Mirror Mirror 2: Raven Dance (1994)

After a prologue in which a Catholic nun, Sister Aja (Veronica Cartwright), is blinded by the demonic mirror from part one and a crazy lady is eaten by it (or something), we find ourselves an undisclosed number of years later in the same nunnery.

Actually, it’s not a simple nunnery anymore, but an orphanage. An orphanage of a kind, at least, for this is one of those peculiar movie orphanages lacking orphans. Well, apart from dancing-mad Marlee (Tracy Wells) and her (probably) autistic brother (name of the actor withheld to protect bad child actors). For, ahem, reasons, an industrial punk group rehearses a jaunty little number in front of the mirror. In the nunnery/orphanage, while Marlee and brother are watching, oh, yes. The impatient music critic mirror zaps the band to ashes and does something (?) that connects it to Marlee and sibling and leaves Marlee either blind, practically blind, or with reduced vision, depending on the needs of any given scene.

From here on out, things become less strange, though not more comprehensible: Marlee is apparently heiress to a fortune, but her evil step sister Roslyn (Sally Kellerman) teams up with one Dr. Lasky (Roddy McDowell) to drug her insane, the local handyman (William Sanderson) providing practical help to provide her with more effective “hallucinations”. At the same time, Marlee and the mirror fall in love. Our heroine dances a lot, excitedly, terribly. A young Mark Ruffalo appears to earn his “I was in horror movies at the beginning of my career” boy scout badge by getting into a love triangle with the mirror and Marlee. He may be a ghost, or the grown-up child of Nikki from the first movie, or both, or something. He’s doing the rebellious lover thing, badly, and ends up wrestling the mirror demon (I assume) for five second in the incomprehensible climax.

Reading my attempt at a plot synopsis, you’ll probably think “what the hell is going on?”. Watching Jimmy Lifton’s (also composer of the synth noodling score and “writer”) Mirror Mirror 2, the same question came up repeatedly in my head, as well. The only part of the script that makes any narrative sense is the whole, not terribly interesting, “drive the relation” insane business. It doesn’t make much logical sense, of course, but then, the basic situation Marlee is in with the orphan-less orphanage (because that’s where rich heiresses end up, right?) makes little sense either. The supernatural elements are even more incomprehensible. In general, motivations and emotions seem to shift from minute to minute, whereas plans are too stupid to comprehend.

Which really sounds like rather good fun if you are like me: usually of the persuasion that mood, worldbuilding and an air of strangeness are the most important thing about many a movie. Alas, large parts of Mirror Mirror 2 are no fun at all, but feel like an endless slog through badly copied Hitchcock, unconnected supernatural shenanigans and terrible dance routines. The beginning is fun enough, and the climax, while still making not a lick of sense, at least has the good sense to be bizarre and goofy enough to distract one from the pains of existence. The in-between - what the layman might turn “most of the film” – however, is excruciatingly dull nonsense, as if our writer/director had confused some doodles he made on a napkin with the finished script and just shot the napkin. It’s so bad, even the on paper very fun cast can’t turn it entertaining; let’s not even dream of “coherent”.

In short: Collateral (2004)

If nothing else, this Michael Mann joint about a taxi driver (Jamie Foxx) becoming the unwilling chauffeur and unlikely fall guy for a professional killer (Tom Cruise) on a five stop murder tour of police informers through LA does prove that good direction and excellent acting is absolutely all that is needed to turn a bizarre, overconstructed and deeply implausible script into a highly engaging movie.

The film’s plot is a melange of improbable happenstance and stupid plans by supposed “professionals” that would make quite a few giallos look completely realistic. However, as with the giallo, realism and believability really aren’t the point here. Instead, Mann creates a world out of his patented amassing of plausible feeling details (which are often total hogwash in actual reality, but no matter) and a visual style that goes all in for a very digital look when that wasn’t a thing most serious directors who could afford any better tried, where all the theoretical nonsense makes total emotional and thematic sense in practice. Because it’s all in a day’s work for Mann even on a bad day, he squeezes in quite a few fantastic action and suspense scenes into the cracks of his the tale of a man losing all of his illusions and finding strength through it, starring Los Angeles by night as the perfect metaphor for the modern world. Going by the critical consensus of the time, he also made pretty much everyone watching happy with it.

While Mann is working his magic, he not only gets the expectedly great performances out of Foxx, Jada Pinkett Smith and Mark Ruffalo (doing the most Michael Mann movie cop character imaginable), but also a less awkward performance out of Cruise than most directors get when asking him to act instead of to star. In these cases, the problem usually isn’t that Cruise isn’t trying but that he’s trying so visibly to rise to the occasion, ironically seeming to lack the self-confidence to really be in the role instead of playing it. Here, there’s still a bit of the stiffness this often produces, but there are many scenes where Cruise actually nails the character in a natural and fluent way.

Three Films Make A Post: The hunter becomes the hunted.

Enhanced (2019): By now, quite a few low budget filmmakers have realized that they may not be able to keep up on the spectacle of contemporary superhero cinema, but they sure as hell can use superhero tropes when focussing on comparatively low power sets and street level plots. Like at least half of these films, James Mark’s Canadian example of the type Enhanced is clearly taking its cues from the X-Men, with (mostly) innocent superpowered beings hunted by the government.

The resulting movie is a lot of fun for my tastes. It makes good use of the fantastical elements it can afford, presents some choice comic book science, and comes up with a handful of very nice, small-scale action scenes with more than decent choreography and direction. Leads Alanna Bale and George Tchortov comport themselves well in and outside of the action, too, so there’s a fun time to be had here.

Deep Cover (1992): Bill Duke’s (who is probably much better known for his character actor work than directing despite his copious direction credits on TV and in the movies) movie about a black cop played by Laurence Fishburne when we still called him Larry going undercover as a drug dealer (and partnering with Jeff Goldblum) packs a lot of style (one can certainly be sure that Duke watched Miami Vice and learned all the right lessons from the show), quite a bit of creative wildness, comments about being a black man in the 90s and a generally acerbic attitude towards 90s drug capitalism as well as the war on drugs into all the best-loved tropes you expect from a film in this genre.

With the help of Fishburne, Goldblum and a generally wonderful cast, Duke makes a film that manages to be genuinely intelligent under the cheap thrills, delivers these thrills in the best possible way, and really convinces anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear that he should have been one of the great crime movie directors after this, instead of the travelling craftsman he became. (No shame in being one of those, naturally).

In the Cut (2003): Also pretty fantastic is this hazy and moody erotic psychological thriller by the great Jane Campion, who never let her feminism stop her to get deep into the less easily stomached and judged areas of sexuality, desire and lust, and indeed found much useful for feminism to explore there. This is very much a film of a hazy yet tactile mood, interested in all kinds of liminal spaces – between characters, between feelings, between glances, between waking and sleep, between lust and caution, and of course (this being Campion) between touches. The film is pretty giallo-esque in its eroticism, as well as in the deep implausibility of its thriller plot; just as it is with most other great giallos, that implausibility really isn’t the point, though.

Of course, this being a Campion movie, we also get to watch some great performances, not just by Meg Ryan going brilliantly against her America’s Sweetheart thing with ease but also by house favourites Mark Ruffalo, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Nick Damici (of all people to encounter in a Campion movie).

Three Films Make A Post: In the heart of every victim is a hero and he'll tear apart a city to prove it.

Wild (2014): In part, Jean-Marc Vallée’s film (based on a memoir)about a woman making a thousand mile plus hike through the US wilderness to conquer her personal demons is certainly made of the material of self help books, but there’s also actual emotional weight in Reese Witherspoon’s performance, in the way Vallée tries to make the rhythm of her days in nature visible, in the beauty as well as an amount of danger (usually in the form of threatening men who never quite get around to doing something to Witherspoon but also make clear that they very well could which is a thing we male parts of the audience should take a good look at) the film finds by the wayside, and in the film’s general lack of preachiness. I also rather admired the way Wild shifts into flashbacks that feel as associative as actual memory, suggesting something true about the way memories come to the surface of our minds.

Go for Sisters (2013): This is probably not the best or “most important” film John Sayles has ever made, but there’s so much unhurried beauty, and such a clear eye for the ways cultures and people intersect in border regions that it’s still impossible for me not to find it rather on the brilliant side. On paper, the plot could make a thriller, but in practice, this is a road movie about friendship, class, and borders that lets its dangers and crimes happen as just another thing coming up by the wayside.

This approach doesn’t feel slow or lazy but has a relaxed beauty mirrored in wonderful performances by LisaGay Hamilton, Yolonda Ross, Edward James Olmos and various others. Like quite a few of Sayles’s later films, this feels like a product of someone who has a lot to say about people and the very specific world they inhabit, and shares it thoughtful, without grand gestures. I imagine Sayles to be a very good listener.

Begin Again aka Can a Song Save Your Life? (2013): This film by John Carney is a bit of a Hollywood feel good film about the saving graces of music featuring Keira Knightley and Mark Ruffalo, but it comes about its positive feeling the honest way: by accepting the bad shit and thinking about ways to get through it. That some of these ways might not be a hundred percent applicable in real life seems neither here nor there – this is a film that cherishes hope, music and friendship so much it’s not a lie but a promise. It also has a better ending than you’d expect or fear.


Carney knows and understands music much better than many directors making films about musicians, so there’s a lot in here about the way songs and life intersect, the impact a song can still have on a life (and not just of those writing them), as well as the sheer joy of music. The music the characters make is also just right for them as well as the film. This is the kind of movie that really can make someone happier and more hopeful for a bit. At least this someone.

In short: The Avengers (2012)

Sometimes, it's easy being me. I'm not one of those cult movie fans always in desperate need to proof they're part of the cool kids (not unlike certain friends of art movies who would not be found dead ever being entertained by a movie, or smiling watching one), so I can allow myself to like those blockbuster concoctions that are good, or - as is the case here - pretty fucking great.

Given the overabundance of money director/writer/king of nerds Joss Whedon had to blow up (often quite literally,) it's not much of a surprise The Avengers' spectacle is fantastic to watch. Although even that part is not always a given if one keeps the body of work of Michael Bay in mind, who knows how to make big explosions and giant robots boring. Whedon, on the other hand, knows how to make the big and loud things big and loud and actually interesting.

Not surprisingly, he also understands that the big and loud things become inherently more interesting, more fun and more important to an audience if you anchor them in smaller and quieter moments that are in reality much more important, and therefore spends as much - if not more - time and effort on these.

As an old comic fan, Whedon also inherently gets what his characters are about (so no Bendis-style Captain America silently condoning torture, and no Kenneth Brannagh-Thor as a jock with a hammer), and uses this knowledge, a cast that can act their asses off if given the opportunity (and isn't by the way, Mark Ruffalo the best Bruce Banner you've seen, and Scarlett Johansson a much more convincing Black Widow than anyone could have expected?), and a script that manages to squeeze an insane amount of subtlety in to make what would in a lesser movie be just the connecting tissue between action scenes sing.

Other typical Whedon virtues are also in and accounted for - the quick and clever dialogue, the sudden reversals of genre tropes, and the ability to naturally shift from comedy to tragedy and back again in the course of two lines of dialogue. The real beauty of the film is how well this aspect of The Avengers connects with the more usual blockbuster virtues, as if having a heart and a brain and big explosions in a movie wasn't a big thing.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,superheroes,joss whedon,scarlett johansson,robert downey jr,chris evans,mark ruffalo,chris hemsworth,jeremy renner,tom hiddleston

Three Films Make A Post: The first 11 minutes will absolutely shock you. The last 11 minutes will rivet you to your seat.

The Brothers Bloom (2008): I suspect there's only two ways people can go with this one - either they'll fall in love with Rian Johnson's highly stylized and playful film about lies and stories so good they can become the truth, or they'll call it pretentious and be annoyed by its obvious cleverness. Me, I'll never be found among those saying even a single bad word about a film that can pull off a karaoke version of the Band's "Sleeping".

Man of Vendetta (2010): The directorial debut of Woo Min-ho has most of the qualities I associate with South Korean thrillers: it's as slickly directed as any major Hollywood film, but much more willing to go into really nasty and unpleasant places without needing to wallow in the nastiness more than is necessary. It's acted excellently by a cast that knows the difference between "sparse" and "wooden". It has a script that doesn't feel the need to always add another twist if that twist would be to the detriment of mood and characters, yet still knows and uses all the tricks of its genre.

Still, while I can and do admire these achievements, Man of Vendetta never clicked with me emotionally. It might be that the film's keeping of its child-kidnapping and murdering psycho something of a cipher without backstory makes it difficult for me to be all that frightened of or shocked by him, or just that the "lone civilian fights psycho for his little daughter" format is quite played out, even if its realized this technically proficient. For whatever reason, my admiration never turned into actually caring, and a film that was supposed to have an emotional impact just didn't.

Cyborg Girl (2008): Speaking of movies that don't have the emotional impact their directors seem to want them to have easily leads to this Japanese science fiction comedy romance melodrama (no, really) with Haruka Ayase and Keisuke Koide, directed by South Korean Jae-young Kwak whom you might know from My Sassy Girl. Guy falls in love with a time-travelling android built by his own future self to safe himself from serious bodily harm and a major disaster that is pretty uncomfortable to watch this shortly after the Japanese earthquake. Hilarity, a bit of friendly violence (yay!) and cloying, overly drawn-out sentimentality ensues. And no, there's nothing at all creepy about the film's set-up, at least nothing Kwak (also responsible for the script) knows of. Though the two leads really do their best with what they are given, Cyborg Girl is just too overloaded to get the tears out of me that it wants its audience so badly to cry. I'm perfectly willing to be moved by a weirdly artificial tragedy, but the film's tendency to just wallow in it all the time feels cynical and manipulative where it's supposed to be sad and heart-warming. The here melodrama just feels terribly artificial in all the wrong ways.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,japanese movies,south korean movies,comedy,romance,thriller,sf,melodrama,rian johnson,adrien brody,rachel weisz,mark ruffalo,rinko kikuchi,haruka ayase,keisuke koide,jae-young kwak