Beating a dead horse

Millions of horses died in the Great War. The image of those enormous and elegant, muscular and lithe bodies collapsing, terrified, cut up, scattered, tangled in wire, rotting across muddy European plains alongside the unfathomable numbers of human dead and dying is a very powerful, poignant one. It isn’t difficult to understand how storytellers would be drawn to it. I haven’t read Michael Morpurgo’s 1982 children’s novel, so I can’t attest as to whether or not it works on its own, but as adapted for the screen by Richard Curtis and Lee Hall, adapted into something that doesn’t feel much like a children’s movie (except that it feels naive and oversimplified), and adapted in such a manner that the horse is no longer the centre of the story (and instead fills that centre with corny stock characters), War Horse is astonishingly hollow, simultaneously mechanical and sentimental, faux-innocent, and thus secretly cynical. In short, it brings out the worst in Steven Spielberg, whose direction of actors has never been more leaden (he gets what I can only hope will be the worst, most strained and artificial performance the normally great Peter Mullan will ever give), whose camerawork has never felt more thoughtlessly money-coated (he seems to need a crane just to shoot inserts), and aesthetically droopy (there’s a closing day-for-dusk shot that has to be seen to believe how ugly it is). It may be the nadir of Spielberg regular John Williams’ long career of composing wildly over-animated scores; every time anyone so much as smirks it’s like E.T.’s flying past the moon.

Perhaps Spielberg felt that War Horse would be a return to past glories; after tackling Normandy, he could now sink his teeth into the Somme (from the Holocaust to The War of Worlds, nothing seems to charge the elder Spielberg’s batteries like colossal, senseless death counts). Indeed, Joey, the thoroughbred-turned-plow horse-turned-war horse, becomes something of a Private Ryan. Everything stops, literally, to tend to him. Brits and Germans meet in the middle of a corpse-strewn battlefield and band together to rescue Joey from a lonesome, slow demise. A field doctor stops attending to a glut of agonized wounded soldiers just to help Joey. At some point, the magical aura surrounding this horse and the way it prompts everyone to ignore all else becomes, arguably, kind of offensive.

It doesn’t help that the horse is just, you know, a horse. There’s nothing all that cinematic about him. Spielberg and cinematographer Janusz Kamiński have no special way of rendering him charismatic. I adore horses, but just sticking one in front of a camera doesn’t make me instantly teary-eyed; the fact is, their allure, the particular nature of their features, isn’t easily captured on film... But really, I’m just struggling to make sense of why War Horse is such a dud. I think rather than generalize or theorize I should just say that this is one of those pictures where, scene-by-scene, over the course of its grueling runtime, you’re sort of baffled by all the small, wrote, bad choices that slowly accumulate: the lame comic relief (a goose), the forced emotions, the speechy dialogue. Spielberg, so much more at home with lighter material (E.T., Catch Me If You Can), has gone to war once more, and this time he really got creamed.

House arrest: Paranormal Activity

She’s a nice girl, but she has a history. She’s been followed all her life by something unseen, something which makes its presence felt in other ways. Katie is an English major, good-humoured, pretty, but somehow plain. Micah is a day trader with a large house for them to share. He’s got average guy looks, style and attitude, and an average guy’s fear of commitment. Everything about Katie, Micah and the house they occupy is so rigorously ordinary it’s nearly anonymous. There’s almost no décor to speak of. They don’t have photos on their computer desktops. But we know people like this, who like things new and clean and comfortably boring. Their relationship is founded on such unspoken acceptance of the status quo. Their characterless home becomes a blank slate upon which fear can slowly spread across.

Everything we see and hear in Paranormal Activity is transmitted through Micah’s video camera. There are noises in the night. Soon there will be movement. A sober psychic will visit, but he claims what they’ve got here’s a demon, and he’s strictly a ghost man. He gives them the number of a good demonologist, but the demonologist is out of town and they have to wait, with only Micah’s camera, an occult guidebook, and a Ouija board for protection. Of course they have each other, but their nerves are getting mutually rattled and, despite Katie’s repeated protests, Micah won’t stop taunting whatever is stalking her. Micah’s cocky—he thinks he knows how the movie is going to end. You could say Paranormal Activity is a parable of martial anxiety. Micah regards his camera as a sort of erotic appendage. He asks Katie to kiss it. Micah wants to get busy on camera, but Katie isn’t willing to consummate. Micah jokes that they’re engaged to be engaged, which is another way of saying that the force of Katie’s domesticating presence may be scarier to him than any malevolent demon.

Orin Peli’s micro-budget debut, arriving in theatres ten years after The Blair Witch Project, an obvious precursor both in form and marketing strategies, is flawed in several ways but perfectly ingenious nonetheless. It succumbs, like that other Blair Witch offspring [REC], to the habit of over-explaining the persistence of the running camera. It distracts with questions as to why this nice, if troubled young woman wants to be with this idiot, whose callousness is overstated. The film would benefit immensely from shaving off the last 30 seconds or so, when the sudden intrusion of corny horror movie effects sucks the air out of the documentary verisimilitude. (This ending, shot after Peli’s original cut was completed, was reportedly suggested by Steven Spielberg, an early fan and instrumental in the film’s distribution.) But Paranormal Activity still works, at times brilliantly so.


The most inspired shot in the whole thing is the one repeated over and over, one that almost echoes Michael Haneke or David Lynch. Micah’s camera is set up to monitor their bedroom while the couple sleeps. The results are mostly static, which is the masterstroke. Our eyes dart between the people sleeping, the gloom beyond the bedroom door, and the in-camera clock, which speeds up for expediency and then slows down just when that dreaded something is going to happen. Was that a murmur? A shadow? Was that just a breeze? This anticipation is what bad dreams are made of.

It bears comparison to The Strangers, a movie with an unusually large gap between the eloquence of its premise and the inanity of its resolution. Like The Strangers, Paranormal Activity concerns a couple at a turning point in their relationship, isolated in a single location, their anxiety seeming to manifest as an intruder determined to get inside. In a sense the entire story becomes a sort of sex act, or slow rape. The intruder, the ostensible demon, penetrates the house little by little, lubricating the cavity, if you will, until it’s made its way fully inside, fusing the alliance between sex and death inherent in these stories. But unlike many stories of this kind, Paranormal Activity understands the importance of restraint. And it doesn’t climax early.

Will wonders never cease? Too much aliens and awe overwhelm the winsome ordinary in Close Encounters

It’s easy to chuckle over the fact that Steven Spielberg’s finest movies exhibit more of a knack for collaborating with alien puppets than with actual human beings, yet revisiting Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) serves to remind us that there was a time when America’s biggest brand-name director could evoke an extraordinary sense of the mundane. Close Encounters’ messy households full of noisy toys, cluttered kitchens, kids beating the shit out of dolls, parents hollering over each other and broadcasted cacophony possess a spontaneity, liveliness and sensitivity rarely repeated in later Spielbergs. Here, the amiable clamour of modern domesticity nicely juxtaposes the cosmic awe that eventually overwhelms everything. 

(So well orchestrated is the familial hum that, in combination with the emergence of the toxic emergency and its accompanying carnival atmosphere, one could arguably spot raw material for Don DeLillo’s White Noise within the movie’s best sequences.)

It has a brilliant first line—“Are we the first ones?”— and a great B-movie set-up, those stoic faces of air traffic controllers all lined up like Rushmore or reflected spookily on the radar screens. It has a little kid with the unlikely name of Barry, cute, boldly inquisitive in that particularly American way, and dopey as all hell, his only comment upon witnessing an alien air show being “Ice cream!” It has a terrific Richard Dryfuss flipping out, tossing uprooted shrubs, bricks and trash into his house to make an impressive installation in the living room, which, in one of the most inspired shots, looms between Dryfuss negotiating desperately with his deserting wife on the horn and a TV frantically whipping out exposition. It has good old Bob Balaban and, bizarrely, Nouvelle Vague forefather François Truffaut as his own kind of alien: a Frenchman, and the only one to acknowledge the heroism of Dreyfus’ crackpot. “Zey belong here more zan we,” he solemnly declares.

Unfortunately, Close Encounters also has John Williams, perhaps the biggest ham in movie score history, supplying accompaniment so bombastic and illustrative as to go over like a limpid parody of the same 50s sci-fi flicks Spielberg is trying to elevate to some sort of blockbuster art. And it has those pesky, anemic aliens, big on minimalist music and laser light shows, who take forever to finish with the New Agey dueling banjo shtick and land the damn ship already. The final act of Close Encounters is way more boring than contact with extraterrestrial life has any right to be, but we can still enjoy the earlier sections, evidence that ordinary humans anticipating a miracle are more fun than the miracle itself.