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By Cole Smithey

‘Stephen King’s The Mist’

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It took director Frank Darabont writing a better ending for Stephen King’s 1980 novella before he could tackle making the best legitimate horror movie to come out in years. A father and young son become stranded in a populated strip mall grocery store in Maine where a deadly mist enshrouds the area as part of a terrible storm. Hidden in the thick fog are gigantic insects and prehistoric creatures that ensnare the store’s inhabitants in a grip of fear that brings out their worst and best qualities. Marcia Gay Harden is magnificent as a Christian fanatic, and Thomas Jane gives the best performance of his career in a low-budget, retro horror movie that is equal parts satire, suspense and surprise. “Stephen King’s The Mist” is a reminder of what a really great horror movie is all about.

Darabont, whose filmic adaptations of King stories (“The Shawshank Redemption” and “The Green Mile”) carry strong stamps of approval, is so in tune with King’s sense of timing, nuance and character development that it feels like he’s getting away way with something from the outset. Because Darabont and King are collaborating writers whose history together goes back to Darabont’s first feature (“The Woman in the Room”) there is a joyful effortlessness that comes across in this collaboration like silk being drawn off a greased spool.

First, we get a charge of inside humor when the opening scene reveals family guy David Drayton (Jane) painting movie poster artwork that is as cheesy as it is enticing. The fierce storm outside has no patience for David’s pastime, and lets him know it by sending a giant tree through the room’s large picture window that shatters our momentary self-satisfaction. Drayton is a man whose concern for property comes as a distant second to the safety of his family. There’s some discussion of the loss of the tree that his grandfather planted, and we instantly know that David is the kind of person we would all like to think we are well intentioned and balanced. It’s an empathy that will steadily increase during the film’s onslaught of irrational physical danger and cult-mentality. And it’s an investment of hope and belief that will be challenged to its core by the end.

Drayton and his 9-year-old son Billy (Nathan Gamble) give their disagreeable neighbor (Andre Braugher) a ride to the town market to pick up supplies before the thick mist descends. But the dense vapor is too quick. A visit to the grocery store’s loading dock gives Drayton and a few local men a sample of what the fog hides when giant barbed tentacles attack them before they can shut the roll-up door. Cynicism, fear and stupidity collide in a volatile mix as the group of store-trapped citizens struggles to make sense of the bizarre events escalating around them.

Darabont could never have gotten funding from a Hollywood studio to make the movie with the shock ending that it has, and so he bucked the system and did it for “seventeen and change” a dauntingly small budget that dictated a muscular approach to the material. The low budget production constraints form a direct link to films like Hitchcock’s “Psycho,” Don Siegel’s “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” and George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead” and “Dawn of the Dead.” As with those films, there’s a raw excitement and intensity from the cast and crew that counterbalances King’s meaty source material.

Audiences will take away different measures of meaning from King’s deeply satirical story and its military-inflected dimension. It’s a movie that crosses eras and puts society into a crucible of primal existence. No matter how civilized we may think we are, human tendencies for dealing with the unknown under stressful conditions whether from outside invaders or from the people next to us is remarkably predictable. But what happens inside the mind of an individual beyond the groupthink is something else entirely. You’ll have to see the movie to see that. CV

‘No Country For Old Men’

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After a string of disappointing projects (“The Man Who Wasn’t There,” “Intolerable Cruelty” and “The Ladykillers”) Joel and Ethan Coen have hit cinematic pay dirt with Cormac McCarthy’s 2003 western crime novel “No Country for Old Men.” Adapted, directed and edited by the Coens, the film was widely accepted among critics at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival as worthy of the Palme d’ Or, even though another film took home the prize.

Vapors of Hitchcock, Cronenberg and Tarantino permeate a dusky ‘80s era Texas-Mexico borderland where retiring hardscrabble Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) hunts bizarre serial killer Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) who is busy chasing married Army vet Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin). The three characters form a cross-generational chain of variously disaffected men spiraling down a whirlpool of blood and cash. Painful laughs accompany gut-twisting suspense as McCarthy’s side-winding story swings out of control in increasing arcs of succinct violence.

Chigurh, in an unflattering Dutch Boy haircut, is temporarily arrested before he strangles the officer with his handcuffs and continues on his way, leaving a trail of corpses behind. The archetypal human killing machine embodies a black heart of the borderlands’ drug trade that has infected large swaths of Texas and New Mexico. Bardem thoughtfully creates the most daunting illegal immigrant any U.S. politician ever dreamed about.

While out hunting, Moss has the apparent good fortune of coming upon the aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong in a remote desert area. Amid bloodied bodies, spent rifles and five shot-up trucks, Moss finds 2.4 million dollars in cash and a mother lode of heroin. Hiding the suitcase of cash at home momentarily brightens Moss’s dream of providing a good life for his loving wife Carla Jean Moss (Kelly Macdonald). Chigurh waits at the scene, and Moss becomes his running target, as well as a person of interest for Sheriff Bell, who correctly reads the tea leaves of the crime scene the next day.

Brolin’s recent career comeback, with solid performances in “Grindhouse” “In The Valley of Elah” and “American Gangster,’ is more than validated here. Of his recent roles, Moss is the leading man part that allows Brolin to trust his instincts in creating a conflicted character living on his wits alone. To say that Brolin’s acting comes as a revelation in the film is an understatement.

There’s an impression here that, just as they achieved with “Fargo,” the Coen brothers have perfected a dry-witted version of their self-blended modern noir cocktail. The title, “No Country for Old Men,” is an opinion pulled from the philosophical mind of Sheriff Bell, an honest Texan broken-hearted over the drug and border crossing violence that has consumed his home. Bell dreams of spending his remaining days with his patient wife Loretta (Tess Harper), but too much has changed in the region. The new American West is fueled only by greed and a thirst for retribution, if not preemptive slaughter. It’s not a place that Bell can abide.

The Rio Grande River, which Moss temporarily escapes across, becomes a barbed wire filter for his cash. McCarthy’s source material insinuates symbolic ideas about an American society where western life has turned far more violent than the blood-soaked days of the Old West. Justice and honor are foreign words unrelated to modern survival and accumulation of wealth. Suspicion is the coin of trade that must necessarily gravitate toward bitter death. And yet, there is a sense of hope, in the face of such brutal truths, that back cycles across the movie when its deceptively ethereal ending resolves the motivations of everyone involved. You can’t always get what you want, and you can’t always keep what you have. The Coen Brothers have gotten their mojo back. CV

The 2007 Wild Rose Independent Film Festival produced by AriesWorks Entertainment culminated in an Awards Ceremony Saturday Oct. 27 at the Fleur Cinema and Cafe. For a list of the winners, visit www.dmcityview.com under the film section.

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