They Wait - Ghost stories are tricky. When done well, you get The Sixth Sense or The Stir of Echoes. When done poorly, you get derivative crap like The Invisible. They Wait falls somewhere in between. The film is very competent, but it feels very by-the-numbers. The arc goes just as you would expect: some haunting type event or events occur; certain characters are in-tune with the spirit world and see these things; there is a mystery to be solved so that the spirits can rest; spiritually in-tune person is reluctant, but relents and tries to solve the mystery; mystery solved and somebody’s back-story turns out to be not so clean; spirit can rest in peace; spiritually in-tune person no longer haunted. They Wait’s angle is that it takes place in a small Asian-American community in Vancouver, so the ghosts are Asian there’s a lot of talk about Chinese mysticism. But this is just garnish. At its heart, the movie is still your typical ghost story. Jaime King plays a mother whose little boy who gets his soul kidnapped by an angry ghost. She and her husband have just come to Vancouver for her husband’s uncle’s funeral. The family stays in the old factory/apartment building her Chinese aunt-in-law lives in. Of course weird stuff begins to happen and there are some good scares along the way. The problem of course is that there were no real surprises. Jaime King does a good job as does everybody else (save for a pretty much wasted Michael Biehn—why bother with him if he only has like three minutes of screen time?). The film is competently directed and looks ready for distribution. It’s a pretty easy sell and I can imagine the pitch being like “think Sixth Sense meets Dark Water” or something to that effect. The most interesting thing about the movie for me is that I bet the writer really, really, really wishes the movie, The Bone Collector had never come out, because that title would have been absolutely perfect for this film. Damn you, Denzel.
Frontieres – I understand why they keep making these movies, but I don’t think they are cool in the slightest. This is Texas Chainsaw Massacre set in the French countryside with Neo-Nazis. It is survival horror in the same vein as Hostel 2, Captivity, The Descent (which I quite enjoyed actually) and a slew of others. I wish the movie had been something else entirely, but it was a Midnight Madness feature so I can’t say I was expecting depth. However, the film alludes to the social/political turmoil going on in France right now, specifically pertaining to the growingly disaffected Muslim youths who live in the French ghettoes called banlieues. Could you have made a smart horror movie that also served as commentary on the situation? I think so, but this movie clearly isn’t it.
What irks me about these types of films is the sheer brutality and misanthropy involved. For some reason, I can watch a woman get strangled with her own guts in Mother of Tears and kind of laugh/cringe, but here just watching a huge brute of a man wail blows onto the waif-ish protagonist played by Karina Testa feels wrong and unclean. In the former, the whole thing is so absurd like watching your little brother stumble around with spaghetti sauce on his shirt pretending he’s been shot. It’s fake and everyone knows it. In the latter, the violence strives for hyper-realism and that makes it very uncomfortable. It feels like something a sadist would get off on. There are not really any sympathetic characters in the movie either, except for maybe one, a Muslim kid named Farid, but he gets the worst of it. The movie just feels relentlessly nihilistic. I prefer my horror flicks to either be trips into absurdity or terror, sometimes a mixture of both. These types of film just seem to revel in how squeamish they can make the audience. Not my cup of tea.
Rendition – Why Does Gavin Hood Hate America? So far, this is the best movie I’ve seen at the festival. I love well-crafted thrillers. Like Syriana before it, Rendition tackles the most pressing current issue: the U.S. war against terrorism. Specifically, the movie is about the methods the U.S. uses to obtain its intelligence these days. The title as Peter Sarsgaard’s character explains comes from the U.S. policy called extraordinary rendition. It is a policy that allows the U.S. to detain and export its own citizens to places where torture is legal. Since 9/11, the policy has been used to interrogate countless U.S. citizens. When these people are detained, they are denied legal counsel or even the right to contact their families. There was a widely publicized case that came to light last year about a man named Maher Arar who was actually Canadian. Anyway, the film focuses on a man, Anwar El-Ibrahimi, who is accosted by the CIA on his way home from South Africa. He is then sent outside the U.S. to be tortured and interrogated. The narrative has a few threads, although not all equally satisfying. Reese Witherspoon plays his wife who is desperate to find any information she can about her mysteriously absent husband. She does a good job, but her story kind of fades to the back with respects to the other main stories. Those two stories are about one C.I.A. operative's (Jake Gyllenhaal) internal struggle between conscience and duty and a young Muslim girl trying to rebel against the course her father has decided her life should take. Both are handled very well and although Gyllenhaal's arc is sort of predictable, it is nonetheless satisfying. Save for a few lines towards, the end, Hood's characters never sermonize and each is developed rather nicely. Definitely worth seeing again when it's released this Fall.
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