With the temperature outside hovering around the freezing mark, I can't say I blame the young couple sitting next to me for necking and exchanging words of love throughout the Pang Brothers' The Messengers.
After all, the inside of a movie theater is much warmer, possibly more comfortable, and just as dark and private as the back seat of a car parked in a public place. Perhaps the lights of the many frequently-used cell phones nearby our row reminded the young lovers of the headlights of passing traffic, were they accustomed to fondling one other in an automotive context.
Still, it made it that much more difficult for me to concentrate on the Middle America-via-Asia ghostly goings-on. And The Messengers needs all possible forebearance, as does Katja von Garnier's Romania-set werewolf grrl power flick, Blood and Chocolate.
What links both films are noteworthy performances by young actresses -- Agnes Bruckner in the former and Kristen Stewart in the latter.
Bruckner was remarkable as a beleagured schoolgirl in Karen Moncrief's bone-weary 2002 drama Blue Car and acquitted herself very well as another schoolgirl in Lucky McKee's imperfect horror flick The Woods (filmed in 2004 and finally released in 2006).
It's a tiny bit startling to see the passage of a couple of years on her face -- she is even more physically beautiful and has left any possible consideration of her as a teenage schoolgirl in the dust. That being said, she is most interesting as the 19-year-old Vivian when she is brooding in silence. Her character passes the time of day as a chocolate maker, but her destiny lies in the night.
Vivian is a werewolf and the leading candidate to be mated with Gabriel (Olivier Martinez), the leader of her pack. Gabriel only mates once every seven years, and as his time approaches, his eyes -- and those of everyone else in the pack -- remain on Vivian.
Blood and Chocolate simmers on low heat throughout its running time. It's more of a meditation on what it means for a girl to become a woman -- who just happens to be a werewolf -- than any kind of action piece. We're treated to extensive looks at modern-day Bucharest, which looks like a great setting for a werewolf movie, and several "transformation" scenes, in which the large, hungry-looking pack run through the woods, leap into the air, and are transformed magically into wolves before they hit the ground. During those brief few seconds, their bodies are graceful figures of light and motion, but how so many are supposed to be nourished by feeding on just one human per month is never explained, nor is it clear how they sustain themselves during the balance of the month.
Bruckner looks wonderful, and could be her generation's greatest brooder, but she needs a better romantic foil than the likes of Hugh Dancy, the densest graphic artist on the planet, or Olivier Martinez, who really needs to speak in his native language with subtitles. The script too often strands the performers in splendid settings with nothing to do.
Director Katja von Garnier has some good ideas about how to film individual scenes and how to put them together, but as a whole the film suffers from far too much torpor for its 98-minute running time.
I watched Blood and Chocolate in ideal screenings condition: a multiplex on Friday at 7:15 p.m., with no one else in the 200-seat theater! Half a dozen people did filter in during the first 15 minutes, but it was an appropriately quiet crowd.
Not so my next film, which started down the hall just 10 minutes later. The 400-500 seat theater was filling fast with a much rowdier crowd, not helped by the lack of sound as the trailers played. When The Messengers began, the sound had been restored, but it was never quite loud enough to quiet the restive crowd. So my potential enjoyment of the movie was affected by the setting in which I saw it.
Though I've already cited the performance of Kristen Stewart, most Twitch readers will be more interested in the movie because of the Pang Brothers. Beginning with the one-two punch of Bangkok Dangerous and The Eye, Danny and Oxide have made a name for themselves internationally -- working either individually or together -- with a series of visually arresting pictures.
Where they've managed to shoot themselves in the foot, though, is that eternal weakness for many stylish directors: the script. It's not as though they don't get involved in writing their own pictures, it's that writing is not their strength, at least not at the same level as their visual (and editorial) artistry.
So it should not be very surprising that The Messengers looks terrific and features several sequences that are brimming with energy, color, and cool little shocks, yet ultimately leaves behind a residue lacking taste or substance.
The script this time is credited to Mark Wheaton and Todd Farmer. The setting feels lifted from a sequence in Hitchcock's North by Northwest: an abandoned farmhouse in North Dakota surrounded by fields of sunflowers is haunted by the spirit of a dead woman and her son, horribly murdered years before.
Coming to stay in the house are your normal American dysfunctional family: the very pretty Dylan McDermott and Penelope Ann Miller as the parents of Jess (Kristen Stewart) and Ben (played by twins Evan and Theodore Turner). Ben doesn't talk and Jess is pretty much ignored by her folks. Something Awful has happened in their recent past, and Dad thinks an isolated farm is the best place to work things out. (Cue music from The Shining). Amping up the weirdness quotient is bearded yet kindly drifter Burwell (John Corbett) and the preternaturally quiet real estate agent Colby Price (William B. Davis), who manages to sneak up and appear on the farm though he doesn't appear to have a car.
Kristen Stewart held her own in David Fincher's Panic Room as Jodie Foster's kid, and really made an impression in Jessica Sharzer's underseen Speak. Here she has to be spunky and rebellious and scared and protective, and she pulls it all off with gusto and panache and all kinds of other words normally reserved for male action stars of a certain age.
Again, it makes you wish she was in a better movie, in the same way that you wish that directors from other countries could get a crack at English-language movies with their own scripts (no matter how imperfect) rather than getting saddled with leftovers from higher-priced Hollywood hacks.
To be specific, John Corbett ultimately proves to be very unsatisfactory in his role, and we never feel a true sense of danger or dread because the stakes are never explained -- it's just another boring family sticking it out in the sticks out of stubborn pride and not listening to each other when things go bump in the night. Come, come, must every familiy in every horror movie be completely ignorant of horror movies? It's a strange paradox that production companies are very happy to churn out horror movies because they're so eternally popular, but then pretend that nobody ever sees them.
The Messengers is not a very good movie, but it is a serviceable "PG-13 horror" vehicle for the inattentive teen crowd that is otherwise occupied with necking and text messaging instead of giving a movie a chance to affect them. It's a non-ironic feast of images for the post-modern ironic masses. Next time I'll be sure to bring someone to nuzzle with.
MY NIGHT AT THE MULTIPLEX
US$9.00 one adult ticket -- Blood and Chocolate
US$9.00 one adult ticket -- The Messengers
US$11.50 one small popcorn, one hot dog, one small drink
US$4.00 one cinammon pretzel
