Films: Film Noir, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Future Screenings: None

The end of the festival is fast approaching, and frankly I'm rather glad. I've seen a higher than average number of great movies this year, but I'm also really tired! Plus, I can't keep eating at places like Wendy's and expect to continue living.

Film Noir
Pretty much, if it's film noir, I'm going to go see it, and this one (the debut film for directors D. Jud Jones and Risto Topaloski) even had the words "film noir" in the title, so there was no chance of me not attending a screening. It's a computer-animated movie, mostly lacking in color, that has a classic noir premise: a guy wakes up under the Hollywood sign with no memory of who he is, next to the body of a cop who's been shot dead. All signs point to the fact that he killed the cop, so he quickly decides he must be the bad guy in this story. And as he heads out to discover his true identity, everyone he meets and everything he learns seems to support this idea. A private detective (whose phone he has in his coat for some reason) was after him; a powerful criminal wants him dead; he beat all his lady friends; he apparently accepted money to have sex with some of them; he dealt drugs; and he seems to have killed, not just a hero cop, but also an innocent young woman. While he's finding all this out, he quickly gets himself into deadly trouble, not only with the police, but also with a gang of very dangerous criminals.

It's a pretty familiar premise, but it's also a pretty good one, and could have made for a really good movie. Sadly, this is not that movie. First off, the animation is really pretty terrible. The backgrounds are generally okay, but the people look and move in a very creepy, fake way (seriously, I've seen video games do this stuff better) that makes the film's numerous, unnecessary sex scenes even more disturbing than they would already be. The dialogue and narration are okay, but occasionally tend toward the corny and lame, and the story is told pretty poorly. The central mystery is finally solved a good 20 minutes before the end of the movie in a shoddily constructed series of flashbacks that utterly fails to generate any shock or surprise (partially because the solution is pretty obvious by that point, and partially because it's kind of a rip-off of a famous Hollywood movie that came out over 10 years ago). And after the mystery is solved, the movie just keeps going and going, painfully overstaying its welcome.

But worst of all is probably the way the film handles the action scenes. They're horribly clumsy, unrealistic, and ridiculous. In one scene, our hero is shot at at point blank range and somehow manages to duck under the bullets—but this isn't the Matrix, and he isn't Neo. In a later scene that's even more ridiculous, a villain fires a machine gun at him in his car for a full minute from only yards away, and yet somehow manages not only to miss our hero entirely, but also not even hit his car. Then there's the scene in which our hero slowly pulls out and aims a hand-held rocket launcher at his enemy, who responds, not by simply shooting him, which he could clearly easily do, but instead by freaking out and trying ineffectually to get away. And so our hero survives over and over again in impossible situations, leading to a goodly amount of unintentional humor.

To put it simply, Film Noir is not a good film noir, and furthermore, it's not even a good film, period. Like Pistoleros, it was made by people who clearly love this genre of film, but who, instead of creating a successful example of said genre, have only managed to assemble a disappointing collection of cliches.
Festival rating: Poor

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
The festival's screening of this black and white silent film from 1920, starring native son John Barrymore as the titular character(s), was accompanied by a live soundtrack from local indie rock band Golden Ball. The film is of course an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's classic story about the noble, charitable scientist and medical doctor named Jekyll who creates a potion with which to separate his good and evil natures. As the evil Hyde, he can indulge in every secret pleasure and temptation, while Jekyll remains pure. Or at least, he imagines so. In fact, Hyde begins to take over entirely, and as Jekyll he is wracked with guilt for the terrible things he's done. And what if Hyde should get his hands on Jekyll's young lady love?

It's an undeniably intriguing story, but it's told here in rather an odd fashion. I'm used to silent films often simply not displaying intertitles for unnecessary dialogue (and in fact it's a practice I usually enjoy, as it forces the storytelling to be more subtle, and based more on visuals than words), but here, various scenes go by that seem like they must have included some rather important dialogue, with nary an intertitle to be seen. Instead, we'll stare at people sitting in a room talking for long minutes, and then intertitles will drop in explaining away whole sections of story in clumsy exposition.

I think part of the problem is that the film is about a man indulging in evil acts, but, apparently due to the standards of the time, it fails to explicitly describe or display hardly any of those evil acts. Most of the time, we just have to take the movie's word for it that Hyde is a nasty guy. Admittedly, Barrymore, with his striking face and amazing control over its expressions, does a pretty great job of making Hyde look and move like a really nasty guy, and of making Jekyll look and move like a man tortured by inner demons. Although by our modern standards, Barrymore overacts terribly during the transformation sequences, and also while playing Hyde, in some scenes he still manages to be really terrifying. There's also a particularly surreal, disturbing, and effective sequence where Hyde manifests as a giant, creeping man-spider infesting Jekyll's body.

Also by modern standards, the film has pretty slow pacing, and I nearly fell asleep once or twice. Still, it's mostly entertaining and sometimes even moving, and it was great to see such a clean, bright print of such a venerable old classic. As for the music, it was also generally rather good, featuring simple, strong, indie rock rhythms, and the occasional hint of creepy cymbal clashes and violin strokes to symbolize the evil of Hyde. I have to admit, however, that I did at times find it becoming a bit repetitive and annoying, and at other times it didn't fit what was going on on the screen very well, and instead seemed to be music that just happened to be playing at the same time as the movie, rather than music that was playing with the movie.

But watching a restored print of a classic silent movie with live musical accompaniment is pretty much always going to be an entertaining experience, and this was no exception.
Festival rating: Good

Image Credit: Flickr user pedrosimoes7