Dream Home: Grade B

B

Dream Home (2010)

Josie Ho, Anthony Wong Chau-Sang, Eason Chan, Hee Ching Paw, Kwok Cheung Tsang; Director Ho-Cheung Pang (Cantonese Chinese; Subtitled).

There is a movie in theaters now with Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz called “Dream House.” A family becomes the target of a serial killer in that movie. I haven’t seen it.

This film is called Dream Home, and is from the point of view of a serial killer. A young woman has scrimped and saved for a lifetime to afford the perfect apartment by the sea. But alas, the building is fully occupied and nothing is for sale. Solution? Kill some occupants, creating instant vacancies.

In fairness, I need to say the victims are not just “killed,” for that sounds tidy. No, these victims are violently, bloodily slaughtered, using knives, boards, fists, and garrotes. This is an extremely violent, bloody, Hong Kong horror/slasher film. Nevertheless, I found it enjoyable.

One reason is that there is a balance between the young woman’s ordinary everydayness, at work, with her friends, with her family, versus her forays into serial murder, so you don't overdose. There is no attempt to provide psychological continuity between those two halves of herself. The movie plays it as if the gory murders were the most reasonable thing in the world for a person to do. There is no suggestion that she is a conflicted Jekyll/Hyde. So realism is out the window, but still, the story is marginally plausible.

Also, the murders are very creative, almost humorous. What I mean is that they are so gory and brutal, you can’t for a moment take them seriously. They are just real enough to make you gasp, and you will. For creative murders in the filmic art, you can’t beat these. I doubt that you have seen murder by vacuum cleaner, for example. Finally, the acting is better than not bad. So if you can get past some extreme violence and blood and guts, this is one of the better in the Hong Kong slasher/horror genre.

Righteous Kill: Grade D

D
Righteous Kill (2008)
Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino. Director Jon Avnet.

“Camera suspense” is the dishonest technique of restricting the camera’s scope so the viewer cannot tell what is going on. Typically, there will be a tight shot on a person’s face, but we are not allowed to see what that person sees. Or the camera shows the actor’s feet walking along a sidewalk but no surroundings, and we’re not even sure which character it is. These, and similar techniques are designed to add suspense to a scene that does not have any. Camera suspense is a crude attempt to cover up bad writing or bad directing, or both. This film is entirely based on camera suspense.

A second structural deception is the “And then I woke up” gambit. That’s the way ninth-graders end stories they have started but cannot resolve. This movie doesn’t use that technique literally, but it inserts arbitrary writer’s tricks to end a story, and those tricks inevitably invalidate much of what has gone before, making them a slap in the face of the viewer. Like camera suspense, it is deeply dishonest, a cheap cover-up for poor writing.

DeNiro and Pacino are NYPD homicide detectives after a serial killer. There is suspicion in the department that the killer might be a cop. In the end, the killer does not shoot a victim dead enough, he identifies his assailant from his hospital bed, and the killer is caught, but it’s not who you think, because of the dishonest writing that just jerks the story to a close, so who cares.

The dialog is terrible, full of clichés, platitudes, lame smart remarks, and statements of the obvious. The story reeks of racism and sexism. Granted, it is a cop movie, but it does not skillfully use racism and sexism as story telling devices. Rather it is just an unself-conscious racist and sexist movie. It could have been made in the 60’s.

The acting is uniformly abominable. The characters are not developed nor crafted by the actors. DeNiro gives about 5 minutes of acting and I saw about one minute from Pacino. Otherwise they were asleep throughout. These two mega-stars could have saved this movie with the right director, but my hunch is that all the filmmakers were so star-struck that they forgot they needed to tell a story. Redeeming virtue? DeNiro and Pacino. They really do have charisma, even when they are sleepwalking.

Antibodies: Grade B

B
Antibodies (2005)
Wotan Wilke Möhring, André Hennicke, Hauke Diekamp. Writer-director Christian Alvart. (German, subtitled).

This update of Silence of the Lambs adds a religious ambiguity to the investigator but does not break new ground. Maybe we are just burned out on the serial killer theme, or maybe nobody can ever top Anthony Hopkins for emanating sheer pathological menace.

Möhring is the killer, captured by police in a riveting short scene before the titles, perhaps one of the best scenes in the movie. In prison, he won’t speak. A country policeman (Hennicke) interviews him in connection with a missing child in his town, and the killer suddenly starts speaking in cryptic riddles with the intention of messing with his mind, as Hopkins did with Foster. The policeman becomes obsessed with ascertaining whether this prisoner is the killer of the girl in his town. The killer claims she was dead when he got there, but he saw the real killer. He drops enough clues that the policeman begins to suspect his own son (Kiekamp). The thought drives the policeman nearly mad from religious guilt and a heavy-handed Biblical theme of Abraham and Isaac is played out. That could have been a good theme for recasting the whole story, but it is just thrown in at the end.

The directing and cinematography, though often bloody and violent, are outstanding and raise the film above average. Acting is only average though. The imprisoned killer is intelligent but also just batty, covering his cell walls with slogans and crude drawings of mutilation. Möhring does not have the stillness Hopkins used to convey menace. Policeman Hennicke is distractingly histrionic. The story sags badly while he discovers his shadow side amidst much breast-beating angst. There are a few late-breaking surprises that are just too clever, and the happy ending contradicts the film's noirish mood.

Mr. Brooks: Grade D

D

Mr. Brooks (2007)

Kevin Costner, Demi Moore, Dane Cook, William Hurt. Co-writer-Director Bruce Evans.

This should have been a good movie. It has a great story premise, a mild mannered businessman (Costner), who is addicted to killing. He even goes to an AA meeting and announces that he is “an addict.” Demi Moore is a troubled detective hunting Costner and Cook is a younger fellow who wants Costner to teach him how to be a serial killer. The second big plus is a gimmick in which the killer’s conscience is portrayed as a character (Hurt) so the killer and his conscience can have on-screen dialog. “Raines,” a recent TV show that sadly, didn’t make it, involved Jeff Goldblum as a detective with a visible alter-ego. Beats a Shakespearean soliloquy. Add to those benefits a strong cast and some very good cinematography and you should have an excellent movie.

So what went wrong? Two things: the acting and the writing. The acting is flat, mechanical, and dull from the beginning, to the point where we just don’t engage with any of the characters. I wasn’t convinced that any of these players were strong actors to begin with and this movie confirms my opinion. The bad writing is more difficult to fathom. After a strong first hour, it inexplicably goes south, becoming increasingly stilted, unimaginative, and implausible. There was a promise of character development in the beginning, with Costner trying to quit his killing habit, but nothing comes of it. When Costner goes to kiss his sleeping daughter and she suddenly lunges up and stabs him in the neck with a large pair of scissors, I knew the writers had become desperate for ideas. And that’s no spoiler either, because it didn’t really happen. Ha-ha. It’s just an illustration of how stupid the writing becomes, serially killing what could have been, with better actors, or with a director who could make these actors dance, a potentially great film.

Zodiac: Grade C

C

Zodiac (2007)

Mark Ruffalo, Jake Gyllenhaal, Robert Downey Jr. Director David Fincher

The Zodiac killer terrorized San Francisco in the 1960s and 70’s but was never caught. Some murders are shown early in the movie but the bulk of the story is about the police investigation, which never gets off the ground and results in nothing. There is no tension in the story, just false leads, dead ends, and jurisdictional disputes. Early in the movie, RDJ plays Woodward against JG’s Bernstein in scenes gratuitously evoking All The President’s Men. Ruffalo as the police captain gives the best performance in the movie despite a stupid Columbo shtick that has him running around in a wrinkled raincoat. The period costumes and sets are so meticulous that they actually distract from the drama. You find yourself saying, “Wow, look at that Coke machine!” Even so, there were several dialog anachronisms. I liked the way Donovan’s “Hurdy-gurdy Man” took a sinister aspect by being associated with the killings, but period music was not used throughout. The real mystery is why nobody saw fit to edit this 2.5 hour movie to make a story out of it.