Robin Hardy returns to a similar universe as his 1973 horror classic The Wicker Man with this irrelevant follow-up, a nearly farcical adaptation of his own novel Cowboys for Christ. The passage of time has seen the director grow from a subversive young artist to a crafty and disappointingly contrary one.

The Wicker Tree, alas, cannot stand up to its predecessor nor can it even keep a straight face for the proceedings. I believe Hardy intends this as a pointed satire taking aim at religious fervor and spiritual superiority. Instead what he has is a bunch of trussed-up, cartoonish pagan savages chasing a pair of clueless born-again hayseeds over hill and dale. The culminating effect here is a long yawn.

If there’s any reason at all that this dramatically inert farce would draw the attention of horror fans it would be due to the reputation of Hardy’s original film. Sure, seen in the cold light of 2012 after one unintentionally hilarious remake and scores of imitations, The Wicker Man can seem a bit antiquated or even deliriously overcooked. Still, it was a film of mysterious and tantalizing notions, lost in an otherworld of long-lost pagan practices and religious piety, the latter depicted in both Christopher Lee’s sinister Lord Summersisle and Edward Woodward’s Christian policeman. There’s also that shocking and evocative finale that gives the film its name and horrifying context. Things are more cut and dry this time around.

Because we are never in question of the pagan’s intentions and motives, nor of the daft dopiness of the young evangelicals, The Wicker Tree becomes one long game of waiting for the other shoe to drop. The tone isn’t ominous enough, and there’s almost a light-hearted comedy at play in the early chapters where we watch the well-meaning but self-deluded Beth and Steve—morally righteous Texas missionaries looking to win souls—get repeatedly run down by an intensely unlikable band of oddball, Scottish savages.

Graham McTavish’s Lord of the Manor takes over for Lee (now featured in a pointless cameo) and he’s a more obvious one-note villain, orchestrating the Hunt for the Laddie and the related fertility rites to draw attention away from the nuclear reactor incident that’s literally poisoned the wombs of Tressock’s women. If Beth and Steve are the clueless and spiritually false ‘ugly Americans’, then McTavish is the manipulative foreign monster who wields a band of dim, cannibalistic hicks for his own self-serving means (he, after all, has a financial stake in the nuclear plant that did all the damage). With no sense of moderation, The Wicker Tree never gets to satire, but veers awkwardly into spoof where it remains for the duration.

There are very few pleasures to be had here because Hardy hasn’t expended any time building tension or character interest. When Beth and Steve are finally set up for the sacrifice n the second half, there’s no horror to be felt at their predicament, just befuddlement at their complete lack of common sense or survival instinct.  Brittania Nicol as an ex-country singer who misses the casual sex she traded up for smug chastity is sort of sweetly amusing but has no presence when the peril begins.  Beth’s limp-rag of a boyfriend, Steve is a recovering gambler who isn’t so much in love with the Lord as he’s in lust with Beth’s secular allure. If we are supposed to believe they deserve their fate, we don’t. This isn’t a balanced picture of religious dysfunction, because the pagans are clearly murderers and hapless rubes spinning their wheels in archaic barbarism.

The original was a thinking man’s horror film, wrapped in a sensual and visually stimulating shell. It wasn’t a simple exploration of the dark side of religion, but of the tension between our modern sensibilities and the inherent superstitions that exist in traditions of faith. There’s something primal and nightmarish in the first film’s reveal, while nothing more than a glib ‘that’ll teach you to exploit/convert the masses’ rises from the chaos of The Wicker Tree. Hardy puts a sharp point on every aspect of the new production, as if to ensure that we get that it’s all meant to be funny, one big joke at the expense of organized religion, be it Pagan or Christian. Visually, there’s no dread or mystique applied to the landscapes, the rituals or even the sacrificial paraphernalia this time around.

The Wicker Tree had long since exasperated any good will it had with me by the time it  arrived at its centerpiece, a Beltane fire festival and lavish hunt that separates the young couple for their subsequent demolishing. These scenes are laughable and lack convincing pageantry even though it’s been assured to me those are real Beltane dancers. There’s no one here to blame but Hardy, who didn’t really have a story worth telling but likely wanted to return to the film’s theme to update the point. The real point is that directors of horror classics should leave well enough alone when it comes to their earlier achievements.

Trailers do in fact lie, but this one worries me that it may be playing a little too tongue in cheek. The jokes fall flat and you can really see this falling into a typical post-modern horror movie that is too self aware for it’s own good.

Check it out here and let us know what you think:

Release date: May 15th 1987

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

If there’s anything that one remembers about 1987’s The Gate, it’s that it beat mega-dud Ishtar at the box office twenty-four years ago. Well, that and it had one of the creepiest video covers ever to adorn a PG-13 flick. Any kid that ever walked into a video store in the late 80’s must surely recall those evil red eyes staring up out of that gaping dark pit with the tagline ‘Pray it’s not too late.’ About eight years old at the time, I had nightmares generated from that image alone.

It’s funny then to return to Tibor Tackacs’ The Gate all these years later and try to imagine what it’s effect must have been upon release. I never saw the film in the 80s, and caught it on cable sometime in the mid 90’s where I was mostly indifferent to it. Watching it now is an unusual experience; it’s not really scary at all, even when you consider that it’s actually a horror picture designed for kids. At the same time, there’s a disconnect between The Goonies meets Gremlins innocence and the demonic theme that includes satanic rites, blood sacrifices and the unleashing of Hell on Earth. But that’s the 80’s for you, after all.

I actually enjoyed The Gate on my most recent viewing, while acknowledging that it’s an incredibly slight little movie that gets by mostly on some clever writing and wonderful visual effects. It’s hard not to like a film that tries this hard, playing off the appeal of bigger-budget supernatural thrillers like Poltergeist while cheerfully exploiting a timely moral hysteria over satanism and heavy metal. It helps that Glenn and Terry, the adolescent best friends at the heart of the story, are convincingly written by Michael Nankin and well acted by Stephen Dorff and Louis Tripp. Christa Denton has good chemistry with them as Dorff’s older sister, Al, who’s begrudgingly babysitting the two boys until their misadventures require she help fend off a Lovecraftian apocalypse.

When you describe it like that, The Gate sounds a bit more intense and grown-up than it actually is. The subversive elements of the script are there mostly for over-protective 80’s parents, who would have found a mocking finger (not likely the pointer) waving back at their own judgmental one. Glenn and Terry accidentally unleash demons out of a hole in Glenn’s backyard—it’s sitting where the tree-house used to be—and must then consult Terry’s underground metal album for instructions on sending them back where they came from. Ironically, this scene plays off the irrational fear that rock bands were ‘backmasking’ hidden, demonic information on their records that could only be heard if they were listened to in reverse. When the record plays backward here, it gives the kids important info on saving the world from evil. Take that, PTA!

Also picking at a prickly conservative climate, The Gate features a hilarious and telling sequence that riffs on the cluelessness of horror characters when it comes to spiritual warfare. Terry attempts to quell the occult assault of little monsters by reading passages from the New Testament of the King James Bible. When the hellish activity doesn’t look to slow, he physically lobs the bible into the hole as if it were some kind of holy hand grenade. Even better, it temporarily does the trick. Later still, Glenn fires up a kit-rocket infused with love (and a few practical household substances) to dispatch one of the really cantankerous hell lords. In between all of this, The Gate plays like a fairly standard ooga-booga pic where the kids try and outrun a tribe of minature stop-motion ghouls and zombies that climb out of the walls.

 It’s almost a shame I didn’t see The Gate when I was a kid, as it would have arguably more to offer me then. Despite the monstrous flourishes and the hokey devilry, the ultimate gist of The Gate is that children are more reselient and morally intuitive than their adult counterparts give them credit for. Glenn and Al resolve their sibling rivalry and bond not because they are thrust into a life-threatening predicament, but because they come to value each other as brother and sister. There’s a surprising amount of empathy directed towards Terry, a nerdy, slightly sinister problem child with a tumultuous home life. Glenn’s dad encourages him to treat Terry with care, and Glenn does so even when it’s difficult, ultimately bringing the best out in Terry too. These themes aren’t forced in the same way an afterschool special would jam them down your throat, and as a result they are more effective.

The real reason to see The Gate, though, is for the monsters that come in a variety of shapes and sizes and are surprisingly well rendered for a cheap, over-twenty year-old horror film. My favorite beasts are the little goblins that creep up out of the ground and then march in small garrisons through the dark corridors of the house. They aren’t very menacing individually, but the combination of stop-motion models and forced perspective create some decidedly creepy compositions. The eye peering out of a hand, the workman zombie that seems to grow right out of the wall, and the enormous leviathan that rips its way right through the middle of Glenn’s house are clever and imaginative dalliances with dark fantasy.

 If only they were in a movie that had a bit more gumption in regards to tension. The Gate’s biggest malfunction is that it never rises out of the kid-friendly mindset, and exists in an audience limbo. Despite the positive elements, it’s still fairly dark for children of a certain age, and it’s not tense enough for older viewers. It certainly doesn’t have the fright factor necessary to captivate adults and the comedy, while mostly clever, doesn’t take over enough to define it that way either. It’s fun, but there’s just not much there. In fact, Tibor Tackacs seems to be trying out the genre here, and it’s interesting to note that his follow-up I, Madman was a more successful and thrilling horror entry. Stiil, the modern-day Tackacs, directing tripe like Mansquito and Ice Spiders for the SyFy Channel, must look back on The Gate with something approaching hallowed reverance.

Read our other Summer Flashback articles:

The Frighteners

Dragonheart

Eraser

Kingpin

Independence Day

Lone Star

Con Air

Breakdown

Twin Town

Contact

Event Horizon

Blade

Cube

 The Blair Witch Project

Rounders

Run, Lola, Run

All through Joe Carnahan’s survival thriller The Grey I was  unable to warm myself up. I kept staring at that merciless and cold Alaskan wilderness, thinking of Jack London and reconsidering my expectations.

Neeson, that patron saint of surly Irish loners, plays John Ottway, a rugged immigrant marksman who shoots wolves for an oil drilling company. Ottway gets a chance to put those skills –and others– to the test when his plane crashes into the wilds of Alaska and he and the surviving oil workers must contend with a hungry pack of wolves. That is the basic shape of the plot, but it doesn’t account for the grim nature of the film.

The crash is devastating, killing all but seven of the men. The pack of grey wolves show up almost immediately, giving the remainder no time to plan for their survival in the unforgiving cold. Ottway rises to the occasion as their leader, mostly because he’s more experienced but also because there’s a natural sense of authority about him and a feeling  that he has nothing to lose. Ottway organizes the men and gets them on the move, keeping them nestled among the trees.

Although he’s a somber, brooding sort Ottway becomes a kind of makeshift commander and priest. At one point he gently helps a dying man make that final transition with grace and dignity. When events don’t require the group to fight for their lives, Neeson bonds with the men on a deeper level. Together, they challenge the notion of whether a loving, sovreign God would allow them to perish in such a  predicament, and openly question if there’s anything left for them but the indiscriminant, pitiless jaws of mother nature.

Let’s return to Jack London for a moment. The Grey has all the earmarks of a survival story like ‘Call of the Wild’ or ‘To Build a Fire’ and in Ottoway and his doomed cohorts, Carnahan finds protagonists who are very similar to London’s men at the mercy of nature. They are working-class outcasts who do a job very few would ever want to do, and they are minimalized and trivialized by the company they work for. Out in the wild, they are left with nothing but their instincts and even those seem unlikely of saving them. There’s something real and relatable about each of them;  Carnahan does a good job of distinguishing their faces, often captured in extreme close-up so that the world shrinks to the hot breath and terrified eyes of men huddled around a protective fire.

Carnahan makes a significant leap as a director here, manuevering the obvious macho overtones of the premise with an immediacy that  diffuses the inevitable outcome. The cinematography is stunning and suffocating; you can feel the chill in every scene and the cabal of wolves look almost poetic as they cascade down frosty forest paths towards the fearful men. Ottway’s reminiscences to a happier time with his loving wife are poignant and effective, and create a dramatic tug-of-war between the dire situation in the present and the sanctuary of the past. Both sides of this coin are held together by Neeson, who makes Ottway an interesting and rather troubled character.  We would be tempted to follow him through any number of scenarios, but for this one he seems perfectly suited and every scene is escalated because of his involvement. This is Oscar calibre work and it isn’t surprising to hear talk of re-releasing The Grey later in the year to facilitate awards’ recognition.

Some audience members may be less than thrilled with the ending, expecting a different kind of resolution and forgetting that such stories told by London and Hemmingway concluded similarly. With The Grey, it’s not so much that the movie ends as it runs out of film to contain its events. We leave the film with that brutal drama still playing out on the icy stage in our mind. Just don’t tune out before the credits play.

Blu-Ray Disc Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

High-Def Presentation

Universal’s AVC-encoded 1080p transfer for The Grey is harrowingly beautiful. In fact, the atmosphere is more tense and forlorn at home than in the theater, where the crisp, fearsome clarity of the Alaskan wild springs to life. The night-time scenes also vibrant and distinct despite some moments of obvious  grain when things get really dark. The plane crash and sequences of characters hurtling through the trees trying to escape the wolves gain a terrifying immediacy. If The Grey is a tightly coiled spring of suspense, this transfer only increases it’s tension and bouyancy.

As good as the image is, it’s the sound design that truly makes The Grey shine as brightly on blu-ray as it did in  theaters. The DTS-HD 5.1 Master Audio is amazing and essential to the way the film works. Carnahan has structured the sound so that the natural environment emerges as its own character. Howling wind, growling wolves, and crashes through the under-brush are so specifically defined that we are painfully aware of them and what they represent in the story. This soundtrack amplifies Carnhan’s choice in every way. In the most frightening moments, you are tempted to cover your ears.

Special Features

There aren’t too many special features on this blu-ray release, but Universal has provided some interesting material.

The feature commentary with Carnahan and his editors is not a particularly notable one, but the director isn’t afraid to take to task  his fellow filmmaking peerst or those he’s previously worked with. The insight he brings to The Grey in particular is mostly technical, but it’s fun to hear him talk because he’s quite glib about his career. Discussing some of the more complex shots, editors Barton and Hellmann provide nice behind-the-scenes illumination.

There are 23 minutes of deleted scenes here and none of them deliver the wolf fight that some might be holding out for. Many of these scenes are easily identified as disposable, particularly one featuring Ottway interrupted mid suicide attempt by a polar bear. The sequences that build his relationship with his wife should absolutely have stayed in the film though, and the extended campfire sequence is more satisfying and poignant for the added moments.

Final Thoughts:

The Grey is one of the best films of the year so far and one of the finest examples of a survivor thriller I’ve ever seen. Carnahan proves here that he’s capable of making an adventure film with asense of depth and character that doesn’t rely purely upon sensory thrills, although The Grey has those too. It’s a strong film and hopefully the beginning of a new chapter in a bright directorial career.

To my eyes, it might be one of the most repetitive trailers I’ve ever seen. If I had to guess all of this imagery is cobbled from about 10 to fifteen minutes of the actual movie. That, honestly, could be a good thing, as it may mean they are trying to reserve some of the surprises for July. Hard to get past a feeling of ‘been there, done that’ though.

Love Andrew Garfield as Spidey, though. What do you think?

Of course, Requiem for a Dream would still be lighter than Terrace and List, so it’s hard to know what that means exactly. Also, lighter won’t necessarily mean better with Wheatley, who may be a purveyor of the dark and dismal, but goes about it with such style and substance that it’s hard to fault him. The plot follows campers Chris (Steve Oram) and Tina (Alice Lowe) who find themselves at a hallowed pagan tourist site, where presumably some fresh hell will be unleashed on anyone in the vicinity.

This new clip hints at the dread-filled tension and twisted dark humor that characterizes Wheatley’s work. Consider me intrigued, and here’s hoping that Wheatley can once again delivers something both unsettling and fresh.

Check it out here:

The premise is that world loses electricty on a global scale, with no idea why the lights went our or how to turn them back on. Fifteen years later, a small band of travelers, spurred on by a tragic loss, set out on a journey across a transformed America. Along the way they will encounter dangerous militias, the potential secret of the blackout, and a green computer screen that spits out cryptic messages. Um, that last one sounds terribly familiar.

The show may hold promise, but it will need to build the intriguing elements of its mystery early if it wants to distinguish itself from typically dreary post-apocalyptic fare. No surprise that in a post Hunger Games world we get plenty of shots of young people brandishing bow and arrow.

Along for the ride are  Billy Burke (“Twilight “), Tracy Spiridakos (“Being Human”), Anna Lise Phillips (“Terra Nova”), Graham Rogers (“Memphis Beat”), Giancarlo Esposito (“Breaking Bad”), David Lyons (“The Cape”), Maria Howell (“The Blind Side”), Tim Guinee (“Iron Man”) and Andrea Roth (“Rescue Me”).

Revolution is slated for the 10 pm time slot on Mondays this fall.

It’s been previously reported that Sharktopus scripter Mike Maclean wrote this. Instead, the trailer gives Michael Madsen a writing credit! Either he came in and rewrote the thing or the trailer guys messed up. Both seem equally likely. Poor Michael Madsen. He’s not Tom Sizemore. Does he really deserve this?

The Piranhaconda looks much different than the molds, casts and pre-production art we saw over the past year. Ironically, the extra time has only resulted in it looking much, much worse.

Finally, a redband trailer featuring the inevitable blood and skin would make the need to watch the full movie useless. I’ve already seen enough with this teaser.

At what point does antagonistic satire become simply antagonistic? It’s a relevant question in a climate that regularly produces ‘comedies’ diverse in their anger and offensiveness. Last week alone I saw God Bless America, The Comedy and Sacha Baron Cohen’s The Dictator, all of which form a portrait of our current headspace in regards to what constitutes intelligent deconstruction vs blunt, stupid shock value.

Although I have my issues with all three films, it is Cohen’s The Dictator  that clumsily marks the line where forceful bad taste ceases to function as social commentary. After the trifecta of ‘Ali G’, Borat and Bruno, the comedian might see himself as an on-point and fearless satirist, but his new movie has much more in common with dreck like The Love Guru and Macgruber  than something like Chaplin’s The Great Dictator.

Cohen plays General Aladeen, a tyrannical despot that rules the fictional country of Wadiya with a merciless, iron fist. He’s a pure caricature of real oppressors like Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong-Il (to whom the film is amusingly dedicated) and the long-running joke is that he doesn’t see himself as all that bad of a guy, despite his efforts to manufacture nuclear arms, keep his people democracy free, and make constant and unsettling jokes about murdering children, raping young boys, and shooting Jews, blacks and Arabs. The plot even makes him the victim of a coup in which his right-hand man (Ben Kingsely) switches him out with a double and leaves him shaven and desitute in America.

Ah, but you forget silly critic, that’s the point of Cohen’s humor, to turn the knife on his target by embellishing it to a place of extreme ridicule! Ok, maybe that was the intent ( and achievement) of  Borat, which used cartoonish reflections of social ugliness to peel away our cultural veneer, but The Dictator isn’t just a regular narrative film, it’s a by-the-numbers comedy structure where Aladeen is not only the hero in his own eyes, but the eventually lovable comic protagonist. Um, say what?

By giving him a purposefully dumpy Anna Farris—‘looks like a hobbit wearing a Chemo wig’—to play off of, director Larry Charles transforms Cohen’s Aladeen into an absurdist rom-com hero whose bad behavior is relegated to the usual stunted-adolescent excuses. That may work if you are dressing-down figures like stock-car drivers, news anchors and professional golfers as Sandler and Ferrell have done, but to choose as your subject a murderous, blood-thirsty tyrant who is righteous in his own mind and then play him as ironic and misunderstood is a juvenile mistake. It removes the reflection of reality that good satire needs in order to sting as it should.

It doesn’t help that taking away the reactions of unsuspecting real-world people from Cohen’s shtick basically defangs it. Watching Ferris or Kingsley (slumming again and again) feign shock, obliviousness or self-denial isn’t all that funny, and Cohen’s dictator becomes an emperor with no clothes. There are dastardly gags involving a cell phone left in a pregnant woman’s womb, a refuge with no arms that Aladeen calls ‘Captain Hook’, and Cohen rolling off of Megan Fox in post-coital glee to announce ‘Now you have herpes.’ It may sound thrillingly naughty but almost of all it feels like a kid trying to tell a knock-knock joke when everyone refuses to say ‘Who’s There?’

The Dictator is not devoid of laughs but it is devoid of an acerbic, discerning hand that would generate more than chuckles at the usual penis and crap gags. If you are going to pointedly bring up and poke fun at the depravity of the despot mindset, you need to be brave enough to transform the concept into something a bit more morally uncomfortable than a slightly glossier version of those ‘Scary/Date/Teen Movie’ debacles.

The new Dark Shadows is as old, tired and odd as its undead protagonist, proving that it might just be time to retire the arcane partnership of Tim Burton and Johnny Depp. Eight collaborations with only two real clunkers (Alice in Wonderland and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) is not a bad run, but the spark and the heart have dminished from the pairing. Although it’s entertaining enough in patches, Dark Shadows mostly bears testament to the fact these two artists are just going through the motions now.

>Based off a goofy gothic soap opera from the late 60’s and early 70’s, this Shadows starts well enough. I was initially cheered by the dark-fantasy flourishes that occupy the visually delightful prologue. Burton, drawing a page from his best Depp picture, Sleepy Hollow, teases out N C Wyeth Americana and Nathaniel Hawthorne-esque devilry to tell the tragic back-story of Barnabas Collins (Depp), heir to an 18^th century New England fishing empire.

Collins, whose parents established the quaint hamlet of Collinsport, ran afoul of vengeful, obsessed witch Angelique (Eva Green) when he spurned her ardor to pursue his own beloved, Josette (Bella Heathcoate). That feisty “whore of Beelzebub” takes vengeance by driving Josette to her doom, cursing Barnabas to live as an undead vampire, and coaxing the townspeople to bury him deep in the Earth to suffer eternal torment. As told, it’s a striking fairy-tale vignette that does more to evoke the eerie creep factor of the Dan Curtis series than anything that comes after it.

When Depp’s Barnabas is finally released from his slumber by a shocked construction crew, he finds himself wandering back to Collinwood Manor only to discover the year is 1972 and his family legacy shrouded in dark secrets and a century of misfortune. This is also the point where the picture establishes its true identity as a good-natured ribbing of the source material’s risible gothic intensity. It retains more of the original’s high-strung ambience and incidental camp than the trailers would suggest, but Shadows feels too much like a real soap opera–goosed with some fish-out-of-water snark—to sit comfortably as a big summer popcorn flick.

Writer Seth Grahame-Smith has delivered a clunky script built around paper-thin characters and an even thinner plot that exists to set-up a series of stale jokes. Most of these deal with the misadventures of an aristocratic gentleman vampire wandering around in the age of lava lamps, shag carpeting and pet rocks. The rest of it hinges on the triangle of Barnabas, Angelique, and Victoria—the modern reincarnation of Josette—and how silly it is that a knockout like Green would still be salivating to knock boots with the pasty, K.D.Lang nosferatu that Collins has become. Surround them with the vestiges of the Collins family in the form of game actors like Michelle Pfeiffer, Chloe Moretz, Jonny Miller, and Burton muse Helena Bonham Carter as a live-in psychiatrist and you have a recipe for a traditional Burton freak show. Except we have come a long way since Edward Scissorhands’ cheeky suburban unease and nothing Burton does is so much freaky as mildly odd in a mainstream, family-friendly way.

I did enjoy Depp’s turn as Barnabas even if it’s absolutely nothing new or fresh for the actor. A far cry better than his wrong-headed MJ take on Wonka, Depp amps up the dramatic pauses and high-maintenance theatrics of the small-screen vampire to create a caricature that reminds of Jack Sparrow if he were written by Jane Austen. Pfeiffer and Moretz have good chemistry with him, but their scenes are constantly forced into the ‘clever comedy’ mold. Green is the only member of the cast that outshines the been-there-done-that blandness that infects everything else. She makes the witch a genuinely insane and cast-off individual, a sincere loner that spiritually reminds of Burton’s classic outcasts. She may be the villain but she’s got the proper charm and sexy menace that the material deserves.

Burton dresses up the film in the style to which he has become accustomed. Storybook colors and soft-pedaled German Expressionism make Dark Shadows look sumptuous and giddy, like an issue of Eerie magazine or Tales from the Crypt. If only there was more to it than style. Had Burton and Depp played the material a bit more straight, and found a story worthy of their time-traveling, blood-sucking entrepreneur, then this could have been something more than a fitfully amusing lark. Burton needs to acknowledge that the edge is off the goth; it’s time to either pursue darker shadows or come into the light and shed the emo accoutrements. Whether he likes it or not, its been decades since he was anything close to the overlooked loner.

Here’s hoping

We often forget how much what we read and see as a young child truly does have great significance in our lives. Some of it gets lost in the fog or slips within the cracks of our subconscious.

And sometimes all it takes is to see an illustration or hear a title and all these memories flood back.

That’s how it was for me when I saw the trailer for Spike Jonze’s adaptation of Sendak’s classic ‘Where the Wild Things Are’. Though the book itself is only a few pages long, something within those pages captured so much. I was instantly transported back to my youth and living the tale of the boy in the wolf costume running away from home to the island of the Wild Things.

Maurice Sendak died today at the age of 83 from complications from a stroke. The man is gone now, but his classic work will live on to be enjoyed by children for years to come. Each will discover the lonely, sad, youthful, joyful tales that Sendak was able to conjure up.

The man himself was outspoken and brash, but was a breath of fresh air in many interviews, showing not only an understanding for why his work was understood, but more about that of human nature altogether.

I’m sad that he is no longer with us, but I look forward to showing his work to my own daughter.

There is a wild thing in all of us.

 Sasha Baron Cohen has been known for years as an instigator. From his time on ‘Da Ali G Show’ and once he broke in America in ‘Borat’ he has raised quite a lot of hackles but also mad a lot of people laugh. It will be interesting to see how he does in a scripted comedy without the visceral impact of confronting real people.

From the new trailer we do get a bit more of a look of how the plot will shake down (which unfortunately seems to follow his standard focus of a ‘fish out of water’). If what we are seeing in this trailer is any indication of what is to come, looks like he’s out to offend everyone possible.

Hopefully he remembers to make people laugh too.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

Although the title summons a vibe of the mythic, Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is more a stately character study than some sort of moody epic in the Sergio Leone vein. A police procedural unfolds in the dimming twilight of an Anatolian countryside with a group of archetypical men—a police commissioner, a physician, a lawyer and a prisoner– searching for a woman’s body. As the day fades and darkness creeps in, the men begin to reveal secrets of their own that change the nature of their interactions. Although it doesn’t play out like the kind of potboiler audiences may expect from the set-up, Ceylan’s film is an exquisite example of detective fiction where the viewer, not the characters, studies the clues, puts the pieces together, and draws conclusions from the evidence.

I may have gotten myself in trouble, dropping the term ‘detective’ in there. Anatolia may feature a dead body, a couple of suspects, and a search party looking for a missing person, but it isn’t driven by these elements; they don’t add up into a thriller or a who-dunnit. If anything they mostly serve as backdrop to a series of conversations that skirt the borders of social, political and existential anxiety. A morality play in three segments, Anatolia is moody and excruciatingly paced, unfolding over the course of two and a half hours without pandering even once to the audience.

Suspense is built not from solving the mystery of the murder or the location of the body, but in sorting through Ceylan’s allegorical characters and their individual concepts of truth—in fact, the biggest enigma is discovering which of them is the protagonist. The film is an observation, so carefully rendered that it avoids sloppy diversions into melodrama. The details of the conversations mount, creating portraits of the doctor, the commissioner, the  prosecutor and the alleged murderer, but Ceylan doesn’t give us instant clarity. Anatolia obscures many of the truths it’s protagonists are looking for until the last third, which manifests itself as a post-dawn autopsy both disarming and blackly humorous in its effect. Even then, truth itself proves pliable, and when lies come to light the perpetrators of those lies seem to have noble reasons for them.

The visual component of Anatolia is perhaps its most profound, an irony not lost on Ceylan who wants us to consider the interior souls of these men by becoming careful observers of their exteriors and the serene but lonesome landscape they inhabit. In the first hour, there’s a quiet, lulling melancholy in images of the search party vehicles wending over shadowy hills and valley. Inside, the occupants of those vehicles engage in discourse that shed light on who they are and how they approach the reality of the situation in front of them. Ceylan arranges these interludes amidst a series of vignettes that could almost be still-life paintings for their intricate structure and patient meditation.

In the film’s satisfying conclusion, one of these characters finally steps forward and draws a close to the audience’s search for a moral focal point. By the time we have gotten there though, Ceylan has wandered off from his original course and gotten lost in the metaphorical Turkish countryside, waving his flashlight beam around to capture fleeting glimpses of his country’s unrest personified in the handful of figures shuffling about in the night.  Like most of his other films, Anatolia  has been leeched of obvious emotional cues and while there’s enough provided to keep us engaged during the hefty running time, I wasn’t particularly moved or impacted by it. I remember many of the images, but their meaning fades with the close of the film. The allegory that ties into Turkish history and sociology may be interesting in the moment but it doesn’t add any substance to what struggles  at times to be more than a narrative exercise.

Once Upon A Time in Anatolia is still well worth seeing, if for no other reason than that it doesn’t presume its audiences to be dopes. Ceylan trusts that we will meet the film halfway, and he does work to ensure we want to make the journey. Pursuing the ghosts of filmmakers like Krzystof Kieslowski and Andrei Tarkovsky, Ceylan imagines his films as terrariums of image, sound and life living itself out in front of unprejudiced eyes. There are moments in Anatolia where I began to feel as if I were looking through the eye of God, taking in the comings and goings of figures less significant than they seem. As the information mounts and their secret souls are laid bare there’s a temptation for judging these characters. Judgment finally arrives at the end of a long but enticing journey, with the impact of a firecracker in the dark summer night.

Once Upon A Time in Anatolia played this weekend at the Maryland Film Festival. It will screen here in Baltimore at   The Charles Theater on May 19th, 20th and the 24th.