Read the rest of this letter…

(Victoria, British Columbia, April 2012)

Five college-kid archetypes are in for a hell of a ride in "The Cabin in the Woods."

(Drew Goddard, 2012)

April 17, 2012

by Joel Crary

I rarely go to horror films these days. I know what I’m going to see. The well for ideas has run dry, so studios return to old properties with new technology. A few superficial updates to bring them into modern day, and they could coast on brand names well into this century. Before my screening of “The Cabin in the Woods,” a trailer ran for “Piranha 3DD,” a sequel to a remake. I probably won’t see it. “Piranha 3D” kind of answered every question I had about killer fish at a spring break resort.

We’re not supposed to ask questions about movies like that, I guess. Horror movies fulfill a Pavlovian function of movie-going. Audiences have known this since “Scream” was released in the mid-’90s; hell, the more dedicated have known it since Mike questioned every character’s motive in “There’s Nothing Out There.” Isn’t it suspect that the same group of kids can head up to the same spooky cabin in every single horror movie and commit the same old mistake of speaking a foreboding Latin phrase out loud?

Studios don’t expect us to mind the repetition. There’s an “Evil Dead” remake in the works, after all. But that’s another year away, and “The Cabin in the Woods” might just take the air completely out of its sails. “Cabin” is partly a satire of that kind of movie, and in the early going, the similarities are uncanny. A group of college kids who run the gamut of two-dimensional personalities – the athlete (Chris Hemsworth), the slut (Anna Hutchison), the smartypants (Jesse Williams), the virgin (Kristen Connolly) – hop in a Winnebago and make for the backwoods, where a cabin lacking only the clattering porch swing waits to swallow their sanity whole.

But hold on. First we meet Rich (Richard Jenkins) and Steve (Bradley Whitford), two technicians in white collared shirts who are killing a coffee break with a conversation about babyproofing. In a giant room resembling Ed Harris’ moon-base quarters in “The Truman Show,” they monitor the kids with satellites and cameras. When they reach the cabin, the men direct their behaviour with doors wired to open and expunged gases, kind of like the way an amusement park pumps popcorn smells into the well-manicured bushes next to the Tilt-a-Whirl.

There’s no point in expanding on the characters. They’re meant to be archetypes. The conventions arrive fast and hard, one after the other: A redneck gas-station attendant hints at horrors to come as he cusses and spits tobacco. A ghostly voice whispers out of the deep dark woods. During a game of Truth or Dare, the kids find a collection of oddities in the cellar, any of which would facilitate a horror plot. Rich and Steve take bets on which one they’ll choose, and the maintenance crew win with the diary, complete with aforementioned foreboding Latin phrase spoken aloud.

The choice triggers a zombie assault by a fictitious family that used to inhabit the cabin. It’s all the phantom compounds’s doing. It kills the kids off one by one, “punishing” them for engaging in sexual acts and splitting up to cover more ground and other horror-movie mistakes that Rich and Steve steer them into. One friend wonders why the others are acting especially like alpha males and “celebutards” all of a sudden. That’s Marty (Fran Kranz), the stoner, and every flick like this needs a character like him to keep it intellectually viable.

As a self-aware stab at the horror genre, “The Cabin in the Woods” is clever enough, a somewhat scathing commentary on the viewing habits of modern audiences, though far south of “Funny Games” on the nihilism scale. The way it distances itself from the killings in certain scenes produces an interesting effect. It’s almost as if we’re given a look behind the curtain at entertainment execs as they sit around, patting each other on the back, lighting cigars with bills, laughing at our insatiability for violence, the whole schmeer. I was suitably disgusted without feeling talked down to.

But then things really pick up in the third act. How to describe the insanity that transpires? There’s a scene where a collection of elevator doors open in the compound, and the entirety of Hell descends on all who are standing nearby. You almost can’t believe what you’re seeing, so intensely cool is the effort behind it. There’s a lot of heart and soul in that kind of carnage. Writer/director Drew Goddard and writer Joss Whedon have an army of supernatural credits backing them up, and they truly let everything fly against the wall, opening a hole from which a demonic bat erupts. Fear not, disenchanted fans of horror. You’ll find yourselves grinning gleefully. And may the angry gods have mercy on the “Evil Dead” remake.

Dear Joni,

You’ve probably forgotten all about this, but I wanted to make good on a New Year’s resolution I made a while ago that until this past week had gone unfulfilled. The last time we exchanged e-mails, I asked you for a list of things to do if I ever found myself in Victoria, and you very kindly obliged with a lengthy reply. This past Wednesday I finally made it out to the city and spent a few days wandering around, using your suggestions as a guide. And I had a great time.

One of my first stops was Habit on Pandora Avenue, a few blocks west of my hostel. I took your advice and tried their espresso, and while I’m not a connoisseur by any means, it certainly served its purpose. I was able to whip through a bunch of work at three times my usual speed thanks to the caffeine jolt. I also checked out another coffee spot on your list – Street Level Espresso on Fort Street, where I enjoyed a cappuccino and enormous biscotti while flipping through their collection of lomo photography books.

I’m not much of a vinyl collector, but I went by the places you mentioned – Ditch Records on Fort, where I picked out a copy of “Give Up” by the Postal Service from its wide selection of pop, and Talk’s Cheap on Pandora, where I flipped through a ton of punk until I came across a Hard Core Logo/D.O.A. split 7-inch, number 337 in a limited edition run of 500. Score.

Boucherat Gallery was closed, unfortunately (and I wonder if they’re still showing exhibitions – their website lists their most recent as long ago as August). It was nevertheless cool to check out the quaintness of Fan Tan Alley and the rest of Chinatown – Canada’s smallest and oldest, as you said. I took the opportunity to enjoy a bowl of Teriyaki chicken at the Noodle Box while I was in the neighbourhood.

But before you think I didn’t come back from Victoria without checking out a gallery, rest assured I did manage to tour through Absolute Underground. I also moseyed up Douglas to the Fifty Fifty Arts Collective, where they were showcasing funny and inventive work by a local artist named Tyler Witzel.

I could go on and on about the food I had at establishments like Solstice Cafe, Barb’s Fish & Chips, and John’s Place, which had amazing (and amazingly priced) vegan hamburgers. But the crown jewel in Victoria eateries was certainly the Blue Fox Cafe, where I took my sweet time enjoying their all-day eggs benny. I was even lucky enough to beat the line, just before the lunch rush picked up.

You told me to check out Beacon Hill Park, and I did – twice, in fact, because on my first effort I was slightly too late to visit the petting zoo. When I returned, I spent a generous amount of time with the baby goats, one of which took a shine to the vinyl I’d bought the day before.

I also found a climbable tree and went about remembering how to put myself in it. It’s been a few years, but it’s like riding a bike, really. Hook your arms and swing. I definitely wasn’t wearing the shoes for it, but I kind of like the feeling of wearing the wrong shoes in certain situations.

Last but not least, you told me to visit livevictoria.com for show information. I did so even before I booked the hostel, to make sure I’d be in town for something decent. I ended up going to see the Joel Plaskett Emergency at Alix Goolden Hall, the converted church at Pandora and Quadra, along with David Vertesi. It was the Emergency’s first show on the “Scrappy Happiness” tour. (And the first time I’ve seen them live, can you believe it?) Here they are performing “Work Out Fine”:

Thanks very much for the tips, Joni. Victoria’s a terrific town. If I can return the favour someday, let me know. (If you ever need a heads-up on Peterborough, Ontario, I’m definitely your man.)

Take care,

Joel

in the next room, a woman comes
like a seagull
her arms spread like wings, probably
coasting

ii)

“no coffee,” she tells me
over a giant one
with a picture in the foam;
“no tea.”

iii)

down the hall,
nine-tenths Etta James belts out,
as if she’d rented that room
to practise undisturbed

iv)

the hum of the fridge, here
the distant beep of a crosswalk

Katniss Everdeen takes aim in "The Hunger Games."

(Gary Ross, 2012)

March 23, 2012

by Joel Crary

I feel as though I should momentarily put myself into a high-school mindset (band shirts, acne, virgin, got it) in order to review “The Hunger Games.” As great as the movie could be for a full-on adult audience, it’s primarily geared toward the ever-lucrative market of Twihards in search of a break from all the sucking. And hey, more power to them; compared to “Twilight,” Suzanne Collins’ novels are… well, maybe not “Lord of the Flies,” but they aim higher and score more often.

This is your classic post-apocalyptic setup. After a loosely defined great war, America was divided into 12 districts. Every year for the past 74, each district has been forced to offer up two of its children as “tributes” to participate in the “Hunger Games,” a fight to the death in which only one child survives. After being marched through the streets like extras in “Village of the Damned,” the kids take their place in front of television cameras for a lottery. Bad luck for District 12′s Prim Everdeen (Willow Shields), whose odds of being chosen were low given her age. Her big sister Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence), good with a bow, volunteers in her place. A baker’s son, Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson), is also chosen. The two of them are whisked off to the Capital, which hosts the central governing body of all districts.

The Capital is really something else. Compared to the concentration-camp aesthetic of the districts, it looks like Oz beyond Kansas. Wild costumes and makeup permeate a re-imagination of the Washington Monument. Colourful characters are introduced left and right, instantly prettifying the screen. District 12 liaison Effie Trinket (a nearly unrecognizable Elizabeth Banks) changes her outfits and hair for every scene. Promoter Seneca Crane (Wes Bentley) sports a beard that looks as if it’s used part-time as a weapon. Media personality Caesar Flickerman (Stanley Tucci) is flamboyant enough to make Ryan Seacrest throw his hands up and hop aboard a fishing trawler. They’re colourful, is what I’m saying.

Katniss and Peeta train alongside the kids from the other districts in one of those James Bond warehouses as the Capital goons barely pay attention. They’re more concerned with how the Games will come across on television. A stylist named Cinna (Lenny Kravitz) is brought in to spruce the kids up, going so far as to light them on fire for their inaugural public appearance. That’ll do it. From there, questions of Katniss and Peeta’s feelings for each other blossom into a narrative that viewers will no doubt cling to as the two of them try to kill each other live on television.

The spectacle is all part of the show. After 74 years, dying in the Games would be a bummer, sure, but it would also be something to look forward to, especially if you’re living in a district wracked with poverty. District 12′s most recent victor is Haymitch (Woody Harrelson), who’s since been driven to drink heavily. His pointers, however, are sound. Once Katniss and Peeta make it to the arena for the Games, they have to win over audience “sponsors” who will keep them going with food and equipment, in much the same way they’d vote up “American Idol” contestants.

If this is sounding a little too familiar, you’re tapping into the real horror of “The Hunger Games,” which attempts to twist “Survivor” and other modern reality-show concepts into something inconceivably awful. The event makes sense for its culture of terrified post-war Americans, who have been conditioned to accept it alongside nationalist clichés and platitudes. (“This is how we remember our past. This is how we safeguard our future.”) The hope of winning keeps the districts producing, and the president (Donald Sutherland) from dealing with the nuisance of uprisings.

I marvelled at the film’s early Capital-centric scenes. Once things move into the arena, the film loses faith in its message and shoves it aside for the show. The arena is well-conceived, a shout-out to “Minority Report” with a dash of “Predator.” Tree knots are outfitted with whirring cameras, while images of the murdered kids appear in the artificial night sky. Seneca and his team come up with despicable ways to keep Katniss moving and killing, using the arena as a sandbox to build digital obstacles and create chaos. Pack mentalities form and the kids stalk each other expertly, leaving dead bodies in their wake, though we’re spared most of the gore. What we see is enough to communicate a sick sense of dread, including a disturbing image of a child having his neck broken, but “Battle Royale” this isn’t.

I read the first of Collins’ books last year and thought it would make a better movie. It does. The plot revolves around televised media, something film is primed to capture. The flightiness of Collins’ prose is masked by great action sequences (though we’re still afforded the opportunity to watch Tucci say “tracker jacker” with a straight face). But that means missing out on Katniss’ inner monologue, vital to a character who’s constantly aware she’s being watched, and Lawrence has to deliver it solely through facial expression. To her credit, she’s up to the task. The question of how Katniss really feels about Peeta, who appears to be genuinely jazzed about her and stuff, is one I’ll leave to hardcore fans.

Those fans should be wholly satisfied with “The Hunger Games.” It’s a pretty superficial indictment of reality television, but its surface is inventive and very nice to look at. I wished director Gary Ross and his writers (Collins was among them) had drawn more of a direct line in their satire. “Games” isn’t as smart as it wants to be; with its attractive cast and polished explosions, its concerns seem to lie chiefly in getting kids into theatres to root for their heroes. Here’s to hoping that starts more important conversations in hallways.

Jeff and Pat come to terms with the universe in a hotel bathtub in "Jeff, Who Lives at Home."

(Jay Duplass and Mark Duplass, 2011)

March 17, 2012

by Joel Crary

In the late 1980s, “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” author Douglas Adams wrote two novels centering around Detective Dirk Gently, a gumshoe who solved crimes according to his philosophy of “the fundamental interconnectedness of all things.” Based on his belief that everything in the universe is part of the same whole, he finds that following random strangers proves as effective a way of tracking down clues as any other. Strangers have one up on Dirk, after all – they know where they’re going, and he has yet to figure that out.

Jeff (Jason Segel) lives an incredibly Dirk-like existence, minus the ambition. Because he believes that everything is connected, all he has to do is pay attention to universal signs to arrive at his destiny, whatever that may be. Speaking of “Signs,” in the opening scene of “Jeff, Who Lives at Home,” we see Jeff recording his thoughts on the M. Night Shyamalan movie into a tape recorder, until the shot cuts to reveal that Jeff is sitting on a toilet. Randomness is a handy fallback when you’re not going much of anywhere.

The problem with Jeff’s philosophy, not that he sees one, is that after 30 years of following it, he hasn’t moved beyond his mother’s basement. He spends his days watching infomercials and smoking as much pot as he did when he was a teenager, back when the idea of interconnectedness must have been especially novel. His telephone rings – a wrong number asking profanely to speak to Kevin. It must mean something, but what? Jeff rearranges the letters in “Kevin” to spell “knive,” which even he must know is a stretch grammatically.

It’s around this time that we’re introduced to Jeff’s brother, Pat (Ed Helms), who tries to soften the blow of a hastily purchased Porsche by offering his wife Linda (Judy Greer) strawberries on her pancakes. Linda introduces the breakfast to the hood of the car, the first of a series of arguments that will potentially lead to a split. We also meet the brothers’ mother, Sharon (Susan Sarandon), who is quite deservedly being hit on by a secret admirer at work by way of paper airplanes and discreet chat messages. Her husband’s no longer in the picture, and she gazes forlornly at a photograph of some exotic waterfall on her desk, another lifetime away.

There you have three stories that don’t much need to intersect: a comedy in Jeff’s, a romantic comedy in Pat and Linda’s, and a drama in Sharon’s. Any one of these storylines may have produced a more effective film. “Jeff, Who Lives at Home” gives us a mishmash, using Jeff as its transport vehicle. He wanders from situation to situation, following coincidences he invents for himself. At various points, coincidence demands that Jeff leap from a bridge, stalk a young man in a basketball jersey, and hold on for dear life to the back of a candy vending machine supply truck, leading to amusing if half-realized moments of self-discovery.

“Jeff, Who Lives at Home” is striving for randomness, and that’s what I liked about it. I would have been happy to spend the film watching Jeff involve himself in complete chaos. At one point he’s mugged in a park for his efforts to establish universal cohesion. There’s an energy to scenes like that – just when you think Jeff might be on to something, the rug is pulled out from under him. But then he becomes an excuse to fuel the inevitable Pat/Linda storyline, which is quite the routine destiny to have. Sarandon’s character is little more than an afterthought, inserted to portray more relatable kinds of disorder, but not really gelling with Jeff’s outlook from the prison of her cubicle walls.

It’s a given that Segel and Helms are going to offer a few laughs, but their pairing feels slightly uninspired, as though it’s one of the last combinations of modern comic-actor buddy casting that hasn’t been tried yet for a reason. Jeff’s proclivity for pot is a failsafe for writer-directors Jay and Mark Duplass, who did such a great job at restrained comedy with “Cyrus,” a movie that featured believable characters with definitive aims. Here their cast is aimless, fruitlessly trying to patch together their lack of direction into a salient point. The result is a bit like “Dude, Where’s My Car?” for fans of the mumblecore aesthetic.

Hugo stumbles across another mind-blowing sight in "Hugo the Hippo."

(Bill Feigenbaum, 1975)

March 15, 2012

by Joel Crary

Pacific Cinémathèque is screening “Hugo the Hippo,” from a print on loan from director Bill Feigenbaum, on Sunday, March 18th, at 1:00 p.m. as part of its Cinema Sunday matinee series. For more information, visit http://www.cinematheque.bc.ca.

Some movies exist solely in the back corners of our brains. They’ve been there as long as we can remember. Years pass and we can’t quite make sense of the images they’ve left behind. I saw “Hugo the Hippo” when I was three years old, or maybe I didn’t – maybe it was a picture book of the film, or the soundtrack. The name has stuck with me, along with the characters – images of a green man shouting edicts, a pink hippopotamus submerged up to his nose in a harbour on the African coast.

And “Hugo” simply isn’t a film anyone can grab to fill in memory gaps. Produced in Hungary by Pannonia Film Studio in the mid-’70s, the movie made its way west courtesy of 20th Century Fox and promptly bombed at the box office. It hasn’t seen a home video release since the early ’80s, even with a website clamouring for its release on DVD. A Betamax-ripped version can be viewed on YouTube, but it’s clear only the incredibly faithful have made the effort to keep Hugo on the fringes of the public consciousness. A cult film this ain’t – it’s downright invisible.

In the movie’s early frames, we’re thrust into Zanzibar by way of Marie Osmond and Burl Ives, two of the whitest casting choices one could make for a movie set in Africa. The Sultan (Robert Morley) is in a tiff because his clove trade is being cut off at the ankles by sharks, clad in biker regalia and looking about as menacing as the Sharks in “West Side Story.” His solution is to capture hippopotami from the Tanzanian jungles and let them loose into the harbour to flatten the sharks into paper-thin S&M poster children.

Leading the expedition is Minister of Finance and Law Aban Khan, the aforementioned edict-spouting green guy whose menacing visage has stuck with me for decades. When he opens his mouth and Paul Lynde’s effete voice comes out, his creepiness shoots into the stratosphere. Thanks to the help of the Sultan’s court magician, who harnesses the power of gratuitous synths to whip up enormous robot cowboys, Aban Khan’s men corral a herd of hippos, including Hugo’s parents. (“I’m going to call you King George,” Aban Khan says to Hugo’s dad, complicating the colonialist undertones in one fell swoop.)

The hippos rid Zanzibar of the shark scourge and are declared a nuisance after the town industrializes. In a surreal stand-in for literal river-horse genocide, Aban Khan wipes out the herd by opening fire on hippo-shaped clouds in the sky. Hugo escapes and is adopted by the schoolchildren of a small fishing village, among them a ne’er-do-well named Jorma (Ronnie Cox) who turns Hugo into a makeshift science project. The two of them frolic through some real trippy shit. Along the way, Marie and Jimmy Osmond belt out catchy songs about the inherent awesomeness of hippos and Mr. M’Bow-Wow, a teacher who rides an ostrich to school and electrocutes himself without noticing. All the while, Ives interjects a welcome grounding to the complete insanity of what we’re being shown.

“Hugo” is animated much in the phantasmagoric vein of George Dunning’s “Yellow Submarine” and Fox’s later “Raggedy Ann and Andy: A Musical Adventure” – psychedelic image piles on psychedelic image, knocking any sense of physical space out the door along with all reason. Rarely does any object or backdrop in the film serve only a single purpose. In one imaginative sequence along many, Hugo and Jorma evade a garden full of militant vegetables bent on their destruction. Stalks of corn shoot kernels like cannonballs while a hot pepper tries to singe the pals away, looking a tad too vaginal for its own good.

Perhaps adults like me are now fated to view “Hugo the HIppo” through the lens of the ’60s’ sex and drugs culture. (To his credit, director Bill Feigenbaum has said that’s all bullshit.) In any event, the movie works best as a completely bizarre curiosity. Most of it is quite dark, and while not literally violent presents some pretty weighty themes involving death and isolation. It also contains content that isn’t so much politically incorrect as bewildering – a group of monkeys play basketball while the Harlem Globetrotters theme pours into the soundtrack; Jorma starts his day with a bowl full of nutritious Jungle Pops. I have no idea where these ideas came from, but nevertheless, there they are.