Here's something you might be interested in.
Ask a Hipster — Advice you didn't know you needed
Big Screen — Movie commentary
Blurt — Music's inside track
Booze News — San Diego spirits
Classical Music — Immortal beauty
Classifieds — Free and easy
Cover Stories — Front-page features
Drinks All Around — Bartenders' drink recipes
Excerpts — Literary and spiritual excerpts
Feast! — Food & drink reviews
Feature Stories — Local news & stories
Fishing Report — What’s getting hooked from ship and shore
From the Archives — Spotlight on the past
Golden Dreams — Talk of the town
The Gonzo Report — Making the musical scene, or at least reporting from it
Letters — Our inbox
Movies@Home — Local movie buffs share favorites
Movie Reviews — Our critics' picks and pans
Musician Interviews — Up close with local artists
Neighborhood News from Stringers — Hyperlocal news
News Ticker — News & politics
Obermeyer — San Diego politics illustrated
Outdoors — Weekly changes in flora and fauna
Overheard in San Diego — Eavesdropping illustrated
Poetry — The old and the new
Reader Travel — Travel section built by travelers
Reading — The hunt for intellectuals
Roam-O-Rama — SoCal's best hiking/biking trails
San Diego Beer — Inside San Diego suds
SD on the QT — Almost factual news
Sheep and Goats — Places of worship
Special Issues — The best of
Street Style — San Diego streets have style
Surf Diego — Real stories from those braving the waves
Theater — On stage in San Diego this week
Tin Fork — Silver spoon alternative
Under the Radar — Matt Potter's undercover work
Unforgettable — Long-ago San Diego
Unreal Estate — San Diego's priciest pads
Your Week — Daily event picks
Verbinksi on vacation
Madman's dream, A Cure for Wellness
A Cure for Wellness: The gorgeous European spa–based existential crises of Paolo Sorrentino’s Youth x the lurid grotesquerie of a Hammer Studios horror film = a good time at the movies
With Pirates of the Caribbean, Gore Verbinski took a silly-spooky theme park attraction and built it into a multibillion-dollar defense of bucking the system and living by your wits. With A Cure for Wellness, he takes the campy dread of Hammer Horror films (Horror of Dracula, et alia) and builds it into a a gorgeous, epic assault on anti-immigration sentiments in Europe and elsewhere. (Yes, I’m serious.) True, it’s long and indulgent, littered with loose ends, unexplained details, and a few outright absurdities. Also true: despite those flaws, it remains solidly built, masterful with mood, and just wonderful to look upon.
Of course, if you’re going to ultimately condemn those who wish to build a wall against the leveling forces of technology, democracy, commerce, and racial mixing, it’s dramatically wise to give them all the credence you can at the outset. So the film opens on a professional man working both too hard and too late at his computer, with only a photo to connect him to the family waiting at home. Beset by chest pains, he heads to the water cooler for a drink, but it’s too late. (As he collapses, he topples the water jug, and the spreading wetness heralds the liquid nightmare to come.) Who could argue with the claim in the narrated letter that follows, that there is something sore amiss in humanity’s frantic grasping for material gain and illusory power? Perhaps it really would be better to retreat to a simpler, happier life — say, at a castle-cum-spa in the Swiss alps?
That’s what Dane DeHaan’s boss did, and now the young Turk has to go and fetch him, lest his company’s big merger fall through and his personal backside get paddled by the SEC. The casting of DeHaan, who looks rather similar to a young Leo DiCaprio, is inspired, given DiCaprio’s turn as a visitor to a mysterious hospital in 2010’s Shutter Island. Here as there, our hero is plagued by the creeping feeling that either the world’s starting to slip or he is. And here as there, those in authority seek only what’s best for him — honest — even as he grows increasingly hostile and afraid. Those awful things you thought you saw? The writhing eels in the sensory deprivation tank? Merely an effect of the toxins leaving the system. Tell me, how did your father die?
Movie
Cure for Wellness ***
Director Gore Verbinski takes the campy dread of Hammer horror films (<em>Horror of Dracula, et alia</em>) and builds it into a a gorgeous, epic assault on anti-immigration sentiments in Europe and elsewhere. Yes, it’s long and indulgent, littered with loose ends, unexplained details, and a few outright absurdities. But despite all that, it’s solidly built, masterful with mood, and just plain wonderful to look upon. Dane DeHaan (looking enough like Leo DiCaprio to recall 2010’s <em>Shutter Island</em>) plays an ambitious Young Turk sent to retrieve his boss from a wellness spa in the Swiss Alps. The big guy’s needed back at the office to make a merger go through, but his last letter home was an extended diatribe echoing the spa director’s thoughts on soul-sick modernity and its endless striving for money and power. (He’s not entirely wrong, of course, but then, the devil has been known to speak truth when it serves his purpose.) Once there, DeHaan finds it increasingly difficult to leave: there’s an accident, and there’s a girl, and something weird is going on, something involving eels... I’d say this big-budget B movie puts the “grand” back into “Grand Guignol,” if it weren’t for the earnest moral condemnation at its heart: that the real crime against nature is the use of the world’s wretched refuse to prop up a madman’s dream of civilization.
Verbinski does not make the mystery at the film’s heart especially difficult to unravel. Nor does he do much to obscure the significance of the young beauty who DeHaan sets out to rescue in place of his boss. Rather, with A Cure for Wellness, he wants you to sit back, relax, and enjoy the big-budget-B-movie execution. Yes, that really was a suspicious figure pulling back a curtain to spy from an upstairs window. Yes, that really is a bald-headed Igor carting corpses into an underground chamber. And, oh hell yes, that really is a mad scientist’s laboratory outfitted with a vampire’s boudoir. I’d say it puts the “grand” back into “Grand Guignol,” if it weren’t for the earnest moral condemnation at its heart: the real crime against nature is the use of the world’s wretched refuse to prop up a madman’s dream of civilization.
Here's something you might be interested in.
Verbinksi on vacation
Madman's dream, A Cure for Wellness
Verbinksi on vacation
Madman's dream, A Cure for Wellness
A Cure for Wellness: The gorgeous European spa–based existential crises of Paolo Sorrentino’s Youth x the lurid grotesquerie of a Hammer Studios horror film = a good time at the movies
With Pirates of the Caribbean, Gore Verbinski took a silly-spooky theme park attraction and built it into a multibillion-dollar defense of bucking the system and living by your wits. With A Cure for Wellness, he takes the campy dread of Hammer Horror films (Horror of Dracula, et alia) and builds it into a a gorgeous, epic assault on anti-immigration sentiments in Europe and elsewhere. (Yes, I’m serious.) True, it’s long and indulgent, littered with loose ends, unexplained details, and a few outright absurdities. Also true: despite those flaws, it remains solidly built, masterful with mood, and just wonderful to look upon.
Of course, if you’re going to ultimately condemn those who wish to build a wall against the leveling forces of technology, democracy, commerce, and racial mixing, it’s dramatically wise to give them all the credence you can at the outset. So the film opens on a professional man working both too hard and too late at his computer, with only a photo to connect him to the family waiting at home. Beset by chest pains, he heads to the water cooler for a drink, but it’s too late. (As he collapses, he topples the water jug, and the spreading wetness heralds the liquid nightmare to come.) Who could argue with the claim in the narrated letter that follows, that there is something sore amiss in humanity’s frantic grasping for material gain and illusory power? Perhaps it really would be better to retreat to a simpler, happier life — say, at a castle-cum-spa in the Swiss alps?
That’s what Dane DeHaan’s boss did, and now the young Turk has to go and fetch him, lest his company’s big merger fall through and his personal backside get paddled by the SEC. The casting of DeHaan, who looks rather similar to a young Leo DiCaprio, is inspired, given DiCaprio’s turn as a visitor to a mysterious hospital in 2010’s Shutter Island. Here as there, our hero is plagued by the creeping feeling that either the world’s starting to slip or he is. And here as there, those in authority seek only what’s best for him — honest — even as he grows increasingly hostile and afraid. Those awful things you thought you saw? The writhing eels in the sensory deprivation tank? Merely an effect of the toxins leaving the system. Tell me, how did your father die?
Movie
Cure for Wellness ***
Director Gore Verbinski takes the campy dread of Hammer horror films (<em>Horror of Dracula, et alia</em>) and builds it into a a gorgeous, epic assault on anti-immigration sentiments in Europe and elsewhere. Yes, it’s long and indulgent, littered with loose ends, unexplained details, and a few outright absurdities. But despite all that, it’s solidly built, masterful with mood, and just plain wonderful to look upon. Dane DeHaan (looking enough like Leo DiCaprio to recall 2010’s <em>Shutter Island</em>) plays an ambitious Young Turk sent to retrieve his boss from a wellness spa in the Swiss Alps. The big guy’s needed back at the office to make a merger go through, but his last letter home was an extended diatribe echoing the spa director’s thoughts on soul-sick modernity and its endless striving for money and power. (He’s not entirely wrong, of course, but then, the devil has been known to speak truth when it serves his purpose.) Once there, DeHaan finds it increasingly difficult to leave: there’s an accident, and there’s a girl, and something weird is going on, something involving eels... I’d say this big-budget B movie puts the “grand” back into “Grand Guignol,” if it weren’t for the earnest moral condemnation at its heart: that the real crime against nature is the use of the world’s wretched refuse to prop up a madman’s dream of civilization.
Verbinski does not make the mystery at the film’s heart especially difficult to unravel. Nor does he do much to obscure the significance of the young beauty who DeHaan sets out to rescue in place of his boss. Rather, with A Cure for Wellness, he wants you to sit back, relax, and enjoy the big-budget-B-movie execution. Yes, that really was a suspicious figure pulling back a curtain to spy from an upstairs window. Yes, that really is a bald-headed Igor carting corpses into an underground chamber. And, oh hell yes, that really is a mad scientist’s laboratory outfitted with a vampire’s boudoir. I’d say it puts the “grand” back into “Grand Guignol,” if it weren’t for the earnest moral condemnation at its heart: the real crime against nature is the use of the world’s wretched refuse to prop up a madman’s dream of civilization.
Comments