Movie Reviews – Making A Long Story Short

A Psychological Thriller To Sink Your Teeth Into: Panic Room (2002)

Panic Room (2002) is a psychological thriller you can really sink your teeth into.

Jodie Foster is my go-to for psychological horror. Since finding fame as Iris in Taxi Driver (1971), Jodie Foster has been pegged as the gritty female lead for a number of psychological movies like The Accused (1988), The Silence of The Lambs (1991) and Flight Plan (2005).

Directed by David Fincher, Panic Room (2002) had the benefit of Se7en (1995), The Game (1997), and Fight Club (1999). Hot on the tail of Fight Club, Fincher uses a lot of the same camera angles- the rapid zooming in and across the brownstone house to give an idea of its enormity- which show the playground these robbers have to run around in. Fede Alvarez might have been influenced by Fincher in his creation of Don’t Breathe (2016), another psychological thriller which relies on unusual shots to move the audience around the house.

Fincher was quick to distance Panic Room from his other, more critically acclaimed movies by hailing it ‘popcorn movie-making […] good B-movie stuff.’

Newly divorced Meg Altman (Jodie Foster) and her daughter Sarah (Kristen Stewart) view a house on Manhattan’s upper West side to start their life afresh, away from Meg’s cheating ex. The estate agent sweeps into the master bedroom on the uppermost floor of the house and Meg’s forehead wrinkles.

‘That’s strange. Is this room smaller than it should be?’ she says.

The panic room nestled behind a secret door in the master bedroom doesn’t seem to be much of a selling point, really.

With the purchase made, the mother and daughter sit down over a glass of wine and cola respectively. Watching her mother pick at a sad salad, Sarah says, ‘Fuck him. Fuck her too.’

They toast to that.

The pair are asleep by the early hours of the morning, Sarah comforted by her night light, and her mother by the glass of wine which follows her from shot to shot. As night falls Burnham (Forest Whitaker), Raoul (Dwight Yoakam), and Junior (Jared Leto) enter the house just loud enough, of course, to wake Meg.

panic room leto and whitaker — Junior (Jared Leto) and Burnham (Forest Whitaker)

When Burnham has no luck with the front door key (rookie mistake) he enters the house through a hatch in the roof. The audience no doubt wonders why a house with a security system worth what must be thousands of dollars has such a weak point.

Whitaker fans will be happy to know that Burnham is the thief with a heart, the thug with a conscience. His eyes widens as he sees the night light, and when he lets the other two thugs in downstairs he says the job’s off. That’s it- he’s done. He wasn’t counting on a woman and child being there.

But of course he isn’t. Despite his reservations about Raoul- who increases the stakes by carrying a gun- Burnham grudgingly agrees to continue with the job, just as long as he gets his hands on the millions supposedly hid in the panic room.

Meg spots the thieves on her security cameras.

Panic Room sets everything you need to know up in the first fifteen minutes. A lot like Don’t Breathe in this respect, it dedicates most of the film to the psychological nightmare Meg and Sarah have to overcome, with little preamble about the specifics of their situation. Panic Room has been criticised as having a bare-bones sort of script, but what would be added to the film by seeing Meg’s husband cheat? What can be gained form seeing the messy divorce, custody battle and all? Would the movie have the same effect if, half way through, the plot was still plodding through Meg crying in the bath?

Panic Room is a psychological thriller you can really sink your teeth into. And I love the gender imbalance. Burnham is worried about continuing with the job because his conscience rails against hurting a woman and a child. He does not consider that he will be chased, fought against, defeated. He assumed that the woman and child will defer to his plan, screaming hysterically, arms in the air.

Panic Room is a B-movie which defies all over B-movies: the carefully crafted cat and mouse game makes for an intense watch. It’s more nail biting than popcorn biting.

The Best Suspense Movie of The Decade: Don’t Breathe

In the 2013 suspense horror Don’t Breathe the lines of good and bad are blurred

The new Netflix release Don’t Breathe (2016) opens with Rocky’s (Jane Levy’s) bloody body being dragged down the street. This does nothing to dissipate the tension that runs throughout the movie.

Far from the stereotypical horror, Don’t Breathe blurs the lines of good and bad. Director Fede Alvarez does not rely on supernatural horrors, instead he shows us that the most frightening things exist in real life.

Reunited with Levy, who also played the protagonist in his 2013 movie Evil Dead (a contender for the best horror movie of the decade), Alvarez creates a complicated relationship between desire, crime, and ultimately, the will to survive.

Don’t Breathe follows three thieves: Rocky, Alex (Dylan Minnette), and Money (Daniel Zovatto) as they enter the home of an Iraq veteran (Stephen Lang) and attempt to steal his money.

The thieves are surprisingly easy to sympathise with bar the paper gangster Money, who complicates the robbery by bringing a gun. Alvarez uses Alex to depict the moralistic burglar: he is outraged that Money has brought a weapon, and wonders aloud how it will effect their jail sentence if caught.

Rocky’s home life is less than desirable. She needs to steal from the veteran to take her sister away from her alcoholic mother. This desire leads her to travel further and further into the depths of the man’s house, and discover more horrors along the way.

Alex is more of a mystery. His main motivation appears to be quick cash, and the crush he is harboring for Rocky, which Money quickly shoots down.

‘You think just because you jerk off to her Instagram selfies, that makes you a Romeo?’

In Alvarez’ world everything comes together. At least at first.

Alex father works for a home security company, so they can break into the man’s house without a sound. The man is a reclusive veteran who lives on a street full of abandoned houses meaning the three thieves can enter undetected. Coincidentally, the man is blind.

Any hope of a quick burglary unravels when the trio enter the house.

Money gases the old man to sleep in his own bed. Minutes later the old man appears in the living room, asking, ‘Who, who’s there?’

money pulls gun — Money pulls a gun on the veteran

The audience is almost fooled into thinking the man is a feeble pensioner. Until he attacks Money.

Don’t Breathe is heavy on the visuals and the sound effects. There is scarcely any dialogue as the tables turn on the thieves and it becomes clear that they exist within the blind man’s world. Every movement, every breath, is a step closer to death.

The most memorable scene is one in which the vet flips the electricity switch. He then uses objects he has placed around the basement (a fan here, a piece of wood there) to maneuver around, while Rocky and Alex are running scared. In the darkness their eyes are wide with fright.

Stephen Lang is perhaps better known for his stage work, but might be recognised for his role in Avatar (2009). His role in Don’t Breathe is certainly a delicate one: his clouded eyes and tense shoulders make him look haunted, and as his backstory unravels, they become representative of the monster he is.

Jane Levy is the perfect counterpart to Lang. When his character is horrific, she is horrified. Ultimately, Don’t Breathe is a battle of wits between Rocky and the veteran, with the audience backing Rocky. Her desire for the better life for herself and her sister urges her forward, much to the dismay of Alex.

‘Rocky. The door’s right fucking there. We can leave right now.’

In the moment where she could leave, Rocky stays and shows herself to be a moralistic person worthy of the audience’s respect. As the movie progresses, the blind veteran falls further from the idealised picture of the victimised elderly man, and becomes a villain in his own right.

‘There’s nothing a man cannot do when he accepts the fact that there is no God.’

What is most interesting about Don’t Breathe is the power balance between the two opposing forces. It is a fresh take on the prototypical horror movie, in which the death of the protagonist is a foregone conclusion.

Ocean’s Eight: Transcends Gender Bias

Far too many critics focus on the gender-swapped cast

After reading some reviews for the new installment in the Ocean’s franchise, I was worried that this highly anticipated film would be another case of Ghostbusters (2016), a film that tries to emulate the original and fails horribly, dragging the gender-swapped female cast down along with it.

After seeing Ocean’s Eight (2018), I am convinced that too many reviewers focus on the cast being all female, as opposed to the original all male case in the Steven Soderbergh directed movies. Gary Ross takes on the role of director for the 2018 installment, and his style of directing brings a different dynamic to the films.

The Soderbergh directed Ocean’s films all follow a pattern: lovable rogue Danny Ocean assembles a team of talented misfits and relieves an unlikable antagonist of their most prized possession. Ocean’s Eight follows much the same premise.

Debbie Oceans (Sandra Bullock) has just been released from jail after serving five years after a con went wrong. Her then boyfriend Claude Becker (Richard Armitage) handed her over to the police to secure his own freedom.

Out of jail, Debbie contacts her long time partner in crime Lou (Cate Blanchett) and the pair find a bunch of A to Z list celebrities to abet them in their goal of stealing a £150,000,000 Cartier necklace from around Daphne Kluger’s (Anne Hathaway’s) neck at a gala. This is where the similarities to the Soderbergh directed films end.

Blanchett is not used to her full potential. The audience (and critics alike) are disappointed as an actress whose repertoire ranges from Elizabeth 1st to Bob Dylan functions mainly as a plot device. She gives Debbie a place to live, she warns Debbie that her desire for revenge against Becker will lead her right back to prison. It seems that Ross’ chief focus for Lou is to wear gregarious clothing.

Bullock plays the cool and collected Ocean masterfully, and when she tells Lou that she is not going back to prison the audience is sure she has a trick up her sleeve.

Many of the star cast did not get enough screen time. All of the individual characters come across as almost fully formed people in their own right. The time constraint means that the audience is left wanting more. Nine Ball (Rihanna) is seen furiously tapping away at her keyboard, but not much else.

Amita’s (Mindy Kaling’s) relationship with her mother is an interesting one, but the audience only ever sees this dynamic as a motivation for Amita to become a criminal. Tammy (Sarah Paulson) portrays herself as the clean-cut mother, but her shed stocked full of stolen goods says otherwise. Snippets of personalities are typical of the Ocean’s franchise, and are perhaps representative of a world where people work together for a month to make a quick buck.

And of course there are moments where the audience has to suspend their disbelief. Why would eight women, some of them entirely straight-laced, agree to steal a necklace worth £150,000,000? Why does Cartier agree to loan the necklace to Kluger for a gala event? Why does the fraud investigator in charge of finding the stolen necklace (James Corden) meet with Debbie and agree to frame Becker?

All in all, Ocean’s Eight stays true to the Ocean’s franchise. In typical Ocean fashion Debbie outsmarts her ex-boyfriend, steals the jewels, and splits the money between her partners.

Being a criminal has never looked so good.

Cult Classics: Donnie Darko (2002)

’28 days… 6 hours… 42 minutes… 12 seconds. That… is when the world… will end.’

What makes Richard Kelly’s ‘Donnie Darko’ a cult classic?

A Times article stated that: ‘”Cult” used to indicate a secret pleasure, a film you and a select band crept out late at night to see at the scuzziest cinema in town.’ Fatima Fernandez suggests a ‘more including definition‘ in which cult ‘movies were box office-bombs that were rejected by the mainstream media but ultimately embraced by a more obscure audience.’

‘Donnie Darko’ depicts a ‘tangent universe’ (bear with me), a world which is created when the fabric of the fourth dimension becomes corrupt. This new ‘tangent universe’ can only survive for so many weeks on its own before it collapses in on itself under the pressure of the audience’s incredulity.

The seasoned cult fanatic who has read all the information on the (extensive) Donnie Darko website might describe the plot as follows: the majority of Donnie Darko is set in an alternative reality that has been created by a corruption in the fabric of the fourth dimension. In this tangent universe the protagonist (Donnie) is visited by a man in a rabbit costume (Frank) who tells him ’28 days… 6 hours… 42 minutes… 12 seconds. That… is when the world… will end.’ Frank guides him on his journey to send the artifact (the jet engine that falls into Donnie’s bedroom) back to the present universe to stop the corrupt fabric of time destroying the real (present) universe.

Frank, an individual who has died in the tangent universe while at a costume party, is one of the ‘Manipulated dead,’ someone who understands that they are operating in an alternative reality. Frank, along with the ‘Manipulated Living,’ further Donnie on his journey to fixing the deteriorating fabric of reality. It should be noted that the ‘Manipulated Dead’ have a greater impact upon Donnie’s journey than the ‘Manipulated Living,’ as the former group have a better understanding of what steps need to be taken to repair the reality vortex.

And breathe.

To add another layer to the Richard Kelly’s narrative, at first Donnie does not understand that he is in an alternative reality. It is only with the aid of Frank and the others that he begins to understand that he alone can stop the world ending in ’28 days… 6 hours… 42 minutes’ and ‘…12 seconds.’ No one could understand such a complicated movie on the first viewing: I only understand it (partially) because Kelly created ‘The Philosophy of Time Travel,‘ a book which one of the characters wrote that is only available on the Donnie Darko website. So what drove the first time audience of Donnie Darko to watch it a second, third, or even fourth time?

Donnie Darko was not well received. The Domestic Total Gross was $517,375, nothing compared to Pulp Fiction’s $107,928,762 gross. Both are cult classic films, so what made Donnie Darko’s reception so poor?

The film was released not long after the September 11th attacks, which meant that there was little advertising by the production company and little desire to see the movie for the American public. It only grossed $110,494 on its opening weekend, and all signs pointed to writer and director Richard Kelly’s second film being a ‘box office-bomb.’

Luckily for Kelly, VHS and DVD saved ‘Donnie Darko.’ In New York the Pioneer Theatre held night time screenings of the film for over two years. Peter Bradshaw attributes the renewed interest in the film to its re-release, stating that ‘Donnie Darko has a political and satirical flavour that wasn’t as strong at the time: it is set in 1988, the chastened end of Ronald Reagan’s comforting reign.’ He does not specify what this political undertone is.

‘Donnie Darko’ seems to more accurately fit in with Fernandez’s suggestion that cult classics do poorly at the box office and are then rejuvenated, although the film has too broad an audience to be considered an ‘obscure’ audience. Maybe ‘Donnie Darko’ would have been an immediate hit if the timing had been better, if the advertising had been stronger. Maybe, as Richard Kelly said about his 2002 science fiction, reality bending story about a 16-year-old boy entrusted with saving reality as we know it, ‘Sometimes films need time to marinate.’