Pod Culture: The Reagan Era (Excerpt from Reflections in the Hall of Mirrors)

First things first. Although technically yesterday was the second anniversary of Critics at Large, today commemorates when we actually began two straight years (and counting) of daily posts on the arts. We started with only three writers feeding coal into this literary furnace and today we have thirteen active scribes who've taken up the shovel. Thank you and congratulations to all –especially those of you who have been actively reading and supporting our efforts every step of the way.

To kick off our third year, here's an excerpt from Reflections in the Hall of Mirrors: American Movies and the Politics of Idealism, my latest book currently in progress (which also explains my periodic absence from Critics at Large). But it just so happens that I'm also about to begin a nine-part lecture series on Reflections a week from Monday at the Miles Nadal JCC in Toronto (see details here). While I considered posting material from the Introduction ("If History's Taught Us Anything...") which covers the first lecture where I examine The Kennedy Era (through The Godfather, Part II and The Manchurian Candidate), the section was just too long to include here. Therefore, I'm jumping ahead instead to a portion from The Reagan Era where I discuss Phil Kaufman's 1979 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (a post which is still long but I beg your indulgence).

I know that, in the literal sense, Invasion of the Body Snatchers was made in The Carter Era, but Reflections in the Hall of Mirrors is not a literal interpretation of the American movies in each Presidential period. I work from the notion that since movies operate like waking dreams there is an unconscious nation that lies beneath the conscious one. In this post, I've tweezed together the opening portion from the book's introduction and the section on Invasion from the chapter Mourning in America: The Reagan Era. The students from my recent film criticism class, who composed terrific reviews of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, will no doubt recognize most of this material from a review of the movie that I also wrote for the class. 

Donald Sutherland, 1935-2024

Elliott Gould, David Arkin, and Donald Sutherland in M*A*S*H (1970).

Even in a roster as quirky as the list of actors who dominated American movies in the late sixties and early seventies, Donald Sutherland – who died at the end of June, just a month shy of his eighty-ninth birthday – was an outlier. Of course, he was different from his cohort in an obvious way: he was Canadian, born in the Maritimes and educated as an engineer at the University of Toronto, though he went on to train as an actor at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. And he carried his Canadian identity with him always, through nearly six decades of a career in the U.S. – he never lost his accent or his elocution-class diction, and his acting virtues included distinctly Canadian qualities like modesty, gentleness, understatement and an ironic wit that you might miss if you weren’t listening closely enough. His skill at conveying the interior conflicts of decent men amounted to a sort of genius, and his best roles permitted him to move that skill, which has generally been relegated to supporting performances in Hollywood pictures, into the foreground. His slender six-foot-four frame made him appear paradoxically slight and imposing at the same time, as if he’d slipped off a hanger in a closet, and he had rather a goonish face (which his frequent beard tended to offset). He looked like a small-town Canadian square, but he was as much a hipster as Elliott Gould, who partnered him memorably in Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H, the film that made them both famous. And, defying movie conventions, he was sexy at the same time, opposite Jane Fonda in Klute, Julie Christie in Don’t Look Now, Brooke Adams in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

When the Real Pod People Intrude: Oliver Hirschbiegel's The Invasion

In my last post, I talked about the two-dozen plus DVDs I picked up for a buck each at the Rogers rental shutdown. As I stated, a few of the films I grabbed I assumed would be pieces o' crap, such as Oliver Hirschbiegel's The Invasion (2007 - starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig) which I had heard nothing but bad things about. It was the fourth version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, so I bought it for $1 to watch at some point just to complete the “collection.” So imagine my surprise when, except for the completely destroyed ending and idiotic bits here and there throughout the film, I found The Invasion well-acted, credibly made and far more pointed than I was expecting it to be.

In the first two versions, the invasion was literally a space-born spore that came to earth (never explained in the Don Siegel's effective 1956 version; carried to our planet on the solar winds in Philip Kaufman's brilliant 1978 version). Abel Ferrara's weak 1993 Body Snatchers also left it unclear where the spores came from, but suggested environmental problems – not space spores – on a military base caused the pods to evolve and take over people. In Hirschbiegel's version, spores have attached themselves to a returning space shuttle which experiences a catastrophic failure. When the shuttle breaks up on re-entry, it spreads the spores across the US (especially around Washington, DC, where most of the film is set) attached to the shuttle's wreckage. 

An Actor's Life: Kevin McCarthy

“They're here already! You're next!”

Kevin McCarthy, who passed away on September 11th, was a journeyman actor who worked constantly from his uncredited debut in Winged Victory (1944) right up until earlier this year when, at the age of 96, he starred in the short film Drawback. He is and always will be best remembered for playing Dr. Miles Bennell in the original version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) for which the line quoted above is his best (and probably only) remembered line of dialogue. Journeyman actor he may have been, but his talent always shone through in whatever he did. A committed stage actor, his filmed credits were mostly guest shots on TV shows. His first was The Ford Theater Hour (1949), but many other shows he guested on from the 1960s through the 1990s are still remembered today: The Twilight Zone (1960), Ben Casey (1961), The Fugitive (1966), Burke's Law (1966), The Man From Uncle (1966), The Invaders (1967), Mission: Impossible (1971), Columbo (1973), Hawaii Five-O (1976), Flamingo Road (1980-1982 – he had a role for the show's entire run), Matlock (1989) and Murder, She Wrote (1992). There were dozens of others – shows you've heard of and ones nobody but agents and trivia buffs remember.

Lost Treasures: Shaun Cassidy's Invasion (2005-2006)

“Mommy. You smell different.” (Rose Varon to her mother, Mariel, on Invasion)

According To Jim was on the air for eight seasons featuring 'fat guy, hot wife.' Two and a Half Men? It’s now plowing through its eighth laugh-free season. CSI: Miami? We've been nine years and counting watching David Caruso put on his sunglasses (or is it taking them off ... or is it both?). These shows are drivel. Uninspired, insipid, poorly scripted and acted. How many seasons did Shaun Cassidy's completely brilliant show, Invasion, get? One.

I'm not going to condemn the viewers for their lack of taste (that's too easy, because smart shows like Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Big Love, True Blood, Battlestar Galatica, etc., had or continue to have long runs – albeit on cable). Rather, I just shake my head at Invasion's bad timing. It came on the air about a month after Hurrican Katrina destroyed New Orleans, and, as if the hurricane was the show's fault, the media took it to task. High production costs were another factor. At the end of its only season, Invasion's ratings were no worse than According to Jim's, but ATJ cost a buck ninety to produce, while Invasion ran over $2 million per. It died due to economics and the blindness of the ABC studio heads.

Invasion was about the world we live in now: blended families (divorced couples still attached because of children) attempting to cope with each other; trying to maintain ones individuality in a world that wants you to conform; coming to terms with changes in your body as you age; the painful struggles of teenage boys and girls growing up too fast; the dangerous post 9/11 world where terror can come from abroad, above or your next-door neighbour. It just happened to be wrapped in a science-fiction frame.

Dark Mirrors: Get Out and Race in America

Daniel Kaluuya in Jordan Peele's Get Out (2017).

“The truth is, they don’t surround us. We surround them. This is our country."

– Glenn Beck, Fox News Channel, March 13, 2009.

Jordan Peele’s gripping film, Get Out, which explores contemporary race relations on a micro-level through the prism of horror comedy, has received considerable attention from critics, including this site’s Justin Cummings and Kevin Courrier. Among other films, they have rightly pointed out its cultural markers as Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and The Stepford Wives. In both versions of the latter, wives are reprogrammed into robotic doppelgängers, and Get Out can be viewed as a sinister version of Dinner. But Sidney Poitier’s other 1967 film, In the Heat of the Night, also comes to mind. His role as the urbane cop who encounters southern redneck racists finds its mirror image fifty years later in Get Out, in the black photographer Chris’s unease with the seemingly polite but cringe-inducing patronizing of white liberals, a veneer that covers their malevolent and dangerous presence. I would add two fictional progenitors to Get Out: H. G. Wells’s early science-fiction novella, The Island of Doctor Moreau, about a physician who experiments on animals to turn them into human-like hybrids, and Stephen King’s End of Watch, which posits the idea that the consciousness of a comatose psychopath can be transferred to the minds of others who become the agents of his nefarious plans.

Childhood's End: Revisting Coraline, Pleasantville and Watchmen

When I was a kid, I used to love those pop-up books where, when you turned each page, the characters (and their peculiar characteristics) would jump out at you. In Henry Selick’s animated adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s SF fantasy novel Coraline (2009), he elegantly employs 3-D to essentially invoke the same effect (as Martin Scorsese would later do with wondrous aplomb in his 2011 Hugo). Yet you don’t find yourself thinking about how Selick (A Nightmare Before Christmas) achieves the kind of macabre splendour he does here, but rather, you become saturated by the tempest of a young girl’s runaway imagination. Coraline Jones (voice of Dakota Fanning) has just moved into Palace Apartments with her socially-conscious parents, Mel (voice of Teri Hatcher) and Charlie (voice of John Hodgman), who are so busy working on their new gardening book they don’t notice that their precocious daughter could care less about foliage and dirt. Due to her parents’ neglect, she becomes curious about a tiny door in their living room wall. Although she initially fails to find out what’s inside, one night, a small mouse leads her behind the door where she encounters a replica of her family – except these parents are “perfect” and cater to her every whim and desire. What Coraline soon realizes, though, when she sees that her “other” parents have buttons for eyes, is that things aren’t as perfect as they seem.

Conflict in Context: War on the Silver Screen

Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove (1964) is one of the many films profiled in War on the Silver Screen

Anyone looking for a history of film will find a plethora on the market. Among them are Norman Cousins’s compendium of world films Story of Film (published by Pavillion books in 2004, with a new edition in 2013), followed by his fifteen-hour mega-documentary of the same name, and The Big Screen: The Story of the Movies (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012) by film scholar and author of twenty books, David Thomson. Both volumes demonstrate the vast knowledge of their authors about films and filmmaking. Yet there is relatively little about the larger historical context within which the films were made. For example, in Thomson’s chapter on war, he does write a few insightful sentences on context but they are dwarfed by the dizzying array of films he mentions and only briefly comments upon. Looking for that context narrows the options. What I have found most valuable is Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies (Henry Holt & Co, 1995), edited by Mark C. Carnes, that consists of sixty reviews of historical films by historians and other authorities in the field. I liked these reviews because most of them do not, in the words of one reviewer, “quibble about inaccuracies, simplifications, invented characters, imagined dialogue, anachronisms” but focus on whether the film is true to the spirit of the character or historical issue. The reviewer of the film, Malcolm X (1992) criticized director Spike Lee for underplaying the political evolution of the eponymous character, and the reviewer of All the President’s Men (1976) acknowledged that although the film was accurate, it was untrue because it misleads the audience into thinking that the revelations of two reporters were responsible for the downfall of Nixon even though the film ends with the re-election of Nixon. The actual history behind these films is largely confined to a sidebar on each page. Of the sixty entries, seven of them are on the subject of twentieth-century war films. More recently, Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War (Penguin Press, 2014) by Mark Harris is very good on how that war shaped the career of five Hollywood directors, but there hasn't been a book that provides an overview of how war films have shaped their audiences’ consciousness – until now. 

War on the Silver Screen: Shaping America’s Perception of History (Potomac Books, 2014), a crisply and accessibly written monograph by historian Glen Jeansonne and film critic David Luhrssen, is a welcome corrective. The authors combine their talents to argue that war films have done more than books or history lessons to influence people’s perception of war. Their thesis is bracing, perhaps even self-evident, but it is difficult to prove with empirical evidence. The book’s greatest strength is that it gives almost equal space to the historical context as it does to the films themselves. I do have some reservations about their treatment of the films they have chosen for major analysis and with certain key omissions.

Floundering: Why Can't American Cinema Get SF Right?

A scene from Never Let Me Go (2010)

If literary science fiction, which I read regularly, tends to be better at bringing ideas and concepts to life than it is at evoking memorable characters, science fiction movies tend to do the opposite. They often deliver strong characterization and vivid protagonists but generally falter at inserting those people into an imagined future or alternate world that functions logically and believably.

Take Never Let Me Go, the highly critically acclaimed 2010 British film based on a dystopian novel by Kazuo Ishjguro. Admittedly, I haven’t read the book, but the film makes no interior sense whatsoever. The movie’s opening crawl indicates that in 1952 breakthrough scientific experiments cured most diseases and by 1967 the average lifespan was over 100 years old. Yet the inhabitants of that different world use the same technology – radios, cassette tapes – in the same time-frames as we do. That’s simply ridiculous considering the remarkable dramatic medical advancements of Never Let Me Go, which we still haven't achieved in 2011. Should they not have matched their medical breakthroughs by equally great leaps in technological know-how, especially because mankind would have been spared the need to find the cure for cancer and other illnesses and thus had more time to innovate in other fields? A world where illness has been largely eradicated by the '50s is one where DVD players and computers would have been common by the '60s and astronauts would likely have landed on Mars by the '80s. To postulate that the England of Never Let Me Go would look and feel the same as our own is nonsense. Similarly, the movie’s revelation that its main characters – SPOILERS FOLLOW – a trio of young people (beautifully acted by Keira Knightly, Andrew Garfield and Casey Mulligan) were actually clones that were only being kept alive until their vital organs were needed for transplant to their ageing/dying humans is also illogical. (Director Mark Romanek doesn’t do a good job of springing that news on the viewer, I figured it out pretty early on.) If their world was so cruel as to use them for this purpose – and remember they assumed they were fully human – why give them lives, an education and jobs before yanking it all away from them? It would be far more realistic if their 'world' was just made up of false memoires implanted into their brains while they lay in suspended animation or something along those lines. 

A Formula Film with a Human Face: The Criterion Collection Release of Lawrence Kasdan's The Big Chill

When Lawrence Kasdan's The Big Chill came out back in 1983, it was understandable (especially if you were a political activist in the Sixties) if you found yourself appalled at just how glib and superficial the whole treatment of the period was. In it, a group of former college radicals gather for a weekend when one of their former comrades, Alex, who has lost his way, commits suicide. As they bury him, they dredge up the good ol' days and reflect on what has happened to each of them since. This would have been perfectly compelling if The Big Chill had believably suggested that any one of these people were ever once radical, let alone political activists. The level of ease they reach together in that South Carolina home, even when they rub each other the wrong way, doesn't take into consideration the uneasy course the country has taken since they last took up sides against it. The group seems more caught up in what middle-age and their choice of occupation has done to them rather than what has happened to the United States by 1983.

For a movie supposedly about the politics of a turbulent period, there is little to find that's political in it. With no sense of what happened in the land between their time as committed activists and now, there's not even a comprehension of how some of the counter-culture (especially the Weathermen) began turning criminal, even psychopathic, like the political revolutionaries in Dostoyevsky's The Possessed, or the bombers in Jean-Luc Godard's prescient La Chinoise (1967), as the decade drew to a close. The shootings at Kent State and Jackson State in the early Seventies are never alluded to on this mournful weekend, and the picture never once mentions a President. The country itself is what ends up missing-in-action in The Big Chill. For all their former activism, and their engagement in the world, the collective gathered here are only interested in their state of mind and their own well-being rather than the state of the country. You're never convinced that this group was ever made up of idealists who, by the Eighties, turned into narcissists. They suggest instead refugees from one of Werner Erhard's human potential encounter groups rather than anyone who did time in the SDS. Despite the death of one of their own, which provides the very title of the picture, there is little in the way of a chill in the air considering where America actually was when the film came out.

Songs We Refuse to Sing

Toronto Mayor-elect Rob Ford

While walking home from dinner with a friend last evening, I had the Toronto Civic Election on my mind. This year's Mayoralty race had been a bitterly fought battle between Rob Ford, a right-wing demagogue from the suburbs, and George Smitherman, a provincial Liberal Party politician, who entered the race to bring fiscal responsibility and social awareness to a metropolis where its suburban citizens were angry with our current Mayor David Miller. Many were enraged over high taxes, political entitlement, waste and an ill-functioning transit system. During his campaign, where he vowed to "stop the gravy train," Ford marshalled that fury into a frightening populist froth. He resembled the late comic Chris Farley on Saturday Night Live, acting out his character of the suburban Ralph Kramden, a big lug always in a state of continuous fulmination.

Mind Control in Stephen King’s End of Watch

Author Stephen King. (Photo: Eric Feferberg/AFP/Getty Images)

When I began reading the first installment of Stephen King’s hard-boiled crime trilogy – the critically acclaimed and Edgar Award-winning Mr. Mercedes (2014) followed the next year with Finders Keepers and concluding with End of Watch (Scribner, 2016) – I wondered how long King would confine himself to the genre’s conventions. He did pretty well for over two and a half volumes, then he veered into his comfort zone, the realm of horror that draws upon tropes of the Gothic. As a crime novel, End of Watch generally works because King finds a way to retreat and provide the police with a reasonable explanation for the resolution though we, the readers, know that the conventions of a police procedural cannot explain what has occurred.

Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate and the Death of the Auteur Theory

The “pantheon” of worst films is usually topped by fare such as Edward D. Wood Jr’s Plan Nine From Outer Space (1959). No question. It is truly terrible. But naming a picture like that the “worst film ever made” is too easy. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel. The man had no talent so it was easy for him to make a truly awful movie. What I think should be considered when creating a list of the worst films ever made are the filmmaking skills and ambition of the director. Michael Cimino had both. His The Deer Hunter (1978) won the Oscar for Best Picture, and his debut, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974), was a quality character-driven action picture that starred Clint Eastwood and Jeff Bridges. The film he made after The Deer Hunter, Heaven’s Gate, gets my nomination for the worst film ever made because Cimino had talent and ambition. He was also (and still remains) a megalomaniac.

And just in case you think I’m now shooting fish in a barrel, labeling a film “the worst ever made” by jumping on the bandwagon of what everybody already knows, I was actually at the Toronto debut screening on November 20, 1980. Most people never saw the full version on the big screen since it was pulled from release after that evening and only briefly returned in a severely cut form (the long version is now on DVD; the short version is not). Going in, I knew very little about what had happened the night before at its world premiere in New York City (and the savage review it got from The New York Times critic Vincent Canby). Sure, I admit, I had heard a brief report on the radio that the screening had not gone well, but that was all I knew (remember, this was prior to texting and Google and we had to rely on newspapers, radio and TV). I thought little of the report since I preferred to make up my own mind.

Hollywood: Ryan Murphy’s Woke Fantasyland

Jeremy Pope, Darren Criss, and Laura Harrier in Hollywood. now streaming on Netflix.

This review contains spoilers.

Ryan Murphy’s latest offering, the Netflix limited series Hollywood (co-created with Ian Brennan), is so flat-footed and dopey that you watch it with a sort of indolent fascination, as if you’d been brained with a frying pan just before turning on your television set. It should be a camp classic, but it isn’t quite; still, it’s too stupefying to be boring. Murphy has chosen Hollywood in 1947 as the locale for a woke fantasy – an alternate history in which people of color and women and gay men manage, in the course of just a few months, to liberate themselves and make Hollywood the forefront of a cultural revolution decades before America got around to it. Despite opposition from a crew of two-dimensional bigots, while the head of Ace Studios (Rob Reiner) is hovering near death after a heart attack his wife (Patti LuPone) takes over the reins and, stirred by the pleas of her friend Eleanor Roosevelt (Harriet Harris), lets a young director (Darren Criss) cast his African American girlfriend (Laura Harrier) in the lead of a movie called Meg written by a gay black writer (Jeremy Pope). The producer (Joe Mantello) invents wide distribution to get over the southern boycotts; the movie is an immediate hit and wins a raft of Oscars, including three for non-whites. At the ceremony the writer kisses his boyfriend – a young unknown named Rock Hudson (Jake Picking) – on the mouth before going up to accept his. Hollywood changes overnight. All it takes is a few courageous souls.

Satire & L'affaire Charlie Hebdo (3 of 4): The Lessons of Philip Kaufman's Quills

In the opening scene of Philip Kaufman's prickly erotic drama Quills (2000), based on Doug Wright's clever and prescient play, we bear witness to a muscular brute partly dressed in leather who both gropes and caresses a young woman in what appears to be a sadomasochistic tryst. As we're drawn in further and become aroused by the deeper and darker dynamics of their grappling, we soon discover that we've actually become enraptured by the sight of Mademoiselle Renard, a libidinous aristocrat, who is about to meet her demise at the hands of a sadistic executioner during the Reign of Terror following the French Revolution. Just as she is about to be decapitated, we meet the incarcerated Marquis de Sade (Geoffrey Rush) who is in the process of documenting her tale. In one swift stroke, Phil Kaufman implicates us in our deeper fascination with sex and violence. With that audacious opening, the director, who is no stranger to eroticism and politics (The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Henry and June), brings us in more intimate touch with our hidden and forbidden desires. He uses the outrageous exploits – and the brutally frank writings – of the Marquis to raise more probing questions about the role of art, the matters of sex and the dubious tool of censorship. And it's no accident that the story is set a short time after the Reign of Terror because what's up for grabs in Quills is the romantic belief in the basic goodness of man.

Risk and Reward: The Unique Perils of TV Criticism

Bobby Cannavale and Olivia Wilde in Vinyl on HBO.

If there is one huge difference between being a film critic and reviewing network and cable television it's about time and commitment. After two hours, I can quickly dismiss something like the dramatically inept and politically naive Trumbo, which treats the Hollywood blacklist – yet again – in an apolitical style that turns the story into an easy-to-digest morality tale between innocent idealists and HUAC, while shrewdly ignoring how Stalinist policies actually infected and divided the American left. It wouldn't have been quite so easy to write it off had it been a TV mini-series. I would have had to give it more time. You can usually tell after a half-hour whether a film will hold together, come to life, or turn turtle. But it's not so easy with a television series.

Critic's Notes & Frames, Vol. X

Singer Joe Cocker, who sadly died over the holidays at 70 after a battle with lung cancer, could get to the bottom of heartache in a song like no other. Listening to him perform, with his gravel voice, was like hearing Louis Armstrong cured in a blue funk. Containing a melancholic soul that rivalled Billie Holiday, Cocker's ecstatic surrender to the naked emotion in a romantic number, at its best, could transcend masochism. Of all his memorable tracks from "Hitchcock Railway" to his soulful take on "With a Little Help from My Friends," his gospel tinged "Do I Still Figure in Your Life?" asks with maybe the greatest urgency the most poignant demand of his audience.

Film director Carlos Saura has made many dazzling dance pictures before, from Carmen (1983) to Flamenco (1995), but Iberia (2005) may be his most erotic work. Using a studio outfitted with minimalist backdrops of scrims, curtains and mirrors, Saura adapts sections of composer Isaac Albeniz's "Iberia" suite for a number of the biggest stars in the Spanish dance and music world to perform. Yet like Jonathan Demme in Stop Making Sense (1984), Saura makes us conscious of the artifice he's creating, letting us see the cameras, the lights, and the recording equipment, only then to employ the magic of performance to evaporate the artifice. Saura isn't content just capturing that alchemy, though, he goes further inside the process of performance art itself and, while using expressionistic techniques, reaches the purest essence of dance to create a fully realized expression of love for the sensuality of movement.

Master Acting Classes: The Right Stuff (1983)

Fred Ward, Dennis Quaid, Scott Paulin, Ed Harris, Charles Frank, Scott Glenn and Lance Henriksen in The Right Stuff (1983).

In The Right Stuff, writer-director Philip Kaufman pulls off the near-impossible. Not only does he find a deeply satisfying way to dramatize Tom Wolfe’s cheeky, novelistic non-fiction chronicle of the development of the NASA space program, but in the course of three hours and fifteen minutes he moves from satirizing it to celebrating it. He does it with the aid of his brilliant collaborator Caleb Deschanel, whose astonishingly varied cinematography moves from a replication of the velvety, myth-bound westerns of John Ford in the thirties and forties and George Stevens in the fifties through a wide, muted yet clear-eyed reflection of the late fifties and early sixties in New Mexico and Florida to a gloriously trippy depiction of John Glenn’s triple orbit around the earth in the Friendship Seven in 1962. And he does it with the aid of one of the most thrilling ensemble casts ever put together – almost all of whom were relative unknowns in 1983.

Scorsese's Labyrinth: Shutter Island

 

Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island is less an adaptation of author Dennis Lehane’s mystery thriller than it is a virtual funhouse of the director’s favourite film noir tropes – only there’s no fun in it. As he did in his ridiculous re-make of Cape Fear (1991), Scorsese gets so absorbed invoking the work of various film stylists - including Jacques Tourneur's I Walked With a Zombie (1943), Vincente Minnelli’s The Cobweb (1955), Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) and Sam Fuller’s Shock Corridor (1963) - that he can’t find a style of his own to take us inside the drama. Working from a dense but convoluted script (by Laeta Kalogridis), Shutter Island is a cluttered labyrinth that begins as an ingenious detective story but slowly shifts into a psychological character study. However, Scorsese gets so jazzed on creating a surreal atmosphere, aided by the atonal sounds of Ligeti, Penderecki and John Adams, that he clouds the clarity of the story. If it wasn’t for the good work by many of the performers, desperately breathing life into their stock roles, the picture would sink under the weight of the director’s B-movie fetishes.

Little Stabs at Happiness: The World's End & You're Next

Martin Freeman, Paddy Considine, Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, and Eddie Marsan star in Edgar Wright's The World's End

The first weeks of September are a dozy, uninspiring time for moviegoers. Summer’s over, but fall’s not quite here yet; for serious movie geeks, most of the excitement is generated by the news from high-profile festivals (Telluride, Toronto); in the real world, something like Don’t Tell a Soul or The Exorcism of Emily Rose suddenly has a reasonably good chance to be one of the top box-office draws of its opening weekend. Given the kind of summer it’s been at the movies, it’s perfectly appropriate that a couple of the better popcorn movies still lingering around certain multiplexes in these post-dog days offer the charm of small-scale, ironic apocalypses.