Tag: Guillermo del Toro

Nightmare Alley

Posted on by victorfraga

Guillermo del Toro’s first movie since 2017’s Oscar winning The Shape of Water is an adaptation of William Lindsay Gresham’s eponymous 1946 novel. It’s fairly faithful to the book, much more than the first version, a noir movie entitled Nightmare Alley (Edmund Goulding, 1947). Both movies deserve credit of their own, and an attentive viewing.

Bradley Cooper plays Stanton Carlisle, a man with a dark and mysterious past who ends up working at a carnival run by Clem (Willem Dafoe). The story depicts the epic rise and fall of a man during the end of the Great Depression, and ends around the time the US enters the WW2. Stanton is blasé, the War means nothing to him. Stanton is a master manipulator who, along with fellow ex-carny Molly (Rooney Mara), creates a mentalist act that they perform to the upper echelons of New York’s elite. One night psychologist Dr. Lilith Ritter (Cate Blanchett) interrupts the show, and the mechanisms of Stanton’s downfall start to fall into place.

Structurally, Nightmare Alley is essentially two films stuck together: the world of the carnival, and Stanton’s noirish descent into hell. It could be a challenge to the bridge the two stories, but there is a convenient crossroads point where you could put in an intermission. The film runs for two hours and 20 minutes, but it’s never dull for a second—the story just flies by. Del Toro’s camera is never static; it’s always moving, often in very subtle ways.

The ensemble that Del Toro put together is as perfectly compiled. There is not a bad or even mediocre performance Blanchett is the film’s scene-stealer with the most delicious femme fatale delivery since probably the ’50s, especially her last line: “I’LL LIVE!” The role of Dr. Lilith Ritter is one of the film’s biggest improvements over the original: Blanchett portrays her as even more of an icy bitch than Helen Walker did. Cooper, who was actually Del Toro’s second choice after Leonardo DiCaprio dropped out, gives far and away his best performance to date. The way he just manipulates everybody who comes his way is mesmerising. The turning point is when he cons a local cop with his spiritualist act.

Mara was born to play Molly, the sweet “Mamzelle Electra” whose act consists of channeling electricity through her body while wearing a showgirl outfit. Mara is also the actor who most resembles their counterpart in the original 1947 film, and is just as good as Colleen Gray. Molly’s relationship with the strongman, Bruno (Ron Perlman), is less romantic in this new version. He is more of guardian. Perlman is the person who bought Del Toro a copy of the novel back when they were shooting Del Toro’s first feature Cronos (1993), and said it was the only film he wanted to remake. The main carryover from the director’s The Shape of Water cast is Richard Jenkins, who plays the Ezra Grindle. The way this obscenely wealthy auto tycoon feebly screams at Stanton, “you… dirty motherfucker, you dirty motherfucker” works very well.

Nightmare Alley is completely rooted in a brutal noir reality. There are no flights of fairytale wonderment unless you count the world of the carnival. Del Toro gives the audience an assortment of riches, with Clem’s makeshift museum of pickled punks, the funhouse (which is only in the film for a couple minutes is a stunning achievement in production design) and all the strange acts, from the spider-woman to the dog boy. Near the very end of the film you even see an extra made up as the real-life Koo-Koo the Bird Girl, who is best remembered for her part in Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932). That film looms large over both versions of the Nightmare Alley, and is the perfect double-bill choice to go with either version.

The production design is just to die for: the carnival is magnificently designed. The entire film feels very lived-in, and it’s so immersive that it’s a shame there wasn’t an IMAX versions exhibited. There is very little CGI in the whole film, except for fire, some background snow, and the sparks over Molly’s body. Del Toro also made a black-and-white version, and has said the carnival looks better monochrome, although he admits that Dr. Ritter’s stunning art deco office looks better in the gold, green, blue and red palette that Del Toro uses there.

It’s stunning that the film was shot on digital. You feel like you are watching a film from the ’40s, not the 21st century. It’s very much a black-and-white film in colour.

Nightmare Alley is everything you could want from a motion picture. It’s completely riveting, absolutely gorgeous, the story is top-notch, and the performances evoke the best of old Hollywood. If you don’t know the original film or novel, you will also come away with a very different meaning of the word “geek.” Finally, it’s important to mention that it’s a noir, and not a neo-noir—it has the pulpy atmosphere of the classic era, and is not a revisionist take on the genre. The film wears its noir credentials on its sleeve.

Nightmare Alley is now on all major VoD platforms

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark

Posted on by victorfraga

This brand new fantasy-horror movie – showcased with much fanfare at the Bankside Vaults – struck me as a combination of The Evil Dead (Sam Raimi, 1993) and It Follows (David Robert Mitchell, 2015) by way of Goosebumps (Rob Letterman, 2016). An interesting set of influences, you may think, but the result is narratively and thematically trite – haunted houses, cursed books. Even triter is the character work. It’s all geeks and jocks. How many times have we seen bookish girls and bespectacled boys get tormented by douchebags in a varsity jackets? Too many.

However, the most disappointing thing is the utter dearth of scares. This is cattle prod cinema at its most formulaic; so easy to read that even its most earnest attempts to spoil your underwear barely register. All it succeeds in doing is a spot of heart flutter and a touch of ear damage – decidedly unimpressive.

There’s no denying its technical proficiency, though. It has a deft blend of the practical and the digital, which is no surprise given the Guillermo del Toro’s influence, although this counts for little when the subjects, their dialogue and their circumstances which are impossible to remember.

The problem is that director Andre Ovredal and producer/writer del Toro appear to be far more interested in Stephen Gammel’s macabre illustrations than Schwartz’s writing. There’s period detail and a slim satire of the Nixon era – represented by the bigoted, authoritarian police chief – but any substance is sidelined in favour of ghoulish set pieces, which may be exciting to its loyal fan base but are too random and episodic to anyone else.

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, August 23rd. Special screenings will be held across gloomy locations such as the Bankside Vaults of London. Available on VoD in April!

Godzilla: King Of The Monsters

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Warner Bros’ latest effort in their strategy to create a self-contained universe out of Toho’s Godzilla and his accompanying trademark monster characters to rival that of Disney’s popular Star Wars and Marvel cinematic universes is a mixed bag. On one level, it’s a hackneyed family story involving a couple splitting apart with their daughter caught in the middle, a plot not of the slightest interest to fans of Godzilla who aren’t paying to see a family drama. On another level, it’s a thinly veiled excuse to recreate Godzilla, King Ghidorah, Mothra, Rodan and others with state-of-the-art, special effects technology and have them fighting against one another, at which aim it succeeds handsomely. In passing, it delivers facile, one-line ideas about nuclear war and global warming. Finally, it wants to explore the iconography of these extraordinary creatures, but scarcely knows where to begin. They are great properties, but you can’t help but wish it was directed and produced by people with a stronger visionary sense.

The family story concerns scientist Dr. Emma Russell (Vera Farmiga) with her daughter Madison (Billie Bobby Brown) in tow. Her husband Mark Russell (Kyle Chandler), who when the film starts is out in the wilds studying wolf packs, is attempting to get back in touch with his daughter by email. Insofar as this family dynamic drives the characters, it feels pretty redundant. Farmiga upstages the rest of her onscreen family, investing her essentially cardboard character with pathos well beyond what the hackneyed script deserves. The presence of scientists played by oriental actors Ken Watanabe and Ziyi Zhang seems curiously peripheral, even though at one point the former plays a significant role in attempting to rejuvenate an apparently dead Godzilla.

Much more interesting is Emma’s use of a device she’s built called the Orca to produce sound frequencies mimicking those of Titans in order to make them behave in certain ways. Her falling in with crazed military type Jonah Allen (Charles Dance) suggests her as a megalomaniac determined to unleash the giant beasts and cause havoc on Earth, but then she presents an alternative scenario in which mankind has ruined the planet through global warming and the monsters are its way of getting out of control humankind back in its rightful ecological place thus saving the planet from extinction. Promising concepts, but sadly they’re never really developed into anything. The same is true of ideas about Godzilla absorbing radiation so that he can produce self-immolating blasts which nuke his one-on-one adversaries in battle while he survives.

Put aside the many shortcomings, however, and the recreations of giant radiation-breathing lizard from the sea Godzilla, flying creature Rodan, Mothra the giant moth and, most especially, three-headed King Ghidorah, greatly impress. The latter is the real star here, with his three heads swirling around menacingly on their long necks. Ghidorah possesses hydra-like qualities, but only once do we see a missing head regenerate, one of numerous elements on which the filmmakers fail to capitalise. A line of script somewhere posits him as a being from outer space who’s come to Earth and upset the balance of the monster ecosystem by displacing the ruling Godzilla, another idea which is nice as far as it goes, but doesn’t go very far. Kong is name-checked a few times and appears occasionally in static images to remind us that Godzilla vs. Kong is due out next year.

A mysterious organisation called Monarch, the corporate logo of which coincidentally resembles that of Extinction Rebellion turned on its side, has a series of numbered Outposts around the globe where various giant beasts are held in underground storage facilities. As titles such as ‘Monarch Outpost 61, Yunnan Forest, China’ appear on the screen, they create a believable sense of a covert, global network.

Yet in terms of developing an overall mythology, the whole is nowhere near as satisfying as the vision behind Warner Bros’ underrated kaiju (giant monster) movie Pacific Rim (Guillermo del Toro, 2013). Toho’s original Japanese Godzilla/Gojira (Ishiro Honda, 1954) and the more recent Shin Godzilla (Hideaki Anno, 2014) both proved the property capable of incisive socio-political comment even as its men-in-rubber-suit monsters of the fifties or their later computer-generated effects counterparts satisfyingly burned and stomped Tokyo. The new Godzilla: King Of The Monsters doesn’t really have anything like as much to say, preferring to trade in spectacle and fall back on monsters fighting each other, sending in troops with guns whenever the proceedings need another boost to keep the adrenaline up. In other directorial hands, it could have been very special indeed: on so many levels, a seriously wasted opportunity. That said, the creatures themselves are fabulous – and they get an awful lot of screen time.

Godzilla: King Of The Monsters is out in the UK on Wednesday, May 29th. Watch the film trailer below: