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Prepare to be electrified. Frozen is a brilliantly conceived, gut-wrenching horror film about three vital, healthy, appealing and attractive skiers whose perfect snow day turns into a nightmare when they get stranded on the chair lift after dark. This is every skier’s worst fear, and the talented writer-director Adam Green gives it life in ways that will leave you impacted long after the 94 minutes or unrelenting suspense have ended. Calm and jaded as I am, this movie left me so paralyzed with terror that I chewed a whole pencil in half watching it.
Everyone who has ever gazed up at a slope pounded with fresh snow wonders what it would be like to get lost 10,000 feet in the air on a deserted slope with a blizzard on the way. But the three chums in Frozen don’t even get to the slope. Dan, his girlfriend Parker, and his best friend Joe (Kevin Zegers, Emma Bell, and Shawn Ashmore) have finally bribed their way onto the ski lift in time for the last run of the day. Night is falling, the lights go out, the mechanism stops, and the mountain won’t open again until the following weekend. The staff thinks the final head count has been taken and heads for the parking lot below in the snowmobiles. What might ordinarily be an easily solved mechanical problem turns into a worst-case scenario on the level of Open Water, the unforgettable horror movie about two skin divers accidentally left behind in the shark-infested Pacific. This time the snow takes the place of water, but the end result is every bit as pulse-poundingly ghastly. This game trio, anxious to escape the chaos of routine by spending some quality time together, is resourceful, young and physically fit, but as the stages of psychological panic progress, starvation, frostbite and hysteria take their toll. To keep from going crazy, they try to pass the time with games (“What is the best selling cereal of all time?” and “Name the three celebrities you’d most want to do you”) but nothing works. Dan tries to hang onto his slowly fading manhood with words of encouragement (“We’re going to get through this, OK?”) but dropping a glove, gripping a frozen pipe that rips the skin off the hand, and enduring the howling wind are ordeals for which nobody can prepare. Dan finally leaps 50 feet to the ground below to go for help and breaks his leg in the fall. Just when you think nothing worse can happen, along comes a pack of wolves. It’s one damn thing after another, but I will clam up now. This is one hair-raising adventure guaranteed to keep you frozen yourself.
Frozen is the best kind of horror film, about innocent people plunged into mind-boggling circumstances beyond their control. I predict instant word-of-mouth success at the box office, but it’s no fad or phenomenon. Made by real pros with lasting shock value, it is miles above and beyond such temporary distractions as The Blair Witch Project (an amateurish fluke it resembles in no way except a shoestring budget) in quality, artistry and lasting appeal. Every aspect of the nightmare is captured as realistically as breathing by director Green, while his screenplay miraculously finds the time to develop character and build rapport between the excellent actors and the audience. Mr. Green does a masterful job of balancing action in the air with the terrible events on the ground below. The screenplay perfectly captures the way people think and talk under stress, and it’s amazing how much variety there is in the camerawork. The whole thing was shot high above the ground in punishing sub-zero temperatures in a real snowstorm on an actual lift so dangerous it could accommodate only the director and one cameraman. (The actors helped change the camera lenses.) There’s nothing phony here, and Mr. Green makes every micro-second count. The result is a maximum of terror without a single computer-generated image or fake special effect.
Frozen is the kind of must-see horror film I can only equate with coming face to face in the garden with a hungry crocodile.
We all know how rotten today’s movies can be, but even at the bottom of the slag pit you won’t find a load of garbage any smellier than From Paris with Love. This is one you have to kick to the mental curb to save your I.Q.
Produced by penultimate no talent sometime writer-director Luc Besson (The Fifth Element), it must be explained that this time he only provided the idea for the story, which is bad enough, since there is none. But the film was actually directed by Pierre Morel, who only last year poisoned the ozone with the moronic kidnap-revenge movie Taken. All of these people seem dedicated to destroying the city of Paris. Whatever Liam Neeson left behind after Taken is now bombed, trashed, torched, machine-gunned and exploded by the disastrously miscast team of John Travolta and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers in From Paris with Love. They should have all stayed in bed.
Let’s see now. What is this thing about? To the best of my comprehension (logic and perception do not apply), Mr. Rhys-Meyers, on a break from The Tudors, plays James Reese, a personal assistant to the U.S. ambassador to France who is actually some kind of covert operative for the CIA, dividing his time between playing chess, playing house with a fiancé with a strange accent, and playing secret agent, unscrewing license plates and planting microchips under tables with wads of chewing gum. Enter a crude, crummy, loudmouth American spy named Charlie Wax, played by a fat, greasy John Travolta with a shaved head and a gold hoop earring. He looks like Mr. Clean and talks like Mr. Filthy in a script by a hack named Adi Hasak that should have been put through a shredding machine and burned. It grieves me to see a once-unique talent like John Travolta sink so low.
Within one hour of his arrival in Paris, this freak is teamed up with the bumbling, resistant Reese as they invade a Chinese restaurant, blow up the chop suey, gun down the entire wait staff and escape toting a Chinese vase filled with cocaine for their own personal use. OK, so they’re out to expose and wipe out an Oriental drug ring that killed the daughter of the U.S. Secretary of Defense. (You can’t make this stuff up.) But it turns out the U.S. Secretary of Defense doesn’t even have a daughter. Crashing through the streets killing at least 20 more people without a single cop in sight, snorting coke, playing video games and hanging from car windows while mowing down the French populace with automatic weapons, they completely discard the Chinese underworld plot and switch gears again.
OK, so it’s about international security on the Champs Elysee. Eureka! They’re after terrorists! We know this because the only terrorist in sight is in a parked car talking on a cell phone. Stealing every cliché in the book, including the title of the James Bond movie From Russia with Love, this demented farrago of pointless massacres is glued together with dumb jokes so old they’re hairy. After dropping explosives from the top of a building that kills all of the people inside, Travolta grins moronically and says, “And then there were none.” What, no gendarmes? They finally show up and Travolta blows them up too, then s teals their police car. It all leads to the U.S. delegation for the African Aid Summit, whatever that is, where Mr. Rhys-Meyers’ fiancé turns out to be a suicide bomber who….but why go on? From Paris with Love is dead already. It doesn’t make one word of sense. Maybe it’s not supposed to, but that’s getting to be a poor excuse for bad movies marketed for ten year olds and grownups with brain damage. This one is a good example of two formidable talents wallowing in C-level trash. It’s a flying mess, and they seem to be making it up as they go along. Final word: I never knew it could be so easy to sleep through a movie this noisy and stupid. Now I know.
From Israel, the acclaimed film-festival attraction Eyes Wide Open is a restrained and ascetic little movie about a forbidden love affair between two religious Hasidic Jews in Jerusalem. It’s not Avatar.
Aaron, a respectable butcher with a wife and four children in a strict ultra-orthodox neighborhood, hires a young apprentice from a yeshiva who has just arrived in Jerusalem with no place to stay and looking for a job. Ezri is so gentle and has such soulful eyes that to his surprise Aaron forms an attachment that isn’t paternal or altruistic for very long. Observing how his synagogue treats others who meet with disapproval Fighting lust “for the catharsis of the soul”, the older man soon surrenders. The result is an outbreak of gossip, suspicion and intolerance that threatens his marriage, business and sanity. Friends, neighbors, religious counselors, even the wildly religious Torah students among his customers boycott his store, make life unbearable for his family, and label his lamb chops “unholy”. Aaron observes how his synagogue threatens and punishes others who meet with disapproval, but he cannot give up Ezri. Guilt runs rampant. Tragedy is inevitable.
There’s too much theological debate about sin. Otherwise, the dialogue is as minimal as the austere camerawork. The tempo crawls, the directorial flourishes are invisible. Too many rabbis, too many references to ritual baths and too many beards do not add up to everyone’s cup of therapeutic tea, but you have to give director Haim Tabakman credit for trying to open the eyes of the world to the prejudices of a closed society with a film about a taboo subject. The Israeli cinema is not exactly a thriving industry, but Eyes Wide Open is pretty courageous stuff. I don’t know anything about the puzzling orthodox rituals of Hasidic Jews, but for a group that calls itself “God’s chosen people” this movie makes them seem awfully cruel, implacable and ignorantly distrustful of everything they don’t understand. Not to mention self-righteous. You want to tell Aaron and Ezro “Go get yourselves some button-down Ralph Lauren oxfords, corduroy pants, and a pair of loafers—and move to Brooklyn.”
Old monsters never die. They just keep coming back, in an endless series of unnecessary remakes. So get ready to hear once again legendary screenwriter Curt Siodmak’s famous line: “Even a man who is pure in heart and says his prayers by night may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms, and the autumn moon is bright”. The Wolf Man is back, and he’s not just another pretty face.
Based on the classic 1941 horror film The Wolf Man, with Lon Chaney, Jr. as Lawrence (Larry) Talbot, a soft-spoken British-born nobleman who returns from America to run the country manor of his father, Sir John Talbot (Claude Rains), and has the rotten luck to get bitten by a werewolf (Bela Lugosi), the 2010 re-telling, for no logical reason, changes the spelling to The Wolfman. A lot of other things change, too, and not always in ways you could call improvements. The tense pre-war setting is now an ornate and over-produced Victorian England in 1891. Larry, now a hopelessly adrift Benicio Del Toro, is no longer a California astronomy student but a New York actor playing Hamlet in London. (Don’t ask.) Sir John, his father, is now a weird, disappointing Anthony Hopkins. Chaney was a soft, fleshy actor with a wimpy voice and clammy skin, but he brought a sympathetic sweetness to the role of the ill-fated Lawrence Talbot. Del Toro may be a stronger screen presence than Chaney, but he mumbles and scratches so much that nobody in his right mind would ever believe him as Hamlet, and he looks so baggy-eyed and ravaged before the wolf ever appears that there’s nothing to build his character on. Gwen Cunliffe (Emily Blunt) no longer runs the village antique shop, but is a mixed-up girl betrothed to Larry’s dead brother, who has a sick penchant for wandering around in the fog and makes the dumb mistake of thinking she can cure lycanthropy. As the titular head of one of England’s finest families, Anthony Hopkins displays a spectrum of curious accents that wander from Southern trailer trash to an Irish brogue to Hannibal Lecter, sometimes all thee in the same scene. With all due respect, he is no Claude Rains.
After the werewolf rampages through the gypsy campsite, attacking everyone who ignores the warnings of ancient fortune teller Geraldine Chaplin (where is Maria Ouspenskaya, now that we finally need her?), the movie makes a number of tactical errors from which it never recovers. The folks at the local tavern still wisely melt their silver into bullets and keep plenty of wolfbane handy, full moons still rise like white pumpkins, and snarling creatures still pop out of the swamp with teeth that need a dentist, but any resemblance to Curt Siodmak’s 1941 script ends there. Siodmak was a Polish Jew who escaped the Nazis and retained a lifelong hatred of the Germans; many symbols of horror in The Wolf Man were references to Nazi persecution and the pentagram that appeared in the palms of the werewolf’s next victims was an obvious substitute for the Star of David. This time, there are no pentagrams to make your blood run cold. Elegant Talbot Hall is no longer a safe refuge from a world gone mad but a mausoleum full of cobwebs, candlelight and underground crypts that looks less like one of England’s fanciest estates and more like the House of Dracula.
The monster is now a computer generated behemoth in Rick Baker makeup that drools noisily, severs heads with a single claw, and makes an awful mess on the carpet. Larry is hounded by a Scotland Yard inspector played by Hugo Weaving, one of the three drag queens in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, and dragged away in chains to a gothic madhouse where a primitive brain doctor (the great English stage actor Anthony Sher) tortures his patients with horrors of his own—dunking Larry screaming into vats of ice and jamming foot-long hypodermic needles into his jugular vein. (Think Dr. Fogg’s Asylum in Sweeney Todd.) While these lunatics treat lycanthropy as a self-induced delusion, you can hardly wait for them to experience their first full moon. In the resulting carnage, the Wolf Man rips out human kidneys and spleens with bare teeth in a bloodbath that is not for the squeamish or faint of heart, followed by a leap frog across the roofs of London that looks like outtakes from Godzilla, King Kong and Mighty Joe Young..
The film’s biggest departure from the 1941 classic— and its silliest mistake—is making Sir John a werewolf, too. Yes, for reasons that are not entirely clear, he killed his whole family and applied the fatal bite that turned his own son into a savage beast forever—a disease from poison fangs for which there is no cure. In an explosion of mayhem that leaves Talbot Hall looking like a slaughter house, everything leads up to the big showdown between father and son that gives you two wolf men for the price of one. There’s more, and some of it is effective enough to turn your hair gray overnight. But the direction by Joe Johnston (Honey, I Shrunk the Kids) sacrifices originality for computer graphics and stop-motion camera tricks, and the script by Andrew Kevin Walker and David Self bulges with real howlers: “I didn’t know you hunted monsters”. “Sometimes monsters hunt you!”
In 1941, the Wolf Man was so popular he was revived in four more Universal horror classics, two with Abbott and Costello. He’s still entertaining enough to rise several notches above the dumb re-makes of The Mummy and Dracula, but can history repeat itself? How scary is The Wolfman in 2010, when half the people in the New York subway look like werewolves already?