Take Names.

About a year ago I took an interest in comic books. It didn't really last long and it only started because I read Watchmen and brashly assumed that there would be other books that might meet that standard of quality. I was wrong, but I did observe an interesting phenomenon spending so much time talking to strangers in the comic book store. Obviously there's only so much you can mine out of the superhero genre before it's totally tapped, but these people go back to the comic store every week and buy more comics supporting an industry that's thrived for almost a century. The limited story possibilities lead to a lot of formulas and retreads in the comic world, to the point where almost nothing is interesting or original. Only when someone like Alan Moore writes a book, not out of unconditional affection for a character but out of the creative aspiration to do something interesting with the medium do we get anything interesting. Comic book fans, therefore, tend to lead an existence of bare incident, where everything is preordained and they don't even expect the entertainment that they invest so much in to surprise them. Take All-Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder for instance. If I had to guess at Frank Miller's feelings towards comic book fans, it would be that he went into the industry optimistic that he could shake things up and move comics away from their formulaic qualities by introducing a darker imagining of Batman, but all this did was change the standard Batman comic into a gravel road of violence and homoerotic frankness. Depressed and/or a little bit blinded by his success, Miller spent the intervening years applying his skills to graphic novels that he at least had artistic control over. When asked to return to Batman and write something with universal appeal, though not as a continuation of his Batman series, he went balls-out, playing fast and loose with canon and turning Batman into a malevolent thug and having him abuse the fuck out of Robin and Alfred. It was genuinely interesting, well-written, subversive and offensive in the way that good satire should be, but comic fans lost their shit. Knowing they could easily go back to the warm comfort of lukewarm writing, they instead decided to buy the book in massive quantities and complain endlessly that their patron saint, Frank Miller, had abandoned them. And he had. Still has. The demands of the comic world are too shallow for someone with creative ambition to stay in the industry more than a few years without becoming resentful. (There's an argument for Frank Miller being one of the best living satirists here, but it's not an argument that's terribly pertinent to Kick Ass).

That's the feeling I got from Kick Ass, the new film from Matthew Vaughn, who still hasn't convinced me that he should be helming feature films or if he should be chased through the streets and punched to death by a dumpster. It's the most standard formula, dressed up and spun around and fed tequila shots a bit, but in the end it's a perfunctory action film with very little to distinguish itself from the dozens of similar films pumped out every year. Actually, I take that back. This film is more bland and standard than almost any major action film, because they at least have the decency to shake things up even a little bit, but Kick Ass is dicey and poorly executed in ways that the most atrociously bland movie one could assemble wouldn't be.

The film concerns a teenager named Dave played by Aaron Johnson, who's going through the "why aren't I a superhero?" stage of puberty that comes after the pubic hair but before the nipple worms, but he takes it a step further and actually dresses up as a superhero, buys himself some batons and manages to get himself knifed in broad daylight the first time he tries to fight some crime. When he recovers, he dresses up again and quickly encounters a group of men beating the fuck out of some pussy. Dave steps in and a brilliant action sequence ensues. It's exciting, tense, perfectly staged and scored (to a Prodigy song called Omen) and Johnson gets a little speech that really builds up the audience's emotional involvement in the scene and gets them hopped up and ready for a triumphant, crowd-pleasing action scene and then...it ends. Like that. The bad guys just walk away. It was a tremendous disappointment that set the tone for the rest of the film, and really, after all the hype about how it was going to be porn for action film fans, I wanted to push an active volcano into the theater and erupt it all over your seat. YES, YOUR SEAT AND YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE. The only truly excellent action scene is a short one that falls in the middle of the film and doesn't add much to the plot, but it's shocking for its frank use of violence, whereas earlier in the film people were getting legs sliced off and things like that, which really took away from the "normal people as superheroes" angle, and it was nice to see an action scene that wasn't cartoonish but contained some shocking violence. Oh, and it's on Youtube. So you can send me whatever you were planning on spending on a ticket. Paypal is okay, but I'd prefer cash in an envelope left under a tree in the park. You know the place. The one where you left your girlfriend's ransom money last summer. I MADE HER INTO A HAT. I believe the success of the scene has a lot to do with its status as a throwaway scene, most likely inserted into the film to keep it moving along at a steady pace and not really subject to Vaughn's recurring aesthetic. It's simpler, and it works a lot better for that.

The film also concerns a few other heroes, specifically Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage) and Hit Girl (Chloe Moretz) who introduced retardedly late in the film so that they won't outshine the main character for the entire film. Without those characters, not only would the studio not have its retarded marketing campaign, but it wouldn't have a film. The entire film is so dependent on them to work and so disinterested in Dave that the entire thing could have not only been successful, but been greatly improved by the exclusion of Dave, who only seems to have been included to give the 18-35 demographic an easy point of reference. His arc is done after he meets Big Daddy and Hit Girl, when he realizes that he's fooling himself and that he'd rather be a Myspace celebrity (really, Hollywood? Myspace?) and the film suffers greatly from his stupid narration. While I've never seen the original cut of Blade Runner, I'd imagine that the narration sounded like this, underlining every little thing that happens, spelling out motivations and themes for stupid people, and generally being a useless asshole.

Most people I know were pretty into the Hit Girl thing, but I don't see how a little girl killing people and saying fuck is very original. You guys should come hang out at my parents' house or something. At least Moretz plays the role with straightforwardness as opposed to the jokiness that I thought she'd employ, and it gives her a bit more credibility as a character who's meant to be a human being made out of flesh and blood and not titanium alloy and wizard poop, which is what Vaughn seems to have been going for.

So what did I think? It sort of sucked. It missed almost every possible opportunity and even Nicolas Cage wasn't that good (which, going by the Cage Curve, should earn him an Oscar). The humor, which really got hyped up by the ad campaign, really fucking bugged me. Most of the jokes were totally throw-away or "little girl says fuck". The only thing that made me laugh was the guy in the back who thought the movie was fucking hilarious, and when a cinema audience on a Tuesday night is more interesting than the movie, go fuck yourself.

4/10

Love on the Battlefield

I'll thank every God ever worshiped for giving me a weekend where I can first visit all the pitfalls of blockbuster filmmaking and become filled with the bitterness and distrust that most critics feel towards these films on one day, and on the next I can see a film that reminds me of everything I love about big films and why my eternally losing battle to champion these films is worth the gunshot wounds and flashbacks.

As I made staggeringly, irritatingly clear in my piece on The Princess and the Frog, I've got a thing for animation. It offers its filmmakers complete and total control over every visual element of the production and a talented filmmaker will use that level of control to create a landscape to compliment and deepen the audience's understanding and emotional involvement with the story and characters. A live-action film can do this, but the best few are rarely even close to as successful as the most mediocre animated films. And while it's more upsetting to see a creative team fail and squander that opportunity, it's not a commentary on the quality of How to Train Your Dragon, but rather a general handjob I give out to animated films just for being animated.

In the past I've avoided Dreamworks productions because they fucking suck (any of the Aardman Animation productions being the obvious exception). I liked Shrek when I was ten because I was ten, but beyond that I have no affection for their films, which have always been the commerce-obsessed cousin of Pixar, the one who always hangs out with Pixar at family reunions, but who Pixar really can't stand. They use cheap, gaudy gimmicks like casting celebrities just to put names on the marquees. Who casts Ewan McGregor for his voice? Or for any other reason?

That is one of the very few things I can hold against How to Train Your Dragon, a splendid motherfucking film for the whole family. It weaves the story of Hiccup, a skinny, anachronistic teenage outcast in a viking village plagued by dragon attacks. In this world, a viking's life is dedicated to dragon fighting, something Hiccup's frail little girl-arms were not slopped into existence for. He's instead become an apprentice blacksmith, something he is casually outclassed at by the one-armed, one-legged Gobber. Hiccup's routinely disappointed father Stoick leads the vikings and, thanks in no small part to Gerard Butler's naturally hostile voice, always sounds like he's ready to drop Hiccup and his chicken-legs into a vat of lava for viking soup. Hiccup employs his lamentable engineering prowess to wound the most dangerous of all dragons and to prove his success to his skeptical fellow vikings, goes out to put his prey in a sack and skin it into a fashionable belt. Being the girly boy-lover he is, Hiccup's first instinct is to befriends and exchange a few knitting patterns with his prey, a dragon named Toothless whose ability to fly Hiccup has destroyed. As the shroud of mystery lifts around Toothless, Hiccup begins to understand the woefully misunderstood dragons, never once exploiting their trust for a surprise strangling.

I won't defend the film on the basis of a plot outline because it's a genre film, where the true value is found in the details and in this case it's the relationship between Hiccup and Toothless, which builds from the ground up and takes the entire length of the film to develop in its entirety. It's a rare thing to see a film aimed at children with so much patience for its characters. Not even Ratatouille, which had a similar relationship between its two protagonists, built its story on the spine of a bond growing and strengthening. The animated "performances" for the characters are first-rate and the film would lose half its impact without them. While Hiccup is strongly written, interesting and well animated, his arc is mostly the rack upon which we hang the plot and is a lot more straightforward than Toothless's. Toothless is a totally mute character whose every ounce of character depends on animation, not droning exposition, and the animators sustain a level of mute emotiveness found in only the best animated films animated by the very best animators. He'll almost certainly be the finest animated character to be found in a 2010 film.

As for those genre sensibilities that drive the narrative, the story makes several advanced leaps that I didn't expect from the moment the conflict or thread was introduced. In fact, a brief aside: right off the bat I was enthralled with this movie for--what else?--its action. The opening action scene is likely to be on my list of favorite action scenes of the year, featuring some voice-over narration explaining the world and conflict while keeping the visuals swift, kinetic and exciting. I grew a bit worried, however, when they started to introduce threads and conflicts that will obviously fit in to the narrative in the most played-out, cinematic way possible. For instance, the obligatory love interest, Astrid, whose charmingly anachronistic ensemble could introduced to the fashion world as "viking-chic" and is marketable because it includes Ugg Boots, is introduced in front of an explosion in a slow motion moneyshot establishing her as the chick in the movie. Again, I expected a typical "Oh she hates me, oh we have some stuff in common, oh let's resolve the conflict together and close the movie with our first kiss hooray the nerd got the hot chick" arc, but it was far less typical than that. Much like Hiccup's relationship with Toothless, it builds from the ground up and the narrative never betrays its characters. While it ends the way you expect, their relationship remains combative and truly hostile. When I say "hostile", I don't mean "playfully hostile" like we've come to expect of movies, I mean genuinely hostile. She insults him and belittles him publicly and really despises him, and their relationship is the devolution of that relationship and the ascension of a relationship built on a foundation of respect, and from there a small pubescent spark forms. It's shockingly genuine, it's just that it's played out in a stylized world.

I love the way conflict is introduced and resolved in this film, and I love that the narrative and works for the characters, is driven exclusively by the characters and evolves out of the characters desires and actions. My only major complaint with the film is a little late-second act conflict dump. It leads to a pretty standard "clear-cut good guys vs. clear-cut bad guys" climax, and while it's visually stupifying and rousing and exciting and climactic and all the things I hoped it would be, it's also disappointing in its standardness. The whole film has been characterized by understanding for all its different characters and a disregard for typical conflict setup that the climax rings a bit hollow and hypocritical. We're supposed to root for the destruction of the antagonist when this whole film has been building our respect and attachment to the dragons. It's a little revision to the thematic palette that I did not appreciate, but god DAMN it was pretty.

Oh yeah, the whole film is ridiculously pretty. As pretty as, or even prettier than any of Pixar's efforts, thanks to The Roger Deakins, who consulted on this film as he did for Wall-E. The film's colors and cinematography is the other 50% that gives it the emotional heft that Dreamworks' films have been missing for so long. Let's hope this gets remembered Oscar time. If Avatar can get a Best Cinematography Oscar, I don't see why How to Train Your Dragon can't.

One last thing: I love the title. It's charmingly simplistic in the face of the film's thematic complexity. Hiccup surpasses the notion that he's "training" toothless after maybe their second time together and their relationship being a genuine friendship has become sort of forgone. When the title card appears just before the closing credits, it's almost more of a question: How to Train Your Dragon? With compassion and respect, that's fucking how.

9/10

Hate Him Back

There's a fork in the road of responsible criticism. There may be no way for me to know that Louis Leterrier was trying to make a bad movie, but I suspect he was, and with some subtlety. But does Clash of the Titans' badness transcend the traditional definition and put it in a class of the bold and unique? No, not at all. So I can saunter down giving it props for achieving its goals road or I can amble down state road fuck this movie. Either way, I imagine this entire review will be me wrestling with my opinions, dumping an arbitrary numerical score at the bottom of the page and taking a nap, because all roads lead to napville. I'll give Leterrier this much: the badness of Clash of the Titans is fascinating for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is Sam Worthington's bizarre performance, ranking among the weirdest things born of laziness I've ever seen in a production of this size.

I'll give you guys a quick once-over with the plot, and you tell me what it sounds like. Innocent pile of mashed potatoes living an idyllic life with his super fantastic family is thrust into a situation where the good people of the land are facing a magical nemesis of God-like strength and who they cannot hope to defeat. For poorly explained reasons, our hero can do what thousands of trained, organized men cannot and break into the villain's house, jump him on the toilet and throw the elderly butler down two flights of stairs on the way out. On the way, he encounters dangerous beasts and servants of the villain with huge, glaring weaknesses that they're just begging you to exploit, and acquires many divine tools and weapons, one being a lightsaber, that help him out of overly specific situations.

For those of you who stay a step behind, that's also the plot description for all the Zelda games. Part of what makes this such a fascinating piece of shit is that it's a movie made for people who don't like movies, and would rather spend their time playing video games. Though the execution of this is sloppy because, like all video games, it's only possible to create awkward, stilted characters and narratives out of interactive media, I'm frightened that this will actually work, either now or in the immediate future, and that this is the trend that my beloved blockbuster will follow for the next decade. Not that my relationship with blockbusters has always been a good one. I'm not unaccustomed to bags of oranges reorganizing the layout of my stomach organs or finding myself in a club bathroom snorting cocaine off the ass of a willing woman, but this is a step down a path I'm not willing to follow, especially if Clash of the Titans is any indication of what to expect.

For instance, Sam Worthington was also in the much better Avatar last year where he also played a character whose middle name was Tabula Rasa. In Avatar, Jake Sully was a simple character who went through a simple arc and was like that so that any schmuck could relate and James Cameron could fuel his money-powered robohookers. In Clash of the Titans, Perseus is a personalityless blob because he's a player-controlled character and you want the player to project their own personality onto the character. The writers try to sidestep giving him human characteristics by making him stand for ideals that he has no basis to believe in, but everybody claims to believe in. In one scene he stands up to Zeus of all fucking people and tells him that he will not join the Gods because man stands together and their powerful sense of morality will prevail in the end. He makes a whole speech about brotherhood, clearly forgetting that the first fifteen minutes of the movie established him as sort of a shut-in who just hung out with his immediate family all the time. Yeah, his dad seemed like a pretty good role model, but his whole family was just four people, and they were all killed by the fifth person Perseus ever saw. He doesn't know shit about humanity, unless his fishing rod picks up public access and he's been watching soap operas on a pool skimmer.

So Perseus, as written, is a terrible character, but while the character is bad in an interesting way on paper, Sam Worthington's performance gives it an entirely new dimension of badness. If you remember the beginning of the Zelda games with any clarity, you remember that you always start as a nubile innocent, generally a child in tights whose route to the potion shop always involves skipping through a field of flowers, who never harms a thing and who has a song and a smile for all the creatures of the earth. But when that same player controlled character looks like a five o'clock shadowed, cigar chomping Sam Worthington, you've taken a candy-colored fun slide into a lysergic fever dream. Or maybe a Scandinavian art film. But it only ever gets stranger. For instance, the character and the performance are casually anachronistic, specifically in the face of elements of the production that actually give a shit. Like the silly ancient Greek hairstyles the entire cast sports, except for Sam Worthington who apparently buzzes his hair in the mornings. Or the Greek accents most of the cast makes a passing effort to adopt, except for Sam Worthington who perpetually sounds like he's on the lookout for a mob of kangaroos whose pouches he can hitch a ride in.

When I first heard about this project I got pretty excited. An action film set in Greek myth? I think there's an untapped vein there (though I have a new one to get excited about), and when Liam Neeson was cast as Zeus, Ralph Fiennes as Hades and Danny Huston as Poseidon, I thought this could be an incisive, well-acted film with a strong action filmmaker calling the shots. All three of those excellent actors are wasted in this film, though. Liam Neeson gives it a shot but can't act through all the effects and deliver the broad performance the script calls for, Ralph Fiennes, the best "villain character actor" we have in American commercial cinema (except maybe Mark Strong these days) shuffles around wheezing but otherwise acts exactly like Ganondorf, and Danny Huston, who has one line, actually manages to make it out of the film without a scar on his resume. The only person I actively liked in this film was Mads Mikkelsen, a brilliant actor in the European arthouse who played Le Chiffre in Casino Royale and quickly became my all-time favorite Bond villain. His presence was a small consolation, but the man deserves better than this, like a job at the county fair.

I suppose the last six paragraphs I wrote could be rendered moot if the film delivered on the basic levels it's meant to, but it doesn't. I almost missed the slow-motion copper dude porn of 300 during Clash of the Titans' action scenes: at least you could see what was happening in those. People bitch about shakycam ruining movies and giving them a headache (pussies), but they're cool with something like this, where the action is a series of things flying by the camera too close for us to tell what the object actually is, cut together with a maddening disregard for things like blocking and topped off with a shot of Sam Worthington standing on a pile of corpses playing air guitar.

I find it hard to believe that Louis "Hose Fighting" Leterrier directed Clash of the Titans and that movie where Jet Li played a kung-fu fighting dog. You know, the one with Morgan Freeman and Bob Hoskins, the one that got the art crowd to pay attention to martial arts movies for a minute. I thought The Incredible Hulk was pretty mediocre, but I was still enthusiastic about this guy. His directorial choices are baffling here, though. His production design is awful; one scene, for instance, looks like 10% of the original Dagobah set was salvaged, filled with green floodlights and stuffed into frame. It shows a jarring lack of care when all the CGI shots are framed and composed so carefully and the live-action shots are stationary cameras on a flat angle encompassing the whole set so that the actors can wander around during dialogue. That's called a play, it looks boring on a big screen and more green floodlights won't change that.

It also has some of the worst CGI I've ever seen, so no mild consolation for those of us who like to absentmindedly stare at CGI. Many of the CGI shots are textureless, and even more have a an ugly sheen to them, specifically Zeus. I saw it in 2D, but I wonder if this is an effect that the 3D upconversion had on the film. Zeus has an awkward flatness to him when he's glowing, as if he's meant to be popping out and the people responsible for the upconversion used that scene's lighting as an excuse to really fuck with the depth.

So it's bad, yeah. But it's certainly interesting. I wasn't angry walking out of it like I was walking out of Alice in Wonderland. I was pumped up and benign, excited to discuss its tremendous failures with my friends. For now, it has the unmistakable gloss of the CGI boom and is something to be looked at with contempt. But someday, when it has aged badly, it may make a good midnight film.

2/10

In lieu of anything interesting to write about

Here's a list of occupations Joe Johnston would be better suited to than filmmaking, in celebration of the recent casting announcement for upcoming bad movie Captain America:

• Garbage eater

Because I'd love to go to his place of employment just to watch him eat the garbage. I'd throw petty change at him and on a good day he'd eat a couple pennies and I can watch him shit blood later, because Joe Johnston doesn't deserve the dignity of a door on his doghouse. Speaking of which...

• Dog catcher

Because the dogs will outwit you, Joe Johnston. Make no mistake about it.

• That. Over there.

Frankly, I don't really remember a lot from The Wolfman, but a lot of the stuff that happened in it I'd like to wish on Joe Johnston now. I believe my ice distribution company could write off "ice water tester" on its taxes if we gave the job to Johnston and paid him in coupons for discounted ice.

• Sandwich

For eating.

• Tree

For processing carbon dioxide into oxygen.

That's all I can think of, and I don't think there's a lot of money to be made as a tree. Anyway, I hope to play catch-up with a lot of the movies I didn't get to see in theaters but are now available on DVD for the next few weeks. I'll also have a new entry in the Vampire Movies That Don't Suck As Much As Twilight series.

Joe Johnston Can Eat My Shit

Do you recognize this asshole? Probably not. I did give him a mustache.

Drawing a mustache on someone is a sign of disrespect.

You had two possible reactions. Either you shrugged in indifference, or you put your limited edition 1966 Counterculture Captain America figure through your monitor. Sorry about that. That man is Joe Johnston, a director who, if you were to objectify his filmography, would look like a sack of severed legs put through a continuous tumble dry for a week. If you still don't know who he is, his career includes such mind-numbing pile of animate, rotting banana peels as:

• Jumanji
• The Pagemaster
• Jurassic Park 3
• Honey, I Shrunk the Kids
• October Sky
• The Wolfman
• Hidalgo
  

If you just said "Hey, that's my favorite movie!", then you're probably standing in a mud hole that you think is a house right now. No, really. Look around. Is your big screen TV made of mud? Did you write that off as a small manufacturing error that didn't merit a return? I'll bet you did. Do you walk everywhere because your Lamborghini collapses under the pressure of your body every time you get in it? You live in a mud hole. You're probably right next to a Costco. They might hire you. Wash the mud off, first. Don't want to look crazy for a job interview.

Now, after you've done all that, you may want to consider that list again. Is something missing? You're right, The Rocketeer, which is a fucking awesome bit of post-propoganda action kitsch and a film I adored as a child. It's lite and flag-wavey, but is never burdened by its patriotism, which is handled with an energetic, pulpy touch. When I heard Joe Johnston was going to direct Captain America, I initially buried my fists in the nearest vagrant but quickly reconsidered. If he can retread the Rocketeer path and bring a good cast into the mix, he can pull it off, especially under the watchful eye of Marvel, who won't let a project languish in post-production and turn into something entirely different over years of editing. My spirits brightened, although I could name a dozen better candidates off the top of my head.

If The Wolfman proved anything to me, it's that Johnston can assemble a cast that should work (in theory, anyway; see Wolfman review for further analysis) and he proved me right. A list of actors up for the part of Captain America was released and John Krasinski was at the top of it. The fans, holy shit the fucking fans. They went buttfuck. They cursed everyone involved with the production, threatened boycotts, injected dopamine straight into their eyesockets and Marvel quickly issued a press release stating he was out of the running.

I don't know how many of you follow movie news, and I don't know how many of you remember when Heath Ledger was announced as the actor to play The Joker, but people lost their shit. In everyone's mind he was still the girly pretty boy from A Knight's Tale or the dude that fucked that kid from October Sky in that movie that we make jokes about. Now, imagine for a moment if Christopher Nolan, famous for not being a pussy, had buckled under fan pressure and cast Robin Williams. Or someone. Imagine what we would be denied if we second-guessed the production of a film, and imagine what a pussy the filmmakers and/or studio would have to be to dam up the natural flow of their film to please morons.

Just watch. Just watch the film fall out of Marvel's ass and just watch everyone stare in sarcastic shock because the filmmakers weren't doing what they wanted, but rather depositing the demands of the unwashed masses directly into an otherwise coherent project, forgoing cohesion and greatness for the warm blanket of familiarity and expectations met at eye-level.

This is not fucking possible. If people who read comics would sell their Oscar Mayer Weinermobile and go for a jog every now and then, they'd realize that the human frame cannot support that sort of musculature. A real woman does not look like this. Fantasy is great and all, but we have to remember the limitations of the real world, and we're casting an actor based on his skill first and his biceps second. Krasinski is tall and sleekly muscled, perfect for a character whose primary attribute is his speed. Imagine John Krasinski in the Captain America uniform. Strong jaw, mask distracts from the goofy nose. Pretty wholesome and all-American, isn't he? Now imagine him without it on, playing the goofy, nerdy Steve Rogers. Holy shit, isn't that perfect? And isn't this an origin story? Well butter my bread, I think we've found a Captain America.

John Krasinski is clearly (CLEARLY) the best choice for the role, but now that he's supposedly out of the running, we have actors like Mike Vogel, who will play the exact same version of the character that John Krasinski, but who will be (somehow) more marketable. Meanwhile, the studio throws Chris Evans onto the list in a retarded attempt to keep the fanboys from flipping over the Marvel headquarters. If you asked me a few hours ago, I would have said there was no way they'd give a role written for a pasty, skinny white guy to a pin-up like Chris Evans, but after I've been thinking about it there doesn't seem to be an end to Marvel and Joe Johnston's pussyness. I don't know who will get the role, but this film could have been great. It could have easily been the best of these Marvel films because the character lends himself so well to the long legacy of American action films and cartoon jingoism.

I suppose Krasinski got the worst of it, and will forever know that a role he would have been perfect for and that would have made him an international superstar was stolen by fanboy whining and arbitrarily given to someone else.

Madness: It's A Rule Now

The Crazies is probably the best movie that can be made out of the modern horror formula, you know, the one I keep talking about that's as stale as a brick that went through the wash but sat in the drier for days. Oh, you don't know the formula, liar? It's about a capable, resourceful man who has to take charge of a band of survivors when his hometown is overrun by a grotesque threat (it's almost always zombies). A second threat, almost always human, is introduced to up the stakes and answer the cynical modern horror audience's calls to see humanity played as a bunch of bloodthirsty opportunists. The hero and his love interest are the only ones to survive at the end, but the cynical end credits usually blow them up or sick a Rancor on them or something. The audience masturbates through the rest of the end credits.

Any regular readers (are you there?) know that I like genre films (stop reading at any time), and The Crazies is exactly that: a genre film polished to a mirror shine, then rubbed with diamond cream and vampire sparkles. I know I've spent the last month bitching about how boring modern horror is, and The Crazies represents everything that's boring and antiquated about the genre, but it does it with excitement, good characters and a reasonably involved story. Oh yeah, and some very pretty visuals. Really, way too pretty for this film. So pretty, in fact, that it makes me think this is just a genre effort from an extremely talented filmmaker who hopes to use a simple genre film to break out onto the mainstream. He goes through all the motions, but everything about this film is absolutely better than it has to be. The standard-issue jump scares are still there, but they're mostly there to make the film palatable to 14-year-olds giving each other awkward, raw handjobs in the back of the theater while the projectionist records it to splice into the second reel of Alice in Wonderland and make that film more nightmarish.

So yeah, the story fits straight into that mold like some sort of script girder. A sheriff, his wife, her secretary and the deputy are one of only a handful unaffected by a disease that makes the infected illogical, violent and veiny. The military shows up and starts killing everyone and our heroes try to escape.

I think the reason this film works so well is that, while it advertises itself as a horror film, has some jump scares and zombie-like things that vaguely define it as a horror film and otherwise fits into the mold of a horror film, it's really a thriller. It's a pretty straightforward thriller with people sewing each others' eyes shut instead of people frantically deleting files from a computer, and it's sort of cheating, although it's effective cheating. Like most thrillers, there's more emphasis on character and plot, but with the streamlined story of a horror film. Good for it, but now you're a dime-a-dozen thriller instead of a dime-a-dozen horror film...which actually leads to some interesting overlap in the horror-thriller venn diagram.

Let's start with the sheriff. He's a pretty standard protagonist for these sorts of films. First of all, he's a sheriff, which means he has a gun and can kill the bad guys by making their brains fall out. Second, he's a hard-driven man of principles and action, and presumably the only person in town with a Bowflex. Again, that's a pretty standard character description for the hero of a zombie movie, so let's discuss something that's pretty miraculous about the character, despite being something that we should expect of every movie. He's pretty realistic. Obviously he gets into some wacky situations, but the way he deals with them is at once realistic and totally understandable. Rarely does he get into a situation where he's engaging more than one crazy, and he's pretty excited to just run away screaming whenever he can. The one time he gets action hero 'roid rage is when he's watching his wife be tortured, and I'm pretty cool with him pulling a knife through his hand in that situation. He only seems relatively experienced with a gun, like a small-town sheriff who spends all his time getting cats out of trees would (unless he's an insane Western sheriff) and his gung-ho deputy is really just a lunatic. And the women aren't really that interesting, as usual. One of them is pregnant, which is as close as you can get to a personality trait with women, I think.

I really like the structure of the film, too. Most of the film is written around specific setpieces, and they're all pretty spectacular (although the one in the morgue isn't nearly as great as the others), with a special shout-out to the showstopping bedroom setpiece. And they're not necessarily action sequences! It's better to define them loosely as setpieces or conflicts and they're spread very well throughout the film. Like a conflict or [action] setpiece should, they're built from the bedrock of interesting characters and designed to get into their heads while keeping the film exciting and visually dynamic.

It's a great example of genre filmmaking, but I don't really want to see more films like it. I'm happy with The Crazies and now I want horror to move on. I know that won't happen, though, and thrillers in horror masks is about as good as we're going to get. It's a formula, and it's simple, and it's almost forgettable and it really isn't something that I thought about or reminisced about too much after I saw it. Also, it's sort of a lie. A good lie, but come on, it's lying through its teeth.

7/10

But I Don't Want To Go Among Dull People

Something has happened. I don't know if it really is the result of focus group evil or if it was truly an accident, but Alice in Wonderland is quite possibly the most vile formula picture I've seen in a theater. Top to bottom it's the safest possible picture that could have had $150 million dollars thrown its way. Let's go down the check list. Familiar source material that won't scare anyone? Check. Huge star? Check. Tiresome moral about being yourself? Check. Stock characters whose back stories were pasted into the script with stickers? Check. Epic battle finale? Check. Horrible love story jaw-droppingly crammed into the middle of the movie but not completed in a bizarre acknowledgment of the audience's horror? Check. 3D surcharge? Check.

Don't get me wrong, Tim Burton and I have a great relationship. Especially his early films. I love Pee-Wee's Big Adventure and Ed Wood, The Nightmare Before Christmas and Edward Scissorhands are the classic pieces of Tim Burton style that he has now beaten to death, and even some of his more recent films, like Sweeney Todd (based on my favorite musical, so, you know) and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory I liked more than I probably should have. But the recurring theme in his career is his inability to choose a script. When he stumbles into a truly great script, like Ed Wood, and assembles a great cast, like Ed Wood, there's no stopping him. His weakest efforts have always been his weakest efforts because of their poor script. Batman and Batman Returns have more script issues than I can count on my molecules, not to mention the fact that they hollowed out a Michael Keaton-sized action figure (only slightly larger than a normal action figure) and stuffed Michael Keaton in it, making Batman a statue that waddled everywhere. Oh no, it's Batman! but we can finish counting the loot first. He's all the way on the other side of the room.

Anyway, yeah, scripts. The worst crime Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland commits is to try and expand characters that are not only iconic, but were written specifically to work in the context of one setting, one scene, one set of dialogue. The Mad Hatter is the perfect example. What Burton and Depp and the writers do to that character is unforgivable. A truly bizarre character is makeup-ed to meet a studio focus group's definition of "weird", has all the edges shaved off by a hack screenwriter and is then given a dash of Johnny Depp's signature mannerisms and sets it out on a warmer to be lazily chewed by cow people. Here's the background to the Mad Hatter: He was a happy little hatter, and then the Evil Red Queen killed all his friends and now he's mad. He doesn't do anything especially mad, he just mostly talks about being mad.

Oh yeah, and the fucking Red Queen. I don't know if the Mad Hatter really the worst thing about this film. It may be the way the film takes all the vaguely defined characters of the book and uses whatever characteristics they can extrapolate to put them in the most formulaic roles. The Red Queen seemed sort of evil, so we'll make her a tyrant that must be toppled. The Caterpillar had a hookah. I think that makes him wise. The Cheshire Cat could disappear. Make him a superhero with the power to evaporate. The Doormouse had a sword, so she'll be an action hero. I could do this for all the characters. So I will. Alice is a young lady in late-Victorian England, so we'll make her stand up to the aristocracy and be herself and do absolutely mad things like wonder what it would be like to fly or become head of a trading company in an afternoon. Tweedledee and Tweedledum were argumentative weirdos, so let's make them comic relief bullshit. The White Queen is a benevolent ruler, presumably based on her name and nothing else. And Crispin Glover, oh my beloved Crispin Glover, is delegated to the most awful of villains, the Queen's right hand who has no mercy for the allegedly charming creatures of Wonderland.

How can Hollywood have no idea how to use Crispin Glover? While their target audience was people who wear shirts that say things like "normal people scare me" or call the "cool kids" (a mythical band of travelers I've never been able to find) sheep, they tried to net fans of the truly bizarre by casting Crispin Glover, and this isn't the first time that's happened. What will it take to get him another Willard?

Its use of 3D is probably more effective and coherent than it was in Avatar, but not by much. Coraline is still the all-time champion of the technology, and Alice in Wonderland's superiority to previous applications of the technology is simply a matter of money and time for R&D, not any major artistic achievement, and if there's anything we can give Alice in Wonderland credit for it's for having a lot of money behind it. Still, it's Tim Burton's ugliest film, looking not unlike a five-year-old's vomit after eating a box of crayons with that unmistakable CGI sheen rubbed on it (still, it's nowhere near as ugly as last year's A Christmas Carol). It's such a stark contrast to the gobstopping but gaudy beauty of Avatar that really shows that where Burton's talents and eye end, Cameron's stretch far beyond.

Its desire to puke all over the legacy of Lewis Carroll's books is sometimes admirable, and Tim Burton being a studio puppet is sometimes fascinating, and Johnny Depp turning himself into a saleable commodity is sometimes sad, but mostly I wanted to be one of the people in my sold-out audience smart enough to walk out of this film. I didn't because I wanted to see it through the end, but then something happened that was so nightmarish and unwatchable I had to cover my eyes. And the audience loved it. If you end up being dragged to this movie, try and figure out what it is. It's my gift to you, a small human kindness to make the experience endurable, but I hope to God you don't have to go through what I did.

1/10

Little Golden Men (Part 2)

Best Picture is pretty exciting this year. There's a film that's leading (The Hurt Locker), a good possible upset (Avatar) and I have a horse in the race with a marginal chance of spoiling (Inglourious Basterds). So that'll be fun. Unfortunately I'm going to have to sit through everyone going through the motions, with Mo'Nique, Christoph Waltz, Sandra Bullock, Jeff Bridges and Kathryn Bigelow walk up and give rambling speeches like they split an economy-sized bag of barbiturates in the bathroom before the ceremony. Like I did with nominations, I'll probably play it pretty safe.

Best Picture

Should Win: Inglourious Basterds
Will Win: Avatar
Possible Spoiler: The Hurt Locker

I'm saying Avatar will win even though The Hurt Locker is the safer bet. I mostly want Avatar to win so that the Best Picture - Best Director rift will become a family rift.

Best Director

Should Win: Quentin Tarantino
Will Win: Kathryn Bigelow
Possible Spoiler: James Cameron

Don't get me wrong, Kathryn Bigelow made an excellent film that was exceptionally well-made in all respects and that I really enjoyed. It's one of the best war films we've had in years, and certainly the best film about our occupation of Iraq, but Quentin Tarantino did something bold, original and not just a little bit mad with his own war film. He used the language of cinema to create something unique and magnificent. I could pick out pretty much any scene from his film and make it an argument in his favor, but watch this scene and tell me he doesn't deserve it.

Best Actor

Should Win: Jeff Bridges
Will Win: Jeff Bridges
Possible Spoiler: Jeremy Renner

Jeff Bridges has this in the bag, and while I haven't seen his film, he is one of my favorite actors to come out of the 80s who should have won for The Big Lebowski a decade ago. Jeremy Renner might get in if the Academy goes Hurt Locker crazy, which is pretty likely.

Best Actress

Should Win: Anyone but Sandra Bullock
Will Win: Sandra Bullock
Possible Spoiler: If anyone else wins, Sandra Bullock's mind-control Gestopo will erase everyone's memories and say that she won.

I hate Sandra Bullock.

Best Supporting Actor

Should Win: Christoph Waltz
Will Win: Christoph Waltz
Possible Spoiler: Christopher Plummer

Christopher Plummer is a fine actor and a respected actor. I wouldn't mind seeing him win an Oscar, but I don't think even the Academy will play politics over what may be the best performance of the year. This is a category that, recently, has been used to reward truly great actors who do truly great work, no politics attached. This category has been a refreshing source of justice for the past two years and I hope that trend continues.

Best Supporting Actress

Should Win: N/A
Will Win: Mo'Nique
Possible Spoiler: Either of the chicks from Up in the Air

Haven't seen any of these films, but Mo'Nique has this in the bag as I understand it. The Academy could give it to one of the chicks from Up in the Air if they want to give more than a screenplay mention to that film, but I really doubt it. Hey, speaking of which...

Best Original Screenplay

Should Win: Inglourious Basterds
Will Win: Inglourious Basterds
Possible Spoiler: The Hurt Locker

Even the dumbfuck Academy knows that Tarantino's screenplays are one of the greatest things about American cinema in the past twenty years. He deserves a second Oscar. Too bad no one recognizes his directing.

Best Adapted Screenplay

Should Win: In the Loop
Will Win: Up in the Air
Possible Spoiler: Precious

In the Loop deserves this. I don't understand why you wouldn't want to give it to this film. I suppose the nomination is enough and that most people just haven't seen it, but if something gets nominated and you're an Academy voter, wouldn't you want to go see it?

Best Cinematography

Should Win: Inglourious Basterds
Will Win: Avatar
Possible Spoiler: The Hurt Locker

This one will line up with Best Picture, so we'll know who wins Best Picture at this stage, unless they go with one of the other films, which I don't think they will. Hurt Locker or Avatar.

Best Editing

Should Win: Sally Menke
Will Win: Bob Murawski & Chris Innis
Possible Spoiler: Joe Klotz

Again, Tarantino and Menke constructed an editor's showcase with Basterds, but Hurt Locker will win because...I don't know. Everyone is stupid but me.

Best Original Score

Should Win: Michael Giacchino
Will Win: Michael Giacchino
Possible Spoiler: Michael Giacchino, for the love of god.

Please give this award to Pixar and especially to Michael Giacchino. Hey, way to snub Ratatouille two years ago, assholes.

Best Visual Effects

Should Win: District 9
Will Win: Avatar
Possible Spoiler: District 9

I don't think of Avatar as having "visual effects" per se, but rather being an animated film with live-action sequences. A lot of visual effects is how it's integrated into the whole film, and an animated film doesn't really have to bother with that. District 9 created some marvelously emotive characters on a shoestring budget and integrated them perfectly into the landscape of the film.

Animated Film

Should Win: Up
Will Win: Up
Possible Spoiler: Fantastic Mr. Fox

So many good animated films were released this year that I really just love the hell out of this category right now.

Art Direction: Avatar
Costume Design: The Young Victoria
Makeup: Star Trek
Original Song: The Weary Kind
Sound Mixing: Avatar
Sound Editing: Avatar
Foreign Language Film: The White Ribbon
Documentary: The Cove
Documentary, Short Subject: The Last Truck
Live Action Short: The Door
Animated Short: A Matter of Loaf and Death

IT IS MY BIRTHDAY.

I'm twenty today, which is okay. I don't have any sort of attachment to being a teenager, but I am attached to the curve upon which you're graded simply for being a teenager. This blog is going to be much less impressive when it's run by some guy in his twenties rather than a fresh-faced and optimistic teenager.

There are small things that will have to change about me now. As the title suggests, quotations from The Office are going to be a satisfactory replacement for a real sense of humor, I can no longer smoke clove cigarettes, I have to start looking for someone to marry or at least pretend to look until I get a chick pregnant and I have to discover a philosopher, change my lifestyle drastically and then give up when I can't maintain the changes after four months or so. As a placeholder until I find some really awesome Assyrian philosophies, I'll invite you all to celebrate my birthday. We'll meet in the catacombs beneath Paris, I'll encourage a dress code of black robes and solemn stares, I'll serve loaves of bread with candelabras stuffed into them and I'll fill a pail with water which we can take turns drinking out of.

The only thing I think I'll really miss about being a teenager is the lax expectations. As I said before, having an occasionally interesting thought is far more important when you're less than twenty years out of the womb. I'm going to be expected to do something really interesting or be looked upon as a failure, so suggestions are welcome.

Rats in a Maze

I know that mostly on this blog I bring you my opinions on films, and not pieces on recent pop culture, but since I can't imagine anyone being particularly invested in this blog, I'm going to veer off course. Today I bring you a brilliant piece of anti-art that deconstructs various social phenomena and beg that you take it seriously.


Yeah, I'm talking about Jersey Shore, a show that has stirred retarded amounts of controversy for being about stereotypical modern Italians. There are stereotypical morons everywhere and just because they exist and a television network aims to show that they do exist doesn't mean that they're racist, pretending they don't exist is what's racist. Jersey Shore is a wholly justifiable account of stupid people being stupid in an environment where reckless stupidity is encouraged from birth.

I'm tempted to not even call Jersey Shore a show, but rather a social study. If an editor with some authority had realized this, Jersey Shore could have become a truly great documentary, but those of us savvy enough to see through the flashy editing and thick, gelatinous layer of drama see something far more interesting and perhaps a next step in social evolution.

Let's take their physical confrontations first. I've seen people get their heads bashed against walls and have their chests stomped in. When you see people in situations like that, there's a real possibility that a fatality will occur. Now, on the Jersey Shore, people will get in fights over nothing ("Go back to Staten Island!") and despite the mens' raging testosterone they do nothing but slap-fight. It's more of a territorial display than a confrontation driven by rage. Maybe it's the fantasy world constructed by MTV, but these people are never in danger of not having money or gym memberships or being harmed physically. The only real looming threat is alcohol poisoning, which shows up like the Ghost of Christmas Past to flash their lives before their eyes every god damn day.

For those of you who know the characters on the show (yes, they're fucking characters, and they may as well be animated), it's easy to say that the men are the most fascinating. Mike "The Situation"'s egomania could get him institutionalized, Pauly D actually comes off as a sort of shy nerd who thinks his DJing and neck muscles are going to keep everyone from noticing he has no idea how to interact socially, and Ronnie is a giant woman who spends a week every month shuffling around in sweat pants with his hair tied up complaining that women don't pay enough attention to him. And while historically, women murder themselves dieting and working out to be presentable to the men whose growling beer guts will bark at each other over which woman they want, the men now spend around two hours a day at the gym making sure their six packs are finely detailed enough that the tabs can be cracked while the women are constantly mistaken for a used tire dump. I'm not against women slugging beer like a keg and eating enough bacon grease to fry what's left of Haiti per se, but when the guys are injecting steroids into their eyelids to just be presentable, a problem is escalating.

The only one who seems to realize the absolute madness in the house is Vinnie, who is living his first summer as a 21-year-old at the Jersey Shore. My twentieth birthday is on Friday, so I completely relate to Vinnie's drunken antics, but most of the housemates are close to thirty and look like raisins baked in alcohol and glued to Sylvester Stallone's body. Vinnie bags more hot chicks and is more likely to comment on the insanity that flows through the house like vomit through Snooki than anyone else.

As for the women, the only outright insane one is really Snooki, a living balloon animal who is the brunt of some comic editing at least a few times, like the time that she dresses up like a pumpkin with tits and talks about how making out with and/or getting fingerfucked by a stranger in a club isn't really that big of a deal before we cut to her making out with a dude who's at the club with his girlfriend, standing about three feet away. She then storms out of the club and cries about how she can't find love when she takes off her underwear on the dance floor before picking herself up with a one-sided conversation about going to community college to become a veterinary assistant because "I fucking love animals". She also describes herself as "the fucking princess of fucking Poughkeepsie", a phrase that needs to be given a bath.

Otherwise, we have JWOW who seems to be under the impression that fake tits look like anything but soccer balls glued to your chest and that the Wicked Witch of the West had a sexy voice; Sammi, who is relatively sane for a seventh grade girl; and Angelina, whose position as most attractive girl in the house lasted about eight seconds before she started screaming at everything that was made of wood until she got kicked out of the house in the third episode. Snooki has become the celebrity of the women, and when that became apparent the producers clearly tried to push her into a relationship with The Situation, which was awesome because they spent the entire summer coming to terms with the fact that no one would fuck them. Unfortunately, I smelled foul play as soon as The Situation left Snooki naked in a hot tub, came up with a lame excuse for the cameras and went back downstairs to scrub his dick.

It's easy to make fun of these people for being stupid, and one of the reasons I waited so long to post this was to avoid being piled in with the many bloggers who were ragging on the cast of Jersey Shore for being stupid, but my real point is that in a modern society where all stresses are removed and the hunter-gatherer instinct is placated, the modern mating ritual comes front and center and Jersey Shore offers every kind of mating relationship possible, and it would seem that it comes by this conclusion completely naturally and innocently. That's a rare and truly incredible thing in art and I think it's worth pointing out. I think Jersey Shore gets to the center of human sexuality in a far more honest, compelling way than many great works of art that made its mission the exploration of sexuality. It's trash, yeah, but it's trash that stumbled upon something great.


PS - I made this infographic to illustrate the show for those of you who haven't seen it yet. It was going to be prettier but I decided it wasn't that important to the impact of my piece, so I left it the way it is. I didn't even bother making the background blend with my blog's background. Hohoho!

Jersey Shore Inforgraphic

One Man as an Island

It's only February and I'm already done with movies for 2010. I'm declaring Shutter Island the best movie of the year and buggering off to an opium pipe until next year.

As some of you may know, Taxi Driver is one of my very favorite films. I'll always hold it aloft as the best example of a film using a heavy amount of style to convey a character. I love style, I love characters, so that's kind of up my alley. Shutter Island is Scorsese's update of that method, this time putting his protagonist through a meat grinder of events and depositing his ground up brain in a metal bowl for everyone to poke.

I can already tell you that Shutter Island is not likely the film you imagine it is, and if that last paragraph didn't give it away, I'm giving it away now. I'm not inclined to blame this on the marketing campaign, because the film engages in the same sorts of trickery that the advertisements do, but declare the marketing a natural extension of the film and a unique tool in preparing the audience for the emotional gauntlet they will be dragged face-first through. I say this not as criticism or warning, but as an observation that, for once, the marketing campaign enhances the impact of a film instead of drowns it out and I wonder if the film will maintain certain elements of its impact when removed from its advertisements, for Shutter Island is all about raw emotion. In the same way that a mad man is driven by nothing but raw, teeming emotion, Shutter Island beats the audience into a bloody, crippled coma with emotion like nothing I've ever seen before. It's not the Gothic horror you think it is, and it's not the exciting detective story that you might think it is if you're five. It does, however, still contain the twist that you think it does and that Scorsese can't possibly be less interested in.

There's a dance I could do to keep from revealing the twist, but it's pointless since you've already guessed it. If you don't want to know, don't read any further, but if you have seen the film, you know that our hero, Teddy Daniels, is a patient in the Ashecliffe mental hospital located on Shutter Island. I have now seen this film twice. The first time I saw a hallucinatory, experimental dramatic thriller thing with all the contrivances and self-importance that goes with that genre that I just made up. The second time I saw it, I saw a very sad portrait of a clearly insane person who, despite all the ridicule and disinterest the people around him can bathe in, he remains unaware of his own delusions. I would be just as happy to have Teddy declared insane in the first scene and leave the rest of the film exactly the same, but this way we're offered two completely different readings of one film. Personally I think people who shout about having guessed the twist before setting foot in the theater are giant douchebags; anyone who doesn't give the film a chance to tell the story on its own terms is probably a fifteen-year-old girl and is texting the entire fucking film anyway. If I were to tell you the plot synopsis of The Sixth Sense ("there's this little boy who can see ghosts and talk to them and he hangs out with his psychiatrist all the time!") you'd guess the fucking twist. If I were to tell you about The Usual Suspects ("this dude is telling this cop who caught him at a destroyed ship full of dead bodies about how the crime was perpetrated by an enigmatic crime lord that no one has ever seen!") you'd guess the fucking twist. The Usual Suspects in particular works because of the way Bryan Singer and Christopher McQuarrie misdirect the audience, especially towards the end. Similarly, there's a lot of excellent misdirection in Shutter Island (although it's hard to hide a twist as momentous as "the main character is insane and a lot of this may be occurring in his head" sometimes) that threw me off the scent, although I did sigh a sigh of disappointment when my initial suspicions were confirmed. I think, though, that Scorsese doesn't really give a fuck about the twist and is only using it to give the film some mass appeal (we've been going through a lot of plot synopseez here and "dude goes crazy for two and a half hours" won't look very good on promotional Burger King cups) and that the twist was really only a detail of the film he hoped to make. I think my suspicions are confirmed by how untrusting he is of the "big reveal" scene to be interesting on its own, so he couples it with what is absolutely the best scene in the film: a flashback to the day his character well and truly snapped. If there is a twist in this film that isn't totally routine, and I say that there is, it's that scene, so I will say no more of it.

All I've done so far is make excuses for the film, so let me tell you what it's really about, and that's the emotional gauntlet I referred to a while back. Every scene seems to be saturated in a different emotion, sometimes going so far as to have an abrupt, distracting change in color palettes (that's not the only jaw-droppingly bad cut from an editor who should know better, but has never really been concerned with continuity; The Departed is full of continuity errors, too) and the supporting cast, almost all of whom are given just one scene, seem to be in on this and play their parts with but a single emotion: Jackie Earl Haley's part is played with nothing but fear in the portion of the film that's the most straight-up horror of any, Ted Levine plays with hostility in a conversation that starts with casual discussion of the beauty of flowers, Max von Sydow with the lust of authority, Emily Mortimer with fragility and despair, and so on and so forth. It's easy for these performances to blend because the gimmick isn't overbearing. They all have one scene, remember? One more thing, because I must make absolutely sure that no one misunderstands my point here: I'm not saying that each character represents a different emotion in Teddy's head, I'm saying that each character is given a certain emotion as a motivation to deepen that gauntlet I keep talking about and their job is to illicit that response, or personify that response if you're a snowman, for the audience.

The three characters that get real screen time are Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo and Ben Kingsley who hasn't been noteworthy since House of Sand and Fog, or Sexy Beast if you're a cynical fuck (he was the least-interesting part of Transsiberian) and continues this proud tradition here. Mark Ruffalo actually keeps you guessing about his character's loyalties, always coming off stupider than he is, until the end, and the first audience I saw the film with seemed to really like him. I'm apparently going to have to become a champion of DiCaprio's performance in this film, though. DiCaprio is always at his best playing strung-out characters in over their heads and rarely the charismatic hero that he seems to see himself as, and that fits the mold of Teddy Daniels perfectly. At the beginning he fancies himself the charismatic hero, but as events unfold and his delusions take hold of him he becomes that mad wreck that DiCaprio is best with (see: The Departed, the last third of The Aviator). By the end of the film he can barely contain the emotions sprinting through his head and he drags us with him.

So I feel like I've done nothing but make excuses for the film, but it's not at all the case that this film needs excuses made for it. It seems to be the consensus that it's one of Scorsese's weaker films. Don't get me wrong, Gangs of New York is a shitty script with a shit performance from DiCaprio glued to Daniel Day-Lewis' camera-destroyingly awesome performance and some of the best period sets and costumes ever and it was basically his return to form. The Aviator is just pretty Oscarbait, but especially watchable Oscarbait, and while The Departed is probably the crime drama of our generation (if we don't count The Dark Knight), it's certainly not becoming of someone who gave the last generation its crime drama with Goodfellas to do it again. It's just some thrilling editing, witty dialogue and excellent lead performance that makes that film what it is, not really something that requires one of the greatest filmmakers of all time to produce. I don't hesitate for a moment to say Shutter Island is his best film since Goodfellas. It's visually striking and narratively charged with storytelling more experimental than anything Scorsese's tried to do since Taxi Driver. It gets into the head of a dynamic, interesting protagonist with the deft use of techniques unique to the language of film, and it punched me through the head with its raw, teeming emotion. It's a lofty, abstract goal that can only be achieved if Scorsese approaches this film with that sort of madness and recklessness he had i the 70s and 80s. Thelma Schoonmaker's editing (when it's keeping its shit together) is maddeningly dense, and in Emily Mortimer's scene is used to the most perfect effect that editing can be used for: first to disorient, then to isolate. Scorsese himself uses rear projection and those pounding , overbearing orchestral scores that were used in the police dramas and haunted house films that he initially seems to be emulating before it all breaks apart and his real intentions are revealed with hallucination scenes of eye-shattering beauty. I could watch those scenes again and again and get spooked every time.

I suppose in the end it comes down to the effect the film has on me. I've seen it twice and the second viewing, although filtered through a completely different reading, had a similarly visceral effect on me. If Scorsese goes back to safe, Academy-friendly and box office-friendly pictures after this that can be described with the phrase "consummate professionalism" again, I'll be okay. We'll always have Shutter Island.

10/10

Night Time Through the Ages

So I think more vampire movie reviews are necessary. I haven't decided exactly what films will be included. I will say that the vampire film I most want to see is Werner Herzog's Nosferatu: Phantom Der Nacht, which is unavailable on DVD, though I plan to try and hunt down a VHS copy. For now I'll chart my early history with the vampiric form, which, as far as I can remember, began with Neil Jordan's Interview With the Vampire.

It concerns a couple of vampires prancing about in frilly collars through Victorian Europe and civil war-era America, gently sucking blood from the exquisite necks of voluptuous 19th century bitches with not a second glance towards their brilliant tits as they dump them in the...well, that's never really explained, but we can assume they were doing something with the bodies, like maybe decorating, after all Neil Jordan never seems to have enough fucking set dressing. Not even Jack the Ripper had enough hooker skin laying around to tailor himself a hooker skin waistcoat and top hat, but these vampires would have enough to make a hooker skin circus tent with hooker skin elephants and clowns and probably a hooker skin audience once the police stopped them selling hooker skin tickets to hookers. Interview With the Vampire seems to be an indictment of old timey law enforcement before it's a vampire movie or a horror movie or a period piece or gay porn.

Not only are these vampires gay, they're fucking sad. They spend the entire movie shuffling around their little Gothic fairytale land complaining about being immortal and their ability to fly. They're like the rich kid in elementary school complaining that their butler forgot to marinate their steak in caviar while you spread the cafeteria's free butter over your leftover breakfast rocks. There's very little action beyond our vampires talking about being vampires and how much it sucks to be vampires; most of the film is just discussing this film's vampire mythology in the context of how much it sucks to be a part of it or establishing the characters.

I'm oversimplifying, so here's a real plot synopsis: Brad Pitt is Louis, the suicidal plantation owner who inexplicably accepts a vampire's offer to become his (totally platonic) companion for all eternity. Really he's the only whiny one, but it's hard to divide him from the rest of the characters when his constant complaining seems to enter the pores of the other characters, turning even the coolest, most relaxed vampire into a tidal wave of frustrated tears. While Louis mopes around about how much it sucks to be suicidal, immortal and at the mercy of human blood to continue his sad little life, Tom Cruise gets to dance around and make fun of him as Lestat, the pretty-fucking-evil nobleman who seems to have been vamping a few decades longer than Louis. He's the elated, fun-loving (and to whom fun means "wanton murder") mentor to Louis' sullen teenager of a student. Louis makes everything worse for the two because of his constant moping, and when his maternal instinct kicks in, Lestat produces a little vampire lady out of a child dying of plague, to whom Louis endlessly mopes. What begins as a playful father-daughter relationship becomes something more sinister as Claudia (Kirsten Dunst) becomes Lestat's equal in bloodthirst and evil. The best scenes (of course because of my predisposition towards thrillers) is the tension between Claudia and Lestat, and the film benefits from shoving the despondent Louis into the background, at least until the end. That's not to say Louis isn't a good character or that Brad Pitt's performance isn't good, but I simply derived more pleasure from watching Tom Cruise and Kirsten Dunst interact.

It took Brad Pitt a long time to become a worthwhile actor. Studios and filmmakers were always putting him in bland popcorn or Oscarbait films without anything to really do. It wasn't until Fight Club that he got a truly extraordinary character to play and began to give great performances consistently (he was fantastic in 12 Monkeys, but he regressed for a few years after that). His casting in things like Seven Years in Tibet, A River Runs Through It or Legends of the Fall were decisions made for the benefit of the film, they were chosen to give the film a bland commodity to trade in that would bring in all sorts of young folks. None of those roles he played were exceptionally written, and were almost unanimously boring ciphers or audience surrogates. Tom Cruise had a similar, if not nearly as pronounced, issue in his early career leading up to, say Born on the Fourth of July. Today it's quite apparent that Cruise is at his best playing villains. My favorite of his performances are Magnolia and Collateral, but our first evidence of this trend came in Interview With the Vampire where he was cast completely against type to loud outcries of miscasting. Casting against type and miscasting are completely different things, though, and Cruise seems nothing short of elated to shed his heroic leading man image and sink his teeth (VAMPIRE HUMOR) into the role of an irredeemable villain, a hellhound of such staggering badness (where the fuck is my thesaurus?) that he declares himself, in a moment of clarity, too evil for Hell.

If Tom Cruise wasn't so fucking pretty and wasn't such an egomaniac, he would probably be a great character actor specializing in villains and dickheads. There's no action franchise more boring than the Mission: Impossible films and we can thank Tom Cruise's villainous megalomania and subsequently disinterested performance for that, but when his real-life evil is funneled into a role not too far removed from his public persona, something notable begins to happen. This was the first time Tom Cruise really got to let loose, and it's always a little shocking to see how honest the evil in his performance is. Specifically I think of a scene in the film that I have a lot of affection for: a scene where Lestat, trying to strangle whatever humanity remains in Louis, invites two prostitutes into their home, kills one and drains the other to near-death. He then implores Louis to end her suffering and accept that to survive he must murder. He begins to torture the prostitute to further goad Louis into murder by forcing her into a coffin. As her forces her in and then lifts her out, he employs a joking, facetious tone that seems to effect the situation in no way aside from to satisfy his natural desire to play with his food. These lines are delivered with a devious evil faked in no way, like making eye contact with the Antichrist. There are a few scenes like this, and they all give me the fucking shivers, but none are so effective as this. It pierces the veneer of acting and puts us in the presence of a real-life maniac. Or maybe not. Maybe Tom Cruise is just the greatest actor ever.

In other news, Kirsten Dunst (something like eleven during filming) plays my favorite "innocent little girl that is actually a bloodthirsty monster". It's a role that requires a great deal of maturity on her part because it is essentially: little girl who has become an adult while keeping the body of a child and the spoiled obnoxiousness of a child but the maturity and evil of a seasoned murderer pretending to be a child. She possesses a charisma that not only is possessed by so few child actors, but that she never seemed to possess again. The role is made that much more difficult by her character being the most intelligent and cunning of the three and it requires a gravitas so rarely contained within a child to make that convincing.

While I'm talking about performances, I'd like to give a special mention to Stephen Rea playing (as Brad Pitt hammers into the audience's head, essentially destroying the effect of the scene) "a vampire pretending to be a human pretending to be a vampire". It's a small role, but an effective one especially considering that Rea is a truly great actor who doesn't get nearly enough good work. He plays a vampire who has waded in decadence so long that he's become a cackling hyena; his overindulgent lifestyle has left him no reason to ever act like he isn't a) on stage b) loudly laughing and joking with other vampire actors or c) murdering. It's such a stark contrast to Louis' stoic pouting that it deserves individual praise.

Now that I've exhausted your attention span with far too detailed accounts of the performances , I'd like to direct your attention to the purely functional story and Louis' slow arc. It's obvious that Jordan is an independent director because he effortlessly draws great work from his cast and spends the rest of his time building elaborate, unnecessary sets. I've heard people complain about the film being overproduced, but I'd argue the point. Surely the long shots of New Orleans ports or the cobblestoned streets of Paris aren't necessary, but they're pretty in a way that isn't especially distracting, especially since almost every scene takes place at night and it gives all the proceedings a gloomy, Gothic aura. All the sets are rendered rather beautifully and effectively, but they are only ever the centerpiece of individual shots, or rather parts of individual shots. Unless we're challenging the long-standing tradition of establishing shots, or the right of establishing shots to be pretty instead of stock footage of the Tanner family's home, I don't think there's anything to complain about here, although I've never seen a movie I would call "over produced", I'm sure it's a legitamite complaint for some films, just not this one.

The only thing about Interview With the Vampire that I think flat-out doesn't work is the whole Interview thing. It's an awkward framing device, like the team of divers in Titanic, that doesn't add much to the film. If it's an excuse for Louis to narrate the film, it's a weak one and there's no reason why you can't just have narration because you think that's how the story should be told. No one's going to bitch about that, not unless you impliment it poorly. It's not something that effects the film beyond repair, but it's worth mentioning because it's a perfectly effective film and none of the truly glaring flaws are that detrimental.

If there's any flaw that really effects the film as a whole, it's Brad Pitt. His performance is so listless and disengaged that we lose our emotional center and the whole piece lacks impact or emotional heft, and that trick he learned for Benjamin Button - acting only with his eyes - doesn't seem to have developed yet.

Despite its scrubbed emotional palette, there's a lot to be said for Interview With the Vampire. I was a little bit in love with it when I was younger and I think it might have had something to do with its sterility. The vampire thing is pretty incidental, it's basically a period piece about some folks who happen to be vampires and sort of eskews the notion that if it's a vampire film it has to be a horror film, and I find the straightforwardness of the approach rather refreshing. It's Gothic and atmospheric, but it doesn't go for scares. It has an endlessly fascinating lead role next to an exquisite supporting role against the backdrop of some really lovely design, and I think that's a lot to go on. Even if it lacks impact, it's memorable for a lot of other reasons, and it's certainly not a mess.

7/10

Wolf Father

I'm not against remaking classic monster movies. If there's any remake I get really excited for, it's the remake of classic monster movies. It seems like it should be really easy, mostly because the rules are pretty vague, whereas most remakes force the creative team into a tight framework, lest ye get too original. A monster movie requires only a skeletal formula, leaving a creative team free to explore all corners of the myth. It's staggering what an immense failure The Wolfman is in every respect, specifically in its attempts to work against the script and performances, thinly attempting to connect the two disparate styles with gum and paperclips and the hopes and prayers of orphans made manifest. If the film had committed to a tone, either one of these tones could have feasibly worked, but with half the film pulling in one direction and the other half pulling in the other, it manages to tear itself to shit, fucking up even the most fundamental aspects of story.

First, our protagonist should be someone we like and relate to. I don't take exception to this film's Lawrence Talbot, an actor long estranged from his family who spent some time in a mental hospital during his youth after witnessing the suicide of his mother, but as written and as played by Benicio Del Toro, he's totally static, unengaging and unrelatable.

It's sort of a miracle that Mumbles Del Toro is an actor today, one of the great justices of Hollywood that he can get cast in something like The Wolfman and has an Academy Award. I'm a huge fan of his, specifically his ability to communicate vast emotion through his junkie eyes and drunken slurs, always creating tragic characters with a unique charisma. I love the idea of him in mainstream releases, contrasting so strongly against the typical Hollywood star by never even coming within noseshot (haha dogs) of being boring. To be fair, he's in a badly written, badly directed film that was retooled and fucked with far too much in post-production, a practice that will never be kind to actors. Still, it's a testament to a film's ineptitude that they can make Benicio Del Toro, one of the most inherently watchable actors of his generation, completely bland. Similarly, Emily Blunt, one of the best actors of her generation, is totally wasted in a role that calls for her to overact in that subdued, costume drama way that we're used to from every actress that isn't Emily Blunt. It's a relic from when the film was what it should have been: a moody Gothic horror film. Oh, you still thought it was a moody Gothic horror film? So did I, until about twenty minutes into the film and so did the actors until, presumably, the premiere.

If you hear someone praise this film by tossing around phrases like "this is a Wolfman for our generation", toss that person's face like a fucking salad. Our generation sucks sometimes, and we can all agree (WE CAN ALL AGREE) that our generation's horror films suck more than anything else, including our war. The sad fact is that as you stood over that man's bloodied remains, you'd realize he was right: The Wolfman is a Wolfman for our generation and while an excellent cast and lavish production design are eviscerated, shredded, minced and fucked before your eyes, I defy you not to cry tears of blood thinking about how our kids are going to think we were gigantic fuck-ups. It doesn't even have any pretense towards real horror. Apparently after so many rewrites, reshoots and re-edits, a director loses his mind and decides to make the muppet kung-fu film we've always wanted, but with werewolves.

"Muppet kung-fu" is a pretty appropriate way to describe the tone of this film, but it neglects the gore-porn angle. For some reason, I thought this film was PG-13 going in, a thought I began to question after the tenth anal evisceration. I realize now that I was under this impression because there's no reason for The Wolfman to be anything large or bombastic or, in my mind, any way at all for it to be large or bombastic. It's high-concept horror with no intentions toward being horror. Still, I haven't even begun to describe how fucking mad this film is. Ironically over-violent horror films are a trick learned by direct-to-DVD Blockbuster exclusives years ago and one would think that a major Hollywood filmmaker like Joe Johnston would know how weak it is, but that's the only trick the film has. He doesn't even stage his action with any flair, it's all just campy decapitations between sandwiched between Very Serious dialogue.

At least Anthony Hopkins and Hugo Weaving aren't wasted, Hopkins because he gets the one scenery-chewing role in the film that comes close(ish) to the film's tone, and Weaving because he has never given a bad performance and could only be miscast as a preschooler. But those are just two parts of the film that don't explode in fiery failure

I love truly mad or unusual films, especially ones that were produced for a large audience in the Hollywood system, but that's not what The Wolfman is. It's pseudo-weird, playing tricks hacks have been playing for years to get a reaction stoned high schoolers have been giving to cheaper films for years. It's a movie for stupid people. The sort of thing people go to to talk loudly over and forget about a few minutes after they leave the theater. It's something that preteens go to until they discover alcohol and sex, but since it's rated R they won't be able to get in and will have to discover alcohol and sex. In fact, all the babies born of preteens in the next two years will be called "Wolfman babies", which will confuse religious crowds in the coolest way possible. As in shooting babies with silver bullets. Yeah. That'd make a good film.

2/10

Portrait of a (Vampire) Killer

Watching From Dusk Till Dawn has helped me realize why horror films so rarely work. Things need to change and evolve, become new and connect with a new audience. Horror hasn't changed since the 80s, even today when we go see a horror film, nine times out of ten we're watching teenagers get hunted by a murderer of some sort, or maybe we're just watching a person meet a slow demise. People don't actually shake in terror from these things, it's just gore-porn with no real ideas or intentions behind it. Because Hollywood has been lazy and audiences have been even worse, we've been trapped in a revolving door full of mutilated corpses for about thirty years.

That's not a new criticism, but it's a fucking relevant one until someone does something about it. It means a lot to me that From Dusk Till Dawn exists for that reason, even if no one understands its intentions. You see, a major change in any artform has to come in a package that's easy to consume for the public, and after that the truly great genre films will appear. By nature, true horror films are not easy to consume for the public. When something that's truly horrifying but lacking the defining genre stereotypes that make it identifiable as movie horror arrives, people do not know what to do with it and tend to discard it. We're left with truly exceptional experiments that succeeded in more ways than they had any right to that were left totally ignored by the public, and whose reputation has less to do with the actual intentions of the film and more to do with the self-conscious kitsch it wrapped itself in and the reputations of the creative team involved.

Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino succeeded more readily than any other filmmaker in trying to do something new and different with horror. I can understand how heartbreaking and disappointing the film's failure was and how that could have driven Tarantino to never touch the genre again and to return to what made him popular in the first place with the nice but forgettable Jackie Brown. If you ask me, and you may as well because you're reading this, From Dusk Till Dawn is Tarantino's strongest screenplay of the 90s, if only because it pulls off such bizarreness so flawlessly.

I can't even begin to summarize the film's plot, so I will say this: it is about two bank robbers slash brothers in Texas. There's a preacher and his family in there somewhere, a bar, a few shootouts and the film may or may not have something to do with vampires. All those plot points and secondary characters are peripheral, though. If you're determined to think of it in these terms, you could call the bank robbers the "monsters" of the film, specifically Richie (Quentin Tarantino) a character that the film lives and dies for. Everything truly important and edgy happens in the first thirty minutes of the film when the secondary characters are just barely introduced and just barely defined.

Which inelegantly brings me to another point. The lengths the film goes to to define characters most people would see as stock (murdering bank robbers) are interestingly contrasted with the film's half-hearted attempts to define the preacher, Jacob (Harvey Keitel, clearly the most professional and actorly of any of these actors), who receives a glazed over characterization in one scene where Seth (George Clooney) prods him for information on his life. The preacher gives him all the typical character bites: his wife died a painful death, he lost his faith, quit his job, he's taking his children with him as he runs away out of grief and the two criminals that have kidnapped him are pushing him to the edge, and he's willing to kill for revenge should either of his two children be hurt. In that one scene we're given a character who is often seen as an interesting, compelling character, but Tarantino shows him to be more a stock character than the murdering bank robbers that he loves with all his heart.

There's a story that Tarantino started writing this film the night that he won his Academy Award. If Tarantino said that in an interview or something he intentionally gave his film another layer of meaning. Tarantino regards Jacob's character with respect, but is far less interested in holding his hand through his routine arc than he is with showing a deranged killer with no capacity to change run into obstacles that he can't wrap his child-like mind around. I hesitate to say Tarantino spits in the face of Oscar bait, because I don't think that he would have included Jacob in the film and given him such rich dialogue and hired an actor he respects as much as Harvey Keitel if he didn't love the character, but I certainly think his presence in the film is a commentary on what was happening in the world of film at the time and how critics and audiences were lumping his films with stuffy domestic dramas just because Pulp Fiction won an Academy Award. Tarantino's love of film has always been B-Movies and exploitation and trash, whereas the sensibilities that the critics fawn over, like his dialogue and his careful characterization, are derived from art and life in general.

In more ways than the blatantly obvious, this film is Tarantino's statement on winning an Academy Award. The clearest evidence that this film is all about Richie is that Tarantino himself plays the character, seemingly untrusting of another actor to take on a character he holds so close to his heart. If we were to list all the movie psychos, my hard drive would probably fry and I'd crash Google's servers, but Richie Gecko is a totally different beast. The movie doesn't relate to him on our terms, it relates to him on his own terms. In many scenes, we're literally inside the head of a murderous psychopath, and that world's similarities to ours make it all the more seductive. The differences are painfully subtle, but perfectly captured in my favorite shot in the film. At one point, Kate, the daughter of Jacob (played by the uniquely sexless Juliette Lewis) turns to Richie and says "Richie, could you do me a favor and eat my pussy? Please?". The suddenness of this statement keeps us wondering if it's really happening for about a second too long, and Richie is totally transfixed by her in all her sexless glory. How the great Guillermo Navarro shot her is a mystery to me, but the effects may be the purest little nightmare I've ever seen. Her eyes are different colors, one a harshly lit green, the other much darker. Her hair is a texture that you would be afraid to touch or that you might have nightmares about being suffocated by. The way her face dominates the frame suggests the powerful sexual urges Richie feels when near a woman he finds sexually desirable. It's interesting to see this scene in context, too, because the two best scenes in the film, featuring the Geckos and a hostage named Gloria, shows Richie's sexuality in a different mode, perhaps fueled by a lack of physical attraction to Gloria.

These two scenes, as I've said, are the best in the film. At the beginning of this post I suggested that From Dusk Till Dawn had a very new brand of horror up its sleeve and it's mostly expressed in those two scenes. In fact, they're so dark and so suspenseful and so perfectly realized that as I watched them this most recent time, I found myself sweating in terror. My point about modern horror is that the novelty of slashers and such has worn off after thirty years, and while I'm well aware of many horror films without men in hockey masks, so few of them work without eventually selling out and becoming just another cheap horror film. An untrained eye could accuse From Dusk Till Dawn of the same crimes, and it wouldn't be a totally unsubstantial argument, but I would argue that Rodriguez and Tarantino aim to make a large statement not only about horror, the history of horror and the optimistic future they have in mind for horror, but the direction that horror is going in thanks to lazy filmmakers and audiences. Their new brand of horror is self-contained and featured in just a few scenes. After that, as is typical of Tarantino's writing, he bounces around from style to style, quickly getting bored with one, but always moving seamlessly.

In fact, Tarantino's genre infatuation (and I'm a man who loves his genre films, so Tarantino is really right up my alley) has never more blatantly been the foundation on which is film is built. Observe: most every character in this film is a genre stereotype who behaves with the logic of that genre "world". I already discussed Harvey Keitel's character, but Seth Gecko, George Clooney's character, is clearly super-slick action hero type, perhaps even a James Bond type. You'll notice he's the only one in the film who can kick a shelf full of bottles and have the exact one he wants fall right into his outstretched hand. He's the only one who can punch someone standing right behind him and cartoonishly knock them unconscious, and you'll notice that he's the one who gets all of Tarantino's trickiest dialogue. Richie is a bit harder to peg, but as I watched the film I got the feeling that his character was mostly derived from screwball comic relief characters. Of course, the twist is how unhinged that person would be, always tagging along with his slick, handsome older brother and watching everything he does fail in comparison to his brother's casual successes.

Now I think it's time we address the elephant in the room: vampires. The fact that it's vampires is incidental, and there's a lot less going on in the second half where Tarantino and Rodriguez indulge their love of B-movies, but there are a few things of note. I'm always taken aback at Tarantino's death scene no matter how many times I see this film. He's become more sympathetic since he murdered Gloria and it's become more and more clear that he's just a child. His death scene has an air of tragedy, and I think that has a lot to do with the filmakers' love and sympathy for the character. Also, Seth makes a statement about the vampires that has a lot behind it:

"I know why you lost your faith. How could true holiness exist if your wife can be taken away from you and your children? Now, I always said God can kiss my fuckin' ass. Well, I changed my lifetime tune about thirty minutes ago 'cause I know, without a doubt, what's out there trying to get in here is pure evil straight from hell. And if there is a hell, and those monsters are from it, there's got to be a heaven. There's just got to be."

There's a lot happening in this speech, but I'd like to direct your attention to the bolded statement. Richie was the monster in the film's first half, and when the vampires are introduced, he is killed. I'm inclined to say the reason the second half exists at all is to mitigate Richie's actions by comparing him to creatures of pure cocksucking evil (there's also a line at the very end about psychos that has a similar effect). Richie may have been a bad person, but he certainly wasn't pure evil straight from hell.

I admire Tarantino's tenacity more than anything about him, but I can't bring myself to commend his performance here. I think it might be a symptom of two major personalities working together so shortly after becoming big fucking deals and not being able to be completely honest with each other. If Tarantino had directed this film and had viewed the dailies, he would have understood why his performance wasn't working. I understand that he's protective of the role, but he's just not right for it because he's not an actor. It's absurdly clear when he's interacting with Clooney, who's doing some of the best work of his career in this film. Tarantino understood that he has an awkward screen presence, but he did not understand that an awkward screen presence is not the same thing as an awkward presence in this film. I think Tarantino learned his lesson here, too, because to illustrate my point, it's very easy to point to Frederik Zoller in Inglourious Basterds. His very presence disrupts the flow of the film with its awkwardness without ever once taking you out of the film with stiff expressions and movement and stilted speech.

Aside from Clooney, my favorite performance in the film is Brenda Hillhouse (who I just discovered was Tarantino's acting teacher) playing the hostage Gloria. She only has a few lines, but the camera is unwilling to stop looking at her, and she gets the most interesting character moment in the film that isn't given to Richie. When Richie innocently and disarmingly invites her to watch TV in the other room with him, she spends a few moments hesitating before she and the audience begin to understand that he's genuine and that he is truly a child. We understand his capacity and penchant for violence, but we are as yet unaware of his capacity for sexual violence. We know something bad is happening, and there's an ominous fog over the whole scene, but we root for Gloria and hope that she survives and that we've just misread Richie. How much Hillhouse communicates just with expression is one of those acting marvels.

I can't express how badly this film has been misjudged. Hopefully history will be kind to it, but its only reputation is as the midnight movie that it sort of is for about thirty minutes. It's given no thought or credit outside of that and I blame audiences too lazy to engage with it on a level outside of exploding vampires. It's not unusual for a brilliant genre film to be ignored for everything but its cheap pleasures, but the disservice done to our fucking culture by ignoring From Dusk Till Dawn is head-spinning. The beating it took critically and at the box office may not have been your fault, peers of mine who were six years old when this film came out, but it's your fault for not rediscovering this film for more than its trashiness.

10/10