Italian Horror Blog-a-thon: DVD of the Week: Dellamorte Dellamore (a.k.a. Cemetery Man)

NOTE: This post is part of the Italian Horror Blog-a-thon over at Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies.

Michele Soavi got his start as an actor with small roles in Italian horror films like Lucio Fulci’s City of the Living Dead (1980) and then worked in various capacities (actor, screenwriter and assistant) on five of Joe D’Amato’s movies. Soavi went on to work as a second assistant director on Dario Argento’s Tenebre (1982) and was promoted to first assistant director on Argento’s Phenomena (1985). He also directed a couple of music videos and this led to his directorial feature debut with Stagefright (1987).

After a spell working on other people’s films again, Soavi got another opportunity to direct with The Church (1989) which was a much larger film than Stagefright in terms of budget. This was followed by The Sect (1990) and finally the independently produced Cemetery Man (1994) (a.k.a. Dellamorte Dellamore) which was based on a popular Italian comic book called Dylan Dog and went on to become an international success.

Francesco Dellamorte (Rupert Everett) is a cemetery watchman who kills the living dead when they rise from their graves (“returners” as he calls them) along with his oafish assistant, Gnaghi (Francois Hadji-Lazaro). He can’t explain the phenomenon – to him, dispatching the living dead is simply a job. One day, Francesco spots a beautiful young widow (Anna Falchi) and is immediately attracted to her but she wants nothing to do with him.

After a lusty tryst with the widow that begins with a passionate kiss in a decrepit crypt and ends up with them making love on her husband’s fresh grave only to end badly for her, Dellamorte starts thinking more about the living dead epidemic. In a vision, he is told by Death to start killing the living, that way he won’t have to kill them when they’re dead. And so, he goes from night watchman to mass murderer. Dellamorte certainly isn’t your conventional protagonist. For starters, he reads old copies of the local phone book in his spare time. He seems indifferent towards life and death, content to merely exist. Only the young widow is able to make him feel passionate about life again and then she dies.

Anna Falchi, aside from being a stunning, sexy beauty with those pouty lips and curvaceous, hour-glass figure, plays three different roles and even gets to be one of the undead. It’s easy to see why Rupert Everett’s character falls so hard for her and repeatedly.

Soavi sets the darkly comic tone of his film right from the first scene where Dellamorte quickly and efficiently dispatches one of the living dead. The cemetery setting provides a rich, gothic canvas for which the filmmaker to paint his subversive horror film on and to immerse us in at every opportunity. Working with horror maestros like Fulchi, Argento and Lamberto Bava certainly paid off for Soavi who expertly orchestrates the carnage in such a way that ranks his film right up there with other splatstick horror classics like Re-Animator (1985), Evil Dead 2 (1987) and Braindead (1992). He has the living dead riding around on motorcycles and Gnaghi ends up falling in love with the disembodied head of a living dead girl that evokes the aforementioned Re-Animator only in a sweeter, more naively romantic way.

Like those movies, Soavi’s film isn’t afraid to thumb its nose at convention and smash a few taboos along the way. Cemetery Man has everything you’d want from a cult horror film: stylish camerawork (that, at times, evokes Sam Raimi during his Evil Dead days), cool gore effects, naked voluptuous women and a wicked sense of humor.

Special Features:

“Death is Beautiful” is a retrospective featurette made specifically for this DVD. Soavi cites the three filmmakers that inspired him to become a filmmaker as D’Amato, Argento and Terry Gilliam. He worked for all three at various points in his life and learned so much about the art of filmmaking. Soavi talks about how he got involved in the film and how he was hesitant, at first, because he felt that the screenplay was childish and he didn’t get the sense of humor. This is an excellent look at the making of this movie with Falchi and several key cast members also interviewed.

Also included are a theatrical trailer and a decent Michele Soavi biography.

The Crazies

With the recent threats of Anthrax, SARS, bird and swine flu, The Crazies (1973), with its deadly viral outbreak affecting a small town in Pennsylvania, has become more relevant than ever before. Case in point: the impending remake starring Radha Mitchell and Timothy Olyphant. Made between zombie film classics Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Dawn of the Dead (1979), The Crazies is the missing link, of sorts – a warm-up for Dawn in that it explores many of the same themes but you can see filmmaker George A. Romero working them out in The Crazies.

Romero starts things off with a bang as a father smashes up his house before setting it on fire with his two kids and wife (whom he already killed) still inside. No explanation is given for his destructive behavior which makes his actions that much more chilling. David (W.G. McMillan) and Clank (Harold Wayne Jones) are two voluntary firefighters that rush to put out the fire. A highly contagious virus, code named Trixie, has infected some of the town’s inhabitants, turning mild-mannered people into crazed killers. The military has moved in and army soldiers are everywhere. David’s girlfriend is a nurse named Judy (Lane Caroll) and she shows up to work and finds all kinds of soldiers in white hazmat suits setting up base camp. David and Clank realize that something big is going down and decide to find Judy and split.

Naturally, the military doesn’t give a crap about the townsfolk and are thinking only about natural security, even considering dropping a nuclear bomb over the town in order to burn out the infected area. The military are in a state of controlled chaos as they try to contain the infected with varying degrees of success. A dance is broken up as martial law is imposed. Innocent people are woken up and taken from their homes, including crying children seized from their beds. David, Clank and Judy cross paths and joins forces with Artie (Day of the Dead’s Richard Liberty) and his daughter, Kathie (Lynn Lowry), after they are all captured by the military. They manage to escape and hole up in an abandoned country club as they try to figure out what to do next. As he did with Night of the Living Dead and to even greater effect in Dawn of the Dead, Romero explores the dynamic between these characters, including how they cope with the stress brought on by the dangerous situation they find themselves in.

The Crazies features slightly cheesy pre-Tom Savini gore that looks a lot like red paint but this only adds to the film’s low-budget charm. There is also a refreshing lack of recognizable movie stars. Instead, Romero populates his film with a cast of average (in the best sense of the word) looking people that could have been picked up right off the street. This kind of casting gives the film an authenticity, an almost documentary-like feel. The amateurish, unpolished delivery of dialogue by the cast also adds to the realism. It is like these people are being caught on camera during an unguarded moment in their lives, like we are intruding. For example, we are introduced to David and Judy in bed having a conversation that an actual couple might have. It is touches like this that help us get to know these characters so that we empathize with their plight later on.

Also adding to the realistic feeling is the film being shot on location in actual homes and buildings. Romero starts off with a claustrophobic vibe as most of the action takes place in-doors but by the film’s climax, he moves the action outdoors and really opens things up with an exciting chase that takes place in the countryside. There are all kinds of striking images in The Crazies, like a doctor with a gas mask on tending to two children with burns. There are chilling images of bodies being stripped of their valuables, bagged and then burned. In another scene, a crazed priest sets himself on fire a la the infamous Buddhist monk who did the same thing to protest the Vietnam War. Perhaps the most memorable image is that of an infected old lady repeatedly stabbing a soldier with a knitting needle only to resume her knitting as it nothing happened.

The army comes across as ineffectual as represented by Major Ryder (Harry Spillman) who seems like a bureaucrat in a military uniform. He looks disinterested and spends his time waiting for supplies to arrive, signing forms and giving orders that don’t always seem to be followed. Ryder gives an understandably upset local doctor sarcastic answers to some honest questions. His superior, Colonel Peckem (Lloyd Hollar) is a little better. He seems organized and actually knows what he’s doing. Even though he may well-informed, he meets resistance from his superiors, politicians far away from the situation who have no real understanding of what’s going on. Peckem is a rare, sane voice in a chaotic situation. Dr. Watts (Richard France, who would go on to play another scientist in Romero’s Dawn of the Dead), one of the developers of Trixie is brought in and complains to anyone who will listen. He has no problem voicing his opinions, openly criticizing his military handlers. The film cuts between scenes of the overwhelmed and disorganized military and the protagonists from the town just trying to find a way out of this nightmarish scenario.

The Crazies began with filmmaker Paul McCullough who wrote a screenplay called The Mad People about people who went crazy after a weapon spilled. Romero remembered, “it was really a character piece, it was people doing things, doing life that you see in the papers every day.” The military subplot in the McCullough’s script was only featured in the first act. Producer Lee Hessel agreed to finance and distribute the film but only if Romero rewrote the script to focus on the military taking over the town. Hessel had previously worked with Romero on There’s Always Vanilla (1971). Another change Romero made to the story was to have more action as per Hessel’s request. The budget was set at approximately $270,000 and the film was shot over 40 days. This was the first time that Romero worked with Screen Actors Guild actors and 35mm stock. Despite Hessel’s best intentions, The Crazies was poorly distributed and released under several different titles all over the country. It was not given a wide release but was eventually rediscovered on home video.

The Crazies takes the template Romero established with Night of the Living Dead and adds a political component, showing the ineptitude of military leaders. In this respect, The Crazies is a warm-up for Dawn of the Dead as it also features a small group of protagonists forced to survive on their own, unable to trust the authorities as they battle the infected. The Crazies also anticipates recent outbreak viral horror films like 28 Days Later (2002), its sequel 28 Weeks Later (2007), and Planet Terror (2007). Unfortunately, The Crazies is often considered to be a minor work in Romero’s canon but I have always felt that it was an important stepping stone towards more ambitious projects like Dawn of the Dead and Knightriders (1981). He showed more political and social awareness – something that was only hinted at in his early work.

Here's the trailer:

DVD of the Week: The Nightmare Before Christmas: 2-Disc Collector's Edition

When The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) debuted in theaters, it was a modest commercial success but hardly the massive hit Disney had hoped for, especially with the pedigree of Tim Burton’s name above the title. It was well-received by critics who felt that it was too scary for children and the film went on to become a cult classic with its own vast merchandising empire. The film was given an excellent DVD release a few years ago and Disney has gone back to the well, re-mastered it and added some new extras.

Halloween Town is a magical place inhabited by vampires, witches, ghosts and skeletons hanging from talking trees where the Mayor (voiced by Glenn Shadix) gives the vampires an award for most blood drained in a single evening. Jack Skellington (voiced by Chris Sarandon) is the Pumpkin King and is bored with the same old routine and “weary of the sound of screams.” Sally (voiced by Catherine O’Hara) is a Frankenstein-esque creation, a stitched together rag doll created by mad scientist Dr. Finkelstein (voiced by William Hickey) who can scratch his own brain when he feels like it. She secretly pines for Jack.

Depressed and directionless, Jack wanders through the forest and finds a door leading to Christmas Town. He lands in a place covered in snow with Christmas lights hanging on every house. Jack is revitalized with this colourful new realm which is the complete opposite of the gloomy, dreary Halloween Town. Jack decides to introduce the spirit of Christmas to the denizens of Halloween Town. He also kidnaps Santa Claus and, with help from his friends, takes over his job on Christmas Eve. Sally believes that what Jack is doing is wrong and proceeds to restore order and rescue Santa from the evil ghost Oogie Boogie (voiced by Ken Page).

All of these creatures are lovingly rendered with stop motion animation that evokes the old Rankin and Bass cartoons albeit with an Edward Gorey vibe. The animation in Nightmare Before Christmas is impressive with such care and attention to each and every character. They all have their own distinctive look and personality. There is a personal, handcrafted feel to everything that creates a tangible texture missing from completely computer animated films.

All of the songs in this musical are insanely catchy and part of the film’s enduring appeal. Danny Elfman is the mad genius behind the music which comes as no surprise being a veteran of numerous Tim Burton productions. Thanks to the film’s premise, Nightmare Before Christmas works for either Halloween or the Christmas season. It features a vibrant color scheme and beautifully realized characters created by Burton, top notch direction by Henry Selick, and dialogue written by Caroline Thompson who wrote Edward Scissorhands (1990). This really deserves to be regarded as a modern classic and one of the best things to ever spring out of Burton’s brain.

Special Features:

So, if you already own the previous Special Edition is it worth double dipping for this new version and what is new? The good news is that with the exception of a DTS soundtrack and director Henry Selick’s solo commentary track, everything from the previous edition has been included in this one.

Disc one includes a new audio commentary by producer Tim Burton, director Henry Selick, and music designer Danny Elfman. They were recorded separately and then edited together. Burton talks about the classic animated holiday TV specials that made a huge impression on him. He was always intrigued by the visual combination of his two favorite holidays: Christmas and Halloween. Elfman claims that this is his favorite collaboration with Burton and talks about how he got involved. There is a significant amount of overlap from the numerous featurettes included on this set.

A new extra is “What’s This? Jack’s Haunted Mansion Holiday Tour,” which takes you through a haunted mansion ride based on the film. The attention to detail and decor is fantastic, done in Gothic fashion. You can also take the tour with a trivia subtitle track imparting all kinds of factoids. Also included is a featurette examining how they added the Nightmare Before Christmas style to the classic Haunted Mansion design.

Also new is “Tim Burton’s Original Poem,” narrated by none other than veteran genre actor Christopher Lee. This provided the original inspiration for the film. Lee’s great voice narrates over evocative concept art.

“The Making of Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas” takes us through various stages of the production, including the music, storyboards, art direction, and animation. It provides a detailed look at all of the work that went into creating the film and the challenges of stop motion animation.

The second disc starts off with “Frankenweenie,” a short film Burton directed in 1984. He offers a new introduction and mentions that work has begun on a feature-length stop motion animated film. Shot in gorgeous black and white, it’s about a young boy named Vincent (Barret Oliver) who decides to resurrect his dead dog Sparky a la Dr. Frankenstein. Shelley Duvall and Daniel Stern play his very Leave It To Beaver-esque parents. Also featured is the late-great Paul Bartel as Vincent’s science teacher.

“Vincent” is an animated short film that Burton made early in his career about a young boy who idolizes Vincent Price, who, incidentally, narrates the story. It has a wonderful, Expressionistic look reminiscent of early silent horror films.

Also included are three deleted storyboards and four animated sequences introduced by Selick. They feature sequences that didn’t make the final cut, some were never animated. Selick explains that they were cut for reasons of time and pacing.

“The World’s of Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas” explores the characters that inhabit Christmas Town, Halloween Town, and the Real World with all sorts of character designs, animation tests and concept art. It allows you to see the various incarnations of these beloved characters.

“Storyboards-to-Film Comparison” takes a look at a scene from the film and allows you to watch it simultaneously with the corresponding storyboards.

Finally, there are “Posters and Trailers,” a collection of poster art, a teaser trailer and a theatrical trailer.

From Dusk Till Dawn

Bob and Harvey Weinstein must have been salivating at the prospect of teaming up Quentin Tarantino, red hot from Pulp Fiction (1994), and George Clooney, red hot from the television show ER, on a film. What they got wasn’t exactly a mainstream crowd-pleaser but rather a down ‘n’ dirty grindhouse movie called From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) that was several years before Tarantino and his filmmaking brother-in-arms Robert Rodriguez would make it official with the double bill of Planet Terror and Death Proof in 2007. The screenplay for Dusk Till Dawn had been kicking around for years, before Tarantino exploded on the scene with Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Rodriguez with El Mariachi (1993). The two filmmakers used their new found clout to push this pet project through the system: a drive-in movie on a studio-sized budget and with recognizable stars like Clooney, Harvey Keitel, and Juliette Lewis.

From Dusk Till Dawn starts off in familiar Tarantino territory with the Gecko brothers: Seth (George Clooney) and Richie (Tarantino), stone cold killers on the run from the law. It seems that Richie broke Seth out of prison and to celebrate the two have gone on a crime spree that has resulted in a bank heist and many dead lawmen. They are introduced in an exciting prologue that could be a mini-movie unto itself. A Texas Ranger (the always watchable Michael Parks) enters a liquor store in a tense yet chatty scene where he talks it up with the greasy-haired register jockey (John Hawkes). In Tarantino’s world, having the gift of the gab is essential to one’s survival and when a character runs out of things to say they tend to die. Pretty soon the Gecko brothers are walking out of an exploding store thanks to a well-aimed flaming roll of toilet paper.

They take refuge at a roadside motel with a female bank teller they took hostage from the bank robbery that is never shown (just like the heist we never see in Reservoir Dogs). Ritchie and Seth plan to make a break for Mexico and find safe haven in a place called El Rey (a reference to a similar place of salvation in Sam Peckinpah’s The Getaway). All they have to do is cross the border and meet their contact Carlos (Cheech Marin) at a biker bar called the Titty Twister. To escape the ever-increasing manhunt, the Geckos decide to hijack a Winnebago with a preached named Jacob (Harvey Keitel), his daughter (Juliette Lewis), and his adopted son (Ernest Liu).

The Titty Twister turns out to be a really raunchy, biker bar/strip club where if you even look at someone funny you run the risk of dismemberment. But this is the least of their problems. It soon becomes apparent that this is no ordinary low life scumpit, but an ancient home to a rather large army of vampires. It is at this point that From Dusk Till Dawn mutates into a full-on, balls-to-the-wall horror film. The Gecko brothers and Jacob and his family are forced to defend themselves against hordes of the undead in a siege situation straight out of John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) with a healthy dose of George Romero’s zombie films.

Robert Kurtzman of KNB Effects Group, a special effects company, had a treatment called From Dusk Till Dawn and was looking for someone to turn it into a screenplay. Writer Scott Spiegel (of The Evil Dead fame) had met and befriended a then-unknown Quentin Tarantino through a mutual friend. He recommended Tarantino to Kurtzman based on the strength of his Natural Born Killers screenplay. Kurtzman read and liked it and agreed to pay Tarantino $1,500 to write a draft of Dusk Till Dawn. While filming Desperado (1995) in Acuna, Mexico, Tarantino asked Rodriguez if he would consider directing his Dusk Till Dawn script that he had shown him briefly in 1992. The director agreed to helm the project with the only stipulation being that Tarantino would rewrite the script. He agreed and the project was a go, but only after the two filmmakers finished shooting their respective vignettes for the anthology, Four Rooms (1995), which featured two other up-and-coming indie filmmakers, Allison Anders (Gas Food Lodging) and Alexandre Rockwell (In the Soup). Without giving a chance for the buzz surrounding Four Rooms to die down, Rodriguez and Tarantino moved on to Dusk Till Dawn.

From the start, the two men established the agenda that their film would adhere to. As Tarantino stated in an interview, "The thing that's kind of cool is we're basically making this head-banging horror film buff drive-in movie with this really big-budget – and we're not pulling back. We're going for it." It is this kind of take-no-prisoners attitude that propels the hyperactive (and hyperviolent) narrative of From Dusk Till Dawn. The film marked Rodriguez's biggest budget yet at $18 million, but still small potatoes compared to a Sylvester Stallone film where $20 million of the budget goes towards the actor's salary. Like he did with El Mariachi and Desperado, Rodriguez uses all of his resources to make the film look better than it costs and gives the material his own unique spin despite the presence of Tarantino's obsessions which often threaten to overwhelm the film.

Rodriguez's influence lay in the origins of the vampires which were rather vague in nature in the script. The director decided to use his working knowledge of Mexican history and base the creatures' genesis on ancient Aztec and Mayan culture. "There were actual vampire Goddess statues and things during Aztec times ... So the idea is that this den of vampires in an old Aztec temple has, over the years, been turned into a sleazy bar in Mexico to continue to attract victims." It is this playful attitude towards his own heritage and the film's story, coupled with Tarantino’s strong script, which keeps From Dusk Till Dawn from slipping into self-parody.

This was the first film that demonstrated George Clooney’s ability to make the jump from the small screen to the big one. With the character of Seth Gecko, he isn’t afraid to portray an amoral criminal and yet Clooney’s natural charisma makes you like him. The actor is able to turn on the charm and also show a more intense side when someone crosses him, like the opening shoot-out in the liquor store. Unfortunately, this is one of the films that Tarantino acts in and demonstrates why it is better he stay behind the camera. He looks like someone trying to play a twisted criminal instead of becoming the character like everyone else. Tarantino even sports a ridiculous looking Burt Reynolds-circa-Deliverance (1972) haircut. His character’s death doesn’t come soon enough. It’s a credit to Rodriguez’s skill as a filmmaker and the strength of the material that the film isn’t ruined by Tarantino’s lousy acting.

It doesn’t hurt that there are plenty of distractions, like a showstopping scene where a scantily-clad Salma Hayek dances seductively with a rather large snake. Of course, she turns out to be the queen vampire at the Titty Twister. There are all kinds of inside jokes and references for genre fans, like a bit where make-up legends Greg Nicotero (who also worked on the film) and Tom Savini play rival bikers who have a disagreement. That is, until Savini shows off his crotch gun (first seen in Rodriguez’s Desperado). Another genre veteran Fred “The Hammer” Williamson also has a memorable turn as a biker who gets to deliver a monologue about the Vietnam War a la Bill Duke in Predator (1987).

Harvey Keitel gives From Dusk Till Dawn some much-needed gravitas as a preacher who has lost his way after his wife’s death and must find God again if his family and the others are to survive the vampire attacks until dawn. Keitel does a nice job of showing Jacob’s transformation from a faithless preacher to, as Seth puts it, a “mean motherfuckin’ servant of God.” In addition, several Rodriguez regulars show-up in supporting roles, like Danny Trejo as the Titty Twister bartender and Cheech Marin in an impressive three different roles.

Not surprisingly, this film divided critics. Roger Ebert gave it three out of four stars and described it as “a skillful meat-and-potatoes action extravaganza with some added neat touches.” In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, “The latter part of From Dusk Till Dawn is so relentless that it's as if a spigot has been turned on and then broken. Though some of the tricks are entertainingly staged, the film loses its clever edge when its action heats up so gruesomely and exploitatively that there's no time for talk.” Entertainment Weekly gave the film a “B” rating and Owen Gleiberman wrote, “Rodriguez and Tarantino have taken the let-'em-eat-trash cynicism of modern corporate moviemaking and repackaged it as junk-conscious ‘attitude.' In From Dusk Till Dawn, they put on such a show of cooking up popcorn that they make pandering to the audience seem hip.” However, in his review for the Washington Post, Desson Howe wrote, “The movie, which treats you with contempt for even watching it, is a monument to its own lack of imagination. It's a triumph of vile over content; mindless nihilism posing as hipness.” The San Francisco Chronicle’s Mick LaSalle called the film, “an ugly, unpleasant criminals-on-the-lam film that midway turns into a boring and completely repellent vampire ‘comedy.’ If it's not one of the worst films of 1996 it will have been one miserable year.” Cinefantastique magazine’s Steve Biodrowski wrote, “Whereas one might reasonably have expected that the combo of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez would yield a critical mass of nuclear proportions, instead of an atomic fireball’s worth of entertainment, we get a long fuse, quite a bit of fizzle, and a rather minor blast.”

At its heart, From Dusk Till Dawn carries on in the proud tradition of other low-budget, gonzo horror films like Sam Raimi's Evil Dead trilogy and Stuart Gordon's Re-Animator (1985), while paying homage to classic horror films like George Romero's Dawn of the Dead (1979). Rodriguez admires these "lower budget, edgier kind of horror films, the ones where you didn't know what the filmmaker would do next. Because they didn't have any money, they would just try and grab you any way they could." Rodriguez and Tarantino now had the money to play with, but still maintained the low-budget aesthetic that they admired so much.

If the first half of From Dusk Till Dawn feels like a Tarantino film reminiscent of True Romance (1993) and Natural Born Killers (1994), which feature amoral outlaws on the run from the law, then the second half is all Rodriguez as he lets his John Carpenter-esque freak flag fly for a blood-drenched finale with all sorts of creative deaths involving balloons filled with holy water, a crossbow and a disco ball. As with most of his films, Dusk Till Dawn is a fun ride with everything you could want from something like this: gun-totting criminals, tough bikers, cool action sequences, memorable dialogue, lots of inventive gore, and half-naked vampire strippers. What more could you ask for?

DVD of the Week: Silent Hill

NOTE: To celebrate Halloween I will be posting articles related to horror films all month.

Since Christophe Gans’ surprise international success with Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001), there has been a certain amount of anticipation for what he would do next after showing such promise with a film that effortlessly juggled several genres. For awhile, he was attached to The Adventurer, an Indiana Jones-style adventure film and a remake of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, neither of which made it past the pre-production phase. Fortunately, he finally made another movie called Silent Hill (2006). Unfortunately, it’s an adaptation of the video game of the same name. The track record for these kinds of movies isn’t that good (Resident Evil and Alone in the Dark anyone?).

After her daughter Sharon (Jodelle Ferland) almost sleepwalks her way off a cliff while yelling out the words, “Silent Hill,” Rose (Radha Mitchell) decides to find and take her daughter to the place of the same name as a form of therapy. Rose and her husband Chris (Sean Bean) differ on how to treat their adopted daughter – he thinks she should be medicated and see a doctor, while Rose chooses Silent Hill, West Virginia because that’s where Sharon supposedly came from. Unfortunately, after they leave, Chris does some research and finds out that where they are going is a notorious ghost town that was devastated by a horrendous fire 30 years ago.

While foolishly trying to outrun a police officer (Laurie Holden) on a motorcycle on a dangerous stretch of road, Rose crashes her SUV trying to avoid a mysterious figure. When she regains consciousness, her daughter has disappeared and ash falls from the sky like snow. Rose continues on foot with the cop and they soon find themselves in Silent Hill, a deserted town not on any maps. Unfortunately, they soon encounter the town’s creepy denizens while searching for Sharon.

Radha Mitchell, who established solid genre credentials with Pitch Black (2000), plays a strong woman who undergoes an emotionally harrowing journey during the course of the film. She is credibly scared out of her mind when it is warranted but is also very proactive, driven to find her daughter. Mitchell has the ability to act tough while also conveying a vulnerability that makes her very appealing. It is also nice to see Sean Bean cast against type, playing a sympathetic character instead of the bad guys he traditionally plays.

As he demonstrated with Brotherhood of the Wolf, Gans is an excellent visual storyteller and within the first five minutes not only the central dilemma but also a richly atmospheric world with a David Lynchian soundscape is established. He also demonstrates a knack for vivid, unsettling imagery: an army of horribly charred toddlers still burning as they swarm all over Rose, crying out in pain. With its nightmarish, otherworldly look, Silent Hill clearly exists in another time and place and Gans conveys this through production and set design rich in detail and a soundtrack that uses music sparingly but when he does it is unusual and very effective. He downplays a musical score that is trip-hop in nature (a funky juxtaposition) in favor of elaborate sound design including an eerie air raid siren that goes off repeatedly when something bad is going to happen.

I have never played the video game so I have no idea how faithful this film is to its source material but it is strong enough to stand on its own merits and is very much its own entity. They say every town has its own story and Silent Hill’s is as troubled as they come. Over the course of the film, its past and the source of the apocalyptic fire that brought about its demise is gradually revealed. Silent Hill is one of those rare horror films that is truly horrific, right down to its impressively staged grand guginol finale where the tormentors become the tormented as Rose serves up some well deserved revenge but not in a stereotypical way, like at the end of a gun. Like most good horror movies, Rose’s journey is a waking nightmare with one frightening encounter after another with all sorts of grotesque creatures tormenting her along the way.

Silent Hill is a refreshing horror film in that it not only features two female protagonists who are more than capable of taking care of themselves and uncover the mysteries of the town but also a formidable female antagonist and the man as the passive character who waits by the phone for our heroine to call. Roger Avary’s screenplay isn’t anything special but it doesn’t need to be in Gans’ capable hands. Together, they have crafted a clever horror film that depicts a zealous, puritanical society punished for unjustly persecuting witches. The film illustrates the destructive power of hatred – pretty heavy topics for a video game adaptation.

Special Features:

“Paths of Darkness: Making Silent Hill” is comprised of six featurettes that can be viewed separately or altogether. Gans was a big fan of the video game and found it very scary with lots of cinematic possibilities. For the director, the film is about fear and emotion and that is what attracted him to it. He also purposely cast actors who work predominantly in independent cinema because they aren’t instantly recognizable and in one featurette he touches upon why he cast the actors that he did while they talk about their characters. Most of the town of Silent Hill was created from scratch with four different phases of its incarnation that resulted in an impressive 106 sets! However, they did film some exteriors in the Canadian town of Brantford, Ontario. A terrific amount of work went into these sets as these extras illustrate. They also explore the stunt work and how, in particular, Radha Mitchell and Laurie Holden did a lot of their own stunts and had a blast doing them. We also see how the various creatures were created – Gans’ mandate was that they should be disturbing rather than disgusting, although, they are that as well.

Days of Heaven

In retrospect, Days of Heaven (1978) can be seen as a transitional film for its director, Terrence Malick, whose first film, Badlands (1973), was a fictionalized account of Charles Starkweather, a young man who went on a killing spree with his teenage girlfriend. Malick’s follow up to Days of Heaven was an adaptation of James Jones’ World War II novel, The Thin Red Line (1998). While Badlands was a fairly straightforward film, Days of Heaven marked a significant evolution in Malick’s thematic preoccupations as he explored man’s relationship with the environment and the resulting effect. The filmmaker also examined the destructive relationships between people. This is all depicted in an observational style reminiscent of a documentary albeit with some of the most stunning cinematography ever put on film.

Like Badlands, Days of Heaven is narrated by a woman and, in this case, by a child named Linda (Linda Manz). Bill (Richard Gere) is a short-tempered steelworker who flees Chicago in 1917 with his girlfriend Abby (Brooke Adams) and his kid sister Linda after accidentally killing his boss (Stuart Margolin). The factory is a hellish, noisy place and Bill and Abby lead a bleak, dirty existence. It’s no wonder that they set out for the west with its beautiful, expansive landscapes. In a voiceover narration, Linda says of them, “in fact, all three of us been goin’ places ... looking for things, searching for things ... goin’ on adventures.” This particular passage is the key to understanding what motivates and drives these three people, especially Bill. They lead a nomadic existence, going where the work and opportunity for adventure takes them. Linda’s narration tells us little about these three people and, instead, offers abstract ruminations about life, like when she says, “Sometimes I’d feel very old like my whole life’s over, like I’m not around no more.”

Bill and Abby are lovers but maintain a facade to the outside world that they are brother and sister because of the societal stigma of not being married. They travel by train to the Texas Panhandle where they work harvesting wheat for a wealthy farmer (Sam Shepard) who ends up falling in love with Abby. Bill’s tendency is to keep moving, to go where the work takes him while Abby wants stability. She reciprocates the farmer’s advances and Bill and Linda stay on after the seasonal workers leave. At first, everyone gets along but when Abby and the farmer get married, Bill becomes increasingly jealous and unhappy with their arrangement. Initially, the farmer is sick and diagnosed to die within a year but once he falls in love with Abby, his condition improves, which complicates matters.

The scenes where we see people harvesting wheat has an almost documentary feel to them as if we are watching archival footage of what it must’ve been like back then. The first third of the film is almost like a sociological study as we observe how these people work and live off the land, much like the natives we see at the beginning of The Thin Red Line. Malick also shows what these people do in their spare time: playing blues music during the day and Cajun music at night while dancing around a bonfire. There are lingering shots of nature that convey the spectrum of its power, from locusts eating wheat to gorgeous shots of the landscape, as we see the characters playing golf on a grassy hill or a field of wheat blowing violently in the wind. Malick shows the gradual changing of the seasons and, in another shot, a massive thunderstorm dwarfing the land. Every shot is exquisitely composed so that every frame could be a work of art, a still life. For example, when the workers first arrive on the farmer’s land, Malick presents a stunning pastoral setting with golden wheat fields in the foreground and green pastures in the distance while the clouds in the sky take on a purplish hue. Days of Heaven allows you to get lost in its landscapes and in the atmosphere Malick creates.

Malick eschews any kind of traditional narrative in favor of an abstract tone poem. The film simply presents these characters’ lives and we are just observing it. To that end, there is a real naturalism to the performances of the actors. We see the characters working hard off the land as was the custom back then. We learn about them from their actions and how they behave. Bill, for example, is headstrong and quick-tempered as evident from how quickly he starts a fight with a fellow worker who insults him. Brooke Adams has a wonderful, earthy kind of beauty and you can see why the farmer is attracted to her character. Abby doesn’t give much away but how she feels is conveyed in Adams’ expressive eyes. Sam Shepard has a natural, western charm and charisma that is perfect for his character and which would be exploited in a much more iconic fashion in The Right Stuff (1983).

Producer Jacob Brackman introduced fellow producer Bert Schneider to Malick in 1975. On a trip to Cuba, Schneider and Malick began conversations that would lead to Days of Heaven. Malick had tried and failed to get Dustin Hoffman or Al Pacino to star in the film. Schneider agreed to producer and he and Malick cast a young Richard Gere, playwright Sam Shepard and Brooke Adams. The CEO of Paramount Pictures Barry Diller wanted Schneider to produce films for him and agreed to finance Days of Heaven.

Malick admired cinematographer Nestor Almendros’ work in Francois Truffaut’s The Wild Child (1970) and wanted to collaborate with him on Days of Heaven. Alemendros was impressed with Malick’s knowledge of photography. They decided to model the film’s look after silent films which often used natural light. They also drew inspiration from painters like Johannes Vermeer, Andrew Wyeth, and Edward Hopper, as well as photo-reporters from the turn of the century.

Jack Fisk designed and built the mansion in the wheat fields and the smaller houses where the workers lived. The mansion was not a facade (as was normally the custom) but authentic inside and out with period colors including brown, mahogany and dark wood for the interiors. Patricia Norris designed and made the period costumes from used fabrics and old clothes in order to avoid the artificial look of studio-made costumes.

Production began in the fall of 1976 in Alberta, Canada. The cast and crew found Malick to be cold and distant. He was having trouble getting decent performances out of his actors. Shepard had his own impressions of Malick, describing him as “one of those guys who has a great deal of difficulty having a conversation, but then every once in a while he’d go off on this extraordinary intellectual tangent.” Two weeks into principal photography and the footage that had been shot was not working so Malick decided to throw out the script, shoot a lot of film and work it out in the editing room.

According to Almendros, the film was not “rigidly prepared,” allowing for inspiration both in front of and behind the camera. Daily call sheets were not very detailed and the schedule changed to suit the weather. This upset some of the Hollywood crew members not used to working in such a spontaneous way. Almendros felt that most of the crew were used to a “glossy style of photography” and were frustrated because he didn’t give them much work. On a daily basis he asked them to turn off the lights they had prepared for him. Some crew members said that Alemendros and Malick didn’t know what they were doing. Some even quit the production but Malick encouraged and supported Almendros to use very little studio lighting, pushing this notion even further by taking away more lighting aids, leaving the image bare.

Due to union regulations, Almendros was not allowed to operate the camera himself and with Malick, he would plan out and rehearse the movements of the camera and the actors. He would stand near the main camera and give instructions to the camera operators. Almendros worked on Days of Heaven for 53 days but had to leave due to a prior commitment on Truffaut’s The Man Who Loved Women (1977). The cinematographer hand-picked his replacement Haskell Wexler, who worked on the film for 19 days. The two men worked together for a week so that Wexler could familiarize himself with the film’s visual style.

The production was plagued with numerous problems. The harvesting machines constantly broke down, which resulted in shooting beginning late in the afternoon, allowing for only a few hours of daylight before it got too dark to go on. One day, two helicopters were scheduled to drop seeds and peanut shells that were supposed to simulate locusts on film. However, Malick decided to shoot period cars instead and he kept the helicopters on hold at great cost. Schneider claimed that Malick ran $800,000 over budget and this created a significant rift between them. They used thousands of live locusts for inserts and close-ups, captured by the Canadian Department of Agriculture. For the extreme long shots, the film was run backward and the actors walked in reverse so that the locusts appeared to be flying up.

Malick spent two years editing Days of Heaven because he was indecisive. After a year of editing, he called Shepard and asked him to come to Los Angeles to do some insert shots, including a series of close-ups done underneath a freeway underpass. Another insert included a shot of Richard Gere falling face first into a river which was shot in a big aquarium in Sissy Spacek’s living room.

Days of Heaven received generally positive reviews from critics. Roger Ebert wrote, “Days of Heaven is above all one of the most beautiful films ever made ... His tone is elegiac. He evokes the loneliness and beauty of the limitless Texas prairie.” In his review for The Chicago Reader, Dave Kehr wrote, "Terrence Malick's remarkably rich second feature is a story of human lives touched and passed over by the divine, told in a rush of stunning and precise imagery. Nestor Almendros’s cinematography is as sharp and vivid as Malick's narration is elliptical and enigmatic. The result is a film that hovers just beyond our grasp – mysterious, beautiful, and, very possibly, a masterpiece.” The Chicago Tribune’s Gene Siskel also wrote that the film "truly tests a film critic's power of description ... Some critics have complained that the Days of Heaven story is too slight. I suppose it is, but, frankly, you don't think about it while the movie is playing.” Time magazine's Frank Rich wrote, "Days of Heaven is lush with brilliant images.” The periodical went on to name it one of the best films of 1978. However, in his review for The New York Times, Harold C. Schonberg wrote, "Days of Heaven never really makes up its mind what it wants to be. It ends up something between a Texas pastoral and Cavalleria Rusticana. Back of what basically is a conventional plot is all kinds of fancy, self-conscious cineaste techniques.” Days of Heaven went on to be nominated for four Academy Awards and won for Best Cinematography. Malick won the Prix de la mise en scene (Best Director award) at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival.

If Badlands is tightly scripted, then Days of Heaven has a looser feel with more shots of the environment and voiceover narration that is sometimes naive and sometimes all-knowing. The emphasis on the environment and how it relates to the characters was a pre-occupation of some films in the 1970s, like Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971). Along with Days of Heaven, they show the often harsh, unforgiving nature, with its raw, natural beauty, and how it affected the people who lived on it. Malick would expand on the themes examined in this film with even more skill and in more depth with The Thin Red Line and The New World (2005). The first two thirds of Days of Heaven has the meditative quality of Thin Red Line while the last third features the last vestiges of the lovers-on-the-run story from Badlands before he would move on to the ambitious scale of his next film.

The Game

NOTE: This post was inspired by Piper's two excellent posts on this film over at the Lazy Eye Theatre. Check 'em out here and here.

After the success of Seven (1995) expectations were high for David Fincher’s next film. He had risen from the ashes of the Alien 3 (1993) debacle and produced a critical and commercial hit when everyone least expected it. What would he do next? Never one to take the easy route, Fincher confounded critics and audiences alike with The Game (1997), a fascinating film that plays around with the conventions of the thriller genre like a feature-length episode of The Twilight Zone. Critical reaction was fairly positive and the box office returns were decent but not as good as Seven’s. Even among fans of Fincher’s films, The Game is somewhat underappreciated but worth revisiting if only to explore the shadowy alleyways and nightmarish scenarios that torment its protagonist.

Nicholas Van Orton (Michael Douglas) is a wealthy investment banker who lives alone in his family’s palatial estate just outside of downtown San Francisco. He follows a daily routine that involves making business deals. Imagine an older, slightly more mellower Gordon Gekko from Wall Street (1987) who somehow escaped imprisonment and moved to the west coast. Nicholas lives in a hermetically-sealed world as evident from the meticulously decorated, museum-like mansion he inhabits. He’s divorced and his parents are both dead, his mother recently and his father committed suicide when he was just a boy. Describing Nicholas as emotionally unavailable is an understatement to say the least.

It’s his birthday and his ne’er-do-well younger brother Conrad (a refreshingly jovial Sean Penn) meets him for lunch where he gives his older sibling a present. It is a pre-paid invite for a company known as Consumer Recreation Services (CRS). Conrad tells Nicholas to call them because it will make his life “fun.” He is rather enigmatic about CRS, describing them as an “entertainment service” and that what they offer is a “profound life experience.” Nicholas is turning the same age as his father when he died and it is implied, via flashbacks, that his greatest fear is ending up like him so he decides to give CRS a try.

Nicholas goes through an extensive screening process with Jim Feingold (James Rebhorn) so that whatever it is his experience is it will be tailored to his personality. Feingold describes it as a vacation, except that “you don’t go to it, it comes to you.” He goes on to drop tantalizing tidbits like, “we provide whatever’s lacking,” and “we’re like an experiential book-of-the-month club.” Among the battery of tests Nicholas undergoes, one bears a remarkable resemblance to the famous montage sequence in The Parallax View (1974).

One day, at the racquet club he frequents, Nicholas overhears two men talking about CRS. He meets them and they are intriguingly vague about their own experiences. The next day, a representative from the company calls to inform him that his application has been rejected. That night, Nicholas arrives to find a life-sized doll lying in his driveway with a key from CRS in its mouth. Later on, his television starts talking to him. His game has begun. Nicholas’ day begins as usual only now with the awareness that he’s playing the game and this causes him to look at everyone and everything differently. Strange things start to happen. He can’t open his briefcase during an important meeting. A waitress spills a tray of drinks all over him. A homeless man collapses in the street right in front of him.

At first, these incidents don’t seem like much but as the film progresses they take on a more ominous tone and become more dangerous. For example, Nicholas and Christine (Deborah Kara Unger), the waitress who spilled the drinks on him, take a homeless man to an emergency room that suddenly becomes deserted and the lights go out. The game also starts to take on a much grander scale. How can so many people be in on it? Are we to take everything literally or, like Nicholas, are we supposed to accept things as they are and take the ride? A certain sense of paranoia sets in and we are constantly guessing what is real and what isn’t. The deeper Nicholas goes into the game, the more nightmarish the scenarios become and the film escalates into full-on paranoid thriller mode.

The screenplay for The Game was written by John Brancato and Michael Ferris in 1991 and was promptly put in turnaround at MGM while Fincher was making Alien 3. In 1992, director Jonathan Mostow was attached to the project with Kyle MacLachlan and Bridget Fonda cast in the lead roles. Principal photography was to start in February 1993. However, early in ’92 the project moved to Polygram and Mostow dropped out only to become an executive producer of the film. Producer Steve Golin bought the script from MGM and gave it to Fincher in the hopes that he would direct. According to the director, the film was about “loss of control. The purpose of The Game is to take your greatest fear, put it this close to your face and say ‘There, you’re still alive. It’s all right.’” He has mentioned that there are three primary influences on the film. Nicholas was a “fashionable, good-looking Scrooge, lured into a Mission: Impossible situation with a steroid shot in the thigh from The Sting.”

Fincher liked the various plot twists and turns in the script but brought in Andrew Kevin Walker, who had written Seven, to make Nicholas a more cynical character. They spent six weeks changing the tone and trying to make the story work. Fincher intended to make The Game before Seven but when Brad Pitt became available that project took priority. The success of Seven helped the producers of The Game get a larger budget than they had originally projected. They approached Michael Douglas to star in the film but he was hesitant, at first, because there were concerns about Polygram’s ability to distribute it what with the company being rather small in size. However, once he came on board, his presence helped get the film into production.

At the 1996 Cannes Film Festival, Polygram announced that Jodie Foster (playing the role of Christine) would be starring in the film along with Douglas but Fincher was uncomfortable with putting a movie star of her stature in a supporting part. After talking to Foster, Fincher considered rewriting Conrad as Nicholas’ daughter so that she could play that role. However, she had a scheduling conflict with Contact (1997) and could not appear in The Game after all. However, she would go on to star in one of Fincher’s subsequent films, Panic Room (2002). Once Foster was out of the picture, the role of Conrad was offered to Jeff Bridges but he declined and Sean Penn was cast.

More revisions were made to the script. Originally, Nicholas kills Christine and then commits suicide but Fincher felt that it didn’t make sense. In 1996, Larry Gross and Walker were brought in to make further revisions to the script. Principal photography began on location in San Francisco despite studio pressure to shoot in Los Angeles which was cheaper. Fincher also considered Chicago and Seattle but the former had no mansions that were close by and the latter city did not have an adequate financial district. The script was written with ‘Frisco in mind and the director liked the financial district’s “old money, Wall Street vibe.” However, that area was very busy and hard to move around in. So, the filmmakers shot on weekends in order to have more control. The cast and crew endured a long, tough shoot that lasted 100 days with a lot of night shoots and locations.

Fincher utilized old stone buildings, small streets and the hills to represent the city’s class system pictorially. To convey the old money world, the director set many scenes in restaurants with hardwood paneling and a lot of red leather. Some of the locations used included Golden Gate Park, the Presidio and Filoli Gardens and Mansion in Woodside, San Mateo, which stood in for the Van Orton family home. Fincher masterfully transforms San Francisco into a shadowy labyrinth that Nicholas must navigate.

With his trademark atmospheric cinematography (courtesy of Harris Savides, who would collaborate with Fincher on Zodiac), Fincher presents the city as a gradually threatening place where danger lurks at every corner so that what was once familiar has become very strange. This was the first time that Harris Savides had been the cinematographer on one of Fincher’s films. In the 1990s, they had worked together on music videos and commercials. For the visual look of Nicholas’ wealthy lifestyle, they wanted a “rich and supple” feel and took references from films like The Godfather (1972) and Being There (1979), which featured visually appealing locations with ominous intentions lurking under the surface. According to Fincher, once Nicholas leaves his protective world, he and Savides would let fluorescents, neon signs and other lights in the background be overexposed to let “things get a bit wilder out in the real world.” For The Game, the director employed a Technicolor printing process known as ENR which lent a smoother look to the night sequences. For him, the challenge was how much deception the audience could take and “will they go for 45 minutes of red herrings?” To this end, he tried to stage scenes as simply as possible, using a single camera because “with multiple cameras, you run the risk of boring people with coverage.”

Michael Douglas is no stranger to playing icy, business types and initially Nicholas is clearly a riff on his Gekko character only this one is more receptive to changing his life. After all, he has no choice. Douglas does a good job of gradually showing how Nicholas changes from a repressed individual to someone who appreciates life thanks to being thrown into several life-threatening situations. It’s only once he’s been chased by vicious dogs, dropped into a dumpster and almost drowned that he begins to appreciate life. However, as the game continues to escalate, he gradually unravels which puts his mental and physical limits to the test. Nicholas has to hit rock bottom, to be torn down completely, before he can change into a better person.

Sean Penn brings a playful vibe to his first scene in the film and it contrasts well off of Douglas’ repressed character. Penn also bring a welcome levity, like when Conrad tells Nicholas that he remembers being at the restaurant they meet at many years ago. Nicholas says that he took him and Conrad corrects him: “No, I used to buy crystal meth off the maitre’d.” The two men banter back and forth as only siblings can. Conrad is the polar opposite of his brother. He speaks his mind and has a snarky sense of humor. However, this is flipped on its head when Conrad appears for the second time while Nicholas is in the midst of the game. This time, Penn brings a frantic intensity as he rants and raves about being hounded by CRS. Conrad has been reduced to a paranoid mess and gets into messy confrontation with his brother as their dysfunctional relationship reaches the boiling point.

Deborah Kara Unger’s test reel was a two-minute sex scene from David Cronenberg’s Crash (1996) and Douglas remembers that he thought it was a joke. When he and Fincher met her in person they were impressed with her abilities. Christine is a rather enigmatic character. She starts off with an antagonistic relationship with Nicholas but she appears to become his ally after being drawn into the game along with him. However, like Conrad, and pretty much everyone Nicholas meets, appears can and are deceiving. The strikingly beautiful Unger imbues her character with a sarcastic common sense that plays well off of Douglas’ privileged businessman. She is quite good in The Game and it’s a shame that she didn’t do more high profile films after this one.

Fincher does an excellent job orchestrating the various nightmare scenarios that Nicholas experiences, chief among them a white-knuckle taxi cab ride that ends up with him trapped in the car as it goes speeding into the San Francisco Bay. As the car descends into deeper water, a frantic Nicholas desperately tries to find a way out. This sequence was shot near the Embarcadero with the water tank elements for Nicholas’ near-drowning done on a soundstage at Sony Pictures studio. Douglas’s close-ups were filmed on a soundstage that contained a large tank of water. The actor was in a small compartment designed to resemble the backseat of a taxi with three cameras capturing the action.

The Game was released on September 12, 1997 in 2,403 theaters, grossing $14.3 million on its opening weekend. It went on to make $48.3 million in North America and $61.1 million in the rest of the world for a worldwide total of $109.4 million. The film received mostly positive reviews. Roger Ebert gave the film three and a half stars out of four and praised Douglas as "the right actor for the role. He can play smart, he can play cold, and he can play angry. He is also subtle enough that he never arrives at an emotional plateau before the film does, and never overplays the process of his inner change.” In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, “Mr. Fincher, like Michael Douglas in the film's leading role, does show real finesse in playing to the paranoia of these times.” Time magazine’s Richard Corliss wrote, "Fincher's style is so handsomely oppressive, and Douglas' befuddlement is so cagey, that for a while the film recalls smarter excursions into heroic paranoia (The Parallax View, Total Recall).”

The Washington Post’s Desson Howe wrote, "It’s formulaic, yet edgy. It’s predictable, yet full of surprises. How far you get through this tall tale of a thriller before you give up and howl is a matter of personal taste. But there’s much pleasure in Fincher’s intricate color schemes, his rich sense of decor, his ability to sustain suspense over long periods of time and his sense of humor.” Entertainment Weekly gave the film a “B+” rating and Owen Gleiberman wrote, “Emotionally, there's not much at stake in The Game — can Nicholas Van Orton be saved?! — but Douglas is the perfect actor to occupy the center of a crazed Rube Goldberg thriller. The movie has the wit to be playful about its own manipulations, even as it exploits them for maximum pulp impact.” However, Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers felt that “Fincher's effort to cover up the plot holes is all the more noticeable for being strained ... The Game has a sunny, redemptive side that ill suits Fincher and ill serves audiences that share his former affinity for loose ends hauntingly left untied.” Fincher defended his film’s apparent jumps in logic by saying, “you have to embrace the movie for what it is, and what it is is a really strange trip.”

The Game is more than a cinematic jigsaw puzzle. It is also about a man coming to grips with his past, a son finally dealing with the death of his father – something that has haunted him his whole life. It has been said that the film is a modern re-telling of the Scrooge story – a mean, rich man learns the value of life by being shown how precious it is. The Game is ultimately a tale of redemption with a surprisingly satisfying emotional payoff at the film’s conclusion.

There is also an excellent look at this film over at This Distracted Globe.

Also, I would be remiss without give credit to James Swallow's book, The Dark Eye: The Films of David Fincher, which was the source for most of the production info contained in this article. If you're a fan of Fincher's films, this book is an invaluable resource.