Film Fatale

Silent Hill
Dir. Christopher Gans. 2006. R. 120mins. Radha Mitchell, Sean Bean, Laurie Holden, Alice Krige.

Say this for Silent Hill: the movie looks just like the game it's based on. The same yellow fogs, the same faceless monsters lumbering along dark hallways, the same dead-eyed characters who blunder into peril, searching alone for loved ones. You know those dead video game eyes: that one-percent-less-than-lifelike facial expression displayed by even the most ingeniously rendered video game characters. The kind of eyes you'll get while trying to get through two hours of this movie.

Slow and scare-free, Silent Hill nonetheless has a gloomy beauty—if you like looking at photography books of ruined industrial towns, peeling paint and rusty stairwells. There's not much story here: For reasons never made clear, the heroine, Rose (Radha Mitchell) drives her weird little girl Sharon (Jodelle Ferland) who is adopted, from Ohio to the town of Silent Hill, West Virginia.

Warned off by Rose's estranged husband (he's googled SILENT HILL: the entries all came up HAUNTED) and local police, mother and daughter soon run afoul of Silent Hill's strange powers. It's located atop a coal mine which frequently explodes, and despite a steady precipitation of coal dust and ash, no one ever coughs or wheezes, not even the crazed religious cult that chases Rose as she chases her runaway daughter. Far too late in the story, Rose observes that in Silent Hill, "something terrible happened."

That's the funniest line in an awfully grim film.

One interesting note on it, though:

Screenwriter Roger Avary got the idea for the movie's version of Silent Hill from the coal town turned ghost town Centralia, Pennsylvania. Beneath it, a coal fire has been burning since 1963.

The former town of Centralia has been the subject of magazine stories in Harper's (February 2004) and Esquire (August 1999)

Sony's Silent Hill website has more on the movie, Avary and the town.
Ugo has extensive coverage here.
http://silenthill.ugo.com/features/realsilenthill/default.asp

Sony's SILENT HILL site

http://www.sonypictures.com/movies/silenthill/index.html

They also link to a history of Centralia

http://www.offroaders.com/album/centralia/centralia.htm

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 12:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In recent weeks, it's become impossible to ignore the bizarre behavior of a beloved, perpetually smiling film star.

I speak, of course, of Julia Roberts, who has confounded public expectations by not making a summer movie and not doing anything scandalous or wildly emotional like getting married, divorced, or having a baby.

Roberts is acting in a play. On Broadway, no less.

That's just...weird.

But in a good way. Whatever theatre reviewers will say of her performance in Richard Goldberg's Three Days of Rain, tickets are sold out for the plays' entire run.

David Edelstein, the film critic for New York magazine, shelled out $250 bucks to see an early preview, and he writes this week about how Roberts, until now a purely cinematic performer, comes across on stage.

Here's a little of what Edelstein says in The Close-Up Is Her Voodoo

"It’s that somehow those clown-princess features coalesce into one of the best faces ever captured on the big screen.

She’s plainly gorgeous in still photos, but it’s in motion that the real magic happens. She can entrance you with the tiniest shifts in expression. And does she know it!"

UPDATE, April 20: The opening night reviews are in.

The Boston Globe 's carries a slam from theatre critic Ed Siegel: he didn't like her effusive Oscar acceptance speech for Erin Brockovich in 2001, and he reviews her Three Days of Rain performance as if she'd swanned onstage in a vintage gown and started bawling.

Self-confessed "Juliaholic" Ben Brantley of the New York Times was, like Edelstein, entranced by Roberts' unique beauty, but managed to notice that the play was weak and the role didn't suit her.

"The only emotion that this production generates arises not from any interaction onstage, but from the relationship between Ms. Roberts and her fans"

"We wanted our Julia to do well," writes Brantley. "In a smaller, Off Broadway house, she wouldn't have to worry about projecting and could perhaps relax a bit. (She never seems to know what to do with her body.) And she really should be playing a romantic heroine, of the imperiled or comic variety. Her parts in "Three Days of Rain" are essentially character parts, and Ms. Roberts is not a character actress."

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 12:37 AM | Permalink

What is your idea of important entertainment?

A movie that's worth ten bucks and two hours of air conditioning? Or a movie that once looked like a dream and still haunts like a ghost, even now, years after it was made, chopped up on TV or seen on a computer screen?

If there's anything important in the smash up of art and commerce, it's hard to find in what passes for entertainment news. Most of it looks a lot like this:

http://www.panopticist.com/archives/the_magazine_covers.html
sendup by Andrew Hearst.

I promise I will do better than that.

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 12:16 AM | Permalink