Midnight Clear

NetFlix 3.1/5
IMDB 5.7/10
My Rating: 8/10
Sincerity Factor: 9/10
Treacle Factor: 3/10

 On Christmas Eve in a small town, five isolated strangers face despair, but as their individual lives cross paths, each is affected by the others.

So, after the utter misery that was The Christmas Box, here is something cheerier - A Christmas movie about loneliness, depression and suicide!   Straight-up warning going in - This is one of the darkest, bleakest holiday movies I've ever encountered, and yet if you stick with it, there probably won't be a dry eye in the house.  This is an extra-impressive accomplishment considering that the entire movie is rendered without sparkles, magical angels, Christmas wishes, miracles, or anything remotely reindeer-ey.  There isn't even any snow!

It's even more startling when you realize that this is taken from a story by Jerry Jenkins, co-author of the utterly retarded Left Behind series.   I very nearly turned it off when I saw that, because I could not imagine that anything written by a guy who believes the "good people" will be Raptured into space could possibly be enjoyable for me, and I was braced for another massive attack of bad religion.  When it was over, I found to my slightly stunned surprise that A) it was one of the best Christian movies I have ever seen, and B) ironically, this fundamentalist writer has also managed to write perhaps the best humanist Christmas film ever.  High praise, but I have to give him credit - Pick a holiday movie, ANY holiday movie, and you're almost certain to get something where all the unhappiness in the story is set right by some outside magical force, be it angels, God, or Santa.  Midnight Clear stands just about alone in presenting a movie where humans... Just humans... have magnificent impacts on each other's lives simply by doing the small decencies that make society work.

The basic story is this:  Five people face a Christmas Eve night at the end of their tethers.  Kirk is trapped in a dead-end business, a Quick-Stop he purchased in hopes it would be a valuable commercial location.  Young mother Mary struggles with life as a single mom after her husband is left brain-damaged by a car accident.  Mitch is a youth pastor tasked with inspiring his church teens but riven with self-doubt as to his ability to make faith "cool".  Retiree Eva lives alone and methodically plans suicide.  And the main character, Lefty (a stellar performance by Stephen Baldwin), is a hopeless homeless alcoholic, the sort of character we've all met at one time or another, a guy who simply cannot do anything right.  The movie follows each of these stories as they intersect and impact on each other in unexpected ways.

You know you're in for a different sort of Christmas film when it opens with a homeless character living out of his car and being fired on Christmas Eve.  And this isn't homelessness as big budget films would depict, no "wise" hobos or spiritual singing in the alleys here - Lefty is a loser, pure and simple.  It's a magnificent credit to Stephen Baldwin's acting abilities that he's able to imbue this no-hope character with something that keeps you watching, even as he visibly careens further downhill.  Lefty is "that guy", the one who always does the worst thing in the worst situation simply because he doesn't know how to recognize the right thing to do. He's been down so long that he can't see beyond begging the next guy out of $5 of gas money.  The scary thing is that I've been close enough to him to understand his situation...

And, I think, empathy is one of the movie's most-required traits to appreciate it.  In a nutshell, if you haven't stared into this abyss, you'll probably just find it depressing - Comfortable middle-class types will balk and want to change channels to the Hallmark film, or anything that seems cheerier.  Unless you've actually been in a situation where an unexpected stranger handing you a tiny bit of help literally meant all the world to you, you may have trouble appreciating this movie.  For those who can relate, though, it's a terrific film, and as the cover blurb says, "One's heart soars from watching it".

While Lefty's homeless Christmas Eve is the main focus, the other characters are also excellent.  K Callan's Eva, especially, is riveting...  This is an elderly lady who can glue you to the screen just watching her facial expressions change from one moment to the next.  You know her path from the opening scenes, where she hobbles onto a decrepit porch, fills a cat food bowl, pauses, and then pours the remaining food from the bag into a pile on the porch.  The grace, dignity, and stubbornness with which she advances her suicide plan is tragic and chilling.  Kirk and Mary provide some banter when Mary's car breaks down at the Quick Stop, but the fifth character, Mitch, might be my favorite even though he has possibly the least lines and focus.  Mitch is another soul adrift - Unlike the others, he's comfortable and supported by family and community, but is sunk into personal depression, unable to inspire or understand how to live a "good" life.  Maybe he's most of us - Wanting to do a good deed, but not knowing what to do and too inhibited to try.  His Christmas Eve job is unenviable... To herd a group of caroling teens from home to home, visiting shut-ins and passing out care packages from the church:

Mitch is living in the shadow of his injured friend, that guy who really was inspirational to the youth and always did everything right.  He also provides the film's small moments of comic relief as we hop from the tragedies of Lefty and Eva to the atrociously singing teens going door to door.  By the end, these five people have encountered each other in the ways they need, both knowingly and unknowingly, and the story clicks together like a puzzle as  dozen disparate threads snap into place.  It's inspiring and still believable - There are no perfect happy endings here and no one is miraculously delivered from their problems, but they get a tiny bit of help and sometimes that's enough.

Is it perfect?  Nope... The few points of Treacle I gave it above are due to a couple moments of Too-Neat coincidences - Moments or lines that might have been better cut.  Then again, what's a Christmas film without at least a tiny dollop of sentimentality?  I think what impresses me the most is that it's a clearly religious film and I actually liked it - Usually movies with religious messages put me off terribly (I have no problem with religious faith per se, but I have a potent dislike for the dogmatic organized church).  So if a movie can touch me, classic "angry atheist" that I am, it really must be doing something right.  And as I said, I'm left a bit boggled to find that the movie also carries such a profound humanist message, given the fundamentalism of the writer.

In the end, it's a Christmas movie that will make you think, and that's high praise indeed.

Hausu (1977)

NetFlix 3.7/5
IMDB 7.5/10
My Rating: 9/10

 A schoolgirl decides to spend her summer at her aunt's country house with her friends, but disturbing events after their arrival prove the house is haunted and OH MY GOD THE COLORS, MAN!  THE COLORSSSS!  MY FEET ARE NOT TOUCHING THIS FLOOR AND NOW I CAN UNDERSTAND THE RUG, GIVE ME ANOTHER HIT OF THAT LIZARD, MAN...


OK, Hausu is not your typical haunted house film, not at all.  And by that I mean, Hausu is like a haunted house film as Dennis Hopper on acid is like Captain Kangaroo.  Holy hell, this was amazing! One of the most imaginative movies I've ever seen. I strongly recommend any working visual artist to see this, because it will give them creative inspiration for a year.  I don't even BEGIN to know how to describe or review this thing. Imagine the Partridge Family mashed up with Evil Dead and directed by the Pan's Labyrinth guy against a Dario Argento color palette.  Virtually every shot of this was a framed artwork, and the scene transitions were constantly cool - If you thought the guy's dead body in Heavy Metal becoming the landscape was a clever scene switch, you need to see this. It is not actually a plotted movie so much as it is an experience.I do

But there is a story, of sorts.  The first past of it resembles a musical chunk of that guilty pleasure, the Brady Bunch movie (I won't admit to liking it, nor will anyone else, but really, it was a dark and secret cupcake of joy, and easily one of the best of the usually dreary movies made from old TV shows).  Our heroine, Gorgeous, heads off to the countryside accompanied by friends with names like Melody, Kung Fu, and Sweet.  The skies are blue... I mean REALLY blue, like the blue that you'd experience after doing mushrooms and LSD and watching The Yellow Submarine all night...  The clouds are fluffy and painted on, and life is a Sunshine Day.

And yes, the girls are standing in front of a painted backdrop from which we just panned out to reveal the identical painted backdrop in larger scale, all while the Partridge Family bus drives away.  If you're having problems already, stay far away from this because this is a movie that believes mental circuit breakers are pointless if they're not tripped as often as possible.  At any moment you're fully expecting Gorgeous and her friends to burst into singing, "Keep On Dancing".

Things start to go Twilight Zone as the girls arrive at the house.  Well, perhaps not so much Twilight Zone as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but, you know, more surreal.  The fun kicks off with one of the girls being chased around the yard by a floating head that bites her on the ass, and events get more bizarre from there.

Is the house haunted?  Is the aunt really crippled?  What's up with her evil white cat?  While virtually every scene in the film remains gorgeous, like our title character:

...Things quickly go from bad to worse for our cast of attractive young victims:

And not to belabor the point, but yes, that's a girl being eaten by a piano.  This is just one of the film's endless surrealist sequences which bombard the audience with horror, animation, comedy, over-the-top gore, and several Picasso's worth of color palette.

I'm not spoilering anything with these caps because the visual overload in the film is so intense that they don't even scratch the surface. Many scenes are set against painted backdrops instead of actual locations, giving it a really weird ambiance that wavers between HR Puffnstuf and Nightmare before Christmas. The killings, when they happen, are some of the most memorable I've ever seen. I can't recall a single distinct death from any Friday the 13th movie, but I won't forget the piano scene for a very long time.  Seriously, this is one worth seeing for the sheer bizarreness of the whole thing - You won't see another film like it.

Here's the trailer, for an idea of what you're in for:

The Eclipse

NetFlix 
IMDB
My Rating: 10/10





EXCELLENT movie. Perfect, IMO.  Thinking about it long after it was over.  Note - NOT the Twilight movie, this is a 2009 Irish indie film, so don't think my mind has been possessed by a tweenie emo girl and I've started watching body-waxed vampire movies.


Review! Erm, OK, well for starters, this is a ghost story movie you can watch with your wife or SO. The trailers and promo stuff are not doing it any favors, IMO, because the marketing makes it look like a thriller or horror film, and in fact it is that and a lot of other things... It's really a ghost story, family drama, romance, comedy, and meditation on loss. And I will add that one key factor of enjoying this movie seems to be having experienced the loss of a loved one or close friend yourself. From comments I've read, a lot of folks who haven't gone through the process of someone suddenly just not being there any more, have a hard time relating to the film emotionally. 

The lead character has lost his wife to cancer, and is left grieving with two children and a father-in-law in a rest home. Strange events lead him to believe he is being haunted. Over the course of a few days, he works as a support guy for a local literary festival and crosses paths with a smart female horror writer and a drunken, egotistical, "name" writer. Aiden Quinn has a hilariously sad part as the famous author.

Someone on IMDB said that if you go into this expecting a horror movie, you'll be disappointed. Expect a thriller, and you'll be disappointed. Expect a romance, and you'll be disappointed. You kind of have to go into it expecting nothing and willing to go with the flow, to really enjoy it. While it is not an overt horror movie, I will say that it has some of the absolutely scariest scenes in cinema history - I jumped off the couch and nearly spilled my pipe all over myself at one point. It's reminiscent of "The Woman in Black" that way... Everyone remembers THAT scene from WiB, and the scare scenes in this are on par. While there are other things going on in the movie (Relationships starting, ending, family drama, etc), the haunting hovers over everything and jumps in at the most unexpected moments. 

 

It's also stunning to look at. The town where it was filmed is an amazing backdrop, and the cinematography and framing is fantastic. The use of lighting, blacks, silhouettes, landscapes, etc is really a visual treat. When it was over, Em commented, "That was as gorgeous as the Secret of Kells in an entirely different way". 

I have no idea what to compare it to. The pace is slow, the story is quiet and understated, the characters are riveting and real, and it has this odd quirky sense of humor on top of everything else - I think I can safely say that if you enjoyed the film "Local Hero", you would also enjoy this. Imagine "Local Hero" crossed with "Paranormal Activity", if you dare.

On IMDB, the comments run towards lots of thoughtful, well written positive reviews giving it a 7-10/10 rating, and various people giving it a 1 and saying it was the most boring movie they ever saw, was completely stupid, etc... "Nothing HAPPENEDDDDDD" was a common refrain. I'll admit that when it ended, I blinked and my first reaction was, "What? That's all?", but on reflection I feel it had a perfect ending - Ambiguous and open, so you can decide for yourself what happens next. Mostly I was just bummed to be parting company with these excellent characters after only 90 minutes. I do think that roughly 3 out of ten people will really love the movie, probably 5 of ten will shrug and think, "Meh", and 2 of ten will not be able to sit still or enjoy it at all because they want to see Jigsaw cutting up girls with silicon boobs.
 
Best watched when feeling quiet, contemplative, and perhaps a bit sad - and not in the mood for explosions, monsters, wacky comedy or car chases. Funnily enough, I would call this a very "adult" movie, in the sense that one has to have experienced some of the issues in the movie to really relate to it and appreciate it.

Damn good flick.

Second opinion: http://www.coldfusionvideo.com/archives/eclipse-the-2009/
(Interestingly, his complaints were what I liked - The fact that the movie does not hand you wrapped-and-tied explanations for everything. I enjoyed the ambiguity much like I enjoyed the ending of "The Thing" - Others who want definite explanations and a neat wrap-up will not be as happy)

Suggested Accompaniment: Something extremely elegant.  This is not a movie for a bathtub of buttered popcorn; it is more a movie for a glass of dry white wine and a long-stemmed black churchwarden pipe, preferably loaded with a slow burning flake tobacco like Three Nuns... Something sharp and with just a bit of bite.

JCVD

NetFlix
IMDB
My Rating: 7/10


I am going to freak out my readers by saying this is a Jean Claude Van Damme movie that was really good and that everyone should see. The man can act.  

It was pretty damned excellent. I think it has a 7.3 on IMDB, IIRC, and the only reason it's not higher than that is because a bunch of moronic JCVD fans keep voting it 1's because it wasn't the kind of movie they wanted (Cheesy martial arts action). It is an actual, real, authentic serious movie.

In JCVD, JCVD plays himself - An aging, washed-up action hero star forced into progressively lower and lower budget movies that have killed his career, while trying to recover from drug abuse and fighting a losing legal battle with his ex-wife for custody of their daughter. He returns to Belgium to recuperate a bit, and ends up in a post office during a robbery (FWIW, post offices in France & Belgium are alike in this - They are banks as well, and can offer checking and savings accounts, loans, etc). Due to a misunderstanding, the police outside believe JCVD himself is running the robbery, while he is stuck indoors with the hostages and three pretty unbalanced criminals who have just seen their perfect plan go up in flames.

This is the point where a typical JCVD movie would have him crawling into the ductwork and roundhouse-kicking lots of bad guys a la Die Hard. The difference here is that it's played exactly like real life - No superhumans, no giant kung fu battles, etc. JCVD is exhausted and stressed and jet lagged, and sane enough to realize that if he tries anything heroic, he's almost certain to get an innocent hostage shot. The movie then becomes, "What can a normal, real life guy do in such a situation to keep the hostages alive?" He is not at all a superhero - In fact, he's pretty much a freaked out loser - but tries to find ways to use his celebrity status to help out. One of the criminals worships him and loves his films, another is coming unglued because he's supposed to be in charge, and the third is a chillingly-acted psychopath.

The violence in the movie is realistic, not martial arts flick. It's a bit like a modern version of Dog Day Afternoon that happens to have this movie actor dropped into the storyline. Definitely worth seeing.  

Suggested Accompaniment:  It's a pretty rough and raw film, so I'd recommend the same for libations.  In fact, it's hard to pin down... Not really a popcorn film, but not a cheap beer movie either.  I think I'll go with some sort of Leffe beer, if you can get it, and some sort of very ragged sandblast pipe - Something with a lot of hard-worn character, coupled with a very potent Latakia tobacco.  Bring your Old Ironsides and Pirate Kake to this one, folks.