Two Moons (2012) ☆☆1/2(2.5/4) : A haunted house with two moons in the sky

Posted on July 14, 2012 by kaist455

Two impressive things in new South Korean horror film “Two Moons” are the title itself and the image represented by the title. It is a very dark and creepy night in the forest in some remote area, and we have a haunted house where some ominous force seems to be working against the people in the house. And then we see the two moons in the sky, which are identical in shape but look a little different in color. Something is very wrong, isn’t it?

The movie is your average haunted house film peppered with dark places where something may be lurking inside to terrify you. The characters keep saying that they are afraid, but, of course, they are bound to look around the house, and they see many disturbing things inside and outside of the house. They hope the night will be over as soon as possible, but the night seems to last far longer than they wish.

You may quickly guess what the hell is going on in the house and the surrounding area not long after when you meet three main characters at the start. Three people suddenly find themselves in the dark basement storage room of the house, and, while they surely remember who they respective are, none of them has any memory about how they came or were brought to the house. The basement room is fortunately not locked, but they are virtually isolated in the house. They try to get out of the forest surrounding the house, but they fail, so they eventually go back to the house and decide to stay in the house until the dawn comes.

However, the house does not look like a safe place to them. They frequently hear some strange sounds in the house. They see something moving in dark corners. They feel the malevolent presence of someone else besides them. Furthermore, it is possible that one of them is not what he or she seems to be – naturally, they become more suspicious of each other than before. Why is So-hee(Park Han-byeol), a young novelist, so particularly interested in who her fellows are and when they were born? Why is the hand of In-jeong(Park Jin-Joo), a whiny high school girl, smeared with blood when she wakes up with others in the basement room? And can what Seok-ho(Kim Ji-seok) remembers about himself really be trusted?

If you are familiar with many horror films about haunted house, you will probably ask the same questions, and then you will possibly also get the right answers for yourself within minutes. The movie never escapes our expectation, so we are not so shocked to know that there are indeed secrets in the house, represented by the other characters in the house played by Ra Mi-ran and Park Won-Sang. As a matter of fact, the movie even makes references to one or two well-known horror movies, so we can see what kind of surprise is coming to us. Well, if you are stuck with two moons in the sky in an unrealistic place where a dead body can be suddenly disappeared or a murderous character cannot be killed easily, you know for sure that you are in a very serious trouble, don’t you?

But the characters in the film are not smart enough to know what’s going on in the house even after the second half of the story begins, and, this is worse, they are cardboards characters we do care about much. They usually shout or whine just because, well, they are pressured as the tools of the plot. I am not familiar with the three main performers in the film, but I could see that the weak characterization is not their fault. They try their best, but their diligent performances are frequently inhibited by the flat dialogues of the weak screenplay, and I cared increasingly less about what would eventually happen to them while appreciating several nice scenes in the movie.

There are indeed some good scary moments in the film. As I said above, I like that impressive scene revealing two moons hovering over the house in the dark of the night, and the movie does a nice moment which reminded me of that famous deleted scene of “The Exorcist”(1973). This is a low budget film, but the spooky atmosphere surrounding the house is well maintained throughout its short running time(86min) even when the characters are in a bright space. When they are moving around the house while only depending on a lantern or a cellular phone, you know something can suddenly appear out of the darkness at any moment.

The director Kim Dong-bin has been infamous among South Korean moviegoers for “Red Eye”(2004), which was, according to my acquaintances, one of the worst South Korean horror films in the last decade. I think “Two Moons” is not a bad horror film, but I also feel that it could be a better movie if he and the other people behind the movie were more creative and imaginative in handling their nice idea. Besides the problems in the story, I also found that two or three scenes in the film could be more effectively terrifying if they were handled more competently. For example, when the movie shows the two characters groping in the darkness, it switches to an infrared camera to show them clearly to our eyes, but it feels jarring rather than scary.

Although the potential in its premise is limited by its low budget, “Two Moons” can be enjoyed as a small horror film if you are aware of its regrettable limits, but I cannot recommend it because of its apparent flaws. It is effective at times, but it is also marred by its weaknesses in handling the story and the characters. Serving us with scary moments is not enough to make a good horror film – it always depends on good story and good characters we can identify with. But maybe I will fondly remember when these two moons hit my eyes like a couple of big pizza pies.

Posted in Movies | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

My FFC review for “Motel Hell”

Posted on July 13, 2012 by kaist455

My Far-flung correspondent review for “Motel Hell”(1980) has just been posted at Roger Ebert’s site.

If you want to read it, click here.

The review was expanded from my original review written in October 2010.

Posted in Movies | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011) ☆☆☆(3/4) : British retirees outsourced to India

Posted on July 7, 2012 by kaist455

If you think “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” is one of those travelogues you have seen before, you are partially right about that. I am sure you have heard about their genre formula; A bunch of Western visitors come to an exotic place unfamiliar to most of them, and that exotic place in question, usually pretty to look on the screen, gives them the time and chance to reflect on the mundane lives they respectively have been leading, so their lives are changed with a bunch of life lessons they have learned at the ending.

But I am not grumbling about this cliché at all. My description of this genre formula sounds very trite to you, but it works whenever movie has right ingredients to be mixed properly, and, with many goodies to be savored, “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” is one of such charming cases. We have terrific British performers who fill their respective characters with warmth and humor, and the movie reminds me again that India is a very interesting and beautiful country never ceasing to amaze or confound outsiders like me because of its dizzy complexity palpable in its people, culture, and society. You think there is no surprise, and then India always surprises you.

The movie has a surprise for me like that. I am familiar with several curious cases of outsourcing in India through the notable films like “Slumdog Millionaire”(2008), but “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” amuses me with another interesting case of outsourcing. Besides being a major outsourcing market for many call centers as usual, now India starts to become another kind of outsourcing market in the film – providing the places and services for the retirees who come from the West. For instance, in case of Muriel Donnelly(Maggie Smith), your average old snorty British lady entering her retirement age, she is informed that it is a lot cheaper and faster to get her surgery in India rather waiting for surgery in England. She does not like foreigners, but cheap cost is something she cannot refuse.

Muriel is one of seven British retirees who will lodge at the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel in Jaipur, Rajasthan. We are briefly introduced to them one by one at the beginning. Evelyn Greenslade(Judy Dench) has recently lost her husband; she also has to give up her flat because of his debt, and now she tries to make a new start in a new place while being active at her blog site(the movie is frequently accompanied with the narrations through her blogging). Douglas Ainslie(Bill Nighy) and his wife Jean(Penelope Wilton) are an unhappy middle-aged couple; they become unhappier then before because they invested their retirement fund to their daughter’s failed online business. While Madge Hardcastle(Celia Imrie) comes to India to search for another Mr. Right in her life, Norman Cousins(Ronald Pickup) is also looking for a new chance like her, though this bachelor has been miserably failing to find his love so far. In case of Graham Dashwood(Tom Wilkinson), a recently retired judge, he visits this country for the first since he left the country a long time ago; he wants to find his lover in the past, who gave him the happiest moment in his lonely life during their regrettably short time.

Right from when they arrive in India, they experience how different India is from their world. They are stuck at the airport on the way to Jaipur, so they decide to take a bus(they learn their first lesson in India: “There is always room.”). When they finally arrive at the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, well, the hotel is not exactly something they imagined while reading its brochure. It is more like a shabby inn rather than, say, a three-star hotel for the retirees(and the beautiful), and one room does not have even a front door. To think what I came across in one youth hostel in Manhattan in 2004 was bad…

The hotel is managed by a young man named Sonny Kapoor, played by Dev Patel(remember his breakthrough performance in “Slumdog Millionaire”?) with sincere hyperkinetic enthusiasm. Sonny has the hope and ambition to make his hotel, which was inherited from his dead father, into a nice place for his customers, but he is in a difficult situation. While it is hard to draw investors with his humble place, his older brothers will soon sell the place if there is not any way to save the hotel. His mother wants him to marry someone suitable for him, but he is in the relationship with a lovely girl named Sunaia(Tena Desae), of whom his mother disapproves despite his feelings toward her.

While most of the characters follow predictable paths, but there are delights and surprises here and there. While there are humorous moments while Madge and Norman try to find someone to date with(at one point, she tries to register in a local social club as Prince Margaret for saving money – only to be met with a brusque reply from a no-nonsense employee who is not fooled easily), we gradually realize the touching poignancy behind Graham’s impromptu decision to suddenly visit the country he left years ago. Douglas feels happier to be in India while his wife does not like going outside the hotel at all(she especially detests spiced Indian dishes). Evelyn is happy to start her second life through a job in a call center, which is incidentally where Sunaina works. Even Muriel, always distrustful of foreigners, begins to open her lonely heart through an unlikely relationship between a hotel maid, a lowest caste girl who is grateful to Muriel because of the attention Muriel gives to her.

The talented British actors are gathered for this film, and it is joyful to watch them work together. The characters may be a little too thin or typical, but they bring a lot of humanity to their characters, so the movie lightly moves around clichés while drawing laughs and poignancy from them. All performers do a good job as a well-rounded ensemble, but I must say Wilkinson is especially moving as a man freer than before through his search for his lover, which is eventually resolved in an unexpectedly insightful and heartfelt way.

I forgot to tell you about how India looks good as an important part of this film. Jaipur and its surrounding area in Rajasthan look as good as they can be in travelogue film, and the busy streets filled with rickshaws, tuk tuks, and other vehicles or the alleys lined with little shops are still colorful sights to see even though I have encountered such sights indirectly through movies and documentaries many times before.

Based on Deborah Moggach’s novel “These Foolish Things”, the director John Madden made a pleasant feel-good travelogue movie with lots of charm to draw you inside its colorful world which overwhelms at first and then charms its visitors. Ol Parker’s competent adaptation is sappy at times, but the good performances compensate for that a lot, and the movie feels like a good short journey on the whole. It may not be something new, but it is something colorful enough to be cherished.

Posted in Movies | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

We Need to Talk about Kevin (2011) ☆☆☆1/2(3.5/4) : A woman stuck with her bad seed

Posted on July 7, 2012 by kaist455


What a truly naughty boy Kevin is. If you are parents, he is your worst nightmare; he is mean, vicious, willful, uncommunicative, and, possibly, psychopathic. Since his birth, he has been tormenting his mother, and now he has committed an atrocious incident to plunge his mother into the situation far worse than ever. Folks, if you have ever think your son is very naughty, here is the example to remind you that your son is not so evil at all compared to this bad seed.

But was he a bad seed from the beginning? Can we say that his mother was at least partially responsible for that terrible incident just because she failed to direct her son to a right way? These questions are kept being asked in the devastated mind of his mother in “We Need to Talk about Kevin”, a dark, relentless film which feverishly looks around the fragmented memories inside her while looking at her torturous struggle to deal with the aftermath of an irreversible tragedy in her shattered life.

Although almost two years have passed since that tragedy at her son’s high school, Eva Khatchadourian(Tilda Swinton) has not yet completely recovered from its aftershock. Her face looks stiff, gaunt, and exhausted; it seems that she heavily depends on alcohol and medications for going through her hard daily life. There is no one to support or console her, and she lives alone in a small shabby house to which she moved from a big suburban house she and her family lived. And the people at the town still remember who she is; on one morning, she finds that somebody threw red paint on her car and the front of her house. When she comes across the mother of one of the victims after she gets fortunately hired, she is slapped hard just because she looks happy.

You may wonder why she does not leave the town. Is her decision a part of her self-immolation for dealing with growing guilt? It seems so, because her mind is endlessly tortured by not only the present but also the past, as reflected by the fragmented narrative structure of the story which freely moves back and forth between the present and the past. The director Lynne Ramsay, who adapted Lionel Shriver’s novel with Rory Steward Kinnear, provides the feeling of agitated mind through the constant use of red color on the screen, and there is a striking opening sequence where Eva is covered with the red juice of tomatoes along with the crowd at the Tomatina festival in Spain.

That was when she was fallen in love with her husband while she was working as a well-known travel guide writer. Not long after she married Franklin(John C. Reilly), she gave birth to her son Kevin, and that was how her hell started. Maybe she was not the best mom in the world, she did as much as she could for her son, but she kept being frustrated. She tried to communicate with Kevin, he did not respond to her much, and he looked like very determined to annoy and hurt his mother in every way available to him, including soiling his diaper(he kept wearing it even when he was no longer a baby, by the way).

Did he sense that his mother never wanted to have him? Or was he just born to be cruel to his mother? The movie does not give easy answers to the difficult questions it digs out of the story, but one thing is certain; as Kevin, played by Jasper Newell when he is a little boy and then played by Ezra Miller when he becomes a teenager, grows up, he becomes more fiendish and manipulative than ever. While successfully keeping his mother annoyed and exasperated all the time except a few ‘open’ moments, he somehow makes his father believe that his son is a good kid with problems. Franklin is so oblivious to a growing problem in front of his eyes that he misguidingly supports his son’s interest in archery. Even when his little daughter(Ashley Gerasimovich), a lovely girl who has been a consoling light in Eva’s stressful daily life at home, gets a serious injury possibly because of Kevin, Franklin is too generous to his son while trying to remind him of what happened to his little sister. It’s strange, but haven’t we heard of the parents who are sometime unbelievably blind to the flaws of their children?

Franklin’s unwise responses to Kevin may look a little too unrealistic, but what we see in the film may be a distorted reality reflected and fueled by the guilt and confusion in Eva’s tumultuous state of mind. The movie feels barren even when everything except Kevin seems to be all right at Eva and her family’s house, which looks comfortable at first but increasingly feels cold and isolated as we observe more sadistic behaviors of Kevin. While the songs played in the soundtrack add considerable degrees of black humor to Eva’s nightmarish circumstance, the quiet lack of communication between Eva and her incarcerated son is painful to look.

The narrative structure of the movie is messy on the surface, but the movie does not lose our attention thanks to Ramsey’s excellent direction and Tilda Swinton’s harrowing performance. Swinton has always been convincing in her films, and she is terrific in this movie as an unfortunate woman who happens to be stuck with her bad seed while not hesitating to show flaws inside her character. Eva would have chosen to continue her career without having a family if she had been able to choose, and that aspect of hers cannot be hidden even when she tries to be a kind mother to her young son.

John C. Reilly gets a basically thankless job as Eva’s husband, but he nicely supports Swinton’s performance while playing his character as a gullible guy who tries to look like everything is fine. With spiteful stare and vicious attitude, Jasper Newell and Ezra Miller are so effective and consistent as their bad son that you can understand why Eva seems to be only one who sees the evil inside him. Kevin is one hell of obnoxious boy you want to strangle within a minute, but you also know where his mean pleasure comes from. Miller has a particularly chilling moment when Kevin has just finished his atrocity at the school. When no one remains unharmed in his sight, he takes a bow as a finishing touch, but to whom? You will not probably need lots of time to get the answer for that question.

“We Need to Talk About Kevin” is a difficult film to watch because of its unflinching look at its dark, uncomfortable subject, but it is also an emotionally devastating movie you cannot easily forget after watching it. While the irony of the title is that nobody in the film gets any chance to talk seriously about its title character, the last scene implies that there may be such a chance someday – but it is already too late to change anything in Eva’s life, which will always be burdened by a cross named Kevin.


Posted in Movies | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Port and Beach (06/29/12)

Posted on July 3, 2012 by kaist455
                                                               
The vacation season has not started yet, so it was quiet on the beach of Sokcho…
Posted in Photos | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Observatory and Summerhouses (06/28/12)

Posted on July 3, 2012 by kaist455
                                                            
 Goseong area is right next to the military demarcation line between North Korea and South Korea. You can see North Korea land at the Unification Observatory.
The scenery of the coast line facing East Sea is so beautiful that we have former North Korean dictator Kim Il-sung’s summerhouse, former vice president Lee Gi-boong’s summerhouse, and former president Lee Seung-man’s summerhouse. Look around, and you will understand why they had their respective summerhouses in this area.
Posted in Photos | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Lavender Farm (06/28/12)

Posted on July 3, 2012 by kaist455
                                         
After the symposium was over, we went around the east coast region for seesighting. The first place is a beautiful flower/herb farm in some country town.
Posted in Photos | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Cell Cycle Symposium (06/27/12)

Posted on July 3, 2012 by kaist455
                            
I attended the annual South Korean Cell Cycle Symposium with my colleagues and adviser professor. The symposium was held in East Coast region which has been always popular vacation place.
Posted in Photos | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Minority Report (2002) ☆☆☆☆(4/4): A great multifaceted entertainment from Spielberg

Posted on July 3, 2012 by kaist455


Watching Steven Spielberg’s “Minority Report” (2002) again through Blu-ray made me muse on how much my life with movies has changed during the last 10 years. When I watched it with my father at one of the big movie theaters in my hometown on one summer day of 2002 July, we were not yet familiar with multiplex theaters, and I watched movies mainly through VHS while infrequently going to theaters. DVD was slowly attracting my attention and I eventually bought a DVD-ROM drive for my computer in 2002 October. And I was not particularly interested in downloading movies from Internet; why do I have to watch movies in my small dorm room when I can enjoy them at big theaters?

Ten years have passed, and many things have changed. Most of my hometown theaters are now changed into multiplex theaters, and visiting the local theater near my campus is automatically included in my weekly schedule whenever interesting films are about to be released. While VHS has disappeared for years, several DVDs in my movie collection have been replaced by Blu-ray editions. And I know well that I can watch a movie through a high definition video file if I want; thanks to high-speed Internet, it takes less than an hour to obtain it even if a file is larger than 10Gb. I still prefer theaters, but it is better to watch movies through Internet in some cases. For instance, when I went to the local theater on last Friday to watching “The Cabin in the Woods” (2011), it was like watching a terribly dim 3D movie due to a bad converting job on digital film; I promised myself that I will watch it again in a proper condition once it is released on Blu-ray.

While my life with movies has changed a lot like that, I find “Minority Report” remains the same as before. Like Christopher Nolan’s “Inception” (2010), this is a rare multifaceted summer blockbuster film where actions and ideas co-exist together in an intriguing science fiction story. Propelled by its compelling mystery plot, it provides us memorable moments filled with suspense and thrill. Decorated with the fascinating technologies of its realistic future world, it might have looked like fantasy when it first came out, but now it looks uncannily prophetic because many of the technologies shown in the movie are developed or being developed at this point.

If I have to pick one aspect that is still unrealistic in the movie, it would be the base of the main system inside the Department of PreCrime, installed in 2048 in the District of Columbia. For the last six years, the police officers at PreCrime have successfully prevented murders through information about when and where they will happen, and they extract the information in advance from the visions seen by three precogs incubated in a milky photon pool, who are the unfortunate victims of a genetic mutation caused by a drug addiction of their parents. While it seems they can see other things in the future, their hive minds are especially sensitive to future murders, so Lamar Burgess (Max von Sydow) and Dr. Iris Hineman (Lois Smith) established PreCrime for using their talent to solve the increasing crime problem in six years ago.

I have always wondered about how their mutation affects the neuron system to bestow such a fantastic ability to them. It seems to be an inheritable mutation, so it is definitely involved with genes and their expression in the cell. I wonder whether disruption in the brain structure due to protein malfunction makes them see the future through a higher dimension, but this is just my silly cranky thought. As a matter of fact, neither the movie nor Philip K. Dick’s short story it is based on explains the biological aspect of their main premise in detail.

Nonetheless, their unreal premise provokes many interesting thoughts and questions. Can they arrest a future perpetrator, or a “pre-criminal,” for a murder even if he has not yet not committed a crime? Maybe he can be arrested for an attempt to murder (the opening sequence of the movie is a good example of that), but what if a perpetrator has no thought about murder at all when he is arrested? Can his trial be legal when it is already processed with an appointed judge and a prosecutor before their arrest? And, if a predicted murder is prevented, how can we say its prediction was right?

Philip K. Dick’s short story revolves around an amusing paradox generated from its premise. Because its hero John Anderton knows the future in advance as the head of PreCrime, he finds himself in a complex situation which can be explained by a basic quantum physics theory. You obtain the data about the future, but that act of measurement affects the future itself, so new data are obtained as a result, but the future is changed again. Knowing what will happen in the future can result in a really annoying problem, you know.

This intricate aspect of Dick’s story is replaced with a relatively less complex mystery plot in Jon Cohen and Scott Frank’s screenplay, but their mystery plot, expanded from the premise of Dick’s story, is fair, intelligent, and entertaining. In the opening sequence, John Anderton (Tom Cruise), who is the chief detective of PreCrime in the movie version, is handling case #1108. While the names of victims and a perpetrator are already identified along with the time of incident, he and his men need more information for locating them as soon as possible. It is Anderton’s job to extract clues from the visual puzzle pieces received from their three precogs– and how he manipulates them in a big transparent plastic panel through the gestures of his hands in midair is one of the defining moments in the film.

Not only he is able to enlarge, shrink, revolve or sweep them, but also he can reel them back and forth as he wants only with his hand movements. With Franz Schubert’s “The Unfinished Symphony” playing on the soundtrack (how ironic the title is), he looks like a symphony conductor, and the music accentuates the smooth, confident professionalism we have observed from Harry Caul in “The Conversation” (1974) and Jack Terry in “Blow Out” (1981).

PreCrime has been steadily gaining approval during its six years of trial in Washington D.C. The number of murder incidents is decreased to almost zero in the area, and now all of their recent cases are crime of passion represented by red ball (pre-meditated murder is represented by brown ball in contrast). We get a humorous line at one point: “Now, put the gun down. I don’t hear a red ball.”

There will soon be a national ballot to determine the expansion of PreCrime to the federal level, and the Department of Justice wants to know whether there is any serious flaw in PreCrime – and, possibly, whether they can take it over. Anderton is not so pleased about Danny Witwer (Colin Farrell), a federal agent sent to evaluate the system, and neither is his boss/mentor Burgess, an old man who will not be happy to see the milestone of his long career taken away from him.

The thought-provoking conversation scene between Anderton and Witwer begins with a legal and logical dispute on whether a pre-criminal can be arrested even if there is no crime committed yet. Their conversation moves to the religious and socio-political area when Anderton shows Witwer the “Temple,” a big, quiet basement hall where precogs are protected from outside. A former seminarian, Witwer quickly notes that Anderton and his men are not different from priests protecting oracles in their temple, while also pointing out that the power lies not in oracles but priests. The system can be perfectly objective, but what about the people who have the authority to handle it? In Witwer’s view, there are always human flaws and they will lead to problems in the perfect system.

Because of his strong belief in the system, Anderton does not agree with Witwer, but he soon faces a dangerous possibility inside the system. The subject of case #1109 is none other than himself, and precogs predict that he is going to murder someone he has never heard about. Did somebody manipulate the system to frame him? Or, is this a mind-boggling case of predestination paradox? Eluding his former colleagues now chasing him, he tries to prove his innocence by any means necessary, but isn’t it possible that this very act of his will cause a predicted incident? There is also a possibility that he can undermine the whole system; if he does not commit a murder, then the system will be proven to be wrong, and that may trigger the end of the system.

Through his meeting with Dr. Hineman at her wondrous greenhouse filled with various genetically modified plants, Anderton realizes that PreCrime is not as perfect as he thought. He learns of the existence of “minority reports,” which represent possible alternative futures but are discarded for the perfection of the system, and now he is determined to find his minority report to prove that he won’t kill anyone.

His situation is a classic case of the framed hero, exemplified by many Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller films including “North by Northwest” (1959). Using a minority report as a MacGuffin to drive his thriller plot, Spielberg serves us a number of stylish, exhilarating set pieces. There’s a long chase action sequence which furiously starts in a narrow alley and then leads to an auto factory nearby; how the action is continued on an assembly line may remind you of the car factory scene which was envisioned by Hitchcock but never realized when he was making “North by Northwest.”

Another very good sequence involves with Anderton and Agatha (Samantha Morton), one of precogs he takes away from PreCrime to get her help. This happens at a shopping mall they go into while running away from PreCrime officers. She is physically weak and helpless to walk by herself because she has been in an incubator for six years with her fellow precogs (they are respectively named Arthur and Dashiell, so we can see that Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Dashiell Hammett are referenced in the of the story). Her psychic talent guides Anderton through their tricky moment while he is supporting her, and we get an exquisite moment shining with precise execution while she is instructing him on the next moves to evade their pursuers. Every move is beautifully fit into an elaborate strategy in the end, and this sequence has a nice homage to the umbrellas in Hitchcock’s “Foreign Correspondent” (1940) as its finishing touch.

The special effects are important factors, but they mostly serve the story and the characters as bountiful details of their vivid world–along with the terrific production design by Alex McDowell. The futuristic architecture and its amazing Maglev transportation system realistically exist in the Washington D.C. we are familiar with, and, considering how much time Spielberg and his crew spent with the experts and scientists from various fields during pre-production, this may be not that different from how Washington D.C. will really look like in 2054. After watching the movie, I thought about how the looks of my campus have been changed during the last 12 years; there are still tacky old buildings (we jokingly called them public bath houses), but they’re being gradually replaced or surrounded by modern architectures. The campus looks different now, but it is not entirely alien to us. I guess that’s the reason why Washington D.C. depicted in the movie feels more plausible to me than before.

Its future world looks more utopian compare to what we saw in another famous science fiction movie “Blade Runner” (1982), which is also based on a short story by Philip K. Dick, but there also exist dystopian sides in this bright world. There are retinal scanners everywhere in the city to locate you, and digital billboard commercials call your name whenever you pass them, and there are still dark, seedy corners somewhere in the city evoking the familiar atmosphere of film noir. In this underworld, there is a drug dealer who provides Anderton the drug to ease personal grief over his lost son, and there is also a doctor who can change your identification through his illegal optic operation in a shabby room; his girlfriend and assistant is the character closest to the definition of femme fatale in the story.

The movie is shrouded in a cold, metallic feeling thanks to the cinematography by Spielberg’s long-time collaborator Janusz Kaminski. With its desaturated color tone and muted hues, the movie approaches to the monochromatic mood of black-and-white noir film from time to time. John Williams’ score is moody and nervous, and the neurotic french horn performance accompanying the suspenseful sequence where tiny spider robots move around the apartment building for a retina scan is reminiscent of Bernard Herrmann’s brooding thriller scores. During this sequence, Kaminski’s camera deftly moves around the cross-section of the building while looking upon its tenants who are retina-scanned one by one by spider robots (I was surprised to learn that they actually built a very big real set for this scene), and this increasingly tense circumstance culminates to one spider robot sensing something strange when it and other robots are about to leave.

The best thing about the performances in the film is that the actors look convincing with the special effects on the screen. Now and then Tom Cruise has been an excellent action movie star, and his everyman quality helps us identify with his character. His direct, earnest performance may be a little too straight for a flawed noir hero haunted by the memories of his lost son, but Cruise never lets the human dimension of the story be lost from the screen even during fierce action sequences, and we come to realize that the story is not only about Anderton’s search for a changeable future but also his quest to find a way to deal with the painful past lingering inside his head. Colin Farrell, Max von Sydow, and Samantha Morton are all effective as the main supporting characters surrounding Cruise, and Morton is strikingly uncanny and poignant with her expressive face right from her first appearance. When Agatha and Anderton comes across a crucial moment I will not describe in detail, Kaminski’s camera masterfully captures a haunting shot representing two opposing wills inside them.

With “A.I. Artificial Intelligence” (2001), the movie shows us that Steven Spielberg has changed a lot compared to what he was during the era of “E.T.” (1982) and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (1977). While he is capable of making a lightweight comedy like “The Terminal” (2004) or an innocent adventure story like “The Adventures of Tintin” (2011) or an unabashedly sentimental drama like “War Horse” (2011), there are also the sheer chaotic terror in the first half of “War of the Worlds” (2005) and the gray espionage of “Munich” (2005). “A.I.”, which has been steadily gaining its status as an underrated work since it was released, was initially criticized for its sentimental finale by many people, but they seemed to overlook how sad and gloomy that finale actually is. Imagine how unbearably dire it would have been for David if he had been a real human being instead of a humanoid robot. In the case of “Minority Report,” there are some sentimental moments which do not mesh well with the other elements in the film, but its overall tone remains cold, dark, and hostile with an edgy sense of black humor in spite of the tentative optimism in the ending (I still love that gross refrigerator scene, though I cringe every time I see it).


“Minority Report” is a captivating neo-noir science fiction film filled with style, substance, and ideas. The movie dazzles me with its abundance of details, and it is constantly interesting even when it relatively drags during its last act. We get most of the answers before its finale, so there is not much mystery at that point, but now suspense dramatically builds on a circumstance similar to the one at the end of Philip K. Dick’s story, with the fate of some characters as well as the fate of PreCrime at stake. It may be freer to live without PreCrime, but what will happen next?

One fascinating thing about the movie is that our world has been approaching its world step by step in many aspects since the movie came out in 2002. At present, multi-touch interfaces like the one shown in the film are not the technology of the future anymore, and now I frequently see people operating iPads with their hands at my campus, including my beloved advisor professor. When I came across an article about the development of E-paper, I instantly thought about the subway scene featuring the people getting the latest new from their electronic newspaper or magazine (my personal question; how do they recycle it?). Spider robots in the movie may come true someday, like drone planes, because US military is currently developing them and I can imagine these tiny little robots reconnoitering to detect enemies hiding somewhere.

While the world of “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968) may be still too far from our world, the world of “Minority Report” may be closer than we think considering the rapid speed of current technology advancement. As a matter of fact, we will probably have a PreCrime of our own someday. No, there are no mutant psychics, but I read an informative science article from the Guardian that one researcher actually built a system which can tell you the likelihood of your house being broken into. In addition, an internal document from the US Department of Homeland Security revealed that they actually tested a program to predict criminal intent on civilians. Well, isn’t it nice that we can at least think and discuss in advance our brave new world to come, through good science fiction like this movie?

Posted in Movies | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

The Cabin in the Woods (2011) ☆☆☆(3/4): It’s not your typical cabin in horror movie

Posted on June 30, 2012 by kaist455

For enjoying “The Cabin in the Woods” as much as possible, I advise you to keep yourself away from any information about it before watching it. Although one main surprise in its premise is easily guessed from the beginning, there are a lot more in this smart horror film, and its entertainment is based on how it cleverly twists the conventions and rules of horror movies with the sense of a devious fun.

But I think you have to know what kind of horror film it looks like at first, so I will tell you about how it establishes its stage at the beginning. Five college kids go to the cabin in some remote area which is recently purchased by the cousin of one of them, and there are many apparent bad signs they come across during their journey. The place is so remote that it cannot be found on GPS, and the road to the cabin has no guard rail to protect their camping car from the precipice next to it, and they also come across a gas station which looks as shabby as its unpleasant owner, who gives them a solemn warning about what will happen to them through his nonsense words.

In such a circumstance like this, you will probably have a second thought about spending night at the cabin, but these kids proceed with their weekend plan, so they finally arrive at the cabin. They look like your typical stereotype characters you can expect from horror films; Curt(Chris Hemsworth) is a popular athlete student, Jules(Anna Hutchison) is his blonde girlfriend(she has recently died her hair, by the way), Holden(Jesse Williams) is a smart kid, Dana(Kristen Connolly) is Jules’ best friend, and Marty(Franz Kranz) is a goofy guy who smokes lots of marijuana.

During the afternoon, they have a fun time in the lake near the cabin just like those dead teenager characters in Friday the 13th movies(When I watched these movies when I was young, I did not understand why some big dude wearing a hockey mask tried to kill them all when they seemed to have a good time). When the night comes, they go back to the cabin and begin their night party with beer. While watching them, we come to see that they are actually nice kinds who just want to spend a nice time together. The character like Marty can easily become a target of mean jokes because of his dopey behaviors, but they are really friends, and they keep their decency even when they play ‘truth or dare’ game.

But something terrible is bound to happen because, well, the cabin itself is drenched with malevolent atmosphere. Its interior is gloomy and ominous, and we see that there is a very disturbing picture in one of the bedroom, which hides another disturbing side of the cabin behind itself. And the cabin also has a dark basement filled with various ominous objects. If you have seen the movies like “The Evil Dead”(1981), you know it is wise not to touch anything for your survival when you walk into such a basement like this, but….

Yes, this is a typical horror movie plot we encountered countless times before, but “The Cabin in the Woods” adds one amusing idea into the story I will not describe in details. Let’s say it seems their circumstance is more insidious than they thought, and we already know that two employees in some special facility, played by Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford, are monitoring what is happening inside and around the cabin.

Observing these two employees and others in the facility is like how the conventions of horror films are operated against characters. While watching everything thanks to their sophisticated technology, the people at the facility also can manipulate not only the environment but also the people inside their controlled area. We have seen the characters making dumb choices in horror films many times, but there is an amusing reason for that in this case.

The director/co-writer Drew Goddard and the producer/co-writer Joss Weddon must have had lots of fun while writing their story. They set the stage, and they push the characters into it, and then they see what will happen while preparing the next step of their diabolical plot with the various tools and devices at their hands. The movie starts slowly, but it has a considerable degree of creepiness to draw our attention, and then it gleefully twists its story while pushing its characters more ruthlessly into the corner.

And we come to see that the movie is essentially a joke on its genre. For some purpose revealed later in the story, the people at the facility try to have the kids in the cabin dispatched in the way we usually expect from horror films, and that makes them more or less than a screenplay writer or director who follows the rules of horror movies to force the characters to a pre-determined ending waiting for them in advance. The movie later goes further with an interesting thought on the free will of characters in fiction during its third act. Can it be said the characters in fiction have a free will even if they are already stuck in the story determined from the beginning? Can they affect their own fate? The movie pushes these questions with its uninhibited take-no-prisoner attitude, and that ultimately results in the playfully bloody climatic sequence which I can only describe as an orgy of horror films while not spoiling your entertainment.

Like Wes Craven’s “Scream”(1996), another playful deconstruction case of horror genre, “The Cabin in the Woods” is loaded with genre conventions and references, and I enjoyed appreciating some of them. The more you are familiar with the genre, the more you will be entertained by its diabolical playfulness with the genre. We can say that the movie literally assembles many used stock materials in its secret place for its convoluted story, but it is not often to come across a smart horror movie both scary and humorous.

Posted in Movies | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment