The Blair Witch Project (15) - Selected cinemas
Much has been written here and elsewhere on the commercial phenomenon that is The Blair Witch Project, the tiny independent production made for a mere $60,000 which startled the film industry by taking over $135 million at the US box-office during the summer. The film's success was driven by an innovative Internet campaign and the kind of word-of-mouth that makes movies must-sees.
However, the key to what drew audiences in such numbers is the skill with which the film taps deep into the fears within our imaginations. It really is all in the mind, because The Blair Witch Project is that rare modern horror movie which wholly eschews graphic gore and flashy effects. The film opens with a title card which reads: "In October of 1994 three student film-makers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland, while shooting a documentary . . . A year later their footage was found." The mockumentary style purports to follow their experiences, beginning on a relatively light-hearted note as the filmmakers arrive in Maryland and visit a cemetery before speaking to local residents about the legendary Blair Witch which supposedly has been responsible for a series of child murders.
So far, so mundane, and these expository sequences are relatively boring, lulling the viewer into a state of complacency - which is soon to be shattered. The deeper the student film-makers venture into the woods, the edgier the movie's mood turns, and by their second night a mutual sense of dread dawns on them as they hear eerie noises outside their tent. Then they get lost and start to blame each other for their misfortunes - and the atmosphere of unrelieved fear builds to the point where one of the film-makers says, "I'm scared to close my eyes. I'm scared to open them."
The three student film-makers are played by unknown actors, each of whom is playing a character with the same first name - Heather Donahue as the director, who is shooting with a Hi8 video camera, Josh Leonard as the 16mm camera operator who's filming in black-and-white, and Mike Williams as the sound recordist. The story is told entirely from the subjective point of view of their two hand-held cameras, and while the jerkiness of the camera work might feel jarring initially, the decision to stick with it for the whole film - just like the casting of completely unfamiliar actors - firmly pays off in terms of authenticity and plausibility.
The Blair Witch Project is the first feature directed by Eduardo Sanchez, who is 30, was born in Cuba and raised in Maryland, and 35-year-old Daniel Mynick, who is from Florida. They met as students at the University of Central Florida film school in Orlando and honed their skills on other people's projects while devising a film of their own.
Without any realistic hopes of raising a budget, they opted to shoot their film in a video verite style and used credit card advances to cover the initial shooting budget of $25,000. In their impressively resourceful scheme of things, they hired their unknown actors and gave them a crash training course in using camera and sound equipment, took them off to the Seneca Creek state park in Maryland and sent them off with just an outline narrative.
The actors, who were fed with morsels of clues along the way, had no idea where the narrative was leading. Mynick and Sanchez call this approach Method filmmaking - as in Method acting - because the actors were living their roles 24 hours a day during the short eight-day shoot.
In a lean, taut 87 minutes, the movie plays on our fears of the unknown and of the dark and proves - as Deliverance did, for example - that the great outdoors can prove just as threatening an environment for a horror movie as any haunted house. Crucially, Mynick and Sanchez adopted the philosophy of the great Alfred Hitchcock - that what is powerfully suggested is more likely to frighten audiences than buckets of blood and gore.
- Michael Dwyer
Romance (Club) - IFC, Dublin
In the heyday of European art cinema in the 1970s, exhibitors would privately admit that a significant part of their box-office takings came from the "dirty mac" brigade - those who hoped for some titillation from the frank depiction of sexuality in many of those films, and were willing to sit through hours of often dreary angst to get it. With dirty macs more than adequately catered for these days by video and internet porn, it's rare to see an arthouse film arriving on these shores trailing such a cloud of "controversy" as Catherine Breillat's Romance - particularly since most modern debates on cinema censorship centre more on violence than sex, and Breillat's film is concerned far more with the latter.
It's hard to avoid the suspicion that the distributors of Romance are hoping to hype this austere and rather limited film on the basis of its explicit content - the IFC has been running a teaser campaign to journalists over the last few weeks, emphasising the "forbidden" subject matter, and its publicity notes include a news release from the British Board of Film Classification, explaining its decision to grant an "18" certificate without cuts to Romance. What relevance this has to Ireland, where the film is being shown without a certificate under the club system, is far from clear. For those interested in censorship issues, though, it does offer a fascinating insight into British attitudes to the depiction of the erect male member on screen.
The organ in question belongs to Italian porn star Rocco Sifredi, taking his first plunge into dramatic acting as one of the sexual partners of the film's star, Caroline Ducey. Ducey plays a woman driven to despair and anger by her boyfriend's disinterest in sex, who embarks on a series of random encounters with other men - first Sifredi, then the headmaster at the school where she works (Francois Berleand), who introduces her to the joys of bondage.
One can see why Breillat cast Sifredi in particular - it takes a professional to maintain an erection during Ducey's drawn-out, self-pitying and pretentious precoital musings on the nature of love, sex and life. Indeed, Romance at times seems like self-parody of po-faced French cinema, with its humourless, self-absorbed characters, heavy-handed visual motifs and simplistic colour-coding (the use of white and red in costume and design is risibly gauche). The final few minutes hint at something more interesting, but Romance fails dismally to live up to its pre-publicity as a provocative, original exploration of sexuality.
- Hugh Linehan
Tarzan (General) - General release
In a week of much-hyped films, there's something almost reassuring about settling into the latest, equally-hyped offering from Disney - at least you know what to expect in terms of quality from the world's leading animation company. The question with Disney films is usually whether the more sentimentalised, icky tendencies of the company have been kept in check.
With Tarzan, happily, the answer is a resounding yes. While Disney puts a very 1990s take on Edgar Rice Burroughs's much-filmed character (only Dracula has had more screen incarnations, apparently), a zippy script, lively characters and some remarkable three-dimensional rendering make this one of the best of the recent Disneys. It's also a cause for some relief for this writer at least that the soundtrack is more or less free of the dreadful MOR drivel which has disfigured most of the company's films. What you get instead is a clutch of Phil Collins songs - hardly ideal, admittedly, but relatively unobtrusive most of the time.
The real pleasure of Tarzan is in its fine animation and spectacular set-pieces. Nostalgists for The Jungle Book may quibble with this film's less vivid characterisation in the supporting animal cast, but they can hardly find fault with the magnificent jungle landscapes and the swooping, steadicam-type shots which whirl us through the forest canopy on Tarzan's shoulder. The hero himself is characterised here as a troubled adolescent, who discovers his identity through an encounter with a band of explorers (voiced by Nigel Hawthorne and Minnie Driver, among others). The Lord Greystoke subplot, and the return to England, are jettisoned (always a good idea), and the focus is on Tarzan's growth from Prince to King of the Jungle.
Remarkably, this is the third Disney production in less than a year to have gorillas as its heroes (after Mighty Joe Young and In- stinct). Clearly someone in the corporation has a soft spot for this particular endangered species - always depicted with gushy anthropomorphism as loveable, noble and sad. It can surely only be a matter of time before gorillas start seeking the right to reclaim their identity and start telling their own stories, free from Hollywood sentimentality.
- Hugh Linehan
Bowfinger (15) - Selected Cinemas
Lampooning themselves has become an increasingly popular pastime among the Hollywood elite in recent years, with films such as The Player, Get Shorty and Swimming with Sharks all taking potshots at the venality, greed and shallowness of life in La-La Land. The fact that big-name stars seem only too happy to appear in these films shows that there's not much edge to their satirical thrust - in fact, many have veered perilously close to vanity projects (Basic Instinct screenwriter Joe Eszterhas's disastrous Burn, Hollywood, Burn, which never got a release here, shows the genre at its narcissistic worst). So it's right to be wary when two of Hollywood's most self-indulgent, undisciplined talents appear together in such a movie. Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy are, after all, both good examples of how early comedic promise can curdle in the face of stardom.
But this slapstick comedy, directed by Frank Oz (who made the under-whelming In and Out) and written by Martin, has such a wonderful premise that one can't help holding out some hope for it. Martin plays a madly ambitious, almost bankrupt producer-director, intent on making a science-fiction extravaganza called Chubby Rain. But he needs a star to make the film happen and hits on the idea of putting action star Kit Ramsey (Murphy) in the film without his knowledge, by shooting scenes around the unwitting Murphy in the restaurants and on the streets of Los Angeles.
It's a great idea, but Oz and Martin fail dismally to take advantage of the many possibilities it offers. Instead, they go for the most obvious jokes at every turn - sometimes they hit (there's a good line about Teddy Kennedy), but most often they just fall flat. Missed opportunities abound - Murphy's character is a member of a Scientology-type cult run by the ruthless Terence Stamp, but the film wastes this potentially fertile ground for satire. There's been some speculation that the ambitious, promiscuous starlet, played by Heather Graham, is based on Martin's former girlfriend, Anne Heche (who left him for Ellen DeGeneres), but a lesbian gag at the end of Bowfinger is so weak that you can't imagine Heche - or anyone else - being particularly bothered.
- Hugh Linehan
