The Forest: Can't see anything for the trees

The Forest (2016) • View trailer 
Two stars. Rated PG-13, for disturbing images and content
By Derrick Bang

We must hear it half a dozen times, from various characters: You shouldn’t visit the forest, because it’s a bad place. But if you’re gonna explore it, then — no matter what — stay on the path.

So, naturally, at first opportunity, our numb-nuts heroine — and her small search party, led by a supposedly experienced guide — stray from the path.

Having ventured into the spooky Aokigahara Forest in order to find her missing twin sister,
Sara (Natalie Dormer) isn't entirely surprised when their guide, Michi (Yukiyoshi Ozawa,
left) spots something potentially unpleasant. Journalist Aidan (Taylor Kinney) is less
concerned; one way or another, he expects to get a great story out of their little adventure.

It’s difficult to endure movie characters who behave with such unrelenting stupidity.

It’s also difficult to endure movie scripts that are so sloppy and ill-conceived. Three people apparently were required to write this laughable excuse for a chiller: Nick Antosca, Sarah Cornwell and Ben Ketai. Antosca and Ketai have a minor string of TV credits; this is Cornwell’s scripting debut. To put it kindly, she’d be smart to keep her day job. Her colleagues should stick to the small screen.

Their clumsy narrative for The Forest is yet another example of the idiot plot: a story that lurches from one scene to the next, only because each and every character behaves like an idiot at all times. I’m guessing Antosca & Co. were inspired, in part, by the New Asian Horror Wave that produced The Ring, The Grudge, Dark Water and their many imitators; The Forest occasionally, fitfully, achieves that level of atmospheric unease.

But director Jason Zada, in an unimpressive feature debut, has only one unimaginative nail to hit as this saga proceeds, and he hammers it relentlessly:

Our heroine, Sara (Natalie Dormer), hears or sees something unusual. She s-l-o-w-l-y walks toward it, cinematographer Mattias Troelstrup framing her face in an ever-tighter close-up. Then, smash-cut to a whatzit that leaps out at her — which is to say, at us — accompanied by an orchestral shriek from Bear McCreary’s score.

Every. Single. Time.

Is it just me, or are horror movies getting more tired, more predictable ... and more dumb?

The story, such as it is:

The U.S.-based Sara wakens, late one night, knowing — thanks to their shared bond — that something has happened to her identical twin. Jess, forever in search of herself, is living in Japan and teaching English to schoolchildren. During a few frantic and unsatisfying phone calls, Sara learns that Jess ventured into the Aokigahara Forest, at the base of Mr. Fuji, where people often go to commit suicide.

As a result, the forest has become infested with yurei, the restless and angry spirits of these suicides, who “encourage” despairing visitors to join their ranks.

Stuff and nonsense; Sara knows that Jess is still alive, thanks to their connection. Sara therefore hops a plane to Japan, and soon makes her way to a rustic hotel adjacent to the Aokigahara Forest. She strikes up a conversation with expat journalist Aiden (Taylor Kinney), a fellow stranger in a strange land; his connection with an experienced forest guide — Yukiyoshi Ozawa, as the pensive and brooding Michi — turns them into an expedition of three.

The Counselor: Guilty as charged

The Counselor (2013) • View trailer 
No stars (turkey). Rating: R, for graphic violence, grisly images, profanity and strong sexual content
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 10.25.13

Cormac McCarthy apparently felt that 2009’s big-screen adaptation of his novel The Road wasn’t sufficiently bleak, violent or morally depraved, so he upped his game with the original screenplay for this glossy bit of rubbish.

Despite repeated, protracted and viciously descriptive warnings from Westray (Brad Pitt,
left), our imbecilic title character (Michael Fassbender) stubbornly insists on getting
involved with a massive shipment of illegal drugs. After all, what could go wrong?

Rarely have so many A-list stars been involved in such a lamentable waste of time.

The Counselor isn’t merely set in a world of abominable behavior; McCarthy’s characters are cheerfully pragmatic about it. No act too vile to contemplate? They don’t merely contemplate; they discuss barbarism with the thoughtful ease of two fellows comparing cigar brands in a gentlemen’s club. Then, having laboriously exhausted the subject, director Ridley Scott ensures that we’ll eventually get to watch each degenerate act.

McCarthy has a Pulitzer Prize to his credit, for the aforementioned The Road, and rumor suggests that he’s under consideration for a Nobel Prize for literature. The characters in his novels often struggle with moral ambiguity in an increasingly cynical world, although we’re generally able to sympathize with a well-meaning protagonist, whether John Grady Cole in All the Pretty Horses, or Sheriff Ed Tom Bell in the grimmer No Country for Old Men (adapted into a sensational 2007 film by Joel and Ethan Coen).

But there’s nobody to like in The Counselor; indeed, it’s difficult to even understand most of the characters who populate this deadly dull study of ill-advised acts and their horrible consequences. Everybody is morally compromised at best, or sociopathic, or indifferently brutal. Everybody except the token innocent, that is, who may as well be wearing a sign that reads “Sacrificial Lamb.”

Mind you, a roster of degenerates isn’t necessarily bad in and of itself; Quentin Tarantino has a way of extracting wonderfully dark entertainment from the vicious swine who inhabit, say, Pulp Fiction or Inglourious Basterds. But that’s precisely the point: Tarantino characters are engaging for the way they revel in their bad behavior, whereas the increasingly tiresome players in this drama give new meaning to the word “boring.”