THE DUKE ON WHITE NOISE
It does a man good to know that out there on the barren plains of
Hollywood, some folks are sitting down for to watch shit like Ju-
On or Kairo or even those Lord Of The Ringu’s and thinking
something other than “Man, wouldn’t this be great if only there
were more Caucasians and less subtitles?” It appears that the
whole realisation that, pretty much, those Asian cats are making
the best horror flicks right about now, might be influencing
Hollywood in areas other than the ones where folks sit about
acquiring remake rights and such.
For sure, we’ve still got stuff like the Dark Water remake coming
up (a flick that, let’s be honest here, wasn’t really that much
of a “horror” in the first place), but if maybe you were wanting
to see a western horror flick that owes a lot to the Koreans or
the Japanese without copying and pasting the plot wholesale, then
what The Duke would do is point you in the direction of White
Noise.
What White Noise concerns itself with is the E.V.P, or Electronic
Voice Phenomenon. Back in the days of The Duke's Youth, shit like
that right there used to scare The Child Duke fuckless, is what.
The notion that a detuned radio or telly might be transmitting
messages in-between the fuzz and the static, that right there was
enough to ensure that The Duke turned the damn thing off every
night, for fear of falling asleep and waking up to a screen-full
of static and a loada hushed gibberish about “The Duke…
Motherfucking… Dunst Is Waiting… Fucking…. Duke De…. Ooooh” and
so on.
White Noise deals with exactly this sorta tomfoolery. What occurs
is that Michael Keaton’s wife dies, and all a sudden there’s a
fella telling him that she’s been sending him messages through
the telly. Obviously Keaton laughs this off and never thinks
about it ever again, and then the flick follows him through his
career as a business man of some sort, eventually succumbing to
intense cocaine abuse and then dying with his willy out in the
middle of a car-park.
Or it might do, if it was maybe directed by Scorsese, but no,
Keaton takes a scene or two for to laugh it all off, and then,
instead of laughing, goes and checks out what this old coot has
to say. Things get progressively spookier, more disturbingly
eerie and such, and even Deborah Kara Unger of Davey Cronenberg’s
Sex With Automobiles gets involved.
And really, you can’t blame Keaton for following it up. The
chance to have a conversation with a deceased loved-one, that
chance right there doesn’t come along too often, I’m guessing. He
probably lies awake most nights thinking of stuff he shoulda
said, stuff he shouldn’t a said, stuff he maybe would’ve said if
only she had said something other than what she did back that
time in the bath. All sorts a conversational avenues he wishes to
God he had explored. Now he can, and all with the aid of nothing
more diabolical than a detuned Samsung.
That right there is another reason, actually, why White Noise is
profoundly unsettling, and still would be, even if it was a load
of crud, which it isn’t at all. Ouiji boards and psychics and
such, all that stuff probably does the same trick, but there’s
never one about when the idea that talking to the dead might be a
bit of a laugh comes into a fellas head, and so the world goes on
untroubled by the forces of Evil breaking through and such. A
bunch a drunk fuckers in a frat house or an opium-den, though, if
they decide to conjure Satan just to see what happens, since lets
face it, this fucking crack-ganja is awful, if White Noise is to
be trusted, and all those websites that state that, yeah, this is
pretty much proven, is what, if that’s all correct, then next to
no effort is required for to go ahead and do it. They don’t have
to worry about writing out the alphabet and cutting out the
letters and arranging it into a circle and then finding a glass
that hasn’t been pissed in. They just gotta turn on the telly.
Maybe that’s why Channel 4 in the UK shows The Magic Roundabout
in the middle of the night. Maybe they hope that when these
drunken rapscallions decide to invoke all hell through the telly,
they’ll find Dougal and shit instead, and be too busy laughing
and staring in awe for to think another second about the
paranormal.
Just a damn theory, is all The Duke has to offer.
Anyhow, to return to the whole Asian Horror thing from back in
the first paragraph.
White Noise is an obvious attempt to make those same techniques
work in a Hollywood flick based on an original screenplay, rather
than a foreign number some executives saw one night in their
hotel suites. The whole thing is unsettlingly cold, clinical
even, what folks would have called Kubrickian back in the days
before Sadako got flung head-first down a motherfucking well. The
shots of the tide ominously lapping the shore, that shit brings
Ringu to mind in a second.
Also, there’s the whole Evil Technology thing from shit like Kairo
or Phone, and the former is evoked more times than enough by the
shadowy spirit-type things drifting around the edges of the frame
here and there.
And that framing, that framing is wonderful. Things are shot in
such a way that characters or props are shoved to the furthest
reaches of the screen, leaving a gulf in the middle that a fella
can’t help but scrutinise for hints of something that shouldn’t
be there. Like in Ju-On – The Curse, when your eyes trundle
timidly around the frame, since the fella is no more than a tiny
dot at the bottom, and surely it’s framed like that for a
motherfucking reason. Sure enough, just as it cuts, you spy a
fucking woman looking out from the top bedroom.
It’s like The Haunting, as in the Robert Wise masterpiece, and
not the one about some pixels scare the shit outta Catherine Zeta
Jones. Inanimate objects become terrifying, oppressive, looming
large at the corners of the frame.
Still, for all these things White Noise does wonderfully, there’s
a few things that get on a fellas nerves. None of these have to
do with Michael Keaton, who’s a joy to behold, is what. If I was
Michael Keaton I’d be feeling a tad pissed off at Quentin
Tarantino right about now. “What the fuck, QT?”, I’d be saying.
“How come John Travolta appears in your flick and next thing
anyone knows there’s those John Woo pictures and fucking
Battlefield Earth and all sortsa shit waiting once shooting
stops? Wasn’t I in Jackie Brown? What the hell do I get? A kick
in the nuts and a Multiplicity, most likely.”
Hopefully what’ll happen is White Noise’ll initiate some sort of
revival for this most underrated of actors. Didn’t you see
Pacific Heights? What the hells wrong with you people? He was
Batman, for crying out loud, long before that American Psycho
took to wearing the leather and the fancy belt.
White Noise also constitutes a stepping stone of sorts for
Director Geoff Sax, or Geoffrey as the credits would have it.
He's been flinging out excellent TV work over here in The United
UK for a couple decades now, wrestling with subjects as varied as
Shakespeare and Doctor Who. Far as I can tell, this is his first
Hollywood feature, and what it appears to insinuate is that this
fella knows how to point a camera or two.
However the hell, there are times when White Noise, which has
been granted a Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card on account of the
inherent creepiness of its subject matter (I mean come the fuck
on, you could have Cynthia Rothrock starring as a kung-fu defence
attorney, and it’d still freak the hell out of a fella, provided
it had enough sound effects and so on on account of the “DEAD”),
still manages to annoy a fella somewhat. For motherfucking
example, plot canyons appear all the damn time, and characters
are remarkably inconsistent when it comes to the old intelligence
and “logic” and stuff; One minute they’re drawing seemingly
impossible links between the most minute pieces of information,
the next they’re taking half-an-hour of screentime to work out
something so blindingly, frustratingly obvious that you’ve
already worked it out fifteen minutes before they even consider
starting to think about it.
There’s also a sense that certain scenes or characters have been
drastically trimmed, so moments which should knock you upside the
teeth in a Usual Suspects-esque manner have you instead wondering
about who the fuck was that / what the fuck was that / why the
fuck is that? And so on.
In addition to this, even though the flick is pleasingly downbeat
throughout, there’s still a couple seconds at the end that make a
man wanna puke.
Also, why the hell do ghosts have to be so damn cryptic all the
time? (ha ha. Cryptic. And they’re ghosts, so…) If they’ve only
got one chance for to get some vital message across, why not just
come out and fucking say it? “Yeah, thing is, I’m (Whoever the
hell. Deceased), I buried my life savings under the tree in the
back yard. There's a shovel in the shed. Go about four foot, four
and a half, tops. Just under the oak that’s got the carving of a
penis on it. The address is 444 North Crescent. Not 445, although
they also have a similar tree. Cheers.”
Why all this “Maple… Ash… Don’t believe it” nonsense? Why all the
“Jimmy… isn’t… frozen?”
Unless maybe you were enquiring as to the reliability of a
cryogenic chamber you been working on, and the test subject is a
fella called Jimmy. But I digress.
So what can be learned from it all is that even with a screenplay
that borders on ridiculous half-way-through, you can still craft
a memorable, brilliantly effective horror flick by taking the
time to make sure every fucking scene has the ability to jangle a
man’s nerves. It might just be that there’s a mirror in the top
left that unsettles for no discernable reason. It might just be
that someone’s putting on a radio, and you know no good can come
of it, and even if the scene ends and everything’s grand, you’re
still thinking about that damn radio, how some catastrophic shit
must be just around the corner.
It ain’t perfect, but it reaches something approaching fantastic
on several occasions, and it tries, man. It doesn’t rely on fancy
effects or teens running about the place, and it manages to
completely avoid any possible similarities with that flick about
Kevin Costner’s wife gets attacked by a giant Dragonfly or some
shit.
It’s well worth seeing, is what. Like a lot of that spooky Asian
malarkey, it stretches the old suspension of disbelief well
beyond any polite boundary, but what you remember is the shit in-
between, the half-glimpsed faces, the seemingly-illogical sense
of terror, the brilliance of Michael Motherfucking Keaton.
Good work, dead folks.
Thanks folks.
Send The Duke An Email
Hollywood, some folks are sitting down for to watch shit like Ju-
On or Kairo or even those Lord Of The Ringu’s and thinking
something other than “Man, wouldn’t this be great if only there
were more Caucasians and less subtitles?” It appears that the
whole realisation that, pretty much, those Asian cats are making
the best horror flicks right about now, might be influencing
Hollywood in areas other than the ones where folks sit about
acquiring remake rights and such.
For sure, we’ve still got stuff like the Dark Water remake coming
up (a flick that, let’s be honest here, wasn’t really that much
of a “horror” in the first place), but if maybe you were wanting
to see a western horror flick that owes a lot to the Koreans or
the Japanese without copying and pasting the plot wholesale, then
what The Duke would do is point you in the direction of White
Noise.
What White Noise concerns itself with is the E.V.P, or Electronic
Voice Phenomenon. Back in the days of The Duke's Youth, shit like
that right there used to scare The Child Duke fuckless, is what.
The notion that a detuned radio or telly might be transmitting
messages in-between the fuzz and the static, that right there was
enough to ensure that The Duke turned the damn thing off every
night, for fear of falling asleep and waking up to a screen-full
of static and a loada hushed gibberish about “The Duke…
Motherfucking… Dunst Is Waiting… Fucking…. Duke De…. Ooooh” and
so on.
White Noise deals with exactly this sorta tomfoolery. What occurs
is that Michael Keaton’s wife dies, and all a sudden there’s a
fella telling him that she’s been sending him messages through
the telly. Obviously Keaton laughs this off and never thinks
about it ever again, and then the flick follows him through his
career as a business man of some sort, eventually succumbing to
intense cocaine abuse and then dying with his willy out in the
middle of a car-park.
Or it might do, if it was maybe directed by Scorsese, but no,
Keaton takes a scene or two for to laugh it all off, and then,
instead of laughing, goes and checks out what this old coot has
to say. Things get progressively spookier, more disturbingly
eerie and such, and even Deborah Kara Unger of Davey Cronenberg’s
Sex With Automobiles gets involved.
And really, you can’t blame Keaton for following it up. The
chance to have a conversation with a deceased loved-one, that
chance right there doesn’t come along too often, I’m guessing. He
probably lies awake most nights thinking of stuff he shoulda
said, stuff he shouldn’t a said, stuff he maybe would’ve said if
only she had said something other than what she did back that
time in the bath. All sorts a conversational avenues he wishes to
God he had explored. Now he can, and all with the aid of nothing
more diabolical than a detuned Samsung.
That right there is another reason, actually, why White Noise is
profoundly unsettling, and still would be, even if it was a load
of crud, which it isn’t at all. Ouiji boards and psychics and
such, all that stuff probably does the same trick, but there’s
never one about when the idea that talking to the dead might be a
bit of a laugh comes into a fellas head, and so the world goes on
untroubled by the forces of Evil breaking through and such. A
bunch a drunk fuckers in a frat house or an opium-den, though, if
they decide to conjure Satan just to see what happens, since lets
face it, this fucking crack-ganja is awful, if White Noise is to
be trusted, and all those websites that state that, yeah, this is
pretty much proven, is what, if that’s all correct, then next to
no effort is required for to go ahead and do it. They don’t have
to worry about writing out the alphabet and cutting out the
letters and arranging it into a circle and then finding a glass
that hasn’t been pissed in. They just gotta turn on the telly.
Maybe that’s why Channel 4 in the UK shows The Magic Roundabout
in the middle of the night. Maybe they hope that when these
drunken rapscallions decide to invoke all hell through the telly,
they’ll find Dougal and shit instead, and be too busy laughing
and staring in awe for to think another second about the
paranormal.
Just a damn theory, is all The Duke has to offer.
Anyhow, to return to the whole Asian Horror thing from back in
the first paragraph.
White Noise is an obvious attempt to make those same techniques
work in a Hollywood flick based on an original screenplay, rather
than a foreign number some executives saw one night in their
hotel suites. The whole thing is unsettlingly cold, clinical
even, what folks would have called Kubrickian back in the days
before Sadako got flung head-first down a motherfucking well. The
shots of the tide ominously lapping the shore, that shit brings
Ringu to mind in a second.
Also, there’s the whole Evil Technology thing from shit like Kairo
or Phone, and the former is evoked more times than enough by the
shadowy spirit-type things drifting around the edges of the frame
here and there.
And that framing, that framing is wonderful. Things are shot in
such a way that characters or props are shoved to the furthest
reaches of the screen, leaving a gulf in the middle that a fella
can’t help but scrutinise for hints of something that shouldn’t
be there. Like in Ju-On – The Curse, when your eyes trundle
timidly around the frame, since the fella is no more than a tiny
dot at the bottom, and surely it’s framed like that for a
motherfucking reason. Sure enough, just as it cuts, you spy a
fucking woman looking out from the top bedroom.
It’s like The Haunting, as in the Robert Wise masterpiece, and
not the one about some pixels scare the shit outta Catherine Zeta
Jones. Inanimate objects become terrifying, oppressive, looming
large at the corners of the frame.
Still, for all these things White Noise does wonderfully, there’s
a few things that get on a fellas nerves. None of these have to
do with Michael Keaton, who’s a joy to behold, is what. If I was
Michael Keaton I’d be feeling a tad pissed off at Quentin
Tarantino right about now. “What the fuck, QT?”, I’d be saying.
“How come John Travolta appears in your flick and next thing
anyone knows there’s those John Woo pictures and fucking
Battlefield Earth and all sortsa shit waiting once shooting
stops? Wasn’t I in Jackie Brown? What the hell do I get? A kick
in the nuts and a Multiplicity, most likely.”
Hopefully what’ll happen is White Noise’ll initiate some sort of
revival for this most underrated of actors. Didn’t you see
Pacific Heights? What the hells wrong with you people? He was
Batman, for crying out loud, long before that American Psycho
took to wearing the leather and the fancy belt.
White Noise also constitutes a stepping stone of sorts for
Director Geoff Sax, or Geoffrey as the credits would have it.
He's been flinging out excellent TV work over here in The United
UK for a couple decades now, wrestling with subjects as varied as
Shakespeare and Doctor Who. Far as I can tell, this is his first
Hollywood feature, and what it appears to insinuate is that this
fella knows how to point a camera or two.
However the hell, there are times when White Noise, which has
been granted a Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card on account of the
inherent creepiness of its subject matter (I mean come the fuck
on, you could have Cynthia Rothrock starring as a kung-fu defence
attorney, and it’d still freak the hell out of a fella, provided
it had enough sound effects and so on on account of the “DEAD”),
still manages to annoy a fella somewhat. For motherfucking
example, plot canyons appear all the damn time, and characters
are remarkably inconsistent when it comes to the old intelligence
and “logic” and stuff; One minute they’re drawing seemingly
impossible links between the most minute pieces of information,
the next they’re taking half-an-hour of screentime to work out
something so blindingly, frustratingly obvious that you’ve
already worked it out fifteen minutes before they even consider
starting to think about it.
There’s also a sense that certain scenes or characters have been
drastically trimmed, so moments which should knock you upside the
teeth in a Usual Suspects-esque manner have you instead wondering
about who the fuck was that / what the fuck was that / why the
fuck is that? And so on.
In addition to this, even though the flick is pleasingly downbeat
throughout, there’s still a couple seconds at the end that make a
man wanna puke.
Also, why the hell do ghosts have to be so damn cryptic all the
time? (ha ha. Cryptic. And they’re ghosts, so…) If they’ve only
got one chance for to get some vital message across, why not just
come out and fucking say it? “Yeah, thing is, I’m (Whoever the
hell. Deceased), I buried my life savings under the tree in the
back yard. There's a shovel in the shed. Go about four foot, four
and a half, tops. Just under the oak that’s got the carving of a
penis on it. The address is 444 North Crescent. Not 445, although
they also have a similar tree. Cheers.”
Why all this “Maple… Ash… Don’t believe it” nonsense? Why all the
“Jimmy… isn’t… frozen?”
Unless maybe you were enquiring as to the reliability of a
cryogenic chamber you been working on, and the test subject is a
fella called Jimmy. But I digress.
So what can be learned from it all is that even with a screenplay
that borders on ridiculous half-way-through, you can still craft
a memorable, brilliantly effective horror flick by taking the
time to make sure every fucking scene has the ability to jangle a
man’s nerves. It might just be that there’s a mirror in the top
left that unsettles for no discernable reason. It might just be
that someone’s putting on a radio, and you know no good can come
of it, and even if the scene ends and everything’s grand, you’re
still thinking about that damn radio, how some catastrophic shit
must be just around the corner.
It ain’t perfect, but it reaches something approaching fantastic
on several occasions, and it tries, man. It doesn’t rely on fancy
effects or teens running about the place, and it manages to
completely avoid any possible similarities with that flick about
Kevin Costner’s wife gets attacked by a giant Dragonfly or some
shit.
It’s well worth seeing, is what. Like a lot of that spooky Asian
malarkey, it stretches the old suspension of disbelief well
beyond any polite boundary, but what you remember is the shit in-
between, the half-glimpsed faces, the seemingly-illogical sense
of terror, the brilliance of Michael Motherfucking Keaton.
Good work, dead folks.
Thanks folks.
Send The Duke An Email
