CS Weekly Archive > The Big Picture > 4/24/09

You Gotta See This:
Seven Films Worth a Second
(Or a First) Look

By david michael wharton

CS Weekly's managing editor raids his DVD collection to suggest a few films you might have missed, or might want to revisit.

We've all got them. The cult favorites we bring out when friends are over and everyone's in the mood for a movie. While the group debates between better known blockbusters and comedies, you sneak over to the shelf to pull down a little-seen favorite, dust it off, and begin your sales pitch: "You guys have probably never seen this one…" All of the films on this list have found their way into my DVD player many times over the years, and, while sometimes flawed, each offers a pleasant alternative to many of the films currently unspooling in your local theater. Plus, your own floor is less likely to be sticky.

Lucky Number Slevin
Written by Jason Smilovic
The Gist: Smilovic's writing talents have always been outweighed by his bad luck, as the writer has bounced from one short-lived TV project to another (from the excellent Karen Sisco to last year's My Own Worst Enemy). In 2006, he sidestepped into the feature world with Lucky Number Slevin, a comedic thriller packed to the gills with acrobatic dialogue and a deftly executed third-act tonal shift. After arriving in New York to visit a friend, a particularly unlucky case of mistaken identity leaves protagonist Slevin (Josh Hartnett) with a twice-broken nose and a few days to satisfy the vendettas of two competing crime bosses who couldn't care less that he's not the guy they think he is.

Why You Should Care: Slevin's Slevin is the ultimate case of "wrong place, wrong time." As he attempts to navigate the machinations of crime kingpins The Boss (Morgan Freeman) and The Rabbi (Sir Ben Kingsley), Slevin never lacks a Chandler-esque quip: as The Boss points out, "I bet it was that mouth that got you that nose." Slevin opens up with enigmatic hitman Mr. Goodkat (Bruce Willis) spinning the bloody and woeful tale of a fixed horse race, and from there, Smilovic's script dives headlong into an over-the-top, hard-boiled world where competing crime-bosses live across the street from each other and Slevin finds himself accosted by mute Hasidic muscle. Of course, we all know that horse race was more than just atmosphere, and part of the fun is watching as Smilovic slowly reveals how everything and everyone ties back to that opening scene. When the inevitable twist comes, Smilovic is less interested in shock value than in storytelling, a lesson some other, higher-profile wordsmiths might do well to note.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
Screenplay by Shane Black (also directed)
Based in part on the novel Bodies Are Where You Find Them by Brett Halliday
The Gist: After being AWOL for a while, one-time screenwriting golden boy Shane Black (Lethal Weapon) returned to the screen with this 2005 crime thriller/black comedy, which also marked his directorial debut. Petty thief Harry Lockhart (Robert Downey Jr.) stumbles into a New York casting call while fleeing a robbery-gone-wrong, and when his remorse over getting his partner killed bubbles to the surface, he's pegged as a brilliant method actor. He's shipped off to Los Angeles to be tutored by studio-payroll private eye Gay Perry (Val Kilmer), but a series of mysterious murders and a reunion with a long-lost crush (Michelle Monaghan, never better) soon launch Harry into a hilarious metafiction that pokes fun at every hoary cliché of the genre and gleefully bulldozes the fourth wall.

Why You Should Care: Nobody writes buddy-action-comedy like Shane Black. With the exception of this film and the first Lethal Weapon, Shane Black's curse has always been writing brilliant scripts that get turned into mediocre movies, often beginning with the letter L (Long Kiss Goodnight, Last Boy Scout). Lockhart is Black's voice made flesh, peppering the film with the digressions, asides, and observations that make Black's scripts such a kick to read. Like Slevin, Lockhart is a good-hearted schlub whose fists never quite back up his mouth, best demonstrated when he interrupts a pending rape, only to get his ass kicked and then watch as the girl goes home with the rapist anyway. Black juggles razor-sharp dialogue, inventive structure, and gut-busting laughs, all while crafting a multilayered mystery and flipping every genre convention he can find on its head (Harry thinks the pulp novel in his jacket stopped a bullet; then he realizes the hole goes all the way through the book…). It's pure Black, and it's not to be missed.

Primer
Written by Shane Carruth (also directed)
The Gist: Writer-director Carruth's 2004 Primer is the smartest time-travel story you've never seen. Filmed dirt-cheap in and around my stomping grounds of Dallas/Fort Worth, Primer follows a group of engineers who spend their free time tinkering with new inventions to patent. Things take a turn for the peculiar when two of them accidentally create a time machine.

Why You Should Care: Eschewing the usual Hollywood time-travel bullet points, Primer takes the same approach to its time-travel as it does to its protagonists: it's smart, it's complicated, and it's not interested in dumbing things down. While viewing Primer again for this article, I rewatched 20 minutes of it to verify that my interpretation tracked. That's not meant as a criticism. The first third of the film is littered with techno-speak as the guys try to fathom what it is they've created. Odds are, you won't understand most of it; fortunately, you're not supposed to. The dialogue serves primarily to suggest authenticity, and thankfully Carruth's script never stoops to any "As you know, Bill…" scenes. That being said, Carruth's ability to suggest without elaborating is exquisite, as when the guys unplug their new device from the power source…and it keeps running. The script quickly establishes its heroes' meticulous natures, a quality that prefigures the careful, observational way they experiment with their new discovery. Concepts of causality and paradox are explored with both intelligence and a dash of wit (one character asks, "Are you hungry? I haven't eaten since later today."). Eighty-eight miles-per-hour in a DeLorean might be more visceral fun, but if anybody actually discovers time travel in the real world, it will probably unfold a lot more like Primer than Back to the Future.

Frailty
Written by Brent Hanley
The Gist: Tipping my (ten-gallon) hat to another Texas native, Brent Hanley's 2001 film Frailty feels a little old-fashioned in this age of J-horror and torture porn…and that's a good thing. Director and actor Bill Paxton's "Dad" is a hard-working single father in a small Texas town, devoted to his sons Fenton (Matt O'Leary) and Adam (Jeremy Sumpter). It's a simple, pleasant life that becomes anything but when Dad tells the boys that God has sent him a message: there are demons in the world, and they have been hand-picked to slay them. With an axe. Oh, and they look like normal people.

Why You Should Care: Many horror films ignore character development in favor of scares and splatter. When your characters exist primarily to be ruptured in a variety of unpleasant ways, why bother making them likeable or interesting? Frailty, on the other hand—despite being about a family chopping the hell out of people with an axe—is nothing if you aren't invested in this family. The film draws its terror from the fundamental childhood fear of something being "wrong" with your parents. Young Fenton must confront the very real possibility that his father has gone mad, and that this madness has driven him to murder. Moreover, he must do so without any allies, as his younger brother is all too eager to buy into Dad's fantastic stories, and local law enforcement dismisses his claims as the tall tales of a kid with too much time on his hands. Wrapped in a frame-story confession by the adult Fenton (Matthew McConaughey), Frailty explores the tradition of the unreliable narrator and wraps up with several rapid-fire twists. Ultimately, however, those twists are less important than the story of a son forced to confront the humanity—and the frailty—of his father.

Below
Written by Lucas Sussman & Darren Aronofsky and David Twohy (latter also directed)
The Gist: Continuing the "little-seen horror film" trifecta that culminates with the next entry, Below is a creepy, unique spin on the haunted house genre that probably didn't play in a theater near you. Cursed with a tiny release and next to no marketing, Below came and went completely unnoticed in 2002—a handy quality for a submarine, but not so beneficial for a theatrical film. Featuring a great paranoid performance from the criminally underused Bruce Greenwood, Below follows the crew of the World War II American submarine Tiger Shark as it finds itself trapped between Nazis on the surface and supernatural shenanigans…well, below.

Why You Should Care: Below features perhaps the most creative solution ever to the fundamental problem of the haunted house story: namely, once the walls start bleeding, why don't these idiots just leave? Various stories before have chalked it up to greed (spend the night, get a million dollars), locked doors, or any number of other excuses. In Below, however, the crew of the Tiger Shark can't escape the haunting because the boat itself is haunted, and they can't surface because a German destroyer is hunting for them above. The claustrophobic fear of a good haunted house story is amplified by the tight confines of the submarine, and the script by Sussman, Aronofsky, and David Twohy is chockablock with excellent set pieces, from a speaker-rattling depth charge attack to a perilous trek between the inner and outer hulls to fix a leak. The mystery of the haunting itself isn't that hard to solve, but the set pieces and the setting make Below a cruise worth booking.

Session 9
Written by Brad Anderson (also directed) & Stephen Gevedon
The Gist: A palpable atmosphere of dread is crucial to any good horror flick, and Session 9 conjures up dread in spades…and most of that is just the setting. Filmed in and around the decaying Danvers State Hospital, Session 9 follows an asbestos-removal crew as they struggle to strip the crumbling buildings and meet a tight deadline. As the days pass, the dark soul of the place begins to affect each of them, and one character becomes obsessed with discovering the secret story of a patient whose tale culminates on a tape marked "Session 9."

Why You Should Care: Director Anderson mentions on his DVD commentary that many of the rooms used didn't require much set decoration: the place came ready-made as the stuff of nightmares. While the setting in Below is memorable for the ways it informs and steers the plot, the hospital in Session 9 actually becomes a character in and of itself. Anderson fills the film with long, lingering shots of the hospital's corridors and grounds, and it's amazing how well these moments can suggest the psychological descent of the characters without a single line of dialogue. The script gives each of the characters a rich sense of history, with all the infighting, inside jokes, and petty rivalries you'd expect from men who have worked together for a long time. Session 9 never relies on jump scares or gore, instead turning the screws gradually, building an unshakable sense of unease that ramps up toward the film's climax. Credit also goes to Anderson and Gevedon for refusing to explain everything. By the end of the film, you'll know everything that happened to the ill-fated crew—what remains is the question of why. Leaving open to interpretation whether the events were the result of supernatural interference or simply the darkness of the human heart, Session 9 also culminates in one of the best closing lines ever.

Gattaca
Written by Andrew Niccol (also directed)
The Gist: Andrew Niccol's thoughtful 1997 science fiction film explores an all-too-believable world where the genetic code has been tamed and unmodified children are both a rarity and a new underclass. Vincent (Ethan Hawke) is a "faith birth" who dreams of visiting outer space, but an inborn heart deficiency has doomed him to a future spent sweeping floors. Determined to prove that he is more than the sum of his DNA, Vincent partners with a crippled athlete (Jude Law) to impersonate a more genetically perfect specimen and achieve his dreams of becoming an astronaut. But all those plans could be destroyed when a murder at the Gattaca facility where Vincent works threatens to expose him.

Why You Should Care: Like the best science fiction, Gattaca uses its fantastic trappings to explore who we are and who we will become. Questions of nature versus nurture are explored against a thriller structure, with Vincent racing to stay one step ahead of the investigators in a world where a single eyelash, a drop of saliva, or a stray skin cell could expose him as an impostor. The script introduces Vincent through his meticulous morning routine: scraping off dead skin and hair, and preparing the devices that will allow him to trick Gattaca's blood and urine tests. As with a police procedural, technique reveals character, and the almost impossible nature of what Vincent is attempting establishes just how determined he is to succeed. Gattaca is a deeply human story about refusing to accept the limitations others impose on you…a valuable lesson indeed for anyone hoping to succeed as a writer.

David Michael Wharton is managing editor of CS Weekly and a contributing editor of Creative Screenwriting He thought about including The 'Burbs on this list, but if you don't already have that in your collection, he doesn't want to be your friend anymore.


Lucky Number Slevin courtesy The Weinstein Co.
Frailty courtesy Lions Gate Home Entertainment
Session 9 courtesy Universal Home Entertainment

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