THE LAST EXORCISM: My Summer Of Cinematic Dead Ends, Fat Chances And Unexpected Gifts

Yet, on the evidence of The Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield, Rec and Paranormal Activity, this is a habit verging on insanity. As depicted in these recent horror movies, documentary filmmaking has become the cinematic equivalent of the sport of noodling, during which crazy Southern anglers try to stick their fists in the maws of giant catfish. They have only themselves to blame if they get carried to the bottom of the river, never to resurface. In defense of the documentarians in The Last Exorcism, they do travel with a bodyguard of sorts, a confidently appointed and smugly disbelieving preacher who practices exorcism in order to debunk it, but anyone who saw The Exorcist knows that a skeptical cleric in a demon fight is about as much use as a paintball gun in Kandahar. How easily a night shoot turns into a nightmare. For the audience, of course, that's good news. It's a measure of my gratitude to the off screen filmmakers that I walked out of the movie with a smile on my face. Despite a last minute stumble that robbed the plot of a lot of its mystery, I had a good time in The Last Exorcism. Director Daniel Stamm and Screenwriters Huck Botko and Andrew Gurland deliver the basics. They create compelling central characters, including a pastor aptly named Cotton, played by Patrick Fabian, whose work here seems informed by homework or heritage. The down-on-its-luck Sweetzer family feels real enough to pity, particularly the goblin-haunted daughter, Nell, a convincing performance by Ashley Bell, who makes her a cocktail of all-too-trusting naivete, blind terror and otherworldly malice. The depiction of demon possession is nicely bare bones. Here and there, as when Nell's head shifts in impossible directions, we feel a touch of computer graphic wizardry, but by and large, technology never intrudes. The Last Exorcism is neither as scary as Quarantine, nor as astonishing as Cloverfield, nor even as unsettling as last year's surprise hit Paranormal Activity, but it offers a rare note of satisfaction in a summer of weedy desolation. In a shocking turn of events, these filmmakers apparently gave a damn about the audience. What possessed them? * Or am I asking the wrong question? Has it merely been the worst summer movie season in memory, making even modest achievements look significant?
Some have made that claim, but what a difficult hypothesis to prove. Even in the worst of years we tend to get a ravishing wonder or two.

The passage of time reveals hidden luster. Detritus gains dignity.

My own rotten movie summer (sounds like the title of a YA novel waiting to happen) felt at the time like 1985, when Clint Eastwood's all-time crappiest western Pale Rider competed for my bellhop's dollar with Explorers, The Goonies and Teen Wolf. I was stuck in the mountains of North Carolina and needed good movies more than I ever have before or since, but I kept getting overdoses of Michael J. Fox. He loomed over my life like a televised moon. There was no escape. On principle, I refused to go see Back To The Future.

That, of course, was my mistake. Looking back, I realize that it was also the summer of Prizzi's Honor and Fright Night, not the worst fate to befall an audience. A quarter century later, regarding the summer of 2010, it's easy to list the duds, but a lot of people may recall only one movie.

I'm talking, of course, about Inception, which galloped into July like a unicorn, opening to a magic carpet ride of stunning reviews and lavish box office. Golden-haired Leonardo DiCaprio arrived in the nick of time, following a June of wilted sequels and tepid reboots. In quick succession, I saw Iron Man 2 and Toy Story 3. Both received positive reviews, but I got the feeling that critics held back or didn't care or had gone so soft that they could no longer be trusted as guides to quality. They were in their own funk and couldn't be bothered to swat a fly, much less a big budget summer tent pole flick.

Now, let's be honest, there are far worse sequels than the second Iron Man, and Toy Story 3 has its charms. Robin Hood sounded dull, and Sex And The City 2 looked predictably avoidable, but who was surprised? Eclipse opened huge, scooping up the teen population, but people said it was the best of the three Twilight movies, so maybe the summer of 2010 wasn't really awful. Maybe it was just empty, like a boring conversation that refuses to stop.

Movie sluts like myself can be so damaged and sad, if we don't get exactly the right dose of pop and art house, we lash out.

Maybe I should have been happy with the demented yellow popcorn people of Despicable Me<. Maybe I was meant to bend over for The Last Airbender, and maybe the loud, wide suck of Dinner With Schmucks came as a personal delivery from movie gods who were tired of having to please my refined tastes. Maybe the ferocious incomprehensibility of Salt was meant to make my dinner inedible.

But if that's the case, why did everyone else have to be punished, too? And who on earth deserved The Prince of Persia?

By the end of July, after three months of disappointment and dismay, I saw blight. Something mottled and yellow had begun to creep across the American movie business. Hollywood executives had finally managed to infest the last shred of individual creative genius in their big budget movies, and nothing remained but a bright and shiny husk, the shape of a locust. Give a recent summer movie a whack and watch the dust spill out.

*

Then I saw Inception, the most eagerly awaited film of the summer, and it was like rain after a drought. You could feel smart audiences and critics alike licking the moisture off their arms. Life and hope could float again. My counterpart, Craig Detweiler, danced around rhetorically like a farmer whose crop is saved. He radiated screen shine, waxing philosophical about the deep themes of consciousness and free will taken on by Kubrickian wunderkind Christopher Nolan.

I, too, felt the relief. Inception has a soul. It's not a sequel. It's not a clone. It's not a former television series. Best of all, its success means someone else will get a shot at making an interesting big budget movie in Hollywood. For that alone, I owe a debt to Christopher Nolan.

I only wish I could like his movie. I tried. The movie isn't half as clever as its champions think, and as a road map to the depths of the mind, it's a complete fraud. Nolan took a complicated idea and translated it into big screen magic, but he didn't get much further than the idea that our minds are sort of like computer games; they have levels, and you don't want to get stuck in the bottom one. He signals to us through gloomy orchestral sounds and dour performances that serious matters are afoot, and we brace ourselves, but the seriousness resides almost completely in the music and the faces, which rarely if ever tell jokes or even smile. That would be unserious.

He's even less interested in the shape of the human mind than he is in the nature of moral corruption, yet he insists that we take him on such grand terms. I genuinely tried in The Dark Knight, too, but by the end of the movie I knew the truth. Nolan's movies always start "dark" and "serious", but at the halfway mark they begin to look like a style statement, and by the end feel suspiciously like an ordinary action movie.

Inception isn't ordinary. It soars at times, but what moves and excites is architecture, the spectacle of a huge plan hurled at great expense through space. The most interesting face in the movie belongs to the character of Arthur, played with somnolent urgency and suspicion by the great Joseph Gordon Leavitt. What I wouldn't have given to see what goes on in the underground aquifer of his mind!

For one, he's the only character who gets a real laugh, when he makes a move on Ellen Page, and for two, in a movie about the unconscious, he's the only one who makes a move on anyone. He alone seems to care about sex. Cue Alfred Hitchcock's scream.

At the very least, let's hope he's not designing skyscrapers in the depths of his brain, unlike DiCaprio's protagonist, whose deepest reservoirs of creative energy appear to have gone headlong into street grids and zoning codes. The constructed dreams of Inception feel motherboardish to me, the boulevards devoid of the wet work of human psychology, the men and women trapped inside a computer game that describes itself as a profundity.

Give me Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World any day of the week. In this movie, one of the biggest flops of the summer, men and women trapped are also trapped inside a computer game, but they're under no illusions. They exist in a modest little Canadian fantasy of fun, sex, rock and graphic art, but the amusement on their faces fizzes like a cold drink on a hot day. By the time Scott Pilgrim was over, I'd mostly forgotten the sins of Inception and completely changed my mind about the rotten movie summer of 2010. Things were looking up.

*

The best of the late August batch wasn't Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World. It wasn't even Sylvester Stallone's The Expendables, but the latter movie reminded me of a central truth about the art form. The human face is cheapest thrill and the greatest mystery that the screen provides, and this mindless action bonanza about over-the-hill mercenaries who kick butt after retirement contains the ruined crags and fallen brows of a dozen ghostly action heroes who have never been better. Stallone himself, never one of my favorites, turns in his most affecting performance since the original Rocky.

The plot of the flick is written in his weary eyes. That goes double for Mickey Rourke, whose dissipated, soulful tattoo artist ranks among his best performances. At times, The Expendables plays more like a documentary about the aging process of movie stars, and in that depiction, right beneath the surface of the story, we get a sad and unspoken and ancient truth. Beauty fades. Glory passes. Bullets are nothing compared to natural degeneration.

Other little treasures fell into my lap as the summer peaches ripened. The Other Guys, starring Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg, has at least five good laughs. When Ferrell's hot wife appears, she is embodied in every sense of the word by Eva Mendes, and Wahlberg's angry cop can't believe she sleeps with Ferrell. We can't believe it either, so when he keeps asking, "Who is that?", the joke echoes beautifully back over a thousand movies in which unbelievable hotties played the love interest to schlubs.

Christian Carion's Farewell, a Cold War spy thriller, is the best movie on that subject since The Lives Of Others, and Aaron Schneider's Get Low mostly avoids the killing quaintness of period movies about rural America.

Once more, I took pleasure in the faces: the skepticism and wariness on the molten candle that has become Bill Murray's head; the bright appeal and intelligence and wit of Sissy Spacek, whose welcome illumination contains flickers and hints of everything she's ever done, from Carrie through Big Love; and most of all Robert Duvall, whose performance is a reminder that one of the true giants of American cinema still evanesces before us.

In hindsight, how could I have mistaken the summer of 2010 for a dead loss?

The moment that changed my mind came halfway through Lisa Cholodenko's The Kids Are All Right, the most accomplished American movie of the year. In the movie, a pair of lesbian mothers played by Annette Bening and Julianne Moore cope with the sudden appearance of a long-forgotten sperm donor in the lives of their two teenage children. The daughter is going to college, and the son may or may not be gay, and the last thing the women need is a footloose new heterosexual foil to complicate their lives.

The foil, Mark Ruffalo at his slacker best, wreaks havoc, and the moment of discovery, when Bening's character discovers just how far things have gone, is a superbly wrought masterpiece of camera work, sound design, editing and performance. The camera slows, and Bening observes a dinner party through the eyes of a relentlessly controlling woman in the instant when she grasps she's lost control of everything. The moment couldn't be more harrowing. It's as if she just discovered a bomb beneath the table.

Nothing in <em>Inception</em> comes close to this instant of heightened drama. No single face in the summer's most successful action movie has near the kick, the soul, the solidity that obtains to Bening in this scene. She's so much more interesting than DiCaprio that you want to take that funky elevator down a few floors into her unconscious and see what's crouching in her mental sub-basement, except, of course, it's not necessary, because Bening conveys more of buried conflict and ancient wounds in a turn of her head than Christopher Nolan managed in two and a half hours of pinwheeling vehicles.

Some of the credit for the performance has to go to Cholodenko, a veteran of the independent cinema and one of our finest chroniclers of relationship complication. In High Art and Laurel Canyon, Cholodenko specialized in making unlikely situations and people feel deliciously real, but in The Kids Are All Right, she has her first classic.

Under the circumstances, I had to happily revise my opinion of the summer. The worst of it was bad indeed. Most of June and July barely touched mediocrity. But the best, from The Kids Are All Right to Farewell, Get Low to The Other Guys, The Last Exorcism to Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, and not forgetting the cold splendors of Inception, gives me hope that American movies aren't dead yet, just sleeping through a long winter.