Paradise lies on the other end of the magic intestine: Coraline

It all begins with a girl and a house. Her parents are there, too, having just transplanted the whole family, but they’re too bogged down with gardening literature projects to even bother unpacking and sprucing things up, and anyway they’re too impatient. There’s also the neighbouring boy, but he’s so sheepishly well intentioned and sort of annoying, and anyway, a boy. There’s a cat, but he’s a mangy old puss that’s kind of falling apart. There are other neighbours who will prove to be genuine eccentrics and sources of diversion, but they come a little later. So what sticks in my mind after watching it is Coraline (voiced by Dakota Fanning) and this house, looming, so empty and creaky and drab, like pretty much everything surrounding it in this permanently overcast, hilly rural Halloween setting.

Coraline and the house are a good match, even if she doesn’t recognize it at first. She’s sly and given to mischief, while the house hides a secret labyrinth. They’re both deceptively compact, she being so slight yet fiercely resilient, and the house, for all its dilapidated grandeur, holds countless inner passageways and impossible spaces. Soon she’ll discover a little door in a wall that during the day opens only onto brick but at night onto this intestinal tunnel, at the end of which is a parallel world where everything seems sort of the same yet suddenly much more fun. Precariously fun. There’s a mechanical chicken that shits out popcorn. There’s a burlesque show performed by elderly acrobats (voiced by the always lively pairing of Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French) for an audience of Scottish terriers.

Most importantly, there is an “Other-mother” and “Other-father,” completely devoted to their beloved little girl, cooking up delicious meals, showering Coraline with gifts and games, so attentive as to seem almost pathological. They have black buttons for eyes, rendering their every expression of servile joy a little hollow. And here, we sense, is the catch. Everybody knows there’s no such thing as a free lunch but Coraline’s going to learn it the hard way. In a way Coraline is a haunted house story, built around the protagonist’s ability to identify and drive away the demon spirits.

It would be enough to get just about anything new from Henry Selick, the director of The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach. His stop-motion animation has such a tactile quality that feels only more enchanting now that so many mainstream animated films fuss endlessly over computer-generated whimsy. His figures each possess unique rhythms, and their transformations are so much more startling for having mass and texture. But the story of Coraline, taken from the novel by Neil Gaiman, is pretty enchanting in its own right, a throwback in the best possible way to old-fashioned stories that lure the magical out of the ordinary. The role of the döppelganger doll Coraline is given near the start is especially smart in that it adds to the richness of Selick’s world and its fascination with objects and the shadow side of just about everything. Pretty fun, overall, and probably ideally suited to kids just old enough to handle a few scenes of extended creepiness.

When darkness fails: On horror, The Strangers, terrific first acts, lousy endings, and using unlikable stars to your advantage

For all my problems with the movie—which you can read about here—I have to give Eden Lake some credit. It did manage to kinda stick to my ribs after I rented it a couple of weeks ago. It whetted my appetite for more new horror, and I found myself deciding to give writer/director Bryan Bertino’s debut The Strangers a whirl, despite my having this lingering memory of glancing at reviews from the time of its theatrical release last year that deemed it ridiculous. Well, ridiculous it certainly is, with far more creeping-up-behind-you moments than any movie can probably sustain, a few of those turgid scenes where the actors have nothing to do but flip out, cover their faces and say oh my god a dozen times, and risibly inconsistent antagonists, a zombie-like trio who wear these stupid masks for no apparent reason, who rarely talk, and when they do they sound like morons, and who seem to suffer from some serious short term memory loss, given how often they lose track of the whereabouts of our vulnerable, desperate heroes, a young couple trapped in a cottage in the woods. Still, I find myself in this position of, on one hand, wanting to completely write-off the movie for ultimately proving itself to be so dramatically soppy and, on the other, pondering the intricacies of its highly intriguing first act. I didn’t realize just how similar the set-ups were in Eden Lake and The Strangers when I rented the latter, but let me tell you, while Eden Lake is arguably the more effective chiller of the two, The Strangers has certain elements that if reapplied could still make for a very interesting movie.


Kristen (Liv Tyler) and James (Scott Speedman), like the protagonists of Eden Lake, venture into the woods for a romantic getaway during which the male of the couple plans to propose marriage. Unlike the unfolding of Eden Lake however, the proposal in The Strangers occurs before the couple arrive at their isolated locale. In fact, we only confirm the proposal’s occurrence in what is basically a flashback within a flashback, in a sequence of narrative fragments that serves to disarm the viewer quite effectively. And unlike the couple in Eden Lake, who seemed unambiguously in love with each other and ripe for tying the knot, essentially just tragic victims of circumstance, Kristen and James begin the story with the devastating realization that they’re not in agreement as to what they want from their relationship. Kristen, we discover, has turned James down, and in the same way that we can read the apocalyptic events of The Birds as being some sort of manifestation of Melanie Daniels’ perusal of Mitch Brenner, of the female protagonist’s sexual unconscious overwhelming that of the male’s, so can we read the horrific events that arise in The Strangers as being some similar manifestation of Kristen’s assertion of her desire to remain unwed and independent, of the intense discord it inflicts upon an event intended to be a celebratory confirmation of love and devotion.


I have to confess that I really don’t find Speedman a very appealing presence in movies. I won’t get into the quality of his acting abilities here, but, for the sake of my next point, let me just announce my entirely subjective distaste for the guy as a movie star. The point being that Speedman, for precisely the same reasons that he bugs me, is, for me at least, pretty much perfectly cast in The Strangers. James, having been freshly rejected, comes off as a truly oppressive boyfriend, one who grows only more oppressive with every ostensibly gentlemanly act he performs, such as his insistence that Kristen take the engagement ring he bought for her regardless of her refusal of marriage. He can’t take it back, he says, so she might as well have it. So gratingly paternal is James with Kristen that even when he’s about to leave the cottage to run an errand, he lights a fire for Kristen, as though she were incapable of doing it herself. The extent of his oppressiveness can be found even in the film’s setting itself: it’s his family’s cottage they’re going to spend the night in, full of his memories, placing him into an even greater position of power, power now essentially resigned to gloating resentment and annoying self pity. (And, to return to the movie’s dumbness, this old family cottage that seems to be uninhabited most of the time somehow has this amazing collection of contemporary music from the likes of Joanna Newsom, Gillian Welch, and Billy Bragg and Wilco, and not just on vinyl, but on 45!) No wonder Kristen doesn’t quite feel comfortable marrying this guy. He’s suffocating.


So a stranger turns up at the door, asking for somebody named Tamara. James leaves on his errand and while he’s gone the stranger returns and starts to torment Kristen, even penetrating the house without Kristen’s witnessing it, only to go back outside and knock on the door again. Go figure. James returns, the strangers multiply and get noisier and more insistent and there’s a predictable but nonetheless satisfying twist in how the first real act of violence plays out. So far so good, but it’s all downhill from there. So be it. But what about that first act? Is it me or is there something to it? It seems to be a prime example of the peculiar condition of the horror genre: while things are still ambiguous and the basic elements still falling into place, a horror movie can hold so much promise that that promise itself can, for some of us, actually make the movie worth watching. Even if the ending stinks. I’m imagining a film festival somewhere that only shows the first half-hour of horror movies. Afterwards audience members gather and discuss various endings that would often be superior to the actual endings. Who knows? Could be a hit.

The good neighbour policy: Sam Jackson does a little creative gardening on Patrick Wilson's white ass in Lakeview Terrace

The first two-thirds of Lakeview Terrace feel like Marxist propaganda, the last third like capitalist propaganda, the whole thing like some sort of distinctly American nightmare, with some surprisingly curious politics and one hell of a dunderheaded narrative. Abel (Samuel L. Jackson) is old school LAPD, a widower with two-kids, a humongous piece of carefully manicured residential property and a chip on his shoulder the size of Plymouth Rock. He’s a hard-ass with a knack for intimidation as well as flights of charm and manipulation. (The movie’s got plenty of good cop/bad cop—in the same cop!)

Abel’s also got some serious issues with racial integration and cultural appropriation—in a memorable early scene, he menacingly reassures his new next-door neighbour Chris (Patrick Wilson) that he can listen to hip-hop all night long if he wants but when he wakes up the next morning he’ll still be white. More importantly Abel’s stridently territorial—at one point he even hires some slob to piss in Chris’ shirt drawer. Chris and his conspicuously fetching black wife Lisa (Kerry Washington) are thus shamelessly sullying Abel’s suburban enclave, practically asking for the full brunt of our man Jackson’s wrath—which apparently is precisely what the very loud, obnoxious but nonetheless jovial audience at the sneak preview I attended came to gobble up. I felt like I was at a wrestling match. These guys actually talk to the screen.

Though I was initially surprised to see Neil LaBute credited as director, it’s actually not that hard to see what attracted him to this material, which, incidentally, was dreamed up by David Loughery, the guy who brought you Money Train and Passenger 57. Right from his earliest films—In the Company of Men, Your Friends & Neighbors—LaBute’s fancied himself something of a moralist and provocateur, though the results have dwindled to the point where his last movie was the outlandishly dumb remake of The Wicker Man. Yet Lakeview Terrace shares with The Wicker Man a gleeful immersion into an essentially closed community lorded over by those who would shape it into some sort of fascist paradise, and the fires consuming Southern California and creeping toward Abel and Chris’ pissing contest carry a certain apocalyptic portent that no doubt agreed with LaBute’s natural pessimism.

Of course it all goes nowhere. At least nowhere all that interesting. The prickly marital squabbles that burble up in the midst of the war-like neighbourly ones feel lazily tacked on, and Chris’ paranoia being surrounded by pushy, Alpha Male Negroes doesn’t build up to a confrontation worthy of the concept. There’s a lot of motivational overkill—like the monologue about the deceased wife’s carrying on with her whitey boss—perhaps to help us understand Abel’s little attitude problem, but in the end he still goes down in a hail of flamboyant nonsense instead of prompting further intrigue or audience implication, and—hooray!—property ownership and vague liberal values rule the day.

(For something more substantial on suburban angst, check out Gary Burns and Jim Brown's Radiant City.)

Man on Wire: Trespassing as sublime art

On the overcast morning of August 7, 1974, New Yorkers lucky enough to have been passing below the twin towers of the World Trade Center bore witness to a genuinely singular event. Philippe Petit had ascended into the clouds for a walk, or rather a dance. The calendars of he and his accomplices were marked on that day with the word “coup.” Disguised, carrying much equipment, and having to constantly evade security, they’d snuck up to the rooftops the night before, strung their wire between the towers, and as the day began Petit, with a focus that's just unfathomable to me, inhabited the largely intangible performance space they’d created for about 45 minutes, dazzling onlookers, merrily taunting police.

They were all arrested, of course, charged with trespassing and disturbing the peace. But the trespassing strikes me as essential to the nature of the feat. It needed to be unsanctioned, unexpected, a sort of vision nurtured clandestinely. Petit was sent in for psychiatric evaluation, but no mental illness could be established. The reporters asked Petit why he did it, and obviously there could be no satisfactory answer. In ‘On the High Wire,’ his essay on Petit, Paul Auster writes: “The desire is at once far-fetched and perfectly natural, and the appeal of it, finally, is its utter uselessness. No art, it seems to me, so clearly emphasizes the deep aesthetic impulse inside us all.” Indeed, the purity of the act is somehow its most potent element.

The event, the most grandiose and publicized in a life of similar feats, is the subject of James Marsh’s extraordinary Man on Wire. Marsh’s documentary—and caper movie of sorts—isn’t a point-by-point biographical profile of Petit. (March also has the grace to never make overt something best felt, the fact that recalling this event gives us back the WTC, not as a site of trauma and terror, but one of awe and inspiration.) Rather, Marsh focuses each moment of Man on Wire exclusively on the event’s painstaking preparations—which necessarily include Petit’s previous wire-walks across the towers of Notre Dame Cathedral and those of Sydney Harbour Bridge—and its immediate aftermath. And Marsh had the good fortune to have chosen a subject that was well documented: Petit and his friends shot a lot of terrific footage of their work-in-progress and of the coup itself.

Perhaps even more importantly, Marsh was fortunate to have a superb storyteller in Petit himself, still elfin, animated, a strawberry-maned Petit Prince, still deeply charismatic, not to mention his cohorts, including his articulate, passionate technical mastermind Jean-Louis Blondeau, and Petit’s girlfriend at the time Annie Allix. As Allix, with great sincerity, explains how upon meeting Petit, “it was quite clear that I had to follow his [destiny],” Marsh nicely juxtaposes her spoken testimony with images of her actually shadowing Petit on the wire, a moving evocation of a young woman surrendering completely to love.

Still, for those of us who’ve never witnessed anything like it, the build-up to the event, which roughly consumes the first two-thirds of Man on Wire, though exciting, can feel sort of abstract. It’s only when we begin to see the actual images, and even more so when we see and hear the intensely emotional testimonies regarding that day, that we are all helplessly caught up in the sublimity of the act, which bypasses audacity and becomes something that penetrates a universal desire to live more rigorously. And it also becomes clear in the film’s final section that Petit’s seemingly weightless passage over Lower Manhattan, the fulfillment of an elaborate, un-repeatable dream, was also a passage into another life altogether, a moment in which, inevitably, everything changed for everyone involved. This moment unfolds as something beautiful, overwhelming, and, in all those trailing-off sentences, something very painful. We should all be so lucky as to feel something like it sometime in our lives.