Monica Keena | Through the Shattered Lens

(Lisa is once again trying to clean out her DVR! She’s got about 182 films on her DVR and she needs to get them all watched by the end of this year! Will she make it? Not if she’s too busy writing cutesy introductions for her reviews to actually watch the movies! She recorded Crime + Punishment in Suburbia off of Flix on February 25th!)

Oh, dammit.

I have seen some really pretentious movies before but Crime + Punishment in Suburbia is really something else. As you might be able to guess from the title, the film is supposedly based on the Dosteyevsky novel but it takes place not only in modern times but in suburbia as well. Oh, and it actually has next to nothing in common with Doteyevsky novel, beyond a murder and occasional religious symbolism. And by occasional, I mean that there’s a scene where Vincent Kartheiser wears a Jesus t-shirt.

Kartheiser plays Vincent, a teenager who I think we’re supposed to think is dark and disturbed but instead he just comes across like a weird little poser. I mean, honestly, it takes more than just wearing black clothes to be weird. I had a closet full of black clothes when I was eighteen and it still never brought me any closer to enlightenment. Anyway, Vincent is a classmate of Roseanne (Monica Keena) and Roseanne is dating a handsome but dumb jock named Jimmy (James DeBello). Roseanne’s mother is named Maggie (Ellen Barkin) and Maggie has recently married an abusive drunk named Fred (Michael Ironside).

Fred is a total jerk so Maggie goes out with her best friend, Bella (Conchata Ferrell), to a bar. It’s at the bar that she meets Chris (Jeffrey Wright), a handsome and charming bartender. Soon, Chris and Maggie are having an affair and when Fred finds out, he rapes his stepdaughter. Roseanne convinces Jimmy to help her murder Fred but, after the deed is done, Roseanne finds herself struggling with her conscience.

Now, of course, in Crime & Punishment, the whole point is that the murder itself was largely random and motiveless. The rest of the book deals with the protagonist’s attempt to come to terms with not only his crime but also with the meaninglessness of it all. In Crime + Punishment in Suburbia, Roseanne has a good reason for killing Fred. Fred is such a monster that there’s no real confusion as to why Roseanne did what she did. One could argue, quite convincingly, that if she didn’t kill Fred, he would have ended up killing her. That makes the film’s later attempt at moral ambiguity feel rather hollow and empty.

The other problem with Crime + Punishment in Suburbia is that we don’t see the story through Roseanne’s eyes. Instead, the entire movie is narrated by Vincent. Now, Vincent Kartheiser is not a bad actor. Anyone who has seen Mad Men knows that. And, in this film, he occasionally gets to flash a cute smile that makes the character a little bit bearable. But the character he plays, Vincent, is so weird and off-putting that you have no desire to spend 100 minutes listening to him portentously talk about his existence. Considering that Monica Keena actually gives a pretty good performance as Roseanne, the decision to tell her story through Vincent’s eyes feels all the more mistaken.

The only thing more overwrought than Vincent’s narration is Rob Schmidt’s direction. This is one of those films that uses every narrative trick in the book to tell its story. Look at the wild camera angles! Look at the sudden slow motion! Look at the freeze frame! This is one of those movies that you watch and you just want to shout, “Calm down!” at the director.

Crime + Punishment in Suburbia is one to avoid.

(This review probably contains what some people would consider to be spoilers.)

Today, as part of my continuing series reviewing the films of the Friday the 13th franchise, I take a look at Freddy Vs. Jason.

After spending 15 years in development Hell, the film Freddy Vs. Jason was finally released in 2003. With this film, New Line Cinema brought together the stars of their two best-known horror franchises, Jason Voorhees (played here not by Kane Hodder but by Ken Kirzinger) and Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund.)

During the time that Freddy Vs. Jason was languishing in development Hell, a huge number of potential storylines were pursued and a lot of scripts were written. Some of those scripts are surprisingly good and one of them (the one with the enviromental message) is hilariously self-important. Most of them are just terrible and can be found online via a google search. The main problem was how to convincingly bring both Jason and Freddy together when the two of them essentially epitomized two radically different subsets of the slasher genre. Especially when compared to some of the other ideas that were considered, the concept behind FreddyVs. Jason is actually pretty clever.

As the film starts, Freddy is trapped in Hell because he’s been forgotten by the teenagers of the world. They’re no longer scared of him and, as such, they’re not having nightmares about him. Freddy’s solution? He tracks down Jason (also hanging out in Hell and having dreams that neatly parody his whole image of being a murderous defender of purity) and, by disguising himself as Pamela Voorhees, he convinces Jason to resurrect himself in Freddy’s old hometown. Jason promptly starts killing teenagers and Freddy is blamed. Soon, people are having nightmares and Freddy has his gateway back into the real world. Unfortunately for Freddy, Jason keeps killing everyone before Freddy can get to them. Freddy sets out to kill Jason and it all leads to one “final” battle between the two of them.

I have to admit that when I first saw Freddy Vs. Jason, I didn’t care much for it. Of course, at that point in my life, my view of whether or not a film was good or bad was largely based on the type of night I was having when I saw it. I saw Freddy Vs. Jason with a guy who 1) thought proper date attire was shorts, a t-shirt, and a baseball cap and 2) who apparently thought my right breast was just an armrest there for him to lean on whenever he got bored. Bleh. Beyond the company that I saw the film with, I was also upset that the character I most related to, Katharine Isabelle’s Gibb, was rather brutally killed off while boring old Monica Keena was allowed to survive. My initial response to Freddy Vs. Jason was that it had to be bad film because I had a bad time while I was watching it.

However, I recently rewatched it again with my BFF Evelyn (who always dresses up and is pretty good about not feeling me up every three minutes) and I actually enjoyed Freddy Vs. Jason a bit more the second time around. I think it also helped that, in between the two viewings, I got a chance to see all the other Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street films along with a lot of other horror films and was now able to see how scenes that seemed pointless the first time around were actually meant to comment on the history and the conventions of both the Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street franchises. The 2nd time around, I could better appreciate the perverse parody at the center of Robert Englund’s performance as Freddy Krueger. While the human characters are never all that interesting, the “final” battle between Jason and Freddy is genuinely exciting. When I first saw it, I thought that the film’s final scene (with Freddy’s decapitated head winking at the camera before laughing) was incredibly stupid but now I appreciate it for what it is — a deliberately campy homage to the over the top exploitation films of the 70s and 80s.

As opposed to the previous few films in the Friday the 13th franchise, Freddy vs. Jason was a huge box office success. It was the first (and, come to think of it, only Friday the 13th film) that I saw in an actual theater and it actually did give me nightmares (mostly because I foolishly chose to relate to the obviously doomed Katharine Isabelle). With that type of success, it was inevitable that there would be another film in both the Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street franchises. Those two films, however, would not be sequels. Instead, they would be (bleh) reboots. We’ll take a look at the reboot of Friday 13th (and finish off this series of reviews) tomorrow.