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PAGE 6
TUESDAY,APRIL 15,2014
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
MOVIE REVIEW
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'Oculus' mirrors compelling story with suspenseful chills
Look into the mirror. What do you see? A dynamically told, damn good horror movie.
"Oculus" takes the horror cliche of the frightening image in the mirror and develop it into a whole premise of thrills built around the characters not being able to trust their own eyes while a powerful evil terrorizes them. It creatively constructs believable rules of engagement with the supernatural force, and narratively unfolds a backstory that perfectly complements and uniquely combines with the main tale, always driven forward by the two main characters.
After spending 10 years in psychiatric care for apparently murdering his parents as a child, Tim Russell (Brenton Thwaites) re-enters society at the care of his compellingly determined sister Kaylie (Karen Gillan). She wastes no time in digging up old ghosts,
convincing Tim to help her destroy the demonically powered antique mirror that really caused their parents' deaths.
Early on he doesn't believe her, making for an interesting psychological standoff as she cites the mirror's history of causing its owners to kill their families, while he remembers their own family tragedy differently and tries to logically explain her conclusions. This crafts both a mythology for the mysterious mirror and an investment in the relationship of these troubled siblings.
Their conflict introduces themes of self-delusion and broken family before the mirror comes out to play. Then we get to watch those ideas come to life in the creepy hallucinations it causes and flashbacks of how it infected their mother (Katee Sackhoff) and fantastically intimidating and dead-eyed father (Rory Cochrane).
Their childhood backstory
plays out like a pretty typical father-goes-crazy-from-haunted-home/item plot. It starts with more standard flashbacks at first, which then start to meld with the current quest to kill the mirror. They relive the horrors of that experience and have to fight those demons all over again, while trying to simultaneously survive the increasing threats the mirror throws at them, moving between their childhood and adult selves.
Director/co-writer Mike Flanagan really impresses with such strong storytelling in this genre piece, and highly satisfies in bringing the narrative full circle. Suspenseful style
and creepy chills dominate over gory effects and cheap jump scares, keeping the atmosphere consistently effective and engrossing, also thanks to constant danger and a lack of dumb behavior. A "Chekhov's pendulum blade" serves as a particularly unnerving device, meant as a fail safe to kill the mirror but also frequently putting Tim and Kaylie in death's way too.
It feels pretty rare nowadays that we get mainstream horror movies with stories and concepts this cool, this well-executed and this genuinely exciting throughout. So, take a look into the oculus and see some real horror staring back.
Edited by Krista Montgomery
Relativity Media
MOVIE REVIEW
'Fading Gigolo' mimics title, more fading than funny
ASSOCIATED PRESS
It's a sentimental farce that presents Turturro as a Brooklyn Jack-of-all-trades whose pal (Allen) decides that another trade this Jack, named Fioravante, would be good at is pleasing women.
"Fading Gigolo" is John Turturro's idea of an old-school Woody Allen comedy, so he wrote Allen into it.
Allen is Murray, one of Fioravante's several bosses, as the younger man has to juggle several service sector jobs to make ends meet in what we call "the
gig economy."
Murray runs a rare book shop, and he's about to give up the ghost.
"Only rare people buy rare books."
But those rare people figure the grandfatherly Murray can help them find something a little special — like a third for a planned menage a trois.
Mild-mannered Murray has to talk milder-mannered Fioravante into it. It helps that Sharon Stone was the woman doing the soliciting.
"Is he clean?" the society trophy wife wants to know. "I'm a
And we're off, with Sofia Vergara as the "trois" in that menage. Fioravante tackles this new gig with sensitivity and compassion. That's why Murray figures there's no harm in offering him to this lonely Orthodox rabbi's widow he's just met.
ittle crazed. I just came from an AIDS benefit."
Avigal (Vanessa Paradis) is lonely, depressed and, Murray figures, in desperate need of a man's touch. But how do you "help" an Orthodox woman?
"I don't shake hands," she says. Her culture doesn't allow
her to touch a man. Her elders watch over her like a hawk. Her Bensonhurst community even has its own NYPD-sanctioned neighborhood watch, and one of those over-zealous watchers (Liev Schreiber) watches Avigel with love, and a lot of suspicion. Even passing off Fioravante as a masseuse with hands "that bring magic to the lonely" is going to be tricky.
ty years ago, he'd have made Murray's "new pimp throws around the cash" scenes very "Broadway Danny Rose" and funnier.
The ancient Allen gamely makes Murray a doting, baseball-playing father in an interracial marriage full of kids he has to keep entertained. Thir-
Bob Balaban is amusing as Murray's trusted but irritable lawyer, Vergara and Stone set off comic sparks. But Turturo winds up playing the sad straight man in his own comedy. And he and Paradis play this too somber. Sex scenes are more explicit than silly. The movie gropes around for a lighter touch.
Moments like when the Orthodox religious police nab
Murray for an inquisition are meant to play like farce, but the often-scary Schreiber lends that an alarming theocratic, fascist feel. Seriously, New York allows "religious police" to enforce dogma?
But by then "Fading Gigolo" has mimicked its title and faded, a failure in tone, a romantic comic juggling act where every dropped ball kills another potential laugh in a movie that desperately needs them.
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