An angel...drowned in tears

Maybe it's because he came from the godless no man's land of video installation art, which most critics view with the same contempt that Graham Chapman's King Arthur holds for Camelot, but no one I've read ever seems to talk about Steve McQueen's influences as a filmmaker. People are quick to reference other films on the subjects he tackles (addiction, slavery), but no one I've read has delved into how he came by his technique, at least not in the cinematic tradition. Having seen most of his stunning gallery work, it's easy enough to say that he just figured out in small doses how he wanted to show the world. Certainly one could look at Giardini, his half-hour split-screen effort that covers a neighborhood and its silent occupants over the course of a few quiet days, as a test-run for Shame's microscopic investigation of a man's routine, upset by intrusion and leading to self-destruction. The name most frequently dropped in discussions of 12 Years A Slave is Spielberg; Schindler's List, Amistad and The Color Purple are easy points of comparison but I don't think the two Steves have much in common as directors. In order to figure out where McQueen's roots are planted, look back further to his earliest short films. Look at the dark drawing room wrestling match in Bear, or the dreary countryside all around the stonefaced director in Deadpan. It's the same countryside that Michael Reeves and Piers Haggard used to haunt. The wrestling match may be in slow-motion and narrative-less, but it's quite clearly an re-staging of the centerpiece of Ken Russell's Women In Love. He and Russell share a fascination with the body and everything it can endure. Not to mention they're both fearless.

This is an English tradition from which McQueen's patience seemed to displace him. After all, the camera's movement is all but invisible when it does show up in Hunger, Shame and 12 Years, and Reeves and his generation could barely sit still. Russell in particular redefined where a camera could go and how fast it could get there. But you don't have to squint to see Michael Reeves in McQueen's cinema. The IRA soldiers of Hunger look an awful lot like the bored mods of The Sorcerers, notably Ian Ogilvy, who haunts the city at night like Michael Fassbender in Shame. The monster-under-the-surface theme propels both Shame, The Sorcerers and The She Creature. Most importantly, there's an awful lot that connects 12 Years A Slave to Reeves' magnum opus Witchfinder General. 

Witchfinder General has an interesting reputation. I think it's thought of mainly as a horror film and having Vincent Price at his most sincerely evil would appear to validate that, but it's something different. Looking explicitly at the practice of burning innocents as witches to keep religious authority on its pedestal, Witchfinder General or The Conquerer Worm as it was called in the US, is one of the harshest looks at English history ever filmed. Matthew Hopkins, played by Price, was a real figure who killed something like 300 women in his lifetime. Here he stands in for the worst traditions of the English government; scholars have pointed out there was little accuracy in Reeves' depiction of Hopkins practices but that's hardly the point. Reeves was more interested in the feeling of truth. After all, being burnt alive hurts, trial or no trial. Reeves' depictions of the hangings, beheadings, burnings and drownings are still unbearably cruel today. The mass drowning in particular still curdles my blood. Reeves managed to tone down Vincent Price and get one of his iciest performances as the deceiving Hopkins; I don't think he ever bested his work here. Reeves never directed another film and this is justly the film he's best remembered for; it kicked off a wave of politically charged witch-burning films in the 70s that acted as mirrors to the modern era's repressive status quo. That sound familiar?

12 Years A Slave takes a very similar approach to its era and subject matter and is also based on a book, though it's much more closely adheres to provable fact than Witchfinder General. Solomon Northrup's book of the same name is based on his experiences as a kidnapped slave, an invaluable document that means the script already has the authenticity missing from Witchfinder General, but the important thing is the overlap in execution. Sometimes it's simple; a few beautiful shots of the countryside, of the indifference of nature which goes on being splendid no matter what man does to it, to break up the horror of humanity. But more often it's rougher than that. Reeves and McQueen want to put you inches from the whippings and brandings, to remove any chance of ironic distance. The events are in the past, but the pain should be present-tense. Reeves fought a very public battle with censors over the violence in Witchfinder General because he needed it to tell the story, the same way McQueen spares no whipmark and lets the weeping and wailing of bereaved mothers go on through multiple scenes. The horrors of Reeves' first two films were big and colorful; if he was pushing the envelope in Witchfinder it wasn't just to get a rise out of thrill-seeking audiences. He was trying to be honest and make English audiences realize what had happened to its people before things had become 'civilized.' Perhaps sensing that that particular story had been told, set his sights on a chapter in dire need of revisiting. McQueen can't help but render things beautifully but like Reeves his direction never feels less than totally honest. They went back in time to tell stories, not indulge their muse. Shame and The Sorcerers represent their respective artistic ids, untethered and pure. The scene of Karloff eavesdropping on the young couple swimming has the same cold sensuousness as Fassbender renting a room to try out 'normal' sex with a co-worker. An aside: Ian Ogilvy and Karloff represent both sides of Fassbender's psyche in Shame. Ogilvy slowly falls under the spell of Karloff's witchcraft and can't control his body. Fassbender wants to behave normally and rid himself of his vices but they hold him down and make him act against his best interest; he can see his idealized self just out of his grasp but can't reach it without self-destructing.

Both Reeves and McQueen shoot faces with rhyming clarity but also know when to cut away. They know precisely how much to show and how to get away with it. Both films have conflicting moments where the male hero is tortured by proxy, using a female intermediary at the hands of the sadistic overseer. In Witchfinder, Hopkins kidnaps young lovers played by Ogilvy and Hilary Heath, who've caught onto his witch-kiling scheme to stay above the law. In order to harm Ogilvy and get him to confess to bogus witchcraft so he can be 'legally' executed, Hopkins stabs Heath in the back repeatedly with a thin needle, a sight I have to watch through my fingers. In 12 Years, Fassbender's drunk slave owner Epps wants to punish the woman he loves, one of his slaves, and himself while he's at it but makes Solomon whip the girl on his behalf to make sure he isn't the one who walks away with the most damage to his mental health or pride. Solomon knows that Patsey would rather be whipped by a friend than by her master and rapist but he's been able to keep a certain remove from himself and his captors. Epps wants to remove it and break Solomon just as Hopkins wants to force a confession from the young soldier. The pain is only symbolic as both Hopkins and Epps both know that they're going to inflict the damage one way or another. They want pain to mean something because it's how they relate to the world. It's what keeps the illusion of their power alive. Also noteworthy is that in both films, our heroes are allowed to have revenge against their tormentors (Chiwetel Ejiofor whipping the overseer played by Paul Dano, Ogilvy overpowering Price with an ax), but it's fleeting and unsatisfactory. Anything more than that would be to cheat the past and have their heroes sink to a place where audiences can't follow them. The most memorable torture follows each; Solomon's day spent hanging from a tree, only his toes keeping him alive, and Ogilvy's screaming incoherently at being robbed of real vengeance, which would have truly put him on Hopkins' level. Ogilvy's impotent ravings are some of the most psychologically damaging sounds you'll ever hear. Just try and scrape them off your brainpan. Their almost as rough as the weeping mother in 12 Years.

McQueen also has a very important precedent in the work of Reeves' American counterpart, Curtis Harrington. Like McQueen, Harrington got his start making avant-garde short films that heavily influenced the feature films he'd make in the 60s and 70s. They essentially approached features from inverse angles. Harrington went from shorts to work-for-hire, turning sci-fi potboilers into Kenneth Anger-inspired (the two were good friends) pop-art subterfuge. His first assignment for American International Pictures were reshoots to turn a russian sci-fi film called Planet of Storms into Voyage To A Prehistoric Planet. My favourite addition involves Basil Rathbone being forcefed life-giving pills from his robot doctor in the middle of an interplanetary storm. This was the first clue that Harrington was in no way an ordinary director. McQueen worked the other way around, independent financing and picking stories he can organically apply his style. What they have in common is aesthetic control. They've each produced a handful of tableaux that I'll never be able to forget that lift their films above more ordinary takes on the same subject. Put Queen of Blood, Harrington's second sci-fi thriller, next to Space Probe Taurus, They Came from Beyond Space or one of Antonio Margheriti's Gamma One films, all roughly of the same vintage, and Harrington's strengths as a director stick out like a sixth finger. Similarly, place McQueen's Hunger next to Jim Sheridan's In the Name of the Father and McQueen emerges as an artist interested in appealing to more than just our love of a compelling story and/or our consciousness. Harrington and McQueen both share an interest in psychosexual tension and power structures, specifically social ones. Games, Harrington's third film, bears marked thematic similarities to the ground covered in the Epps section of 12 Years, and the brother-sister relationship in Shame, though Harrington's playing with a loaded deck and for much lower stakes.

The work that Harrington got out of Dennis Hopper is not dissimilar to what McQueen has been able to get out of Michael Fassbender. The cocksure but sensitive sailor in Night Tide feels like a cousin to the Fassbender persona, like his quietness, his indecision, his compassion to a fault raised the three characters Fassbender plays in the McQueen films. Both actors sense an opportunity to grow while in the hands of artists they knew and trusted. In Queen of Blood one can see Hopper working out his own method; so much broils under the surface. Similarly Fassbender couldn't quite keep his southern accent together for all of Ridley Scott's The Counselor, but really makes the effort to maintain a consistent dialect in 12 Years A Slave as the monstrous but clearly conflicted Epps.  Harrington and McQueen both had to keep a number of plates spinning and clearly had less interest in designing the life out of the performances, especially when dealing with the likes of Hopper, Fassbender, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Basil Rathbone and Brad Pitt, respectively. They let their actors breathe and find their own way through complicated and/or well-worn character types. They've gone the trouble of producing the most visually awesome versions of the stories being told (Slave narrative, sci-fi/horror) so it wouldn't do to hamstring their performers. Queen of Blood is perhaps Harrington's most sumptuous production, every shot art directed to look quite unlike anything ever attempted in American popular cinema. It most resembles Mario Bava's Planet of the Vampires, another AIP production from the year before, but Harrington has such a bizarre, ethereal approach to his set-pieces that the whole thing floats by. Bava's compositions are sturdy as a pair of steel-toed boots, keeping the central mystery grounded the whole time. Harrington aims for the stratosphere and unsurprisingly flies right through it. McQueen's dramatic structure takes a similar tack. We know how long Solomon is kept in bondage, but McQueen hops around the timeline, focusing on the most important and harrowing representations of his experience. Like Harrington's astronauts, we float through Solomon's nightmare (McQueen's camera only occassionally feels as rooted to any particular spot as, say, Bava's) always a few feet above or below Solomon and often a far enough distance away that he can track a lengthy action scene without breaking continuity. Take for instance the scenes where Epps takes his aggression out on Solomon when he can't bring himself to harm Patsey. He chases Solomon around and through a pig enclosure, and McQueen stands back, letting us know exactly how far away from each other they are. It's distant but keeps the scene from feeling exceptional - this is what Solomon dealt with every day. Chasing him with the camera would have felt like undo emphasis. It also keeps it as dirty and absurd as it would have been, with both men sliding around in mud and being separated by the woman of the house like children. And so we drift from scene to scene, preserving the illusion of 12 Years passing without fretting over lost time. Harrington's approach to the deaths of major characters has the same sense of gliding. These things happen. He also loses a lot of time in the many months spent traveling to Mars' moon Phobos in Queen of Blood, but you never notice or mind because the journey is so full of his unique design. There's a mountain of difference between the two approaches, but they produce the same effect; integrity of momentum preserved by acute, confident visuals. When both filmmakers pause that motion and present us with firmly composed looks at the people who occupy their worlds, the effect is devastating. For a moment, a masterpiece painted just for us. They litter Queen of Blood, but the best of them lies in 12 Years when Solomon and a host of other slaves have just disembarked from a steamship. They sit in differently colored, dirty, faded clothes, their faces masks of exhaust and pain. 

These connections aren't intended as keys to the McQueen puzzle, indeed 12 Years A Slave could hardly be a work that stands more firmly on its own terms. But placing him in context has helped me like him as a person, as well as an artist. I can imagine his journey from installation virtuoso to internationally lauded filmmaker with unprecedented access to an international dream cast. I love the work that Reeves and Harrington did in the 60s and 70s, but I think I like them more because I know about their lives and the artists they were indebted to: Harrington owed much to his peer Kenneth Anger while Reeves found Don Siegel at his home to tell him he thought he was the greatest director alive. This puts more life into their films for me and the chill one gets from watching Shame or 12 Years A Slave can be warmed by knowing McQueen is part of a long tradition of artists who did great work as feature directors. I for one can't wait to see what he does next. After their third films Harrington turned increasingly to TV movies and Reeves passed away, far too young. I can't wait to see what McQueen does next. Might I suggest he follow in Reeves and Harrington's footsteps and give horror a chance?

The Heart of Salem

Rob Zombie is an anomaly. Not as polarizing, or as generally reviled as Eli Roth or Tom Six, as unfairly neglected as Greg McLean or Neil Marshall, nor as easily forgotten as James Wan and Darren Bousman, he is a horror filmmaker who has been nailed to many different crosses. Though most of us still remember when he made his living making metal music and the kooky videos that went with them, his switch from music to movies wasn't as inevitable (or, ahem, misguided) as the transitions made by Prince or Madonna, as enigmatic as David Byrne, nor as left-field and misguided as Fred Durst or Mr. Oizo. Zombie's a director without a steady cult, someone who's never made a film that we can all agree on. Unlike Roth or Wan his movies have gotten steadily better as he's steadied his craft and figured out what sorts of stories he wants to tell, even as he's often constrained by the demands of an increasingly horror-phobic studio system. But this past year, to my gratitude, the money was on his side, and he was given total creative autnomy on a project of his choosing and the result is Lords of Salem, a witch-burning film that despite clearly attempting to make it look and move like many others, speaks in a voice that could only be Zombie's. Mixing ghastly psychedelic imagery with disarming, effecting realism, Lords tells the story of a woman who falls prey to an ancient curse brought on by a coven of witches (played with Gleeful abandon by the always welcome Dee Wallace, Meg Foster, Patricia Quinn and a truly awesome Judy Geeson) and a satanic vinyl record. In other words, this movie speaks an old language. The question is, who's fluent these days? Lucas Mangum and I both gave it a whirl. 

Lucas Mangum So what did we think of Lords of Salem?

Scout Tafoya Even as I was aware of what was going wrong from a narrative standpoint, even as a few lines of dialogue struck me as Zombie trying a touch too hard to sound unforced and normal (which...what ambition!), even as he goes too far in his penultimate freak out into Altered States territory than the film can quite handle, I was equally aware that I liked the film too much to let the problems outweigh the overall effect. Or to put it simply, I'd decided I was going to love it and I did. I like Zombie. I like him as a person as well as an artist. 


I'll now refer everyone to my writing on Zombie's Halloween Films here only because Lords of Salem is the film I was wishing and hoping for when I walked out of Halloween 2. It's a horror film but the mean-spirit of his previous work has been channelled into something a little more watchable and understandable (drug addiction and sacrificial murder, as opposed to senseless murderings for the helluvit) and thus a more ambient, lived-in movie emerges. It's basically horror-as-status-quo, which is, far as I can see, kind of its own genre. The Witch Who Came From The Sea and Maniac are sort of up this alley, but they go from straight to crazy with no discernible attempt to shift the tone accordingly. Suspiria nearly achieves something similar, but I thiiiink that's because Dario doesn't speak great English or concern himself with, as he puts it, "Cartesian storytelling." Zombie is basically making an old-fashioned slice-of-life film, or maybe a better analogy is that he's making a 70s crime film, but he's replaced a heist with witch burning. Sidney Lumet efforts like The Anderson Tapes or Dog Day Afternoon jump out, because again, it's the lives of the robbers that makes the action worth watching.

I also share that piece above because I stand by the sentiments and think they apply to Lords, even if he has begun to learn from his mistakes. He's mostly maintained that beautiful unrehearsed acting style from his players, and given some of my favourite forgotten actors a chance to play it more or less straight - Ken Foree is perfectly cast, Bruce Davison and Maria Conchita Alonso don't strike me as the perfect married couple, but individually their performances are excellent and I liked the idea that Zombie thought they could convincingly play married. He's actually a far more romantic filmmaker than anyone gives him credit for - his depiction of married life is, when it's not relevant to show otherwise as in the case of Mr. and Mrs. Myers, idyllic and lovingly detailed. Also, dig the way he shows the hopeful romance/friendship between his leads. That wide shot of Whitey on the docks is heartbreaking, not to mention beautiful in that early John Boorman way.

And the Boorman quote brings me to the film's strengths. It takes its reference points in stride (the exception being the Ken Russell nods, which stick out more than they should, but, whatever, that's more a problem in mixing music video theatrics, Animation and Live action when the live action has been up to this point very well grounded - Zombie evidently didn't realize how well he'd been doing) and creates something purposefully familiar but also spins it in a way we've never seen. The compositions, those purposeful zooms, the truly bad-ass images of the witch sabbaths, we recognize them from staples like Argento, Carpenter, Coscarelli, Kubrick and Boorman (I love the shoutout to the Zardoz head!) but also lesser known influences like Mark of the Devil or Otakar Vávra's The Witch's Hammer. But the reason the appropriation works, for me, is because they're presented just outside the fringes of lives I buy, ones that involve flirtation, record players and NA meetings. He believes in his characters and their environments and sells them flawlessly. Even the villains are believably clique-y and lovable. That they're also played by genre regulars given straight roles to go to town with, the thing I liked best about his Halloween films, is icing on the cake. He's an actor's director, even if it looks like his images took years to dream up and choreograph. Just look at Dee Wallace and Patricia Quinn! They look like they're having so much fun! Wallace's hair alone is more shading than many characters get in their own movies. And how fearless is Meg Foster?! Furthermore, I feel like Sheri Moon, at this point in her life, wouldn't just take her clothes off just because - she's gotta love her husband and believe in his ideas. The space he gives his actors delivers a sense of his world view and what a giving director he is, to cast and audience alike.

In preparation for writing this I watched a film called Reverb, which takes a different approach to a similar idea. Made and shelved in 2007, it concerns a rock musician and his girlfriend given a cut-rate deal at a swank recording studio because a friend works there. They become obsessed with a song and in the wake of hearing it and falling under its spell the guy feels a creative breakthrough and follows his muse to strange ends. His girlfriend, freaked out by his obsession, finds out the origin of the phantom song and the creepy dude who wrote it. It's mostly nonsense, the studio's too clean except for a token echo chamber/kill floor, no metaphor emerges about the recording process (which is especially pathetic considering how easy that would have been) and the filmmaking's far too slick. In short, I don't know anything about the director from watching this movie. I know loads about Zombie from his few films and his muscular stylistic/grammatical evolution. He was out to provoke at first, but his worldview has since emerged through his constructions. I know the movies he likes, but I also know his opinion of people, his humanity, his ideas about what makes for a good life lived well, how far people can fall and still be up for forgiveness. And the more I learn about him through his movies, the more I like him. Plus...I mean, come on. Vinyl as the messenger of Satan? Witch burnings? Ken Foree as a DJ? Paisley wallpaper as a sign of impending doom? This thing was made for me.

Did you take to it as much as I did?


Lucas First, I have to mention that what stands out the most in the film is Zombie's adoration, not just of horror, but of film. From the wallpaper in the apartment to the camerawork, this is a guy who just loves the art of filmmaking. As much as I enjoy his music, I almost wish he would've devoted his earlier years to film, so we could have a larger body of work to explore. The dude is clearly educated on the medium and isn't afraid to show it. Hopefully we won't have to wait another four years for his next film.

I'm not sure if I like it as much as Devil's Rejects, because that film had so much to say about moral ambiguity and how a quest for revenge can really twist somebody. Lords of Salem, to me, was just him telling a story, which is fine because it was a damn fine story. If I don't like it as much as Rejects, it definitely comes in a close second. While his love of film and horror is ever-present, it never takes away from the story, never slides into being a mere tribute to the movies he likes. I'd dare say that the first two thirds are perfect. I liked the gray tint that the film has and even though I couldn't help but shake my head when I saw that Sheri Moon's love interest looks suspiciously like Rob himself, I really liked the two main characters and their dynamic. Their back and forth really revealed the complexity of their relationship and I felt like they were people I knew, which is a golden ticket for me whenever I'm reading about characters in a book or viewing them on the screen. Though he borrows liberally from Kubrick, Polanski, Argento, and even Paranormal Activity's Oren Peli (who also produced Lords of Salem), it never once feels derivative. Again, I think that's because of character, but that could just be the writer in me.

I had mixed feelings about the third act. I mean, I liked what I saw, but only because I'm a huge Rob Zombie fan. The freakout scene with the goat-riding, the grinding black metal dude, and the melting Jesus face could have easily come from any White Zombie video. So as a Rob Zombie fan, I liked it. As a movie fan, I'm kind of up in the air. At least when it comes to how everything played out in the end. I did like the final shot of Sheri though. There was something very humanistic about showing her that way after experiencing all the horror. It also gains points for being very deliberate, which a few years ago, his detractors would've surely said he wasn't even capable of pulling off. The three witches were great. The concept was fun. And the protagonists are likable, especially Sheri, who shows us that she is more than capable of playing a dramatic role. I'd say it's a winner.

I plan to watch it again and again, because there was something really refreshing about it.

Scout Agree, though this is definitely my favourite of Zombie's films, by a comfortable margin. Those compositions are...epic. Those alone place this in my tentative top ten for the year without breaking a sweat. As for your reservations, I concede that the Altered States style animation and the black metal dude were missteps that take us out of his leading ladies believable and perverse suffering, but these are forgivable sins, I think we can agree, because after all he's trying to unseat us. He just also accidentally unseats the narrative for a few seconds.

I think you're right to make mention of Peli. That guy evidently had enough money to produce a whole fleet of horror films (hence the slew of James Wans coming out left and right...jesus that man annoys me) and chose to fund a Rob Zombie in amongst the Chernobyl Diaries and Insidii (the plural of Insidious, of course). This is the smartest thing he's done since making Paranormal, and I like this film far better than Paranormal because I feel like that film took a little time and calculation and Lords took a lot of very specific detail and a very peculiar sensibility honed over many years. Again, I don't know shit about Peli from watching his movies, but I'm grateful that he chose Zombie to make something that ultimately has nothing to do with his particular brand of films. Brave choice considering how commercially iffy Zombie's been in the past and since it gave me this film, I'm grateful.

The more I think about it the more this film and its rhythms, sexuality drenched in hopelessness and the grainy look, the more it reminds me of the kind of outre desert horror films made in the early 70s. The title appearing next to the goat head is what first alerted me to the similarity, but the priest scene is a great example of capturing a feeling of hopelessness inherent in the films being made in the first place. The Wrong Way, Blood Freak, Bloodsucking Freaks, things that make Al Adamson movies seem not just professional but safe. Movies with no one who ever made another film in the cast, so there's no proof they weren't actually killed. I recently bought a Vinegar Syndrome double feature DVD whose A-side was The Suckers, the apparently legendary lost porn-version of The Most Dangerous Game. That film has the same kind of hopelessness but of course in the Zombie it's intentional, whereas in the past it's been because I've looked through the story (what little there is) and into the lives of the creators. There's always an edge to movies like that, like they shouldn't exist; like some bikers killed a guy for a camera and the resultant film was a confession.

Zombie captures a bit of that quesy magic here, more so than in Devil's Rejects, which is a little too production-designed to ever lose itself entirely in the mileau. No film with that ends with "Free Bird" could ever fool anyone into thinking there was any real murder in it. Lords has a kookiness to its images that occasionally takes you out of the professionalism and those delicious tracking shots and into the weird America of yesterday. You can't make a movie like The Suckers today because the danger and mystery of the production can't be faked. You cannot get lost in this country today; you're always accounted for. Lords harks back to a time when the 70s seemed especially long because movies would just appear in drive-ins and grindhouses with not a single name you'd heard before. It gets close to achieving that very much missed sense of despair that can sometimes come of watching American roughies of a certain vintage. And I think he gets there by not making this a routine scare-a-thon. He's not trying to scare us with his repeated image of topless, goat-headed women, or of witches flailing away by fire-light, he's just trying to fill our heads with evil, the way the catholic league of decency always assumed rock music did.

What do you think Zombie's ambition was for this film? Clearly it was sort of a commission, even if the ideas were all very obviously his, but do you think he was after something, a place in some particular canon?

Lucas I think he was going for something classic this time around. Not classic as in throwback, but I think rather than take the paths of more recent horror efforts, he was in it to give us a simple yet effective horror film. Horror over the last ten years falls into three categories for me. The first category is that of some sort of endurance test for the viewer; films like Saw and The Collection fall into this category, and Zombie himself has been guilty of it from time to time. The second category is the tribute/parody/remake where you have your Cabin in the Woods and Evil Dead. Then you have the low-budget stuff, which at best gives us Absentia and Paranormal Activity; at worst we get the stuff that just seems like a couple of drunks bought a DV camera and decided to run around an abandoned house with the night vision on. The most recent efforts that Zombie's film is comparable to would be Ti West's House of the Devil and The Innkeepers. I mention those films, because like Lords of Salem, they seem to really stand out from the majority of today's horror films. They look to the past, but rather than copy it, they pick up where the greats left off before the three aforementioned categories became such staples in the current state of the genre.

That's what I feel Zombie set out to do.

Scout And I think he achieved it, with flying colours.

Lucas You're absolutely right. It was a truly refreshing experience, and I think it will get even better with subsequent viewings.

Miserable

Last year we lost Ken Russell, one of the most singular and important talents cinema ever produced. He was never given credit for his huge body of work, his breathless style (he was the first person to truly run with his camera), his iconoclastic tearing away of convention and bastions of taste and political correct discourse, or his love of art. He was an artist who brought something to film and who paid tribute to the other artforms that made his life feel richer. Many people say he never surpassed his work at the BBC making films about the likes of Debussy and Isadora Duncan. While those films are fantastic and important, it wasn't until he discovered color film and had real money at his disposal that he could fully spread his wings. When he moved to major releases, he made one masterpiece after another: Women In Love, The Boyfriend, The Music Lovers, Savage Messiah, The Devils, Mahler and Lisztomania. Ken proved too flamboyant for most but it'd take someone willfully blind not to recognize that here was a talent unlike anything cinema had yet seen. Years in the wilderness following his last great success, Tommy, allowed everyone to ignore that he invented a new cinematic language and lit a fire under the british film industry.

And now, a year after his death and nearly 40 years after Tommy comes Les Miserables. Ken Russell's mother used to have a rubric for films of interest to her. Was it 'A British Picture'? This meant stodgy, stiff and traditional; bad jokes; poorly functioning marriages, cross-dressing, Carry On, Noel Coward. One steered clear of a British picture. Les Miserables is a british picture. Every fan of Russells knows where those steadicam shots come from, where the mixture of high camp and prestige production value was born. And yet no one, least of all the director, seems aware that they're making a Ken Russell film. Imagine it. Or...well, I'm sure you don't have to as there seem fewer people on earth who haven't seen this movie than have. I'd wager more people have seen this than have seen a single Ken Russell movie. Which is why it's ok for most that Les Mis is just The Music Lovers by way of Tommy. Hooper, of course, seems to have forgotten to mention his debt to the onetime Enfant Terrible, presumably embarrassed that he'd stoop to something so low culture to make his big Oscar bait bash. And yet every poorly chosen angle and bull-in-a-china-shop tracking shot drips with his influence, even if he doesn't fully get why Ken did all that; a song shot entirely in Helena Bonham Carter's hair betrays his cluelessness. If he didn't study Russell's films, he's stolen by osmosis. But frankly considering that Russell Crowe is the only person capable of giving Oliver Reed's performance in Tommy for our times (He'd just done his best Reed or Richard Harris in The Man With The Iron Fists, after all), I find it laughable that Hooper has somehow avoided Ken's work. This is the sort of thing Ken went into directing to rebel against. Despite being set in France, only one actor even bothers with the right accent. Bad jokes spring up between tonally incoherent songs and the editing ranges from inappropriate to completely insane. The film moves at just as rapid a clip as Russell during his most lyrical passages (the whole film could be an extended riff on the opening scene or any of the big production numbers in The Music Lovers) yet never slows down to get to know the characters. Anne Hathaway is dead before you get to know her, so one can hardly be moved by her big song. It hardly qualifies as a show-stopper if the show is this tattered and weightless. The film is in a hurry to go nowhere. By the time the story has stopped spinning in circles (what in the world do some of these songs accomplish? "Master of the House" is a great song, but what purpose does it serve?) Hugh Jackman vanishes from the story and when he returns, the film doesn't seem to have a place for him anymore. Russell vanished into flights of song and dance or surreal asides to tell the story; to show the world of the characters. Hooper flits across it like a demented fairy surveying a world he doesn't seem to understand, cutting every 2 seconds to some other part of the world to show off the production design and make-up. 

Musicals typically get away with the oft-remarked problem of people simply bursting into song by being theatrical. No one in the world would mistake Guys & Dolls or Top Hat for reality; that was the point. If the Ginger Rogers or Marlon Brando brought depth to their characters, it sold the emotion and romance, not the world. You needn't buy their respective versions of Italy or New York, simply that Fred or Marlon would do whatever it takes to make good in the eyes of their leading ladies. Stripped of an overtly cinematic approach to its theatrical source and criminally featuring not a single dance number worthy of the name, it just sits there, even if the camera and editor can't help but jump all over the place like kids with espresso. The best it can manage is weirdly off-putting asides like the piccolo that plays whenever a child character sings, even if it's in the middle of an ostensibly dramatic scene. This doesn't help sell anything, it just fucks up the tone. A cardinal sin when the film pretends to be gripping historical drama, what with the shooting of children and whores having their teeth pulled out. Everyone sings angelically, acts enormously, feels deeply and smiles hugely. A haircut and dirt make-up are evidently choices enough to sell the sorrow of these characters because the filmmaking sure doesn't have anything to say on the subject. The singing is just a comforting blanket to audiences keen not to feel anything so distasteful as sorrow or discomfort. The ultimate alienation device. When the most sympathetic character in the film dies, it's very difficult to take her death seriously as no one has stops singing in the same indefatigably jaunty manner and they keep right on going when she's gone. After all, the dead routinely rise to sing big numbers, so how or why should we care who kicks the bucket?  The apparent joy of each character is irrepressible even when they're bleeding to death or throwing themselves in the Seine. And this is during the French revolution mind you. In a movie called Les Miserables! It doesn't have the decency to be eccentric; it wants to be heartbreakingly bold simply by implication, but won't fess up to its devices. Shooting a film of a musical about the death of thousands takes the sort of bravery Ken Russell had in spades. But having no ambition, to be content with making the most rote and by the numbers British film, with every expected beat sung instead of spoken, is far worse than if they'd gone out on a limb and failed. Nothing is risked, nothing is gained. Except Academy Awards. Rest in peace, Ken. We need you more than you could ever know.