Iain Softley
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Connections, in both directions
In that way "The Skeleton Key", which capitalizes on the inherent creepiness of the Louisiana bayou in much the same way "Angel Heart" did, is a perfect addition to the Kruger canon.
Yet the spiritual tradition that invented them Afro-Caribbean voodoo rarely gets the spotlight, serving mostly as a genre backdrop for all-too-familiar stories about good-looking white people in over their heads (e.g., Angel Heart).
There hasn’t been a decent Deep South occult flick since Alan Parker put Mickey Rourke’s rumpled private dick through his satanic paces in 1987’s noirish Angel Heart.
Screenwriter Ehren Kruger's latest illiterate piece of crap (the degree to which his script for the legitimately effective The Ring was doctored is now the stuff of Hollywood legend) addresses these and other pressing plantation-era questions when he deposits snowflake buttercup Caroline (Kate Hudson) into the heart of bayou country, deep in Angel Heart Louisiana, where every phonograph spins a Dixie Cups platter and every cobwebbed attic has a secret hoodoo room.
"The Skeleton Key" doesn't necessarily manipulate this setting better than, say, "Angel Heart."
Screenwriter Ehren Kruger, who adapted the Japanese "Ringu" films into "The Ring" and "The Ring 2," is paying tribute here to the Southern Gothic tradition that inspired such moody thrillers as "Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte" and "Angel Heart."
The script, adapted by Charles Leavitt from a novel by Gene Brewer, concerns (as did Eliseo Subiela's 1986 "Man Facing Southeast") a fellow in a psychiatric hospital who claims to be a visitor from another planet (in this case one called K-PAX).
…lauded 1986 Argentinian film "Man Facing Southeast".
The question at the heart of the film -- is Prot really from another planet or is he just a terribly wounded man with a dark secret luring in his past somewhere -- is nothing new, and echoes of previous films which tackled or at least danced with the subject matter are readily apparent (the 1986 Argentine import Man Facing Southeast comes to mind, as does that other man, the one who fell to Earth and looked a lot like David Bowie).
That aside, the film is a thoughtful update of Eliseo Subiela's 1986 film Hombre Mirando Al Sudeste, or Man Facing Southeast, about a mental patient who claims he is from another planet and leads his psychiatrist and most of his fellow patients to believe him.
The film superficially resembles the well-regarded 1987 foreign film "Man Facing Southeast," but its similarities to "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," "The Fisher King" and "Awakenings" run deeper, though those were all much better movies than this one.
It reminded me most of the 1986 Argentine film by Eliseo Subiela "Man Facing Southeast."
Will Prot help the other patients overcome their own problems, a la "One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest"?
Clearly not satisfied with this corker of a storyline — one that could fill a whole tv series, never mind a movie — director Iain Softley inserts a One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest-type subplot in which Prot helps his fellow mental institutionees find help and redemption in quirkily unconventional ways.
An added wrinkle is that in his spare time Prot tries to mentally balance the other patients in his ward (the usual "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" knockoffs), an attempt that increasingly unsettles Dr. Powell.
Essentially a psychological detective story mixed with mental institution elements from previous pictures such as "Awakenings" and "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," the film is best when Spacey's Prot amusedly responds to Bridges' character doing the inquisitive psychiatrist bit.
There are obvious ties to "Starman" (starring, coincidentally, Jeff Bridges as the visitor from another planet) for the space alien perspective and films like "Awakenings" and "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" for the psychiatric institution viewpoint.
These are the typical patients one finds in films like "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," "28 Days," etc.
But anyone who has seen any of this movie's uplifting-but-so-sad prototypes -- be it "The Fisher King" or "Awakenings" or any of a dozen other movies preaching a sermon of love, peace and harmony and indulgence of weirdos -- will already know the answer.
There are obvious ties to "Starman" (starring, coincidentally, Jeff Bridges as the visitor from another planet) for the space alien perspective and films like "Awakenings" and "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" for the psychiatric institution viewpoint.
Toss in a little Awakenings, a little Starman (including Jeff Bridges--not the spaceman this time), and a little Hollywood preachiness, and you've got yourself K-PAX.
Countless benign alien, doctor/patient, fish-out-of-water and asylum movies all come to mind: "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," "Awakenings," "City of Angels," "The Muse," "E.T.," "Starman" and far too many others to list.
The film superficially resembles the well-regarded 1987 foreign film "Man Facing Southeast," but its similarities to "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," "The Fisher King" and "Awakenings" run deeper, though those were all much better movies than this one.
After the director's last film - the clinical, emotionally eviscerating trauma of "The Wings of a Dove" - it's as if he has decided to go to the other extreme, presenting a naive, touchy-feely fable, a blend of "Starman" and "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", by way of "Awakenings".
…gibberish lyrics) into their music--from conception to DVD, the whole production is a throwback to Song of the South.
Similar themes have been used and reused--even in previous movie hits, like 1983's "WarGames," a teen thriller with Matthew Broderick accidentally reprogramming the Pentagon's war machine computer (a film that may have inspired a lot of real-life hackers).
The Others (2001)
Directed by Alejandro Amenábar
influenced The Skeleton Key (2005)
Plot Visuals Themes
And given that the parlor trick being played here is a complex one, the lengths to which the script must go in order to move the various pieces into place are pretty extensive; and whereas in films like “The Sixth Sense” or “The Others”, where we are given sufficient material to distract us from the fact that the dealer is slipping an ace out of his sleeve and into the deck, here the over-complicated plot mechanisms unfortunately just draw attention to the fact that someone’s putting one over on us.
It's hard not to wonder what "The Skeleton Key" might have been in the hands of a director with a gift for visceral disquietude like Alejandro Amenábar ( "Open Your Eyes," "The Others" ), David Fincher ( "Se7en," "Fight Club" ) or Darren Aronofsky ( "Pi," "Requiem for a Dream" ).
For all its dark, Gothic intentions and supernatural twists, it lacks the emotional and intellectual punch of similarly themed films, most notably Alejandro Amenábar's "The Others."
Think Nicole Kidman in "The Others," Halle Berry in "Gothika," and Naomi Watts in "The Ring."
Like almost every psychological horror flick spawned from Hollywood these days -- from "The Forgotten" to "Hide and Seek" to 2001's exceptional "The Others" -- "The Skeleton Key" creates a mood of general foreboding, sprinkles in a few spine-straightening jolts, then caps it all off with a twist ending that, in this case, viewers may not see coming.
It seems that Ben (John Hurt, in probably the most comfortable role available to an actor since Timothy Bottoms’ limbless, bed-ridden soldier in “Johnny Got His Gun”) has suffered a stroke in the attic and can no longer speak, and his wife Violet (Gena Rowlands) needs help taking care of him.
Girl with a Pearl Earring (2003)
Directed by Peter Webber
influenced by The Wings of the Dove (1997)
Each frame is an exquisite composition by Portuguese cinematographer Eduardo Serra, who made the 2004 Oscar ballot for this movie and was nominated previously for "The Wings of the Dove."
Delft, Holland never looked so luxurious, even on a frosty wintry day, as it does in Girl With a Pearl Earring, one of the most beautifully mounted films of the year, thanks in large part to the stunning cinematography by Eduardo (The Wings of the Dove and What Dreams May Come) Serra and vibrant production design by Ben Van Os, who helped create the cold-to-the touch look of last year's Max, Menno Meyjes's debut that created a disturbing portrait of a pre-dictator Hitler as a young artist.
By reproducing Vermeer's own aesthetic, with its odd combination of close, compassionate detail and rigid, highly deterministic, and sometimes surreptitious sightlines, Webber and his brilliant cinematographer Eduardo Serra ( The Wings of the Dove , Unbreakable ) are able to communicate all of these shifting balances and advantages without much recourse to dialogue.
Every shot in the film looks like it was taken right out of a painting from Delft, Holland circa 1665 thanks to Director of Photography Eduardo Serra (“The Wings of the Dove”) and Production Designer Ben Van Os (“The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover”).
Think of Jimmy Stewart's remarkable performance in "Harvey" in 1950.
He spends most of the rest of the movie in the mental hospital interacting with the various stock neurotics, psychotics, and such, while slowly convincing his overworked and generally unhappy (of course) psychiatrist (Jeff Bridges, who played the alien-on-earth before in 1984's Starman ) that he may in fact be an alien.
If this is beginning to sound like a combination of "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" (1975), and "Starman" (1984), which also starred Bridges, you're on the right track.
There are obvious ties to "Starman" (starring, coincidentally, Jeff Bridges as the visitor from another planet) for the space alien perspective and films like "Awakenings" and "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" for the psychiatric institution viewpoint.
Toss in a little Awakenings, a little Starman (including Jeff Bridges--not the spaceman this time), and a little Hollywood preachiness, and you've got yourself K-PAX.
He did well playing a variant of Spacey's character back in 1984's "Starman," but on the other side of the desk he's simply dull.
This is science fiction without all the special effects, sort of like the old film starring David Bowie "The Man Who Fell to Earth."
Crash's buddies and lover--all of whom he meets in his first days at a new school, like James Dean in "Rebel Without a Cause"--are Kate Libby a k a "Acid Burn" (Angelina Jolie), "Cereal Killer" (Matthew Lillard), no-handle Joey (Jesse Bradford, the young star of Steven Soderbergh's "King of the Hill"), "Phantom Phreak" (Renoly Santiago) and "Lord Nikon" (Laurence Mason).
What if, in Ordinary People, Timothy Hutton were secretly an alien?
She’s being hunted by Donald Pierce (Boyd Holbrook), a gold-toothed, metal-handed baddie who comes across like a post-apocalyptic mash-up of Val Kilmer’s Doc Holliday in “Tombstone” and Jonny Lee Miller’s character from “Hackers.”
Stuck in a mental ward with the usual psychiatric suspects -- the obsessive-compulsive mouse (David Patrick Kelly), the Miss Havisham-ish old lady (Celia Weston), the germophobe (''Slam'' poet Saul Williams) -- none of whom have any problem with the notion that their new neighbor really is an extraterrestrial, Prot becomes their leader.
While Mary McCormack ("The Big Tease," "Private Parts") doesn't get enough time to do much with her somewhat disgruntled wife character and Alfre Woodard ("Mumford," "Down in the Delta") and other performers inhabit characters that seem likely to have been fleshed out more in the novel, David Patrick Kelly ("Songcatcher," "Dreamscape"), Saul Williams ("One True Thing," "Slam") and Celia Weston ("Hearts in Atlantis," "Hanging Up") are all good as some of the mental patients Prot encounters.
Saul Williams ("Slam") is Ernie, a patient with a phobia of air contaminants who always wears a surgical mask and latex gloves, almost normal behavior in these times.
Blessed with veins of sublimely spooky Cajun occult running throughout the script by Ehren Kruger (Arlington Road, The Ring) -- the thrust of which are that the more Caroline believes, the more danger she's in from the spirits in the house -- The Skeleton Key also boasts a handful of creative twists, some pointing toward a hoax, others hinting at something far darker than just ghosts.
…jumbo, and that would be reason enough, perhaps, to hail Key as the fulfillment of the promise we've been hearing screenwriter Ehren Kruger ( The Ring Two , Reindeer Games ) has embodied for lo these many years, since his Arlington Road made a biggest splash than it deserved to.
Without giving too much away, I’ll make the offhand comment that screenwriter Kruger has essentially turned in a genrefied – and less satisfying – version of his previous “Arlington Road”; but a substandard Ehren Kruger script can still knock most horror scripts on their asses, to put it bluntly.
Blessed with veins of sublimely spooky Cajun occult running throughout the script by Ehren Kruger ( "Arlington Road," "The Ring" ) -- the thrust of which are that the more Caroline believes, the more she's in danger from the spirits in the house -- "The Skeleton Key" also boasts a handful of creative twists, some pointing toward a hoax, others hinting at something far darker than just ghosts.
With his scripts for Arlington Road and Scream 3, young, insanely prolific screenwriter Ehren Kruger established a reputation as a sort of cut-rate cinematic O. Henry, a glib, hard-working screenwriter specializing in superficially clever but ultimately annoying, unconvincing twist endings.
The Skeleton Key was written by Ehren Kruger (Arlington Road, Reindeer Games), who loves to throw third-act twists into his screenplays, regardless of whether they actually make narrative sense.
But anyone who has seen any of this movie's uplifting-but-so-sad prototypes -- be it "The Fisher King" or "Awakenings" or any of a dozen other movies preaching a sermon of love, peace and harmony and indulgence of weirdos -- will already know the answer.
The helmer of Backbeat, Hackers, and The Wings of the Dove paints Charles Leavitt's overly sentimental study of the human condition (based on a book by Gene Brewer) with broad references to The Fisher King (also borrowing that film's co-star Jeff Bridges), another compassionate, humorous glimpse of the thin line between sanity and insanity.
The film superficially resembles the well-regarded 1987 foreign film "Man Facing Southeast," but its similarities to "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," "The Fisher King" and "Awakenings" run deeper, though those were all much better movies than this one.
Movies about delusionals are not new (Bridges himself once starred in the similarly-themed The Fisher King), but K-Pax is one of the few that really works.
So the "mean minority" cops haul Prot off the the loony bin that apparently went to the yard sale of Terry Gilliam's where he was trying to sell off his mental hospital stock characters from The Fisher King and 12 Monkeys.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)
Directed by David Fincher
influenced by Hackers (1995)
Characters
If that description sounds familiar, it’s probably because this is more or less how every computer hacker has been portrayed on screen for at least two decades—think Angelina Jolie in Hackers or Wayne Knight in Jurassic Park.
It's hard not to wonder what "The Skeleton Key" might have been in the hands of a director with a gift for visceral disquietude like Alejandro Amenábar ( "Open Your Eyes," "The Others" ), David Fincher ( "Se7en," "Fight Club" ) or Darren Aronofsky ( "Pi," "Requiem for a Dream" ).