Weekly Review -- Ch... ch... ch... changes

This weekend was all about the power of transformation -- alien power and human transformation, that is. Not everyone was who they pretended they were, not everyone was capable of outmaneuvering their opponent in the art of mind games, and some of us were even devoured, literally and figuratively. Still, most of us simply enjoyed the metamorphoses coming our way in two very distinct works, both of which were rather impressive in their intent and execution.

The Thing (2011) -- When it comes to cult status, John Carpenter's films have a reputation of their own. One of the essential rules when dealing with them can be summed up in two little words -- DO NOT. Yes, in all capitals. Do not remake, do not change, do not touch. These are classics not to be messed with. Yes, 2005, I am looking at you and I am still waiting to get my two hours back from The Fog "re-imagining".

This prequel to Carpenter's 1982 horror/science fiction entry is another story, though. Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.'s The Thing shows tremendous respect toward the original, adding some novel touches while simultaneously linking it to the tale we know and love. Incredibly suspenseful and entertaining, it is one of the best genre films I have seen in recent years.

A team of scientists working in Antarctica have discovered an alien ship beneath the ice. After paleontologist Kate Lloyd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) arrives to assist with the find, the alien quickly starts duplicating individuals, making it nearly impossible to tell who is still human and who is not. The group, which includes Dr. Sander Halvorson (Ulrich Thomsen) and pilot Sam Carter (Joel Edgerton), starts falling apart under the pressure of fear and frustration, until Kate devises a foolproof method of confirming identities. Of course, not everything goes according to plan...

Right off the bat, I have to say that fellow fans of the 1982 film can breathe the proverbial sigh of relief. The prequel does not only establish the origins of the story, but also gives us great characters to root for and effects that are as far away from CGI as one can get using CGI. Director van Heijningen jr. knows that he needs to bring the themes and ambiance close to the original's, but not to the point of collision. While the work is his own, it is an appreciative homage to Carpenter's tale. The film manages to maintain a fine line between prequel and remake, with some nice references thrown in for the fans.

The casting follows the premise of the 1982 film. There are no glamour models or teen heartthrobs here. Instead, the actors create believable fish-out-of-water characters, not once striking a note of skepticism for being photoshopped or otherwise manicured. Winstead has played tough before -- Death Proof and Live Free or Die Hard come to mind -- and she is terrific as the paleontologist who gets entangled in the alien predicament simply due to scientific curiosity. Edgerton occasionally channels Kurt Russell in Carter's pragmatic resourcefulness, but shows Carter's other nuances as the situation escalates, creating a memorable addition to the lore. The always good Ulrich Thomsen spews sleazy ambition as Halvorson, while Kristofer Hivju is excellent as Jonas, one of the crew's few voices of reason.

The Thing reminds us that horror and science fiction cinema is not about the special effects. As long as filmmakers pay attention to the writing and acting, magic will happen, because it is the human factor that makes these otherworldly narratives fascinating. Sure, man is the warmest place to hide, but we are also the most unique species to observe. Take that, impostors.

8/10

The Chameleon (2010) -- Con artists make for fantastic film fodder. Their lives are intriguing in their criminality, rendering it possible for us mere mortals to live vicariously through their duplicitous schemes, but also making us pity their lack of self. Such is the case of Frédéric Bourdin, who had assumed identities of a bunch of people throughout his youth, simply claiming that "this is who I am".

A young man, Frédéric Fortin (Marc-André Grondin), claims to be a Louisiana family's long lost son, Nicholas Mark Randall, who disappeared four years earlier. While the sister (Emilie de Ravin) accepts him as Nicholas immediately, his troubled mother (Ellen Barkin) and brother (Nick Stahl) are very suspicious. FBI agent Jennifer Johnson (Famke Janssen) also doubts his story and is dead set on finding out the truth, but what exactly is she going to find?

The film achieves the most important feat when it comes to this kind of tale -- neutrality. Director Jean-Paul Salomé chooses to recount the events in a pragmatic manner, observing all the players in Fortin's game and firmly planting him as the master of the charade. The work chronicles the very bizarre yarn of crime, identity and family, while paying attention to the alleged impostor's idiosyncrasies and the way he relates to his new environment. The only thing that makes no sense is the fact that a DNA test is not ordered sooner. Randall's kidnapping was obviously a big deal, so how come Fortin is not immediately interrogated and tested? It seems that a police presence is completely absent from the picture, and I do not understand why Johnson is not receiving more support from her superiors when she starts her investigation.

The performances are excellent. Grondin is a force of nature as Fortin, moving from one behavioral extreme to another, keeping us guessing as to whether he is an unstable and possibly abused young man or simply an opportunistic liar. The constantly underrated Janssen gives a strong portrayal of an FBI agent determined to prove the fraud. She has some amazing moments of gravity; the car scene in particular is heart-wrenching. Barkin's performance as the conflicted, drug-addicted mother is one of the best that the actor has ever given, and de Ravin is heartbreaking as the sister who believes beyond capacity and reason.

A rumination on belonging to the ruins of truth, The Chameleon is, above all, a human drama. It shows that there is nothing incredible about living out one's existence in someone else's skin, but that the motivation behind these actions is worth examining. We do not know what exactly snaps inside a mind to make the person want to profit from other people's misery, but hundreds of years of evolution have made us well aware of the humanity's capacity for the unimaginable.

7/10

The Shame of the NC-17 crime

A month ago, I saw Steve McQueen's much-lauded film Shame, in which the supremely talented Michael Fassbender plays Brandon, a character unable to function even for a couple of hours without relieving his sexual urges. Be it Internet porn, a random encounter or a threesome, Brandon has been there, done that, and done it a million times over. His sister Sissy, played by the incredible Carey Mulligan, is another troubled soul, clingy and feverish on her best day. There is a strong implication throughout the melancholy proceedings that the two had gone through a cycle of abuse over the course of their childhood, causing Brandon's detachment and Sissy's neediness. The film abounds with bodies writhing around in various acts of short-lived sexual gratification and imagery of emotional damage in the context of the principal characters' agony. It is an unflinching, provocative, honest study of addiction, as seen through an individual's daily psychological and physical hell.

The work leaves the viewer drained and eager to discuss what just transpired.

In the first Saw movie, two men sit around, debating whether or not to cut each other's legs off in an attempt to escape a maniac's lair. In a backstory, a woman is told to dig through the stomach of a murdered man lying at her feet; if she does not comply, a bear trap device enveloping her face is going to snap her skull open. In Saw IV, two men attempt to free themselves from another device, which might prove difficult, given that one man's eyelids and the other man's lips are sewn shut. In the first Hostel movie, a woman has one of her eyes gouged out, among other terror sequences. In Captivity, a woman is drugged, kidnapped and tortured for weeks. In The Human Centipede, another lunatic -- how many of them are out there? -- plans to sew three people together by their gastric systems to construct the title entity.

These works leave the viewer drained and eager to forget what just transpired.

Shame was deservedly one of the most critically acclaimed films of the past year, netting its star Fassbender the Best Actor Coppa Volpi at the Venice Film Festival, a Golden Globe nomination and a BAFTA nomination, among other recognitions. McQueen and co-writer Abi Morgan also garnered their share of acknowledgements for directing and the screenplay, including a BAFTA nomination, a BIFA nomination and CinemAvvenire and FIPRESCI wins at the Venice Film Festival.

Saw, Captivity and Hostel were... not.

In the United States, Shame ended up getting the NC-17 rating, which meant that absolutely no one under the age of 17 would be admitted to see it. The rating greatly limited the number of cinemas where it could be shown and eliminated the possibility of television spots, therefore limiting its audience and earning potential. In Canada, it received the 18A rating from the MPA-C, the equivalent of the R rating in the States. It meant that, in most of the provinces and territories, everyone under 18 years of age needed to be accompanied by an adult if they chose to see the film.

As Shame neared its December release, I started wondering about what stance exactly the more conservative MPAA took toward extreme violence as opposed to extreme sex. My curiosity piqued, I decided to look up the ratings for all of the above horror titles. Surely no one under the age of 17 was capable of seeing them, forget about the accompanying adult.

Everyone who thinks that all of these movies were rated NC-17, raise your hand.

No. Sorry.

Everyone who thinks that a few of them were, raise your hand.

No.

Not one of them was.

Yes, you read that correctly. Each one of them had received the R rating. It essentially means that a teenager can go and see women tormented for fun and men amputating one another's limbs, but under no circumstances are they to see a full frontal, something that they see in the mirror every day anyway.

Is torture a better sight than sex for teens, for adults, for anyone to see? Are we really that desensitized? Why is it acceptable to have an entry from the Saw franchise debut to the top of the box office, when artistically innovative and socially relevant films such as Shame are frequently unable to obtain funding to get them off the ground?

It is worth noting that, although Saw was released with the R rating, its original rating was NC-17. After the film was re-edited, the rating was changed, which brings to mind the question of artistic integrity and its status. Not wanting to negotiate his art, McQueen had refused to re-edit Shame in any way, and why should he? Why would the same standard apply to filmmakers trying to cut out buckets of blood to get a more audience-friendly rating and a filmmaker not wanting to take apart his raw portrayal of a real issue? Is there a system of measurement somewhere that creates a proportion between a certain amount of death scenes and a certain amount of sex scenes? Whenever the so-called powers that be tell me that cutting people open is more acceptable than someone walking around in the nude or two people making love, I feel like showing mercy and undoing whatever brainwashing process they had been subjected to. It simply does not make sense. 
 
Do not get me wrong. I am certainly not stating that Shame should have been rated G or PG, since its themes obviously render it a film for mature audiences. In all seriousness, though, there exist two tiny things called compromise and objectivity. What I am stating is that Shame's harsh rating in North America was blindly defined by its frank depiction of sexual addiction -- not alcoholism, not drug dependency, but sexual addiction. I am saying that, had Shame been about a guy that spends his time getting involved in fist matches and knife fights, it would have been rated R, thereby expanding its audience and authorizing networks to advertise it. I am saying that people run from nudity for miles, only being capable of judging the obvious without questioning the context or employing their curiosity, while searching eagerly for weapons and slaughter, employing their base instincts at full speed. I am saying that sex sells at a steep price. 
 
In case you are wondering, I have only ever seen the first Saw out of all the horror films I mentioned, but I have read some of the reviews for the sake of the other reviewers' efforts. I am generally a genre fan and will not pass up a chance to see a new entry, particularly one gaining popularity by word of mouth. I have to say, I regretted this decision long before the Saw credits started rolling. I would never in my right mind watch any of the other aforementioned "works" and I have not even watched the trailers, due to the fact that I do not consider them to be films at all. Rather, I consider all of them to be exercises in sadism, borne out of an anti-culture of reality TV excess and misguided funding. I do not condone censorship of any sort, but I am not able to see the point in watching other people get tormented under the pretense of morality tales or, worse yet, just because the "filmmaker" was given free reign with a nice helping of cash. I do, however, see a great point in watching a drama that dares to examine an aspect of human behavior in a philosophically relentless and often unpleasant manner, for various reasons. For starters, it might help me understand more about how such an affliction influences and eventually becomes someone's reality. It might introduce me to an experience that I know nothing about, but with which my own experiences share certain threads spread across the cosmos of life. Finally, I might learn a bit more about myself through someone else's contemplations, which is always a good thing. I do not see how such a visionary learning opportunity can be so dangerous as to warrant the NC-17 slap in the face.

The film industry's authority figures must be capable of distinguishing between topics that, no matter how difficult to witness on the surface, incite debate and those increments of violence without any discernible meaning or long-term standing in the cinematic cannon. It is not acceptable to balk in outrage at the human body while indirectly promoting various forms of brutality against it. This attitude is thoughtless and hypocritical. You cannot have it both ways. You have to choose a side. On another note, it is bad enough that players without substance and narratives without value are taking up higher echelons in entertainment nowadays. We do not have to encourage them by placing restrictions on actual works of art.

As viewers, it is up to us to choose what we watch and what gets filmed, so I am proposing that we take a stand. I am proposing that the society's stance on sex and violence, cinematic or otherwise, start shifting in favor of the 21st century. I am proposing that we start regarding what unites us differently from what divides and destroys us. I am proposing that we say yes to intelligent, challenging programming without limits. The progress will be slow, but we will get there, I promise. After all, life is too short to allow yet another Saw to swoop in and slice your intellect in half.