A Nightmare on Elm Street *

Director: Samuel Bayer
Cast: Jackie Earle Haley
Kyle Gallner, Rooney Mara, Katie Cassidy, Thomas Dekker
Kellan Lutz, Clancy Brown, Connie Britton, Lia Mortensen

Anyone who's been alive for the past three decades knows who Freddy Krueger is. Heck, he might've even be the cause for them falling asleep at school during the day or the reason why they would never look at red and black stripes in the same way.
Truth is you don't even need to be a die hard fan of the original movies to know what Freddy represents.
This remake, carrying the tragic Michael Bay seal of quality, takes everything about the character and reduces it to a version of 902010 with blood and, more, screaming.
The setup is still pretty much the same: a bunch of kids begin to die mysteriously during their sleep, the only thing they have in common is that all of their dreams feature a man called Freddy Krueger.
The man wears a knifed glove and most of his skin is burnt. He also has a thing for torturing and brutally murdering the teenagers in their dreams while they sleep.
Because the characters and situations are so inconsequential, the thing that's left to judge about the movie is its ability to frighten us, which it never does.
One of the plot twists has to do with the fact that, after an extended period of time, insomniacs might enter a limbo where dreams and reality are impossible to separate. This nod to the power of dreams could've given the film its most terrifying theme but the Freddy scenes are done with such lack of nuance that the audience always knows when it's a dream and when it's not.
The unimaginative cinematography and score do little to set the mood and there is a scene with visual effects out of Scary Movie.
The most important effect of course should be Freddy himself and while Haley's performance tries to amp up on the creep, it never comes even close to conveying the macabre gusto with which Robert Englund dug his claws into the meat, pun intended.
With all its supposed dismay, attempts at conveying a dark back story with all sorts of perversions and traumas; the truth is that the film's use of facile, ridiculous Freudian techniques to explain the whys of Freddy might be the only thing worth a nightmare.

Shutter Island **1/2

Director: Martin Scorsese
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley
Emily Mortimer, Michelle Williams, Patricia Clarkson, Elias Koteas
Max von Sydow, Ted Levine, Jackie Earle Haley, John Carroll Lynch

The opening scene in Shutter Island contains the entire movie; the Paramount Studio logo fills the screen while an ominous string music fills the air. Then all of a sudden the title cards appear, with no dissolves or fade outs. Seconds later we see U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (DiCaprio) head over a toilet, suffering an extreme bout of sea sickness.
He cleans up, fixes his tie and goes outside where he meets his new partner Chuck Aule (Ruffalo) as they approach the title island (an Alcatraz like fort that harbors an asylum for the criminally insane).
In the old fashioned typography of the credits and the musical nod (which reminds you of something Franz Waxman would've done) Martin Scorsese declares his film will be a throwback to classic noir, gothic and horror films.
But for those paying enough attention, he also gives away the film's plot-and polarizing twists-direct and indirectly (those caring to find out in advance need to do no more than psychoanalyze the concept of vomiting and get creative after an apparent continuity error).
It can be said that because of this effect the film is arguably spoiled for those seeking a mystery flick and also ruined for those seeking a psychological study who instead of being rewarded with a complex whodunit get a facile howcatchem.
Scorsese, who's always been a precise filmmaker, has trouble conveying both predominant aspects of the film and while he obviously has a lot to say (the whole movie is filled with infinite movie homages and references) he tries to say it all at once.
This is evident in the convoluted plot, adapted by Laeta Kalogridis from a novel by Dennis Lehane, which shows us the investigation the marshals conduct in the island (the mysterious disappearance of a patient played by the excellent Mortimer) but also tries to convey the troubles inside Teddy's mind (related to the death of his wife, played by a beautifully creepy Williams) the extent of which also involves WWII traumas and HUAC conspiracies.
Soon the plot has trouble finding its way, if any, among the constant new information we receive; this somehow never really deepens the mystery but makes the film drag, as people who know what's coming undergo an endurance test and those unaware of the twists are drowned by the intense, but vague, dream sequences.
Therefore the film is at its best, when along with editor extraordinaire Thelma Schoonmaker and director of photography Robert Richardson, Scorsese indulges the audience with the power of his images.
There are scenes, involving surreal dreams and flashbacks, that go to places he's rarely visited since The Last Temptation of Christ; places where Michelle Williams bursts into flames and Nazi soldiers are executed in front of the frozen corpses they originated.
Some of these moments achieve the kind of beautiful nightmare qualities David Lynch has become an expert at and while giving Marty mostly new territory to explore, fail to click within the whole.
If one of the purposes of Shutter Island was to blur the division between reality and imagination (or to study if there is any when it comes to specific human perception) Marty's obviously more into one than the other (deciding which is which brings yet another dilemma).
For someone with Scorsese's kind of attention to detail, we also wonder why would he give the audience clues about the mystery and then forget to keep up the game.
The best element of the film is arguably Leonardo DiCaprio who gives one of his richest performances letting himself fall completely into whatever the movie is (he works that final line to the extent that he convinces us we saw a much better movie). He's obviously onto something no one else is and creates an affecting portrait of fear, passion and confidence about to shatter.
He is excellent in moments where other actors might've exaggerated and seeps into the brooding essence of someone like Robert Mitchum (appropriate given Out of the Past hugely shaped the feel of the film), his interaction with the superb, if somehow underused, cast is revelatory.
There's a scene with Clarkson that probably would've made a much more interesting film and his moments with the Vincent Price-like Kingsley and the perversely calm von Sydow, both playing asylum doctors, are spellbinding.
As a whole the experience of Shutter Island can be reduced to a paraphrase of the film's closing scene and lead us to wonder if a so-so Scorsese movie is worse than no Marty at all.

Watchmen **

Director: Zack Snyder
Cast: Malin Akerman, Billy Crudup, Matthew Goode
Carla Gugino, Jackie Earle Haley, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Patrick Wilson

It is 1985, the United States have won he Vietnam war and Richard Nixon is elected to run his third presidential term.
The ongoing Cold War with Russia has led the U.S government to create something known as a "doomsday watch" leading to an impending nuclear holocaust.
Masked superheroes known as the Watchmen also exist in this alternate universe and it's mostly because of them that history has been so different.
There's Nite Owl (Wilson) who masters advanced technology, Rorschach (Haley) a mysterious man who finds patterns in unexpected things, Ozymandias (Goode) the world's smartest man who has turned into a business mogul, Silk Spectre (Akerman) who is preserving the legacy of the name after her mom (the effortlessly wonderful Gugino) retired and then there's Doctor Manhattan (Crudup) a man who suffered an accident that has turned him into a nuclear entity that can manipulate energy and see the future.
But the Watchmen have stopped working after the President (when in doubt blame Nixon...) passed a bill that deemed them unnecessary.
Things change when the Comedian (Morgan), a former superhero, is murdered, leading Rorschach to believe there's a conspiracy behind it and reuniting the other Watchmen to uncover the hero killer, deal with their own personal demons and save the world from nuclear war.
Zack Snyder's adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon's graphic novel is a perfect example of how you can, almost, never have it all.
With a reverential tone meant to pay homage to the source material without offending the feared fanboys, the film loses the rest of the audience who had never heard about these heroes before.
And with a combination of forced comedy, satire, gruesome violence and gratuitous sex meant to entice a larger audience, it's easy to detect that the film is losing whatever profound meaning was in the original.
Because if there is something obvious is that "Watchmen" isn't as much about plot, as about ideas.
Part cautionary tale, part satirical fantasia, the ambiguity of the actions by who we consider heroes and villains is suggested by larger story connections, not by Snyder's directorial efforts.
His characters come off as singularly one dimensional and erratic. Wilson's Nite Owl is dull and uninteresting, while Akerman's Silk Spectre's mommy issues never justify her bizarre choices and her Cameron Diaz pout. Most of the performances lack the energy to feel as if they deserve to be off the novel's pages.
Crudup's Doctor Manhattan is fairly interesting, even if the actor's forced indie-ness tries too hard to turn him into the next quotable Buddha figure, a la Yoda.
Snyder takes away most of the seriousness from the character by playing around with his blue penis which dangles threateningly across the screen as if to defy what skin color you need to avoid triple X rating.
Jackie Earle Haley gives the film's best performance as the slightly sadistic Rorschach with whom the whole neo-noir spirit finds its best ally.
It doesn't matter that the lines he's forced to narrate with sound like Raymond Chandler parodies, Haley's enigmatic take on his character give the whole movie its only signs of relevance and humanity.
Curious, considering that the discourse behind the heroes' plight is for others to find humanity in them (Doctor Manhattan even leaves the planet in a very adolescent rant to find himself).
It's sad that while Snyder has the visual skills to keep the audience watching, he lacks the depth to engage them and involve them in what's going on up there.
The director prove to be a master at evoking the feeling of reading an actual graphic novel providing the film with long, slow scenes, filled with detail that remind us of the square by square process involved with the source material.
But his artsy attempt is made seriously dull, because he seems to have forgotten that film goes at twenty four squares per second.
Viewers can not invest the same energy into mediums as different as these, a novel can be closed at any time, a film playing in a theater can't.
And with a selfindulgent running time of almost three hours, the movie is an endurance test that never achieves the feel of movies like "Zodiac" instead dragging us back and forth in time because it doesn't know just when to stop.
Whatever postmodernist wonders could've been extracted from a political comic book movie "borrowing" elements from other pop culture elements (there's an "Apocalypse Now" reference that should be kitschy but actually works!) are just disposed of.
"Watchmen" is at its worst when it goes and tries to shake off what we've been watching for two and a half hours; when a character declares "I'm not a comic book villain" you can almost see the speech bubble.