Idle Hands

It's a bad sign when I watch a horror movie and my first thought is how badly the romance is written. I have literally no idea why Anton (Devon Sawa) and Molly (Jessica Alba) end up together. It doesn't even qualify as a male fantasy, since those usually require the man to do something impressive to secure a romantic interest. Anton grabs her ass while under the control of his demonic hand, and she's suddenly into him.

I like horror comedy, and this is a film that has plenty of laughs. It actually avoids the End of Days mistake of assuming that supernatural forces work on whatever time zone they're in. That said, the film fails when it tries to go into horror movie territory, mainly because it's entire premise makes the most blatantly useless character our protagonist.

Anton is a stoner teenager, possessed by an evil force that takes control of the hand of incredibly lazy people. I somewhat suspect they came up with a title, and then a story. Under the influence of his hand, Anton begins committing murders. He's initially unaware that he's doing this (presumably carrying out the murders in his sleep), but he eventually realizes the truth, and his hand begins to act more openly.

He also kills his fellow stoner friends, Mick and Pnub (Seth Green and Elden Henson), who come back as zombies. The explanation is simply that they chose not to go to heaven. Why they're the first of countless billions to just decide they prefer Earth I have no clue. Especially since they go to heaven at the end of the film anyway, simply becoming Anton's guardian angels.

Also, in a side plot a druid named Debi (Vivica A. Fox) is hunting for the hand-possessing force. This goes nowhere. She shows up at the very end to finish the hand off, but she doesn't even bother with any exposition explaining what it is. If you're going to leave the supernatural force unexplained, then don't put a Van Helsing in the film at all!

Literally any of these other characters would be a better protagonist than Anton. Even the other stoners are, at minimum, witty and charming. I'm not sure if my dislike for Anton is due to the character or the actor lacking charisma. The character is shown to be so lazy that doesn't notice his parents missing for four days, and is reluctant to get up from the couch even to get more weed.

Mick and Pnub openly criticize him for his complete lack of goals in life. Whether this is intentionally a more optimistic portrayal of stoners, or a commentary on how lazy Anton is I don't know. Either way, the point is clear: Seth Green stoned off his ass would be a better hero.

Even Molly, who doesn't know about the evil forces for most of the movie, is shown to be clever and resourceful when running from them. But, Anton's the hero, so he has to save her. Then, he gets crushed by a car, and turns down heaven himself to be with Molly.

I'll say this: the make-up is good. Seth Green spends most of the movie with a bottle embedded in his skull, and Henson has to carry his own head around. When something violent or bloody happens, it looks pretty good. And about half the jokes hit home.

That said, it's not a film I'd recommend going out of your way to see. And it hits home far better as a comedy than as horror. That's not to imply that it does especially well as either.

Audrey Rose

Anthony Hopkins once had a full head of non-grey hair. That's the single most unrealistic thing about this movie for me. I think this is may be the only film prior to Silence of the Lambs that I've seen him in, so a 1970s Anthony Hopkins was quite a shock.

This is a movie that's subtle in it's horror. It's a film that deals with the fear of uncertainty, and the terror of human existence. Elliot Hoover (Hopkins) believes that his late daughter, Audrey Rose (not depicted, as far as I can tell), has been reincarnated as Ivy Templeton (Susan Swift), the daughter of Bill and Janice Templeton (John Beck and Marsha Mason). Obviously, this does not make for a happy situation.

To be more specific, Hoover's daughter died roughly a decade prior to the events of the movie, in a car crash where she was burned alive. Hoover became desperate for spiritual comfort, and came to believe in reincarnation. A medium described her spirit's current location to him, and Hoover was able to trace the location to the Templeton's apartment complex, and specifically to Ivy who was born on the same day as Audrey Rose's death. Eventually, he moves into an apartment in their building.

During this period, Ivy begins to experience intense nightmares and panic attacks. This becomes the driving conflict of the film. Hoover seems to be able to comfort Ivy by addressing her as Audrey Rose, something that deeply disturbs the Templetons, for obvious reasons. Janice seems willing to accept his assistance in dealing with their daughter, however, as long as it helps Ivy. Bill, on the other hand, sees him purely as an intruder in their family affairs.

Eventually, Hoover takes Ivy to his apartment to let her sleep, and refuses to open the door for her parents. Bill has him charged with kidnapping. This section of the movie confuses me deeply. Hoover's lawyer defends him by trying to convince the jury that Ivy is the reincarnation of Audrey Rose.. I'm unaware of any legal precedent that gives people custody of the reincarnations of their children, so it seems like an utterly moot point in a kidnapping trial.

It's notable that the movie doesn't attempt to make Hoover out to be the completely selfless, persecuted mystic that you'd typically expect in this story. He loves his daughter, yes, but he's also clearly prepared to manipulate the situation to get what he wants. I don't doubt for a second that if he could find a way to get full custody of Ivy he would do so without a second thought for her parents. He even tells his lawyer to put Janice on the stand, because he knows that she'll break down and turn on her husband.

Bill makes a good contrast to Hoover. He believes, not unreasonably, that Hoover is a master of suggestion, and that their daughter's condition is being made worse by his reinforcement. He doesn't come across as unreasonable, but he likewise doesn't seem to have any better solutions as Ivy's behavior becomes increasingly uncontrollable, and she begins making attempts to harm herself.

The ending of the movie seems too clean and simple for this story. Ivy dies in a regression experiment requested by her father that was, somehow, intended to “prove” she wasn't a reincarnation of Audrey Rose. The parents agree to let Hoover take her ashes to India, something I find rather baffling since Hoover's spiritual travels to India came after his daughter died, and I don't believe Audrey Rose went there in either of her incarnations. Apparently India is just where the body of reincarnated little girls are supposed to go.

This isn't a terrible movie, but it isn't exactly a classic either. I know it's adapted from a novel, so I suspect the plot made more sense in that context. As it is, it's a strong character piece, that makes little sense as a legal drama, and has little of value to say spiritually.

Black Swan

Black Swan feels like a one-up on the Fight Club formula. The antagonist is in the head of the protagonist, but not exclusively so. Lily (Mila Kunis) interacts with other characters, and even comments on Nina's (Natalie Portman) delusions. While it's not always clear what literally happened, the movie makes no attempt to hide that it's about a mental breakdown, so this isn't a major spoiler. The real Lily is even amused to find that Nina fantasized a sexual encounter between them well before the end of the film.

Nina is a ballerina pushed into the profession by her stage-parent mother (Barbara Hershey), who gave up her own dancing career to raise Nina. Her ballet troupe's headliner, Beth MacIntyre (Winona Ryder), is aging and ready to retire, so a new lead is needed for the Swan Queen in Swan Lake, who will have to dance as both the innocent White Swan, and the seductive Black Swan. Nina is cast primarily on the strength of her White Swan performance, despite her inability to properly perform the Black Swan.

At the same time Lily enters the troupe, a far more sexual and experienced woman who ends up promoted to Nina's understudy based on the strength of her Black Swan. The two have great chemistry together, but it's not clear how much of the relationship is real. They vary between friendship and bitter rivalry, going out on the town for a night in what seems to be Nina's first ever act of rebellion against her overbearing mother.

Throughout the film Nina finds herself under attack by a doppelganger representing her repressed emotions. However, early in the film the doppelganger exclusively appears with Nina's appearance, in later scenes she begins to hallucinate it as Lily, creating the ambiguity about their relationship. Lily is the free and independent person who Nina wants to be, and Nina hallucinates the aforementioned sexual encounter after their night out together.

The two other major influences on Nina are her mother, and the director Thomas (Vincent Cassel). Both of these figures follow the same basic arc: they push Nina only to realize that they've gone too far. However, her mother is a repressive force trying to keep Nina under her thumb, while Thomas wants her to lose her innocence and her control so that she can become the Black Swan.

Of these two figures, I find her mother to be the most fascinating. While she's initially played as purely malevolent, by the end I'm honestly not sure how to feel about her. She begs her daughter to drop out of the performance as her mental state deteriorates, but her motives are questionable. Does she want to save her daughter, or hold her back from greatness? And how much of her cruelty and control was in Nina's head all along?

Thomas walks the line between a demanding employer, and a sexual predator. The sexuality is so fundamental to the role of the Black Swan that it's hard to argue that a director kissing his actress passionately, or telling her to masturbate, wouldn't have a positive impact on the performance. On the flip side, he is pursuing a woman with an obvious power imbalance.

Before the final performance, Nina stabs her doppelganger, believing it to be the real Lily, when the doppelganger tries to overtake her as the Black Swan. With this act, Nina's hallucinations seem to accelerate, and she imagines herself growing wings on stage as she nails the Black Swan. Seeing Lily, she realizes before the final act that she had stabbed herself, but danced on anyway, declaring her performance to be “perfect” to Thomas in the final line of the film.

The movie manages to avoid one of the biggest missteps of most modern horror: the movie doesn't drive-home it's status as horror. The horror comes from the things that happen. There's never a scene in which the audience is asked to despair. The movie is filled with tension and uncertainty, right up to the final shot. It takes a talented director to make you legitimately uncertain if you should should be happy or sad. Did Nina kill herself in her performance? Or did she finally grow to maturity, while suffering a flesh-wound?

I find this movie fascinating because it's a horror movie that clearly has women as it's main audience. Don't get me wrong, female stories have always been a big part of the horror genre, but anyone can be scared of Ginger in Ginger Snaps becoming a big, slobbering monster. This is a movie that makes the idea of maturing into a world that demands nothing short of physical perfection absolutely frightening. It's a movie about the terror of the female experience, that I honestly don't feel fully qualified to address.

That said, however, this film is great. It kept me enthralled beginning to end. What I've seen of Aronofsky's other work has been, for the most part, either too depressing or too boring for my tastes, but this film hit it out of the park. It's a masterpiece, beginning to end.

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer

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