WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Krampus

A smidge over an hour into Michael Dougherty’s ‘Krampus’, there’s a dementedly brilliant sequence where a white trash weapons fetishist finds himself pinned down by three anthropomorphic gingerbread men armed with a nail gun, a liberal suburban mom fights off a porcelain angel with a snake tongue, a frumpy much-put-upon housewife goes apeshit at some demonic toys with an axe, and an alcoholic aunt with all the personality of drink-driving accident involving a Mack truck and a school bus cuts loose with a pump-action shotgun.

Let’s rewind an hour plus change. ‘Krampus’ opens with a slow-mo sequence, scored to ‘It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas’ wherein a mall opens its doors to a horde of last-minute Christmas shoppers whose sense of festive spirit, joy, peace and goodwill makes your average episode of ‘The Walking Dead’ look like ‘Songs of Praise’ by comparison. Store assistants are trampled, product displays toppled, Santa’s grotto turns into a microcosm of hatred and frustration, and shoppers trade blows.

As the narrative proper opens, this selfsame sense of yuletide pugilism carries over into a school nativity play rapidly descending into chaos as young Max (Emjay Anthony) gets into an onstage scrap with an older lad which is only curtailed, much to the amusement of the other parents, when his father Tom (Adam Scott) drags him away. Tom and his wife Sarah (Toni Colette) are therefore not in the best of moods when they shepherd Max and his sister Beth (Stefania LaVie Owen) back home. Beth’s pissed off anyway that she’s unable to spend Christmas with her boyfriend.

Max, persona non grata in his own home, has only his German immigrant grandmother Omi (Krista Sadler). A woman with a superstitious view of Christmas, she urges him to finish his letter to Santa Claus and feeds him with homemade stolen. Shortly afterwards, the family are descended upon by their boorish in-laws. If Tom and Sarah are the stereotypically affluent and liberal couple, Howard (David Koechner) and Linda (Allison Tolman, who wins Agitation’s woman of the match award for wearing the worst Christmas sweater ever and still being a fucking badass) are every bit as clichéd as the white trash chip-on-the-shoulder oiks with a passel of ill-behaved kids. Including vindictive tomboy Jordan (Queenie Samuel).

When Jordan steals Max’s letter to Santa and humiliates him by reading it over the dinner table (it’s actually quite a sweet letter: he wishes for Christmas to be like it used to be, and his family not to be at each other’s throats), Max ignores Beth’s entreaties not to rise to the bait, brawls with Jordan, and reclaims the letter only to rip it into shreds and throw it out the window. The scraps whirl up into the snowy sky and all hell breaks loose.

A sudden cold snap monkeys with mobile phone signals, takes out the electricity and effectively cuts them off from civilisation. Beth frets over unreturned texts to her boyfriend and insists on walking over to his house. She meets with a bad end en route. We’re about 30 minutes into the film at this part, and the cynical hilarity of the opening sequence has given way to an extended sequence designed to emphasise just how wankerish Howard and his brood are; an extended sequence that needs to pile on the embarrassments and unpleasantries in order to shepherd Max towards his extremely ill-advised decision.

That minutes 5 to 30 of ‘Krampus’ (i.e. damn near a third of it) jettison all traces of humour is a big enough problem in itself. A comedy-horror failing to deliver on the first half of its self-description is on a hiding to nowhere. That those minutes are not only filled with crude cultural stereotyping – but cultural stereotyping that insists the over privileged hygge-obsessed middle class types deserve all of our sympathy and the working class types, who own guns and drive an SUV, deserve none – is an act of aesthetic cuntishness that all but derails the film. It doesn’t help, either, that the one of only two likeable characters – Beth, whom LaVie Owen plays with a winning mixture of sass and sympathy – gets such short shrift so early in the proceedings.

The other likeable character, Omi, is allowed to stick around long enough to deliver an expositional monologue and is then given similarly reductive treatment. Still, her big moment gifts the film with its most interesting stylistic diversion. The flashback that accompanies her explanation of Krampus – the shadow half of St Nicholas, a spirit who punishes instead of rewarding, who takes rather than giving – is rendered as an animation in the vein of Tim Burton’s ‘Corpse Bride’: the time and the place are fudged, but there’s a strong suggestion of wartime and fascism and loss of hope. A lot of weight is carried here, and while it offsets the banality of the first third, it also makes for an uneasy transition into the dark comedy that follows.

It’s an awkward film, is ‘Krampus’. Brilliance and crassness exist cheek by jowl. For every scene that’s utterly hilarious, there are three or four that fail to find a tonal register. The plethora of seasonal archetypes that assemble for the climatic siege are brilliantly realised, but the whole thing is delivered at such breakneck pace that none of them are ever fully developed. An extended coda, which ends on a visually impressive note, strives for a ‘Twilight Zone’ vibe but comes across as ‘Black Mirror’ copyism.

Granted, it’s a better Christmas film than anything that’s been shown at 2pm on BBC2 this year, but it sure as hell ain’t no ‘Calvaire’, ‘Rare Exports’ or ‘Black Christmas’.

Spotswood

Heard the one about the Anthony Hopkins-Toni Collette-Ben Mendelsohn-Russell Crowe movie about a time and motion expert called in to fuck over the workforce of a small family-run business, directed by the guy who made ‘The Man Who Sued God’, that’s arguably one of the best movies you’ve never seen?

No joke. I saw ‘Spotswood’ at Nottingham’s Broadway Cinema – the East Midlands’ beacon for independent and arthouse cinema – on its first release in the early 1990s. Time robbed me of any definitive recollection of the movies, except for an hilarious extended set-piece based an a slot-car race, but I always remembered that I’d enjoyed it.

A couple of decades have passed and I’d got used to mentioning the film to people only to be met with quizzical expressions. Or responses along the lines of “Anthony Hopkins and Russell Crowe in the same movie? Nah, you must have dreamed. I’d have remembered that!” My assertions that, actually, not only did the movie exist but Crowe played a greaser in a hotrod with ambitions to become a corporate sell-out tended to meet with excuses being made and the other party swiftly departing.

I found ‘Spotswood’ for £2.49 on Amazon recently. A panned-and-scanned print that looks like a transfer – albeit an unnaturally good one – from VHS. But what the hell? I got to see it again. And it holds up. It holds up and then some.

Hopkins plays Errol Wallace, an efficiency expert who has just completed an exhaustive study of a major car manufacturer and whose report recommends the lay off of 480 workers. The MD (the film is set the late 1960s, before Managing Directors disappeared up their own rectal passageways and started calling themselves Chief Executive Officers) prevaricates, leading to Wallace’s partner engaging in underhanded practices in order to force the issue.

Meanwhile Wallace takes the reins on the next project, an assessment of Ball’s moccasin factory, a stuck-in-the-50s enterprise whose MD (Alwyn Kurts) is secretly selling off assets in order to keep his full complement of workers employed. Amongst these individuals are up-and-coming salesman Kim Barry (Crowe); good-natured but cringingly naïve despatch boy Carey (Mendelsohn); Wendy (Collette), Carey’s co-worker whose romantic overtures he blindly overlooks; and Cheryl (Rebecca Rigg), Ball’s daughter – temping at the firm prior to embarking on “a full-time modelling career” – for whose affections Kim and Carey find themselves unlikely rivals.

The story arc is predictable: things turn ugly at the auto-plant while Wallace re-engages with the human side of things at Ball’s ailing factory, eventually coming through with the business plan that revitalizes the business and safeguards the workforce’s jobs. I make no apologies for not throwing up a spoiler alert. ‘Spotswood’ is so whimsical and guileless, it’s up there with ‘Local Hero’ as the closest anyone has come to making an Ealing comedy in the last half a century.

The performances are pitch perfect, Mark Joffe’s direction is commendably underplayed (there’s barely a scene in this film that you can’t immediately imagine being utterly ruined and drowned in schmaltz by a Hollywood director), Ellery Ryan’s cinematography effortlessly evokes a time and a place, and there are some inspired and yet unforced musical cues on the soundtrack. Subject of which, the (deliberately) awful garage band cover of ‘House of the Rising Sun’ over the opening credits is toe-curlingly hilarious.

If you’ve never seen ‘Spotswood’ before – or, as seems to be the cultural denominator, even heard of it – I guarantee you’ll benefit from seeking it out. Not only do you get Hopkins and Crowe sharing the screen, but it’s the only movie that features a slot-car race as tense, gripping and imbued with everything-to-play-for desperation as the final bout in ‘Rocky’ or any of the green baize duels in ‘The Hustler’.

Little Miss Sunshine

Meet the Hoover family: patriarch Richard (Greg Kinnear) is a motivational speaker who insists that everyone has a choice between being a winner and a loser, even though his personal success rate relegates him to the latter category; his wife Sheryl (Toni Colette) juggles a day job, motherhood and running a chaotic household; their children number Dwayne (Paul Dano), a goth who wears a ‘Jesus was wrong’ t-shirt and refuses to speak, and Olive (Abigail Breslin) a precocious pre-teen who dreams of being a beauty queen. Unexpected guests in the Hoover household are Richard’s father Edwin (Alan Arkin), newly expelled from his retirement home for drugs related offences, and Edwin’s brother Frank (Steve Carell), a brilliant but neurotic scholar recuperating from a suicide attempt.

Which doesn’t add up to the stuff of which feelgood comedies are made, but ‘Little Miss Sunshine’ – directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris from a literate and witty script by Michael Arndt – is second only to ‘Sideways’ (up soon on the Personal Faves project) in mining a seam of humour from a melancholy set-up, and emerging, in its final scenes, as life-affirming.

Like Alexander Payne’s masterpiece it unfolds as a road movie, the dysfunctional sextet crowding into a beat-up old VW Microbus as they head for California where Olive is to compete in the final of the Little Miss Sunshine contest. Everything from mechanical failure to hospitalisation conspires to prevent them, and when they finally make it to the pastel-decorated hotel hosting the event, Richard, Dwayne and Frank - at odds from the outset - find themselves united in abhorrence: the beauty contest verges on exploitation, prepubescent girls made up and paraded more in the manner women ten or fifteen years their senior. Olive, however, insists in competing.

Melancholy pervades the characters, the journey, the film itself: virtually all of the Hoovers are defeated in their ambitions. By the end, it’s all down to Olive to win one back even though everything seems stacked against her. The ending doesn’t pan out quite as you’d expect ... but it’s an absolute delight all the same, gloriously sending up the beauty pageant for what it is.

Abigail Breslin (aged ten at the time of filming) turns in an astounding performance, but so does the whole cast; in particular, Toni Colette, striking the right note between flustered and dependable as a woman trying to be all things to all family members, and Alan Arkin, an absolute hoot as the foul-mouthed, sex-obsessed Edwin “Are you getting any?” he asks Dwayne at one point. “What are you, fifteen? Just the right age. You're jailbait and they're jailbait. It doesn't matter. Leave it till you're eighteen and you're looking at three to five.” (Bear in mind that it's Edwin who coaches Olive for the dance number she performs at the contest and you might get some idea of how unorthodox her routine is.)

Greg Kinnear, insufferably smug in most of his characterisations, convinces as a man trying to cling onto the positivity he peddles in his seminars even as he suffers one setback after another; while Steve Carell, in a performance devoid of the mugging and tomfoolery that often defines his onscreen persona, achieves a career best that you wouldn’t have thought possible. Both turn moments of cringe-making embarrassment – one involving the purchase of a pornographic magazine, the other the discovery of same by an overzealous traffic cop – into absurdist highlights.

And – proudly reversing into a parking space alongside a forecourt full of automotive icons including Herbie, the General Lee, Inspector Morse’s Jaguar Mk II and a certain Aston Martin DB5 “with modifications” – the Hoovers’ unpredictable yellow VW Microbus manages contain the entire family and all their differences and run away (almost literally!) with some of the funniest scenes.

The Sixth Sense

One of the most pleasurable cinema-going experiences is seeing a film without any prior knowledge of it, not having read a review, seen a trailer or been exposed to a single opinion. You watch with a completely open, unprejudiced mind. You get to discover the film. If it has a startling plot twist or narrative development, or a sucker-punch ending, the effect is that much more powerful.

I saw 'Seven' first time round without knowing anything other than Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman were in it, and with a Sunday afternoon to kill, that was good enough for me. I remember checking out the poster in the cinema's foyer, squinting to read the director's name. David who? I wondered, and went and got my ticket and took my seat.

An ex-colleague told me he watched 'From Dusk Till Dawn' without the slightest inkling that it was going to turn into a vampire movie at the half-way mark. No idea! I wish I could have experienced it like that.

With 'The Sixth Sense', all I knew was that it had paranormal subject matter and there was a twist ending. Even knowing that was knowing too much. As the opening credits rolled, I thought to myself: Right, then, let's see if I can second guess it. Ten minutes later I was thinking to myself -

SPOILER ALERT!

- Yeah, got it: Brucie's a ghost. And spent the rest of the movie being proved right. And didn't take much away with me when I left the cinema. A friend of mine has a diametrically opposite memory of his first viewing of 'The Sixth Sense': the twist blown by a blabbermouth DJ as he listened to the car radio while driving to the cinema.

Watching 'The Sixth Sense' for maybe only the third time over the weekend, I re-evaluated it and found myself wishing, like my friend, that I'd known the ending from the off. That way I could have saved myself a wasted two hours playing smartarse and being disappointed when the film-makers didn't deliver something beyond my educated guess. I could have appreciated how finely nuanced the performances are and what a generous actor Bruce Willis is in his scenes with Haley Joel Osmont, letting his young co-star set the pace; playing off him. How brilliantly Toni Collette nails the harrassed, nervy single mother, portraying not only her character's stressed brittleness, but her desperate affection for her troubled son. Alongside 'Japanese Story', this represents the finest work she has done onscreen.

I could have appreciated how atmospherically shot it is, Tak Fujimoto's autumnal cinematography setting the tone; Shyamalan's use of colours as clues remaining just the right side of clever-cleverness.

I could have appreciated how restrained and confident the direction is, Shyamalan taking his time establishing character and setting. If there's anything that redeems even his lousiest films (because, oh, the mighty was soon to fall!) it's his commitment to slow, calm, studied pacing. Compared to the frenetic MTV-style of chopping and splicing so beloved of that Satan of contemporary cinema Michael Bay - the venal epitome of a generation of directors who cut their teeth making music videos - Shyamalan's approach to film-making is thoughtful; careful. Old school.

Fortunately, over the weekend, I sat back and appreciated all of these things. And believe me, when I slid the DVD into the player, my thoughts were along the lines of: Right, then, let's see if this is really as good as its adoring aficionados make out. I now find myself thinking that, yes, it is. But not for the reason that most people remember it. The twist ending is the least thing 'The Sixth Sense' has to offer. Watch it for its craftsmanship; for what it says about family, memory and human frailty.