Films

30 Days of Night [2007]

Director: David Slade
Actor: Josh Hartnett, Melissa George, Danny Huston, Megan Franich, Andrew Stehlin

.: Synopsis
Barrow is the northern most situated city in the United States, a plane ride away from Anchorage, Alaska, and surrounded by snow and ice. The only reason it exists is that there’s oil rigs out on the ocean, and there’s an oil-pipe that runs near the town. During most months the town is inhabited by about 500 or so people, but during the 30 days of night, the month in which they experience no sunlight whatsoever, due to their proximity to the north pole, the town only keeps a skeleton crew of about 150 people. During the last day, when everyone is busy packing up and trying to catch the last plane out of town, a stranger gets off a large vessel and walks for miles and miles until reaching the town. He almost immediately stands out as he causes trouble in the local diner, demanding a raw, uncooked hamburger instead of a warm one. Things get out of hand, and the young sheriff, Eben Oleson (Hartnett) decides to take him in. He does so because some very strange things have been happening that day; not only have almost all the cellular phones been stolen and burnt outside of town, also all the sled-dogs have been horribly mutilated. That and the unusual amount of various other unsolved crimes that day makes Eben very suspicious and he hauls the man to jail. There he talks of darkness and impending doom, and that he did all “they” asked of him and they’ll reward him for it. Considering it the ravings of a lunatic, Eben continues to investigate the various incidents of vandalism, theft and dog mutilations around town.

Once everyone who’s leaving has caught the last plane, and the last rays of sunlight for a period of 30 days has left the sky, more strangers appear in town, deformed and feral, dressed in clothing not suited for the intense cold weather. They immediately start to attack every citizen of Barrow, viciously biting them and feeding on their blood. The townsfolk try to mount a defense, but the strangers seem unaffected by bullets and immensely strong and resilient. The town is turned into a bloodbath, and only a handful of townsfolk survive, banding together and hiding in secret places, trying to survive as they are being hunted by these ferocious maniacs, hoping to make it through the 30 days of night. Everyone looks to Eben for leadership and guidance, and he’s forced to make some tough decisions and resort to brutalities of his own in order to keep the group alive.

.: Opinion
This is a fantastic film. I had the same feeling about this film once it was over like I did with 28 Days Later; it’s such a great, refreshing take on an old genre, and I was really left with the feeling of “this is what a vampire movie should be like!” The name “vampire” is dropped only twice in the movie. Someone suggest that they are vampires, and another dismisses it, saying that they don’t exist. They’re not really vampires, or at least not the traditional cool and enigmatic ones that you’re used to from popular literature and film, but they are feral and crazy. They talk in a language that’s primal and old, and while they accept all the trappings and opportunities of modern civilisation, they hunt like a pack of wolves.

There’s a certain point in the movie where the leader of the pack addresses all the others about the danger of letting anyone survive. He says, in his strange language, that they have, for thousands of years, moved heaven and earth in order for the humans to believe that they were the stuff of nightmares. Leaving anyone alive threatens that. It gives a glimpse of how old these creatures must be without delving into it like other films like Underworld or Blade do.

What I also found interesting is that the leader of the pack looks relatively human. Sure he has the mouth filled with oversized, needle-shaped teeth, and he has the long calcified claws, but his features are still much like that of a human. The others, however, look more and more feral. As if the younger the vampire, the more deformed he is. Either that, or some vampires retain more of their humanity than others do.

In the end, they are incredibly brutal, and more like Brian Lumley’s Wamphyri than the popular Buffy-type vampires, and as a result the movie is exceptionally gory. There are some very graphic decapitations and killings in this film, which might turn some people off. It makes the film not really scary, but very, very creepy.

Random thoughts; The ending I found a little weak, but not enough for it to let it diminish my opinion of the movie. The atmosphere was really well done and the music, which was excellent, helped it quite a bit. The blizzard scene wasn’t so fantastic because of the CGI, but I guess it could’ve been a lot worse. Acting-wise the movie isn’t very impressive, character development neither, but what I did like (and others will likely disagree with me) is that the two main protagonists, Eben and Stella (George) have a history and act according to that history but they don’t delve into it in an inappropriate way. What I also liked is that even though these vampires are feral, they’re not stupid and they keep some of the townsfolk alive to use as bait to lure out the others.

All in all; fantastic!

Death Sentence [2007]

Director: James Wan
Actor: Kevin Bacon, Garrett Hedlund, John Goodman

This film is based on the book Death Sentence by Brian Garfield, and is the direct sequel to the book Death Wish which was made into a movie, starring the legendary Charles Bronson, in 1974. It became the quintessential and model for all vigilante/revenge films that followed, and has never really been equaled in its purity. Of course, there were many sequels to Death Wish, but none of them were any good, and it’s reported that Brian Garfield hated all of them because they never stayed true to the story. I have to agree; they all sucked.

Death Sentence is different, though. It all starts with a great director (arguable); James “Saw” Wan. While he’s primarily known for having written the gory Saw flicks, and directing the first one, the man knows like few others how to introduce a hefty dose of grit to a movie, and Death Sentence is no exception. The second brilliant move was the introduction of Kevin Bacon to the film. He is one of those actors that any movie can benefit from, and has a penchant for taking up gritty, ugly and controversial roles that others won’t touch with a fourty foot pole. Love the guy. Up next is John Goodman as the corpulent, but ultimately tough as nails father of the two main gangers in the film. He’s filthy and grimy, and it all fits so well that I really got the feeling that he might have been a little too comfortable in the role. And then last but certainly not least is Garrett Hedlund, who I didn’t really know before this film, but definitely is going to keep my attention for a while. While he doesn’t have an impressive array of films under his belt, and is usually cast in a pretty-boy, heart-throb role, his invocation of Billy Darley, the leader of the pack of ganger adversarials that Kevin Bacon faces looks the part to a T.

The story is (predictably) as followed; a senior vice president of a large financial organisation, Nick Hume (Bacon), spends most of his time doing risk-analysis on insurance bonds, until one night, while driving home from a hockey match with his son, he is forced to stop at a petrol station in a seedy part of town. Right before that he spots two hotrods driving in opposite direction without their lights on, and he signals them of that fact. Those of you who know the urban legends of urban America know that this is the start of a gang initiation; if you want to be in a gang, you have to kill someone entirely random to prove your worth. Drive around at night without your lights on and the first person to signal you is your target.

Anyway, they stop at a gas-station and the hotrods quickly drive up, stop, kill the store clerk and the young initiate is forced to kill Hume’s son. The family is devastated, and even more so when they learn that they won’t be able to get the killer in jail for more than 3 to 5 years. Hume decides to withdraw his eye-witness account and the killer goes free. Torn apart by grief, Hume takes matters into his own hands; he tracks the killer down and confronts him. He ends up killing him. The killer has now been killed, and his ganger friends – under the leadership of the killer’s older brother Billy (Hedlund) – decide to take revenge. When Hume’s wife is killed and he and his son are critically injured in a nightly raid on their home, he decides to take on Billy and his gangers and leaves behind any thoughts of risk-assessment and insurgences, and trades them in for violence and bloody retribution.

I really liked this film. It’s a bit overly sappy, hoping to invoke sympathy for Hume and his family’s loss rather early on in the film, but once the grit sets in – especially once Hume decides to shave his head – this movie comes close in grit toSeven, and that’s saying something. Billy and his gang remind me a bit of T-Bird and his cronies in The Crow and they play their part very well.

The Brave One [2007]

Director: Neil Jordan
Actor: Jodie Foster, Terrence Howard, Naveen Andrews

Erica (Foster) and David (Andrews) are to be married. She’s a presenter of a radio-show and he’s a doctor. They are happy and successful people living in New York City. Until they go walk their dog in Central Park and get attacked by a group of hoods. They are beaten so badly that David dies, and Erica is in a coma for over three weeks. When she comes to she has to deal with David’s death, and the realisation that the city she once loved so dearly, is a lot darker and more sinister than she thought it was. For the longest time she feels incapable of going out and walking the streets, going to work, or even going to the grocery store around the corner. She finally manages to get her courage together and quickly realises she feels vulnerable and goes in search of protection. She tries to buy a gun and is confronted with the 30 day waiting period for a license and expresses her dismay in the store. A “friendly” co-shopper overhears and says he can get her a gun for a thousand dollars and she agrees. Pretty soon afterwards, while she’s doing some late night shopping, she stumbles upon a murder; the murderer kills his wife, the cashier of the grocery store, and doesn’t notice Erica until (of course) her mobile phone rings while she’s hiding. The cat-and-mouse game in the isles of the grocery store quickly ends as Erica finds that she’s a good enough shot to wound and kill the man. She takes the security tape and hightails it out of there. This is the start of her vigilante career, and she finds more bad guys to kill.

Investigating the dead people she leaves behind in a decidedly Charles Bronson fashion is detective Mercer (Howard), who befriends Erica and confides in her some of the frustration he feels in trying to bring people to justice when the long arm of the law doesn’t seem to stretch far enough. They both seem to fill a void in one another, but all the while Mercer is seeking to apprehend the vigilante, who is Erica.

The movie is pretty grim, and very violent, and shows the unpolished underbelly of New York City. It’s easy to be dazzled by the touristy areas of Manhattan and be fooled into a false sense of security when you see that everything clean, and open, and well-lit, and that there’s a lot of cops on the street, but there are many not-so-safe areas around New York City that you hardly ever get to see. (Hell, the only borough you usually see is Manhattan and that’s not really a good representation.) Those ugly bits have been very well captured in this movie.

The story is good, but familiar, but acting and visuals makes the film worthwhile. Jodie Foster is good, Naveen Andrews is good, but Terrence Howard is magnificent in this film. He reminds me so much of a black version of Benicio Del Toro, even down to his mannerisms and speech, and it was great to see how he got such an important role in the movie.

A Mighty Heart [2007]

Director: Michael Winterbottom
Actor: Angelina Jolie, Dan Futterman, Archie Panjabi, Irfan Khan, Will Patton

To get this out of the way; there’s a lot of talk on the various movie-related message-boards out there about how the movie is supposed to be incredibly racist. The reasoning behind it is that Mariane Pearl is part Dutch, part Cuban and part French in real life, and is played by Angelina Jolie, who’s white. I can’t even begin to understand the criticism so I won’t address it in my review.

Michael Winterbottom, the man who directed this film, was unknown to me before he made Code 46, an underrated, science-fiction movie starring Tim Robbins, which reminded me of Gattaca. That film was fantastic, and when I realised he was directing A Mighty Heart I got excited. I was quite surprised to see that the patient, steady, long shots that were so characteristic of Code 46 were replaced by a hectic, free-hand, unsteady-cam shots that is reminiscent of The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum. I don’t know when it happened that the unsteady-cam became the drug of choice for directors that want to portray confusion, but I’m getting a bit tired of it being overused. In a few particularly confusing scenes, sure. Or fast-cut shots for that matter, but doing it throughout the entire movie just convinces me that it’s a cheap trick, applied with little or no subtlety. Having said that, I do want to point out that there are quite a few hectic and confusing scenes in the movie, which largely takes place in Karachi. I’ve been to cities like Karachi, and they are inherently hectic and tiring in their scope and overload, so at times the technique adds to, rather than detracts from the film.

The film is about the true story of the kidnapping of Daniel Pearl (Futterman), American journalist for the Washington Post in Pakistan early 2002, and the subsequent search for him and his kidnappers by Pakistani, Afghani and U.S. authorities. Actually, it’s more about his then-pregnant wife Mariane (Jolie), also a journalist in Pakistan, and the way she copes with her husband’s kidnapping, dealing with the authorities, and ultimately dealing with his gruesome death.

I remember seeing the video of Daniel Pearl’s beheading online somewhere, and I remembered how gruesome and bloody it was. And before I sat down in the theatre I was wondering whether or not this film would be a bloody and gruesome one, and, if not, how they’d convey all the violence of the situation. Well, it wasn’t bloody, gory or gruesome, but the violence and ugliness is there, but hidden very deep beneath the surface. It’s actually here where the subtlety that I spoke of earlier is best used. There’s a interrogation scene in which a man is tortured by Pakistani authorities under the leadership of their captain, played magnificently by Irfan Khan. The torture is nothing more than a nod and something unseen and unheard happens off-camera, followed by more anguished cries from the one being tortured, and a confession. Very well done.

The acting is very good. Khan is consistently good throughout the film, and Jolie much less so. Accents aren’t really her thing, as I can’t seem to get Alexander out of my head when I hear her pathetic attempts at a French accent. It’s not so much that, I realise, but more the fact that she can’t keep it up throughout the entire film. There are some particularly gripping scenes in which the sky seems to be the limit of her acting abilities, like the cry she releases when she hears of Daniel’s death; that certainly touched something raw.

The Terminator [1984]

Director: James Cameron
Actor: Linda Hamilton, Michael Biehn, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Lance Henriksen

The first Terminator film was considered a low-budget film back 1984. I guess that would put it en par with a film like Clerks in this day and age. Regardless, it is a visual masterpiece, with decent acting, and fantastic tension-building. Even the soundtrack, as cheesy and dated as it may sound, fits really well.

Sarah (Hamilton), is a young woman living in L.A., working as a waitress at a restaurant, going out on the weekends and trying to have some fun. One day one of her co-workers calls her over to watch a local news bulletin about a woman with the same name as her having been shot and killed, but she thinks nothing of it. When later that day another Sarah Conner gets murdered, the police starts to investigate in earnest. It’s obvious that the killer is going by the phonebook, eventually getting to all the other Sarah Conners. Just when Sarah realises what’s happening, she is approached by a rather creepy looking guy called Reese (Biehn) who rescues her from a massive guy (Schwartzenegger) who tries to kill her. Reese says he’s from the future and that he’s been sent to 1984 to protect her from what he calls the “Terminator,” a cyborg sent to eliminate Sarah because she’s going to be the mother of John Conner, the leader of the human resistance against the machine overlords of 2020. The chase starts from there as the Terminator relentlessly works towards Sarah’s demise while Reese works diligently to protect her.

Less polished than its sequal, the cool Terminator 2: Judgement Day, but what it lacks in polish, it makes up in grit and atmosphere. Double-thumbs up to this movie.