Weekend: MOVIES

Drag Me to Hell

Before he made a lot of money with the "Spiderman" series, director Sam Raimi made his reputation by exploiting the obvious connections between horror and comedy with the "Evil Dead" trilogy. Based on a script he wrote with his brother Ivan in 1992, "Drag Me to Hell" avoids the arch cleverness of recent horror fare in favor of plain storytelling and archetypal characters.

The pretty and dull protagonist, Christine (Alison Lohman), is a loan officer in a bank. She's desperate for a promotion, and her boss suggests her chances would improve if she demonstrated more backbone. So when an elderly woman (Lorna Raver) with a cloudy eye and a terrible cough asks for a third extension on her mortgage payment, Christine refuses. The old hag takes it personally and places a Gypsy curse on the younger woman.

Being a psychologist, her well-to-do boyfriend (Justin Long) tries to talk her out of visiting a fortuneteller (Dileep Rao), who tells her the old woman has targeted her for damnation in only three days' time unless the curse is broken.

Christine tries everything, including animal sacrifice, to counter the hex, and she's occasionally visited by an evil spirit that tosses her around like a beanbag when she isn't regurgitating live flies, suffering from horrific nosebleeds, or inhaling maggots.

The genius of the Raimis' script is the way it projects Christine's ordeal on her everyday life.

More than the curse, "hell" is other people's families or the place where you work. In that regard, Christine's ambitions in terms of love and career appear to have made her betray her better nature. But if she has to pay for this sin, she's not going to go gently, and the movie becomes a hilariously violent supernatural battle between two seemingly immovable forces.

Directed by Sam Raimi, starring Alison Lohman, Justin Long and Lorna Raver

Now showing at theaters nationwide

Synecdoche, New York

The protagonists in Charlie Kaufman's inventive screenplays are usually considered to be surrogates of the author. The main character in "Adaptation" (2002), in fact, is a screenwriter named Charlie Kaufman. These characters are always insecure, and Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman), the hero of Kaufman's directorial debut, is almost crippled by insecurity.

Cotard, a university theater arts instructor, is obsessed with his bowel movements, shudders at his own body odor and bad breath, and believes he is going blind.

Because he is ready to die at any moment he doesn't notice that his artist wife, Adele (Catherine Keener), is about to leave him with their young daughter.

Somehow he channels all this existential dread into a production of "Death of a Salesman" that turns out to be a hit and wins Cotard a "genius grant" of $500,000, which he promptly invests in a warehouse for the staging of his life work, a play about "everything."

Kaufman has never been afraid to fool around with time and space, and as Cotard's production becomes bigger and bigger, it also becomes indistinguishable from his actual life. He hires an actor (Tom Noonan) to play himself, and the actor, in turn, hires someone else to do the same thing.

This Brechtian device is funny and frustrating, and extends to Kaufman's casting, as well. Cotard's muse and assistant, played by Samantha Morton, hires a character played by Emily Watson to play her in the production.

Maybe like me, Kaufman often mistakes these two British actresses for each other.

Eventually, it becomes impossible to separate Cotard's creation from Kaufman's. By staging a dramatic work that is "bigger than life," the two directors seem to be saying that the lives we all lead in reality are pretty small. Keep that in mind while you suffer through yours.

Directed by Charlie Kaufman, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Samantha Morton and Michelle Williams

Starting Saturday in Tokyo, to be followed by theaters nationwide(IHT/Asahi: November 13,2009)