20 iris OVER THE EDGE November 7 - 21, 2007 Movie Reviews Movie - Introducing the Dwights Director - Cherie Nowlan SIMRAN LEHAL CONTRIBUTOR Introducing the what? The who? The who cares. Introducing the Dwights, an Aussie flick relatively unknown to these shores, directed by the even more unfamiliar Cherie Nowlan. Few have heard of, and even fewer have seen the film: for good reason. Introducing the Dwights introduces Jean, a cook by day and comedian by night, and her two sons — Mark, who helps his raucous mother break into comedy, and Tim, a twenty-one year old boy who learns to experience women for the first time. Dried up laughter and coagulated grins split open when, predictably, Jean experiences envy when Tim starts dating Jill, a sex-crazed woman who Jean fears will tear the tightly-leashed family apart. Thus, the already offbeat household becomes the frontline for dysfunction as Jean and Jill battle for Tim’s affections. Although comparable to quirky films like Little Miss Sunshine and The Family Stone with Movie - Psycho Director - Alfred Hitchcock Year - 1960 SARA TIMBERLAKE ConTRIBUTOR Finally, I have been able to witness one of Hitchcock’s finest masterpieces. Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho paved the way for a new genre of movie: the slasher genre. Psycho’s plot line involves a theme used over and over, that of an ordinary person trapped in a criminal situation. Marion ’ Crane (Janet Leigh) still fills Hitchcock’s mold of a woman who is innocent to crime. However, she embezzles $40,000 in order to be with the man she is having an affair with, Sam Loomis (John Gavin). Marion steals the money from a slimy real estate customer (Frank Albertson), yet her motive is love not spite. Eventually she flees Phoenix and heads to Sam’s town of Fairvale California. Except now, another element of Hitchcock’s trademark movies rears its ugly head: paranoia regarding the police. When Marion is taking a nap in her car, a highway patrolman (Mort Mills) wakes her and questions her. Marion Crane is startled, and when she reaches the next town, she trades in her car for one with different license plates. However, the same patrol- man is parked across the street from the dealership and is staring at her. This patrolman fades away, eventually, and clears the way for another, more ominous figure. Marion drives closer to Fairvale, but is caught in a violent rainstorm. She ends up pulling into the Bates motel, where she meets Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins). He is the motel’s manager and the cynical mastermind behind the rest of the film. The results of their meeting are terrify- ing! And the ending has a very unexpected twist. Cinema CNC Review Movie - Rescue Dawn Director - Werner Herzog Year - 2007 Copy WitLeTr Epiror in CHigF There are some movies out there that defy their genre so convincingly that you have to re- think the criteria for that genre. Rescue Dawn is one of those films. Eccentric but eminently talented, writer/director Werner Herzog takes a Vietnam prisoner of war (POW) film and makes you forget the context. Now, I’m no fan of war or its glorification, but what guy out there hasn’t seen at least some part of Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo or Chuck Norris’s Braddock? It was with these conceptions of POW films that I looked forward to the Christian Bale of Batman Begins or 3:10 to Yuma (great contemporary western) kicking ass and taking names. Bale might not be capable of sewing up a gash with his trusty self-stitching kit like Stallone, or killing 17 vicious Viet Cong soldiers with one precision-aimed roundhouse kick to the face like Norris, but he does have that intensely tough smouldering look about him. Then we are introduced to Bale’s “based on a true story” character, Dieter Dengler. Clean shaven and simple, Dieter embodies a variation on Forrest Gump. Admittedly, Dieter can fly a plane well enough to have been given an illegal mission to bomb targets on the Ho Chi Minh trail in Laos of 1966. His back-story is that he looked a pilot in the eye as the plane flew feet over his childhood home in Germany. So when he’s shot down almost immediately and offered freedom if he’ll denounce the US, he’s bemused and says: “I can’t sign this... they gave me wings!” Obviously it’s off to the POW camps for Dieter, but not before some rough treatment at the hands of his long haired, aviator-wearing Viet Cong captors. You have to giggle when they fire a gun all around him and he freaks out at the shooter yelling: “Don’t you ever do that again! Do you hear me? Don’t you ever do that again!” You have to wonder if it’s the English as a second language (no hint of an accent) or if he’s just not into playing the tough guy. In fact, other than shooting three of his POW camp captors during his eventual escape, he doesn’t get violent the whole movie long. In the POW camp Dieter ends up at there’s only one token wasted soldier, Duane (played by Steve Zahn). The rest of his inmates are too weird to be considered comic and too comic to be its portrayal of the non-traditional household, Introducing the Dwights never makes it. Instead, gripes of humour in this Australian flick fade and die, much like the film’s tenuous hold on its tired storyline — boy meets girl, overdramatic mother resents girl, boy caught in middle, heart- warming hugs by the end. Everybody Loves Raymond meets Steve Irwin’s Crocodile Hunter. Diggeri-doo. Although marketed as a comedy, the film has few comedic high points. The jokes are predict- able, stereotyped, and dry: classic male versus female awkwardness and mother versus son ten- sions. Embarrassing family members and the awkwardness of first love, for instance. And, the home-movie style cinematography is messy and parts are missing, like a two-year old learning to cut with scissors for the first time. Similarly, the catalyst for Jean’s transition, her own com- ing of age, is rough and unclear: in a puff of theatrics, she is instantaneously transformed from vile alcoholic croc to a caring and sensitive woman. Why? Let’s leave it to the stale popcorn on the sticky carpet of the theatre to find out. If you naively assume you will be rewarded by sticking to the end of the 1 hour 45 minute Aussie flick, be forewarned: in the film’s final scene, Jane and ex-husband John belt into a torturous rendition of Tina Turmer’s “Nutbush City Limits.” Yuck: bring the earplugs. Or, better yet, don’t go at all. Psycho would not be the caliber of movie that it is without the great cast of Anthony Perkins (Norman Bates), John Gavin (Sam Loomis), and Janet Leigh (Marion Crane). The actors bring the film to life and it practically jumps off the screen. Psycho was based from a book. Evidently, Hitchcock was rumored to have bought all the books in order to keep the ending a secret. The movie was directed by Alfred Hitchcock and also produced by him. The cinematography was brilliantly orchestrated by John L. Russel. Psycho was presented by Paramount studios and grossed $7 million in the box office in 1960. Critics say Psycho is one of the top twenty movies of all time. Hitchcock is a master at making the ordinary seem “creepy.” He takes something as common as a shower drain from the classic shower scene and reshapes it to represent paranoia, evil, and death. These are things not usually associated with an ordinary shower drain, yet as you witness the water and hint of blood circling the drain, you can almost feel Marion Crane’s life force dwindling and feel your own energy fading alongside. The style of film was extremely creative and inventive. John L. Russel’s cinematography is brilliantly done with wonderfully captured shots, which are erratic and linger on the ordinary to give it extraordinary appeal in a surreal way. Psycho’s motivations are clear and they fit perfectly into the mold of this thriller genre and what it intends to be. The script for this film leaves the audience with the capacity to use their imaginations and enables them to come up with their own conclusions without be- ing told directly what to think. This type of script respects the audience and lets them think for themselves, instead of pointing every little detail out. All in all, Alfred Hitchcock has created a classic masterpiece which has lasted and will con- tinue to last through the ages. It has paved the way for every slasher film out there. Yet, no matter how anyone tries, they will never be able to recreate the awesomeness that is Psycho. Psycho is perfect in every way. From the cinematography to the acting, this film deserves two great big thumbs up. considered sad. Gene, the American POW there the longest (“Wow, two years... I didn’t even know we’d been fighting over here so long”) has lost it, insisting rescue is on the way at any moment. He’s so convinced that he threatens to scream to the guards if the rest of the prisoners try to escape and wind up ruining the inevitable release. Between the meanest (not that mean) guard they call ‘lil Hitler’ and the friendly little person guard toting an AK-47 bigger than he is, the POW camp resembles a purgatory that doubles as a theatre of the absurd. As the camp dog hops by begging for food on hind legs, Dieter eats grub worms with a smile on his face while he tries to convince his comrades to escape with him. They sneak out by removing their hand- cuffs with a flattened nail, prying up the floorboards of their hut, pushing aside the fence boards and shooting the guards eating in their kitchen hut with the guns left outside. Even though this escape is far from daring, its real-life plausibility gives it such a subtle intensity that you think of how you could have been there and done it yourself. As one of the prisoners tells Dieter upon his arrival, the bamboo huts aren’t the prison; the jungle is. Indeed, they escape into a viciously green prison of mud and dense vines. The film, actually shot in the jungles of Laos, depicts amazingly the dauntingly imposing elements Dieter and his surviving comrade Duane faced in 1966. Again the oddly out-of-place realism defines the jungle escape. Eating some stored rice, a mudslide wipes them out. So tired and emaciated after almost drowning in a swollen river, they barely succeed in feebly tearing off the massive leeches. Coming upon a small boy carrying pails of water, they bow politely thinking they might have found their way out of the jungle. Villagers run up and without provocation stab Duane. Dieter, unarmed, yells and waves his arms frantically at his friend’s attacker as they turn and run away scared. So a-typical of a war movie, but so much truth in the secluded villagers’ fear of a deathly looking white guy in rags. I guess that in sum, Rescue Dawn is an epic tale of willpower from the everyman. Dieter has no special abilities, aside from his unshakable desire to fly again. That thought alone carries him through the spectacularly inane days in his POW camp and the harrowing jungle that lit- erally shuns human presence. The real beauty of this film is how it manages to both look at the Vietnam-era POW camp in a realistically human light and produce countless layers of meaning through its simple story shot in extraordinary surroundings. I give Werner Herzog props for using his crazy name to its fullest directorial potential. Before this movie (which is his most mainstream to date) he had cultivated a following of movie critics that think of him as a legend in his own right. Now that I’ve seen this effort, I think his more experimental movies might prove quite mind-mushing in a good way. I give Rescue Dawn four misguided expectations out of five.