Red Lights (2012)

Let's talk for a minute about movies that have bad endings. Now it's true that a bad ending does not automatically make the whole film bad. If there is entertainment to be found before the ending hits, then you can't call it a complete failure. I am reminded of the ending of "The Golden Compass," which was horribly disappointing because it just ended without any resolution. Then again, it was the first part of a trilogy that had the next two films canceled, so we can't really blame it if the open ended nature of the ending is unsatisfying. Which it was. Especially since that series would have been crazy awesome.

There is, however, a difference between a movie with a bad ending and a movie with a stupid ending. While stupid endings are bad, bad endings aren't necessarily stupid. Let's take a look at the differences between the two.

Bad Ending - An ending which is unsatisfying, not necessarily because of ambiguity, but because it fails to adequately fulfill any promises the rest of the film mat have offered.
Example: "No Country For Old Men" was very interesting up until the last half hour when the main freaking character, Josh Brolin, gets unceremoniously killed off camera and forgotten about, effectively derailing the entire narrative. Then Javier Bardem crashes his car and walks off, Tommy Lee Jones tells us about a dream he had, and the movie just ends. Not like Josh Brolin's story was interesting or anything. No, I want to hear some vague psychoanalysis of dreams. That's riveting.

Stupid Ending - An ending that insults your intelligence by expecting you to have paid no attention to the rest of the movie, or have absolutely no concern about anything making a lick of sense whatsoever.
Example: The ending of "The Book of Eli" expects us to believe that Denzel Washington not only accurately memorized the entire Bible cover to cover, word for word, but was also blind the entire movie. Yet he constantly was pulling off not only devastatingly effective kung-fu, which while highly dubious is possible, but also had him shooting a gun with pinpoint accuracy on many occasions. I'm talking drilling a guy between the eyes at 50 paces accurate here. While blind as Stevie Wonder. I guess we were supposed to believe that God himself was nudging his arm just a bit more to the left and saying "There ya go. That's a headshot right there." Why is God helping Denzel shoot people? What ever happened to "Thou shalt not kill?" I love when religious tripe contradicts itself.

You see the difference in the two? One is just disappointing, the other is enough to get you mad because you feel like you just wasted your time while the movie laughs at you for it. And I would take a bad ending over a stupid ending any day.

But what possible reason could I have for beginning this post with a diatribe about stupid endings? What possible reason indeed...

"This isn't ending well for me, is it?"

"Red Lights" is a mystery about a pair of professors/paranormal investigators, played by Cillian Murphy and Sygourney Weaver, who go around debunking supernatural claims with science and all that good stuff. Robert De Niro is a blind psychic named Simon Silver, who is apparently capable of extraordinary things including spoon bending, mind reading, and being able to make a person's heart stop. That last one is what prompted his retirement years ago, when one of his critics mysteriously dropped dead. But when he makes an unexpected comeback, the team of investigators feel it's a perfect opportunity to see if there really is more to him than gimmicks.

That's all well and good, and it is admittedly interesting to see the tricks that those phonies use to appear magical, despite the fact that most of the time it just boils down to the guy wearing an ear piece that has someone on the other end feeding him information. It's nothing too advanced, but every once in a while there's a neat little trick they expose which can provide something of a "eureka" moment if you've ever wondered how that stuff works.

There is also an emotional lynchpin with Sygourney's character, who has a son who has been in a coma for some 20 years. She's an atheist, and for her that means that she can't bring herself to take her son off of life support, because she doesn't believe there's anything afterwards. If she did believe, and she wishes that she could, she would do it in a second. But for now she'll keep waiting and hoping that he'll come back and experience the only existence he'll ever have.

I hate seeing great actors in mediocre films.

There is some admittedly really gripping and well done drama to be found in "Red Lights." Sygourney's character is full of so much pain, and she is such a dynamite actress, and always has been, that when she's given room to work she'll tear the house down around anyone else in the room. And with a great actor like Cillian Murphy, who actually has very good chemistry with her, there are the makings of some really good stuff here.

As far as De Niro goes, I'll just say what I've said in the past, even though few people share my opinion here - I find him to be just okay. He's never really done that much for me personally as an actor, but I'm not going to say that he's not good. That would be stupid and false. De Niro is a great actor. I'm just not a huge fan of his. And "Red Lights" was pretty much your average De Niro performance. If you like him in other stuff you'll like him in this. One thing he's not is inconsistent.

See that there? Sneering while blind. The guy's a master, I tell you...

So what was it about "Red Lights" that made me start off this entry so? Obviously, it was the ending. Oh my goodness. The ending was rubbish. Pure and simple. If the ending to "Red Lights" was a literal rubbish pile, it would be the finest pile of rubbish one could hope to find. Award winning rubbish, I dare say.

I don't want to get too into what happens, but suffice to say that it approaches Shyamalan-level stupidity. But it's a strange kind of stupid that doesn't really hit you until you do something foolhardy like "think about it for two seconds." Basically what the twist ending adds is a few little things earlier in the film are put into a new context, and a character's motivations are changed, which admittedly makes certain scenes make some additional sense.

However, at the same time that same character's motivations are now completely backwards and scattered on every other scene in the movie, another character's death is now either impossibly coincidental or impossibly nonsensical, and the life work of one of the main characters is now rendered pointless for no good reason. And the only possible conclusion that we are forced to draw from it all is that that character with the twist is an idiot who likes to sabotage and confuse themselves, which is easy since apparently they also have a bad case of Alzheimers.

 They also drop the most emotionally gripping plot thread, the son in the coma, halfway through the movie. Fantastic. -_-

That's the kind of thing I'm talking about when I say "stupid" ending. And what almost makes it worse is that it's forced. This is not a movie that needed a twist. It would have worked far better if there hadn't been one. In fact, that could have been downright gutsy. What does that say about where we are with movies nowadays when a thriller not having a twist is actually a more shocking twist than having one?

Just...stop trying to be clever, Hollywood. You're not very good at it.

THE BOTTOM LINE - "Red Lights" is passable for the first 3/4's of the movie. The ending is so ludicrously bad that it ruins everything that came before it. Yeah, it's one of those endings. And I hate to say that because Cillain Murphy and Sygourney Weaver are two of my favorites, but this just wastes them. There may be some enjoyment to be found for some, but I'm not sure by who. Maybe De Niro fans who liked "The Village?"

Silent House (2011)

"Silent House" was sold to me on the premise that the entire film is composed of a single hour and a half long shot. I know that there have been other films that have done it, most notably Alfred Hitchcock's "Rope," but I've never seen one of them. The longest shot I remember seeing is that scene from "Hard Boiled" where Chow Yun-fat is running through that hospital shooting up like a couple hundred bad guys that seems like it lasts for a good 15 minutes. And to be honest, that bit got old after a while.

That's not to say I'm opposed to the concept of the single-shot movie. I think with the previous example it was a case of me just not liking "Hard Boiled," although the precision and craftsmanship in that scene was impressive. I think that it could be a very effective way of presenting a story, although my biggest concern would be that the gimmick of that concept might overshadow the rest of the film. I can imagine watching a movie like that and be more concerned about spotting where they could sneak in an edit as opposed to what's going on in the film.

And yes, they do sneak in edits in "Silent House." It's not actually one single shot, I'm estimating it's probably between 10 and 16, although if one weren't looking for the edits, you could easily miss them. And it is true that I did find myself saying "Edit!" out loud whenever I saw an occasion where they probably cut, usually when the camera went behind a box for a split second or something. But that aside, it was not nearly as distracting as I thought it would be. In fact, I'd dare say that it was this decision to present "Silent House" in this fashion that made it at least mildly worth watching, because as far as story goes it has little else to recommend, unfortunately.

"Silent House" is about a girl named Sarah, played by Elizabeth Olsen. She and her father and uncle are fixing up their summer home, which is boarded up and sufficiently creepy looking, and naturally the power is out. And since the movie starts in the early evening, and the movie takes place in real time, it's almost immediately lit with candles and flashlights, which become our main source of light for the film.

Let's hear it for our lighting department! Otherwise known as this lamp!

Other than this very basic lead-in, it's really just best to say "stuff starts getting weird." Once we hit the 15 minute mark or so, Elizabeth Olsen generally spends the rest of the movie at first walking extremely unnecessarily slowly around the house, and then running, trying to get away from whatever the hell it is that's going on. Since a big part of "Silent House" is really about finding out what in the crap is happening, to say much more about the plot would be pretty detrimental to someone's viewing experience of it. And not an insignificant portion of the reason for this is because the lead-in to the ending is far more entertaining than the ending itself.

I'm purposefully going to be obtuse on the ending because I have to be honest, everything leading up to the big reveal at the end is actually pretty interesting. While it may sound really lame to follow someone running through a house for an hour and a half, there is enough intrigue going on that it honestly really had my attention. It was mysterious and cryptic, and nothing was making much sense, and then it just gets balls-out crazy near the very end. I just really wanted to know where in the world they were going with this madness, and that's what kept my attention. In that regard, it was very absorbing.

And then the ending hit. You know, I was really trying to be nice to this movie up to this point, because I really wanted to like it. I love unique films, and this fits the bill. However, I can't let this go. Here's the ugly truth about "Silent House": The ending is yak excrement. And it's one of those endings that only gets worse and makes less sense the more you think about it. I know I have a problem over-thinking stuff like this, but the more I thought about it, the more the ending had me getting more ticked off thinking about the physical impossibilities that the twist needed to happen in order for it to occur.

The worst part is that I had an inkling of what was going on 25 minutes in. And I was really hoping they weren't going to go there, but hey presto, what do you know, they did. Basically, just imagine the most overused "twist" to throw in the end of a thriller/horror flick where things start getting trippy. You know the one I mean. Yeah that's the one they used. Unfortunately it's also the cliche that requires a lot of finesse to get to work relatively seamlessly. And it's so dumb that it really brings the rest of the movie down with it.

Remember kids, just because you foreshadow it heavily in the beginning doesn't mean that it will all make sense at the end. That just means you foreshadowed something that is dumb. I'm looking at you, Shyamalan.

"What if...SARAH is the house the whole time?!"

And while it's not as big of a deal as it could have been, I did have a minor gripe with something else. Essentially it all boils down to how hard it is to escape from a boarded up house. Having never tried to pull down planks of wood that have been nailed across a window, I can only imagine that it would be difficult. However, if you really wanted to escape, I mean really wanted out of a house because someone hiding inside was trying to kill you, I imagine that you'd be able to make at least a little progress out of shear adrenaline and willpower.

In "Silent House," she basically fumbles at the boards a bit, tries yanking for 5 seconds and then gives up to find another longer, scarier way out. She also conveniently forgets about the sledgehammer her dad was using not a half hour beforehand. And yeah, Elizabeth Olsen isn't exactly She-Hulk but you read stories about moms lifting cars off of their children. I'd think at the very least, she could put a bit more effort towards escaping, because I don't care if I'd have to gnaw my way out, were I in her shoes those planks would be gone, closely followed by myself.

Pictured above: Artist's interpretation of the escape.

Or you know...there's always the upstairs windows. You know, the ones that most likely aren't boarded up as heavily. Or go to the padlocked backdoor you couldn't find the key for and get a screwdriver and unscrew the latch since you're on the inside of the house. Or just find a damn crowbar or failing that a hammer and start prying boards off. I'm just saying that because you'd only need to pry off like 2, maybe 3 boards to fit your skinny ass through the gap. Plus there are tools laying all over the place since your dad is fixing up the house. Like that sledgehammer. I'm just saying...

(Seriously, she had to have walked past that sledgehammer at least twice)

YOU DON'T DESERVE ESCAPE.

THE BOTTOM LINE - "Silent House" is an interesting concept that is marred by a really dumb ending. While I praise its attempt at doing something unique, which it did well, and Olsen's performance, which was good, the gimmick is all that it's got going on for it. Recommended if the concept of a film presented as a single shot intrigues you, but don't except much in the way of story.