Da-Ant

"The film you are about to see is an homage to 'no reason', that most powerful element of style." This is the manifesto that opens Rubber, delivered directly to the audience in a breaking of the fourth wall that is somewhat like taking a pound of dynamite to a pane of glass.

Rubber is a "horror" film about a black rubber car tyre that kills people by making their heads explode. With telepathy. And when I say "horror" I do of course mean "side-splittingly funny, pitch black, absurdist comedy." The opening scenes of Rubber are a deliberate assault on the separation between the audience and the film. Normally the opening sequence of a film seeks to bring you into the world of the film; the audience is encouraged to step through the silver screen and forget about the real world for the duration of the story. Rubber perverts these expectations. The film comes crashing through the screen, into the world of the audience. It reminds us at every turn that we are watching a film, and indeed that the very act of our watching is what makes the film happen.

There are actually two plot lines at work in Rubber. The first concerns a murderous inanimate object , an innocent but spirited young woman on the run from some troubled element of her past, and the county sheriff on the trail of the vulcanised psychopath. This is ostensibly the core thread of the movie, but we soon see that this action only serves as a literal distraction for the audience, who exist in the film, embodied as actual participants, though ones who remain clearly and distinctly removed from the action, watching events at a distance through field glasses. This distraction covers the real story, that of the sheriff, who is in fact the antagonist of the story, attempting to kill off the audience (through the manoeuvrings of his toady, The Accountant) so that the film can end and he can go home.

The movie within the movie begins with a sequence that could have come straight from Leone's scrapbook. A man lies face down in a desert. Slowly, he rises, and shakes himself off. He staggers along, and falls. He rises again, and continues to stagger on, through the endless desert. Except that the "man" in question is a rubber tyre (Roger, according to the credits). This is the brilliance of Rubber; that it can appropriate the cinematic language that we are so familiar with, and apply it to situations that cannot be anything but utterly absurd.

Other scenes lift from a variety of sources, including a sequence that takes place in what is clearly the Bates hotel from the original Psycho. For a film that claims to be dedicated to meaninglessness, it is ironic that not a single frame is without a clear purpose. Every shot serves to either ensconce us in the impossible world of a rubber tyre who murders people, or tear us forcibly out of it, as we return repeatedly to the plight of the poor audience, stranded in the desert with no food, and prey to depredations of a murderous cast member, or possibly character. It's never clear whether the antagonist is an actor who wants to stop playing his role, or a character in a story who wants the story itself to end; the latter appeals, if only for its deeply apocalyptic subtext. When the film ends, where does the character go?).

Even the choice of the supposed villain must have taken a great deal of thought. It's such an elegant choice; an object capable of locomotion, but without moving parts to cutely animate. Something that has an element of menace (after all, a tyre, attached to a vehicle, can do a lot of damage), but is also innately ridiculous. An object that can fulfill the emotive needs of the film yet has remarkably little capacity to emote. Consider that all this thing can do is roll forward, roll backwards, fall over, stand up, and vibrate its sides. That's a sum total of five things you can ask your star to do for you on screen. As a film-making challenge alone, that's a spectacular feat to undertake.

I could go on for days about the tiniest of "seemingly irrelevant but incredibly well thought out" details that litter the film. That Rubber invites such complex readings is a testament to the subtlety that underlies the simple brilliance of the film itself. Whatever you may think about the subtext and meaning of this supposedly meaningless film, it doesn't really matter if Rubber "means" anything or not, because whatever else it may be, the film is absolutely hilarious. We are talking literal "tears of laughter" funny here.

Quentin Dupieux provides us with excellent cinematography, full of lingering establishing shots and vivid, often deliberately off-frame close-ups, and the cast all turn in magnificent performances, especially Jack Plotnick, who demonstrates the ability to carry a scene from laugh out loud funny to deeply uncomfortable in a matter of seconds. The script is tightly written, and the humour builds on itself in layers, rising from the initial "WTF?" moments of nervous laughter to the farcical crescendo of the closing scenes, where every element of the film collides in a scene that, if nothing else, will mean that I'll never look at tricycles the same way again.

I could continue to pick at Rubber, pulling out detail after detail, examining each one in turn to find new facets, new thoughts and revelations. None of that really matters though; what you need to know is that Rubber is the strangest, funniest, and most dazzlingly original film you will see this year, and considering that Scott Pilgrim vs The World just came out, that's one hell of an achievement.

Originally from http://www.rgbfilter.com/?p=9032

The basic premise of The Last Exorcism, directed by Daniel Stamm and written by Huck Botko and Andrew Gurland, is that of a documentary crew doing a piece on the life of Reverend Cotton Marcus, played by Patrick Fabian. A Louisiana preacher of the fire and brimstone variety, Cotton proves that the delivery of the word is sometimes more important than the word itself, as he proves on camera when he delivers a fiery sermon on banana bread. As part of his role as southern preacher, Cotton has performed hundreds of exorcisms, but as he's matured is experiencing a crisis of faith. He still does the fire and brimstone routine, but he's lost his mojo. With thousands of followers via his website, he still receives requests to perform exorcisms, but takes a much more secular approach, while giving his congregation the religious experience they seek.

With a documentary crew in tow, he picks a random exorcism request of the top of his pile and they proceed to record the journey, which takes them to the Sweetzer farm, to cast the demon of of farmer's daughter Nell (Ashley Bell). From there, the story is fraught with the kind of jump scares, and genuinely creepy moments that you would expect from a mash up of The Exorcist and The Blair Witch Project, with a few twists of its own thrown in for good measure. What was unexpected is the amount of sympathy the script manages to evoke for each of the characters, the good Reverend in particular. Every major character in the story, from the Rev to the family seemingly beleaguered by a demon is well rounded, and although based on stereotypes, manages to break the mold in one way or another. As the final scenes unfold, there is genuine emotional attachment to their respective fates. It seems that lately,most horror films have settled on cookie cutter characters, who's personal arcs are pretty predictable from the first frame they appear on screen. In that sense, The Last Exorcism is a horror rarity with films like Let The Right One In and The House Of The Devil (and maybe in a more twisted vein, The Devil's Rejects), that actually gives you people to care about.

The story is really the story of Cotton Marcus, and Patrick Fabian's performance is top notch. It's tough to say anything without giving away the story, but Cotton starts out being one step above a con man, and evolves to become a truly sympathetic character as he relates why his faith was challenged. The performances of the Sweetzer family are all great as well, as the father (played by Louis Herthum) and brother (portrayed Caleb Landry Jones) appear to be largely the stereotypes we expect at the beginning, and become something more by the end.

Special note needs to be made of Ashley Bell's performance as Nell Sweetzer, the apparently 'possessed' girl. In calmer scenes, she gets a chance to play a convincing childlike sixteen year old, and manages to switch over to raw evil in a heartbeat. It's the scenes where she's 'taken over' that she gets to pull out all the stops. The film makers decided to forego complex FX make-up and CGI, for these scenes, instead relying on lighting and Ashley Bell's natural ability to contort her body in painful ways when the demon takes over. Whether it took a lot of training to warp herself that way, or she's naturally double jointed, it's impressive.

Like the all natural approach taken with the Nell character's 'possession' scenes, the gore is actually quite restrained compared to many contemporary horror films, especially those with Eli Roth's name attached. Despite this, there's a single scene in the movie involving an animal which took me out of the film, and serves no real purpose beyond being downright sadistic. I can see why it would be there, given the circumstances at that point in the film, but as someone with some intestinal fortitude, even I found it somewhat gratuitous, and frankly, out of place in the movie.

The other issues mainly have to do with the tropes of the 'found footage' sub-genre of horror film making:

* Who found the footage, and why are they presenting it?

* Couldn't they have edited out the audio beeps and black frames?

* Why didn't the cameraman just get the hell up outta Dodge?

* In what context are they editing the 'found footage', and why don't they tell us what happened next?

* What's with all the running in the forest at night?

It's a tough narrative framework to get around. Unlike a traditional film where the frame subconsciously disappears as you're drawn into the story, the conceit of the faux documentary puts every little technical detail from lighting to film stock out as a storytelling element. When it doesn't come together 'just so', you run a much higher risk of taking the audience out of the film. The Last Exorcism does suffer from these issues, but the script is tight enough that it was only for a moment here and there.

The pacing, which starts with a slow burn that ratchets up to a breakneck speed by the final act, is solid, and the film ends on a satisfying note. Even with the momentarily falterings due to the faux documentary trappings, the well-drawn characters and solid performances not only save the movie, but manage elevate it beyond the genres it mashes up. Cotton Marcus is one of the most interesting, engaging and, well, human, horror movie protagonists I've seen in a long time.

Originally posted at http://www.rgbfilter.com/?p=8690