The Ice Storm (1997)

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“How are the parental units functioning these days?”

A very straightforward (in plot terms) 1973-set drama principally concerning two middle-class Connecticut families. Ben Hood (Kevin Kline) and Janey Carver (Sigourney Weaver) are having a fling. And since Janey’s husband Jim (Jamey Sheridan) spends a lot of time working away from home, the adulterers have plenty of opportunities to enjoy sexy time –  although, at this point in the affair, Janey appears less than thrilled with the arrangement. Ben’s wife, Elena (Joan Allen) gradually begins to suspect the truth, which doesn’t exactly help with her self-esteem issues.

Meanwhile, 14-year-old Wendy Hood (Christina Ricci) and similarly aged Mikey Carver (Elijah Wood) and his younger brother, Sandy (Adam Hann-Byrd) are doing what kids of their age tend to do: exploring nascent sexual desires.

The era in which the film is set is very appropriate. Concurrently, the Watergate scandal is unfolding, some of which we see on TV screens, providing the kind of background noise that reflects the cheating nature of Ben and Janey. And it’s the age of the ‘key party’, an example of which plays a significant part in the movie’s last act.

It’s an era of profound disillusionment: a likely crooked President, a still-raring war in Vietnam, the Manson murders still fresh in people’s minds and a spike in inflation (that is set to climb even higher). Understandably, the film’s adult characters are disenchanted – with their lives and with each other. And the kids feel similarly let down by their parents, who aren’t quite the unimpeachable gods they once appeared to be.

Of course, our parents are bound to let us down in one way or other. In Ben’s case, it’s with his hypocrisy (hello, Mr Nixon!). At one point, he catches Wendy and Mikey in an uncompromising position. Nothing too serious, just a bit of fumbling. Anyway, he instantly goes into ‘affronted dad mode’, castigating both kids. Bear in mind that this occurs at Jim and Janey’s home, where Ben has just been secretly meeting with the latter.

There are other generational ripples, including Elena stealing from a drug store and for no real reason other than she’s going through a late-30s’ funk. And this after we’ve already seen her daughter pick up an item without paying for it in the same shop. Although, she was fully aware of what she was doing.

The outlier in all of this is Wendy’s 16-year-old brother, Paul (Tobey Maguire), who is perfectly sanguine about family life and its anomalies, which he observes with wry detachment – and through the prism of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s <i>Fantastic Four<i> (a dysfunctional family in excelsis).

Ang Lee is the ideal kind of director to bring Rick Moody’s novel to the screen. This is an ensemble piece and equal weight is given to each of the main characters, and Lee never gets in the way of the performances, which are perfectly judged. And though this is a well-shot film, Lee’s fully aware that he’s not here to dazzle us with fancy-schmancy visuals. Rather, he endeavours to take an honest, un-hysterical look at messy familial relationships.

The Ice Storm works as well as it does because the drama is adroitly orchestrated and performed. And there are a number of simple yet beautiful vignettes, like Ben carrying Wendy in the snow to prevent her feet from getting cold. At this moment, she might as well be a toddler – to all intents and purposes, this father and daughter are transported back to a time when he was her hero and she was the most important thing in his life.

Later in the film, Ben carries another child – but in altogether different circumstances…

Memento Mori (1999)

The film starts with high-school student Shi-eun (Lee Young-jin) running around a track – and straightaway, I had a very good feeling about the movie. Why? Well, because the actress was really going for it, giving the impression she might actually be a genuine athlete. So often in movies, sporting prowess isn’t conveyed very well – oftentimes, quick cutting or a ringer used in long shots, etc. is the order of the day. This sequence demonstrated to me something that is apparent throughout the rest of Memento Mori – the cast and crew give a damn.

If you’ve seen the first entry in the themed Whispering Corridors series, you’ll kind of know what to expect: a bunch of teenaged schoolgirls, intense emotions, frustrations, betrayals and some supernatural stuff. However, Memento Mori is no mere retread of the previous year’s film; this sequel features a new team behind and in front of the camera and tells a different story.

And that story progresses in nonlinear fashion, which is quite appropriate for a film that partially shares the title of a Christopher Nolan film (which was at least a couple of months away from being released when this came out). Students Shi-eun and Hyo-shin (Park Ye-jin) are in love and they don’t mind hiding the fact from the rest of the school, thus casting themselves in the role of obvious outsiders. Shi-eun’s sportiness, her boyish hairdo and hearing problem only serve to alienate her further. Anyway, they decide to write a shared diary, which forms the basis of the film (and its title).

Said journal is found by another student (at a later time in the timeline but not in terms of how the film is presented), Min-ah (Kim Min-sun). She quickly becomes obsessed by the lives of the two lovers, who have since split (again, in real time, not as we’re watching the movie).

What caused the breakup and what part, if any, does a teacher at the school – Mr Goh (Baek Jong-hak) – have to play in all if this? 

A major event causes things to unravel big time, leading to a final act that is orchestrated bedlam of the highest order.

I liked Whispering Corridors quite a bit but I loved Memento Mori. The acting is excellent, particularly from the three main leads. Really, though, there are a number of memorable performances by young actresses who bring their respective characters to life. Life in an all-girl Korean comes across authentically: the humour, the commotion, the noise, the cut and thrust and so on. (Not that I ever went to an all-girl Korean school, you understand.) There are some scuffles between some of the students that look like they could be potentially dangerous. These performers really commit!

The film is written and helmed by Kim Tae-yong and Min Kyu-dong, and they do a fine job of making the viewer feel invested in the characters, the mystery and the developing drama. Yes, this is a horror film but the emphasis is firmly on characterisation, relationships, secrets and all that good stuff. Adding an extra layer of class to the production is Jo Seong-woo’s score, which predominately consists of lyrical, ear-worming piano melodies and ominously beautiful choral singing.

Halloween III – Season of the Witch

“We had a time getting it here;

you wouldn’t believe how we did it!”

Conal Cochran

What to say about the red-headed stepchild of the Halloween series? Well, quite a lot, really.

I first became aware of it when I caught an article in a copy of Starburst magazine that was lying around at school. It was a short news piece, outlining John Carpenter’s idea to take the series off into a new direction. I was sold.

Now, I wasn’t (technically) old enough to see it at the cinema. I’m not even sure if it was released theatrically in the UK. However, I did catch it one late night on BBC 1, sometime in the mid-80s. From the moment it started, I was hooked. I can even remember my dad’s interest being mildly piqued (he wasn’t normally into this kind of thing).

Director Tommy Lee Wallace is credited as the film’s screenwriter. However, for the greatest part, it’s Nigel Kneale’s baby, albeit that it was rewritten first by Carpenter and then by Wallace.

If you’ve seen Kneale’s Quatermass and the Pit or The Stone Tape, it’s easy to understand his fascination with both science and the supernatural. If you think about it, Carpenter sets up the premise somewhat in Halloween II, when Dr Loomis discovers Myers’ bloody ‘Samhain’ scrawl on a school blackboard. Explaining the phrase, Loomis remarks:

“It’s a Celtic word, Samhain. It means the Lord of the Dead, the end of summer. The Festival of Samhain – October 31st.”

He goes on to say:

“In order to appease the gods, the druid priests held fire rituals. Prisoners of war, criminals, the insane, animals were burned alive in baskets. By observing the way they died, the druids believed they could see omens of the future. Two thousand years later, we’ve come no further. Samhain isn’t evil spirits. It isn’t goblins, ghosts or witches. It’s the unconscious mind. We’re all afraid of the dark inside ourselves.”

So it’s clear that Carpenter was already thinking along these lines, and as a fan of Kneale’s work, he perhaps keyed the writer into the notion of pagan dark magic. Actually, I think it was producer Debra Hill who said that the pitch for the movie was (and I’m paraphrasing): “witchcraft meets the computer age.”

I’m not going to pretend that Halloween III is a grade-A feature film but it does have a lot to offer. For me, it’s far more interesting than the endless retreads featuring Michael Myers. Halloween II is fine. It’s good. I like it quite a bit, but Mikey’s story was rightly intended to end there.

I’ve always been slightly bemused by the constant slamming of Halloween III, and mainly because it doesn’t feature Myers. Do people not read up, even just a little, about a movie before going to see it? Are cinema-goers not up for something a little different? (Rhetorical question.)

The film might have been considered a failure (certainly it was critically mauled) but it made its money back at least five times over at the box office. Of course, it didn’t perform nearly as well as the all-conquering original or even its follow-up, but it wasn’t a flop, even if fan backlash resonated for nearly 30 years after its release.

Anyway, I love Halloween III. I’m not immune to its faults though. I do think Stacey Nelkin is miscast. She doesn’t really bring much to the film, which hurts it a little. Someone a little older, certainly closer in age to Tom Atkins would have made her relationship with him a little more believable. (Yes, in a film where the central premise is fairly unlikely.) To be fair to Nelkin, though, she isn’t given much to play with (other than Atkins, of course. The wily old dog…).

Other than that gripe and certain lapses in logic, Halloween III is a very entertaining movie and one that goes to some very whacky and decidedly dark places.

Dan O’Herlihy is superb as the twinkly Irish patron of sleepy Santa Mira. He gives an acting master class; effortlessly demonstrating how to tackle a B-movie role perfectly. He plays it with absolute commitment – providing a nuanced and eminently watchable performance as the film’s bad guy.

For O’Herlihy’s Conal Cochran, his job has its perks, and while he is clearly dedicated to his rather genocidal endeavour, he’s damn sure he’s going to have some fun in the process. (“A joke on the children”, if you will.)

An example: before, during and after the Test Area A scene (which is really quite disturbing), O’Herlihy plays it three ways: wry amusement, implacable seriousness and, then, a kind of weary disgust. It’s written all over his face as if to say: “This is what it’s all about. Not long to go now.”

I love the way all of Cochran’s suited guys are played. These supporting actors are clearly devoted to their respective roles and, with the likes of Dick Warlock in their ranks, they come across as blandly creepy – and rather destructive.

For me, the film is part of a near-perfect trio of Halloween movies produced by Debra Hill and John Carpenter, who were both heavily involved in number III’s gestation and realisation. And the trinity is complete with the peerless Dean Cundey, who weaves his cinematographic witchcraft into every frame.

As director, Tommy Lee Wallace, like Rick Rosenthal and Carpenter before him, does a very good job. He’s certainly got an eye for the story’s visuals elements, using the full extent of the anamorphic lens. A perfect example is the way that he directs the suited assassin as he arrives at the hospital, goes about his business and leaves, often disappearing just out of frame as the camera and Dr Challis try to keep up. Overall, Wallace brings a lot of style to proceedings, even if he’s a little uncertain with the acting at times.

The music is great too, one of my favourite Carpenter soundtracks. There are no obvious ‘hits’ but it’s a lovely, layered and rather melancholy score that enhances the mood of the piece perfectly.

So, Halloween III… it’s my second favourite of the series. It’s behind the original, of course, but it is often the one that I enjoy the most. After this, the Halloween ‘franchise’ (rolls eyes at that word) would never be this good, this creative and this much devilish fun again. (Well, not until Halloween (2018), that is…)

Alien: Covenant (2017)

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For my money, Covenant is one of the better Alien films. Actually, I might be tempted to place it second only to the original – although, it’s possible I might be thinking purely in terms of how much it engaged and entertained me. Certainly, I barely registered the film’s two-hour runtime. However, it does have its flaws. For one thing, there are too many characters – and though this was the second time I’d seen the film, I still couldn’t get a fix on who everyone was and how they related to one another. And beginning the narrative on a sombre note is kind of pointless since we don’t know who any of these people are yet – so why should we care that one of them has died? And the big action set piece – heroine versus alien atop the Covenant – is cartoonish and frankly boring. Get on with it already. In pure sci-fi-horror terms, though, Covenant delivers, incorporating much of the previous film’s creationist text without leaning too heavily into it.

I haven’t bothered checked but I’m guessing this instalment constitutes a compromise between what the director wanted to do with the follow-up to Prometheus and what he felt he had to do. If this is indeed the case, his commercial impulses provide the series with a welcome course correction.

Never Let Me Go (2010)

“We didn’t have the gallery to look into your souls – we had the gallery to see if you had souls at all.”

In Never Let Me Go, life on Earth pivots on a medical/technological advancement that occurred in the early 1950s.

This (very important) point needs to be put to one side, however, because our attention must first be diverted to the children of Hailsham boarding school in 1978. Here, we meet the story’s main protagonist and occasional narrator, Kathy (Isobel Meikle-Small) and her friends Tommy (Charlie Rowe) and Ruth (Ella Purnell). These 11-year-olds are much like any kids of that age, and they’re embarking on one of life’s most perilous journeys: adolescence.

Never Let Me Go is a tale of friendship, jealousy and love. While there is something more sinister at play, director Mark Romanek and screenwriter Alex Garland elect to focus on the human side of this story’s equation. The more you watch it (or read the source material, Kazuo Ishiguro’s wonderful novel of the same name), the more the naivety of youth hits you so hard that it damn near breaks you in two. It’s especially true of the Hailsham children. They are treated as ‘lesser’ and with barely disguised disgust (or, more charitably, abject pity) by almost all of the adults they come into contact with. And yet, they know no other way, which means their sheer delight in the simplest of things (an old George Formby film, for instance) continues untrammelled.

It’s only Sally Hawkins’ empathetic teacher, Miss Lucy, who sees them for what they truly are: young people with love and hope in their hearts – and only a burgeoning sense of the issues that we all have to face at some time or another. About 25 minutes into the film, we witness Miss Lucy talk to her class like no one has talked to them before. To see the faces of these children and to know they are now aware of their fate… Subsequently, the teacher is replaced; there’s no room for a conscience in this institution, or perhaps this world in general.

The narrative scrolls forward to 1985; Kathy (Carey Mulligan), Tommy (Andrew Garfield) and Ruth (Keira Knightley) are now all but grown up, and free to discover the big bad world for themselves – up to a point. It’s now that they embark on a voyage of discovery; just like any young person, they want to find themselves – an ambition that, in Never Let Me Go, takes on an extra significance. It’s the lives they lead at Hailsham and later in the cottages that form part of a rural farmstead that will represent the best days of their time on this Earth.

Never Let Me Go essentially uses its dystopian premise to examine what it is that makes us human (“That’s the whole point about art it says what’s inside of you, it reveals your soul.”), and does so with such economy and compassion and without any affectation. 

The performances are exceptional, particularly those of Mulligan and Garfield, who, I feel, transcend their craft. In so doing, they grasp tightly the viewer’s heart and never, ever let it go. I must also praise casting director Kate Dowd for populating the film with exactly the right actors, including the young performers that portray Kathy, Tommy and Ruth – they own those characters just as much as Mulligan, Garfield and Knightley.

And though Rachel Portman’s quite beautiful score is very much to the fore, it’s never overbearing; it charts the emotional travails of the trio while depicting the world of the film as it reveals itself in all its wonder and darkness. 

“You poor creatures I wish I could help you.” (How is it that a piece of speculative fiction can be so impossibly moving?)

If you haven’t seen this film and it sounds like it might interest you, I would advise trying to stay spoiler-free (essentially: avoid discovering the movie’s premise). Even if you do know what it’s about and haven’t seen it, it will still make for a rewarding, albeit gut-wrenching, viewing experience. 

Or read the book. Honestly, the novel and film are as good as one other.

One thing the film does that the book cannot is establish its world through production design and sound. The cassette (Songs after Dark by an artist called Judy Bridgewater) that Tommy gives Kathy – as a consequence of a ‘bumper crop’ of cast-offs that has been donated to the school – is one such example. The design of the tape’s packaging and the main song itself (Never Let Me Go as sung by Jane Monheit) make it seem as though it must have existed. Or the soft-core porn magazines that Kathy retrieves from a dustbin and flicks through in an attempt to try and find herself. There are many other ways in which the film’s production design and art direction provide it with a tangible sense of alt-world reality.

This review, if indeed it is a review, has reached completion.

House of Hummingbird (2018)

The story takes place during an eventful 1994 summer. South Korea is competing in the FIFA World Cup in the United States, North Korea’s first Supreme Leader Kim Il-sung dies and Seoul’s Seongsu Bridge collapses, resulting in 17 injuries and 32 fatalities. 

One of these events plays directly into the life of Eun-hee (Park Ji-hoo), a 14-year-old girl trying to make sense of the world. She belongs to a dysfunctional household; Dad is cheating on his wife, who works so hard in their family business that she’s left in acute pain at the end of each day, and with barely enough energy to do anything else. Even so, Dad remonstrates with her for not keeping their daughters under control, chiefly the quietly rebellious, slightly older sister, who comes and goes as she pleases. Meanwhile, the eldest sibling is studying hard in order to get into university. And he routinely beats Eun-hee.

House of Hummingbird could be seen as the kind of film in which the men are bastards and the women are victims, and that’s true to a certain extent but Kim Bora (the film’s writer-director) takes care to flesh out both sides of the gender divide. So we get an understanding of the enormous pressure males in South Korea are/were under to be men, to succeed, to be breadwinners. Whereas, more often than not, females are/were relegated to secondary roles.

And Eun-hee is experiencing the first blooming of romance, with a young lad who seems to be right for her. And she has a good, close female friend. But as anyone who’s experienced teenage life knows, things don’t always pan out the way you expect.

There is a beacon of light, however, in the form of a university student, Yong-ji (Kim Sae-byuk), who teaches Chinese to Eun-hee and her friend at an after-school cramming class. Yong-ji sees something worth nurturing in Eun-hee, who is an aspiring Manga artist. And with a few carefully chosen words, she manages to inspire the girl, providing her with the impetus to keep going, to believe in herself.

This is a film concerned with life’s non-sequiturs and ellipses, with things that are said and left unsaid and of things that can’t always be resolved. It’s a film about a young person at a notable time in history. And while it offers a welcome reprieve for one character it delivers a sucker punch that leaves Eun-hee – and by extension, the audience – reeling.

Haunt (2019)

Haunt’s premise is simple: a group of friends, looking for some fun on Halloween night inadvertently stumble across a haunted house attraction that delivers more scares than they could ever have anticipated.

The film is nicely put together, particularly in terms of direction, cinematography and production design. The house itself (which is really a warehouse) seems authentic and its attractions suitably low-rent.

The friends are quite well-drawn and even likeable for the most part. Certainly, Katie Stevens is effective as main girl Harper and we’re not hammered over the head with her personal baggage – in this case: a troubled family background – take note, makers of Crawl. Actually, this aspect of the film is reasonably seamlessly integrated into her characterisation and the overall narrative. And it makes sense that she wouldn’t be as gung-ho as her pals – and it’s easy to understand why she hangs onto a boyfriend that doesn’t treat her well, sadly. As for the film’s antagonists: they’re suitably unsettling and different enough from one another to be interesting in their own right.

I found myself getting into the story pretty quickly, and though I kept expecting it to fall apart, it never did. That said, I’m not sure I quite understood how the ending was arrived at but I did enjoy it – it makes for a satisfying conclusion in terms of both storyline and Harper’s personal arc.