Well, it's not like it was an ancient tribal burial ground.

Poltergeist

(2015)

MGM’s ransacking of their archives for properties to remake to negligible response, other than sullying their reputation through wanton disrespect, might not seem that heinous in respect of Poltergeist. It was, after all, the spooky equivalent of Jaws. A Spielberg concept “directed by Tobe Hooper”, run into the ground through neglect and the desire for artistically bankrupt sequels. But Gil Kenan’s update is so wilfully redundant, particularly when the original had something special going for it, it might be worth keeping the 2015 take in mind as a harbinger of what will become of many an ‘80s classic (well, there are only so many ‘80s classics to start with, but you get the idea) when their master architects are no longer around to put the kibosh on suits’ plans to jump-start a brand.

MGM’s plundering hasn’t produced anything anyone’s sat up and taken notice of, and none of them have felt like a prestige or event picture, from Carrie to Robocop to Fame to Red Dawn. And with a ho-hum speed-ramped Ben-Hur and a Fuqua’d The Magnificent Seven to come this year, and Road House and another Thomas Crown Affair in the pipeline, that doesn’t look like it’s going to change very soon. There was some vague hope for Poltergeist. After all, Sam Raimi was attached as producer, who had garnered respect for shepherding various horror properties to the screen (mostly remakes of Japanese fare). And Kenan seemed to have the right sensibility. Monster House was well-regarded, and his live-action debut, City of Ember was under-seen but suggested he wouldn’t have to return to expressing himself purely via pixels any time soon.

Poltergeist, though, as suggested by the limp attempts to update it for a generation 30-years on, brings little new to the table, particularly arriving as it does in the shade of James Wan’s more effective series of family-shockers. Maybe that’s down to David Lindsay-Abaire’s antiseptic screenplay (he also contributed to the less than impressive adaptations of Rise of the Guardians and Oz The Great and Powerful; the latter suggests he impressed Raimi, but I can’t think why, given the end result), or maybe it’s just a general lack of confidence given the original’s insurmountable iconography.

The closest we come is in the depiction of the parents, whose own domestic disturbance is far more engaging than the frightful occurrences (he’s out of work, demanding she stay at home to complete that novel, although really it’s about his insecure breadwinner status). Indeed, when Sam Rockwell and Rosemarie DeWitt (another reason to have looked to the picture’s potential, as they’re excellent choices) are on screen, before they’re bowdlerised by the incessant un-special effects of the last half hour, you might almost believe Poltergeist is heading some place interesting. Rockwell’s never one to play a normal guy, but that makes his efforts to be an understanding dad and gracious husband more marked, leading to a memorable sequence of gross immaturity as he embarks on a spending spree with his one non-maxed-out credit card. DeWitt has less to do, but she tends to make you forget when she’s doing it.

The kids aren’t as successful, though. Kyle Catlett, the lead in The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet, comes across like he’s just stepped out of a new Kenan CGI animation, and where his oddball quality worked in Spivet, here it just tends to mark the movie out as cartoonish and ungrounded even before anything strange has happened. Saxon Sharbino is just another teenage daughter, and Kennedi Clements, essaying the “They’re here!” role, is insufficiently supported by gradually escalating strangeness so her plight lacks any impact.

Which is the biggest problem. The picture unfolds in such a functional, mechanical manner in respect of the supernatural element, it neither surprises nor scares anybody. Tree scene? Check. TV set (big TV set)? Check. Gateway to another realm, but now with copious, bland CGI? Check. Jared Harris offers some relief as smooth showman ghostbuster Carrigan Burke, full of war stories and bearing the demeanour of a faker, and Jane Adams offers contrasting gravitas as the earnest faculty professor on hand, but by this point the picture can only play out its store in undemanding, unconvincing fashion.

When we arrive at the house kidnapping the family car, for yet more CGI-assisted attempts at a top-that finale, there’s still ten minutes to go, and it’s a snooze. One might hope this would impede the studio’s will to remake its back catalogue, since none of them thus far have really been worth the effort, but if there’s any chance of just one landing, you know they’ll take it.

Comments

I never strangled a chicken in my life!

Rope (1948) (SPOILERS) Rope doesn’t initially appear to have been one of the most venerated of Hitchcocks, but it has gone through something of a rehabilitation over the years, certainly since it came back into circulation during the 80s. I’ve always rated it highly; yes, the seams of it being, essentially, a formal experiment on the director’s part, are evident, but it’s also an expert piece of writing that uses our immediate knowledge of the crime to create tension throughout; what we/the killers know is juxtaposed with the polite dinner party they’ve thrown in order to wallow in their superiority.

They'll think I've lost control again and put it all down to evolution.

Time Bandits (1981) (SPOILERS) Terry Gilliam had co-directed previously, and his solo debut had visual flourish on its side, but it was with Time Bandits that Gilliam the auteur was born. The first part of his Trilogy of Imagination, it remains a dazzling work – as well as being one of his most successful – rich in theme and overflowing with ideas while resolutely aimed at a wide (family, if you like) audience. Indeed, most impressive about Time Bandits is that there’s no evidence of self-censoring here, of attempting to make it fit a certain formula, format or palatable template.

You must have hopes, wishes, dreams.

Brazil (1985) (SPOILERS) Terry Gilliam didn’t consider Brazil the embodiment of a totalitarian nightmare it is often labelled as. His 1984½ (one of the film’s Fellini-riffing working titles) was “ the Nineteen Eighty-Four for 1984 ”, in contrast to Michael Anderson’s Nineteen Eighty-Four from 1948. This despite Gilliam famously boasting never to have read the Orwell’s novel: “ The thing that intrigues me about certain books is that you know them even though you’ve never read them. I guess the images are archetypal ”. Or as Pauline Kael observed, Brazil is to Nineteen Eighty-Four as “ if you’d just heard about it over the years and it had seeped into your visual imagination ”. Gilliam’s suffocating system isn’t unflinchingly cruel and malevolently intolerant of individuality; it is, in his vision of a nightmare “future”, one of evils spawned by the mechanisms of an out-of-control behemoth: a self-perpetuating bureaucracy. And yet, that is not really, despite how indulgently and glee

Oh, you got me right in the pantaloons, partner.

The Party (1968) (SPOILERS) Blake Edwards’ semi-improvisational reunion with Peter Sellers is now probably best known for – I was going to use an elephant-in-the-room gag, but at least one person already went there – Sellers’ “brown face”. And it isn’t a decision one can really defend, even by citing The Party ’s influence on Bollywood. Satyajit Ray had also reportedly been considering working with Sellers… and then he saw the film. One can only assume he’d missed similar performances in The Millionairess and The Road to Hong Kong ; in the latter case, entirely understandable, if not advisable. Nevertheless, for all the flagrant stereotyping, Sellers’ bungling Hrundi V Bakshi is a very likeable character, and indeed, it’s the piece’s good-natured, soft centre – his fledgling romance with Claudine Longet’s Michele – that sees The Party through in spite of its patchy, hit-and-miss quality.

I'm an old ruin, but she certainly brings my pulse up a beat or two.

The Paradine Case (1947) (SPOILERS) Hitchcock wasn’t very positive about The Paradine Case , his second collaboration with Gregory Peck, but I think he’s a little harsh on a picture that, if it doesn’t quite come together dramatically, nevertheless maintains interest on the basis of its skewed take on the courtroom drama. Peck’s defence counsel falls for his client, Alida Valli’s accused (of murder), while wife Ann Todd wilts dependably and masochistically on the side-lines.

A herbal enema should fix you up.

Never Say Never Again (1983) (SPOILERS) There are plenty of sub-par Bond s in the official (Eon) franchise, several of them even weaker than this opportunistic remake of Thunderball , but they do still feel like Bond movies. Never Say Never Again , despite – or possibly because he’s part of it – featuring the much-vaunted, title-referencing return of the Sean Connery to the lead role, only ever feels like a cheap imitation. And yet, reputedly, it cost more than the same year’s Rog outing Octopussy .

She was addicted to Tums for a while.

Marriage Story (2019) (SPOILERS) I don’t tend to fall heavily for Noah Baumbach fare. He’s undoubtedly a distinctive voice – even if his collaborations with Wes Anderson are the least of that director’s efforts – but his devotion to an exclusive, rarefied New York bubble becomes ever more off-putting with each new project. And ever more identifiable as being a lesser chronicler of the city’s privileged quirks than his now disinherited forbear Woody Allen, who at his peak mastered a balancing act between the insightful, hilarious and self-effacing. Marriage Story finds Baumbach going yet again where Woody went before, this time brushing up against the director’s Ingmar Bergman fixation.

You can’t climb a ladder, no. But you can skip like a goat into a bar.

Juno and the Paycock (1930) (SPOILERS) Hitchcock’s second sound feature. Such was the lustre of this technological advance that a wordy play was picked. By Sean O’Casey, upon whom Hitchcock based the prophet of doom at the end of The Birds . Juno and the Paycock , set in 1922 during the Irish Civil War, begins as a broad comedy of domestic manners, but by the end has descended into full-blown Greek (or Catholic) tragedy. As such, it’s an uneven but still watchable affair, even if Hitch does nothing to disguise its stage origins.

I think you’re some kind of deviated prevert.

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) (SPOILERS) Kubrick’s masterpiece satire of mutually-assured destruction. Or is it? Not the masterpiece bit, because that’s a given. Rather, is all it’s really about the threat of nuclear holocaust? While that’s obviously quite sufficient, all the director’s films are suggested to have, in popular alt-readings, something else going on under the hood, be it exposing the ways of Elite paedophilia ( Lolita , Eyes Wide Shut ), MKUltra programming ( A Clockwork Orange, Full Metal Jacket ), transhumanism and the threat of imminent AI overlords ( 2001: A Space Odyssey ), and most of the aforementioned and more besides (the all-purpose smorgasbord that is The Shining ). Even Barry Lyndon has been posited to exist in a post-reset-history world. Could Kubrick be talking about something else as well in Dr. Strangelove ?

Sir, I’m the Leonardo of Montana.

The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet (2013) (SPOILERS) The title of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s second English language film and second adaptation announces a fundamentally quirky beast. It is, therefore, right up its director’s oeuvre. His films – even Alien Resurrection , though not so much A Very Long Engagement – are infused with quirk. He has a style and sensibility that is either far too much – all tics and affectations and asides – or delightfully offbeat and distinctive, depending on one’s inclinations. I tend to the latter, but I wasn’t entirely convinced by the trailers for The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet ; if there’s one thing I would bank on bringing out the worst in Jeunet, it’s a story focussing on an ultra-precocious child. Yet for the most part the film won me over. Spivet is definitely a minor distraction, but one that marries an eccentric bearing with a sense of heart that veers to the affecting rather than the chokingly sentimental. Appreciation for

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

Search This Blog