Most horror movies achieve their scares by jolting the viewer. They grab them by the collar and shake them about with a blood-curdling scream or a quick explosion of strings from the soundtrack. But nobody screams in Let The Right One In, an atypical horror movie that possesses the skill and discipline to engage its audience, not with jump scares and orchestral swells, but with chilling, unrelenting quiet.
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Given the recent setbacks in the struggle for gay rights, it can be difficult to view Milk without the specter of those disappointments looming just outside the screen’s borders. The film, which depicts the rise to power of Harvey Milk, America’s first openly gay political figure, serves as a stirring call to arms for gay rights activists, and as a reminder that sometimes progress is possible only through dedication, perseverance, and sacrifice.
The trailer for the French film A Girl Cut In Two would have you think that the film is a taut, sexy, tense thriller about the violent love triangle between a beautiful girl and the two men who compete for her affections. What the film actually delivers is about as sexy and tense as Rush Limbaugh enjoying the effects of a painkiller binge.
In 1999, the film adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club became an obsession for aimless twenty- and thirty-something males, who closely identified with its examination of the alienation felt by the so-called “middle children of history”. The film continues to resonate with disenchanted corporate drones and Ikea shoppers everywhere who work jobs they don’t want so they can buy things they don’t need.
Though Palahniuk has written nearly a dozen books since that movie premiered, it has taken until now for a second adaptation of his work to reach the screen, but it remains to be seen whether Choke, another tale of young men struggling to give their lives meaning through questionable means, will have a comparable impact.
In the past ten years, screenwriter Alan Ball has given us two of the most scathing examinations of the frailty of human nature in general, and American life in particular.
Ball’s screenwriting debut, American Beauty was nothing short of a cultural phenomenon when it was released, and though the film doesn’t quite hold up under close scrutiny, its strongest moments likely remain etched in the minds of viewers. His HBO series Six Feet Under benefited from having five years rather than two hours to examine human nature in all its contradictory glory, and its insights into what makes people tick tended toward subtle incrimination and unbearable heartbreak. In Towelhead, his film directing debut, Ball once again tries to walk the razor’s edge of placing flawed but sympathetic characters in shocking but realistic circumstances.
