“The Raven,” a new thriller starring John Cusack as mystery writer Edgar Allen Poe, is a convergence of fact, fiction and part police procedural. Poe must help the police track down a serial killer who is using his stories as inspiration, before the love-of-his-life becomes the final victim. It’s “CSI” meets E.A.P.
Set years after Poe’s greatest successes “The Tell Tale Heart” and “The Pit and the Pendulum,” the story begins with a mystery—a locked room containing two dead bodies, but no killer. When brash Baltimore Detective Fields (Luke Evans) makes a connection between the crime and Poe’s stories, the writer first becomes a suspect, then a collaborator.
Meanwhile Poe is trying to eek out a living writing for the local newspaper. “I’ve used up all my tricks,” he tells his editor, explaining why he can’t recreate the big-selling blood and guts of his best known work. Soon, however, the writer must put pen to paper when the mysterious killer kidnaps Poe’s fiancée, Emily (Alice Eve), threatening her with death unless he writes descriptions of the murders in the newspaper.
Despite drawing on the fantastic elements of Poe’s stories, the imposing presence of Brendan Gleeson as an irascible millionaire and the petticoats of Alice Eve, “The Raven” feels rather standard; a run-of-the-mill serial killer story dolled up with period clothes and a performance from Cusack that alternates between disinterest and Nic Cage’s anything goes intensity. It’s wildly uneven, although like all Cusack’s performances, it has a certain charm. The mannered nineteenth century language doesn’t seem to fit his mouth, but occasionally he pulls out a good line. For instance after reading one of the killer’s notes to the police Poe, the part-time critic, says, “Even his prose is barbaric.” It’s a funny line, well delivered, that breaks up the movie’s general feeling of doom and gloom.
Director James “V for Vendetta” McTeigue hasn’t imbued the film with the gothic feel it needs to feel suitably creepy, but worse, he completely misses out on the inventiveness of the stories that inspired the movie. Poe’s works were atmospheric studies of madness, sin and horror but here we are given an average tale, which, if dressed up in modern clothes, wouldn’t feel out of place on any prime time police drama.
Inspired though the crimes may have been by Poe’s work, even Poe scholars couldn’t piece together the solution. Not because it is complicated—it isn’t—but because the clues exist only in the world of the film—the viewer doesn’t have a chance to play along. Between the bumpy journey to finding out who the killer is and the logistically impossible enduing “The Raven” has one of the trademarks of Poe’s carefully crafted work.
“The Raven” isn’t a terrible movie, it’s just a really average one. But it’s as if the filmmakers knew it was going to take a critical pounding and threw in some preemptive strikes against reviewers. Early on a critic is dispatched in a very gruesome way and later Poe dismisses criticism as “the easy stuff.” Maybe he’s right, but I’m not wrong about this movie.
In the last year a number of movies about the Iraq war have come and gone, barely making an impact with audiences. Well intentioned, but earnest movies like Lions for Lambs, Redacted and In the Valley of Elah were box office poison to a public inundated by images of the war on television. The latest film to comment on the war is a subversive new “what if” satire co-written by and starring John Cusack.
Partially inspired by Naomi Klein’s article Baghdad Year Zero, and set in the near future, War, Inc. is a vicious spoof set in the fictional desert country Turagistan. The war torn country is occupied by Tamerlane, a private corporation run by a former US Vice-President (Dan Aykroyd). Once they have completely decimated the place, he reasons, why would they then ignore the entrepreneurial opportunities that arise?
Cusack is Hauser, a hit man (he describes himself as “a morally twisted character from a Céline novel” or “like a reject from the Island of Dr. Moreau”) outsourced by Tamerlane to assassinate a Middle Eastern oil minister (Lyubomir Neikov) who wants to build a pipeline through the country thereby interfering with Tamerlane’s sole proprietorship of the land. Posing as a trade show producer, his cover involves setting up a televised party that will include a pop star’s wedding. Complicating matters are a Central Asian sexpot singer Yonica Babyyeah (Hillary Duff) and a snoopy reporter (Marisa Tomei).
War, Inc is kind of like the love-child of Wag the Dog and Grosse Pointe Blank. It’s darkly humorous, veering from slapstick to sincerity and back to satire with a side trip to soap opera land. The unevenness in tone may trouble viewers uncomfortable with sharp shifts in style, but adventurous viewers may find it exhilarating.
Some of the jokes are obvious—the tanks which patrol the Emerald City safe zone are festooned with advertisements à la Nascar—and some good sight gags are dampened by heavy handed direction—visual gags that are seen in wide shots are needlessly emphasized in close ups—but there is an anarchy to the film uncommon in the mainstream.
There is less and less satire on our screens these days because audiences have to work to get the deeper meaning of the piece and Hollywood doesn’t want people to have to think, they simply want them to buy tickets and popcorn. War, Inc, however, is food for thought. It is outrageous and not easily pigeonholed, but is very clear on where it stands on war profiteers, making interesting comments on the involvement of corporations in the wake of war. Are you listening Dick Cheney?
Showing maimed returning soldiers hasn’t been an effective tool for filmmakers to spark comment on the war, perhaps the jokes and satire of War, Inc. are what it will take to get people to finally respond to a movie that provocatively, but slyly comments on the current situation in the Middle East.
Movies are like time machines. No, they don’t physically transport viewers to another time and place but, like dreams and memories, they can take the audience back to ancient Rome or forward in time to a planet populated by giant blue people. I guess that’s why stories about time travel have been so popular on the big screen.
This weekend John Cusack stars in the latest time travel tale, the self-explanatory Hot Tub Time Machine. For Cusack, the idea of getting stuck in the 1980s doesn’t require a time machine. A star for thirty years, he says all he has to do is turn on the TV to be taken back: “Every time I flip through the cable, I have flashbacks.”
In the movie, Cusack and his buddies head back to the ’80s, a decade that one of the more famous time travel movies used as a starting point.
Everyone remembers the time-travelling DeLorean from Back to the Future — chosen because its sleek futuristic look resembled a spaceship — but it wasn’t until the third draft of the script that the filmmakers decided on the famous gull-winged car. Originally the time travel device was a laser, but that concept was rejected because it wasn’t exciting enough. Then, director Robert Zemeckis considered housing the machine in a refrigerator, but nixed the idea over concerns that the movie could inspire kids to crawl into iceboxes and get trapped.
In the original script for Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, in which the titular characters bring historical figures back from history to help them with a school project, the time machine was a 1969 Chevy Van; afraid of inadvertently plagiarizing Back to the Future, the filmmakers went with a phone booth instead.
Probably the most famous time-shifting story is H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine. In the 1960 movie version, director George Pal fashioned the look of the time machine on a sled (a idea borrowed years later for the hardware in Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Timecop), so, he said, it could slide into the future. Paying tribute to the story’s author, he affixed a plaque on the time machine that reads “Manufactured by H. George Wells.”
In 1971, when MGM sold off a warehouse of old props (including Dorothy’s Ruby Slippers), the sled time machine was purchased by a collector who used it as part of a yearly Halloween display at his Burbank, Calif., home.
Mike Enslin (John Cusack) makes his living off of the fear of the unknown.
As the author of a series of books like Ten Nights in Haunted Hotel Rooms he is a professional cynic who doesn’t believe in ghosts, and delights in debunking the supernatural beliefs of others. He’s stayed in hundreds of spooky places, but it isn’t until he checks into room 1408 of New York’s Dolphin Hotel that he experiences true terror for the first time.
Based on a short story by horror specialist Stephen King, 1408 isn’t just a ghost story, it delves into the psychological trauma suffered by Enslin as the result of the death of his young daughter.
At first the only evil thing about room 1408 is the price of the beer nuts in the mini bar, but soon enough strange things start to happen. The clock radio mysteriously turns itself on, and if that isn’t creepy enough, every time it turns on it’s playing a Carpenter’s song. At first he tries to rationalize his feelings of dread— maybe he’s been drugged, the visions he’s seeing are hallucinations, maybe he’s overtired—but soon the terror grips him and he wants out of the hotel. Trouble is he can’t leave. It’s like the Hotel California, except with ghostly apparitions, paintings that come to life and that damn annoying Carpenter’s song. The question is: Will he survive the night? Or will he become room 1408’s fifty-seventh victim?
1408 has some spooky scenes and some OK special effects, but unlike The Body, another King short story that inspired Stand By Me, 1408 doesn’t have enough meat on its bones to warrant a long-form film. Director Mikael Håfström takes a story that might have made an interesting hour-long episode of The Outer Limits and stretched it to a long 94 minutes by inserting lots of filler scenes of John Cusack making scared faces.
The psychological catalyst for the story—the death of Enslin’s daughter and his subsequent loss of faith in a God that would allow a child to die—has been done before, most recently in The Reaping from earlier this year. More interesting is the idea that by debunking the idea of ghosts Enslin is somehow taking people’s hope of life after death away. Neither idea is explored in any depth, but at least the latter concept adds some weight to the paper thin story.
1408 has a great trailer but fails to deliver the spine-tingling goods.
“It’s the end of the world as we know it… and I feel bored.” Nothing like a quick paraphrase of a classic R.E.M. song to sum up my feelings toward the latest end of the world CGI spectacular from Roland Emmerich. Unlike the 1970’s disaster genre, which tended to focus on one particular mishap, like a boat sinking or an office tower bursting into flames, “2012” is an all-purpose disaster movie. Emmerich lays it on thick, utilizing earthquakes, tsunamis and every other natural catastrophe in the Master of Disaster Handbook, to bring life as we know it to a screeching halt.
The film centers around a global doomsday event coinciding with the end of the Mayan Long Count Calendar’s current cycle on December 21, 2012. In other words, four days before Christmas, 2012, the world goes boom. California falls into the sea, the South Pole ends up somewhere in Wisconsin and the Himalayas are submerged underwater. Staying one step ahead of the devastation is divorcée Jackson Curtis (John Cusack), who pulls out all the stops to get his ex-wife, kids and a handful of stragglers to a lifesaving Noah’s Arc in China called Genesis.
The fifteen year old boy in me enjoyed watching the world blow up real good; the adult in me, however, wanted characters I could believe in. Or at least care about a little bit. It’s not exactly the actor’s fault that I didn’t warm to / care about anyone on screen, they were simply doing their best with a script that had been run through the Cliché-O-Matic before filming began.
Occasionally the cheesy dialogue raises a smile. During a lover’s spat one character says to another, “I feel like something is pulling us apart,” as an earthquake splits the floor between them but more often than not each and every character is saddled with dialogue that would make Ed Wood Jr beam with pride. As all hell is breaking loose the president says to his daughter, “you look just like your mother when you get mad,” and everything is the “most important (insert event here) in the history of mankind!” A thousand monkeys banging away on a thousand typewriters for a week could probably write this script.
But clever wordplay is not why we go see movies like this. We go to revel in a make believe orgy of destruction. Nothing much happens in the first forty minutes however—we meet the large cast, but by the time George Segal shows up the cameo quotient begins to resemble an episode of “The Love Boat”—but when the earth’s crust begins to destabilize at the forty minute mark many spectacular scenes of world demolition follow. Hope you have a huge appetite for destruction because for the next two hours that’s pretty much all there is. “2012” becomes an end of the world spectacle to end all end of the world spectacles, which, works if a doom boom is all you’re interested in, but after a while the elaborate special effects becomes visual white noise.
Emmerich could have kept up interest by adding some real drama beyond timers counting down to zero or placing the hero in life or death situations that he is most certainly going to survive, or by shortening the running time—at a butt numbing 2 hours and 40 minutes “2012” feels like the end of the world is playing out in real time—but instead was content to fill the screen with flashy CGI and little else.
“The Raven,” a new thriller starring John Cusack as mystery writer Edgar Allen Poe, is a convergence of fact, fiction and part police procedural. Poe must help the police track down a serial killer who is using his stories as inspiration, before the love-of-his-life becomes the final victim. It’s “CSI” meets E.A.P.
