journal features

movie review - Fallen

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Toronto, 1998.03.29

This is a movie about a cop who sends off a killer, when he attends his execution. The killer really lays it on, coming across like Satan himself, reveling in all he's done. The cop thinks it's over, no one as thoroughly inhabited by that evil could not have been the killer and now the deaths are finished.

Only, they aren't over and what's worse various other characters surrounding the cop seem to know all about what was happening. And they taunt the man with the same refrain from a Stones song. Becoming convinced that he's dealing with a possession by a devil (named Azazel) he is in way over his head. The climax comes down to a desperate attempt to trap the devil. And, well, you'll have to watch it to work out how that goes.

Denzil Washington plays the lead, a non-believing street-wise cop. By the end, oh far he'll go.

A favorite. Strongly recommended. This is how horror should be treated.

rand()m quote

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)