If you grew up on classic horror movies, you must be as baffled and appalled as I am by the recent avalanche of films, TV shows and airplane-terminal beach books about lovesick vampires turning into goony-eyed romance-novel sweethearts who buy their daily blood supply at Walgreens. To Hillary Clinton, it may take a village, but to what remains of the American countryside gone to hell in Stake Land, all it takes is a stake through the heart. Despite the violence and mayhem, I actually liked this one. It’s harrowing; even the clichés are bloodcurdling; and it takes vampires out of the dime-store paperback genre and puts them back where they belong--in your nightmares, and at your throat.
In this grim, cynical view of a postapocalyptic world, a boy named Martin (Connor Paolo, from the TV series Gossip Girl) teams up with a grizzled vampire hunter called, simply, “Mister” (Nick Damici, who co-wrote the screenplay with director Jim Mickle). Together, they form a surrogate father-son relationship, traveling across the American heartland only in the sunlight daytime hours, heading north toward Canada, where monsters fear to go. Passing signs that preach “And God tore the world asunder,” avoiding cities and sticking to the back roads, where corpses hang from burned trees in nooses, they try to kill as many “vamps” as possible and stay alive in a landscape of horror. Sometimes they find live humans, trying to survive. But when news arrives that the president is dead and Washington, D.C., has been destroyed, everything looks hopeless. “We were all orphans, looking for something to hold on to,” says the boy, who doubles as narrator. Things get bleaker.
If the vampires don’t get them, the cannibals might. So the monsters in Stake Land are a cross between blood-sucking Draculas and the flesh-eating zombies from Night of the Living Dead, and they’re all pissed off, big time. Like the man and boy in The Road, Martin and Mister wander upon roadside campgrounds turned into charnel houses and villages that have been torched. (Call it Cormac McCarthy with fangs.) Miraculously, they also bond with a small band of followers; together, they form a new kind of family unit, one that includes a black Marine, a pregnant girl and, making her first screen appearance in a decade, Kelly McGillis as a nun they rescue from a gang rape. They are all pursued by a venomous fundamentalist militia called The Brethren who blame the vampire plague on the Lord. Directed with an intensity that reaches a fever pitch, the film also takes a moment or two for some gallows humor--Mister fights off a howling gang of the undead with his hands tied, and later, Martin stakes a vampire wearing a Santa Claus suit.
There isn’t much dialogue, and most of the 98-minute running time is devoted to locking in one terrifyingly gothic encounter after another, but the characters are well defined, and director Mickle (who made the zombie-rat thriller Mulberry Street) makes every dime of his micro-budget count. Stake Land is original and entertaining enough to keep the audience focused, even though a lot of things go unexplained. What caused the vampire explosion in the first place? How did they get that way? Where on earth do the protagonists keep finding gasoline, and what do they do for money? I don’t blame the frenzied vampires when they refuse to cross the border and move to Canada. Wouldn’t you?
No matter how inspired, honest or historically accurate they are, movies about the genocides and bloody political upheavals in various parts of Africa have always been doomed at the box office. From Something of Value, Richard Brooks’ powerful 1957 film about the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, to more recent entries like Hotel Rwanda-and dozens in between—people sniff a brief synopsis and ask, “What else is playing?” Ninety-nine percent of the world’s moviegoers are either ignorant, indifferent or just plain confused by everything African--including where it is (I still can’t tell the Tutsi refugees from the Hutu militia). And so, I fear, it will be with
The Bang Bang Club. Applause is deserved, but if ticket sales are as passive as I predict, it means overlooking a very good movie indeed.
A debut feature by South African documentary filmmaker Steven Silver, this harrowing exploration of heroism in the line of fire chronicles the dangerous turmoil during the final days of 1994, between the bloody aftermath of Nelson Mandela’s release from prison and the end of apartheid, as seen through the lenses of the four charter members of an eponymous and exclusive collective of photojournalists who called themselves the Bang Bang Club because they were always in the middle of the gunfire. Following them through the perils of front-line camera work in Soweto as they capture the carnage ripping through a country in flames for the Johannesburg newspaper The Star, the film tackles so many subjects--the Zulu uprising, the Inkata Freedom Party, the United Democratic Front, the South African Defense Force and the African National Congress--that only a diplomat could comprehend it all. But if the politics unfold in confusing ways, the centerpiece story of the brave but competitive quartet of thrill-seeking adventurers who risk life and limb in South Africa and elsewhere in order to get their photos on the wire services before the rest of the press corps builds and grips attention like a hammerlock hold.
The four photographers, honored in books and magazines to this day, are Greg Marinovich (an exemplary Ryan Phillippe), Kevin Carter (Taylor Kitsch), Ken Oosterbroek (Frank Rautenbach) and Joao Silva (Neels Van Jaarsveld). Even though writer-director Silver’s screenplay is skimpy and perfunctory, each man is fleshed out just enough to make us like and memorialize them (Mr. Marinovich and Mr. Silva, both still alive, acted as invaluable technical advisers). Charged by the need to tell the truth about Africa’s civil war and fueled by moral outrage, they have as their ally Robin Coley (played by Malin Akerman), the courageous photo editor of The Starwho helps galvanize international opinion to wipe out apartheid. Marinovich wins a Pulitzer Prize for his photos of a burning man being hacked to death in the thick of a violent street riot, and Kevin Carter wins another Pulitzer for a horrifying image--depicting a starving Sudanese child hunched weakly on the ground, being stalked by a cold-eyed vulture--that shakes the world off its axis. Carter becomes famous, but privately he is so devastated by guilt (he does nothing to save the little girl) that he self-destructs on drugs and commits suicide. He’s the most interesting, conflicted member of the Bang Bang Club (a breakout performance by the riveting Canadian-born actor Taylor Kitsch), but his story has been relegated to a supporting role to provide more room for Mr. Phillippe’s glamorous star power.
Still, the four actors share all of the action: You see them walking down the street lugging their heavy camera equipment in harm’s way, attacked by mobs wielding machetes, dodging sniper bullets. The film explores their friendships and rivalries and reveals a lot about people who crave the adrenaline of danger and place so little value on their own safety. The more fearless you are, the more photos you sell. You’re not guaranteed protection just because you hold a press pass, you always face another enemy you didn’t know you’d made and the amnesty a journalist deserves is never forthcoming. Mr. Silver crowds so much material into shortly under two hours that the result has a fragmented effect. Important themes get short shrift, such as egotism, the resentment aimed at white journalists covering a black man’s war who are gaining world celebrity exploiting South Africa’s struggles and the fact that helping the police by identifying actual criminals in court only makes them targets themselves. Only a bullet can stop the mounting hazards they face daily, and the atrocities they witness take a ravaging toll.
And still, when the wars end, what next? For men like these, there’s always another hell, and death marches on.
The insanity that overtook New York in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s—hard-drug home deliveries, sexually permissive underground watering holes like Studio 54 and Max’s Kansas City, churches converted into gay bars and a haze of pot smoke and paparazzi bulbs--may be viewed, in retrospect, as Oz on helium. But there were no more publicized exponents of this abattoir of self-indulgence and instant tabloid fame than the unfortunate freaks who fell into the clutches of Andy Warhol. Now comes Beautiful Darling, an extraordinarily sad, touching and compassionate documentary by James Rasin about transvestite Candy Darling, the louche Warhol superstar whose perfumed vapor glowed briefly before it was extinguished by the man who exploited her in cheap, cheesy trash like Flesh and Women in Revolt, and by a public that grew weary of her flamboyance and moved on.
But before she died of cancer in 1974 at age 30, Candy Darling made the most of her famous 15 minutes. Born Jimmy Slattery in a suburban tract house in Massapequa, Long Island, to middle-class parents in a boring community of conformity, this skinny misfit, who worshiped Marilyn Monroe and wrote fan letters to Kim Novak (she answered!), seemed preordained to run away and reinvent himself. Manhattan was, of course, his salvation. It was an island of escape, stoked by drugs and dreams, but it was a bad time for drag queens. Hiding their beards with pancake makeup, they were harassed by cops, not to mention a magnet for bullies and psychos. But there was always a place at the table at 33 Union Square West, where Andy Warhol’s Factory welcomed society’s rejects with a Polaroid. Living from hand to mouth, sleeping on people’s floors, bunking in digs at the Chelsea Hotel, taking hormones so she could walk in the street without fear, Candy saw her acceptance in the celebrity underworld spread like mayonnaise. Warhol promised to make her the next Lana Turner. It never happened, but he paraded her around as one of his entourage, one that came to resemble Tod Browning’s Freaks. With cherry lipstick, mink eyelashes and manicured fingernails covering her Adam’s apple, she was photographed by everyone from Richard Avedon to Robert Mapplethorpe. Tennessee Williams almost rescued her with a small role in his Off Broadway Small Craft Warnings (his producer stopped speaking to him), but when the play’s run ended, everyone deserted her, leaving her in despair. Lost in indentity confusion, never sure of what part to play, she was neither a woman nor a man. She was her own invention, and a sex change would have destroyed her creation. Even while dying, she posed in the sheets with a long-stemmed red rose, seeing it as a link to Monroe and Harlow--dying young, blond and beautiful. Nobody claimed her ashes.
Woven into the story is the firsthand involvement of her comrade and fan Jeremiah Newton, who lived with her cremated remains for 30 years before burying her in a rural cemetery in upstate New York. The film employs archival footage, Candy’s diaries (read in voice-over by Chloë Sevigny) and exhaustive interviews, and the cast, living and dead, includes Fran Lebowitz, Dennis Hopper, Peter Beard, Jane Fonda, Truman Capote, John Waters and a surprisingly spry fellow Warhol superstar, Holly Woodlawn, who contributes valuable candor. The movie doesn’t say what happened to Viva, Ultra Violet or Joe D’Allesandro--but unlike Edie Sedgwick, Jackie Curtis and other Warhol discards, Holly Woodlawn is a healthy survivor.
It happened only 40 years ago, but it seems like another planet. And yet Candy Darling stands, forgotten by almost everybody, as a symbol of lost hope, a displaced innocent who spent every waking minute desperately daydreaming about making a dent in the get-famous business, and managing, for a few minutes of pop glory, to succeed.
As an iconic actor, conscientious director and liberal political activist, Robert Redford loves history lessons. Everybody knew about white-collar crime in the White House during Watergate, but nobody knew anything about the two reporters who exposed the story until Mr. Redford and Dustin Hoffman played them in All the President’s Men, in the interests of the great profession of journalism. In The Conspirator, Robert Redford the director addresses another footnote to American history that’s left out of textbooks: the little-known story of Mary Surratt, an innocent woman caught up in the U.S. government witch hunt following the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. It’s an exhaustively researched, brilliantly scripted, carefully made film that cautiously avoids preachy propaganda of yesteryear, while unavoidably reflecting the similar anxiety, tension and fear of a polarized nation today. What goes around, Mr. Redford seems to be saying, comes around.
It took screenwriter James Solomon 16 years to polish his script to perfection, and the hard work shows. We all know Lincoln was shot and killed at Ford’s Theatre in April 1865 by a single bullet to the head from the gun of assassin John Wilkes Booth. The Conspirator graphically re-creates the incident, but uses it only as a starting point to delve deeper into the vengeance and political chicanery that infected the country in the dark aftermath of the Civil War, leaving a nation divided and angry only two years after the surrender of General Robert E. Lee, with everyone distrusting everybody else and politicians screaming for justice in the interests of power and self-promotion. In the margins of history, there is a subchapter historians choose to forget or ignore, in which Mrs. Surratt (meticulously well played by a de-glammed Robin Wright, rough-hewn as a bar of Lava soap) was the only woman rounded up and charged as a co-conspirator in a plot to kill not only Abe Lincoln but Secretary of State William Seward and Vice President Andrew Johnson; she was subjected to a corrupt trial and hanged with the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence (she appeared in the background of a photo depicting the accused rebels, taken in her boarding house).
The facts of her case are still murky, but this movie finds her guilty of nothing more serious than being a Confederate sympathizer and devoted mother who runs a boarding house in Washington, D.C., where the conspirators rented rooms and Booth often visited her cowardly son John, who could have cleared his mother but instead runs away and eludes a massive manhunt, leaving her to face the noose alone. (The film alleges he was shielded from the police by the Catholic Church.) Equally lethal to her cause: she is defended by Fredrick Aiken (James McAvoy), a reluctant and inexperienced 28-year-old Union lawyer torn between his hatred for the South and his duty to the law; and she is tried by a military tribunal, thus denied the civil trial by jury that is her right as an American citizen. It was a violation of the U.S. Constitution. Not to mention the fact that Secretary of War Edwin Stanton (Kevin Kline), one of Lincoln’s closest advisors, chooses nine of his Union supporters to be judges--including one of Lincoln’s personal pallbearers--and cruelly refuses Mary’s pleas for a public hearing. Even after the court finds her not guilty as charged, Stanton changes the verdict. The shameful result is an illegal and immoral attempt to appease a panicky populace demanding closure. Stanton wants the conspirators buried and forgotten, and that’s exactly what happens. No wonder Ms. Surratt is rarely mentioned in American History 101. Aiken is so disillusioned that he leaves the law and became the first editor of The Washington Post.
From the muddy streets and filthy Washington jail cells to the rooming-house wallpaper and stage settings of the play Lincoln watched the night of the assassination, the handsome period production details are just right. The Conspirator revels in meticulously channeling the kind of historic and geographical authenticity that is rare for an independent production on a shoestring budget. From Mr. Kline’s implacable and villainous secretary of war and Danny Huston’s treacherous, guileful prosecutor to Evan Rachel Wood’s turn as Anna Surratt, the tragic victim’s noble daughter, whose tearful attempts to tell the truth in court falls on deaf ears, the performances are uniformly sincere. Mr. McAvoy is especially significant as the conflicted attorney who, despite his Yankee sympathies, fights for a fair trial but fails to prevent a kangaroo court from making a mockery of the law. But it is Ms. Wright who staunchly holds the center ring. An enigma to this day, Mrs. Surratt remains unshaken in her faith and convictions, refusing to testify in her own defense, sealing her own fate as a scapegoat. Masterfully austere, without a smidge of rouge, Ms. Wright manages to be both stoic and vulnerable. As a director, Mr. Redford knows how to handle his actors, build suspense and construct a slice of U.S. history about loyalty and honor in the face of terror and pessimism. He has studiously and laboriously chronicled the events of 1865 into his best film since Quiz Show, but rest assured he has not overlooked the parallels between a young nation in crisis and the post-9/11 fragility of America today. We’re still living in a land of fear and confusion. Lincoln himself said, “A house divided cannot stand.” Now that so-called house is more divided than ever, endangering the lofty ideals on which America was based, and plunging us all in turmoil. No matter where your political leanings lie, the great thing about The Conspirator is that Mr. Redford is wise enough to let the audience decide what the parallels are. See it, enjoy a ripping good yarn and learn something.