1977

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February 15, 2008

Rabid

Posted by Jordan Richardson under 1977, entertainment, horror, movies, science fiction, thrillers | Tags: , , , |
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Rabid

Just in time for Valentine’s Day, it’s David Cronenberg’s Rabid! This 1977 horror film was made in Montreal, Quebec, and had the support of the Canadian Film Development Corporation. Packed with Freudian imagery and a healthy dose of gore, Rabid is an intriguing film. Cronenberg is one of my favourite directors and I find his work to be fascinating. His manipulation of sex and violence to provide shocking, stunning results is always something of note. He hasn’t abandoned those themes, either, as the recent Eastern Promises still demonstrates Cronenberg’s power as a director and his ability to create shocking yet compelling material. He is one of Canada’s best filmmakers, without question.

Rabid was Cronenberg’s fourth film. Cronenberg’s horror films always investigate the terror as it comes from within, not from some sort of external monster. Rabid is no different, following up on the theme of his previous film, Shivers, by manipulating the vampire theme slightly and including a strange lesion as the source of all of the havoc. Cronenberg’s metaphorical sense is on overdrive, too, as the appearance of the lesion is an odd combination of a vaginal-looking parasite with a phallic insert that drills into its victims. This amalgamation of male and female sexual organs is an obvious allegory towards unbridled sexuality and the rabid spread of disease, much like in Shivers.

Rabid stars Marilyn Chambers in her first non-pornographic role, which was clearly a risk. Chambers, who came to fame in films such as Beyond the Green Door, is actually quite good in her role as Rose. Rose becomes critically-injured after a motorcycle accident with her boyfriend, Hart (Frank Moore). Rose undergoes surgery at a nearby clinic which specializes in experimental plastic surgery. After she comes out of a coma, Rose begins to develop a taste for blood and starts seeking out victims. As she takes victim after victim, rabies begins to spread through a lesion on her body. An epidemic of rabies takes over Montreal, leading to martial law and all sorts of other chaos.

One thing Rabid does well is continue to keep its audience in a state of discomfort. Cronenberg has a knack for creating solid impact and sudden gore. In each of his films, he creates such bold impact with his camera, shattering glass or metal into twisted heaps of trash right before our very eyes. His work in films like Crash, Eastern Promises, and A History of Violence all highlight the immediacy that Cronenberg expresses towards violence and impact. Rabid is no different. One example of this is the car crash sequence, as the effects of it are shattering and intense without being gratuitous. Cronenberg doesn’t sit the camera in strange positions to shoot the scene, but rather he plants it right where an eyewitness would be and lets the true terror of the situation play out naturally. It is an organic experience that adds to the detail and the mood of the film.

The sudden flashes of gore are manipulated in the same way and we can see signs that lead to Cronenberg’s work with relentless violence in Rabid. In Rabid, Cronenberg is most assuredly dealing with some gutsy themes. He takes to the blood and violence with seriousness and a rigid attention to its forcefulness, which leads many of the scenes to develop in sudden, jerky ways rather than in the slow-motion torture-style fashion of many horror films. Cronenberg envelops us in the violence by making it quick, sudden, and stunning. His filmmaking is neither masturbatory nor excessive, creating evenness to the film that makes it highly effective.

Also worth nothing is Cronenberg’s attention to the themes of changing times and medical progress. This is especially prevalent in Cronenberg’s eXistenZ, an eerie film in its own right. Within Rabid, the theme is very similar as something has clearly gone wrong with the experimental plastic surgery. In the scenes spent in the facility, we are treated to visions of strange people with strange bandages and appearances. This manipulation of the essence of plastic surgery and progressive medical techniques is something that Cronenberg seems interested in, as he builds a tapestry out of the characterizations by drawing our attention to the odd details.

Rabid never heads into slasher territory, instead remaining on the fringe and focusing in on both the human story of the ordeal and on the strangeness of it all. The intelligence with which Cronenberg writes and directs the scenes of the medical staff trying to contain the rabies is admirable, as is the notion of Rose not knowing she is the carrier. Some elements take a bit too long to develop, but the film’s final sequence more than makes up for it as Rose is encapsulated in the inexorable results of her curse. Cronenberg doesn’t go for a happy ending, nor does he aim for resolution of the entire sequence of events. Instead, he aims for the next logical step in the journey of an ignorant woman carrying a vile disease. The implications are staggering and the film raises some intelligent questions about the nature of violence, sexuality, and horror. It’s worth a look.

7/10

 

December 30, 2007

Annie Hall

Posted by Jordan Richardson under 1977, comedy, drama, entertainment, romance, trailers | Tags: , , , , , , , |
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Annie Hall

Woody Allen’s Annie Hall picked up the Academy Award for Best Picture, Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role (Diane Keaton), Best Director, Best Writing, and was nominated for Best Actor in a Leading Role (Woody Allen). With this slew of award wins, it was interesting that Woody Allen himself did not attend the ceremony, stating that awards mean nothing to him. Annie Hall also landed itself on a few AFI lists, including their top 100 movies list, top 100 comedies list, top 100 romance list, and the top 100 movie quotes list for Diane Keaton’s “La-dee-da, la-dee-da…”

Annie Hall is quite possibly the quintessential Woody Allen film. According to Roger Ebert, Annie Hall is “just about everyone’s favorite Woody Allen movie.” The film did indeed represent a major turning point in Allen’s career, which was largely based on zany comedies up until Annie Hall. The film brought a new level of seriousness to his work and showed that the director was capable of crafting deep, meaningful stories as well as rich comic moments. Annie Hall also helped solidify Allen’s directorial style, as the long shots and long scenes of conversation really came about as a part of the film.

The film is set in New York City and Los Angeles, which each city representing something different to the characters in the film. Woody Allen stars as Alvy Singer, a death-obsessed comedian attempting to maintain a relationship with Annie Hall (Diane Keaton). The relationship is chronicled in the film over the course of several years, interspersed with various fantastical cutaways and flashbacks. We are shown pieces of each character through the flashbacks, which helps flesh out the story. Allen uses various tricks here, including a brief animated segment (which is hilarious) and a scene in which subtitles demonstrate what each character is really thinking. Annie Hall follows the relationship from its beginning to its end.

Along with Keaton and Allen, the film features the usual Woody Allen cast of great character actors. Shelley Duvall, Tony Roberts, Carol Kane, Paul Simon, and Colleen Dewhurst all have supporting roles. Christopher Walken, Jeff Goldblum, Sigourney Weaver, and John Glover all have brief roles in the film as well. Even Truman Capote makes a cameo appearance in the film, playing a passerby that is compared to, of course, Truman Capote by Allen’s character in the park.

In titling the film, Allen had selected Anhedonia, which is a psychoanalytical term for the inability to experience pleasure from normally pleasurable life events. The term certainly encapsulates Allen’s character in the film, as he seems to reject pleasure wherever he finds it for any number of reasons. Another potential title for the film was It Had to be Jew, which was also considered unmarketable. In the end, Annie Hall was decided upon. Because of this title and because of the real-life relationship between Diane Keaton and Woody Allen, many assumed the film was autobiographical. Allen has denied this, yet it is certainly interesting to note that Diane Keaton’s real name is Diane Hall.

Annie Hall was the first of Allen’s films to utilize his now-famous long takes. He learned this technique and perfected by working with cinematographer Gordon Willis. Willis taught Allen a lot about structuring the filmmaking process. Annie Hall was Allen’s chance to really experiment with different aspects of creating a film and, luckily, it paid off beautifully. Allen’s long uninterrupted shots come to life here, as one shot continues unabridged for an entire scene. This, coupled with the semi-improvisational nature of the script, helps make Annie Hall as realistic a romantic comedy as one could experience. This makes much of Annie Hall about characters simply talking. Roger Ebert cites a study that takes a look at the shot lengths in the film. The average shot length in Allen’s film is around 14.5 seconds, while the average shot length in most other films of the era was around 4-7 seconds. When this is considered, the speech given by Diane Keaton about her family is as lovely a piece of free-association long-cut dialogue as ever entered into the annals of filmmaking.

Another aspect that makes Annie Hall unique is its ability to break the fourth wall without being pretentious or annoying (see Kiss Kiss Bang Bang). Allen often addresses the camera directly, sometimes using split-screen imagery and double exposure to further his point. One certain sequence in the film, which was incredibly funny, had Woody Allen’s character leaving a cinema line after hearing more than enough of the criticism of Marshall McLuhan. Allen leaves for a moment, and then emerges with Marshall McLuhan in tow, adding “Boy, if only life were really like this.” These scenes help build a sense of camaraderie with Allen’s character and help place the audience in the middle of the situations that are being experienced.

Annie Hall is an appealing and persuasive piece of filmmaking that resonates from start to finish with care and attention to detail. It is also a fairly unpretentious work, but is likely the greatest passage into the mindset of a brilliant film director possible. Allen jokes about this by stating that Annie Hall is “more like my 2 ½.” This references, of course, Fellini’s masterpiece 8 ½ which contained similar thematic elements and a longing for the unattainable past. The sharpness used by Allen in making Annie Hall really demonstrates itself on screen in the film, creating a flowing narrative that is as much about love as it is about making films that function as mirrors into our lives.

Annie Hall is a handsome piece of filmmaking and a humorous tale of love and love lost. The characters are vivacious and appealing and the dialogue is rich and enchanting. Allen’s direction comes into form here skilfully and his keenness to create quality films is on display. See it for a vision of Allen’s transition into one of the best directors and writers in the world today. Annie Hall is a vision of cinematic glory and is one of the most influential films of all time.

10/10

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July 9, 2007

Jabberwocky

Posted by Jordan Richardson under 1977, adventure, comedy, entertainment, fantasy, historical, romance, trailers | Tags: , , |
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Jabberwocky

1977’s Jabberwocky is a film based on the Lewis Carroll poem. The film is directed by Terry Gilliam (Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Time Bandits) and is a humourous fantasy brimming with lots of goofy moments and buffoonery. Jabberwocky presents a vision of the Middle Ages that is very comical, grotesque, rude, vile and disgusting. It’s also very funny.

The poem by Lewis Carroll is essentially a poem of nonsensical verse. It is found as a part of his novel “Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There“. The poem has been translated and studied in many languages, with many people trying to make sense out of the very nature of Carroll’s work and others trying to figure out if there is any hidden meaning to the poem. Through it all, Monty Python’s resident animator Terry Gilliam elected to put his spin on the material and the loosely based Jabberwocky film was born.

The film stars Michael Palin as Dennis Cooper. Cooper is, yes, a cooper (someone who makes wooden containers) who is forced through a series of comical and strange events to hunt down a terrible monster after the death of his father. Dennis is pretty unlucky, but circumstances soon unfold to provide the cooper with ample opportunities to rectify his own situation and prove his father and others wrong.

Jabberwocky is very similar in style to Monty Python and the Holy Grail, as its take on the Middle Ages and the people of that time is very comic and very crass. In Jabberwocky, someone always seems to be pissing off of a building or taking a noisy dump in the bushes. The film didn’t do too well in terms of box office or critical reception at the time of its release, but since then Jabberwocky has become somewhat of a cult film and has resonated with Python fans and fans of dark humour.

The film does, through its comedy and through its characters, focus in on several thematic elements. One of the themes is that of happiness. By the end of the film, Dennis gets everything a fairy tale hero would want (the recognition for killing the beast, the princess’s hand in marriage, and half of the kingdom) all by accident. All Dennis wanted was to live a humdrum life with an overweight peasant girl, who didn’t even like him. The film’s bucking of the “natural” trend and essentially forcing superficial happiness on it is really a commentary on how one’s happiness is entirely subjective. While Dennis’ attraction to the peasant girl may not make sense to us, it does to him and that is what is important.

Jabberwocky is not as funny as Monty Python and the Holy Grail and it does contain some moments of creaking boredom, but it is a rather comical “fantasy” that explores several thematic elements lurking below the surface. The characters are hilarious, too, including King Bruno the Questionable and Passelewe. Whether it’s people defecating, boys peeing on Dennis, a silly “monster”, fat peasant girls, jovial infidelity, gory violence, ineptitude, or someone constantly selling cabbages you’re after, you’re likely to find it in this comical mess of a film.

6.5/10

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