Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Centennial Tributes: Robert Ryan
By Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.(Warning: Spoilers contained herein…)
Robert Bushnell Ryan was born 100 years ago on this date and he’s one of only a handful of actors who I’ll take the time to watch in anything. But since confession is good for the soul, I thought I’d start this essay out with an admission of guilt…
I used to get actors Robert Ryan and Sterling Hayden confused.
Thankfully, I don’t do that anymore. They’re both still favorites of mine, of course, but I’ve probably seen more Ryan films than those of Hayden’s. My preference for Ryan is due to the fact that the celebrated actor — a man who, off screen, was a pacifist, a tireless campaigner for civil rights and a dedicated foe of McCarthyism — excelled at portraying sadistic villains who were more often than not thoroughly despicable, possessing not the slightest shred of human decency.
And what’s more — he did these roles in such a way that made these “bad guys” oddly endearing…
Born to Timothy and Mabel Bushnell Ryan in 1909, young Robert’s dream was to become a playwright — but since that noble profession can sometimes lead to starvation, he decided to study acting in order to support himself. He had attended and graduated from Dartmouth in 1932, distinguishing himself as the school’s heavyweight boxing champion during all four years of his attendance. He then latched onto a series of odd jobs, including ship’s stoker, ranch hand (in Montana) and a stint with the WPA before signing up to study alongside the great Max Reinhardt. It was during his time with Reinhardt that he met his future wife Jessica Cadwalader, whom he wed in March of 1939 and stayed married until her death in 1972 (he died a year later).
Ryan’s big break on stage came when he was appearing alongside “Viennese Teardrop” Luise Rainer in A Kiss for Cinderella in 1941; her ex-husband Clifford Odets offered him the juvenile role of Joe Doyle alongside Tallulah Bankhead in Odets’ Clash by Night. (In 1952, Ryan would appear in the film version but because of his age was cast in the lead role of Earl Pfeiffer.) It was at this juncture that Ryan began getting small parts in films like The Ghost Breakers (1940) and Queen of the Mob (1940); he received his first screen credit in a B-quickie entitled Golden Gloves (1940), which capitalized on his boxing prowess. From then on, he began to get noticed for his roles in North West Mounted Police (1940), Bombardier (1943), The Sky's the Limit (1943) and Tender Comrade (1943). Upon signing a secure contract with R-K-O in January 1944, Ryan enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps and served as a drill instructor there until 1947. It was while he was in the Corps that he took up painting and, hearkening back to his halcyon college days, won a boxing championship as well.
While in the Marines, Ryan befriended a writer (and future director) named Richard Brooks, who had written a novel that the actor very much admired entitled The Brick Foxhole. Back in Hollywood, R-K-O adapted Brooks’ novel into Crossfire (1947), a down-and-dirty film noir directed by Edward Dmytryk and produced by Adrian Scott (with an adapted screenplay by John Paxton). Ryan portrayed Montgomery, a recently demobilized American soldier who kills a fellow G.I. named Joseph Samuels (Sam Levene) simply because Samuels is Jewish; two other soldiers, Keeley (Robert Mitchum) and Finlay (Robert Young) investigate the murder and ultimately bring Montgomery to justice. Ryan’s portrayal of the anti-Semitic Montgomery was nothing short of astonishing; he literally oozed hatred and intolerance from every pore. The role earned him the only Oscar nomination he would ever receive (for best supporting actor) — but unfortunately typecast him as the silver screen’s resident bigot; he would play similar parts in films like Bad Day at Black Rock (1954) and Odds Against Tomorrow (1959).
Because roles like Black Rock’s Reno Smith and Odds’ Earle Slater were completely at odds with his real-life persona, Ryan accepted the fact that these parts presented to him as an actor a real challenge — but not one with which he was necessarily happy; he was quite reluctant to discuss Crossfire in later years because he thoroughly detested the Montgomery character. Indeed, Crossfire sort of scarred his film career — though he would get an occasion to be a “good guy” every now and then (Berlin Express [1948], The Boy with Green Hair [1948]), he continued to play the reliable “heavy” in films like Caught (1949), The Racket (1951), Beware, My Lovely (1952), House of Bamboo (1955), Billy Budd (1962) and The Dirty Dozen (1967). When he was once complimented on being one of the silver screen’s best heavies, Ryan remarked: “I guess they never saw me in most of my pictures. Still, I've never stopped working so I can't complain.”
But Ryan’s talent was such that even when he was required to be the "baddie" he was able to add subtle nuances to each character that made them three-dimensional, flesh-and-blood human beings. A good example of this is his portrayal of ex-POW Joe Parkson in Act of Violence (1949) — from the moment the movie gets underway he menacingly stalks his former commanding officer Frank Enley (Van Heflin), a seemingly nice middle-class businessman who’s completely flummoxed as to why the embittered Parkson is obsessed with meting out revenge. As the story unfolds, however, we learn that while Parkson’s elevator may not go all the way to the top it’s entirely the fault of Enley, who sold out his fellow soldiers during their internment in the POW camp.
In The Woman on Pier 13 (1950, a.k.a. I Married a Communist), Ryan plays a former stevedore who’s just starting to make good in his company when his past comes back to haunt him in the form of Communist agitators eager to exploit his former affiliation with the Party. Though the film presents the Commies as little more than “gangsters,” Ryan’s Brad Collins character is actually played in a sympathetic fashion; a tragic noir hero whose fate cannot be altered because of his youthful indiscretion. Another noir from that period, On Dangerous Ground (1952), features Ryan on the right side of the law — but as big city cop Jim Wilson, he’s often no better than the “garbage” he deals with on a day-to-day basis…roughing up suspects and seeming on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Assigned by his commander (Ed Begley) to assist locals in a murder investigation in a small town upstate, he comes face-to-face with his doppelganger (Ward Bond) and is redeemed by the love of the murderer’s blind sister (Ida Lupino).
As I stated in the opening lines of this essay, I am such a huge fan of Robert Ryan that I’ll watch anything he’s in…and admittedly, there are a large number of his movies that I can easily pick out as favorites. But the film I keep coming back to — and the one that I personally feel contains his finest performance onscreen — is The Set-Up (1949); a short-and-sweet boxing saga (written by Art Cohn and directed by Robert Wise) that stars Ryan as a worn and faded pugilist named “Stoker” Thompson who’s scheduled for just another bout in his thirty-five years participating in “the sweet science.” Stoker is washed up, a has-been — and his crooked manager Tiny (George Tobias) is so certain that Stoker is going to tank that he takes money from mobster Little Boy (Alan Curtis) for his man to “take a dive”…but decides not to clue Stoker in on the deal, in order to keep more of the kitty for himself.
Stoker is definitely mismatched: he’s fighting the much younger and heavily favored “Tiger” Nelson (Hal Baylor), but somehow has a feeling that he’s “just one punch away” from reversing his misfortune in the ring. His ever-patient wife Julie (Audrey Totter) has heard this all before, and vows to herself that she won’t be at his bout that evening because she can’t bear to see him take another beating. (She later changes her mind.) But the angel who looks after fools, drunks and children is in Stoker’s corner that evening; Stoker’s actually giving Nelson a good scrap — and even when Tiny finally tells him about the fix, he refuses to give up. He soundly beats Nelson to a pulp, and emerges victorious — but Little Boy has the final say when his goons break Stoker’s right hand, taking him out of the fight game forever.
The Set-Up runs a total of 72 minutes and takes place in “real time” — and Ryan is nothing short of sensational. His early career as a boxer no doubt helped in this role, but Ryan clearly has the chops to convince the viewer that he is that washed-up pug who daydreams of a comeback and gets that one-in-a-million opportunity to show that he “could have been a contendah.” The haunting finale of the film — where an anguished Stoker cries out to Julie “I can’t fight no more” — is both heart-breaking and bittersweet; Totter’s performance as the supportive spouse will convince you that although Stoker’s career has ended due to tragedy, she is just the woman who can inspire him to carry on.
One thing that has always fascinated me about Robert Ryan is how he managed to emerge unscathed from the period of paranoia prevalent in the 1950s despite his defiant liberalism; when the House Un-American Activities Committee was discovering “subversives” under every bush and many actors and actress who had even the tiniest tinge of “pink” (read liberal) in their politics found themselves out of work. Ryan once commented: “I was involved in the things he [McCarthy] was throwing rocks at but I was never a target. Looking back, I suspect my Irish name, my being a Catholic and an ex-Marine sort of softened the blow.” Ryan walked the walk and talked the talk (he intensely disliked his Flying Leathernecks co-star John Wayne because the Duke was in favor of the blacklist): he was an extremely vocal supporter of the group known as “The Hollywood Ten” and donated his time and money to groups like the American Civil Liberties Union, American Friends Service Committee, and United World Federalists. He also founded the Hollywood chapter (along with entertainer Steve Allen) of The Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy in September of 1959. In the 1960s, he volunteered to serve in the cultural division of the Committee to Defend Martin Luther King and with other actors like Bill Cosby and Sidney Poitier, founded the short-lived Artists Help All Blacks. He even became a vociferous supporter for Sen. Eugene McCarthy’s quixotic Presidential campaign in 1968.
Toward the end of his life, Ryan continued to do outstanding work in films, including The Professionals (1966), The Wild Bunch (1969), Lawman (1971) — he even went out with a winner in his last film, The Iceman Cometh (1973), in which he played the terminally ill political activist Larry Slade. Ironically, Ryan was himself was diagnosed at the same time with lung cancer, a condition that he publicly denounced (in the manner of actor William Talman) as being caused by his heavy use of cigarettes. He died on July 11, 1973.
(Ivan G. Shreve, Jr. blogs at Thrilling Days of Yesteryear, where Robert Ryan is often referred to as “one of the most delectable rat bastards of the silver screen”…and in all honesty is meant to be a compliment.)
Labels: Robert Ryan
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Tuesday, November 10, 2009
You are who they pay off
By Edward Copeland
Maybe it's the fact that Hollywood is in such doldrums that they are so afraid to take chances and think the next big thing is making movies based on toys and board games that makes well-made documentaries so often beat their offerings in quality and appeal. Even the indie market seems to have hit a rut where those filmmakers plow the same crops, even if they are fields ignored by the big guys. That's why when a documentary as informative and put together with such panache as Robert Kenner's Food, Inc. comes along, it's a cinematic breath of fresh air that puts the majority of fiction films to shame.
Food, Inc., doesn't take the stance as a political screed urging vegetarianism for all. On the contrary, Kenner's film is a remarkably well-made expose on all aspects of the American food system which, as we've learned through the greed and carelessness of the big financial institutions on Wall Street or the money grubbing of hospitals, doctors and health insurance companies, spend much of their time lining the pockets of those who supposedly represent the common man so they can maximize profits and literally control not only what we put in our mouths but what is allowed to come out of them.
Before I delve into the substance of this brilliant film, I want to point out the wonder of its opening credits. Many films have great credit sequences, but unless Saul Bass was involved, they don't usually get the credit. The opening sequence of Food, Inc., is perfection, as it not only pleases the eye but serves as an excellent conduit into the documentary itself.
Unlike the documentaries of Michael Moore, where he is a key part of the show, Food, Inc., isn't about stunts. It's reporting at its finest while still managing to be riveting and informative. Of course, none of the many corporations mentioned in the films agree to talk to the filmmakers and the businesses's deep pockets scare many into insisting on disguises or not talking at all. It's shocking to learn what strong-arm tactics have been used against the nation's farmers and to see the revolving door between the food companies and government regulatory jobs (of which there are far fewer now that there were a mere 30 or 40 years ago).
The corporations have no reluctance to crushing people's lives if they don't conform to their assembly-line, unsafe ways of raising animals for food or growing soybeans. Lawmakers are willing co-conspirators. In Colorado, it actually is a crime if someone speaks out or writes something disparaging the quality of beef raised in Colorado. The First Amendment need not apply to beef.
What's even more special about Food, Inc., is that it's not really a film that falls on one side of the political spectrum or the other, though it definitely, combined with all the other recent scandals, shows the need for strong regulations to protect Americans from all corporations. They keep the prices of the unhealthiest foods down, so that's all the poorest can afford. I almost don't want to cite specific examples from the film: It needs to be experienced. It doesn't matter whether you are as far left as they come or as far right as they come, I don't see how you can watch Food, Inc., and not be angry by the film's end. Maybe this is where common ground can be found since we all need to eat, no matter who we vote for.
Labels: 00s, Documentary
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Monday, November 09, 2009
Is research that hard?
By Edward Copeland
Whenever I complain about anachronisms or factual inaccuracies in a movie, some people think I shouldn't be taking the film in question so seriously. However, I can't help it. If a feature really has me under its spell, that kind of goof breaks it immediately and it's hard to recapture that spirit in the middle of the movie. Granted, Lymelife wasn't really wowing me anyway, but as the inaccuracies added up, it just added to my distaste for the film, despite its talented ensemble cast.
Before I start ranting about the anachronisms and inaccuracies, I feel it's best to talk about Lymelife itself. There's the oft-repeated Tolstoy quote about all happy families being the same but all unhappy families are different, but I swear movies, particularly indies, try their damnedest to put that author's truism to the test.
Lymelife is the directing debut of Derick Martini, who co-wrote the film with his brother Steven. Based loosely on his own experience, it stars Rory Culkin as 15-year-old Scott Bartlett, facing an array of growing pains in 1979 Long Island. His parents Mickey and Brenda (Alec Baldwin, Jill Hennessy) have a tense relationship, especially, as far as Scott knows, over Mickey's grand plan for a large housing community while Brenda yearns for their life back in Queens. Scott's older brother Jimmy (Kieran Culkin) is in the Army and about to be activated for an overseas engagement. At school, Scott is the victim of bullies and longs for Adrianna Bragg (Emma Roberts), who views him as nothing more than a friend (and who hasn't been there).
Adrianna's life isn't going much rosier. Her mom Melissa (Cynthia Nixon) is unhappy and the breadwinner of the home, secretly sleeping with Mickey since Adrianna's dad Charlie (Timothy Hutton) is unemployed because he's been diagnosed with Lyme disease. (On a personal note that rang true, he mentions that at one point in the diagnosis process, doctors thought he might have multiple sclerosis. Before I was diagnosed with M.S., they ruled out Lyme disease as a cause of my problems.) As a result, he spends much of his free time in the woods with a rifle stalking deers he blames for his fate, though he's got more problems than just his illness. If a gun is introduced in the first act...
The cast all performs more than ably, though at times Hennessy lays her New York accent on a bit too thick. Once again, it's truly amazing what good actors the younger members of the Culkin brood, particularly Kieran, have turned out to be given what a mugging ham their older brother Macaulay was in his heyday.
Now, back to the rant. According to the IMDb, Derick Martini was born in 1975 and Steven Martini was born in 1978, meaning the brothers were 4 and 1 in the year the film was set, made clear that it's 1979 by a brief TV shot of the taking of the U.S. hostages in Iran and in a collection of train tickets. Since the press notes say the story is semiautobiographical, why did Martini choose to make it a period piece and, more importantly, why not make certain he got the facts of the period right.
There are little things. Scott has a collection of Star Wars figures and at one point in a hybrid of Travis Bickle and Han Solo, is shooting a laser pistol at his mirror at "Lando." I played this back twice to make sure I wasn't mishearing Greedo, but no, he's calling out Lando, the character played by Billy Dee Williams in The Empire Strikes Back who wouldn't be introduced until May 1980.
Other anachronisms could be nitpicked, but it's a huge inaccuracy that just pulled me out of the picture. Scott's brother is being activated as part of the U.S. effort in the Falkland Islands war. Now, maybe many of you have forgotten that war, but it was between the British and Argentina, it took place in 1982 and the U.S. was not involved in it whatsoever.
Maybe the Martini brothers were too young to get the facts straight, but the movie had two executive producers, including Martin Scorsese, and six producers, including Alec Baldwin, who helped get Lymelife made. Why did none of these people, who could mentor these young filmmakers, step up and say, "This is a giant goof about the Falkland Islands war." I know a lot of them are old enough and smart enough to know the real story and since this was a low-budget indie, they weren't just there for a paycheck. So why shirk their responsibility to help these young men?
Having just finished watching the first two seasons of Mad Men, which is meticulous in its details of real events, down to the day, it comes off as laziness when you see such blatant indifference to the facts in a film such as Lymelife.
Ignorance is not bliss. Ignorance is ignorance and though many advise you to check your brains at the door for movies, that applies more to crap such as Transformers. When you're trying to be real, why be so careless as to allow things to break that reality?
Labels: 00s, Scorsese, Star Wars
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Friday, November 06, 2009
The harder they fall
By Edward Copeland
As documentary filmmaking became more and more interesting, and profitable, in the past few decades, the more old-fashioned "talking head" documentary tend to be a subject of mockery, but that is more or less the form director James Toback uses in his film, though he only has one head and it is a large and recognizable one: Mike Tyson, who is surprisingly self-critical and open as he gives a first-person recounting of his rise and fall in Tyson.
Toback tries to shake things up at time, almost to the point of distraction, with split screens which work fine when one shot is Tyson today and the other is other footage but which seems silly when the screen is filmed with three or four different shots of Tyson speaking to the camera at the same time.
That's a minor criticism though for what proves to be a surprisingly compelling film. Granted, this only contains Tyson's viewpoint, so there aren't any other witnesses to the events to back him up or disagree, but Tyson is so open to admitting his own flaws, that it almost feels unnecessary.
I've never had much of an interest in boxing and while this is certainly no When We Were Kings, it is fascinating to hear Tyson explain what would prompt someone to bit another boxer's ear off. The tale overall is a bit of a sad one and you can't help but think that if his original manager Cus D'Amato had lived a bit longer, perhaps Tyson would have been able to avoid the inevitable fall since D'Amato definitely kept him grounded and focused.
The documentary doesn't miss any of the tabloid moments that surrounded the former heavyweight champ though when he speaks of his rape conviction, he puts most of the blame squarely on the accuser. I have no way of knowing what happened in the hotel room but I remember at the time that his trial happened in the same time period as William Kennedy Smith's rape trial and the two were such a study and what the difference in having good defense lawyers make. At the time, I remember Tyson's lawyers basically saying, "She had it coming because she went back to his room" and painting him as a monster, yet in the documentary, Tyson never gives it to his lawyers.
Still, you ultimately feel sympathy for an athlete who had so much skill at what he did, made a fortune and then squandered most of it, including his love for the sport, though at least he seems to find some kind of peace as a family man now, even though he still seems as if he's a man-child more than someone in his 40s.
Labels: 00s, Documentary
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Monday, November 02, 2009
12 сердитых людей
By Edward Copeland
I sure hope the estate of Reginald Rose or whomever owns the rights to 12 Angry Men got some sort of payment from the makers of the Russian film 12, because there is no question that the film is an unequivocal remake. Sure, there are some changes, but most of the story has merely been transplanted to Moscow, even the easy availability of supposedly unique knives. Director Nikita Mikhalkov's film does enough different to make the story seem fresh, but its length hampers the enjoyment.
Of course, 12, which was one of the Oscar nominees for foreign language film in 2007 though it didn't get a U.S. release until 2009, doesn't have the advantage that all the American incarnations of 12 Angry Men have in that most of the cast are made up of performers familiar to U.S. audiences, giving them a leg up to separating the characters. 12 can't quite differentiate as well. Even when you start to realize which one is the doctor, etc., part of it still plays in terms of Sidney Lumet's 1957 feature version, picking out the Henry Fonda and Lee J. Cobb stand-ins.
What really lengthens Mikhalkov's film and seems unnecessary are the flashback scenes fleshing out the story of the defendant. It really steps on the directorial flow of Mikhalkov, who also plays one of the jurors. Still, it's much better than the film Mikhalkov won the foreign language Oscar for, Burnt By the Sun. 12 wants to be story of a justice system struggling in post-Soviet Russia. There isn't a suitable jury room adjacent to the courthouse, so the jurors make their decision in a rundown school's gymnasium, complete with leaky pipes and asbestos falling from the ceiling.
Accused of murder is a young Chechen man who was adopted by a Russian soldier when his father was killed in Russian-Chechen combat. It does allow for a bit of the hatred between the Russians and Chechens to rear its head (along with some anti-Semitism between the jurors), but the scenes really do nothing to add to the deliberations, especially shots of the defendant spinning in dance in his jail cell as if he were Billy Elliott.
12 Angry Men is such a warhorse, that it almost always can work and this version, written by Mikhalkov, Aleksandr Novototsky-Vlasov and Vladimir Moiseyenko, does have a nice twist in the final stage of deliberations, focusing on what life will be like for the young man, that almost makes 12 reach a higher level of artistry. Unfortunately, it's such a long, predictable drive to get there.
Labels: 00s, Foreign, Henry Fonda, Lumet, Remakes
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Thursday, October 29, 2009
A well of tradition to draw from
By Edward Copeland
Something happens to the best filmmakers. Even when they are good, once they delve into their own ethnic or societal upbringing, they achieve a deeper greatness, whether the film in question is explicitly autobiographical or not.
Steven Spielberg finally seemed to grow up once he made Schindler's List, even though he'd made great films before that. Martin Scorsese and Ingmar Bergman hit high watermarks early because they didn't delay those explorations. Other filmmakers such as Brian DePalma remain hollow ciphers with little interest in self-examination (or beyond making a couple of interesting film sequences per film).
Though No Country for Old Men showed a new step forward for the Coen brothers, A Serious Man is their first film that openly addresses growing up Jewish in late '60s Minnesota and it is unlike anything they've made before, displaying a maturity unseen in their work while still being great and entertaining.
After opening with a short Jewish fable set in the European past, A Serious Man settles into its Job-like tale of Lawrence Gopnik, a college physics professor in 1967 Minnesota who tries to lives a good life until realities he was completely oblivious to start striking him one after another as his son's bar mitzvah approaches and he's due to learn whether he will get tenure at his university.
Michael Stuhlbarg plays Gopnik with a sense of wide-eyed disbelief at the array of misfortune the befalls him. For some reason early in the film, he momentarily struck me like Bryan Cranston's Walter White on television's great Breaking Bad, but Gopnik isn't that complicated nor terminally ill and he certainly isn't going to become an aspiring drug kingpin. Early in the film, the phrase "Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you" appears on the screen and that appears to be Gopnik's approach except for a slight breakdown here or there.
When his wife Judith (Sari Lennick) suddenly announces that she wants a divorce so she can have a ritual Jewish marriage with their friend and widower Sy (Fred Melamed). Sy is an unusual man, wanting to be unusually compassionate and cooperative to Larry while he busts up his marriage. The Gopniks' two children seem disinterested in what's going on with the teen daughter trying to gather cash for a nose job and the son more worried about lousy TV reception for F Troop and money he owes his pot dealer.
Larry doesn't have it much better at his job. As he awaits the tenure decision, he's told that someone is sending anonymous notes questioning his moral turpitude and he's being harassed by a South Korean student and his family who feel that he's been harassed because he's flunking physics and Gopnik won't change his grade or accept his bribe which he may or may not have given the professor.
All of this sends Gopnik on a spiritual journey, embracing his Judaism in a way he never has before, trying to find answers to the all these questions. The Coens keep their own points-of-view close to their chest. You can't be sure if they find all this religiosity silly, if they are viewing Larry's travails from the viewpoint of God or if they take his search seriously.
Whatever the Coens' real-life take, A Serious Man works. In Broadcast News after Albert Brooks' character's disastrous try at anchoring the weekend news, he starts laughing when he describes it to Holly Hunter, explaining that, "At some point, it got so off-the-chart bad, it just got funny." Larry Gopnik never feels that way, but the audience of A Serious Man certainly will as its tone is humor of the darkest shade.
The Coens always have been strong filmmakers, but at times their tendency toward showiness got in the way, especially when the films in question were some of their lesser efforts. There is very little of that here as they do yeoman work on what may be the best screenplay they've written. They're aided ably by frequent collaborators such as composer Carter Burwell, cinematographer Roger Deakins and that phantom film editor Roderick Jaynes.
The entire cast, composed mostly of familiar faces and unknowns, all do good work. Of the supporting cast, I'd single out Melamed and George Wyner as one of the rabbis Larry sees. However, the film revolves around Larry, and the relatively unknown Stuhlbarg pulls it off. His performance is a wonder with so much contained in his face which reminded me of Harold Lloyd. The Coens were smart to place their faith in him to anchor A Serious Man because I can't visualize the film working with another actor as Larry Gopnik.
Labels: 00s, Coen Brothers, DePalma, Ingmar Bergman, Scorsese, Spielberg
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Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Drag Me to Hell: the tortured home viewer's cut
By Edward Copeland
Whenever a film hits DVD with the "director's cut," I'm always torn. Should I watch the theatrical version and write about that, since it's what people saw in the theater, or go with the unrated version. With Sam Raimi's Drag Me to Hell, I toyed with the idea (assuming I liked it) of watching the theatrical version first, which was rated PG-13, and then watch the unrated, unneutered version and compare the two. The best laid plans... Unfortunately, the first DVD that arrived kept freezing and skipping about an hour into the theatrical version. I did all the usual tricks to no avail and then assumed it was a bad disc before mailing it back for a replacement.
When the second disc arrived, the same thing happened, so I tried it out on a portable DVD player, but it didn't solve the problem. Then I noticed something on the screen where you picked between the unrated and theatrical versions: small print indicated that the theatrical version might have problems playing on some DVD players. So, I switched to approximately the same part of the story in the unrated version and finished the film. Therefore, the cut of Drag Me to Hell I saw really was one of my own invention.
Despite the technical problems and my own self-editing hodgepodge, I found Drag Me to Hell quite enjoyable. It's not campy in the way Raimi's early horror forays such as the Evil Dead series was, but Drag Me to Hell is a more straight-forward scarefest about Christine Brown, a sweet young loan officer (Alison Lohman) who makes the mistake of turning down the third mortgage extension to the wrong old gypsy and gets an awful curse placed upon her. Christine's inner, sympathetic instincts might have been to give the old woman (Lorna Raver) to pay what she owes, but her boss at the bank (David Paymer) discourages it and Christine is hoping for a promotion. Given the economic disaster our country has been facing, watching the movie, even though you know Christine doesn't deserve what she gets, you can't help but think it what fun it would have been if some of this country's foreclosure victims, tricked into subprime loans, had been well-versed in the dark arts and taken similar evil action against soulless financial institutions.
Christine does have a smart and attentive professor boyfriend (Justin Long) but she has problems beyond the gypsys's curse to contend with his snobby parents and in addition to her bank boss who still treats her as a secretary while dangling that promotion and a rival loan officer (Reggie Lee) who is after the same job and will sink to anything to steal it out from under her.
Most of the scares in the script by Raimi and his brother Ivan get to be predictable but Sam Raimi's direction moves the action along at such a swift pace that many of the frights catch you by surprise anyway. Lohman, who was so good in the underrated Matchstick Men, really has to carry the film and she does so admirably. Her transformation from sweet and well-meaning to angry, vengeful and willing to do anything to anyone and anything to rid herself of the gypsy's plague is played with great aplomb.
Drag Me to Hell won't go down in history as one of the all-time greats in the horror genre but it's certainly leagues above much of what has passed for good efforts in that field in recent years.
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