Reviews: April 2008 Archives

It pains me to note that The Forbidden Kingdom has the feeling of a valedictory about it. The film is a generally westernized recitation of archetypal martial-arts legends and themes that uses an alternate-realities hook to palm off its main character arc on Michael Angarano, a good-looking kid who comes off as a variation on a theme by Shia LaBeouf, in a bid to give a generation of teenaged American moviegoers a point of emotional entrée to the story of the Asian other. That director Rob Minkoff had the sense to retain the great Asian martial-arts choreographer Yuen Wo-Ping and lyrical cinematographer Peter Pau is to his credit - they give the film notes of beauty and authenticity that play against the inevitable Hollywood gloss slathered across the story (think Karate Kid: The Next Generation) and characters.

The first scenes of The Ruins look like an especially gorgeous episode of some MTV show about rich white people with nothing better to do but lounge in the sun all day. Shot in richly colored widescreen by D.P. Darius Khondji, these are ostensibly early character moments, establishing the tendencies of these two young couples, freewheeling girls and two boys, one uptight and one less so. But director Carter Smith has Khondji linger on the women's bodies, pale in the Mexican sun, attractively toned and -- as the horror fans who will gravitate to a movie like The Ruins will intuitively understand -- fragile in frightening ways. These are the beautiful people, and by the end of The Ruins we'll have spent a lot of time watching them go downhill. Their skin will be mottled with the stains of blood and grime, their clothing filthy from sweat and dirt (and something green), their hungry and terrified bodies ravaged not just by stress and dehydration, but by the immediate threat of alien invasion - by something alive that breaks the skin and then scoots underneath, tearing around your subcutaneous regions like tiny hyperactive moles making tunnels under the grass.

The Blood on Satan's Claw, a 1971 horror potboiler from English genre studio Tigon, lacks the moral underpinnings of Michael Reeves' cautionary classic Witchfinder General but resembles it in setting and atmosphere. Where Witchfinder General was all about the villainous official played by Vincent Price who saw witchcraft in every corner – or, cynically, used accusations of witchery to advance his own personal and political aspirations – The Blood on Satan's Claw clarifies the relationship between wickedness and virtue by showing how evil, in the guise of rebellious children and especially a seductive teenager, can be vanquished by vigilance and bravery on the part of Christian men. It's the kind of movie where the cranky old judge who ducks out of town at the first signs of a supernatural dust-up returns in the final reel, empowered to vanquish the devil himself.

Skeptical viewers may suspect, with some reason, that Wong Kar Wai has been making the same movie for a number of years now – their subjects include displacement across time and space, romantic yearning, color and light, loneliness and reverie. When he changes up the formula, let's say by making his lovers two men (Happy Together) or by goosing the ennui with lavish science-fiction inserts (2046), it only seems to intensify the familiar feelings of gentle anxiety and punch-drunk desire. “We love what we can't have, and we can't have what we love,” Wong once told an interviewer, and over and over his films seem to find new approaches to that same disconnect, traveling roads that wind through familiar surroundings but offer a slightly different view of the landscape.

That great title is the main attraction of this cheerfully nonsensical Warner Bros. farce, which mixes up a couple of bumbling police detectives, Kelly and Dempsey (Hugh Herbert and Allen Jenkins), with a trenchcoated dame (Vesta Vernoff) who stumbles out of the rain and into their squad car claiming that her stepfather has been murdered at a nearby lighthouse. "He's the inventor of a radium ray so powerful that anyone who controls it controls the world," she explains with a straight face, then adds, urgently, "Every nation is seeking it."