Review - Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key

Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key
dir. Sergio Martino
1972

Following The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh and Tail of the Scorpion, Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key is the third giallo film by notable Italian director Sergio Martino. Martino's giallo films follow the work previously done by the more famous directors Mario Bava and Dario Argento. For the unaware, a giallo is an Italian film that while usually placed in the horror genre in America often have more in common with thrillers and are very unique in their style. The term giallo itself originally referred to the cheap paperback thrillers and mysteries that many of the first giallo films were adaptations of. While commonly equated with the "slasher" subgenre of horror films, giallo films are different in several important ways: the story usually proceeds in an mystery or whodunit fashion with the identity of the killer unkown, there is often unique and stylish camera work, the music is often very stylized and is unusual in comparison to American horror films, there is often excessive nudity and violence, the killer is often masked and wields a bladed weapon, and the films often focus strongly on the psychological aspects of fear. As time passed gialli began to feature supernatural and more varied stories and became greatly influenced by the burgeoning slasher subgenre in America.

Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key is a classic giallo. The plot centers on a middle-aged failed writer named Oliviero Rouvigny and his abused wife Irina. Oliviero lives a decadent life filled with alcohol and sex in his large family villa in the Italian countryside. He supports his habits by selling what remains of the villa's furniture to pay for the expenses. Irina, meanwhile fears for her life and is terrorized by Oliviero's cat Satan, whom belonged to Oliviero's mother. After a drunken night out in which his mistress turns up dead, Oliviero becomes the prime suspect in her murder. More women are attacked and Oliviero's twenty year old sexually uninhibited niece Floriana comes to stay at the villa bearing her own schemes. Fear and paranoia build for the characters as the story spirals to it's conclusion. Based on the story by Edgar Allan Poe,The Black Cat, Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key is an exceptionally well written and plotted giallo for it's time.

Recognizable character actor Luigi Pistilli, perhaps best known for Mario Bava's giallo Bay of Blood, plays Oliviero and gives him the life that the part calls for. Pistilli manages to bring us into the broken, twisted, decadent world of Oliviero without driving us away. Swedish model Anita Strindberg, who was featured in many gialli and genre films in Italy during the 60s and 70s, plays the hysterical and terrorized Irina quite well and is a departure from her usually more glamorous roles. The standout in the film is Edwige Fenech who is simply stunning in the role of Floriana. Fenech is well known for her Italian comedies and for her looks and she also starred in a number of giallo films before later moving on to Italian television in the 1980s. Usually relegated to the role of 'good girl' or 'victim' here Fenech plays against type as Floriana. Floriana is a sexually ambitious and ambiguous character whose motives are devious and who attempts to manipulate both Oliviero, her uncle, and Irina for her own benefit. While Strindberg and Fenech, along with several other actresses, have extensive nudity in the film, Fenech also has several love scenes with men and women. The acting is all quite good for this type of film although a modern American viewer may have problems with the Italian dialog and the style of acting.

Martino employs a unique and stylized camera work, as is usual in a giallo, and the music too is quite an important player in the film. While the film is light on violence there is a strong build up of tension and suspense as the story plays out and it certainly stands up well against other gialli in terms of style, story, and suspense. Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key is a fine example of giallo films of the 1960s and 1970s, though with the lack of blood and bodies and the queasy moments of incest found within, Bava's Bay of Blood and Argento's Tenebrae are perhaps better starting points for those interested in these films.

Verdict: 4 and 1/2 stars out of 5.

Review - The Dark Knight

The Dark Knight
dir. Christoper Nolan
2008

The Dark Knight is a good movie. I like The Dark Knight. Ok? I want to get that out of the way before going further into this review as I definitely don't like (love) the movie in the same way so many do. Of course, I'm not the biggest fan of Batman Begins either so perhaps we should start there.

Batman Begins was a fine film that I felt began to fall apart once Batman was introduced. The acting was mediocre to painful (hello Mrs. Cruise) and the villains were never very interesting, frightening, or menacing. Christian Bale's raspy Batman voice was almost laugh-out-loud bad. The fight scenes were poorly staged and incomprehensible in a Jason Bourne-esque way. While these gripes were sticking points for me and Batman Begins, my largest problem with Nolan's Batman films is his insistence on hyper-realism. All these things that I disliked about Batman Begins were present in The Dark Knight, though the acting was a better with Heath Ledger and Aaron Eckhardt.

The plot of The Dark Knight centers around the Joker bringing chaos to Gotham City and Batman attempting to stop him and to help district attorney Harvey Dent succeed so that Batman will no longer be needed. While those coming from a comic book background may be used to the juxtaposition of Batman and the Joker, the true pairing here is Joker and Harvey Dent/Two-Face. The Joker represents chaos and Harvey Dent represents the order that Gotham City needs. Batman is not the focus of this film.

The acting this time out has improved from the last film as Ledger and Eckhardt both give weight and bring their characters, characters who would well fall into cliche in the hands of other actors, to life. Ledger's Joker is a new take on the character, at least in film, and one which works pretty well except for the lack of laughing that the Joker should have in any incarnation. Eckhardt is quite strong as the mentally unstable Dent, but the audience will find Two-Face to not be nearly as interesting as the district attorney which is a shame. Bale is serviceable as Batman/Bruce Wayne once again although any acting he does as Batman is hardly noticeable as he rasps and bares his teeth throughout the Batman scenes. The raspy, throaty Batman voice which was rather horrible in Batman Begins returns and becomes a liability for the film when Batman has more than one or two lines in succession. As Bruce Wayne the playboy Bale is a bit better though the character remains the same as he was in Batman Begins. Katie Holmes has been replaced by Maggie Gyllenhaal in the role of Rachel Dawes, but it seems that Gyllenhaal is attempting to see if she can outdo Holmes' previous low in acting with her portrayal of the character. Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman return playing not only the same characters from the last film, but playing the same characters, especially in Freeman's case, that they've played in dozens of films.

Christopher Nolan once again goes the shaky-cam route for fight scenes and once again the film suffers for it. While the idea behind the shaky-cam fight scene is that it brings the viewer into the fight what it does when executed poorly is simply leave the viewer questioning that just happened. Why bother with the complex fight choreography when no one can discern what is happening on screen? The shaky-cam is slightly relaxed from the heights it reached in Batman Begins, but far too often I was once again wishing that the camera would pull back and show me what exactly was happening. In one fight I wouldn't have known Batman was fighting/wrestling with a dog except for the occasional bark and a quick edit of a some biting jaws. This isn't to say that Nolan would have excelled with a more traditional fight scene as there are some directors who simply have trouble with action, but it would have been nice for him to try.

Before diving into my largest issue with the film one more problem must be confronted. The Dark Knight is too long, too bloated, and could definitely use some editing. The film would have worked far more effectively if it were shortened by 10 or 15 minutes. A film of 152 minutes needs to have better pacing than The Dark Knight as it lurches to starts and stops and never adequately builds to the conclusion. The Lord of the Rings films, while long, were edited down from the Extended Cuts released on DVD not only for total length, but because while interesting, the long versions simply do not work as well as movies. The Dark Knight should have went in a similar direction.

Just as with Batman Begins though, for this reviewer, the crippling flaw in Nolan's The Dark Knight is the realism which he insists on. While there are some gadgets and slightly out-there set pieces most of the film functions strictly in the realm of reality and it is here where it loses me. For me, the excessive realism simply pushes me out of the film with the unreality of it all. No one in the "real world" would dress up as a giant bat and fight crime, and to push the realism of the film makes it all the more apparent that it is unrealistic at heart, as are all super heroes in comics. The hyper-realism Nolan uses pulls me out of the film in the same way as an anachronism or bad dialog will in other films. A film like Batman (1989) is obviously not meant to be realistic and because it never attempts to be I never become annoyed with the ludicrousness of a costumed hero. Even films like Spider-Man or Superman while taking place in a largely realistic New York City are styled in dialog, sets, and direction so that you are never led to believe that the creators meant for these films to be in our world and by the rules of our world in the way Nolan does. The New York Spider-Man inhabits is not our New York nor is it meant to be in the way it looks and the way it is shot. It is similar to the New York that comic-book Spider-Man lives in. Gotham City, while an imaginary city, in Batman Begins and The Dark Knight is simply Chicago. It looks and feels like our Chicago rather than Gotham City.

For me it comes down to the fact that comic book heroes are inherently unrealistic and to push for realism as much as Nolan does creates a tension in the film which becomes jarring and problematic. In the stylized worlds of other super hero films and big blockbuster action movies I can more readily accept unrealistic problems, gadgets, characters, and situations but in a film like The Dark Knight they stand out and call attention to the fact that they are unrealistic. A multi-ton Bat-tank on top of a church roof? A device which will immediately evaporate the water in pipes but not in a river? A cell phone radar technology that can see facepaint on a thug? These things and so much more stand out poorly in the realistic world Nolan wishes to construct. Nolan wants to have his cake and eat it too. Holes in logic, wholly unrealistic gadgets and vehicles, and super heroes and villains in general stand out in a way in the Dark Knight which is problematic for this reviewer. Put simply Nolan created a crime film/thriller that happens to occasionally feature the Joker, Two-Face, and Batman. Best super-hero movie? How does it even qualify as a super-hero movie?

Verdict: 3 stars out of 5.