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![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) rollick | |
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Apropos of nothing, when I started this post this morning, Yahoo's front-page "news" story teaser read "Check out these toupee-sporting infants, plus cupcakes that are almost too lovely to eat." WTF? Anyway. Saw Neil LaBute's remake of The Wicker Man last night. I'm overly fond of the original, though it's a flawed and kind of crappy movie. I was vaguely hoping for an update that would follow the original story but fix the glaring pacing problems. Instead, I got a really poorly made film that kept all the pacing problems and added in a lot of generic horror-movie "Boo!" moments and what felt like 20 flashbacks to a scene that wasn't that exciting the first time. Nicolas Cage plays a cop who witnessed a nasty accident (seen in almost complete detail in the trailer) and is now obsessed with little blonde girls in pigtails, in that he has spooooky nightmares about them dying in shocking ways whenever the film needs everyone to jump. There's practically no tension in the movie, just Cage running around an island asking everyone questions about a missing girl and seemingly not noticing that they're giving him the blandest, dumbest, most evasive answers possible, when they aren't making noncommittal noises like "Hnh." and staring at him with their big, blank cow eyes. Or, well, maybe he notices, because he gets progressively bitchier as the movie wears on. But he doesn't DO anything about it, like, say, ask follow-up questions. This version of the film has no internal logic. Cage is allergic to bees, so naturally when he visits an island known for its honey production, he gets stung by bees and passes out. He wakes up in the home of the island's leader, Lady Summerisle, with the island's doctor sitting by him. He says "Did you use my allergy medication?" She says "No, I dealt with the problem in the ollllld manner." Then they stare blankly at each other, because he won't ask the obvious follow-up question, and she isn't about to volunteer any information. The whole exchange just falls flat. Finally, he says "I'm here to see Lady Summerisle." NO YOU FUCKING AREN'T, YOU MORON. YOU'RE SITTING ON A COUCH IN YOUR UNDERWEAR, IN A DOCTOR'S CARE BECAUSE YOU WERE UNCONSCIOUS 30 SECONDS EARLIER. WHY THE HELL ARE YOU PRETENDING THIS IS A SOCIAL CALL? Ahem. But the whole movie is like that, full of "Wait, WHAT?" moments where people say things that make no goddamn sense, or just completely fail to say the obvious things that WOULD make sense. Also, BOO! A horrible thing just happened! Oh, no wait, it's a dream. But BOO! Another horrible thing just happened! Oh, that was a dream too. Hey, guess what? BOO! This is the one trick the film has up its sleeve. The only possible reason to see this film is either if you didn't see the original and don't know about the big ending. Or if you're hoping for a modern equivalent of the original film's naked, dancing Britt Ekland. (Nope, no nudity in this one at all.) Or if you're curious to know whether the remake ends the same way, or wusses out. SPOILER!!!OMG!: Yup, it ends in the same way. No wussing out. Though it does the same thing in a phenomenally stupid way — the islanders close in on Cage, the screen blacks out, and then you hear crunching, bone-breaking noises and him screaming. Then, just to make sure no one wonders exactly what just happened, or feels remotely creeped out by their own imagination, he yells "Ahhh! My legs! My legs!" The audience giggled incessantly through this because it was so over-the-top ridiculous. Given that there's no footage to go with any of this, it feels very much like something LaBute added in post, after some wiseacre in a test screening said "Why doesn't he just run away?" Especially when the islanders hoist him into the you-know-what… by hanging him up by his supposedly broken legs. THEN they do the thing from the first movie. Anyway. It's a bad sign when the audience is laughing throughout the big, dramatic confrontation at the end of your tense thriller. It's a worse sign when the second the film ends, someone behind you stands up and yells "TOTAL GARBAGE!" But someone did. And dayum, but he was right. My formal A.V. Club review is here, if you want the less ranty and spitty version for some reason. I'm-a feelin':  disgusted
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From: rollick |
Date: September 2nd, 2006 04:00 pm (UTC) |
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They aren't really feminists. More like man-hatin', castratin' bitches. We never actually get proof that they don't educate their men and that they cut their tongues out at birth, but none of the men speak, even when spoken to, there seems to be no socializing between genders, the schoolroom is female-only (while the boys of schooling age are out working in the forests), and of course this all leads inevitably to torturing and killing men as sacrifices.
All of this could have been kind of cool if presented in a less wholeheartedly misogynistic, sexually predatory, joyless, loveless, "this is what happens when women are in charge" kind of way. As it is, the film is just almost completely missing the sense of happiness and contentment that made the first one interesting.
Also, don't get me started on all the insect imagery, because of course there is no precedent for a female-led society except for beehives and anthills.
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From: rollick |
Date: September 1st, 2006 08:56 pm (UTC) |
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NOTHING. That's the problem.
BIG OLD SPOILERS THAT YOU SHOULDN'T MIND SINCE YOU ASKED THESE QUESTIONS, BUT OTHER PEOPLE MIGHT…
No, he isn't a virgin, and they know it — if nothing else, he and the mother of the child he's looking for have clearly had sex, since they dangle the prospect that the child is his over him.
You've unerringly hit on my biggest problem with the movie. They kill him for the same reason they kill Woodward in the original — as a sacrifice to help their crops. But with far less reason, and no sense of poetic justice or narrative appropriateness at all. The whole thing at the end of the original, where they tell him he's the perfect sacrifice, because he came there of his own free will, and he's simultaneously a virgin, a king, and a fool, becomes a sort of lame "you came here of your own free will, and you have ties of blood with us." Because, you see, he slept with Willow.
Who, it's revealed, basically picked him up at random out in the world and screwed him in order to create that "tie of blood." Basically, the society's whole fascinating, archaic symbolism boils down to "she picked you up in a bar, so you are now bound to us and our land and the gods will find you pleasing." WTF? It makes no sense.
What makes even LESS sense is that after the sacrifice, you see Willow and another chick from the island picking up MORE young cops-to-be in a bar, clearly grooming them for sacrifice down the road. So… presumably they pick up a couple of guys every single year, just to make sure there are a few in the larder for the future in case the crops fail and they have the worst growing season on record AGAIN? Makes no damn sense, I tell you.
But mostly, it just seems terribly like Neil LaBute's twisted brand of reductive misogynism to reduce this happy, cooperative pagan society with a twisted traditional belief in sacrifice to a coven of evil man-enslaving bitches who seduce men AT RANDOM on a regular basis so they can kill them later.
Your icon is tremendously appropriate for the film.
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From: rollick |
Date: September 1st, 2006 09:08 pm (UTC) |
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There's no singing or hand-holding in this version. There's a celebratory air, but also a bunch of shrieking "The drone must die! The drone must die!"
Cause, see, they're all women, so of course they have to have this insect theme going on, because women can't be in charge of anything without some sort of queen-ant/bee metaphor coming into place. So there are a lot of bees. And a naked woman covered in bees. And kids in bee costumes. And blah blah blah.
They do have the nifty masks and costumes, though. Cage ends up dressed like a bear rather than running around hitting women's asses with a bladder, but they do have the cheery Carnivale atmosphere going. But I do miss the "everyone hold hands and sing a happy Christian-burning song" moment.
(One nice touch: They have his daughter light the pyre. Which she does with that sort of mixture of shy hesitancy and look-at-me pride that you generally get with little girls asked to perform important parts in ceremonies — flower girls at weddings, and girls undergoing their first communion and whatnot. He's screaming at her to stop, and she's got this whole "Eek, everyone is looking at me! But yay, everyone is looking at me! air that I found kind of charming.)
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From: rollick |
Date: September 2nd, 2006 04:08 pm (UTC) |
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Oh, I am so with you on that. It's one of my peeves about The 4400 as well. I mean, it's bad enough when people don't ask the important questions, but sometimes that's understandable — people get awkward with interrogations, or don't want to pry, or whatever. But when people don't ask the TOTALLY OBVIOUS, COMPLETELY HUMAN questions, like "Wait, what? That made no sense. Are you making fun of me, or do you just not know the answer, or what?" I want to smack them.
For me, the biggest recent example of this remains the film Birth, where five minutes of reasonably intelligent questioning would unravel the entire story. Instead, you get this sort of thing:
Nicole Kidman: Who are you, strange little boy?
Strange little boy: I am the reincarnation of your dead husband.
Nicole Kidman: …ohhh.
[Slow, dramatic fade-out. Fade-in to another scene, hours later, where it rapidly becomes clear that no one has had any sort of reasonable conversation in the interim.]
Family matriarch: And who are you, strange little boy?
Strange little boy: I am the reincarnation of her dead husband.
Family matriarch: …how strange. You can't be.
Strange little boy: But I am.
[Slow, dramatic fade-out. Fade-in to another scene, THE NEXT DAY, with still no sign that anyone has spoken in the interim. Repeat until frustrated beyond measure.]
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From: rollick |
Date: September 1st, 2006 09:49 pm (UTC) |
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Hee! I totally missed that one.
I felt the exact opposite way about the flashbacks. It really seemed to me like LaBute ran out of things to do with his main story (which is inexplicable, given how many steps he left out in the tracking-the-mystery plot) so he just kept recycling that crash footage to no meaningful end. And realizations like "Oh, there are bees in the car this time" and "Oh, this time he CAUSED the explosion" weren't significant enough to make it worth sitting through the same shots over and over.
I do agree that most of the scenes that evoked laughter were meant to, like when he punches the inn woman, or confronts the teacher on her bike. (Not Rebecca Pigeon, by the way, but someone I'm not familiar with.) They're comic overkill, and seem designed that way, though I think it's a poor idea to deflate your dramatic tension when you have so little of it to begin with.
But when people laughed when he attacked the woman next to Rowan? I'm not buying that that one was supposed to be funny — I think it was a shock-laugh over a man clubbing an unarmed, skinny little lady who wasn't physically threatening him in any way. Nor am I buying that people were supposed to laugh when the crowd is closing in on him, or during the leg-breaking noises. I think those laughs were more because it was all so badly staged and ridiculous. And even if they were intentional, that's a terrible time to get your audience laughing, especially when you consider the gut-wrenching horror of the original film at those moments.
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