Word: whannel
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Dates: during 2006-2006
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...bears the message "Play me"). I'm tempted to compare the two men's existential dilemma to that of a Samuel Beckett play. There are differences, though. Instead of being buried to the neck in sand, or stranded on the road to nowhere, Lawrence (Cary Elwes) and Adam (Leigh Whannel, who also wrote the script) are chained on opposite sides of a Stygian bathroom, with a lifeless body between them...
...Because it's as ingenious, and remorseless, as its twisted villain. The brilliant, devious psycho-shadow, dreaming up ways for his victims to kill themselves, is a sepulchral stand-in for the writer (Whannel on all three films) and the director (James Wan on the first, Darren Lynn Bousman on the next two). They are playing the same murderous mind games on the audience - which is trapped, not in a urinal dungeon or a booby-trapped house, but in the darkness of a movie theater or rec room...
...accomplished all this on an 18-day shoot, six of which were devoted to the bathroom scenes, shot in chronological order. (The rest of the picture, about Police Detective Danny Glover's attempt to find Jigsaw, is pretty ordinary.) It was your basic, low-budget, get-it-done movie. Whannel recalls that "James would ask for a third take, and the A.D. [assistant director] would be like, 'What do you think you are - Kubrick?'" Somehow, though, these two kids from an Australian film school, working on their first feature, got it done, and matched the ingenuity of the plot with...
...like this requires good actors to give it heft and plausibility. I'm not asking for today's equivalents of Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine, the stars of the Sleuth movie, but there's more to acting, even horror movie acting, than screaming in agony and shouting in rage. Whannel (who is charm personified when chatting about the film on the DVD featurette) and Elwes can't manage the crucial middle range of emotions the two men have to feel in the moments when they're not trying to kill each other or save themselves...
...little E.R., a little Fear Factor: Whannel may be running out of genres to imitate or subvert. The series is dissipating; the sequels should be called Saw -2 and Saw -3. But that may be a minority opinion. The Regal audience loved the movie, applauding vigorously at the end and chattering happily on the escalators that led them out of the theater and onto the city street at 2 a.m. New York used to scare people; once it was its own horror movie. Now it's just a playground, where the coolest, most scariest rides are in the plexes. People...
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