RAVEN, THE (2012)

RAVEN, THE. James McTeigue, dir. Ben Livingston and Hannah Shakespeare, script. USA, Hungary, Spain: Intrepid, Relativity and three others (prod.) Relativity Media (USA dist.), 2012. See IMDb for complexities of production and distribution .

Listen for John Cusack's Poe talking glibly and ironically, but also possibly sincerely, of a threatening mechanical universe in the fashion of, say, the "immeasurable Steam-engine" coming on "in its dead indifference to grind me limb from limb" in Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus (1836) . Watch for the very elegrant rendering of the inexorably-descending mechanical pendulum from Poe's "The Pit and the Pendulum," cutting into a victim.

5. DRAMA, RDE, 02/V/12