THE PUBLIC EYE

In 1992 alone, My Cousin Vinny, Lethal Weapon 3, and Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, featuring Joe Pesci in some capacity, were all released. Needless to say, it was a very good year for the actor. One film that was sadly overlooked during this blitzkrieg of Pesci cinema was The Public Eye, a modesty-budgeted homage to classic film noir that also acted as a tribute to famed New York Daily News photographer Arthur “Weegee” Fellig who worked in Manhattan’s Lower East Side during the 1930s and 1940s capturing the honest and sometimes tragic elements of life on the streets.
 
This is established over the opening credits with a montage of photographs, some of them Fellig’s, capturing people from all walks of life – in agony, bored, under arrest, and so on. We meet Leon “Bernzy” Bernstein (Pesci) taking photos at the scene of a crime before the police even show up and, more importantly, before his competition arrives. He will go to any lengths to get a shot – even if it means impersonating a priest to get a shot of a dead man with a meat cleaver stuck in his head. Bernzy even has a mobile dark room in the trunk of his car where he can develop his photos quickly.
 
He’s dedicated, always out there, wandering the streets in his car, listening to the police band radio, looking for the next photo opportunity. We see a few shots from his point-of-view and they are in black-and-white, suggesting that everyone is a potential photo for the man. He’s not married and doesn’t have time for anybody else as he is devoted to his work. That’s what makes him the best. It is an empty existence in a way as he is too busy capturing other people’s lives to have one of his own.

Bernzy hopes one day to have a book of his photos published and even has a meeting with an esteemed publisher (played with snooty relish by Del Close) who tells him, “This is, instead, a most admirable picture book about New York,” dismissing them as “too sensational” and “too vulgar,” which is kind of the point – they capture the beauty and the ugliness of life.
 
Like many film noirs, Bernzy is summoned to the lofty heights of high society by a beautiful woman – Kay Levitz (Barbara Hershey) who asks him for a favor. She wants him to check out a man claiming to be her recently deceased husband’s partner and now co-partner of his nightclub that she inherited. He agrees, of course, partly because it allows him a foot in rarefied atmosphere and he is attracted to Kay, a rich, beautiful woman who wouldn’t normally give him the time of day. He tracks down the mysterious man only to find him dead.
 
Naturally, doing a favor for Kay forces Bernzy to break his code of neutrality, complicating his life as he takes sides for the first time, not just with cops, but the FBI who lean on him hard, painting him as a Communist sympathizer, and crooks, entangling him in beef between rival mobsters Frank Farinelli (Richard Foronjy) and Spoleto (Dominic Chianese).

Around the time he made The Public Eye, Joe Pesci was delivering broad performances in movies like Lethal Weapon 3 and Home Alone 2. The Public Eye saw him dial it back and deliver a more nuanced performance as evident in a scene where Bernzy comforts Kay about not being forthcoming about the dead man’s ties to the mob. He’s understandably upset but when she’s apologetic and explains that she picked him because her husband believed in his book of photos, Bernzy softens and Pesci shows a vulnerable side to his character.
 
Pesci also does an excellent job of showing how Bernzy channels his inner pain, his loneliness into his art, like when Kay snubs him in her club for some high society type and when she realizes what she’s done chases after him only to find the shutterbug outside in the rain taking a photo of some rich slob passed out in an alley.
 
Barbara Hershey is an atypical femme fatale. Initially, it seems like she is simply using Bernzy to further her own goals – wrest control of her late husband’s nightclub from mobsters – but then we see her defend Bernzy when she’s alone with her cynical doorman (played to jaded perfection by Jared Harris) and it appears that she really does have affection for him. She is in cahoots, however, with Spoleto, a mob boss who controls the west side of Manhattan. Hershey has an expressive face and she gives Bernzy a look that we see but he doesn’t that suggests Kay is falling in love with him. She actually looks at his book of photos in a wonderful moment and not just a quick flip through but studies them, lingers over each one and is visibly moved.

The film is populated with a bevy of wonderful character actors that make an immediate impact with the limited screen time they are given. Richard Foronjy (Midnight Run) and Dominic Chianese (The Sopranos) play the rival mob bosses that force Bernzy to take sides. Jerry Adler (Manhattan Murder Mystery) plays a columnist turned playwright who is also Bernzy’s closest confidante. Stanley Tucci, however, makes the greatest impact as Sal, a pivotal figure in the mob war. Initially, his relationship with Bernzy is an antagonistic one but then he tells the shutterbug about the beef between the two warring mob families in a powerful scene that Tucci delivers so well.
 
Howard Franklin, who has unfortunately directed far too few films, does a great job immersing us in 1940s New York City, getting the period details just right, from the yellow cabs to the vintage watch Bernzy wears to the Art Deco nightclub Kay owns, but without overwhelming us with it. With the help of David Cronenberg’s long-time cinematographer Peter Suschitzky, he pays tribute to classic film noirs but doesn’t lay it on too thick, doing just enough to capture the vibe of that era. The two men shot the film in very high contrast: “we wanted a crisp look with an edge” that tried to capture Fellig’s photos and avoid a “nostalgic feeling,” Franklin said in an interview.
 
Franklin first became interested in photographer Arthur “Weegee” Fellig when he saw an exhibit of tabloid photographs in 1982 at the International Center for Photography in New York City. Fellig was born in Poland in 1899, the son of Jewish refugees that emigrated to the United States in 1909, settling in New York’s Lower East Side. Growing up, he held every lousy job imaginable before discovering photography in his twenties when he started working as a freelance news photographer. He got a jump on the competition by obtaining his own police radio, which allowed him to be the first on a crime scene. According to Franklin, “When I saw Weegee’s photographs at the ICP, I was really fascinated and immediately began thinking about his images in terms of a movie.”

He wrote a screenplay in 1982 about an artist that was autobiographical in nature and as he got older and worked on it more, “it evolved into a story about the sacrifices you have to make if you’re serious about your work.” He tried to sell the script but there was no interest. Several directors and actors tried to option it with no success and he finally decided to make it himself. Franklin knew he wanted Joe Pesci to play Bernzy as the character’s “style of photography is similar to Joe’s style of acting in that both are very naked – there’s nothing between the viewer and the image.”
 
Pesci knew nothing about Fellig before agreeing to do the film. He read all the books he could find about the man and learned how to use the vintage Speed Graphic camera that was the hallmark of 1940s news photographers. The actor also studied Fellig’s books of photos and “figured what he would be thinking when he took the pictures; how he felt. I tried to make myself feel like him and look like him and take pictures and learn how to do everything.”
Franklin wanted to shoot on location in New York but the film’s $15 million budget and the union situation there made it impossible. The 13-week shoot begin in Cincinnati’s “Over-the-Rhine” district which resembled ‘40s New York. The production then moved to Chicago for a few weeks before landing in Los Angeles to complete filming where they shot on a soundstage at Santa Clarita Studios.
 
The Public Eye received decidedly mixed reviews. Roger Ebert gave the film four out of four stars and wrote, "Writer-director Howard Franklin is subtle and touching in the way he modulates the key passages between Pesci and Hershey. There is a lot that goes unsaid between them." In his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote, "The Public Eye never quite takes off, either as romantic melodrama or as a consideration of one very eccentric man's means of self-expression. The facts are there, but they never add up to much. The psychology is rudimentary." The Washington Post's Desson Howe wrote, "Despite the usual quippy, perky performance from Pesci, as well as cinematographer Peter Suschitzky's moodily delineated images, the movie is superficial and unengaging. It's as if Life magazine decided to make an oldtime gangster movie."

In his review for the Los Angeles Times, Peter Rainer wrote, "And since the film’s production design is so arranged and studio-ish, with carefully placed shadows and spotlights, we seem to be wrenched into an anti-world every time we shift from Weegee’s caught-in-the-moment dramas to this movie’s studied blandness." Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman gave the film a "C-" rating and wrote, "Attempting to breathe life into this hopelessly naive vision of a sad-sack artist-saint, Pesci is forced to rein in just about everything that makes him likable: his manic energy, the leering delight he takes in his own shamelessness." Finally, in his review for Newsweek, David Ansen wrote, "Using all this artifice to illuminate the gritty world of a lonely shutterbug is an odd choice. Yet the tale's mournful B-movie romanticism-and Pesci's introspective, crablike performance-gets under your skin. In its moody, daffy way, The Public Eye gives off an authentic reek of artistic compulsion."

The Public Eye develops a fascinating character arc for Bernzy. For most of his career he chose not to take sides as it was good for business but finally he is faced with a dilemma that affects not only himself but people he cares about and this motivates him to take a side. He is tired of simply being an observer and is ready to get his hands dirty.
 
Having Robert Zemeckis as an executive producer I’m sure helped greatly in getting this film made but I wonder if Pesci used some of the juice from his Academy Award-winning turn in Goodfellas (1990) and his box office clout from Lethal Weapon 2 (1989) and Home Alone (1990) to help push this through the system. If so, I’m glad he did as this is the kind of off-kilter, personal passion project that is so excellently done.
 

SOURCES
 
Ebert, Roger. “Joe Pesci Moves Up from the Ranks of Supporting Players in Public Eye.” Rogerebert.com. October 11, 1992.
 
McKenna, Kristine. “Weegee’s Tabloid World: The very busy Joe Pesci finds a role he can’t refuse.” Los Angeles Times. December 8, 1991.

The Right Stuff

When The Right Stuff came out in 1983, pundits were anticipating it to make a big splash at the box office. Based on Tom Wolfe’s book of the same name, Philip Kaufman’s film depicted the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union with the focus on the Mercury 7 — seven astronauts who trained to become the first Americans in outer space. With this kind of patriotic subject matter how could the film not be a big hit? Despite scoring well with critics, The Right Stuff failed to get off the launch pad with audiences. At the time of its release, the studio backing it decided to market the film in tandem with Mercury 7 astronaut and Ohio Senator John Glenn’s run for the presidency. Mainstream audiences felt that Kaufman’s motion picture was going to be nothing more than an expensive campaign ad and stayed away. The film disappeared off of almost everyone’s radar for several years, only appearing semi-regularly on cable television. However, with anniversary releases on DVD and, more recently, on Blu-Ray, the film has been re-discovered and is generally regarded as an influential cinematic masterpiece.

The film begins with Chuck Yeager (Sam Shepard), a legendary test pilot who was the first man to break the Sound Barrier. He is the perfect embodiment of “the right stuff,” an intangible quality that few people possess. Yeager doesn’t break the Sound Barrier for fame or money. He does it for the challenge, to beat what the film’s narrator (Levon Helm) calls “the demon that lives in the thin air.” There is a scene where Kaufman depicts Yeager riding through the desert on horseback against a very Terrence Malick-esque sunset as if to suggest that the test pilot is akin to a laconic cowboy from a bygone era. Soon, Yeager comes across the rocket-powered Bell X-1, the plane that he will fly to break the Sound Barrier, complete with ominous music and ferocious jet engine sounds. The image of Yeager on horseback staring at a piece of technology that could result in his death sets up a man vs. machine theme that continues on throughout the film.

The give and take between Yeager and his wife Glennis, played wonderfully by Barbara Hershey, during these early scenes is so well done and could be its own short film as she and Sam Shepard convey the unique dynamic between these two people. As the Air Force pitches breaking the Sound Barrier to Yeager, Glennis doesn’t voice her disapproval or fears. She doesn’t have to as the look Hershey gives Shepard says it all. Glennis loves him, but isn’t some subservient housewife as she says later on, “They don’t spend a god-damned thing teaching you how to be the fearless wife of a fearless test pilot.” In many respects, she’s his equal, even challenging him to a race on horseback out in the desert.

The sequence where Yeager breaks the Sound Barrier is beautifully realized with old school visual effects and clever editing. What really helps sell it is the reaction shots of Shepard, even obscured behind a mask, that convey how difficult it must have been. So why does Kaufman spend so much time on Yeager, even having him return intermittently throughout the film as a sort of Greek chorus, commenting on the Mercury 7 astronauts? Clearly, he sees the legendary test pilot as the epitome of “the right stuff” and this is why he’s never made to look silly and always treated reverentially. In one of his early roles, playwright-turned actor, Sam Shepard is perfectly cast as Chuck Yeager. Physically he doesn’t resemble the man, but with his chiseled good looks and piercing stare, he even makes chewing gum an epic gesture. He doesn’t have much dialogue, but he doesn’t need it because he conveys so much with a look or a simple gesture. The Yeager section is The Right Stuff at its most romantic, photographed by Caleb Deschanel with a slight sepia tone to give the footage the feel of an old photograph.

We soon see a sharp contrast between Yeager and the next group of test pilots that show up to make a name for themselves. Even though he is never asked to train for the missions into outer space, all of the Mercury 7 astronauts live in his shadow and the film constantly compares them to his ideal. We are introduced to Gordon Cooper (Dennis Quaid sporting the best shit-eating grin ever) and Gus Grissom (Fred Ward), two cocky pilots who think pretty highly of themselves, but are quickly put in their place. From this point on, whenever the film veers too dangerously close to overt seriousness, Kaufman proceeds to deflate it with comedic moments, usually from Jeff Goldblum and Harry Shearer, two bumbling recruiters who, among many things, show then-Senator Lyndon Johnson (Donald Moffat) a reel of what they feel are ideal candidates to go into outer space: circus acrobats, divers, race car drivers, and so on.

The irony is that the NASA recruiters don’t pick the best pilot – Yeager – because he didn’t go to college, but the ones they do get are certainly among the very best. However, Kaufman constantly reminds us that they are not in Yeager’s league via a montage of arduous physical and mental tests where the potential astronauts are sometimes made to look silly, racist and sexist, but this is put in the context of the times and all of these alpha males competing against each other. The potential astronauts are put in humiliating situations that cut through the instantly iconic status that the government attempts place on them and shows them having human frailties just like everyone else. It’s a fascinating duality that gives these astronauts depth. It also doesn’t hurt that the charisma of the actors shines through and you admire these brave men. As Yeager puts it later on in the film, “You think a monkey knows he’s sittin’ on top of a rocket that might explode? These astronaut boys they know that, see? Well, I’ll tell you something, it takes a special kind of man to volunteer for a suicide mission, especially one that’s on T.V.” What’s interesting is that the film shows how the Mercury 7 were paraded around the press, including a major feature article for Life magazine. The U.S. was in competition with Russia and the government wanted to show that we had men just as capable of going up into outer space as they did.

Looking at The Right Stuff now, it is easy to forget how the now stellar cast was, at the time, relatively unknown. Ed Harris, Dennis Quaid, Fred Ward, Lance Henriksen, Scott Glenn, and Jeff Goldblum were all up-and-coming actors and this film helped put them on the map. The cast is uniformly excellent with Harris, Quaid and Ward as the standouts among the astronauts. It doesn’t hurt that they tend to get more screen-time than the others (poor Henriksen!), but they also make the most of it with Harris playing the all-American Boy Scout and yet managing to go deeper, past the rah-rah façade to show a man who deeply loves his wife as evident in the scene where he tells his harried spouse that if she doesn’t want the Vice-President to come to their house and watch the launch then he will stand by her decision (despite being pressured to do otherwise). Quaid plays the cocky hot shot (“Who’s the best pilot you ever saw?”), and Ward is the gruff one who infamously “screws the pooch,” and was unfairly maligned as the astronaut who made a mistake during his mission. Kaufman does tend to empathize with Grissom in the film and Ward manages to elicit sympathy in what is the lowest point in The Right Stuff as the man even has to defend his actions to his wife (Veronica Cartwright) who is disappointed that she never got to meet Jackie Kennedy like previous astronaut wives.

Speaking of which, I like that Kaufman gives ample screen-time to the wives, showing how they bonded and dealt with the stress of their husbands’ dangerous profession. It also shows their vulnerabilities, like Trudy Cooper’s (Pamela Reed) fear that her husband would die during a mission or Annie Glenn’s (Mary Jo Deschanel) stutter, which makes her so self-conscious that she rarely speaks, which the other wives misinterpret as snobby behavior.

For all of its humor and critique, The Right Stuff certainly doesn’t skimp on awe-inspiring imagery as evident in the wondrous sights on display when Yeager breaks the Sound Barrier or when John Glenn orbits the Earth. The impressive visual effects are as good as anything seen in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), the benchmark that all other films of this type are measured against. In the latter sequence, Glenn sees all sorts of debris that looks like fireflies, which Kaufman juxtaposes with an aboriginal campfire at night. It is fascinating, almost abstract imagery, which he inserts into this epic, historical biopic.

In 1979, independent producers Robert Chartoff and Irwin Winkler outbid Universal Pictures for the movie rights to Tom Wolfe’s book, The Right Stuff. They hired legendary screenwriter William Goldman to adapt it into screenplay form and his version focused on the astronauts while entirely ignoring Chuck Yeager. United Artists agreed to finance the film and the producers were not satisfied with Goldman’s take on the book. He was unable to find a dramatically convincing way to contrast the experience and outlook of the test pilots and the astronauts, leaving the former out of his script. They approached Philip Kaufman to direct and he shared their dissatisfaction with the script. He was hired in 1980 and Goldman quit the project. Kaufman started off by penning a 35-page memo outlining his take on the material. The filmmaker cited films he admired – The Searchers (1956) and The Grand Illusion (1937) – and that he would emulate their “rambling, episodic quality,” in which “truth is found along the way.” When Wolfe showed no interest in adapting his own book, Kaufman wrote a draft in eight weeks. He restored Yeager to the story because “if you’re tracing how the future began, the future in space travel, it began really with Yeager and the world of the test pilot. The astronauts descended from them.”

After the financial failure of Heaven’s Gate (1980), United Artists put The Right Stuff in turnaround and The Ladd Company stepped in with an estimated $17 million for the budget. According to Alan Ladd Jr., the final budget was closer to $27 million. Kaufman spent a lot of time early on trying to figure out how to do the visual effects. Initially, he looked at what George Lucas was doing with the Star Wars films, but Kaufman found that what “worked in outer space for George didn’t work on Earth. They didn’t have the same reality that we were looking for.” And so, Kaufman wanted to keep with “the theme of the film that what if we started jerry-rigging these things.” To that end, he hired experimental filmmaker Jordan Belson, who was “exploring cosmic mysteries” in his short films, to create transitions from night to day and the background of the Earth as seen from high-flying planes or orbiting spacecraft. In lieu of creating a lot of expensive visual effects from scratch, Kaufman accumulated 300,000 feet of NASA stock footage.

According to special visual effects supervisor Gary Gutierrez, the first special effects were too clean looking and they wanted a “dirty, funky early NASA look.” Kaufman was so unhappy with the results that he shut down work on them and fired many of the effects crew. Gutierrez and his team started from scratch, employing unconventional techniques like going up a hill with model airplanes on wires and fog machines to create clouds, or shooting model F-104s from a crossbow device and capturing their flight with as many as four cameras. A Mercury spacecraft was built from the original NASA molds and an X-1 mockup was constructed from old parts while the only B-29 bomber still flying was used.

Most of the film was shot in and around San Francisco, Kaufman’s hometown, and he transformed Hamilton Air Force Base in Marin County into a studio. The desert sequences were shot near Edwards Air Force Base. Yeager was hired as a technical consultant on the film. He took several of the actors flying, studied the storyboards and special effects, pointing out errors. Barbara Hershey remembered that during filming, he would call her Glennis and his son would call her mom. However, Yeager and Sam Shepard were wary of each other, at first, but became friends. To prepare for their roles, Kaufman gave the actors playing the seven astronauts an extension collection of videotapes to study.

Kaufman gave his five editors a list of documentary images that the film required and they searched the country for film from NASA, the Air Force and Bell Aircraft vaults. They also discovered Russian stock footage that had not been seen by human eyes in 30 years. The director’s rather exacting methods met with resistance from The Ladd Company and he threatened to quit several times. To make matters worse, in December 1982, 8,000 feet of film portraying Glenn’s trip in orbit and return to Earth disappeared or was stolen from Kaufman’s editing facility in Berkeley, California. The missing footage was never found and had to be reconstructed from copies.

The world premiere for The Right Stuff took place on October 16, 1983 in Washington, D.C. The Washington Post’s Gary Arnold felt that the film was “obviously so solid and appealing that it’s bound to go through the roof commercially and keep on soaring for the next year or so.” In his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby praised Shepard’s performance: “Both as the character he plays and as an iconic screen presence, Mr. Shepard gives the film much well-needed heft. He is the center of gravity.” Roger Ebert gave the film four out of four stars and wrote, “That writer-director, Philip Kaufman, is able to get so much into a little more than three hours is impressive. That he also has organized this material into one of the best recent American movies is astonishing.”

Yeager saw the film and liked “the way Sam played me. Sam is not a real flamboyant actor, and I’m not a real flamboyant-type individual … He played his role the way I fly airplanes.” Deke Slayton said after the screening, “none of it was all that accurate, but it was well done.” Walter Schirra said, “They insulted the lovely people who talked us through the program – the NASA engineers. They made them like bumbling Germans.” Scott Carpenter said, “It was a great movie in all regards.”

In retrospect, Kaufman and several cast members did not like how the film was marketed. The director said, “The publicity had to be exactly right to attract people, and I think it was presented in a way as sort of academic and a history of the space program.” Scott Glenn felt that it was “the most stupidly marketed film I’ve ever made … We made the film, a bunch of people saw it, and they thought it was so powerful, that it was worthy of a hard-news item: Will this movie be influential in the candidacy of John Glenn? People in the media got hold of it and made it hard news … All that influenced the marketing people into believing they had something ‘important’.” Finally, Fred Ward chimed in with his two cents: “My theory is that they seemed to be trying to sell it to the audience as The John Glenn Story. You know, the patriotic this and that. And it wasn’t.”

At once reverential and also irreverent towards its subject matter, The Right Stuff could have easily been tonally all over the place if it weren’t for Kaufman’s assured touch. One reason why the film may not have connected with audiences is the unusual take on the subject matter. Kaufman tends to go back and forth from a reverential look at these men to parodying them as well. Only Yeager is given a purely worshipful treatment because he represents the epitome of “the right stuff.” However, Kaufman isn’t afraid to show that the Mercury 7 astronauts had their flaws. They were cocky braggarts (Gordon Cooper), materialistic opportunists (Gus Grissom) and naively patriotic (John Glenn). Audiences of the day were probably expecting a straightforward historical biopic that put all of these men on pedestals. Kaufman was more interested in presenting these men as interesting, flawed human beings. They may have not been as iconic as Yeager, but, in the end, did have “the right stuff.”

SOURCES

Ansen, David and Katherine Ames. “A Movie with The Right Stuff.” Newsweek. October 3, 1983.

Bumiller, Elisabeth and Phil McCombs. “The Premiere: A Weekend Full of American Heroes and American Hype.” Washington Post. October 17, 1988.

Farber, Stephen. “Rocket’s Red Glare.” DGA Quarterly. Spring 2012.

“Fred Ward – It’s Hard to be a Hero.” Starlog. December 1985.

King, Susan. “Looking Back at a Film with The Right Stuff.” Los Angeles Times. June 7, 2003.

Morganthau, Tom and Richard Manning. “Glenn Meets the Dream Machine.” Newsweek. October 3, 1983.

Naha, Ed. “The Right Fx for The Right Stuff.” Starlog. July 1983.

O’Neill, Patrick Daniel. “Scott Glenn – The Fast-Gun Astronaut.” Starlog. August 1985.

Rushfield, Richard. “Director Philip Kaufman on What Makes The Right Stuff, 30 Years Later.” Yahoo Movies. November 15, 2003.

Schickel, Richard. “Saga of a Magnificent Seven.” Time. October 3, 1983.

Wilford, John Noble. “The Right Stuff: From Space to Screen.” The New York Times. October 16, 1983.

Williams, Christian. “A Story That Pledges Allegiance to Drama and Entertainment.” Washington Post. October 20, 1983.

DVD of the Week: Insidious

Every so often a low budget horror film comes out and against all odds strikes a chord with mainstream audiences to become a breakout success. This happened with Halloween (1978), The Blair Witch Project (1999), and Paranormal Activity (2007). These films were interested in nothing more than playing on our most basic, primal fears and scaring the crap out of us. The latest horror film to do this is Insidious (2010), a modestly budgeted ($1.5 million) effort from the folks that brought us Saw (2004) and Paranormal Activity. It has gone on to become a bonafide commercial hit ($87 million). More importantly, it flies in the face of the gore-obsessed torture porn sub-genre to deliver good ol’ fashion things-that-go-bump-in-the-night scares that audiences are clearly hungry for. This is even more impressive when you consider that the two men who are the creative driving force behind Insidious are also responsible for the Saw franchise.


The Lambert family has recently moved into their new home and is in the process of unpacking and getting acclimatized to their new surroundings. Josh (Patrick Wilson), the father, is a busy high school teacher, which leaves Renai (Rose Byrne), the mother, at home to unpack and take care of their baby girl. Unusual little things start to happen, like a door moving on its own. While exploring the attic, one the Lambert boys, Dalton (Ty Simpkins), encounters something. He falls and hits his head causing a nasty bump.

The next morning, Josh tries to wake the boy and finds him in a coma. A doctor tells him and Renai that there is no detectable brain damage and he can’t explain what has happened to their child. Three months later and Dalton is still in a coma but he’s allowed to be at home with his mother taking care of him. One day, Renai hears a strange voice on the baby monitor and rushes up to investigate but of course nothing is there but her child. Soon more weird things happen: a loud knocking on the front door, the image of a strange woman appears in the baby’s bedroom window, the once locked front door is now wide open, and so on.

These things put all kinds of stress on the Lamberts and they decide that their house must be haunted so they move to another place but strange things continue to happen which leads them to contact Elise Reiner (Lin Shaye), a friend of Josh’s mother (Barbara Hershey) who is an expert in paranormal activity. She tells them that it isn’t the house that is haunted – it is their child, Dalton. The frequency and intensity of the scares gradually increases as the true nature of what ails Dalton is revealed and Elise gives the Lamberts the lowdown on what’s happening.

Director James Wan is very effective at establishing an unsettling mood right from the film’s spooky prologue. Taking a page out of the film’s producer, Oren Peli’s book (Paranormal Activity), he employs all sorts of tried and true jolts: doors slamming shut on their own, inhuman shadows, mischievous ghosts, and so on. The visuals are enhanced with a creepy soundscape complete with moody sound effects and an atmospheric score by Joseph Bishara. Known for gory films like Saw and Death Sentence (2007), Wan demonstrates refreshing restraint with Insidious.

Wan and long-time screenwriting partner Leigh Whannell have created a compelling and efficient scare engine that plays on some of our simplest fears – that someone close to us is in a dangerous situation that we don’t understand. Insidious doesn’t try to reinvent the demonic possession film but instead mashes it up with the haunted house sub-genre and a side order of astral projection thrown in for good measure. The end result is an entertaining film that resides somewhere between the flashy style of Drag Me to Hell (2009) and the unsettling, white knuckle scare tactics of Paranormal Activity with engaging characters that you grow to care about over time.

Special Features:

“Horror 101: The Exclusive Seminar” features director James Wan and screenwriter Leigh Whannell talking about how they first came up with the notion of astral projection, which they hadn’t seen much in film and place it in a haunted house setting. Whannell wanted to make sure that the audience got to know and identify with the Lambert family so that they would care about what happens to them later on. He and Wan come across as intelligent and eloquent with a good knowledge of the horror genre and its conventions.

“On Set with Insidious” takes a look at the making of the film with plenty of on set footage as we see Wan working with the cast and crew. We see how one of the film’s stunts is performed and an alternate take of a scene. This extra provides some nice insights into filming.

“Insidious Entities” takes a look at the ghosts and demons that appear in the film. Wan and Whannell talk about their distinctive look and where the inspiration for some of them came from and why.

 

DVD of the Week: Black Swan

Let’s be honest, there aren’t many ballet-centric films out there and even fewer that are good, with notable exceptions like The Red Shoes (1948) and the underrated Robert Altman film The Company (2003). So Darren Aronofsky had his work cut out for him with Black Swan (2010), a ballet film reimagined as a psychological horror tale reminiscent of Roman Polanski’s early work. Aronofsky is a filmmaker that strives to make genres his own – edgy science fiction (Pi) and a gritty sports film (The Wrestler). He even incorporated aspects of the horror genre in his harrowing adaptation of Hubert Selby Jr.’s Requiem for a Dream (2000). Black Swan tackles the genre head-on with the kind of intensity we’ve come to expect from the filmmaker.


In a bold move, Aronofsky cast Natalie Portman, an actress known mostly for appealing characters in films like Where the Heart Is (2000) and Garden State (2004), against type as an aspiring yet psychologically conflicted ballerina trying to land the part in a production of Swan Lake. However, the gamble paid off in a big way as she delivered a complex, powerful performance that garnered a multitude of awards, most notably the Oscar for Best Actress.

A New York ballet company’s lecherous director Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel) announces that his take on Swan Lake is going to be a stripped down and visceral affair. He’s looking for a fresh new face to play both the Black and White Swan, which doesn’t sit too well with veteran ballerina Beth MacIntyre (Winona Ryder) who is effectively pushed out, or “retired,” at the beginning of the film in order to make room for aspiring dancer Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman). She is eager to get the role but not only has to battle her own self-doubts but strong competition from rival dancer Lily (Mila Kunis), a newcomer from San Francisco who is everything Nina isn’t: confident and uninhibited. Nina has her technique down cold but she lacks Lily’s passion and the ability to lose herself in the role.

Early on, we see the cracks beginning to show in Nina’s façade. Near a subway stop she passes someone on the street that looks exactly like her. At home, she notices a strange, small rash on her back. Are these symptoms of stress or something else more sinister? As if she didn’t have enough pressure, her overbearing stage mother Erica (Barbara Hershey) treats her daughter like she’s still a little girl. This extends to the décor in Nina’s bedroom – awash in pink and populated with stuffed animals. When she’s not painting creepy portraits of her daughter, Erica tries to control every moment of Nina’s home life. However, Nina is able to escape her clutches once she starts hanging out with Lily. The rival dancer takes Nina for a walk on the wild side, giving her drugs and taking her clubbing, which loosens up her inhibitions and that’s only for starters.

Like he did with The Wrestler (2008), Aronofsky shows us the tricks of the trade, the minutia dancers do, like how they break in a new pair of dancing slippers or tape up their ankles and feet in preparation. He also shows the punishment Nina’s body takes from dancing – she is scarily thin, has busted toe nails, endures a seemingly endless number of rehearsals, and pushes herself to the point of exhaustion.

Initially, Natalie Portman plays the prim and proper character we’ve seen her do before but the actress soon reveals Nina to be a deeply flawed person gradually coming apart at the seams as she tries to cope with the pressure of taking on the lead role in a high profile production. Portman displays some serious acting chops as she brilliantly conveys the mental disintegration of her character. The actress gives all sorts of intriguing nuances that make us wonder just how much of what is happening to her is real or in her head. She commits herself to the role completely and this is particular evident in the climactic sequence where Nina finally performs Swan Lake in front of an audience on opening night.

As if casting Portman was a risk, in comes That ‘70s Show’s Mila Kunis. Now, she’s shown her “serious” acting chops in Max Payne (2008), but the jump from a supporting role in that film to a much more substantial supporting role in Black Swan is a quantum leap for the actress. Vincent Cassel plays a Svengali-like ballet director who pushes Nina by manipulating her emotions and playing on her insecurities about the Black Swan role. Winona Ryder has a juicy role as a disgruntled aging dancer on her way out. She has a memorable scene in which she confronts Nina in a boozy, vengeful haze. There is a delicious irony here as in real life Portman now gets the high profile leading roles that Ryder used to get in the 1990’s.

Black Swan is reminiscent of Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965) and The Tenant (1976) in that they all depict a protagonist’s nightmarish descent into madness. Aronofsky’s film is a terrific showcase for Portman’s talents, challenging her like no other role before as she finally fulfills the promise showed very early on in her career with Leon: The Professional (1994). For Aronofsky, he only improves as a filmmaker, adding another self-destructive protagonist to his roster. He has arguably made his best film to date and it should be interesting to see what he does next.

Special Features:

“Black Swan Metamorphosis” is a three-part making of documentary about the film that can be viewed separately or altogether. There is all kinds of fascinating, fly-on-the-wall, on-set footage showing several scenes being shot. Various crew members talk about their respective roles in the production. This doc provides some insight on how they shot Black Swan on a small budget with little time. Natalie Portman talks about the rigorous training schedule she went through in order to pull off the dance sequences. This is quite a good look at various aspects of the production.