Outside The Box- BURIED Review

Buried is one of those films that's basically sold as seen- it's about a bloke who gets buried alive. Specifically, the bloke is Paul Conroy, a contracted truck driver who wakes up six feet under in a coffin. At his disposal, he has a zippo lighter, a mobile phone and numerous other scant resources provided by his captor, but most pressingly, he has little hope of being found and rescued.

Oh, and at the very top, I'm going to say that it's an arthouse horror film that has been sold far too well. It attracted tonnes of patrons to the screening I saw- patrons who laughed at inappropriate moments, texted and browsed the internet on their phone and generally made total twats of themselves. I rarely get this kind of experience in cinemas in spite of how often I go, and I was absolutely livid when I came out of the screening. But is Buried a good film? Fuck yes.

With his debut English language feature, director Rodrigo Cortés scorches the viewer's nerves in an area no larger than seven feet by three feet. We never leave Paul's coffin for even a second of the film's 95 minutes, and the suspense never ebbs away or relents. A frankly unorthodox script by writer Chris Sparling is bolstered by his confident style, as well as the terrific musical score and, of course, the brilliant central performance.

It only occurred to me an hour or so after seeing the film that I should have been more sceptical about Buried before going in. While I try not to presume the quality or lack thereof in any film, it's 95 minutes of Ryan Reynolds in a coffin. Ryan "Van Wilder" Reynolds! Turns out I was right all along though, because Reynolds is excellent. If ever a film could have been made or broken by a single performance, it was this one. I'm flattering Reynolds to say that the Academy will totally ignore the fantastic work he does here when it comes to Oscars season, because they also ignored Sam Rockwell's dauntless performance in Moon last year.

There are other performers involved, by way of the voices that the desperate Paul hears on the phone, but it's largely all on Ryan Reynolds' shoulders. That said, I'll give kudos to casing director Stephanie Corsalini for putting Stephen Tobolowsky in that one fantastic dialogue exchange that comes late in the film. Groundhog Day's Ned Ryerson is clearly the last person you want on the other end of the phone, saying the things that he does, and it makes even this most insipid formality seem skin-crawling. It almost feels like detracting from Reynolds to say so though- it's odd that he has the most room to show off his hitherto uncelebrated acting talent inside a cramped wooden box.

Lesser films would... No, hang on, let me keep that current. Ahem. Films like Devil don't commit to a premise as bold as the one on show here. That film in particular left the elevator in which its conflict was centred, lacking the courage to even work with four more people and a few more cubic feet than Cortés and Sparling have to play with. The result was an extreme distance from most of the characters, and an inability to sympathise with them.

In Buried, you're dying to get out and get some air, but you're not bored. That the central idea is sustained for as long as 95 minutes without ever becoming stale is simply remarkable, especially as the same idea has been explored with less courage by other directors. The idea of being buried alive is surely a terrifying concept to anyone, but the only instances in which I can really think of it being explored on film are in The Vanishing, Kill Bill Volume 2 and most inauspiciously, Step Brothers. Here, the idea is mined for its full horrific potential, and it's done to eke out the most tension and suspense throughout.

Buried is a film that could have fallen down at so many hurdles, but do not mistake it for anything but an arthouse horror film. It deserves to do well, but after my experience, I would advise people to wait a week until the herd has passed it by, declared it the worst film they've ever seen on Facebook, and fucked off to see Final Destination 12. Ryan Reynolds gives the performance of a lifetime, but the film doesn't even use that as a crutch. Suspenseful, chilling and really rather brilliant.

Buried is now showing at cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen Buried, why not share your comments below? The complaint that annoyed me most from the arch-fuckers in the cinema on the way out? "It's an hour and a half of a bloke crying in a box." Oh readers, how I wished to bury him in the desert and see if he didn't cry...

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

THREE KINGS- The Best Iraq War Movie?

Last week's 1980s smorgasbord leaves the multiplex looking a little bare this week, (there's a Cats & Dogs 2 review coming on Friday, for fuck's sake), so I've been delving back in time to watch some slightly older films this week. This happens a lot more than you'd think based on the review output of this blog, and I'm silly to try and prove that by blogging on the topic of a film that only came out in 1999.

Three Kings was on ITV1, that most evil and asinine of terrestrial channels, this past weekend, and having wanted to watch it for a long time, I decided Christopher Nolan's Insomnia, showing at the same time over on BBC One, would probably turn up on iPlayer. It didn't. It's difficult to be angry about missing it though, because Three Kings is one of the best war movies I've seen in a long time.

Perhaps my memory seems short- after all, Inglourious Basterds was only out last year. But what I'm actually talking about is modern war movies. What must be remembered is that America and its allies are still embroiled in war overseas, a fact that has informed all of Hollywood's action output since the September 11th attacks almost a decade ago.

Never mind that the war is against the broad and entirely intangible concept of "terror", and the fact that you might as well declare war on fluff or rainbows, it's had a huge influence. For instance, all of Steven Spielberg's films post-9/11 (bar that Indiana Jones one) have been related in some way to America's reaction. See The Terminal or Munich or War of the Worlds, you'll see what I mean.

What makes Three Kings different? Simply that it was produced before Bush misguidedly opened fire on Iraq, and it documents the war the elder Bush waged in the same arena, some years earlier. The upshot of this is that it's really prepared to show what America was doing wrong in that war, rather than being informed by vague aspersions towards the legitimacy of the second conflict and liberal guilt as in the likes of Green Zone.

Maybe I'm overstating it with my oh-so-political reasoning and my provocative blog heading, but bear with me- I'm going to be writing about Demolition Man on Wednesday, so you know that'll be a lot more fun. And you know what? Three Kings is actually a pretty fun film too. It's just a thrilling miasma of comedy, action and drama, weighing characters with personality against the undertones of political commentary.

It essentially combines heist movie tropes with the fallout of Desert Storm by sending a group of soldiers- a young father, his fratboy buddy, an undervalued chief sergeant and a cynical major due for retirement- off on a quest for gold bullion. The trouble is, it's all bullion that Saddam Hussein stole from Kuwait, and the four end up violating the ceasefire and bringing the Iraqi Republican Guard down on their heads when it all goes wrong.

There are scenes like those in latter Iraq war films, where characters sit about discussing what's wrong with them as human beings and what's wrong with America as a country, but it never seems preachy. With George Clooney's Major Archie Gates, wondering what was achieved in this minor set-to with Iraq seems a matter of course for him, and far less conspicuous than Clooney's latter visits to the same area in Syriana (which is obviously without humour) or The Men Who Stare At Goats (which is entirely humorous).

Elsewhere, the inevitable diatribe about America's arrogance is delivered fittingly by a more unconventional torturer than we normally get in American cinema. Amir, played by Cliff Curtis, is not some hulking mute or pantomime evil character while torturing our protagonist, he's a man who's genuinely been wronged by his own country and by America itself. Antagonists with proper dimensions are sorely missed in most other Iraq movies.

People will cite Sam Mendes' Jarhead as a great Iraq war movie, but I remember being distinctly underwhelmed by that when I first saw it. I should probably revisit it, but I can only remember it doing things that David O. Russell does better in Three Kings, with Mendes only really being reinforced by the "This really happened" mantra.

The one that does stand out as better is obviously The Hurt Locker, but as I said, you can have a lot more fun with Three Kings. The Hurt Locker is a damn fine film, but it's not one I like to see again too often. Three Kings tempers its social and political conscience with a plot that goes beyond the foreign policy implications and just outright entertains its audience.

There are the same stark visuals and washed out colours, but what you're looking at is still enjoyable on many levels. Can America produce another war movie like this, as long as they're tooling around in the Middle East?

I'm Mark the mad prophet and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

A World of Hurt

Once again I find myself playing catch-up with these reviews. I'm having frequent computer problems lately, as well as having to do things in the real world as I prepare to start university. Freshers week at Teesside University starts at the end of September, and I'm yet to work out whether or not my studies will curb my somewhat excessive film viewing. So, with seven films to review in some manner or another in the next few days, I'll give you a bumper post with three lots of rambling to enjoy/tut at- Final Destination 4, (500) Days of Summer, and The Hurt Locker, the somewhat tenuous connection being pain, with which I could've linked Dance Flick were I prepared to waste time and precious vitriol seeing that arse-end of a film.



And no, I'm not mistaken by the way. As part of my irritating pre-possession that I'm almost always right, I'm downright refusing to call Final Destination 4 by the detached title that New Line is advertising it as. It's the fourth film in the Final Destination series, and I'll call it just that. To give it the phoney "official" title makes me feel like the film is a wayward middle-aged man who goes out and buys a sports car to impress upon all who behold him that he's still fresh and cool. Petty as this may seem on my part, you will similarly find me refusing to use this title for Shit Chipmunk Film 2 later in the year. My main bugbear with the film at hand however is that it suffers the same problem as the previous instalment, in that it's not fresh and cool- it's a rehash of the first film.

While Final Destination 2 advanced the concept of Death's plan being unstoppable with new plot twists and character developments, rather than just expecting the audience to enjoy death porn, the two films that followed both just expect the audience to enjoy death porn. And with the disposable teenage casts of each film, we get a new set of cardboard stereotypes at the beginning of every film, this time having narrowly escaped being burnt, splattered and turned into worm-food by a collapsing stadium when one of their number has a premonition of just that. The deaths are not so much imaginative as more contrived than ever before, and it takes a frustrating amount of time for the characters to catch up with the audience in realising that Death is pissed off. In fact, the only marked difference between this instalment and the one before is that this one is in 3D, a dubious distinction that I'm saving up all my rant juice about until James Cameron's Avatar is released.

It's important for me to extol the fact that this is rubbish first, because I have to admit, it was still entertaining. Watching idiotic stereotypes die with lashings of poetic justice will always have currency for me, but the reason why this fails is because it's a Final Destination film. The first two had interesting characters in amongst the more disposable douchebags, and the film has lost all sense of horror when you're not scared for the characters' lives, but just want them to end in the most splattery and head-fucking way possible. So that's Final Destination 4- the acting is poor, the concept is nothing you haven't seen done before (and done better), and all in all, the trendy de-numbered title does nothing to hide the liver spots and sagging belly of a franchise that should've ended around number 2. But if you like watching idiots die, you'll still enjoy yourself a little.



On the opposite end of the scale to the brash, audience-drawing gubbins of that film though, we have (500) Days of Summer, a slightly unconventional romantic comedy starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel. Like the horror genre, my close friends seem to be under the impression that I hate this genre. As with both genres, I only hate how boring and lazy most romcom output actually is these days- an entire subset of film in which you can tell what the ending is from the trailer. Hugh Grant and Renee Zelleweger will usually star, and some prestige actor like Michael Douglas will utterly debase themselves for a paycheck and a prominent credit in the trailer. And of course there'll be a mad dash to the airport. On the contrary, (500) Days of Summer is a refreshing yet curious mix-up that reminded me of High Fidelity (the best romcom of the last ten years, bar none), and Memento, combining those films' attitude to relationships and non-linear continuity, respectively.

I'm obviously bound to find something to criticise in a film that holds up a mirror on my own slightly-stilted private life in the ways that this film did, so here's my attempts to have a go at (500) Days of Summer. It's of the caste of films that have become popular since Juno and Brick that sort of seems to have "... you know what I mean?" tacked on the end of every line of dialogue. Director Marc Webb gives off a sense that the film is so indie that its very core is possessed of some universal truth that your tiny rigid minds are as yet unable to comprehend. There's also a level of kook is becoming dangerously familiar for Zooey Deschanel, a terrific actress who I'm still really hoping doesn't get shoehorned into that typeset for the whole of her career. Similarly, rising star Joseph Gordon-Levitt reprises the endearing romantic archetype that we've seen him play before, but still manages to make a very good turn as the more central of the two leads, and plays off against Deschanel very well indeed.

A paragraph that started with cynicism turns to praise, and that just about sums up my own viewing experience. The trailers and early buzz were promising, but I always sit down to romcoms with the feeling that they have to win me over. This one was just charming enough to manage that, from a hilariously candid "author's note" from the screenwriters before the film starts through one-liner after one-liner, all set to rather good music- but then I like the Smiths just as much as the film's characters do. We're warned early on that while this is a story about romance, it's not a love story, and the film's realistic views on love and relationships never become pessimistic or uneven. As mentioned, it's a very honest film, and rather inventive on the whole. Like High Fidelity, the standard against which I hold all romantic comedies, it's a film that can be enjoyed just as much on a date or in solitude. The lack of focus on Deschanel's character is one respect in which the film is left wanting, but if you can stomach the ever-so-slightly patronising hint of indie and kook being the be-all and end-all, there's absolutely no reason why you shouldn't enjoy (500) Days of Summer.



Going again to the opposite end of the scale, the quality has improved slightly. There may not be any explosions in (500) Days of Summer like the one pictured above, but the nice explosive type of pain is given a much more cerebral outing in The Hurt Locker. It's being lauded by all and sundry as the best of the films thus far about the current war in Iraq, but I respectfully disagree- this is a film about character. Jeremy Renner plays Sgt. William James, a bomb disposal expert drafted in to replace the recent head-sploded leader of a small team of American soldiers, and that's what the film is about. The film could as easily have been about any war, but seeing as how Iraq is the current big warzone, that's where this character study is set. To my recollection, George W. Bush and 9/11 are not mentioned even once in the whole film, because director Kathryn Bigelow is making a film about the soldiers, not the politics.

Bigelow's casting of Jeremy Renner is also a masterstroke. Not only because of his terrific performance, which definitely deserves some award or other, but because I'd lay odds that few of you reading this can place Jeremy Renner. Even after a look on IMDB. In fact, the big recognisable stars in this film are all barely in it. Guy Pearce, Ralph Fiennes and Evangeline Lily all make appearances, but not one of them features for more than five minutes. Even David Morse, an actor you probably can't place without looking at IMDB but you'll go "oh, him" when you see him in the film, appears for about three minutes overall. In making this film, Bigelow was not about casting Shia LeBeouf as a bomb-disposal nut to sell more tickets and put more posters on billboards. It's all about getting you close to the characters, and it's this approach that makes the whole thing a lot more immersive, not to mention that it puts the film lightyears ahead of any preachy, political or jingoistic film about the Iraq war to date.

Don't get me wrong, by the way- I'm certainly not trying to downplay the explosive element of The Hurt Locker, because I did pick that picture for a reason. In an industry with so few female directors, Bigelow stands out as the best (and possibly the only) female action director, because this film alone is so unbelievably tense. The best sequence of the film involves Sgt. James and his colleagues lying on their stomachs in the scorching sun for a whole day, watching their enemies from afar through a sniper scope, just waiting to retaliate if necessary. The silence is tense, but the bravado the men try to muster as they wait is worse- it's where the audience is shown what makes these men tick. Why do people who go to Iraq, go to Iraq? As a whole, The Hurt Locker is just outstanding- it's the only film I've ever seen to which I can honestly attribute the phrase "The windscreen wiper made me shit myself"- Kathryn Bigelow capably builds the tension throughout, exhausting you at the end of the film. As you come up for air though, you'll still be left with one of the best cinema experiences of the year so far.

I'm literally typing as quick as I can to finish this because I'm supposed to get ready to see Dorian Gray about... now. So naturally, that'll be reviewed in the next of the planned three posts for this week. Alongside that, District 9, before the third and final post covers two of this year's excellent films that are just coming to DVD. I do occasionally miss films when they first come out- the perils of multiplex culture- but I'm making up the slack as best I can.

To conclude, see The Hurt Locker and (500) Days of Summer, but don't bother with The Final Destination unless the 3D gimmick is enough to pique your interest. As ever, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the films I've reviewed, so leave comments if you've seen any of them.

I'm Mark, mad prophet of the airwaves, and until next time, make sure you don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.