It's a debate I've participated in for years. Can a film, a horror film in particular, be considered good or effective if the performances aren't very strong? Do we really turn into a horror film and expect realism and quality on the part of the actors?

I know my answer is almost always yes. We do need good performances or else the actors and the director failed to accomplish their mutual goal of conveying the story as effectively as possible. If I don't believe in the performances, I'm unlikely to believe the story. And if I don't believe the story, I feel like I'm wasting my time. And if I'm wasting my time, I'm not likely to say kind things about a film.

All of this is coming to mind because I watched what some consider the quintessential evil child film for the first time last night: Children of the Corn. Based on Stephen King's short story of the same name, Children of the Corn concerns an adult couple who happen to drive through the wrong town on a trip. Three years before, the children rose up against the adults of the town, slaughtered them all, and began worshiping a boy named Isaac who preached of "He who walks behind the rows" of the cornfield. The result is a very unnerving set-up for a feature film.

So why all of this talk about performances? Simple. The cast is pretty awful. From the children who don't seem to have received much coaching to the adult stars who have nothing to work with, director Fritz Kiersch either failed at directing his actors or had such a stylized interpretation of reality he wanted the performances to be that awkward. Despite these major glaring issues, I was scared by this film. The children were so off in their line reading and performances they turned from horrible to terrifying. They weren't really human: only unreasonable facsimiles of humanity. The adults had to fade to the background to bring out how creepy the scenario really was.

Are there even bigger issues than the acting? You betcha. The special effects in the final reel are bad. Like, if I put a wig on a watermelon and smashed it with a sledgehammer, it would look more realistic than the raging clouds and killer cornfield of this film.

Then there are the inconsistencies. It's almost like Kiersch could not figure out which characters he wanted to focus on, so he threw them all at you in random spurts. The film starts with a child's voice over narration that disappears twenty minutes in. Then we follow the adult couple, switching between husband and wife for another thirty minutes. Throughout those fifty minutes, insurgent right hand religious teen Malachi takes over without saying a word and disappears just as quickly. Then the voice over reappears for a few minutes only to never be touched on again. It's off balanced, and like all the other arguably poor aspects of the film, works.

I don't know how the film works so well. Nothing is particularly effective when looked at as an individual element, yet all of those slightly to really off elements combine to form a very effective horror film. I found myself on the edge of my seat for much of the film, wondering how much worse it could get.

So do horrors need good performances to be effective? It certainly can't hurt. I can imagine how much better the film would be with the right cast. But would the right cast have been as effective in conveying how unusual and off the circumstances were? It's a puzzle.

I turn 24 on Sunday. I figured, why not suggest some of my favorite media for you to enjoy this weekend? Whether or not you can actually find most of these is a horse of a different color.

Film: Rosemary's Baby – the greatest film ever made.

Film: My Fair Lady – if I had my way, there would be mandatory viewing of the Ascot Gavotte sequence every day for everyone in the world. Someday…

Film: Dumbo – the crowning jewel in Disney's animated output? I think so.

Book: The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood – the smartest dystopic novel you'll love, hate yourself for loving, be afraid of reading, yet refuse to put down.

Book: Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates – perhaps the greatest novel ever written about perversion, serial killing, lobotomies, and sex zombies.

Book: The Conjure Wife by Fritz Leiber – the first, and greatest, heart-stopping twists in modern horror literature. It's breathtaking. When the bookjacket says watch out for page x, they mean it. It's a suckerpunch and really unprecedented in literature.

Have a great weekend everyone!

What an awful film.

The end.

…

I could leave the review at that. I really could. So much of The Informant! just does not work on screen. While I respect non-traditional narratives an inventive film making, The Informant! does not seem to justify the unusual choices in what could have been a far more engaging narrative if played straight.

Instead, Steven Soderbergh decided to challenge audience expectations and really twist the notion of reliability in cinema. We're immediately enveloped in a period world straight out of the 1960s: slightly grainy film stock overwhelmed with bright colors and poor fitting business suits made appropriate by a healthy smear of vasoline over the lens. Then the graphic informs us we're in 1992. By the one minute mark, Soderbergh has pulled us into a trap that becomes increasingly frustrating as a story built on anachronisms and falsehoods is expounded in an unreliable way.

Matt Damon had to pack on 30 pounds to play Mark Whitacre, the youngest president of a Big Corn company and an accomplished biochemist. He's trying to inject a chemical additive into corn by-products that keeps contracting a virus and ruining the output. Out of nowhere, Mark Whitacre receives a phone call form a Japanese businessman claiming there is a mole tampering with the research. Whitacre is thrust into a life dedicated to helping the FBI end corruption in his company.

Do not let the opening credits fool you. This is the Matt Damon show. He is in every scene, does every voice over, and drives the plot to it's inevitable conclusion. Poor Joel McHale gets an "Also Starring" billing right under Matt Damon and has, at most, 15 minutes of screen time and 20 lines. No one has anything to work with except for Damon. It's intentional, too.

I do not want to spoil the film for anyone who still wants to see it. As bad as it is, the film is utterly fascinating because so much of what makes it an awful film is a directorial decision by Sorderbergh to play up the core conflict of Whitacre's life. The other characters have to have nothing to work with because Whitacre is the center of his own universe. He's the genius. He's the hero. He's the white hat sent to save the world. He's the perfect husband and generous father. He's everyone's best friend. And everyone else isn't as smart or pretty or talented as he is and don't you forget it.

Have you ever met a person who tries so hard to be liked they'll say anything to get your approval? Even if the stories they tell seem to be an impossibility or flat out contradict what they said to you five minutes before? Someone that it's impossible to hate no matter how oblivious they seem to be to what's actually happening? That is the crux of Mark Whitacre's position in the film.

I'll have to reexamine this one on DVD. I think there's far more to Sorderbergh's approach than initially meets the eye. The focus and color saturation are constantly shifting to offer a clue as to what is happening on screen. The score is campy to the point of making The Three Stooges or The Little Rascals seem like Bach by comparison.

Soderbergh is too smart a film maker to have let this project spiral out of control. It's a character study disguised as a comedic thriller where the subject moves so slowly you don't notice any change happened until the film is over. There are so many red herrings and dead ends, dropped plot lines and shifting supporting characters that your average Hollywood slasher will seem logical by comparison.

And that's the point.

So, I could just say "bad movie" and walk away, but something tells me that was the intention of the film. This might actually be an attempt to so accurately reflect the subject of a film there is no choice but to produce a flimsy narrative, flat characters, and anachronisms. But if that really is the case, then The Informant! should have aimed for three acts on Broadway to give the audience time to process this convention rather than throw it all at the audience for two hours of confusion on the big screen.

If I'm being perfectly honest, I'm surprised the following news item did not happen sooner:

"Dora Akunyili, the country’s information minister, has asked movie houses in Abuja, the nation’s capital, to stop screening the film because it depicts Nigerians as gangsters and cannibals. “We have directed that they should stop public screening of the film,” Ms. Akunyili said. “We are not happy about it because it portrays Nigeria in bad light.”"

While it is true that the Nigerians are classified as villains in District 9, I do believe this is an overreaction on the part of the Nigerian Ministry. There are no heroes in District 9. Everyone, prawns included, is on a sliding scale of pretty bad to evil. The hero, Wikus, starts off as a deplorable human being abusing the prawns to get what he wants. The prawns are quick to break into violence in retaliation to even the slightest distate with human contact. And the Nigerian gangsters are obsessed with alien weaponry and personal gain.

Is the Nigerian portrayal all bad? Yes and no. Even when they do something good, like offer the prawns the opportunity to get real food, they're doing it for personal gain. On the sliding scale, however, I tend to think the South African government cover-up and genocidal leanings against the prawns place them at a higher level of villainy. Wikus' behavior in the beginning of the film is worse than anything that Nigerians do over the course of the entire film.

I do not recall the film claiming Nigeria was invading South Africa in order to cannibalize the people of the nation. I seem to remember the leader of the gang attempting to eat the arm of a man slowly turning into a prawn in a misguided attempt to gain his powers. You know, something that couldn't happen in real life.

What I'm getting at is this: it is just a movie. The rhetoric of the film is based in South African peace and freedom struggles, so there are some mentions of corruption in the country. Part of this corruption as portrayed in the film is a small faction of Nigerian criminals abusing a race of extraterrestrials. As far as I know, there is no giant spacecraft hovering over Johannesburg and Nigerians aren't prone to bouts of self-preserving cannibalism. There are no stockpiles of alien weaponry and human to alien mutation is strictly the stuff of science fiction.

Should I be offended every time someone puts a corrupt Catholic in a film? No, because that film most likely isn't claiming in any reasonable stretch of the imagination that the entirety of the Catholic Church is corrupt. A simplification of international tensions between Nigeria and South Africa? Perhaps. But I feel the analogy is fitting and stand behind it.

Special thanks go out to Steven Lloyd Wilson at Pajiba for pointing the story out this morning.