Fear the Reviews

“Caché is one of those rare movies that proves that less can indeed be more, if the writer-director knows what he’s doing. The story mostly consists of very simple interior shots in a handful of locations, with no musical score, very minimal sound design, and one very basic special effect, if you can call it that. But it isn’t lacking in the slightest, and it arguably achieves a greater creepiness than a story with, say, dungeons and boogeymen would.”

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“Here’s a wild theory: Maybe Memoirs of a Geisha didn’t do so well because we’ve been conditioned to think that Asian women painted white, far from being erotic fantasies, are actually the scariest freakin’ evil spirits in the universe. Think about it: Ringu, The Grudge, A Tale of Two Sisters and Pulse all terrify you with images of white-painted Asian women, often walking with very stylized moves. (Could this be a variation on clown fear?) In Marebito (The Stranger From Afar), a Japanese horror movie shot in less than two weeks between directing Grudge sequels, Takashi Shimizu once again spins a yarn about a very pale Asian woman who’s kinda scary. But she isn’t a drowning victim, nor does she have long hair that covers her face. Thank heaven for new ideas.”

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short takes after the jump

NANNY MCPHEE

The “Lemony Snicket” movie may have been a disappointment in relation to cost, but that didn’t stop Universal from trying to clone it with this somewhat cheaper production based on a series of books by Christianna Brand about a character originally named Nurse Matilda. Like “A Series of Unfortunate Events”, this film from Kirk Jones (“Waking Ned Devine”) features a gifted thespian in frightening make-up who’s forced to play second fiddle to some rather uninteresting child actors in a garishly fake pseudo-Victorian setting (also, both movies feature animated end credits better than anything in the film itself). Here, the star is Emma Thompson, who also wrote the script — she plays a slightly darker variation on Mary Poppins; a wart-encrusted nanny with supernatural abilities who manages to discipline a rowdy brood of brats when no-one else can, least of all their widower father (Colin Firth).

Thompson and Firth are fun, as is Angela Lansbury as Firth’s obnoxious rich aunt, but for the story to work, we have to sympathize with the kids at least a little bit, and that’s quite difficult here. Their dad may be a wee bit inattentive, but other than that, he’s too nice if anything. Certainly he doesn’t deserve the mayhem his children create, which comes across as purely malicious rather than gleefully anarchic. Not helping matters is the hideous art direction, which might best be described as Technicolor puke.

UNDERWORLD: EVOLUTION

Actually, given all the deliberate cross-breedings and mutations that take place in the story, this really should be called Underworld: Intelligent Design. I’ll be damned if I can remember half the insanely convoluted plot of the first Underworld; when you go to see a movie ostensibly about vampires and werewolves fighting each other, it’s annoying and distracting to instead get endless talk about family bloodlines. This sequel tries to refresh our memory, but Tolkien it ain’t. All you really need to know is that the heretofore unknown Original Bad-Ass Vampire (Tony Curran) has been unleashed, and he’s looking for his brother, the Original Bad-Ass Werewolf (Brian Steele), and damn the consequences. All that lies in his way are our supernatural lovers from the first film: vinyl-clad death-dealing vampire Selene (Kate Beckinsale), and hybrid vamp-wolf Michael (Scott Speedman). En route to the big tag-team main event, various peripheral characters must be contacted and further elements of pointless backstory uncovered, notably from a mysterious immortal (Derek Jacobi) who lives on a boat.

The whole thing unfolds like a video game, and would probably be more fun to play than to watch, though the proceedings are reasonably entertaining (more so than the first time around), especially when Curran’s character turns mutant and impales people with his wings. Guillermo del Toro routinely gets far more out of the sewers of eastern Europe than director Len Wiseman, but Wiseman got to bag Kate Beckinsale, so it’s doubtful that he cares about much else.