Horror/Thriller Battle #1

Watching Scott Pilgrim and then going back into Starz's epic Pillars of the Earth miniseries is quite jarring. Alison Pill is frighteningly different in the two of them. Her delivery as the new queen, of "I would like a toy too. 100 pounds from the each of you" was chilling. The series itself is far from perfect, but it boasts several fantastic performances from the likes of Ian McShane and Hayley Atwell (future Captain America love interest). But Pill owns it in her small role that has brilliantly seen her from wronged royalty all the way to power-mad devil; and we still have three hours left.


Today gives us a much closer battle. I'm well aware that horror and thriller are two very different genres, but for the purpose of these battles they're similar enough that they'll have to compete together. The films are written in the order I watched them, not by my preferences or anything else.

Mortal Transfer
vs.
The Wolfman
vs.
Shutter Island
vs.
The Ghost Writer

Let's begin!

The first film is French skin master Jean-Jacques Beineix's 2001 thriller Mortal Transfer. A psychiatrist treating a sexy, mysterious thief falls asleep during their session and awakes to find her strangled to death. He spends the rest of the film trying to hide then dispose the body, as well as figure out who killed her. Beineix relies on melodramatic blues and dodged camera angles to evoke the sleek urban mood he seems to desperately want, but the narrative falls flat after the initial discovery of the body. The doctor spends 90 minutes running around pointlessly and without any dramatic impact. The last 30 minutes are meant to discount a very visual film as suddenly characters decide to sit down and tell us all the twists in the form of painfully long monologues. It's a terrible decision that finally sinks a mediocre thriller.

This next film made a very surprising showing in the battle. Joe Johnston's The Wolfman is supposed to be an awful film, at least according to the overwhelming majority of critics. The trailers didn't look great, but I didn't think they made the film look bad either. Turns out it's both good and bad. In Devin Faraci's review over at CHUD.com (he likes it a lot more than I do), he likens it to the classic B-movies where you'd have to sit through all the boring crap for those few minutes of great material. Unfortunately we don't live in that era anymore so Johnston's film will probably be remembered as just bad. But I agree more with Devin. Every sequence involving an actual werewolf is exhilarating and scary, and expertly executed. Every other scene in the film is clearly racing to the next werewolf attack, robbing these scenes of any actual worth and really fucking with the pace. Then there's the forced, chemistry-free romance between leads Benicio del Toro and Emily Blunt. I know this film went through hell every step of its long road to the theater. It feels cut to hell. Maybe there's a lot of footage that makes these forced elements better? But as it stands, the long action sequences make the film worth a look.

Shutter Island, on the other hand, does not feature any bad anything. I've heard people calling Leonardo DiCaprio's performances here and in Inception very similar, but I'm surprised I haven't really heard anyone noting the similarities between the movies themselves. To go further would be to spoil, but trust me, they're similar. And I'll call Shutter Island the winner. It's a beautiful and frightening walking nightmare. Martin Scorcese has constructed a formalist, visual treat. People complain about the twists, but they seem almost irrelevant to me. Scorcese had no intention of hiding where the story was going. Instead it's a great character examination filled with great, creepy performances. One scene performances from Jackie Earle Hailey, Patricia Clarkson, and Elias Koteas are particularly memorable. We have our front runner, people.

Roman Polanski does his best to make a pretty standard thriller great with The Ghost Writer. He gets close. It often feels more like a drama than a suspense thriller, but it's an effectively cutting condemnation of Tony Blair, and I think to some extent, a man on the run from a shameful past. Shoe seems to fit. Polanski does successfully wring ropes of tension out of some conversations that feel about a few ticks to the left of normal. Ewan McGregor's interview with Tom Wilkinson is probably the example, but Olivia Williams gets the best material overall as Pierce Brosnan's former prime minister's suffering wife/femme fatale. I also enjoyed how not every aspect of this film is about its central mystery. The narrative flows in and out of it so efficiently that by the film's fantastic and subtly exhilarating climax, how the mystery wraps itself up isn't even the most interesting part.

The results:

Shutter Island claims 1st place with an 8.7/10

The Ghost Writer takes 2nd with a 7.9/10

The Wolfman is 3rd with a 6.5/10

Mortal Transfer comes in 4th place with a 5.2/10


Outside of the battle, IFC released a couple of VOD exclusive films in the past couple of weeks. Both were pretty good films from much better directors. Making Plans with Lena is far from Christophe Honore's best, but it is mostly successful as a darker, less sentimental imitation of Arnaud Desplechin's A Christmas Tale. One of my personal favorites Johnnie To made the decision to have most of his Vengeance dialogue spoken in English. Having everyone stuck in their second language sucks the air out of what would have been some fantastic exchanges. I think he picked the wrong film to scale back on his normally extravagant but mesmerizing action choreography. I know he's got more in him than action (someone please fucking release Sparrow, it's got to be one of the best films of the last decade!), but this film could have used more.


I think I'm about as close to caught up with2010 films as I possibly can be at this point. Hopefully I'll finally get around to Greenberg soon.

This week's Comedy Battle

No, I do not plan on hosting a weekly comedy battle, but I'm backed up on several and thought this would be a more interesting way to recap. All the movies will be unleashed into the pit for ultimate death match. Exciting!

This week's fighters:

The Extra Man (2010)
vs.
Colin Fitz Lives! (2010
vs.
Hot Tub Time Machine (2010)
vs.
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (2010)

The Extra Man swings out the gate with the immediate advantage of one of Kevin Kline's best performances. Unfortunately, Kline doesn't provide the legs to keep the film at the forefront for long. And holy bajeezus, Paul Dano does everything he can to stop the movie dead. The guy's been great in a few good films, but between this and Gigantic, I'm really starting to not like him very much. From the directors of American Splendor, Dano plays a shy and quiet aspiring writer new to New York City. He finds an unlikely roommate in Kevin Kline's mysterious playboy. Kline takes Dano on as a protege. The film is fun and a touch moving when it keeps to this main plot. A side story of Dano's interactions with hot co-worker Katie Holmes feels like it's from a different, crappier movie, and it occupies too much time without really going anywhere. But Kevin Kline, I must say again, is at his manic, hilarious best. Will the competition be weak enough for Kline to sail this flawed ship all the way to the end?

Based on Colin Fitz Lives! alone, Kevin Kline won't break a sweat. Fitz supposedly made a pretty significant splash at Sundance in 1997. The director, Robert Bella, went into debt making the film, and no distribution company offered enough money for him to pay it off. 13 years later, he's paid off his debt and IFC has swooped in to finally release the film VOD, where it will at least get an eventual DVD release. Here's all you really need to know about the film. It's a Clerks knockoff. It's two mismatched buddies, working a nightmare shift at a shitty, dead end job. I don't really like Clerks... Fitz has a semi mockumentary angle that shows up periodically, and this part is actually pretty funny. William H. Macy shows up briefly for an enjoyable performance, and then is wasted. The rest is all very derivative, '90s indie comedy crap. Maybe 13 years ago this was a hilarious movie. It's a shame that there probably isn't much of an audience for this kind of humor anymore.

The Extra Man almost finds a competitor in Hot Tub Time Machine, a sad case of wasted title that still includes many hilarious bits, before its conclusion kills the whole thing. 3 best friends and one dude's nephew are transported back 20-something years to a weekend the 3 shared partying at a ski lodge. It's pretty typical second chance, wish fulfillment stuff. Rob Corddry steals the show as the asshole fuck-up. John Cusack gets to hog the screen time with an annoying kill-joy that gets to hang out with an epically wasted Lizzy Caplan. Craig Robinson continues to able to sell almost any line he delivers. Clark Duke doesn't get anything to do besides make witty comments in the background. I know this isn't much of an endorsement so far, but the film throws up a thousand jokes per minute, and a large enough percentage of them land for the film to be worth a watch.

Sorry Kevin, I'm sure you weren't counting on a ringer like Scott Pilgrim vs. The World to show up today. Edgar Wright adapts Bryan Lee O'Malley's fantastic comic to great success. I feel like my writing from the past few weeks reads a bit hyperbolic, but I really have been watching things I've never experienced before, and Scott Pilgrim is another one. Wright uses so many visual techniques and ideas to create the video game obsessed and music-inspired world that these characters inhabit. He also crams six books into two hours in a mostly seamless way. The film never stops moving, or even slows down, but it also doesn't ever feel rushed. The large cast of supporting characters is uniformly fantastic, with Chris Evans and Kieran Culkin as a couple highlights. Unfortunately the two characters who lose the most in translation are Scott Pilgrim, himself, and love interest Ramona Flowers. Michael Cera and Mary Elizabeth Winstead, respectively, are great, but we lose a lot of the time, and thus a lot of the nuance to their relationship. That's one of the only problems I had with this hilarious and heartfelt film. Definitely one of my favorites of the year.

And so Scott Pilgrim wins in a rude landslide. Here's the battle's final results:

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: 1st place with an 8.9/10

The Extra Man: 2nd place with a 6.6/10

Hot Tub Time Machine: 3rd place with a 6.1/10

Colin Fitz Lives!: 4th place with a 4.8/10



Honorary award:

Sadly, Road to Morocco was just too old to compete in today's Battle. Although a great, timeless comedy, it didn't really fit in with the competition. It's timeless, but definitely of a different time. It's sometimes hard to even create an evolutionary thread of comedy from the joyful bickering between Bob Hope and Bing Crosby to the gross out humor of something like Hot Tub Time Machine. If it were in it's prime though, it would have landed in a solid second place slot with a 7.8/10.



Tomorrow we have a horror/thriller battle planned with another set of widely varied films within the genres. Tentatively.