Long Night's Journey Into Day

30 Days of Night

(R)

originally published October 24, 2007

If only the passing horrific exhilarations of the uneven big screen adaptation of the simple, eerie graphic novel could be sustained, the film could be the vampire genre’s new gold standard, a Dawn of the Dead for the undead. Instead, 30 Days of Night, based on Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith’s groundbreaking comic, drags on; the film’s two hours feel no less endless than those titular 30 days. A protracted establishing of the setup - the northernmost town in the United States, Barrow, AK, is battening down the hatches for its annual month of darkness - introduces our separated husband and wife heroes, Eben and Stella Oleson (Josh Hartnett and Melissa George). We also meet an ever-shrinking roster of survivors/ potential victims that includes Eben’s teenage brother (Mark Rendall). After responding to several strange calls - a pile of burnt cell phones, a kennel of slain dogs, a creepy visitor (Ben Foster) - town sheriff Eben begins to suspect something more sinister than coincidence has come to Barrow, and he is right. A horde of ravenous vampires, led by Marlow (Danny Huston, The Kingdom), has plans to turn the town’s month without daylight into an all-you-can-drink blood buffet. Soon, all Eben and his dwindling band of survivors can do is wait for the sun to rise.

With such an original, rock-solid premise, 30 Days of Night should have been the year’s best horror film. Director David Slade (the impressively creepy Hard Candy) and DP Jo Willems conjure up picturesque images of Barrow and the snowy nothing that surrounds it. The vast expanses of white and the blood staining it generate a strangely scenic horror film, and once the amazingly rendered vamps show up, overhead fly-bys stunningly and unusually reveal the bloody carnage and shotgun blasts of a town under siege. 30 Days of Night has so much going right that what goes wrong doubles its disrepute. The ugly repetition of every attack - someone is yanked into the darkness only to be tossed back gurgling from a mauled throat - and excessively jerky camerawork mar the bulk of the action, while the exceedingly tense (on paper) waiting game played by Eben and the other survivors lethargically stagnates on screen. 30 Days of Night becomes The Diary of Anne Frank with vampires (and without all the teenage girl stuff). Had 30 Days of Night, so reminiscent of The Thing and Assault on Precinct 13, been handled by John Carpenter in his prime, the film could have set the new criteria against which subsequent vampire movies should be judged. Instead, it’s just another shady release from Sam Raimi’s Ghost House Productions.

Drew Wheeler

See This Baby Before It’s Gone

Gone Baby Gone

(R)

originally published October 24, 2007

Until 2003, Ben Affleck was the bona-fide Oscar-winning movie star from Good Will Hunting, Armageddon, Shakespeare in Love and Pearl Harbor, as well as People’s reigning “Sexiest Man Alive” and one half of Bennifer, the mega-couple he formed with J-Lo in 2002. Then Bennifer’s first two coproductions, Gigli and Jersey Girl, bombed, and suddenly Affleck wasn’t so hot anymore. (J-Lo knew it; the two broke up in early 2004.)

What is a washed-up 32-year-old former matinee idol to do? Give up? Not if your name is Benjamin Geza Affleck, who turned in his Hollywood blockbuster card for better roles in smaller films. Having earned back some of his awardability with a supporting turn as late television Superman George Reeves, the ex-box office stud is now garnering the best reviews of his career with his directorial debut, Gone Baby Gone. Adapted by Affleck and Aaron Stockard from another novel by Mystic River author Dennis Lehane, Gone Baby Gone is not as darkly depressing as Clint Eastwood’s 2003 Oscar winner, but it is still a draining film. Boston private detective Patrick Kenzie (Casey Affleck) and his partner, Angie Gennaro (Michelle Monaghan, The Heartbreak Kid, MI:III), are hired to assist the police (including Ed Harris and Morgan Freeman) with the disappearance of a four-year-old girl, but the truth they unearth morally complicates the situation far beyond simple child abduction. What Kenzie discovers cannot be easily undone, and laden with a Catholic’s sense of morality, the P.I. finds doing the right thing to be hard and maybe even wrong.

In Gone Baby Gone, Affleck gets everything right. His onscreen Dorchester and Chelsea pulse with tangible, working-class blues. Hatred of class, race, family and self brims over in every scene. The classism Kenzie encounters while sniffing out clues in a local bar is far from a rarity in neighborhoods where power resides in nativist exclusivity. Dialogue often slips by unintelligibly as these angry, sad people (they are too genuine to be called characters or extras) lie, berate and love in their tough patois; the police are even less helpful with their own colloquial jargon.

Much is made of Harris and Freeman, two solid actors who can’t not deliver noteworthy performances, especially when handed character-rich roles (especially that of Harris’ ethically ambiguous Detective Remy Bressant), yet the strongly nuanced Casey Affleck, Ben’s little brother and acting better, anchors this tough little film. Kenzie is Gone Baby Gone’s conscience; his decisions determine the outcome, whether one likes it or not. As compelling as Gone Baby Gone is (and it’s as effective as it could possibly be), its doggedness left me with the same feeling I had about the bigger, badder, similar Mystic River. Once is enough.

Drew Wheeler