Tag Archives: claustrophobic

REVIEW: The Divide Drowns Flat Characters in Arty, Apocalyptic Gloss

Mickey (Michael Biehn), the paranoid building superintendent unwillingly responsible for allowing the characters in The Divide to survive the apocalypse, didn’t plan for or want company. And who can blame him? These people are awful . Like so many groups left in a survival situations (at least in movies, books and MTV reality shows), they shed their veneer of civilization with alarming rapidity as their lives take a turn for the worse. Written by Karl Mueller and Eron Sheean and directed by Xavier Gens, who earned a place for himself in the New French Extreme movement with his 2007  Frontier(s) before heading to Hollywood to make Hitman ,  The Divide is a stylish and would-be shocking variation on a familiar scenario, in which the horrors isolated survivors inflict on each other turn out to be worse than those lurking outside. Gens has talent, if also tendencies to steer the visuals into the music video realm, but he treats the characters here like mobile props and nothing more — the curve of a shaved skull or a tear trickling down a cheek just another bit of nice art direction on the gradual path toward the inevitable destruction of everyone on screen. What happened to the outside world is left to speculation — what looks like a bomb hits the city in the first scene, sending the inhabitants of a New York apartment building scrambling downstairs in search of shelter. Eight people force their way into Mickey’s shelter in the basement before he locks the door. There’s angular heroine Eva (Lauren German), her whiny French fiancé Sam (Iván González), Delvin (Courtney B. Vance), Bobby (Michael Eklund), brothers Josh (Milo Ventimiglia) and Adrien (Ashton Holmes), and Marilyn (Rosanna Arquette) and her daughter Wendy (Abbey Thickson). Mickey has food and water saved up, though not enough — at least not after strange men in hazmat suits barge into the underground shelter, kidnap the little girl, and weld the door shut on the remaining inhabitants. Hell may be other people, but it can also be scenarios in which people endlessly bicker their way to certain doom (this is why I find  The Walking Dead so hard to watch). Power games, alliances and divisions break out as time passes with no hope of rescue or an end, and as the characters grow more unstable and unhealthy, teeth falling out, hair growing patchy as they sit in the dark. Josh establishes himself as the alpha male, sharing Marilyn with Bobby in a scenario that degrades into violent sexual slavery — Arquette deserves either kudos or condolences for the degree to which she surrenders to a role that finds her being chained up, continually degraded and humiliated, treated like a dog, and smearing makeup on her face like some kind of crazed goth dolly. Eva is forced to protect Sam, who’s at the bottom of the totem pole, though she’s drawn to Adrien, who holds on to his sanity as the situation falls apart. These characters are at best doodles, and none of the performances are able to tease more depth out of them — the hints at history between them, like how Sam and Eva met, or the strained relationship between Josh and Adrien, are so sparse that when they’re thrown in they confuse more than they illuminate. The sprinkles of political relevance are clunkier and more problematic. Any film these days that includes the destruction of the New York skyline is going to calls up echoes of 9/11, but The Divide  strongly suggests that Mickey was a firefighter working that day whose issues and isolation are all related to that trauma, from his convictions that “the ragheads” are responsible for bombing the city to his creation of the underground bunker, decorated with an American flag. (Admittedly, Gens makes the Frenchman the least likable character — if the film’s a rough metaphor for a world in decline, the U.S. isn’t alone in taking on the chin.) At two hours, with its elegiac tone and deliberate pacing, The Divide  may lose gorehounds before it gets around to the finger chopping and corpse dismemberment. While there certainly are moments that will have the sensitive covering their eyes, the film’s most disturbing imagery isn’t actually related to carnage. A segment in which Josh heads outside to attempt to figure out what the suited-up soldiers are up to has a hallucinatory, medical nightmare feel to it, rich with the promise of terrible things going on just beyond our comprehension. Later, two characters shave their heads and eyebrows and transform themselves into near-alien figures out of a Matthew Barney video. Gens’s deftness with these visuals, and with the claustrophobic glide of his camera through the dim warrens of the underground space in which The Divide is almost exclusively set, is undeniable. It’s his apparent disinterest in the people filling it that makes the film such an uphill battle, in which the world ends and you can’t wait for the survivors just kill each other off already. Follow Alison Wilmore on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .

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REVIEW: The Divide Drowns Flat Characters in Arty, Apocalyptic Gloss

‘Drive Angry’ Cheat Sheet: Everything You Need To Know!

MTV News has been on the road with the Nicolas Cage flick since the start. By Eric Ditzian David Morse and Nicolas Cage in “Drive Angry” Photo: Summit Publicity “Drive Angry” is perhaps the Nicolas Cage-iest Nicolas Cage movie ever. The ever-unpredictable, often wacky, potentially out-of-his-gourd actor stars as a man who literally breaks out of hell to exact a bloody, muscle-car-assisted revenge plot … in 3-D. It’s deeply weird stuff, and yet, with Cage at the center of it all, it makes a whole lot of sense. MTV News, it should be said, has been at the center of “Drive Angry” coverage, securing the very first interview about the project and continuing to track it from the first trailer to the brink of opening weekend. Read on for everything you need to know about the movie before it hits theaters Friday (February 25). Going on the Road Coming off the $100 million success of 2009’s “My Bloody Valentine,” director Patrick Lussier and his writing partner, Todd Farmer, asked themselves one question: “What movie do we want to see and what movie do we want to shoot in 3-D?” as Lussier later explained to us . “We didn’t really have anything in mind beyond that,” he added. “We started writing an opening scene about a guy named Milton killing these three guys called the F—ers, who are totally scared sh–less and totally deserve it. From there, ‘Drive Angry’ was born. We wanted to come up with something that wasn’t a horror movie but was just a hard-R, action-driven road movie, because that would be a great film to see in 3-D.” Ditching any notion of converting the film to three dimensions during post-production, Lussier hauled 3-D cameras down to Shreveport, Louisiana, and began shooting in the spring of 2010. To share the screen with Cage, Lussier hired Amber Heard to play a sassy waitress who gets pulled into Cage’s scheme and William Fichtner as the agent of the devil’s evil agenda. 3-D, From Scratch When we caught up with Cage in the spring at Wonder-Con , he joked that the pollen in Louisiana made him sound like an “old blues singer” and raved about how the flick would meld an old-school cinematic vibe with cutting-edge technology. “It’s like if you got to see an old ’70s action movie, but in 3-D,” he explained. “We’re doing something semi-historical, because it’s the first 3-D movie shot [in the] style of a ’70s action film. You could see Charles Bronson or [Clint] Eastwood [starring in a film like this] in those days.” Months later, with the shoot behind him and his voice back to normal, Cage marveled at how he escaped the production injury-free. “In this case, I did quite a few stunts with people literally on the hood of the car driving at very high speeds, so it reminded me of those old movies where you have people on top of the wing of a biplane,” he said. “It was a little intense. That was definitely new to me and I was always very concerned about the stunt people I was working with.” Hell on Earth The film’s first trailer popped up online in October and featured everything we could have hoped for: big guns and fast cars, Cage walking slowly away from explosions without looking back, and fab lines like, “Hell already is walking the Earth.” Months later, a Super Bowl ad delivered further peeks at the hard-R craziness. There’s action aplenty, and that’s exactly how Lussier planned it. “We have this great car chase with Nic’s character chasing after Amber Heard’s character, who’s in the middle of a fight inside this RV,” he teased of one scene. “You’re in this claustrophobic space, and suddenly you’re outside with Nic in hot pursuit. There’s all sorts of gunplay on the road. It’s spectacular.” Check out everything we’ve got on “Drive Angry.” For breaking news, celebrity columns, humor and more — updated around the clock — visit MTVMoviesBlog.com .

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‘Drive Angry’ Cheat Sheet: Everything You Need To Know!