HEADHUNTERS
Hollywood—meaning
the industry located in Southern California—long ago lost its touch with genre movies,
the kind of films at which the system once excelled. Since 1991’s Total Recall, the Big Studio approach to
genre films has too often been: “Make ‘em loud, make ‘em confusing, make them unwatchable.
Pummel audience in head repeatedly until they crawl out like flattened worms,
moaning ‘Just what the hell was that, anyway?’”
Sometimes
these movies are called “rollercoaster thrill rides,” but honestly, that is an insult
to amusement parks. Most of today’s Hollywood genre movies are works of brutalism,
like a tour of a cramped, windowless, indoor bomb testing facility. (A possible
exception is Ben Affleck’s Argo,
which I have not seen yet.)
Most of
the best genre movies I’m seeing now are from places like Asia and Europe. The skills
that American studios have lost—pacing, setting, dialogue, characterization,
story—have been absorbed by foreign filmmakers and are coming back to us, maybe
in the same way the Beatles took American Rock n’ Roll and sent it back to our
shores, new and alive.
For an
example, allow me to guide you to the recently released DVD of the exuberant Norwegian
thriller Headhunters, which I saw
again over Thanksgiving.
One of
the current crop of Scandinavian thrillers appearing in novels, movies and on
TV, Headhunters is based on a novel
by Jo Nesbø (unread by me).
Roger
Brown (Aksel Hennie) is a corporate headhunter of short stature, large ego, and
deep debts. His blond waifishness conceals a venal, cheating heart. To keep
himself and his tall, statuesque girlfriend (Synnøve Macody Lund) from sinking into penury, Roger
moonlights as a very clever, cunning art thief.
Roger has
none of the qualities worshipped by Hollywood screenwriting gurus and
marketers: He is short, scrawny, unlikable. He doesn’t even have a cute dog
(and just wait ‘til you see what happens to the one dog that does appear)
It’s his
side job as an art thief that eventually plunges Roger into waters deep and
bloody once handsome, sinister Clas Greve (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, from Game of Thrones) enters the story. Clas
is one of those bad boys adored by some women so the minute he appears, he
starts kicking sand in poor Roger’s face.
Roger soon
becomes a mouse pursued by one mean cat in a grisly, grotesque, and terrifying pursuit,
as things take one bad zig after zag. Along the way, our feelings toward him evolve
from sniggering contempt toward concern and even, finally, a grudging
admiration as this little pig confronts the big bad wolf.
Headhunters is a superbly crafted movie. It starts
slowly, weaving and winding up story, setting, and characterization together
before it springs loose in a ragged but suspenseful chain of jaw-dropping, hair-raising,
occasionally stomach-churning, episodes.
Aksel
Hennie holds it all together as the commanding but insecure and self-conscious
Roger. Even better, he’s under the cruel serpent gaze of a terrific villain in
Coster-Waldau, who plays the equally vile Jamie Lannister in Game of Thrones. (Coster-Waldau will be a
welcome bad guy for years to come.)
Headhunters is beautifully photographed against
the sinister emerald shadows of Norwegian forests. It’s superbly edited without
being over-edited. Once it gets going, its moves fast, hits hard, without
numbing and confusing the viewer. It’s made with enthusiasm and professionalism
by all concerned. Director Morten Tyldum and his team have well remembered the
lessons of Hitchcock, Ford, Hawks, and all the other writers and directors
modern Hollywood seems to have forgotten. It’s not just about hitting ‘em hard.
It’s hitting ‘em right. Headhunters
hits ‘em right.
The
plotting, as happens even with the best, has its share of holes, but there’s so
much pleasure to be had, you’ll have to watch it twice to see where the holes
appear.
Both
audiences I saw it with, Americans all, were sporting grins all around at the
finish. Hollywood, get a clue.
CABIN
IN THE WOODS
Cabin in the Woods is a clever, sometimes funny, but
unscary movie from Joss Whedon, the creator-producer of the TV hits Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the movie Marvel’s The Avengers.
The crafty
recipe for Cabin takes one part Sam
Raimi’s Evil Dead, another helping of
torture porn, a large of helping of Wes Craven’s Scream series, then add a large dollop of The Matrix. Stuff it all into a piñata, bake, then whack away at it
for 95 minutes.
Most of
the funny stuff comes from the interplay between Richard Jenkins and Bradley
Whitford as the two techno-puppeteers responsible for the mayhem, along with
some of the antics of reedy-voiced stoner-hero Fran Kranz. More laughs come
when Sigourney Weaver shows up at the end.
It’s
superbly produced, with live and lively special effects, but it’s so busy with
its in-joke, post-modern references, that it wouldn’t scare a baby (or at least
failed to scare the infant in me). It never stirs up the basic fear found in
the best horror films. Its roots are showing, but they just hang there,
separated from the ground of real human emotion.
In an
interview on the DVD extra, director Drew Goddard states that he and his crew
talked endlessly about how they would visualize the things in life that scared
them most. Cabin the Woods packs
every one of those fears into its busy 95 minutes. But true fear and real horror
remain locked outside, far away in unreachable darkness.
Copyright 2012 by Thomas
Burchfield
Images from Headhunters and Cabin in The Woods web pages
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment