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“The Others”: A Ghost Thriller, but Interesting

Continuing my journey through Alejandro Amenábar’s filmography, we arrive at his third feature film, The Others. At this point, I know what to expect with his films, and this film delivers on those expectations, but that’s about it. Tesis and Open Your Eyes both had very peculiar ways of building suspense, with distinct similarities and differences, while The Others combines Amenábar’s artistic habits with the tropes of ghost films. I don’t know what else to say about this film without spoiling it, but I’ll do my best to inform any readers if this movie is worth your while. Even if that introductory paragraph sounded pessimistic, this film is still enjoyable. It’s a solid thriller, it just comes off as somewhat generic or aimless in certain sections. The main source of tension in the film comes down to whether or not there actually are ghosts in this story, constantly delivering convincing evidence and reasonable doubt. This makes for a far more dynamic viewing experience, making the possibility of frightening imagery or jump scares an actual possibility, rather than an inevitability. This means that much like his other films that I’ve mentioned, the experience is built on actively questioning the plot, world, and your own perception, mirroring the experience of the protagonists. I’ve had a hard time trying to find a satisfying deeper meaning in the film, but the enjoyment it provides in it’s thrills helps keep it engaging, and thought-provoking even after it ends. Even if a few scenes rely a little too heavily on tropes associated with horror films, The Others never becomes a bore, and offers enough twists to the formula (which can’t be named without spoilers) to stay interesting and compelling on its own merits.

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Tesis is a solid thriller that falls a few steps short of classic

(The English translation of the title is “Thesis”, but I refer to it as “Tesis” simply because that’s what it says on the dvd case and I’m already used to calling it that. Open Your Eyes is also a translated title, but I can’t be bothered to learn the Spanish name)

Put simply, Tesis is a thriller film about “Snuff Films”, a real life phenomenon. If you’re fortunate enough to not know what those are, I’m sorry to tell you they’re essentially “murder films”: films where the filmmaker(s) capture, sometimes torture, and murder the subject, all without any special effects. Disturbing, right? Well, apparently it has a market. Especially with violence in popular movies in mine, an alarmingly large amount of people are at least somewhat curious to see what that kind of violence looks like, even if they’ can’t imagine financially supporting a murderer. That reaction is a more thorough premise of the film: a film student writing a thesis on violence in media shows some curiosity into watching such films, very disgusted, but also twistedly curious. The meta bit about this premise is the fact that the filmmaker wrote and produced the film while still in film school. Ammenabar likely had some interest in violence in media himself, so the film is very obvious reflection of his own state at film school, albeit slightly more disturbing and graphic. 

Tesis actually plays with your own expectation of violence, calling attention to how you, the viewer, much like the protagonist, Angela, and the writer, have an interest in seeing violence. When we see Angela inch towards the site of a graphic suicide, you don’t want to look away either, wondering what she’s going to see there. Regardless of whether a purpose like “artistic merit” or “story development” is used as a pretext, you’re still curious about watching violent things happen. Actual brutality is rare enough in the film proper that I feel more comfortable calling it a thriller rather than a horror film. Either way, i think the point of both genres is to induce and bring awareness to some fear in the viewers, and Tesis, by and large, succeeds at that.

The greatest strength of horror as a genre, at least hypothetically, is a true openness about how it will end. While an action film will tell you that the hero is in danger, you know they’re somehow going to win in the end anyways. Romance movies will end with the couple together, or occasionally with a bittersweet goodbye, comedies and fantasies end pretty much where they begin according to the hero’s journey, so on and so forth. But horror films can end satisfyingly with success or failure. It’s a common trope for a single survivor to make it out, but it’s also common to be confronted with a truly brutal tragedy, or a more thoroughly optimistic overcoming of the threat. Tesis uses that really, really well. Since the film is about Angela’s deadly curiosity into snuff, it’s easy to imagine it killing her, her deciding to stop her search, or even her somehow overcoming the threats and escaping. And all of those endings would compliment the theme and character arc in different ways. The film doesn’t just scare you with the notion that the world in the script could kill or harm the characters, but that the story is absolutely willing to do so. There’s at least a few moments that could easily pass as the conclusion of the film as well, adding to the film’s meta suspense (although some viewers might find themselves frustrated and waiting for the move to end after one or two fake outs).

In terms of formal elements, Tesis fares less well. Unlike his next film, Open Your Eyes, Amenabar’s first feature relies on fairly traditional sources of suspense, like musical cues, dramatic irony, and threats of external danger. The real charm of the film comes from the mystery of whether or not Angela is actually in any danger, which lends a different kind of tension to scenes with “antagonists”, who may turn out to be innocent passerby. I hesitate to call it psychological horror, but the thrill of wondering what, if any, of the conspiracy presented is true, leads to a type of fear and suspense you only get in these kinds of movies. I think that strength alone makes Tesis work watching, especially if you have an interest in thrillers or horror, but Open Your Eyes is ultimately a much better exhibition of that feature. That’s not only because it’s a remarkable film in it’s own right, but because Tesis has a few character driven plot holes and flaws that really hold it back, especially on repeat viewings.

What’s the biggest gripe with horror protagonists? They’re dumb and aren’t careful enough. What’s Angela’s biggest flaw? I imagine you can infer the rest. There are a few key moments where Angela is just...really dumb. She’ll lay all her cards on the table too early, falls to really obvious logical fallacies, and just straight up forgets key details. She can be rather clever, but there’s at least a few scenes where you’ll probably be yelling “No! Why would you do that?!” at the screen (or just internally, if you’re as fearful of judgey neighbours as myself). There’s not much to say about this flaw, but it really is such a deal breaker for a lot of engagement with the story. When the dramatic tension isn’t dictated by what the natural course of action or only clear solution is, but rather how intelligent your protagonist is in any given moment, the weight of the story is totally lost. You become focused on how things will end up, not where the characters and story take you. At least this issue is somewhat lessened by the equal dramatic potential of positive and negative outcomes in the story.

What’s my spoiler-free take on this movie? It’s pretty decent, definitely worth watching if you have some interest in horror or thrillers. It’s not quite an exceptional exhibition of those genres, but it’s creative and effective enough to have a lot of value in watching. Most importantly, it does produce some pretty decent scares. I’d say Open Your Eyes is a much better option for a suspenseful story of a similar style, but the two aren’t exclusive to each other. If you wanted to hear a numerical value for this movie, it would probably be something like 7/10, but I don’t think a numerical value like that really communicates what makes a film worth watching or not. If those strengths I mentioned earlier really sound interesting to you, I think it’s really worth watching.

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Vanilla Sky is the Weirdest Remake I’ve Ever Seen

All things considered, I hold a lot of respect for remakes. Sure, it might seem like a waste of creative potential to throw a bunch of money and artists on a project that’s a copy of a previous one, but remakes can “reinvent” the film that came before it. Updating the special effects, correcting problematic stereotypes, retelling an important theme, yadda yadda, you get the idea. You may notice that all those excuses for a remake I listed were based on the remake being made a long time after the original. But Vanilla Sky was released just four years after Open Your Eyes, the film it was based on. It even shares a main cast member playing the same role. So...what’s the point in remaking it? According to director Cameron Crowe, it was to bring the story to an American audience while weaving it into a new story. According to me, a viewer of both films, it was to make the same film but slightly worse in every way. And wouldn’t you know it, when everything’s a “little worse”, the quality of the film as a whole drops a lot. First and foremost, the central theme, plot elements, characters, and even most sets are near-identical to Alejandro Amenábar’s original film. So any changes are mostly in things like dialogue, shot composition, and editing. And honestly, the only thing I’m thankful to Vanilla Sky for is birthing the very memorable movie quote “In another life, when we are both cats”, but even that is far less interesting in context. I’d like to clarify that I’m certainly biased by having watched the original film first, but I’ve done my best to focus my analysis on the formal elements specifically.

Why don’t we start with the respective protagonists? The story opens with the introduction of Cesar in Open Your Eyes, and Tom Cruise in Vanilla Sky, although I’ll probably call him “David” for the rest of the review. Both are fundamentally the same character; they have the same nightmares, sleep around without much care for the women in question, were born rich, and are paranoid about other shareholders trying to steal his company. There’s a few key differences between them though, and it mostly comes down to acting. Cesar is portrayed as a complete douche. He brags about lay he gets, talks rudely to them, values his vanity above everything else, and is just generally...rude, if such a word isn’t too crass. Tom Cruise is unmistakably Tom Cruise, and despite also being a player, he’s also more, well, playful. He seems to form at least some kind of emotional attachment to the women he sleeps with, tries to keep their identities secret from his friends, he doesn’t come off as exceptionally rude, and there are even a few scenes of him being sentimental to friends to teach us “he’s not that bad a guy”. This is the change I most expected, but it’s still one I wasn’t happy to see. The repeated attempts to make the protagonist “relatable” only made him seem two dimensional. Instead of being an enigma, a character with clear flaws, he’s a character who has his depth plainly told to us. The side characters are all pretty much the same, with one notable change to Sofia, the main love interest (who shares a name and actress between the movies). Sofia is a reluctant love interest, who seems to see Cesar as her date’s annoying friend, although some flirtatious subtext can be picked up. Vanilla Sky’s interpretation has her completely fixated on him quite literally from the second they meet. I assume it’s done to make the relationship more “believable” or “charming”, but it really just makes Sofia static, and reinforces tired tropes about “true love”. It comes off as especially cheap at the end of the film, actually undercutting the theme of the story as a whole. All of these changes, while relatively minor, lead to massive overhauls in tone and dramatic tension.

Why do I care so much about that? Because Open Your Eyes is a brilliant psychological thriller, which induced a lot of genuine stress and discomfort in me while watching it, more so than any horror film I’ve ever seen. Suspense is constant even throughout the calmest or happiest of scenes. With long shots, a lack of music, and occasional discontinuous cuts in time, the film conditions you to never trust what’s coming next. Once a shot begins to linger, you start to worry about what’s going to go wrong: Sometimes there’s an abrupt cut, a shocking image, maybe even a tragic twist, but often, it’s nothing at all. You start to question your own sanity just as you do Cesar’s. The cost of Cameron Crowe wanting to make you like Tom Cruise (which is kind of easy because he happens to have Tom Cruise’s face) is that you no longer question him or his sanity. And the editing changes to match this change: cuts don’t waste time, and there’s always something happening. Sometimes there’s legal mumbo-jumbo, or banter, or a musical sequence, but you aren’t given any time to savor these moments. You don’t get to think about how happy Tom must be in a moment of levity or character development, because we’re already watching him have another conversation, or having pop music blasted at us. Open Your Eyes generates a sense of tension and unease that’s able to penetrate even the most mundane or harmless of scenes, while Vanilla Sky creates an aura of, well, ease, that it betrays any dramatic tension. 

Just so you don’t think I’m talking out of my ass, I’ll break down how two versions of the same scene demonstrate this change: the prison portrait scene. In a flashforward to Cesar in a prison cell being visited by a psychologist, we see him repeatedly drawing a portrait of a young woman. The psychologist questions him on the matter, but Cesar doesn’t share much, lamenting about it being a happy memory. Shortly thereafter, we’re introduced to the subject of the portrait, Sofia, and see the game the two of them play, drawing caricatures of each other, giving new context to the prior scene. In Vanilla Sky, the two characters sketch each other before we see Tom redoing the portrait in prison. And in that prison scene, a somewhat glowing, superimposed Sofia is shown inside the jail cell, interacting with Tom and serving as the model for his drawing. That change does two things to the viewer’s impression of the character: it makes Tom’s state of mind explicitly clear to the viewer, and it directs our attention to the obvious hallucination, instead of the bond between Tom and his psychologist. When Cesar was questioned on him compulsive drawing, we’re put into the psychologist’s shoes, wanting to learn about him, which helps us get invested in wanting to see the two characters come to understand each other. Vanilla Sky’s version of the scene brings focus to the cheap trick and breaking of reality, making the dialogue a backdrop rather than an investing subplot. And that’s just one of many scenes to do changes like that.

I guess my conclusion here is that Vanilla Sky is overrated, and Open Your Eyes is amazing.. So, uh, don’t let me spoil it for you, go watch Open Your Eyes sometime, it’s fantastic. Maybe we’ll all be able to appreciate the underrated gem, one day, when we’re all cats (See? It really is just too damn quotable)

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York Film Review: Just Let Him Eat The Spaghetti

This film was odd, but not for the reasons you might expect, considering the title. The titular character (actually named Eddie), who should just be left to eat the spaghetti, isn’t actually the main character, he’s just the subject for our two actual main characters to argue over. Eddy’s place is a mess, and two angels disagree about whether or not this is a good thing for him. Angel A says it’s gross and unhealthy, Angel B says he’s happy. And…..that’s about it. They take turns claiming it’s unhealthy, or it’s fine for most of the 10-minute run time, while Eddie remains comedically silent. While I have a soft spot for divine beings portrayed as bored and overworked office workers, I must admit that this premise wore thin very quickly. Without much in the way of interesting dialogue, the film became a bit of a drag, especially considering it’s relatively long run-time compared to the other films, but it wasn’t complete waste of an experience. The costuming, set design, and make-up was spot on, immediately conveying the personalities and relationships of the characters, debatable better than any of the acting or speaking. Anaphiel wears an all-white suit, betraying a high status, seriousness, and overall cleanliness. This is much unlike Eddie, who wear much looser, darker clothing, capable of enduring far more stains of tomato sauce or coffee. Meanwhile, Exousia keeps the all-white motif, communicating her status as a follow angel, but through a much more casual outfit, including a hoodie, implying she’s much closer to the minds of humans, Eddie in particular. The angels also have a distinct pattern of gold diamond shapes around their eyes, a shockingly creative image that further differentiates them from Eddie in a much more striking way than clothing. The special effects that let Anaphiel take and give files to the heavens are very simplistic, but also pretty seamless, and especially impressive considering that this is a student film. To recap: The film consists of fairly flat characters moving through a fairly flat narrative, but good costuming and set design keeps you guessing about if it will start to get interesting, and stops the film from being a complete slog.

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Famous and Great Films Spider Watched Way Too Late Episode 1: Boyhood

As soon as I heard the premise for Boyhood, I knew it was a film I had to watch. Along with my dad’s strong recommendation of the filmmaker, Richard Linklater, we both decided to watch it as soon as we could. Then, as soon as the film released, we planned to make plans. Then, after watching the Simpsons episode based on, forgetting to go the video rental store, watching several other Linklater films, and returning it to the library at least three times forgetting to watch it, we finally watched it the first chance we got! Only 6 years after it first released. And, yeah, it’s really good. I doubt I’ll have much to say that hasn’t been said hundreds of times by people more famous, but I’m sure I’m loveable enough to listen to regardless.

First of all, it very much felt like a Linklater film, and I’ll do my best to describe what I think that means. In the other projects I’ve seen composed by him, such as Slacker, Before Sunrise, and Waking Life, there are a few common denominators that really communicate his style. Most strikingly, is that his films are pleasantly absent from attempts to make a direct point or deliver a moral, instead of focusing on trying to capture some element or experience of life. Slacker and Waking Life forego any kind of plot to focus on setting and philosophical dialogue, leaving you with more of a “feeling” than a message. In Slacker, you’re left wondering about community, and the conspiracy theory culture surrounding Austin, the city it’s based in, plus any other observations you might make about the various conversations. The dialogue is also very naturally written and directed, leaving you with the awkward pauses, repetitiveness, and other “flaws” associated with real-life conversations.

Boyhood uses this same kind of dialogue. Taking a 12-year look at one person’s life gives the dialogue a great vehicle, capturing the settings and relationships of our protagonist’s life extremely well. Whereas Slacker captures and guides you through a certain social space, Boyhood takes on the far more ambitious goal of guiding you through a certain stretch of time in a single person’s life.

There are lots of disposable characters, who come and go in our main character’s life, and very few of even the long lasting ones go through any meaningful change. There’s hardly any closure offered for any of the characters, and most. What it does do, is capture a piece of reality, and ask you to reflect yourself on it.

Of course, the film itself is lots of fun to watch. You’ll have laughs both with and at the characters, the dramatic situations never dip too far into cliché, and it doesn’t get especially boring at any point either, but I didn’t find anything in the film quite as striking as that aforementioned sense of “reality”. And getting that sense of “reality”, of “aging” and “life” is absolutely worth it. If nothing else, it’ll get you thinking about arbitrary accomplishments in life, and how quickly it passes by.

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Semi-Tough is almost good, but still enjoyable (preferably with friends, intoxication optional)

Last week I ventured into my first ever Burt Reynolds feature, and it was fun, although I probably wouldn’t be able to say that if I watched it. Not only was my dad needed for a few well-timed cultural lessons, but also so we could laugh and chat out loud about the ups and downs of the film playing in front of us. The film follows Burt Reynolds and Kris Kristofferson playing football players (whose names I can’t be bothered to remember) as they enter the playoffs and mess around, with a love triangle thrown in for good measure. If you’re expecting a deeper description of a plot, I’ll disappointed to tell you that there isn’t one. The film follows some miscellaneous escapades of the football team, focusing more on the humour in their partying than their journey to win the superbowl, since all of that happens in brief montages. In other words, the plot serves the scenes, giving excuses for funny events and dialogue to be thrown around, rather than the other way around. It’s an approach similar to Animal House (although that wouldn’t be out for another year), except that Semi-Tough follows a slightly less crude sense of humour, and executes it far less consistently. There are some brilliant jokes and comedic acting sprinkled throughout the film, such as a quick guest character subtly deciding to skip Nixon on his list of American role models, or Bury Reynolds saying out loud that he’s choosing not to say anything when sharing a tender “quiet” moment with a friend. There are jokes in here that are far more clever than they have any right to be, and even a lot of the cruder ones are pretty well performed, but the film is also home to men lying and forcing their way into sex, and a horrendously predictable love triangle story. See, this is why I say Semi-Tough is *almost* good, instead of “mediocre”. It’s not quite as clever or coherent enough to be unironically engaging, but the bits of genuinely perfect dialogue or humour were apparent enough to keep the film from being a “so-bad-it’s-good” piece like The Room. It asks you to pay attention to catch the jokes, but wastes most of your attention with filler and the simplest of sex jokes imaginable. My advice? Pull it up with a friend (or family member, as I did) who will find it just as problematic as you will, and you’ll have a good time laughing through it. When that laughter is *with* the film or *at* it is up to you, and if you’re really lucky, even you won’t know which it is.