2009. Starring Alison Lohman and Justin Long. Directed by Sam Raimi.
There used to be something of a moral code to horror movies. People were victimized or terrorized for a reason, earning the torment through a flaw in character. Maybe they cheated or lied and, in doing so, forfeited the audience’s sympathy. Maybe like Dr. Frankenstein, they really asked for it. That violation of morality made them a deserving victim — hell, even Janet Leigh’s character stole a stack of money before checking into the Bates Motel.
Somewhere along the line — maybe it was The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, or Night of the Living Dead, or through the it-really-happened chill of In Cold Blood — horror began being visited upon random people who didn’t have it coming.
Today’s horror fans have to face some very troubling views of human nature. The Saw series, or the mercifully brief series of Hostel movies, made the imperfect and often corrupt nature of human beings an excuse to graphically torture and degrade. David Fincher’s Se7en, which I have to admit to liking, was at least inventive in how it used the deadly sins as an excuse for torment and murder.
I remember the long-ago mix of terror and excitement I’d experience from reading a copy of Creepy or Eerie magazine. Controversial in their day (and banned in my childhood home), they featured wonderfully illustrated tales of people who always did wrong, usually motivated by greed or jealousy, then got their comeuppance in extremely gory and horrifying ways.
Sam Raimi’s Drag Me To Hell feels like a throwback to the dread and queasiness that resulted from the dark morality rules learned in those forbidden pages.
Christine Brown (Alison Lohman) is trying to better herself — when we first see her, she is practicing her diction on the way to work as a loan officer in an LA bank. She’s hoping all that self-improvement results in a small promotion that will make her more deserving of her professor boyfriend (Justin Long) and more appreciated by his wealthy parents. One of the requirements of the job she wants is “making tough decisions,” which causes her to deny a mortgage extension to a desperate customer, an elderly Gypsy woman (played with repulsive, phlegmy malice by Lorna Raver).
Suffice it to say, the spurned lady doesn’t take it well. After a nasty physical confrontation, she places a curse on the young loan officer, who is advised by a psychic that a demon will torment her for three days, before returning to take her soul to hell.
For such a familiar story — complete with the period of disbelief in the curse, the haunting and dread, and the race against time to escape — Raimi makes the story very entertaining. The director better known for Spiderman has certainly progressed from the camera-strapped-to-a-board approach of the Evil Dead movies, but he infuses Drag Me To Hell with the same humorously dark violence, cheap and sudden shocks, and copious amounts of disgusting and gooey fluids — much of which finds itself launched into Christine’s screaming face.
I’m holding back on all the twists and spoilers, but Drag Me To Hell is not only gruesomely enjoyable, but clever and capable of surprises. Lohman goes through quite a bit of abuse as the insecure careerist who’s pissed off the wrong old lady. (Christine’s diction lessons never quite took — I love the scene where she adorably admits, “I’m thcared.”) But faced with demonic stalking and eternal damnation, she finds the resolve to get down and dirty, and do what needs to be done to undo the curse.
But I bet her loan officer character never again wrongs a customer just to get a promotion. You know what they say about payback.
1973. Directed by Orson Welles.
Orson Welles opens and closes his final film with magic tricks, in part to show us that we can be fooled for our own enjoyment, that we welcome illusions if we willingly participate in them, but also to associate those harmless tricks with the perils of trust. After all — he reminds us at the end — at the start of the film he promised he would absolutely tell the truth for the next hour, then notes that the hour was up long before the end of the film.
The question at the heart of F For Fake is what to believe when a pledge to tell the truth can be true and not true at the same time. If that seems confusing, wait until you hear the story told by Welles of an art forger who is the subject of a book written by a man who claims to be Howard Hughes’ biographer, whom Howard Hughes claims to have never met, if you can believe that it was really Howard Hughes who made the denial. Welles begins his narration (using the footage of an earlier film on the art forger) in a train station that disappears as backgrounds are removed, proving that the teller of the tale creates the reality presented to us. What we choose to believe is determined by the most persuasive storyteller.
Whether the art forger ever forged a painting or claimed not to, whether the author interviewed Hughes or made up the entire thing, whether the young woman who trades Picasso a summer of modeling for the 22 paintings he paints of her — I don’t know if any of that’s true. Whether there’s a bit of truth in any of that is beyond Welles’ point. What you believe is your reality.
And actually, having seen the movie, I know the one part that’s not true. That is, if I believe Welles.
This is not a conventional movie review, but it’s the best I can do for a truly unique work that doesn’t really benefit from an accurate description. You just have to sit back and let Welles’ stream-of-consciousness narrative and editing tricks play with your mind a bit. You won’t be sure of anything when it’s done, but you’ll feel like you’ve learned to spot a fake — by just assuming that everything is fake. The ultimate work of art, Welles suggests, is the Cathedral at Chartres, only because the designer of the masterpiece is unknown, and thus cannot be accused of forgery.
But why should we enjoy being fooled? Maybe because if we are party to the deceit, we aren’t truly gullible. Welles quotes Houdini, the greatest magician of all time, as saying that the magician is really an actor playing a magician, and that’s what’s appealing about the magic trick. We don’t believe it, but like the idea of believing it at the same time. I know, I’m talking in circles. But after absorbing F For Fake, it’s the only thing that makes sense.
2009. Starring Edgar Flores and Paulina Gaitan. Directed by Cary Fukunaga.
The right-wing outrage over illegal immigration — like its outrage over nearly every issue — purposefully avoids consideration of the human lives at the heart of the debate. There is even a trend to refer to illegal immigrants as “illegals,” so as to remove any reference to the humanity of the desperate people involved. Ignoring the vulnerable souls behind a painful and difficult decision must help when you want to demonize and demagogue.
What Sin Nombre forces you to do, from its beginning, is to consider the circumstances of two very different people, forced to join the stream of humans escaping precarious economic and political circumstances. Sayra (Paulina Gaitan) is a pretty and lonely Honduran meeting her father for the first time in years — he long ago crossed the border and has a family in New Jersey, and now wants to bring his brother and Sayra to his new home. She is persuaded to go, even though she no longer feels like part of him.
Meanwhile, Willy (Edgar Flores) is dealing with much more frightening circumstances in the Chiapas region of Mexico. A gang member who is experiencing a lack of commitment, he’s been ordered to induct a new member, Smiley (Kristian Ferrer), but is busy sneaking off to spend time with his girlfriend, who he has been hiding. After an assault on his girlfriend, and forced by his gang leader to join in a robbery of Sayra and her family members, Willy strikes back, sealing his own fate. He decides to escape on the same train, with a network of violent gang members watching for him at every stop.
Life on the trains north is dangerous and dirty, and you can feel the despair everytime Sayra’s father takes out his worn map to indicate how far they still have to go. (Their goal of New Jersey is “off the map,” as he describes it.) They crawl north on the rails, rained on and preyed upon, and hiding from authorities. Willy joins Sayra’s small group of travelers, but realizes that he is putting her at risk at every stop.
Some of the land crossed in Sin Nombre is beautiful in the early morning light and the twilight — vast, barren plains and far-off mountains, but everywhere you look in the near distance there’s poverty and desperation. Nowhere seems like a good place to get off and begin again. Once committed on their journey, the travelers don’t dare pause or delay, or they doom any chance of reaching the border. When Sayra makes the decision to leave the train to join Willy, her grieving father can do nothing but move along.
I don’t know the answer to stemming illegal immigration. I realize that allowing everyone who wants access to a better life is tough to do when the gap expands between the privileged few and the multitudes of the poor. But I know that if I found myself in the same hellish world run by Willy’s gangs, I would do whatever necessary to become an American and change my life for the better. When you put yourself in the shoes of those trying to do the same, and you recognize the same basic desires behind those “illegal” faces — the nameless, to whom the film’s title refers — the issue becomes a lot more human.