist), a scrawny, unassuming 17-year-old, is under house arrest for the entire summer, a sentence eagerly enforced by ruthlessly eagle-eyed cop Stokes (Peter Stormare). His crime? Well, it seems that young David is much better at hacking online accounts than he is at talking to girls: as such, he’s been relentlessly stalking classmate Mona Wilson (Grace Phipps), harassment which has ended him up on the wrong side of the law.

Prohibited from using any computers or going online, drinking alcohol or hanging out with minors, David ends up in a prison that’s truly of his own making. Good thing his best buddies, Kevin (Maestro Harrell) and Abby (Stella Maeve), have as little regards for the rules as he does. Determined to keep their friend company, they bring over some booze, a little weed and, most importantly, a laptop.

Seems that the one thing Kevin couldn’t hack was Mona’s Cloud account, something that the unrepentant hacker still considers to be at the top of his “must-do” list. As David continues to try for complete access to Mona’s online life, he’s suddenly contacted by her via Skype: while David watches, in stunned silence, Mona kills herself, leaving him with the chilling statement that he will “feel what she feels.” As increasingly creepy things begin to happen around David, he can’t shake the feeling that the tables have turned: the watcher is now being watched…possibly from beyond the grave!

Paul Solet’s Dark Summer (2015) takes several disparate horror subgenres/themes (dead teens, social media, cyber-bullying, stalking, obsession, possession, haunted house films, ghosts, shut-ins, disbelieving authority figures) and manages to whip them into an effective, if fairly familiar, little chiller. While I won’t pretend to have my finger on the pulse of young horror fans, I could easily see the film striking a chord with them in the same way that something like It Follows (2014) or Unfriended (2014) might: think of Dark Summer as the iPod mash-up version of old “chestnuts” like Halloween (1978) or Black Christmas (1974).

As befits the filmmaker behind the visually-appealing undead baby drama Grace (2009), Dark Summer is endlessly stylish. Zoran Popovic, who also shot the aforementioned Grace, fills the screen with luxurious long takes and vibrant colors, making the most of a red and amber color palette that accentuates the deep shadows in the background of virtually every shot. There’s an inherent sense of claustrophobia to the film that’s only heightened by Popovic’s camerawork: it’s obvious that the pair make a good team.

The film is also full of solid acting, which becomes quite important given the extremely small cast and confined nature of the proceedings: for the most part, the entire film consists of Gilchrist, Harrell and Maeve hanging out, with Stormare and Phipps popping up to add spice to the dish, as needed. The scenes between the three friends have an easy sense of reality, similar to the aforementioned It Follows, and we get enough sense of Abby’s crush on David, organically, to avoid that plot point from seeming too contrived. For his part, Stormare is always a blast and adds both gravitas and a little smidgen of cynical cool to the proceedings.

For the most part, Dark Summer does everything it’s supposed to, hitting the required beats with efficiency, if something decidedly less than pure innovation. There are the requisite creep figures passing in front of the camera and behind the protagonists…the scene where the heroes uncover a creepy hidden room, full of occult weirdness (extra points for making the scene an homage to Hitchcock’s immortal Rear Window (1954) when it would have been much easier to just reference [REC] (2007))…the attempt to contact the offended spirit, via occult ceremony, that doesn’t turn out quite as expected…any and all of these beats can be found in any number of similar modern genre offerings, even though Solet does manage to incorporate all of them extremely smoothly.

If I have any real issues with Dark Summer, they come with the film’s ultimate resolution, a denouement that manages to completely absolve David of any wrongdoing, while turning Mona into the de facto villain. Suffice to say that some spoilers will follow, so discerning readers, please take note. It’s hard to deny that David, at least as portrayed by the extremely likable Gilchrist, is a very charismatic character: he’s soft-spoken, smart, sensitive, driven, inquisitive…pretty much the guy you want on your side, especially when supernatural shit starts to go down. Despite his inherent likability, however, we can’t forget that David is actually a stalker who may very well have been responsible for causing the object of his obsession to take her own life. No matter how you slice it, that’s a real shit cake, friends and neighbors, and certainly not something most of us would want a piece of.

Solet and writer Mike Le mitigate this unpleasantness by means of a late revelation that not only proves David is a “nice guy” but that Mona is mentally disturbed, dangerous and, quite possibly, a witch. Even before this twist, Kevin and Abby are firmly on David’s side (as does the film seem to be, as well), telling him that Mona was “weird” and a loner, implying that she kind of got what she deserved. While I’m not sure that Dark Summer necessarily qualifies as “victim-shaming,” there does seem to be a conscious effort to iron out any and all of David’s faults: by the final image, he’s not only the unmitigated hero but a tragic one, at that, which seems to increase the nature of Mona’s evil exponentially.

I can’t help but feel that removing any of David’s culpability also removes much of the film’s inherent power and any gut-punch that it might possess. A conflicted, tortured, far-from-perfect hero is a literary trope as old and reliable as the hills but there’s a reason for that: split the audience’s sympathies and it makes the drama stick in their craws that much more. By swinging David from “super creepy nice guy” to “total nice guy,” Solet automatically takes all of that potential conflict, drama and power off the table. Man Bites Dog (1992) is such a complete kick in the face because Ben is both a charismatic, effortlessly cool dude AND a terrifying, psychopathic serial killer: remove either one and the character just doesn’t have the same impact. The same, obviously, applies to David, even if he never gets so much as a foot on the bottom rung of the fetid ladder that Ben vaults up like a champion.

All in all, however, I enjoyed Dark Summer, even if I had issues with the ultimate presentation of Mona and David’s characters. The film always looked good, despite its obviously low-budget and minimal production, and there was a nice, measured pace that allowed chills to unspool as something more than amusement park jump scares: this is another film that handily earns its invitation to the New Wave of Atmospheric Horror (NWoAH) brunch, along with the rest of the usual suspects. The acting was always solid and Gilchrist, who was also prominently featured in It Follows, is rapidly turning into a modern genre star: he’s consistently good here. If the film is, ultimately, not quite the equal of its predecessor, well…that’s to be expected: it’s kind of hard to trump a dead, vampiric baby, after all. I have a feeling that Paul Solet will keep trying, however, which is really all that horror fans can ask for.

4/12/15 (Part Two): Framed to Fit Your Screen

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auteur theory, Bernat Vilaplana, cinema, cyber-terrorism, Elijah Wood, fame, fans, Film auteurs, films, films reviews, hackers, Jon D. Dominguez, Jorge Magaz, modern technology, Movies, Nacho Vigalondo, Neil Maskell, Open Windows, Sasha Grey, stalkers, stylish films, suspense, techno-thrillers, thrillers, Timecrimes, writer-director

As technology advances, so, too, has the way that we consume films. Gone are the days when “going to the movies” meant, literally, going out to see a movie: these days, audiences are just as likely to head into the living room and fire up the Roku as they are to drive to the multiplex when it comes to seeing new, first-run films. With video-on-demand offerings now equaling (and sometimes exceeding) what’s available in the theaters, to paraphrase the Bard, all the world’s on our computer screens and our Playstations are no longer merely players.

Few films have embraced this new era quite as ably, enthusiastically and downright entertainingly as Spanish auteur Nacho Vigalondo’s Open Windows (2014). Combining a complex, Hitchcockian plot with an appropriately glossy, techno-babble sheen, Vigalondo’s film takes place entirely within a series of on-screen computer windows. The result? One of the few films tailor-made for the way that many people will probably wind up watching it: an open window on their computer screen.

Wasting no time, we meet our erstwhile protagonist, Nick Chambers (Elijah Wood). He’s the earnest, clean-cut and rather nerdy webmaster of a fan site devoted to hot, young Hollywood “it-girl” Jill Goddard (Sasha Grey). Jill’s in the middle of a press junket for her newest soon-to-be-blockbuster, Dark Sky, a glowing-eyed-mutant epic that probably wouldn’t be out-of-place on a real-life multiplex marquee. Nick is pleased as punch because he’s just won a dinner date with Jill, a bit of happenstance that pretty much validates the entirety of his life.

Sweet turns to shit, however, when Nick gets a phone call from Chord (Neil Maskell), an employee with the company sponsoring Nick’s contest. Turns out that Jill has unceremoniously cancelled the event at the last minute, giving no reason and leaving Nick stranded without so much as a “how do ya do.” Nick is crushed but Chord offers him a bit of a band-aid: he hacks Nick into Jill’s personal electronic devices, giving the super-fan unprecedented access to entire life.

Declining to give in to Chord’s baser urging, Nick soon finds himself embroiled in a complex plan that seems to be spiraling ever faster and faster out of control. As Chord reveals himself to be less of a helpful perv and more of an evil genius, Nick must do everything he can to clear his own name, protect his beloved Jill and get to the bottom of the intricate game. He’ll have to be smart, however: Chord is brutal, ruthless and five steps ahead of him…one wrong move and it’s game over.

Despite coming off the rails in the final half hour, Open Windows is one of the most exhilarating, ingenious and flat-out fun films to come down the pike in quite some time. When the film is really firing on all cylinders, which is quite often, there’s a relentless sense of forward momentum that makes it all but impossible to blink, lest you miss some sort of background detail or bit of action. At times, the action is split between as many as 16 separate windows, making for the kind of dizzying “split-screen” action that ’60s cop shows could only dream about. It all works spectacularly well, maintaining a sense of cohesion that tiptoes the line between chaos and order but never slips into the abyss.

As someone who absolutely loved Vigalondo’s brilliant feature debut, Timecrimes (2007), I’ve eagerly awaited each new film with the kind of zeal normally reserved for children and cake. For my money, the writer-director is one of the smartest, freshest talents currently operating, a filmmaker who’s just one, big break away from becoming the next del Toro. While Open Windows isn’t quite that film, it is the kind of break-neck thriller that should move Nacho closer to that ever-present world domination.

Open Windows is a tricky film: similar to the way in which one might be rushed through a haunted house attraction, the audience is rushed through Vigalondo’s film, jerking to a halt only long enough to give the carriage a change to climb the rise and plummet down the next heart-stopping fall. It’s a setpiece-based film in that we are, essentially, watching bite-sized chunks of narrative played out before us in a multitude of various formats, each segment the equivalent of a video vignette we might peruse on Youtube. That the whole thing manages to come together into a complete whole (final thirty notwithstanding) is nothing short of a minor miracle. By its very nature, Open Windows is a film that should have been way too chaotic, disjointed, contrived and gimmicky to ever work: Vigalondo spins the various elements into pure gold.

While the film’s technical prowess and editing is duly impressive (cinematographer Jon D. Dominguez and editor Bernat Vilaplana deserve special mention for keeping everything as clear as they do), none of it would work without a sympathetic lead and Elijah Wood is more than up for the task. In the same way that Hitchcock had Stewart, Vigalondo uses Wood’s natural charisma and boyish Everymanism to keep our interest and sympathy fully on his side, even as the film twists and turns into some suitably dark places. Over the last few years, Wood has quietly become one of my very favorite actors, the kind of chameleonic performer who’s equally at home with the monstrosity of Maniac (2012) and the traditional heroism of Grand Piano. He’s the kind of performer who can draw me to a production on name alone and his work, here, is easily on par with his best. Between his work in genre films (I eagerly await his upcoming killer-kids film Cooties (2015)) and his production company, Elijah Wood is a bit of a modern genre hero and I, for one, salute him.

While Neil Maskell (incredibly fun as Banksy in Doghouse (2009)) makes a suitably sleazy villain, the real surprise is porn star-turned actress Grey. After making her “legitimate” film debut in Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience (2009), Grey would pop up in other film, from time to time, although Open Windows marks her biggest role since her debut. She’s quite good here: her fiery interview segment is an easy highlight and she manages to imbue Jill with the perfect mixture of aloof and vulnerable, an impossibly famous person who just wants to be invisible. While the majority of the film’s heavy lifting falls on Wood’s shoulders, Grey proves that she deserves more chances to show her dramatic chops.

For all of its numerous charms and positives, Open Windows is certainly not a perfect film: to be honest, it’s not even a better film than Vigalondo’s debut. Due to the necessary complexity of the storyline, credibility is eventually strained to the point where plot-holes became to rip through the surface with alarming frequency. There’s one point where Chord guides Nick from a hotel room into a car and onto the open road: it’s decidedly kickass but think about any one bit of it too long and the whole thing falls like bad souffle. The film also picks up speed to the point where plot elements blow by in the rearview mirror faster than one can register them.

When all is said and done, however, Open Windows is an undeniably good film. With astute observations on everything from the nature of modern fandom to the vagaries of internet fame to the difficulties of going “off the grid” in a world that’s perpetually connected, Vigalondo has plenty to say and this ends up being the perfect platform for him to say it. While I doubt that I’ll see another take quite as good as Vigalondo’s anytime soon (done poorly, I can only imagine that Open Windows would have been a kitschy, glitchy, head-inducing nightmare), this has definitely made me more receptive to this kind of thing in the future. While I’ll always be a fan of huge, sweeping cinema, Open Windows is proof that, sometimes, it’s just fine to watch something sized to fit your screen.