Hell House

 

We wanted to watch “Jesus Camp” that night. Our conversation topic had diverted to being scared silly at the junk extremist, fundamentalist Christians do, and someone thought this 2001 documentary they stumbled across on Netflix, “Hell House,” would be a reasonable substitute.

Although shortly into it I began to question if “Hell House” was actually celebrating the horrific acts of a group of Christians in this suburb near Dallas. Regardless of its stance, the documentary’s ambiguous editing and testimonials make it a questionably one-sided, unentertaining and uninformative film.

Each year in Texas, the Trinity Church hosts a haunted house designed to recreate sinful acts and the experience of walking through hell before aiming to convert them to the path of Jesus Christ. The house (a literal house built from scratch rather than a tent. Why don’t they use these resources to help the homeless or something?) warns against drunk driving and doing drugs, but also condemns suicide, homosexuality and abortion with punishment of eternal damnation.

Lucky parents can walk through this makeshift hellhole and see their kids grasping for life beneath glass covering a red gas filled chamber. And at the end of the tour, an authoritative black man will give you six seconds to walk through a door and pray with the church or risk dying and going to hell knowing what they now know.

An intertitle at the end of the film informs that the Hell House has attracted over 75,000 people in roughly five years with about 15,000 converting and that other churches are following suit.

I find these to be scary numbers, and the homophobia and general ignorance rampant in this organization insults and terrifies me.

“Hell House” didn’t exactly reflect my opinions, and nor should it. The documentary is all cinema-verite and doesn’t outwardly demonize these people, make fun of them or even question them, but the editing remains ambiguous.

If the film is merely a journalistic, slice of life observation designed to educate us to some shocking people, what is particularly newsworthy about these people in Dallas? I’m aware these thoughts and feelings persist in communities like this, and “Hell House” merely confirms them. Beyond that, our journey into the Hell House is an unedited glimpse of each of the various sketches, denying us the backlash of others that would better educate us or the personal touches of individual characters we can follow and identify with.

And yet if this is a social commentary documentary, it certainly doesn’t seem to be using these scare tactics to great effect. All of the people director George Ratliff observe seem to take scary pleasure in imagining hell, but then he allows them to speak in serene looking infinity backdrops as they spout standard horror euphemisms and other emotionally charged, life changing affirmations. The people who enjoyed the Hell House, such as a mother who claims she’s had two miscarriages and thought the image of a teenager bleeding out her vagina after taking a morning after pill looked realistic, are treated normally, whereas those who actually talk back to the church management seem like the demons.

The message I derived from “Hell House” is that this church is doing something admirable and that their actions will help them escape the Earth before the moment of rapture. The director may not even agree with this statement, even if the church themselves certainly does. But regardless of their positions, I take no pleasure from hearing any part of it.

1 ½ stars

Cedar Rapids

“Cedar Rapids” is not your standard fish-out-of-water comedy because its hero is only breaking out of a very small bubble into a slightly larger bubble.

For Tim Lippe (Ed Helms), Cedar Rapids, MI may as well be the land of Sodom and Gomorrah, but we know better. That’s what makes this very familiar story interesting, clever and good-hearted, but also ultimately tepid.

Lippe is travelling to Cedar Rapids for an insurance convention, and he’s determined to come back to his small hometown in Wisconsin with the coveted Two Diamonds prize.

Having never left his hometown, Lippe is scared witless by these people with so much “worldly experience,” namely Dean Ziegler (John C. Reilly). The Deansie may be a womanizing, drunkard buffoon typical to these comedies, but he’s only crazy and outrageous on Midwestern insurance salesman standards.

Putting these characters on such a small scale is precisely what makes them endearing, and forcing them into a truly outrageous and raunchy scenario would be a betrayal.

But when a lot is made of this Two Diamonds prize, it serves as a notorious MacGuffin. The specific plot points already matter little in a movie like this, but when their dramatic conflicts are intentionally placed on a lower pedestal, the emotional payoff is nada.

And yet there are still charming moments of comedy throughout a very funny cast. Helms plays the dope amongst dopes so well that when he’s forced to sing in front of a crowd, we forget as an actor he does it all the time on “The Office.” Reilly is having a terrific year, and The Deansie is a memorable character just because of the way Reilly controls his body as a performer. Even Anne Heche as the love interest Joan is a congenial tomcat good for a few grins and laughs.

It’s a shame the rest of the movie feels so slight and insignificant around them.

2 ½ stars

2011 Recap: Seeing film’s future in 3-D

Reflecting on the year in film in 2011.

2011 was a backwards looking year for film, and only in recent weeks have we begun to climb out of our nostalgic holes and emerge rejuvenated.

Hollywood is historically bad at correcting former mistakes, and at the dawn of each new technological advancement in film, we forget how to run or even walk and start by crawling once again.

2011’s culprit was 3-D, which bombarded us in more movies than any year in history. The words “Shot in 3-D” nearly lost their meaning, and the technology was almost considered dead, written off as another rising and falling fad in the cycle of Hollywood gimmickry.

But as films like “Hugo” finally emerge, we get a good sense not just of how 3-D can improve the visual aesthetic of a film but how it can actually be incorporated to tell stories differently. And interestingly enough, this growth is part of a Hollywood cycle all its own. Continue reading “2011 Recap: Seeing film’s future in 3-D”

Review: Into the Abyss

One of Werner Herzog’s first requests in his documentary “Into the Abyss” is, “Describe an encounter with a squirrel.” But we know Herzog; you can practically hear him asking it in his chilling German accent along with speculations about smuggling sperm out of a prison, and it almost sounds sadistic.

But from these oddities Herzog gleams a devastating and powerful film that examines death and loss from those who live with death, those who bring death, those who bring life and one who will know death very soon. Continue reading “Review: Into the Abyss”

Cave of Forgotten Dreams

I can imagine the History Channel approaching Werner Herzog to make a documentary on Chauvet Cave. In my mind, they ask if he would make an informative but cinematic documentary with lots of talking heads because they have very successful shows like “Modern Marvels.”

But of course Herzog has no interest in making such a film, and instead he makes “Cave of Forgotten Dreams,” a film with beauty and philosophical ambitions that far surpass those of the scientists who discovered, studied and preserved this cave dating back to the dawn of man. Continue reading “Cave of Forgotten Dreams”

Le Havre

 

A fairy tale is the right expression to describe “Le Havre.” There’s nothing fantastical about this Finnish film set in France, but it’s filled with good-hearted characters and a slightly saccharine story that makes the entire thing feel blissfully right.

Marcel Marx (Andre Wilms) is a shoe shiner in the French port city Le Havre. His job is to make people clean, but he’s in some murky waters. His loving wife Arletty (Kati Outinen) is sick in a tragically Old Hollywood way. And now a boy discovered in a group of African refugees making their way to England in a shipping crate has escaped from the police into Marcel’s care.

The boy’s name is Idrissa (Blondin Miguel), and he’s quiet and timid but willing to help and anxious to get to England. Marcel has no reason to help him, but he does. That generosity and genuine tender care seems to supersede any accusations of “Le Havre” being one-dimensional or simple minded. Continue reading “Le Havre”

Review: Terri

 

I knew kids in junior high and high school who would say weird stuff just to get a rise out of me. They would talk dirty, and it wasn’t insulting to me personally, but they could sense I was naïve, and they enjoyed it. They were just as insecure, but they didn’t carry themselves that way. They were unnecessarily ruthless for the sake of being so.

That’s the problem for Terri (first time screen actor Jacob Wysocki). He’s a big kid for 15, large and fat beyond his age. Kids whisper stuff to him about vaginas and squeeze his man breasts. Is that particularly insulting? It’s certainly annoying. And it doesn’t help that he has to put up with this junk when he’s living alone with an uncle developing Alzheimer’s and walking to school everyday through the woods.

The title character in “Terri” is in a tailspin, developing as an adult and now conflicting with whether he’s weird or normal, smart or mentally challenged, and even good or bad. I liked getting to know Terri and observing how he grows in these few weeks of high school. I would’ve liked to know him as a kid before life seemed so confusing, but the film’s third act leaves its character wandering in uncertainty. Continue reading “Review: Terri”

Win Win

 

How do you take a losing situation and turn it into a winning one? Better yet, how do you take a generic screenplay and turn it into one that is clever, funny and, yes, winning?

“Win Win” is the simple story of a down on his luck father who gets stuck with a runaway teenager but learns to love him, which is not the most ambitious of ideas, but whereas another film would be cynical and mean spirited, “Win Win” cheerfully takes the punches life dolls out in failure after failure and wins us over naturally. Continue reading “Win Win”

Hugo

Who other than Martin Scorsese could make a kids movie about the first pioneer of cinema and make it the most visionary, lovely and wondrous film of the year?

Scorsese’s “Hugo” is certainly a departure for the legendary director, and Brian Selznick’s equally imaginative children’s book would likewise be a hot commodity to many other directors, but few people other than Scorsese could wholly embody his love of cinema and general nerddom for silent films and trick artists like Georges Melies and get away with it.

That’s the selling point for me and other adults speculative about how Scorsese would handle a children’s film. “Hugo” could actually double as the biopic of Georges Melies (Ben Kingsley), the story of how as an adult the magician turned filmmaker who made the masterpiece “A Trip to the Moon” (1902) became a quiet recluse who never spoke of his films after nearly all of them had been forgotten and destroyed.

Scorsese worships the man, arguably the first auteur of film, and he honors Melies by literally recreating his films in stunning color and 3-D cinematography.

For all the movies being re-released and up converted into 3-D today, the last one I thought would get the treatment would be “A Trip to the Moon.” Yet I’m giddy at watching this fantastical mystery story for children simply dripping with film history, and there is something wonderfully fulfilling about seeing a moon with a rocket poking out of its eye floating mystically above the screen. Continue reading “Hugo”

The Descendants

“The Descendants” is a complex family drama that provides lots of inner details without ever delving into them and becoming bloated

“The Descendants” is a film filled with bitterness, resentment and judgment. And yes, I would say it’s a comedy and that it’s quite lovely.

If the film’s idyllic Hawaiian setting or quirky indie comedy trailers seem deceptive, that is exactly the point. “The Descendants” is a film about appearances, and with each character there is a long lineage of Hawaiian heritage who show us that with every meeting and action, we carry along with us emotional baggage and sins of the past that skew our perception of the present.

We want to be honest about the here and now, but in others we only see the past. Sometimes what we see seems unfamiliar, and it’s tough to forgive. Continue reading “The Descendants”