Herr Machine

Take Names.

2010-04-27T08:41:00.000-07:00

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

2010-04-04T14:47:00.000-07:00

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

2010-04-03T08:46:00.001-07:00

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

2010-03-23T13:59:00.000-07:00

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

2010-03-14T12:51:00.000-07:00

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

2010-03-11T11:36:00.001-08:00

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

2010-03-08T09:54:00.000-08:00

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)

2010-03-07T09:32:00.000-08:00

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.

2010-03-05T08:39:00.000-08:00

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

2010-02-26T12:09:00.000-08:00

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

2010-02-22T13:41:00.000-08:00

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

2010-02-20T12:52:00.000-08:00

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

2010-02-16T08:10:00.001-08:00

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

2010-02-05T11:40:00.000-08:00

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

Little Golden Men

2010-02-01T20:01:00.000-08:00

I realized in a mild daze that Oscar nominations are tomorrow morning and for fuck's sake I need to stop delaying this. This was originally going to be two separate posts, but fuck it, man, I'm merging them.

I broke onto the blogging scene as an Oscar predictor, and I still make a point of doing it, mostly because I have friends who also do it and it's sort of fun. My grape of interest is now a raisin now, or a dead cat or something, and that has everything to do with Best Picture last year. Well, Crash had something to do with it, but I was still pretty enthusiastic the next two years, especially when The Departed (my second favorite of 2006 (at the time, (did The Proposition come in 2006? I think it had its American release in 2006, right?) but now it's third or fourth)! The best the Academy has done in years!) won Best Picture. 2008 was a pretty weak year. I saw a lot more movies that year and I only had three films I would have given a 10/10: The Dark Knight, Wall-E and In Bruges, and none of those received a nomination. In fact, they nominated The Reader over those films, which I haven't seen but reserve the right to insult. I didn't see it on purpose. I'm fucking done with holocaust movies. They had their chance, and if your genre peaked with Schindler's List, you underperformed. They're dreary and serious and unpleasant and trade in themes that have been mined into collapse, killing dozens of miners and trapping many more. Holocaust movies are for middle aged people who throw parties and sit around talking about how we should be sending Native Americans checks and how children are the future. Fuck holocaust movies.

Anyway, I was totally uninvested in last year's Oscars. My favorite Best Picture nominee was Frost/Nixon, but I still didn't feel particularly strong about it. I was angry that Danny Boyle won Best Director for some of his weakest, most uninteresting "Hollywood does Bollywood" work. I was furious that Sean Penn won an Oscar for a nice, but uninteresting role for the second time (okay, he was pretty good in Mystic River, but I think we can all agree that Johnny Depp deserved to win that year) when he did so much more interesting work in, say, Dead Man Walking and when Mickey Rourke gave the most ball-shattering performance of the year. I'm just as pissed about Crash as the next guy, but you don't have to give statues to the gays and take them away from more deserving people and create the same problem all over again, do you?

What am I talking about? It's the fucking Academy, of course they do.

So, to be clear, I have not seen enough movies this year to really predict the Oscars accurately, but I'm going to try because tradition is important.

BEST PICTURE
The Hurt Locker
Avatar
Up in the Air
Precious
Inglourious Basterds
Invictus
Up
An Education
A Serious Man
500 Days of Summer

500 Days of Summer is my No Guts, No Glory prediction here, for those of you who know what I mean. I played it safe, mostly, but I can see a lot of surprises popping up here. Either A Serious Man or 500 Days of Summer could easily be traded out for District 9 or Star Trek, but I think the Academy feels like they covered their asses post-Dark Knight with their Avatar nomination.

BEST DIRECTOR
Kathryn Bigelow for The Hurt Locker
James Cameron for Avatar
Jason Reitman for Up in the Air
Quentin Tarantino for Inglourious Basterds
Lee Daniels for Precious

Director seems pretty sewed up right now and it seems pretty crazy to try and mess with this or Best Actor. I haven't seen Up in the Air or Precious, and I'm not Jason Reitman fan, but I'm happy to see my man Quentin in the race again, and with a maybe 5% chance of winning, I can live with that for now.

BEST ACTOR
Jeff Bridges for Crazy Heart
Colin Firth for A Single Man
Jeremy Renner for The Hurt Locker
George Clooney for Up in the Air
Morgan Freeman for Invictus

There won't be any surprises here.

BEST ACTRESS
Sandra Bullock for The Blind Side
Carey Mulligan for An Education
Meryl Streep for Julie & Julia
Gabourey Sidibe for Precious
Zoe Saldana for Avatar

Okay, okay, we all know that last slot, and my next No Guts, No Glory is totally wishful thinking, but I'm hoping that Hollywood's groupie-like affection for James Cameron will get his actors some recognition. If they're serious about giving it Best Picture they will nominate Saldana. Historically a film with no acting nominations doesn't win Best Picture (tell that to Slumdog Millionaire, though) and James Cameron has always gotten great work out of his leading women. At this point I'm willing to bet that Bullock will win because fuck knows why. She won the SAG and the Globe, right? And she's one of the worst actors in Hollywood.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Chirstoph Waltz for Inglourious Basterds
Stanley Tucci for The Lovely Bones
Matt Damon for Invictus
Woody Harrelson for The Messenger
Christopher Plumber for The Last Station

So we all know that Waltz is taking this, which is great, but it's left the remaining spots fair game. I basically chose four people who are great, respected actors but have either never been nominated for an acting Oscar or haven't been nominated in ages. Any one of those actors deserves to win an Oscar one year, but not this year.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Mo'Nique for Precious
Anna Kendrick for Up in the Air
Vera Farmiga for Up in the Air
Julianne Moore for A Single Man
Samantha Morton for The Messenger

Mo'Nique takes this in a cake walk, and the two Up in the Air chicks are going to make it. Julianne Moore is a perennial space-filler and Samantha Morton is a brilliant actress who should have won in 2002 for Minority Report.

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
Quentin Tarantino for Inglourious Basterds
Mark Boal for The Hurt Locker
The Coen Brothers for A Serious Man
Pete Docter and Bob Peterson for Up
Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber for 500 Days of Summer

Tarantino wins this, but it could go to Mark Boal. The Coen Brothers are becoming regulars, and thank Yahweh for that. New Pixar film? Give them a screenplay nomination and shut those damn animated films up. 500 Days of Summer's presence here is an extension of my bold choice to put it in Best Picture. And look at that, if this weren't the year that the Academy decided to pussy out, this would make a great Best Picture slate.

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner for Up in the Air
Geoffery Fletcher for Precious
Nick Hornby for An Education
Neill Blomkamp for District 9
Scott Cooper for Crazy Heart

This lineup makes a lot of sense to me. When you run out of Best Picture hopefuls, the screenplay category becomes a runners-up list.

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
Dion Beebe for Nine
Roger Deakins for A Serious Man
Mauro Fiore for Avatar
Robert Richardson for Inglourious Basterds
Bruno Delbonell for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

And that's it. We'll see how I did in a few hours. I mostly played it safe after my disastrous fuck-ups last year, but knowing my luck the Academy will go crazy and nominate Transformers (the first one) or something. Anyway, I think nominations are announced at 6am or something.

Best Friends Forever

2010-01-30T12:49:00.000-08:00

I'm not a psychic, but I am more perceptive than you. When I say that I fucking knew that Dexter would shit itself inside out when the first two seasons' cocaine barrel ran dry, I'm not bragging, I'm just using my powers for the good of the land.

The first season tracked Dexter's interactions with another serial killer, getting into his head in a very talky, meticulous way while the second season made Dexter the protagonist of a thriller, engaging his character with more action and suspense (more my syringe of poison). Now we're apparently out of angles to go at Dexter's character with, and like so many dramas the writers need to find new things to keep the audience's attention. Cheap gimmicks and violence porn will take the place of the well-written, meticulous character study we've all gotten used to streaming off the finest television pirating websites that 1997 can buy.

The writers' and producers' gimmick is the best friend one. A best friend that Dexter can go golfing with and talk about power tools with and make friendship bracelets with and slit throats with and one that he can eventually drive to the brink of sanity with violence and secrets. Which actually sounds like a good way to approach a story, but there were fundamental flaws in that idea that the show was never going to get around. It's my inclination that Miguel Prado (the best bud in question) being more sympathetic and wanting to help Dexter control his urges but eventually being driven mad by the evil that is only just below Dexter's skin would make for a far more interesting arc. It's unfortunate that the writers opt to make Prado a scheming villain instead, presumably as a quick way to ultimately dispatch the character once the season is over. That gives us nine or so episodes of Prado being a good guy and getting through to Dexter's inner demons, and then throwing him away by making him evil, even contradictory towards his established character once his character has run its course, which strikes me as terribly cheap. For one, it's hard to buy Prado's deception when he's been more like a little kid than a brilliant assistant district attorney. Also, he doesn't seem to understand how being a district attorney works, or at least he has a thirteen-year-old's view of it. After fourteen years of being an ADA, he still hasn't figured out why defense attorneys are there and thinks that district attorneys are the untouchable kingpins of Miami that cannot be stopped even by death.

There's a completely separate case that all our favorite Miami Metro Homicide team is on while Dexter dicks around at sleepovers, and it could not be more lame. It's like an episode of CSI Miami stretched out over twelve episodes. There's just nothing of value or substance in this plot line and it's the worst, most obvious sign that the writers were out of material. They're hunting a serial killer who is looking for a drug dealer that disappeared (Dexter killed him, setting off a string of murders that effects him in no way! They never even mention it!) and that's it. There's nothing else to it. They talk to witnesses who give them clues that, with their police resources, they use to tighten the gap between them and the killer, which like listening to someone describe an episode of Law & Order for two hours. And when they run out of boring police procedural shit, they go to Deborah, who's having a retarded interracial romance with some punk, which is cool because last time we saw her she was balling a Peter Fonda lookalike.

The show is aiming to make Dexter more normal, which is at least an arc for him to go through, but I'm not convinced it's for the best. It's easy to relate to him getting married and having a baby, but him pretending to be normal or doing routine stuff has never been what makes this character interesting. Thankfully, Michael C. Hall is still up to the task of making his character compelling. I've realized that the way Dexter interacts with people when he's preparing to kill someone requires an actor with a complete and comprehensive knowledge of every social grace of every group, ethnicity, age and whatever. Hall understands his character very well. It's a performance with a lot of ticks and sudden changes in demeanor. There are shades of classic movie spies in it, strangely. Also, and I don't know whether to accredit this to Hall's performance or his anonymous looks - I suppose both - but the scenes where he kills are by far the best things about this season. It's a shame there are fewer of them this time, but Hall's performance is very intense. So many of his emotions are faked, and faked so well that we often forget he's faking, but one of the few times we get any real, genuine emotion from Dexter is when he has someone on his table and his words come out in a controlled hiss of pure fucking evil that plays so well against his happy family man/mild-mannered blood spatter analyst image and for just a few moments the show lets Dexter become the villain. There's something deliriously macabre about his apron and his clothing in those scenes, with their muted greens and grays and crisp, freshly laundered look.

I don't know if this season really is host to better acting from Hall or if I just never really grasped that aspect of the performance before now. I'll lean towards the former so that I can credit this ass train of a season with less and I can end with a statement to the writers.

If you run out of story ideas for your show and you don't want the swimming pool to stop getting filled with cocaine-basted roast chickens every morning, you're going to have to make the executives in charge understand that your show needs to stay on the air. And since you've been freebasing Oxycontin off script pages all morning, you're going to have to come up with something fast, but that thing you come up with fast should no longer be "we'll waste such great performers in such great roles", because a savvy studio executive will see through that and have you fed to alligators and your former body parts will spend the rest of their existence being set dressing in Australian comedies. Although I wonder if I could get another Jurassic Park film made with that logic.

3/10

Puppy Love

2010-01-25T17:30:00.000-08:00

Let the Right One In is a film that I've been interested in for a long time. During its initial theatrical run, it didn't come to my state. When it was released on DVD there was a great deal of controversy about the dumbing down of the subtitles and I opted to wait for the original translation to be released on DVD before I viewed it.

It was thus brought to my attention that my best friend, Netflix Instant Watch, had a copy of the film with the original translation intact and. Unlike many foreign language films Netflix Instant Watch pimps, they don't force a dubbed version on me like the public school system completely failed me. Watching a dubbed film is like having my dad cynically half-describe a movie to me from the other room. In other words, it's for children. I know people my age who refuse to watch films with subtitles. The first film I saw with subtitles was Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon when I was ten. Maybe I was born for this, but I think it's more likely that you should read a book sometime.

I digress. Vampire films have a spotty history, and the best comparison I can make is to pirate films. The best pirate film ever made is obviously The Crimson Pirate, but ever since then there have only been a handful of pirate films produced that are even worth watching. While I'm an Interview With the Vampire apologist (I love production design, okay?), I could probably count the great vampire films on one hand. The genre isn't exactly known for being fresh. So few vampire films did anything different since Bram Stoker introduced vampires to sexuality. And pop culture. And we've been watching vampires make out sensually for the eighty years since.

Let the Right One In trades in sexuality, but it goes at it from several fresh angles and it trades in more than just that. To its advantage, it really isn't a vampire film so much as a romantic (I use the word loosely) thriller with a vampire in it. It's loosely plotted and mostly concerns a 12-year-old boy named Oskar who is viciously bullied at his school and his relationship with Eli, a girl who looks to be about his age but is quickly revealed to be a vampire. Mostly we follow their lonely worlds as they expand to include each other.

The film's violence plays into that as well. Easily the best blood-sucking or vampire-related imagery I've ever seen in a film, it's especially effective because Eli doesn't just appear innocent, but is innocent. There are several big, floating question marks around her character that not only have to do with her past (where there are several big, scarred question marks floating) but with her character. Despite her age, she is clearly very sheltered and is in most ways a 12-year-old, but killing for survival brings with it a certain maturity that only appears in flashes. Her character is handled with a logic. Lina Leandersson plays Eli with the characteristically vampiric flourishes, but at a different angle. Mostly we think of vampires as calm, collected and cold monsters because they've lived for so long and rejected emotion in a way that we think is obvious to assume a person that old would. Eli is calm, collected and cold, but it comes from a place of innocence and curiosity rather than one of cynicism. It's an extraordinary performance.

Elsewhere, the cinematography seems to be influenced by Asian, and specifically Korean, and even more specifically Chan-wook Park films. It's not aggressive in its beauty, but holy fuck it's beautiful. Cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema has a marvelous aesthetic, framing his shots symmetrically with slow tracking and a bleak color palette, mostly devoted to blacks and various shades of white. The production design is obsessed with squares and harsh angles, and maybe that's characteristic of Communist Sweden, and if it is I'd like to high five the shit out of whoever designed that gulag of a country at the same time as sort of be scared of ever going near it. It's such a perfect match for the cinematography, and if you ever want to discourage someone from being a Communist, all you have to do is show them this film.

The visuals do so much to push Let the Right One In as a horror film, and they do a damn good job of it. As I noted above, it's not really a horror film at its heart, but director Tomas Alfredson seems intent on showing us that if he had wanted it to be a horror film, he could have made it a horror film. There are a handful of scenes that, aside from the visuals, are extremely effective minimalist horror, and none of them directly involve any vampiring, as if to further prove the director's talent.

It's been years since we've had a worthwhile vampire film, much less an essentially perfect vampire film.

10/10

Yes, Father. I Will Become a Blogger.

2010-01-25T13:02:00.000-08:00

You may have noticed sparse updates recently, and that's for a few reasons. First, I still haven't found a steady source of income and robbing a movie theater for viewings of popular films is not only a complicated idea to explain, but an even more complicated one to execute.

Second, I'm lost at sea with only my Michael Bay retrospective to keep me anchored in the harbor of sanity. This is an official statement: I will accept requests. Something you'd like to discuss? Hear another opinion on? It can be individual films, an entire series of films or, fuck, nothing to do with film at all. If you want a co-pilot on something blog-related, just ask. Most of you know me on Facebook and my email is burnbeforereading@gmail.com. I have no intention of painting myself into a corner with this blog and am open to any and all suggestions. The original intention for this blog was for it to be community based and request oriented.

If all of you turn out to be total chumps and can't come up with something cool, I'll probably do a Kevin Smith retrospective.

Isn't It Good

2010-01-20T07:56:00.000-08:00

It's a curious thing to watch something slowly but swiftly move into greatness, and there's nothing more satisfying than seeing a great creative individual or team turn their failures or missed opportunities into greatness. Every shortcoming of Dexter's first season has been used as a trampoline to grab onto the treebranches of excellence, and the excellent second season would not be possible without those very specific shortcomings. I know in my boners that the writers and producers of Dexter knew that their first season would be their weaker season, but if they could succeed at making it a hit, the second season would be their great achievement.

That said, it has a great deal of surface flaws that could have been fixed quite easily. That it's rife with flaws is just something one has to learn to respect about serialized drama, and that these flaws are so wildly specific to the need for twelve hours of drama lest ye die is disappointing. It's the eternal reminder that, as a product, film and television is always going to be hamstrung by its need to meet certain requirements for the sake of marketability and longevity of investment. I'm more willing to forgive these flaws, though, because television offers a venue for serialization at the same time as long-form drama and while certain concessions are necessary, they're not concessions made by the creative team but rather by the medium they're working in. Television is a flawed medium and that's not going to change until televisions themselves are entirely replaced by the more malleable streaming content or until a mad genius figures out how to work commercials into a narrative.

For those of you who haven't seen the first season, I'll be discussing plot points for the second season that tie into the end of the first season. Also, you may want to know that the show is about a blood spatter ANALyst and sociopath who murders bad guys. In faggot's terms, spoile4s hehe.

After dispatching the Ice Cream Sandwicher, Dexter has become distraught. For almost a year the personal mindgames he played with another serial killer gave his life verve and meaning. His sister is a shaken mess and living with him after her intensely intimate encounter with the Ice Man Cometh and Sgt. Doakes is suspicious of Dexter and following him at night. Oh yeah, and a scuba diving team uncovered the dozens of dismembered bodies Dexter has been dumping in the ocean for years.

On the lame side of things, Dexter's girlfriend Rita thinks that Dexter is a heroin addict and sends him to Narcotics Anonymous where he meets a fox named Lila who, like all attractive women, is totally out of her mind. This is where the series shows its allegiances. When given the choice between being an intense thriller slash dark comedy and being a soap opera, it jumps into the neon jean shorts of soap opera with no shame.

And god damn the writers for taking the easy way out, because they strike dogs about halfway through the season only to give it all up like they couldn't wait. As the first season flirted with dark comedy and horror, the second season becomes a full-fledged black-as-the-heart-of-Africa comedy and we get a scene or two of such knee-shattering horror that it became heartbreaking to watch the writers and producers cop out for the sake of tits. Everything aside from its meandering narrative is an improvement over the first season. Every character is fleshed out and given dark, rough angles, especially Angel, the loveable brown spot on Dexter's rainbow of political correctness who gets a comic and tragic angle and goes through a very sympathetic arc. Deborah, Dexter's sister, is given the most complete arc that also falls victim to some soap opera writing towards the end, but her story is incredibly true to her established character, which goes against the time-honored tradition of destroying a well-established character and rebuilding it for the sake of the plot.

But really the best character on the show was Sgt. Doakes, the endlessly intense, borderline psychopathic police officer who is obsessed with proving that Dexter has some kind of secret. This is the dynamic that allows the second season of Dexter to become the best thriller I have ever watched on television. All those stupid asides that focused on Doakes last season that I complained about are given purpose. Without his character fleshed out, and without his background probed, we would never understand the transformation he goes through and we'd never sympathize with the horrors he goes through.

What makes Doakes such a spectacular antagonist is not only the way Dexter's heroism (in that he's the character we follow, and therefore the hero of the story even if someone else has the moral highground) is established against the Ice Tray Cracker (who is pure, swamp monster evil) in the first season and then challenged by Doakes in this season. Doakes is an asshole, for sure, but he's also a good cop who plays by the rules and gets the bad guys the right way. Dexter is an evil little bastard who hopes Doakes fails so that he can kill the criminals that slip through his fingers. Like all great hero-villain relationships, the conflict is tied to our own sense of morality and we choose sides based on that. If a film or television show understands that, they have the viewer by the balls.

I misjudged Dexter based on its first season and want its forgiveness. I take back everything mean I said about the first season and only stick by my criticisms of the second season. It's a strong argument for not passing judgment until you've seen every episode of a television show, but mostly I'm pleased that Dexter called me out on my lack of patience. It's a show with patience and I'm glad I stuck with it. I encourage anyone considering starting with this show to approach it with the same patience.

9/10

MLK Jr. Day Special: A Brand of Magic That Never Fails

2010-01-18T19:59:00.000-08:00

For Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I chose a film with no cultural identity. Whoops. I figured Kazaam would be steeped in popular image of black culture from the early 90s, like diagonal hair and bright colors. We could discuss the African origin of these trends and how black people deserve to make as much money as white people. We could also discuss that scale I made up a while ago that measures black peoples' fashion sense, where on one end you have Shaka Zulu and on the other you have Barack Obama.

Kazaam concerns a fledgling little cocksucker named Max who, in his quest to kick everything, kicks a boombox housing a black genie, who despite his penchant for rap and brightly colored shirts, claims to be Arabic, which is about as convincing as that one James Bond film where they turn Sean Connery into a Japanese. Kazaam seems to have been made by the most evil people in the world, trying to confuse our society into becoming homogeneous and tear cultural identity away from everyone living in America. When Shaq is rapping about his time in B.C. Arabia, society has just been shaken to its core. Shaq is a wild card for destroying rich cultural histories. You can put him in any movie and destroy any culture, no matter how subtle or small that culture might be. He disrupts something as small and negligible as nerd culture when you imagine him in Lord of the Rings, dribbling the ring through Mordor and slamming it into Mount Doom and he disrupts something as enormous as his own black culture when you imagine that big ol' grin toting a tech.

As much as I'd like to linger on Shaq, I think that obsession is becoming dangerous and I should move on to the child. I don't know who this kid is or why he's in this movie, and I'm not going to dignify his performance with an IMDb search. This kid isn't just stupider than the average kid in a cynical Hollywood movie, he's stupider than a REAL kid his age. While most kids his age are hanging out in front of Village Pantrys giving me tough looks, this kid is hanging out with strange men three times his age and pining for a dad who not only walked out on him before he can remember him, but reacts with an earth-shaking indifference when he finds out his son is not only alive and (relatively) well, but people exist when he's not talking to them.

This movie is so over-processed and pasteurized that it really gave me the creeps. I wanted to stop watching it spit on my grave. The only possible explanation for Shaq is that he was assembled out of the corpses of other entertainers and then thrust upon the world. Today he lives on as a failed experiment, but the testament to his monumentous ability to weird you out with his bland gentleness is public, for all to see. I don't think that anyone, in good conscience, could call Shaq a human. Not without insulting every other human ever born and our genetic relatives, at least extending to lizards. He's the same as those AIs that are supposed to work for human interaction, but in order to get them to work you have to ask them very specific, leading questions. You can never have a real conversation with them, just like you'd never be able to have a real conversation with Shaq and you'd never be able to make a real movie or piece of entertainment with Shaq.

Maybe this is why I hate basketball and sports in general. No other entertainment is so removed from the human element that things like Shaq can bleed through and into other entertainments. If Shaq had to audition for something ever, or even just talk to somebody and convince them he was right for a job, he would fail and the person he talked to would need a shower. Instead, he signed up for basketball at a young age and kept playing. He could have gotten by on not a word, and I'll bet he did. From there, it was all statistics and analysis. He performed well and so he went further and further. Eventually he became famous, but not because he was a personality and not because he was pleasant to watch in any sense. He is weird and he frightens me.

Have you ever watched a movie where you were so caught up in a thought you had about it that you barely even watched the movie? That's how Kazaam was for me. I was freaked out from the moment Shaq stepped onscreen and it didn't let up until the movie was over. This is certainly not empirical criticism, it's the ramblings of a scared child. Maybe recent events have effected my perceptions. I've had a pretty stressful few days. I didn't think watching Kazaam would only add to that.

2/10

The Tightening Noose

2010-01-15T09:17:00.000-08:00

I've just finished the first season of Showtime's Dexter, which I started watching shortly after I discovered how much was available to watch on Netflix Instant Watch, and holy shit there's so much to watch on Netflix Instant Watch. I was completely unprepared for it. When the option was first presented to me, I quickly looked through the available films, saw a handful of good titles and even watched the first few seasons of The Office on a bender with a friend's Xbox.

So Dexter became the ultimate test of this Instant Watch service. And what can I say? It's streaming content, so it's certainly not HD quality or anything, but that's a worthy sacrifice if, like me, you tend to want to ingest TV shows all at once instead of waiting for individual discs to arrive in the mail, and especially if you're sharing an account with a family of seven and you have the two-at-a-time service and every time you get something you're renting a Michael Bay film.

I'm sure you all know that Dexter is about a blood spatter analyst cum serial killer played by Michael C. Hall, but he's a serial killer with a catch: he only kills bad guys. How does he determine who's good and who's bad? Cold logic. He's a sociopath, after all. And why is this film so different from all those shows and movies about subverting the law and murdering to satisfy your personal code of morality that I hate so very much? Not enough, honestly, but Dexter is a sociopath who kills first and foremost to satisfy his desire to murder; I just wish the show would keep that in mind when they deviate from the main story line to have Dexter pornishly execute a drunk driver. Dexter is a sociopath who has the same relationship with a code of morality that I do with the process of making a tequila sunrise. If I mix all these things together I can have a tequila sunrise, which has tequila in it, so hooray. I could drink the tequila straight, but that's not how it's done, I'm supposed to have something larger and I'm supposed to take it slower. The writers take a more commercial approach to the murders, trying to appeal to the audience's love of violence and disgust with criminals. The more interesting approach would be Dexter's hatred of the code, but continued obedience to it out of respect for the man who taught it to him.

Aside from the show's antiquated hatred and misunderstanding of marijuana, there's one scene that's very tellingly constructed from a morally conservative standpoint. Spoilers for the rest of this paragraph. One episode follows Dexter's disposal of a couple who bring Cubans into America and kill the ones whose families can't pay the activation fees. A child hiding in a car trunk gets a front-row viewing of Dexter sedating and dragging the wife off. Dexter has to investigate his own crime scene (rote and you knew this would happen from the moment you heard the premise, but come on, it's still pretty cool) when the police discover the child. They get him to talk to a sketch artist and together they produce an immaculate drawing of JESUS CHRIST. It's like having sugar poured directly into your tear ducts by Glenn Beck. I almost stopped watching the show right then and there. If Dexter was going to become the symbol of the heroic that catch the wicked on behalf of those damned liberal courts that never seem to catch them themselves, I wasn't going to be a part of it. I pressed on, mostly out of curiosity for Dexter's character. Despite what happened in that episode, I was getting invested in the character, despite how hard large portions of the show were working against it.

And in spite of all that they did, the character, remains intact and interesting. The most interesting portions of the show are his interactions with the police officers he works with as a blood-spatter analyst and his personal interactions. Now, those personal interactions are best when he's with his girlfriend Rita, but I'm not convinced they couldn't be better with his sister, a detective who he also works with. In fact, Rita and Dexter's relationship is a sub-plot I'm not entirely sure I like. Rita's a well-written character, but her relationship with Dexter is played out, especially since we get the same pieces of character from his relationship with his sister, and his relationship with his sister tends to be pertinent to the plot.

But what would they do with forty hours of freed-up time getting rid of Rita would give them? More introspection and more fantasy sequences. Being a sociopath, it's difficult to get to know Dexter through his interactions with others, and the writers, for whatever reason, only use his narration and fantasy sequences in conjunction with his interactions with others, rarely to reflect on the world around him. He even says he lives his life in his head, and being in there with him would be a billion times more revealing than trying to figure out what he's thinking while he interacts with people and pretends to be normal.

The biggest offense I think the show commits is to take us out of Dexter's head and give us entire subplots about the world around him, especially the fucking cops he works with. Every time we have a subplot about them, it drags us away from the best part of the show and into the land of boring, Law & Order police procedural bullshit. I don't see why the show needs to create all these salt-of-the-earth characters and put us in their presence for so long. I assume it's because they think we won't be able to relate to Dexter and need to fall back on boring stock characters. And they're right. Most of their audience aren't sociopaths and can't relate to what Dexter is going through, but that's only one way to connect to a character. Just because he's not relateable doesn't mean he's not sympathetic or interesting. And if we can relate our everyday struggles to a character, chances are he's not terribly interesting. Dexter's head is an interesting place and nothing else the writers come up with really compares.

Excel though it may when we're inside his head, the show's approach to the mind of a serial killer isn't exactly original or unique. It's seriously indebted to the writings of Bret Easton Ellis, and even manages the most excruciating homage to his work in one scene that's like being hit over the head with a pole made partially hydrogenated stupid. After all, Ellis' stuff has been brought to life on film really well only once and I think it has a lot of life left in it.

In any case, I just watched the first season. Perhaps all the problems I have with the show are solved further down the line, but based on what I've heard, they aren't.

6/10

Set Phasers to File

2010-01-14T07:04:00.000-08:00

It's taken me nearly six months, but I finally finished my trek through the Star Trek canon. I've watched all eleven films released over 30 years and watched half-interested at all sorts of intergalactic turmoil.

It's unfortunate that these films were, by and large, not very good. In fact, this series was consistently mediocre or sub-par. Only three of the original ten films I'd really consider rewatching or giving much thought to, however I reserve the right to reevaluate my scores in light of my newfound appreciation for the Star Trek canon, the magic of hindsight and the ever-changing tastes of a nubile blogger. In chronological order:

1. Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)
Original Score: 7/10

I'm a sucker for hard sci-fi and the Original Series struck the perfect balance between mass-appeal gadget porn and real existentialist pondering. Also, I'm a sucker for operatic shots of space and gorgeous sci-fi production design. If it weren't for the effects and production design this would be a pretty empty film, though. Even the cast seems disaffected by the script. It is, however, a great capoff for the Original Series. The rest of the films don't resemble it that much and could easily be any space adventure with any cast. While The Motion Picture doesn't do a lot to preserve the cheap aesthetic of the series, it's a great reunion show for the cast.

Revised Score: 7/10

2. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)
Original Score: 4/10

For all the hype surrounding this film, it was even more static than the notorious The Motion Picture. The conflict was slow and unengaging and the characters spent the movie sitting in chairs and doing little to interact with their environment. There was never any sense of urgency or danger, but there was Khan, who was a fantastic villain and probably the only reason I can see to watch this movie, and that's more than some of the later films will offer.

Revised Score: 5/10

3. Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984)
Original Score: 3/10

It's meant to be an exciting space adventure, but the cast always looks like they just woke up and are waiting for their coffee to be ready. And without Leonard Nimoy, the film loses its best actor. And, if stories are to be believed, when casting the Klingon villain they went with Christopher fucking Lloyd over Edward James Olmos. That just might be one of the horsemen of the apocalypse.

Revised Score: 3/10

4. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)
Original Score: 5/10

Discussing this film with a Trekkie friend of mine, he suggested I might get better mileage out of the film if I stop thinking of it as a comedy. I realize that my preconceived notions about the film and what people had told me about the film got in the way of my critical duties, because it's a perfectly fine movie if we ignore all the easy fish-out-of-water comedy. But the whole thing is so fucking safe. The cast doesn't seem to have any energy. It's just a routine space adventure with nothing at stake and no reason to get invested.

Revised Score: 5/10

5. Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989)
Original Score: 2/10

This film is like straight vaudeville. If I didn't know any better, I'd think it's an experimental film made for the sake of weirdness. It certainly held my attention the best of any of the films up to this point and it's hard to deny that it's the most unique of all the films in this series. Still, the shoddy filmmaking and my suspicion that weirdness wasn't the intent and it was just the result of an inexperienced rush job conspired against it, giving it a score that would imply that I hate it. On the contrary, I quite like it and, damn it, this is MY blog and if I like something, I can give it an appropriate score.

Revised Score: 7/10

6. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991)
Original Score: 7/10

The first film in the series that really starts getting anything right comes a little bit late. It's a fun space adventure with aliens, far-off planets, space battles and exciting drama onboard the Enterprise. The drama of the film is unique to the characters and they have things at stake. The cast has more energy here than they've probably ever had and Nicholas Meyer keeps things bounding in his second outing as director after Wrath of Khan.

7/10

7. Star Trek: Generations (1994)
Original Score: 3/10

It was just an episode of the TV show. It was all stupid. I'd much rather watch the TV show. At least the TV show tended to be well-written.

Revised Score: 2/10

8. Star Trek: First Contact (1996)
Original Score: 8/10

A smashing artistic and financial success, First Contact introduced elements of horror and amped up the action, giving a certain six-year-old boy nightmares for months. It's exactly the sort of gamble on tone that the series needed and everything is the better for it. The metaphysical pondering is the most effective yet, the story is the most exciting and the actors never did better work (that I've seen, I'll bet Patrick Stewart making breakfast every morning is a harrowing experience). Unfortunately there are some problems, mostly that the filmmakers don't want to make the film TOO exciting. Am I allowed to deduct points for missed opportunities? Hell, I'm doing it.

Revised Score: 8/10

9. Star Trek: Insurrection (1998)
Original Score: 3/10

It's got pretty much all the same problems that Generations had. It's not even a noteworthy failure. It's just terribly boring. The exciting new directions they went in with First Contact have been mysteriously abandoned. Patrick Stewart's god-like acting seems to be on vacation and we have to listen to bullshit about some group of old people who don't want to be sent to a retirement home even though their shuffleboard court is on top of the solutions to many of humanity's most desperate fears. I didn't get it, I was totally on the Federation's side the whole time.

Revised Score: 3/10

10. Star Trek: Nemesis (2002)
Original Score: 4/10

I'm pretty much subtracting six points for missed opportunity here. This was a film desperately trying to be great, but stuck with a director who didn't know what he was doing and a cast too tired to bring any life to the film. It's like a great musician taking a final bow and then getting his violin strings wrapped around his neck.

Revised Score: 4/10

Even if I liked hardly any of these films, I think I'll miss doing them. It was always interesting and there was always very little accumulated wisdom of the films going in to skew my perspective. Goodbye, Star Trek. You were probably never right to be a film franchise.

Looking Up

2010-01-13T08:11:00.000-08:00

Two things:

First, that's not the theatrical poster over to the right, it's an alternative poster done by Eric Tan, whose blog can be found here.

Second, I most admit that I have made a mistake. A week or so ago I wrote up my top seven films of the year with Up at #6. Upon rewatching it for this review I have realized how wrong I was. I regret not watching it again before writing that because I hadn't seen it since May and its effect had dimmed in my memory. I would like to make amends and declare Up my second favorite film of 2009, making my official list:

1. Inglourious Basterds
2. Up
3. A Serious Man
4. The Princess and the Frog
5. Observe and Report
6. Coraline
7. Star Trek

It seems like madness that I would put Up so low on my list when I so vehemently declared it the best film Pixar has yet produced. Oh, yes, I know that's a big statement, and after all, there's no genre-bending or gap-bridging or technology-striding in Up. It used to be a pretty solid punch-out between Wall-E and The Incredibles for the title of Best Pixar Film, but I think Up manages to come out on top . Maybe I need to watch Wall-E again; after all, I keep a Wall-E figurine on my desk.

Picking a favorite Pixar film is stupid, though. To watch a Pixar film is to be shot in the head with quality and have your brains paint a wall that is exuberance. Up is simultaneously Pixar's most emotionally potent, most fun, most exciting and funniest film. It's the tale of a lonely old widower named Carl Fredricksen. The world is moving fast around him and he has no reason to change. When his wife died he lost not only his wife, but the person who had been his life partner since they were children and the more willfull half of his existence. In his depressed stupor he commits assault and ties 20,000 balloons to his house in honor of his wife's memory. He kidnaps a child named Russell and escapes to Peru. Little does he know that the United States has had an extradition agreement with Peru since 2001, but that never really comes up.

Mainly the narrative is thus: Man lives entire life promising himself and his wife adventure. They lead a happy, if ordinary life and then she dies. He goes off to find adventure and has adventure. He feels rejuvenated by the relationship he has with a young boy, bereft of fatherly influence.

The opening of the film is very realistic and then we introduce the unrealistic Adventure! aspects to bring Carl's arc together. This would be an easy pitfall for any creative team that wasn't Pixar, but they manage to ground the Adventure! and merge it with the more tragic elements of the story. Sure, it's jarring, it's meant to be jarring, but the film never loses sight of its story or characters and is all the richer for managing a huge tonal shift right in the middle and knowing that the best way to do that is to anchor the film with strong characters.

Carl himself is a wonderfully squatty little creature, seemingly composed entirely of squares. He's introduced in that most emotionally wrenching of opening montages that you've obviously heard praised endlessly, so I'll avoid analyzing that particular scene. I hypothesize that his entire character, and therefore the entire film (remember that we established the entire film rests on the shoulders of the characters to keep the mad tone shift from tearing it in half like a smilie face earthquake) rests on this montage. If we didn't feel and understand every bit of Carl's pain, it would be easy to dismiss him as a crochety old fucker and an unpleasant protagonist (a common critical loophole if you haven't gotten your quota of negative reviews filled for the month).

The supporting characters are all magnificent, including Russell, the innocent, excitable wilderness explorer who stows away on Carl's house, Kevin, the giant multicolored bird that Russell adopts and who speaks in squawks and whose movements provide some of the funniest physical comedy I've ever seen, and Dug, the dog who has been given the gift of speech and says exactly what a dog would say if a dog could speak, which is so fucking awesome that I want to kick every filmmaker that made a movie with a talking dog and it wasn't like this right in the fucking shins.

Rounding out the supporting cast is my favorite Pixar villain, Charles Muntz. I have a special place in my heart of Gaston from Beauty and the Beast because his stake in that film's plot is purely emotional. Similarly, Muntz has spent decades hunting the mythical Beast of Paradise Falls (Kevin) and is the owner of Dug and the inventor of the collar that allows him to speak. The Adventure! plot is just so damn well-constructed and so full of exciting action sequences and so well connected to the rest of the story. Dug and Kevin are easily my favorite Pixar comic relief characters.

And those action sequences, oh my those action sequences. With so many films trying to be throwbacks to 1930s adventure serials, it seems a stroke of simple genius to set the film in present day but employ elderly characters using antique machines, allowing the filmmakers to posit the showstopping climax on top of a zeppelin. I don't remember thinking that the climax was so marvelous when I saw the film in theaters, but it's received three individual viewings since I rewatched the film this morning. The most shocking and effective moment in this scene is the reveal of the gun, which works for a few reasons. First, how common is a gun in an animated film? Second, not a single weapon is shown throughout the film. It is, after all, an adventure film, not an action film (learn the difference, Hollywood). But I don't want to demean the actual reveal, the use of music and cinematography, the reactions of the characters, the soundscape. All of these things work in harmony throughout the film and appropriately peak at the climax.

Of course, that's the case with all Pixar films. Up is stupidly, ridiculously gorgeous as as piece of cinematography and is the primary argument for those retarded awards ceremonies to share some of that Cinematography gold with animated films (the cinematographer's guild just gave a nomination to Avatar; we may be getting somewhere). That is, if Wall-E didn't already convince you. And as always, Pixar gives us the best original score of the year, this time courtesy of Michael Giacchino, one of the best composers working today.

But I'm wasting my time. You know all this, you don't need me to tell you. Pixar doesn't make bad movies. They just don't. If Cars were a Dreamworks film (and that's a fair criticism), it would be Dreamworks' masterpiece. Every time they release a film it's a masterpiece to topple their previous masterpiece. If you don't like Pixar, you're fucking stupid.

10/10

Yes, Father. I Will Become a Starship Captain.

2010-01-09T09:25:00.000-08:00

J.J. Abrams' 2009 Star Trek reboot is only sort of like a Star Trek film. If it were a real, tangible item, you probably couldn't get a grip on it without it slipping through your hands like it was covered in afterbirth. In defense of the filmmakers, and I guess this whole review will be my defensive position on Team Filmmakers, the Star Trek series has been covered in duct tape for a while and has really needed a greasebath. It's a new direction for the series, yes, but it preserves the characters and it's the only way the Star Trek series was going to continue. I don't imagine the nerd scum would be happy seeing their favorite daydream blown off the cultural radar and into little tiny pieces of shrapnel called "Family Guy spoofs of William Shatner's voice".

J.J. Abrams has done so much to make this Star Trek film that it needed to be. It's fast-paced, shiney and fun as opposed to the last few films, which were like playing with a rusty pair of scissors. And while he may not have preserved Gene Rodenberry's original intentions, he's preserved his characters in a way that pays tribute to the original ensemble with new actors that don't have to be forced into the script to appease the hoards of bloodthirsty Trekkies. Despite a few lapses in narrative logic (okay, gaping plot holes, are you happy?), the script is exciting and fast-paced and each copy was probably lit on fire before being handed to the actors.

Even if this is the second time I've reviewed this movie here, allow me to summarize the plot. It's futuretime once again and Earth is as gay and boring as ever, while there's all sorts of excitement to be had in space. The USS Kelvin is attacked by a massive Romulan ship, commanded by the delightfully evil Nero (Eric Bana) who spear-guts (In the future? Hot damn!) their captain, leaving first officer George Kirk in charge of escaping certain death. His pregnant wife goes into labor (women!) as weapons systems and autopilot fail, leaving Kirk to pilot the Kelvin into the Romulan ship and buy the escape pods time to escape, creating a sassy 9/11 subtext.

Mrs. Kirk gives birth to Baby Kirk who grows up to be Big Poppa Kirk (Chris Pine) who enlists in Starfleet and meets Leonard McCoy (Pathfinder) and begins a rivalry with Spock (Zachary Quinto). When Captain Nero appears for the first time in 25 years and takes the Enterprise's captain, Christopher Pike (Bruce Greenwood) captive, Kirk and Spock must learn the true nature of friendship to overcome a villain they both have vendettas against.

But let's focus on that first paragraph for a while. Star Trek's opening is another in a long line of perfect opening scenes this year. Abrams is king of this scene, stacking one horrible revelation on top of another and buttfucking the audience into nosebleed with suspense. It's almost an argument for short films, strangely enough, where this ten-minute sequence outclasses an otherwise excellent film on every level, mostly because the writing doesn't have to spend time connecting the dots and the characters are established in such quick strokes. Maybe it's an argument for good writing. I don't know. The film never maintains that momentum, and I don't blame them, really, but that one scene is an action/suspense masterpiece that, surprisingly, preserves the slow, naval feeling of Star Trek space battles.

As an action film and as an adventure film, it is fast and jaw-shattering, but it never again manages to be king of suspense mountain and the construction of individual scenes becomes rather more pedestrian.

None of that's too much of an issue, a film two funzos lower on the fun scale than that first scene would still rock your cocks. The only grave mistake this film makes is with James Kirk himself. First, Chris Pine is miscast, but the role is also written wrong. I'm all for reinterpreting a classic character, but Kirk is at odds with the logic of the script. How can this cocksucker ever inspire loyalty in a crew? That's suppsoed to be the defining aspect of Kirk: he inspires loyalty. Chris Pine does the film no favors by playing Kirk as a smug bastard, instead of making him charismatic and forceful in spite of his dickheaded behavior, he's just brash and dickheaded in spite of his dickheaded behavior.

Treatment of other characters elsewhere is way better. Doc McCoy gets a perfect performance from Pathfinder, Spock is less sad-looking thanks to Zachary Quinto (who was always my favorite part of the perpetual shitwagon Heroes, Lost's bumbling little brother), Scotty gets Simon Pegg in his best performance since Hot Fuzz, and seeing that is worth the fact that you'll never make out with the ticket girl now that she's seen you buy a ticket to Star Trek. Uhura least resembles her original character, and is played by an indistinguished Zoe Saldana, which is a depressing thought, going back to her work here after her work in Avatar blew my mind all over the wall.

Elsewhere, Eric Bana is great in a role that's a bit too small for him, playing an evil wizard. There has been a lot of derision aimed at his performance and how it's one of the weaker elements of the film, but that's something I haven't even begun to figure out yet. He flies around in a giant spaceship that looks like a petrified squid and turns planets inside-out. He also made a spaceship that can only be navigated by Olympic longjumps, unlike the sterile white Plexiglas of the Enterprise. Really, the design is top-notch. It maintains a very 1960s-futuristic feel while at the same time updating it to something we recognize as futuristic (phones the size of feet!). It's not terribly subtle, but it's pretty sweet and it'll make any smelly Indiana viewer think that he's an expert on production design.

Okay, okay, LENS FLARES. I thought the lens flares gave the future a look of brightness and optimism and gave the film a totally unique look. It's a self-conscious move: lens flares, after all, are only produced by a camera. I don't think that's too different from modern films being shot in black and white or any amount of flashy cinematography. After all, any of those techniques are reminding the viewer, in a very deliberate way, that they're watching a movie. Maybe I'm missing the real reason that lens flares are the devil's tool, but for what it's worth, I thought they were great for what they were. As a technique to give the film a memorable look, it worked, and it worked on a thematic level.

Similarly, it's a good aesthetic to capture the action and translates well between the action and interactions between characters and between the ships. As I said before, the space battles are played as fast-paced naval battles and are shot with verve and style. The action between individual characters harbors one of the film's best tricks to keep the film flowing quickly. That is, none of the action sequences last very long at all. They're all shot and staged excellently, but that tendency for them to go on for ages and burn the audience out is ignored. Instead the action bleeds into the next scene seamlessly (watch the drill scene closely to see how each individual scene is attached to a much different sort of action scene) and the tension never even begins to fade.

So, let's recap. Great opening, looks like it was rubbed with ham, terrible lead performance, good supporting performances.

Take that, Star Trek canon.

9/10

Waking Nightmares

2010-01-08T09:29:00.000-08:00

I'm not ashamed to say that if I'm asked what I thought the scariest movie was of 2009, I say Coraline without any hesitation. For this review, I watched it with my four-year-old brother and ten-year-old sister and both of them nearly wet their skulls in terror. While my ample body hair will weave together and crush my skeleton as a defense mechanism against fear, I understand the sensation from a scientist's position and think Coraline would be the best candidate to inspire the sensation should I be a weaker man one day.

Horror for children sounds a bit derogatory, so let's clear something up: films should not be made with a demographic in mind. The marketing campaign is the one that decides the demo, but because a film is animated, or features a child as a protagonist, or isn't rated R for extreme skull fucking, doesn't delegate it to being played on repeat in an orphanage until rug pirates do something made of chocolate.

Coraline is the very Gaiman-esque story of a little girl who encounters a magical creature in her house, one that assumes the form of her mother and populates a world almost precisely like her own. But where Coraline's home world is as dull and boring as anyone's (except she lives in a STOP MOTION WORLD, which would be cool, the little brat), this Other world is a fantastical world where everything is tailor-made to Coraline's wishes. Before long, this Other world starts to show its seems and Coraline's Other Mother begins to show some nasty intentions that would get her reported to CPS by any responsible neighbor.

The film is based on a Neil Gaiman book from 2002, and while I'm not familiar with that particular book, I'm familiar with Neil Gaiman and I'm familiar with Dave McKean's cover art, and I'm familiar with the crushing disappointment I felt when I discovered that the film wouldn't be in the style of McKean's art. As much as I love seeing stop-motion animation, and I love stop-motion, I can still lament what a visual handjob this movie would be if it had been done with traditional 2D animation in this style.

Yeah, yeah, we all know (Maybe. Who are you?) how much I love hand-drawn animation, but its underappreciated little brother, stop motion, is pretty fucking incredible as well. It's also the most labor-intensive form of animation. When I was nine or ten or something, I saw a featurette on the animation process behind Chicken Run where they explained that a really good day saw a little less than one second of animation being shot. I know to this day that I would probably hang myself after the first week, which would give the desperate animators a chance to cut some corners and use my dangling feet as a piece of set dressing.

It's unfortunate that, unless James Cameron's home-theater 3D is the real deal, I'll probably never be able to see this film as it was intended ever again. In 3D, Coraline is truly impressive. As I mentioned in my brief writeup for my 2009 in Review, stop motion offers the perfect venue for 3D: while it fails to add a realistic depth to a cartoony CGI film, and it looks too cartoonish for a live-action film, stop motion is the perfect compromise between animation and live action, and therefore provides the most seamless 3D experience.

And look at that, the 3D does something in this movie. Instead of eye candy, it becomes a visual cue that we have entered the Other world (that's not to say Cameron didn't do something similar in Avatar, but I think that the jungles of Pandora were marked more by a specific color palette than use of 3D, although there was some of that). Our first glimpse of this world is a wide, deep-focus shot of a kitchen, lit with the glowing amber and bright reds that will also come to characterize the Other world, just as the dull blues and grays will come to characterize the real world. Coraline's wonder, in this case, is our wonder.

Coraline herself is exceptionally expressive for a stop motion character, something that I haven't ever really expected from this medium. Her emotions never seem out of place for an eleven-year-old girl and the filmmakers are tasteful enough to not juxtapose moments of inhuman maturity and clarity for the sake of plot-building against more realistic eleven-year-old

Like all of Gaiman's work, it's rooted deep in mythology, and if he has aspirations to be a modern myth-maker, he'll never come closer to success than with Coraline. His inclusion of so many mythological elements, such as talking animals with personalities based on that animal's traits (the laconic cat, the scheming rat), the abundance of the number three, and lots of other stuff that you don't need me to list. As a hero, Coraline is a very typical eleven-year-old (I'm guessing) girl, and the film doesn't jump around that to try and stuff her into the mold of the hero. She's bratty, argumentative and impulsive and has the interests and dress sense of a little girl raised by professional gardeners.

But the real triumph, the real terror of the film is the Other Mother. With buttons sewn over her eyes, she at first appears (aside from, you know, the buttons) exactly like Coraline's real mother. Slowly over the film, she becomes more insect-like and the buttons more like the beady black eyes of an insect. In her final scene, the set dissolves into a nightmarish spider web and she into an enormous spidermonster (?) that will send your children to the therapist for years. Maybe it's because I never expect a movie marketed towards children (I know, I know) to even attempt horror, but that scene has never not given me the fucking spine-tingles.

In the end, my love for this movie comes down to a simple matter of taste. This sort of subdued horror, especially in animation, is something that appeals endlessly to me. There are things in this movie that are truly inappropriate for children, not because of the content, but because of the execution. Some of the creatures designed for this film and the world they inhabit is exactly the sort of thing that inhabits a grown man's nightmares. Where most horror films try to startle you and give you a murder boner, Coraline gives you nightmare imagery and claustrophobic editing, and I'll consider those scares far more genuine any day.

10/10

Virtues for the Vicious

2010-01-08T04:10:00.000-08:00

The Notably Unenthusiastic Return of the Michael Bay Retrospective is here, and you guys thought that I'd forgotten all about it. No, I just chose to pretend it didn't exist for a while. Michael Bay Retrospective, you are the troll that lives under my stairs. You know how to twist my loves into something awful and irrational that haunts me for days and your eyes are two pools of terror and rabies. However, you can't slam a Michael Bay retrospective closed in a hardcover book and expect it to turn into cocaine, so instead of being afraid for the rest of my life, I'm going to stand up to this retrospective and finish the shit out of it. At least that's how I felt until I watched Pearl Harbor.

I'd like you guys to know that I'm plunging my face into a bowl made of scalding hot hot sauce and filled with scalding hot lime juice for YOU, even if I consider my ego a reader of my blog. I'll accept your girlfriends as payment.

So I'm pretty over Michael Bay at this point; his movies are just bad. His action is pretty pedestrian and his editors, brave though they may be for working on a Michael Bay film, don't seem to be able to keep up with him. Furthermore, he's now given me two movies in a row with such unabashed sentimentality that it's like being punched in the face by a man made of sugar. Armageddon had that totally unearned death scene with Bruce Willis, and I thought that was bad. On the plus side, there isn't any weird fetishism in this film, but Michael Bay still doesn't seem to get sex.

Pearl Harbor is a controlled, committee-branded attempt to cash in on the real-life events of Pearl Harbor and the flag-waving and country-singing that the phrase itself instigates. That sounds like something any grouchy critic might say, but I stand by it.

That it's artificially lengthened by about two hours, and includes enough flag-waving to bolster the flag industry and push us out of this recession is enough proof to me. The constant speech-making and the indecent amount of patriotism are like the steel bolts in the USS Arizona.

Frankly the scope is just too big. You can't create two characters meant to be heroes and put them in the center of Pearl Harbor and have them continue to be the center of the film without making them single-handedly turn back the Jap invasion and win the war. Bay opts to create an ensemble of characters and follow them around during the attack, which is a common enough trick (but one that rarely works out - see: Bobby). That's okay, but for my taste I'd rather follow one character or one group and get a feel for them and their character and how they react to the situation than getting flashes of 2-dimensional characters doing heroic things and then disappearing into the ether.

But that's just me. Instead of saying what I would like to have seen, I'll just poke holes in what the film did do. For one, the ground-level view of battle, seen through the eyes of our three leads, their friends and squadmates and commanding officers is sort of gimped by us constantly going back to FDR making profound speeches to the Joint Chiefs. Oh, then we quantum leap into the Japanese military and listen to them talk about how America just can't be beat because they've got so much heart and baseball is fun. That sucked, too.

The general thrust of the story is "into the heart of modern Japan, who we will never let live down the events of Pearl Harbor, even though we stole their military and are at their robotic mercy" via Rafe McCawley, played by apple pie (I'm just joking, it's Ben Affleck. But seriously. Apple pie. America. Heart disease. Corporations.) and his best bud Danny Walker. For the first twenty minutes of the movie, they're the stereotypical American fighter pilots/best buds that you would see in any movie made during World War II, and we even get introduced to Evelyn Johnson (Kate Beckinsale) in the manner of any one of those wartime romances. Unfortunately, this mildly successful portion of the film is at odds with everything else in the movie, with its camp and lite tone against the rest of the film's devout seriousness. We spend a lot of time following Evelyn and her group of girls, who I think are nurses but are shown getting Purple Hearts at the end, so maybe they were secret agents who were putting bombs in the bodies of the wounded and throwing them at the Japanese.

It doesn't take long for Rafe to be presumed dead and for Danny to fuck Evelyn, setting into motion a mindfuck of contrived romantic triangularity and soap opera buttfucking. This in the middle of a fucking (PG-13) war movie that constantly cuts to FDR (portrayed not as the crippled socialist we all love, but as the brash, invincible and still pretty crippled ideal leader by the insane Jon Voight, in full repentance for his hippie days). It's no wonder that when this movie came out, when I was eleven, my image of it was a man-man-lady threesome in the water during the attack. I didn't know what a train was then, but now I think that's a funny image.

I just don't see how all these pieces fit together. It reeks of a script given a checklist by a studio for maximum emotional manipulation. If you're a communist, you'll still get sucked in by the love story, if you're black you'll be crying at the sight of the first black man to ever win the Medal of Honor, if you love water you'll be devastated by all the splashing and boat sinking. It really does have something for everyone, as long as you don't like things that are good.

As for Michael Bay, his filmmaking is as gaudy as ever, but I don't think his evil has really shown its true form yet. He's still pretending like he's a patriot that isn't planning the downfall of Western civilization.

My favorite of his directorial flourishes in this movie had something to do with Ewen Bremner. Ewen Bremner plays the goofy, stuttering squadmate of our two heroes, and at the beginning he sparks a romance with the hottest bitch in that group of nurses (I think it's Jaime King but don't hold me to that). They eventually get married and are happy and idyllic while Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett fight over the somewhat less attractive Kate Beckinsale. It's pretty nice of Bay to give Ewen Bremner a better, more successful romance than Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett, but then Bay unceremoniously blows up Bremner's wife. A lot of people die in this movie, but none of them get the same joyously enthusiastic sadism aimed towards Bremner for being goofy, ugly and stuttery. It's like a cut scene from In the Company of Men.

Michael Bay's fingerprints seem sort of drowned out here; it's so obvious that the film had a billion people working on it during the conceptual stages. The worst crime that the film commits isn't even really Bay's fault. As director, he's liable for the content of his film, but the absurd padding is the fault of the screenwriter(s), first and foremost. First of all, it's an hour of bullshit before the attack even starts, and then that goes on for an hour, and then there's an hour of getting back at the Japs by showing the Doolittle Raid. Meanwhile, we get about ten thousand disconnected sub-plots, like Cuba Gooding Jr. saving the world. He never even meets the heroes. He's only there to get affluent blacks into the audience (a tap-worthy demo if those Madea films are any indication), but is a trainwreck from a story point of view. And there's about fifteen minutes dedicated to Evelyn convincing an officer who she saved earlier in the film to let her listen in on the radios while Rafe and Danny bomb the Japs back, and it adds nothing to the story. It's just more padding to make the movie three hours long. It's embarrassing how badly this film wants to be epic.

One last thing because this is getting much too long. The jignostic attitude the film takes isn't uncommon for war films, but I was really turned off by the way the film refuses to acknowledge that, yes, we got fucked at Pearl Harbor. Instead of offering an ending where America is shaken and disturbed by certain events, it tacks on an hour of Danny and Rafe going back to Japan to get them back and wave the shit out of some flags.

In short, this is a horrible, horrible movie that bored me punch-drunk. I can't believe I have four more movies in this series.

2/10

Nemisees, Nemesi

2010-01-07T06:27:00.000-08:00

There's a story that the producers of Star Trek: Nemesis wanted Nicholas Meyer, who directed Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country to direct their film. He asked to be allowed to rewrite the script himself, and when the producers refused, he turned down their offer. In that moment, the Star Trek franchise ended and would need to be pumped full of youth and lens flares before it would be suitable for human consumption again.

But you can't really describe Nemesis as being fit for human consumption. It's probably the most frustrating of any of the films, because if Nicholas Meyer had been allowed his rewrite and if he had been behind the camera, I have no doubt it would be the best of the original ten Star Trek films.

I don't mean to talk Nicholas Meyer up so much. After all, I don't have much love for Wrath of Khan, and while I quite liked The Undiscovered Country, it's no masterpiece and has its fair share of flaws. The problem is that up to this point, very few Star Trek filmmakers have had any experience behind the camera before making their film. Really, the only experienced director was Robert Wise, who made what is probably my favorite of the original six films. After that we had Nicholas Meyer make Wrath of Khan, his first movie, and then we had Leonard Nimoy for two films, then William Shatner, then we brought back Meyer. For Generations, we had David Carsons, who had never made a film before, and then First Contact and Insurrection, the first and second films of castmember Jonathon Frakes.

Now we have Stuart Baird, who will now be my go-to associative image for the word "hack". He shoots and stages the movie like his kid's first basketball game. Baird is an editor of some note, notably for his excellent work on Casino Royale, Lethal Weapon and the original Omen. He's got Edge of Darkness coming out soon, which looks like an entertaining, straightforward action film with a really pissed off Mel Gibson and directed by Martin Campbell. I'm sure his work there will be excellent as well, but as a director, he's really an unfortunate choice. He's the entire reason this film fails.

In this space adventure, Picard and the Gang run into a clone of Picard named Shinzon, played by Tom Hardy, one of our finest young actors. He has taken control of the Romulan and Reman (I GET IT) empires and is planning to destroy the Federation by killing their favorite sexagenarian. In other news, Data uncovers an evil clone named B-4 that has next to nothing to do with the plot.

Something I'd like to address. Picard's second-in-command, Riker, is retiring to spend more time with his back hair and Data is being promoted to his position. I get that Data is supposed to be this series' Spock, but Spock was capable, badass and Leonard Nimoy. I wouldn't trust Data to lick stamps. He's always malfunctioning and going kill-crazy, and he comes off like a child. I suppose that's the point, but I wouldn't trust him at the helm of the ship should the captain be taken hostage. How about Worf, whose every command would be "furrow brow angrily"? Or the unnamed helmsman afraid to take much action after what happened to the gay helmsman from First Contact. Or the ship's cook.

So Stuart Baird. I suppose we should get back to him. His action scenes are so by-the-books, so unengaging, so uninteresting that I couldn't imagine that he bent over backwards for this directing job, if the stories are to be believed. There's no flash, there's no panache, there's no passion for the art. For instance, there's a car chase scene. What happens in the car chase? They drive, they shoot, they escape. Shot from the middle distance, most likely while the crew was at lunch. There's a shootout. They let a sixty-year-old man fire two guns at once, one of which is a rifle. He takes cover and takes pot shots while Data deciphers a foreign language to operate the door controls. He doesn't pull much out of this excellent cast, especially Patrick Stewart, who has a script that finally comes within swinging distance of his immense talent, but he seems so disaffected and tired of the role, and the director is so incapable of getting anything out of him, that it might be his saddest work yet.

Worse yet is Tom Hardy, a brilliant actor in a very high-profile role, where he was obviously directed to say things quietly and menacingly, stand in the darkest part of the set and be bald. When I saw that he was in this film, I immediately got excited, thinking that we would at least get a good performance from him. It's such a fucking shame that Baird manages to squander the talents of Tom Hardy, but it's almost a feet of incredible failure. That's like making Chuck E. Cheese boring.

And speaking of Chuck E. Cheese, the script still suffers from the same problems, namely we spend a lot of time focusing on side characters just to appease fans, not because they can be effectively worked into the script. We get to address fun themes, like the nature of self and Picard goes up against a real villain who he has an emotional stake against. It has all the makings for a dark film where the Enterprise crew battles their most dangerous villain yet, but everything about the execution is terrible. There's really not one thing that the crew or actors get right, and it's disheartening. If the producers had given Meyer a few months to rewrite the screenplay, the franchise could have had its biggest hit ever, instead it got its lowest-grossing film ever and killed any notion of a Voyager or Deep Space Nine film.

I just wish the producers could have figured out what the problems were. They've had the same problems this entire series, and they never learn anything from the successes or failures. When the Insurrection script was rushed through development and even the director condemned the film, they didn't learn anything. When they hired Nicholas Meyer a second time and ended up with a good, successful film, they learned nothing.

These films have ignored very simple doctrines of filmmaking that could have saved them. Almost every one of these films, good and bad, seems to lack even basic filmmaking craft. The producers could have mined the independent scene for talented young sci-fi directors, which there were plenty of in the early 90s, especially, given that the Star Wars generation was just making an impact.

What a waste.

4/10

Dark, Windowless Rooms in Review: 2009

2010-01-03T00:02:00.000-08:00

I had an emotional crisis over whether or not to share a top ten list this year. Without access to screeners, theaters showing independent (or semi-independent, or faux-independent) films or money enough for essentials I hadn't seen a lot of the supposedly great films that have been released this year, and my Oscar-predicting capacity is diminished by how little Oscarbait I've seen. Not to mention, my friends don't tend to want to see movies that don't have robots fucking and since I'm 19 there's a dreadful social stigma about seeing movies by yourself, made worse since I see almost all the local theater employees socially.

A lot of the films on this list were seen before I became a semi-published sad person and don't have reviews on this blog, or have reviews from before I started taking this shit seriously. I hope that I'll be able to publish reviews for the really excellent films that come up here.

That said, I convinced myself that I had seen enough really great films to make some sort of list out of them, so, lest I keep stalling, allow me to present my list of the best films of 2009, which isn't an authoritative list by any sort of human or animal logic. Also, I'm going to count them down so that you'll have a chance to not read all of this shit.

7. Star Trek
The Action Film of 2009.

A lot of critics are putting Avatar in this position, and I'm inclined to agree, but I must confess a snare that film faces in my critical gauntlet. It's stupid to complain that it's almost three hours long but it seems to exit the title of action film as a result. I don't want to talk too much about it here, because I hope to review it again soon, but suffice it to say it's fun. And it's got some really excellent cinematography, although I can see how you could hate it if you were a formalist fagstone who thinks that a film being self-aware is the same thing as breaking the fourth wall - lens flares and camera tricks are the same thing as the editing tricks introduced so heavily in the early 90s, but we'll get into this more later, I suppose.

6. Up
The Great Story of 2009.

With anything as perfect and heartbreaking and did I mention fucking heartbreaking as Up's opening scenes, it was guaranteed a spot on anyone's top ten, even before you remember it's a film aimed at children but with the emotional poignance of a far more mature film. That may go to show that a lot of the films aimed at older audiences are more interested in jumping through hoops, and where a story matters less, like a children's film that is mostly about colorful visuals and where the story needs not be dictated by what the Academy will find acceptable, a more developed story with a more mature take on mature themes (in this case, aging) can be found. And people wonder why Oscarbait tends to be so emotionally inert. It may not be the unrivaled masterpiece that Pixar has been making recently, but it's a really wonderful script.

5. Coraline
The Visual Experience of 2009.

Combining beautiful stop-motion animation with the most effective use of CGI ever (despite its thematic relevance, Avatar's 3D was still a bit strange and jarring at times). I will forever be excited to see stop-motion films in 3D. Since computer animation is flat and artificial, the depth looks synthetic, like the rest of the film, and doesn't fit the aesthetic very well (one could say that this will change as animated characters get more photorealistic, but I think that argument is laughable after Robert Zemeckis' last three films - square peg, round hole). At the same time, 3D has an inherently cartoony look (observe the opening of Avatar), and fits strangely with a live-action film. It would seem we have a wonderful technology with no practical application until we wander into the realm of stop-motion, a place that uses tangible objects for animation and gives the film real-world depth while keeping the characters and environment perfectly cartoonish, making them the most excellent objects to interact in a 3D environment.

4. Observe and Report
The Character Study of 2009.

This could have easily been a very important film, and it's sad that it was overlooked. I don't expect everyone to really get it, but it's rare to use such an effective, popular form of comedy to get at something deathly serious and without stopping the comedy for a serious, fixed-camera piece of dramatic exposition. Ronnie is a messed up character, and between the cruel, thoughtless things he does and the strange things he says, he becomes a comic figure, but one you might encounter in the real world. Seth Rogen turns his everyman persona up to eleven to play the Ritalin-addled, socially frustrated and self-deluding hero; a Travis Bickle in a satirical environment.

3. The Princess and the Frog
The Loveliest of 2009.

There's really no way for me to describe my feelings for Princess and the Frog without saying exactly what they are: it's like the most beautiful thing in the world was taken away, never to be seen again, and then brought back to you. The idea of ever seeing it again is enough to make you want to cry tears of joy, and seeing it on the screen is enough to make you want to melt with joy. The film overflows with color and excitement and is everything I want to see in a movie. It even shut up for the second act and let me sit there and think about how tap-dancingly great it was before dragging me through a voodoo fever dream for the last fifteen minutes and ending with a shot of flowing, golden beauty that I hardly wanted to move during the credits.

2. A Serious Man
The Oddity of 2009

It's a strange film, which is pretty typical of the Coens. As such a young person who still has so much to learn about film, I feel that this is something I will grow to appreciate more and more as I get older and as I rewatch it. I don't like being told that I'm not entirely grasping a film just because I'm young, but in this case, it's true. I realize watching it that it's a formalist doggie treat, but the whole film is weird as shit, featuring so many jabs at narrative logic and the sort of people we expect (or require) to see in films and the way we expect (or require) their role or arc to be. People have thought of shorter ways to describe the Coen Brothers' current form, but I don't think any of those phrases ("playing with your expectations") do it any justice. They're doing a better job than most critics realize, such as when they complain about how the Coens don't like their characters. As a fifteen-year-old discovering their films, I realized that they think it's disrespectful to the characters to put them through simple conflicts and have them emerge much better people, so when a Coen character goes through a series of epic trials that only ever illuminate hidden aspects of that character or deposit them on the other side, merely confused is the way they show their most profound love. It seems so odd only because we've had a story that's far too realistic for our liking woven in front of us using cinematic language, editing, flashbacks, to take the place of the reactions and thought processes that the characters are experienced.

1. Inglourious Basterds
The Film of 2009.

A film I can't get over. It's incredibly strange and obviously perfect. It replaces action scenes without intense dialogue, perfectly mounted and played immaculately and exquisitely by a cast that never misses a beat and never fails to completely understand their dialogue, character and scene. It's Tarantino's most perfect cast. If making a film so strange and so given to implication, while at the same time keeping your cast perfectly in tune with each other, the dialogue and the character and playing every beat and cue to undercoat the actors isn't the sign of a great director, then I give up. Tarantino will never top this script and he will always try to figure out the exact mixture of ecstasy and Chinese food he consumed that allowed his actors free reign over his film. The more I watch this, the more I realize that it's about the cast. Christoph Waltz is clearly paramount to the film's success, but without the work of Michael Fassbender, Melanie Laurent, Brad Pitt, August Diehl, and Daniel Brühl, their respective scenes would have been unconvincing and boring. The cinematography is even especially functional, lighting characters faces in subtle ways to reveal all facial expressions. So many of his films have been about the words the actors speak, but Inglourious Basterds is Tarantino's achingly genuine love letter to the actors that speak his beloved dialogue and is the last thing to cross off before we welcome him into the big kid's club. He could easily be insane, but his insanity would almost be a natural phenomenon, that his mind is so perfectly in tune with the filmmaking medium and his films make every other film and every other filmmaker seem pedantic and safe by comparison. We're watching a flaming genius stop to prove he's still a genius for a moment before going back to the flaming genius that he engages himself with. Inglourious Basterds is like making eye contact with that genius.

Hail.

The Devil May Care

2009-12-28T16:53:00.000-08:00

Like so many movie faggots, I have a specific area of interest. Some are interested in crappy horror films, some love middlebrow Oscarbait, and I love action films, so when I see an action film I may have a completely different reaction to it than most people. For most people, the worth of a film isn't teetering on the edge a cliff above a fiery abyss made of cancer, and they judge action films on weird garbage like "is the story original", but they all run screaming from the room when I pull out a David Lynch film, but I digress.

My point is, for me, action films are graded on a curve. I have to use every bit of strength in my body to resist giving Spider-Man 3 a 10/10 based on its action sequences, some of the best ever filmed, and remind myself of that film's narrative nightmare and the fact that it's an hour too long and features some really shitty performances. I'll dismiss an entire film in minutes if the action is done poorly, despite whatever assets it may have.

And Sherlock Holmes has assets pouring out of every orifice. The most obvious is Robert Downey Jr., if not, surely, the best working actor, at least my favorite. I can name a dozen actors that could out-act him in community college reproduction of Transformers 2, but not one man alive that is cooler than him. And casting him as Holmes was a stroke of absolute genius. Plus, we get Jude Law as Watson? And Mark Strong as the villain? How could this go wrong?

Guy Ritchie is how it can go wrong. I quite like Snatch., despite my pretentions towards serious film criticism and even Rocknrolla was a fun movie, so initially it didn't seem like such a problem. There was even a totally awesome, hyper-stylized chase scene in Rocknrolla that made me think Ritchie was a man who could handle action. But we'll get back to that in a moment.

Sherlock Holmes is a character I know you're all familiar with. When you're lazily insulting people for being unobservant, you're probably conjuring the great detective's image. In this instance, he's being filtered through Robert Downey Jr.'s persona, which is to say "eccentric genius", so it's a spectacular fit. He's being rewritten as an action hero, which is okay, because it was bound to happen eventually. And Watson, the original sidekick, is played pretty spectacularly by Jude Law, giving the film two excellent central performances that it doesn't deserve. Holmes and Watson play a bickering old Jewish couple who spend a lot of time getting into fistfights and stopping evil plots like most dynamic duos do. In this particular instance, we get that hoary old trick of establishing them as best buds in the whole world while they casually bring down a terrifying menace, only to send them home and into some lame marital problems. The whole opening is lazy and poorly realized, and it's probably the best part of the film overall.

The evil menace in this case is a certain Lord Blackwood, played by the brilliant Mark Strong who sadly doesn't get to be that brilliant in this film. He's been dabbling in black magic and murdering young women and thanks to Holmes and Watson, is hanged for his evil deeds. But before being hanged he promises to rise from the grave and take England for his own, and when he does it's up to Holmes to use logic to stop this seemingly supernatural menace.

So there's your plot, and it sounds okay. The only real question I have is why the filmmakers didn't get their teeth into the "logic vs. superstition" thematic territory that the film flirts with, but Sherlock Holmes commits worse crimes, so I won't dwell on that.

I know this is bad blogging (holy shit, I'm a faggot), but allow me to return to some earlier points, specifically the action scenes and the opening. From the first fight scene I thought that they had taken the action too far. For turn-of-the-century England it was far too bombastic and explodey, and was totally inappropriate for the story. The first fight scene in an action film generally serves as a teaser, usually being the tamest fight and as the film goes on the action will get bigger and more bombastic and explodey. I knew the film was going to fuck everything up from the outset, then, when the opening would barely be appropriate for the climax. The film would have been best served by a series of Indiana Jones-style brawls between Holmes and a small number of combatants. And maybe some fast-paced footchases. The action scenes are way too big a deal for a film like this, and I couldn't stand some of the setups. For instance, the climax is set up on a bridge under construction, but the characters don't go up there for any fucking reason. They just go up there. And then they fight. It leaves us with characters uninvested in their environment and looking like they're swordfighting between shots of absinthe.

The biggest violator of everything great about action films, though, is what's meant to be the showstopping setpiece at the center of the film. Holmes and Watson run into two men and a bloody giant in the slums of London. From its setup, it promises to be an exciting brawl as Watson fights the two men and Holmes uses his brainpowers to outwit the skyscraper. But the film's definition of "outwit" is "pick up a magical electric device that zaps the enemy to death and zap the enemy to death". That is, of course, until the redwood starts running away. Imagine the giant guy in Raiders of the Lost Ark running away from Indiana Jones and Indiana Jones chasing after him, rubbing sand in his eyes and taking his lunch money, and you'll get an idea of how this scene plays. Except he only runs away to set up a boring fight at a dock in the most contrived manner possible. So let's break this down really fast: exciting setup that has all its suspense sapped from it when we give our hero a magic weapon, and then the suspense is further sapped when the rhinoceros he's fighting fucking runs away and then we're supposed to be invested in the fight again when the tyke starts smashing everything for ten minutes while Holmes daintily steps out of the way. As a general rule of thumb, don't have your Robert Downey Jr.-sized man chase down a behemoth if you want the audience to be invested in your film.

And I haven't even commented on the insane editing yet. As I said before, there's an action scene in Rocknrolla that is some sort of post-modern action masterpiece with all its camera shakes and crazy angles, cameras mounted on the actors, etc., and the editing is the glue that holds the whole scene together. In this case, the editing is loose and confusing and serves only to sap any suspense or excitement from the fights. I can't say enough about how bad the action is, but I'll move on because there's so much more to discuss as it is.

The most obvious error the film commits is to include Rachel McAdams, who's a doll for sure, but has no business in this film and who I still harbor ill will towards. Aside from her character being totally useless to the plot and only being present so the teenage boys the film is targeted at can have something to look at (which is fine, she's great to look at), her primary function is to drop Moriarty's name. Moriarty's presence in this film could be fun, but it's so unsubtle and stupid, which could also be fun if played as affectionate kitsch, and unnecessary in doing anything but setting up the inevitable sequel. I'm surprised that they didn't look to another recent film that namedropped the universe's main villain in a way that was subtle and exciting and set up the film for a sequel without being overbearing.

Argh. This movie just has so much wrong with it. It's such a fucking shame because they hired the coolest man alive to play the part of the coolest man of the turn of the century, a time period with really cool clothes. The only parts where the film gets to shine are where it totally focuses on Downey Jr., namely the bits where Holmes explains his deductive method, and even more specifically, a scene in the opening where he plans out in his head exactly how he's going to take down an adversary and then executes it flawlessly.

There's no reason that this shouldn't be the best action film of the year, but it just fumbles on every occasion. It's worth seeing if you have the same homoerotic feelings for Robert Downey Jr. that I do, and especially if, like I do, you think that Jude Law is a certifiable badass and would consort with gypsies and dabble in the black arts to put them in a movie together. I get so frustrated thinking about this film because it's such a waste of such talented people.

But I have one shiny ray of hope. Guy Ritchie, in the past, has responded well to criticism. After the success of Lock Stock and Snatch and the subsequent failures of Swept Away and Revolver, he turned in the very fun Rocknrolla that was an answer to all his fans' criticisms. I hope that he heeds the critics' warnings in preparing his sequel, because there's no reason that this film shouldn't be the most fun thing in theaters.

4/10

Candy Coated Hell

2009-12-24T16:45:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking I wanted to do some sort of tribute to Disney's traditional animation, not just in some lame "these are my favorite Disney films" way, but rather in the tradition of Herr Machine.

So naturally I settled on "most horrifying Disney villain deaths". I figure I'm a fan of Disney and a fan of death, so it's a good fit. Spoilers abound.

Dr. Facilier Dances With the Devil in the Pale Moonlight

I think it's pretty natural to start with the most recent and the one that so kindly reminded me of Disney's unquenchable thirst for the innocence of little girls. I took my little sister to an evening showing of The Princess and the Frog thinking there wouldn't be many other children in the audience, but it was packed with drooling human larvae. For the most part they were well behaved, but audible gasps and shrieks rang out when the film's villain, Dr. Facilier, met his end. Apparently Dr. Facilier has been making deals with demons, and particularly spiteful demons who won't accept a well-structured, four-part apology and a gift certificate to Chili's when you let a plucky young heroine destroy their favorite soul-harvesting necklace. Dr. Facilier gets dragged into a purple voodoo Hell for his trouble. Apparently you can afford to burn through witch doctors like hash in Haiti when you're in New Orleans.

Ursula the Sea Witch in: A Very Disney Disembowelment

The magnificently evil Ursula (who is up their with Cruella and Malificent for best Disney villain, but god damn it don't ask me to choose) seems to have gained the upper hand and acquired King Triton's Trident (she was doing something devious and magical - I haven't seen the movie in a while and don't remember how exactly the exchange goes down, but I'm pretty sure she didn't win it in a sit-up contest) and is doing the usual villain stuff in a romance film like damning true love and punching rainbows in half when, out of fucking nowhere, Prince Eric shows up with a ship and runs her through with it. You can see the scene here and you ought to because you probably don't realize how shocked everyone seems by it. It's like when some jerkoff cuts in front of you in the cafeteria and you press his face into the scalding hot lasagna. We were rooting for you until you did that. Even Ursula's face seems to reflect that sentiment. Sure she was being devious and trying to steal some voices and usurp the crown, but it's just the ocean. Who cares? It's a stupid thing to be king of, anyway. Hey, speaking of which...

Scar Has Awful Friends, Is an Awful Friend

Scar sets into motion the mostly stupidly complex and murderous plan to take control of the Pridelands, a crappy piece of undeveloped land in Africa with nothing fun to do when not lazily chomping on zebras. There only seems to be lionesses around, making Scar the most qualified lion for the job, a deck he clearly had to stack with the murder of his brother. Scar has somehow managed to drive the whole outfit into the ground and turn the Pridelands into a festering desert swampland/lesbian haven, and has even managed to chase out the fucking sun within a few years, or however long it takes for a lion to get facial hair. It takes his wussy vegetarian nephew a whole ten minutes to come back and usurp him, although a popular vote probably would have worked just as well. Still, Simba tosses Scar off a cliff and down to his hyena enforcers, who clearly have no qualms about eating another carnivore. Or maybe they're not eating him, because as far as I can tell, they're just wantonly tearing him limb from limb.

Judge Frollo Goes to Hell

This one gets my vote for "most clearly inappropriate film ever made by Disney and aimed at children". I'm a fan of Victor Hugo's novel and the film manages to gimp a lot of important thematic framework by adhering itself to the most gut-wrenchingly wrong-headed formula that ever could have been applied to this story, so needless to say I don't have much affection for the film. I think we can all agree, though, that Judge Frollo's death scene is sweet. He falls into a pit of lava (why?) that is at the bottom of a sentient cathedral (really) that seems to know it's in a Disney film, or maybe it's a freshman English major who thinks it needs some heavy-handed symbolism for its villain to burn in. Whatever the case, Frollo's death is the stuff a child's nightmares are made of. For those of you who don't remember, he's dangling off a gargoyle when it suddenly comes to life, resembling nothing if not the most common iteration of a hellhound before breaking off and sending him into the lava (still not sure why that's there, maybe the local steel mill is on strike) below.

The Queen is Punished for Months of Ineffective Rule as She Hunts Nubile Innocent

Most of the deaths on this list are pretty logical. Scar is eaten by hyenas for abusing their loyalty, Frollo falls to his death for thinking that a medieval stone gargoyle could support the weight of a grown man. The Queen's government sanctioned murder party is cut short by a group of protesting midgets and deer. Yeah, you may have forgotten that part. If there's any argument for Snow White being one of the greatest films of all time it's that there's a scene where midgets and deer chase an old hag up a cliff and to a death most elaborate. When she is chased to the top of the cliff by the midgets and deer she attempts to push a boulder down the rocky slope and onto them when a lightning bolt hits the piece of rock she's standing on and sends her down the cliff and the 8-foot boulder chases her to the bottom. What sort of horrible, Old Testament trickster god exists in the world of Snow White is absolutely beyond me, but for a death this elaborate, she couldn't have just pissed the Gods off, she had to have confused them. And the only scenario I can imagine is that, in her prayers, she asked the Gods to "give me a sign" and "define 'overkill'" in very close proximity. Oh, and she gets eaten by vultures.

Honorable mentions include Clayton of Tarzan, excluded because I haven't seen that film in ten years, Sykes from Oliver and Company, excluded because MY name is Oliver, Shan Yu from Mulan, excluded because Mulan sucks, The Horned King from The Black Cauldron, excluded because I've never seen The Black Cauldron, and Malificent from Sleeping Beauty, excluded because I'm not qualified to discuss a film that great.

I hope to have your insults penetrate my heart in the comments, but I won't get my hopes up.

James Cameron Retrospective in Retrospect

2009-12-21T15:05:00.000-08:00

So I'm finished with my James Cameron retrospective and I finished it rather quickly thanks to owning over half of his films. I wasn't surprised by any of my reactions to these films, but it's some of the most fun I've had on this blog. I plan to finish up my Star Trek retrospective before the new year and say goodbye to something I've been taking slow because, despite my negative reaction to most of them, I've sort of loved watching them. I'm pretty sure I want to do a Kevin Smith retrospective next and maybe a John Hughes one after that, but any suggestions are more than welcome.

This post is my homebase for the James Cameron retrospective, which is now finished and can be put on the shelf, but not without a table of contents.

1. The Terminator - 11/10
2. Aliens - 10/10
3. Terminator 2: Judgment Day - 10/10
4. Avatar - 9/10
5. The Abyss - 9/10
6. True Lies - 8/10
7. Titanic - 5/10
8. Piranha II: The Spawning - stupid/10

And that's it. Just make sure it doesn't get dusty.

The Last Rainforest

2009-12-19T22:46:00.000-08:00

First of all, I fucking called it.

Just wanted to get that out of the way before I got into anything else. All you faggots saying it looked retarded and that it was going to be the biggest flop of all time, commercially and artistically, can go to hell.

Okay, so my excuse for posting this so late: I bought my IMAX 3D tickets way the hell ahead of time, like two weeks in advance. Dragged some kids who didn't think it looked good with me to see it. As we were watching it, we leaned forward and had a little powwow session. We all three agreed that the 3D was really distracting, didn't look that good and was detrimental to the success of an otherwise very, very pretty movie.

Then we had an intermission, which the theater manager said we weren't supposed to have. Apparently they had assembled the print wrong because when it came back on the 3D looked just fine. I then made it my mission to see the film again because that unpleasant first half had messed with my perception of the film, and that was the fault of the theater owners, not the filmmakers. Also because the dicks at the IMAX 3D theaters don't let you keep the space goggles.

So the best place to start, for more than a few reasons, is the story. On the distant planet Pandora, a corporation has taken to mining for a valuable resource and has hired out mercenaries to deal with the hostile environment, namely a 10-foot tall humanoid species known as the Na'vi, the very dangerous, very tough and very intelligent dominant species of Pandora. In order to better relations, Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) has been involved in developing the Avatar Program, a program wherein a human remotely pilots a Na'vi body, grown in a vat. When one driver is killed, his twin brother Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) is brought in to pilot his avatar, avatars being linked to drivers by DNA for full nervous system immersion (or some other sci-fi technobabble).

The human forces are led by the most evil man they could possibly have found for the job (Stephen Lang), who reminds me too much of my dad. He wants to use Jake's in with the Na'vi to acquire tactical data for the impending conflict. Unfortunately, Jake is being seduced by the Na'vi's natural lifestyle, in tune with the elements of Pandora, meant in no small way to remind you of Native Americans. He quickly falls in love with the strong-willed Neytiri, a hunter of the forest folk and heir to a seat of power in the Na'vi tree house gang. I don't think I'm giving anything away if I say that Jake eventually sides with the Na'vi against the humans.

This plot has come under a lot of fire for being too simple, but it works so goddamn well I don't see how the simplicity is even an issue. It's bare bones and elemental, and if there's one thing that Cameron has a real and true grasp on, it's the elemental. Col. My Dad doesn't have any redeeming human qualities, he's not even a character. He's just pure evil, not unlike Cal from Titanic. And as I said, Cameron has a problem with his leading men being ciphers, but for this film Jake Sully works perfectly and Sam Worthington's listless performance is a perfect match. It's like the performances in 2001 or Blade Runner, where the humans are intentionally played as bland archtypes to bring to the fore the personality of the environment or the other non-human elements. That the human element of the film is totally sterile is exactly the point, Jake even comments on it one scene, saying how much more surreal the human world is after spending so much time in his dreamscape. And the audience feels exactly the same. I wonder if the 3D element of the human scenes look strange and awkward on purpose, so that when we step into Pandora and it gels perfectly it feels natural and far more real, despite being a complete fantasy world.

And WHAT A FUCKING WORLD IT IS. Every plant, fern, rock or square inch of dirt pulsates with life in the most gaudy, colorful way possible. And when the lights went out and the world lit up with neon plants and fluorescent water, I had to take out my eyeballs and dunk them in a glass of water. The world may not work totally logically, but holy shit is it a wonder to look at. This may be the most stunning fantasy world ever constructed for film and my reaction to it is how I imagine people reacted to The Wizard of Oz back in the olden days. If this whole film is an excuse to give us vistas of Pandora, I am more than fine with that.

But that's not all it offers. First is, obviously, James Cameron's old pro hand at action. He stages masterful action in his sleep, which is why it's so surprising that an early chase scene through the forest (!) is pretty unspectacular, even a little bit bad. But I'll forgive that in a second for the epic climax, a battle tallying around twenty minutes that will overwhelm all five senses with the sensation of pepperjack cheese. I don't want to give anything away, but it's spectacular and if you have even a little bit of appreciation for action cinema, you're sure to love it.

And the other big thing is - hold on a second...

ZOE SALDANA FOR BEST ACTRESS

Okay. So Zoe Saldana is absolutely incredible in this film. The first truly great motion capture performance since Andy Serkis in Lord of the Rings. Her character is a combination of all the great things about actors mixed with all the great things about computer animation. It might well be one of the greatest combinations of actor and filmmaking craft towards the goal of creating a great performance. It's more than obvious that an inordinate amount of time went into animating her facial movements. Her performance is incredibly subtle, and while it's hard to say where Saldana's performance stops and the animation begins, I'd like to give equal credit to both sides. It's her strong, animalistic, sexual performance that anchors the entire film. It's a great example of a perfect performance and yet another marvelous female performance in a James Cameron film.

But the main character, if you'll excuse the faggotry, is Pandora itself. If there is an avatar in this film outside of the quite literal avatars, it's the Na'vi for Pandora. They represent the interests of the planet, commune with it and protect the balance of life, always acting with it and understanding it perfectly. It's the elemental tale of a world, not a people, fighting invaders. There are times when Pandora seems to even betray emotions.

The entire film would fall apart as anything but a visual exercise without Saldana. I'm no good at describing performances, but no female performance I have seen this year (despite being super behind, An Education isn't playing anywhere in my fucking STATE) even compares. I hope to god it isn't overlooked because it's motion captured. I hope the gorgeous production design isn't overlooked because it's in a big budget action movie. And I hope that James Cameron doesn't get overlooked for this sort of thing, the sort of thing that he's best at, that he excels at and that every other filmmaker in the world should sit down, shut up and take note of.

9/10

Rich Girl Fucks Bum: A Picture in Motion

2009-12-18T23:37:00.000-08:00

As you may or may not know, I'm nineteen. Titanic came out at the very end of 1997 and it played all the way through the summer of '98, when I saw it at eight years old. Even at eight I was aware of the hype, but there was something else about this movie that everyone I knew (remember, we're eight) was talking about: boobs. It was a PG-13 movie that our moms were going clownshit over and would take us to and there were motherfucking boobs in it. It was like your mom giving you a bag full of boobs or chocolate boobs or some sort of metaphor that involves boobs and moms but isn't weird.

And this movie engendered a love of Kate Winslet in me and a great many other young men in my age group for owning the very first pair of boobs we ever saw. To this day, even though her skin gives away that she smokes a dozen packs of cigarettes worth of tobacco directly out of her mouth every day (like a giant bowl, you see) and she looks ten years older than she is, I still want to marry the shit out of her (Titanic isn't the only reason for that - she just so happened to play the quintessential modern romantic archetype in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the kind of woman no man of my generation can't fall in love with). My point is that I'm biased. Especially in this film, before the smoking and aging caught up with her, she is just fucking gorgeous. But you didn't come here to listen to me fantasize about Kate Winslet (unless you got here with an unusually specific Google search), you came here to listen to me bash Titanic to shit.

But that's not going to happen, really. There are a lot of things to smile about, just as much as there are things to frown about.

The tale concerns itself with some diamond that belonged to some old woman. This woman isn't just a little bit old. She is enormously old, like a powerhouse of old. So old, in fact, that when she gets the news that they recovered possessions of hers from the Titanic (!), she's throwing pottery on a wheel (!!). So in order to explain what old-timey porn starring her was doing on the Titanic, she tells the story of her love affair with a young man named Jack Dawson.

So the younger men listening to her tale climb into her brain and ride it back to the year 1912, where a baseball cost a penny and eating a sandwich was a leap of faith. There, the old woman, named Rose DeWitt Bukater, has been replaced by a voluptuous, young Kate Winslet. She's a member of high society and she has been promised to a man named Cal (Billy Zane), a rich coal baron or something who she has but middling feelings for. And that's where she meets Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio) and their love affair begins.

I suppose I'll begin with Cal. Picking on Billy Zane is like picking on a bowl of fruit, but holy shit he deserves it. As much blame goes on Cameron for what happened here, but we'll get to that in a minute. Cal is a man of such mustache-twirling evil that I half expected them to blame HIM for the sinking of the Titanic. Billy Zane plays the role like he's playing fucking Dracula, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's a deleted scene (wait for the special edition that's sure to come out!) of him floating around, scaring children. There have been a lot of over the top performances in Cameron's filmography, but Zane buys out the bake sale.

Like I said, a lot of it is Cameron's fault. Somehow, Cameron convinced himself that writing this movie wasn't lightyears outside of his particular area of talent, and his long-running handicap of being unable to really define a lot of his characters (especially his supporting characters) becomes some sort of amputation. He's the only credited writer AND director, so I'll give him all the blame I can for writing Cal like some sort of costume drama Skeletor.

Now let's discuss how detrimental he is to the plot. I get that Rose's mother is desperate to marry her off so that they can reclaim the family fortune, but is there a guy who wouldn't list "murder" as one of his interests on an eHarmony profile? That they plan to marry her off and expect her to live through the honeymoon is pretty astounding, and that Rose doesn't say something like "no" when asked to marry No Heart goes to show that maybe she isn't the super tough, girl power girl that James Cameron wrote her to be.

I write all this in half jest. I realize that Rose tries to kill herself early on in the movie and she's pretty quick to take a hobo in over Cal, but still, his performance and character are so over the top it's like he accidentally wandered off the set of a James Bond film.

Leonardo DiCaprio's performance is an example of one of those performances that isn't really a performance. Since this film was aimed squarely at women, and it was a romance, the idea was to get the women to fall in love with DiCaprio. Therefore, the marketing campaign's main goal was to push him as a sex symbol, but a sweet and innocent one. By the time they saw the movie, all the girls will already be in love with him and it hardly matters what happens in the movie, they'll still feel swept away by him. Therefore, his performance can't be too different from his modern persona, and it isn't. It's pretty carefully done to make it fit in with the time period, but he comes across as a turn of the century Backstreet Boy. And he's sort of a blank slate, a recurring theme in James Cameron's leading men. Usually that's because they're an audience surrogate (I was going to say avatar but that would have been JUST IRONIC!), but in this case it's so that too much personality doesn't get in the way of the audience's imaginary love affair.

Kate Winslet fairs much better, obviously, her being a great actress and James Cameron being a great director of women. She's strong but naive and spoiled and blah blah blah, but Winslet brings an intense human edge to the character and a naive joyfulness as she begins to discover the wonders of infatuation.

The first half is romance, the second half is ship sinking.

The second half is pretty good stuff if you're into that sort of thing, but for my money there's a lot of "people running around in circles screaming" on the deck and "flooded hallway" below deck. It works, but it feels a bit stale to me. There are occasional hints of what greatness could have been achieved with this sequence aside from the staggering technical achievement, specifically a handful of shots that make the passenger's quarters look like a haunted house, and a scene with a rather trigger-happy guard. Aside from the technicals, Cameron only succeeds occasionally at creating a sense of chaos. For my money, Cameron has achieved technical brilliance with more successful scenes in the past.

Strangely enough, the scenes that work the best are after the ship has sunk, when the survivors are floating in the water, freezing to death. In spite of its overwrought dialogue, the scene works well because of its strict finality, and Jack's death was pretty shockingly unromanticized. Oh yeah, there were spoilers in that last sentence.

So look at that, another groundbreaking technical achievement gimped by Cameron's own script. This one more so due to some pretty unconvincing performances and the fact that I'm a man with testosterone.

5/10

Lie To Me

2009-12-14T17:31:00.001-08:00

When I mentioned that Cameron's films get lite and poppy after The Abyss, I specifically had True Lies in mind. While it is made with consummate professionalism and has some really swell performances, it's the sort of film that can only disappoint you if you've just watched four films of such high quality as The Terminator, Aliens, The Abyss and Terminator 2. But who could keep that up?

If it weren't for Cameron behind the camera this would be an utterly disposable, forgettable mid-90s Schwarzenegger vehicle, but it's to Cameron's credit that the film works so well. Specifically his rapport with Schwarzenegger and his natural ability to direct women. Frankly, though, it strikes me as the first film since Piranha II that Cameron didn't give his heart and soul to. The action is too similar to Terminator 2's for me to get too worked up over it, featuring lots of car chases with exploding cars and big ol' shootouts, but it lacks the sci-fi angle of T2 that made it so unique and ultimately loses a lot of its value. It just becomes more mundane.

So the story goes something like, Schwarzenegger is Harry Tasker: Secret Agent, but his wife, Helen Tasker (Curtis) thinks he's a boring computer salesman. When their marriage seems to be on the rocks and Helen appears to be having an affair with a used car salesman pretending to be a secret agent, it can only be rescued by some sitcom-style antics and some high-flying adventure.

The angle Cameron seems to have approached this film with is "comedy", which brings me to the movie's biggest fuck-up: Tom Arnold. He plays the comic sidekick and holy shit do I hate Tom Arnold. Tom Arnold is listed as a natural disaster and every time he releases a movie the National Weather Service issues a warning. Tom Arnold can't tie his shoes and every morning has to visit the knot store. The #1 presser of Tom Arnold DVDs are craft rooms at nursing homes. If Tom Arnold were a planet, he would be the sun, expanded to red giant and sucking up Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. Tom Arnold is one of history's (and Middle-Earth's) greatest villains.

Phew. Now that we've gotten that out of the way, let me talk about the things that do work. Aside from Tom Arnold raining Hellfire on the film, most of the actors are really funny, and oddly enough, none of them are noted for their comedy work (unlike Tom Arnold, noted for his comic terrorism). Schwarzenegger, Jaimie Lee Curtis and Bill Paxton are great, Paxton in particular giving a performance only topped a few years later by A Simple Plan. These are the only two performances where I don't think his presence is a detriment to the movie. I always laugh when we're first introduced to him in this film, where he's dolled up like a sex offender with his mustache and over-combed hair. He makes a great counterpoint to Schwarzenegger's cartoon secret agent as a cartoon secret agent in the same tradition, but with an added sexual predator and somehow less credibility.

Best in show is clearly Jaimie Lee Curtis, who gives an inspired comic performance. She has the perfect look for a mid-90s, unsexualized, middle-aged office worker and her appearance perfectly encapsulates the word "goofy" for me. She's clumsy and physical without being an inane comic figure and she's snarky and sarcastic without coming off as an insufferable bitch. She's given all the best lines and the best arc, and sometimes she threatens to overshadow Schwarzenegger's domineering screen presence and Tom Arnold's fuckmouth.

And Schwarzenegger himself obviously handles the action in the same way he always does: like he's ordering a sandwich. It rarely works in more serious movies (and your enjoyment of a classic like Commando specifically depends on the sort of mileage you get out of standing behind Schwarzenegger at a Jimmy John's) unless he happens to be playing an emotionless robot. Thanks to Cameron, though, Schwarzenegger pulls off what is easily the best performance of his career where he isn't powered by hamster wheels. He plays a James Bond figure but with that trademark Austrian awkwardness. Look, if Arnold Schwarzenegger wasn't a huge star and was a cook at IHOP or something, he would still sort of catch the eye. He's not exactly inconspicuous and if you needed to quickly hide him it would be hard to find a broom cupboard that he would fit in. He would make a shitty spy, and the movie knows that. He could never pass as a regular family man or a computer salesman - he looks totally out of place at a dinner table. And the movie knows that. I suspect Schwarzenegger doesn't, though, and the entire juxtaposition becomes very funny.

The action is pretty standard 90s fare, making it a bit disappointing that Cameron was behind the camera. There are a few scenes that stand out, usually when the film gives itself over to physical gags that work surprisingly well.

Can I talk about Tom Arnold again for a minute? Of course I can. I don't see any other bloggers around. Imagine if James Bond had a sidekick named Reginald Bagley, whose gut hung out over his pants and none of his teeth faced the same direction. And imagine that he seemed to love that Bond made him look like a blubbering fuck-up by going into space, banging a dozen moonladies and stopping a world-threatening crisis without ever setting down his martini while Reginald sat on his ass and gave him helpful hints from inside an oversized bag of Cheetos. And Reginald has no impact on the plot. And imagine that this character isn't meant to appear totally pathetic and worthless next to Bond, and you'll get a good idea of the character Tom Arnold plays BEFORE Tom Arnold the war criminal even becomes a factor. It's a personal issue that kept me from enjoying large parts of an otherwise highly enjoyable film.

And that's pretty much all there is to say about True Lies. It's fun, well-made, features some great performances and just doesn't hold up to the crazy ambition of Cameron's last four films. I can't help but feel like he's floundering here, even if it's just momentary. It will only take three years for him to release the most expensive movie ever made up to that point, a film of such crazy ambition and such unbelievable success that it begs me to watch it again for the first time since it was released (when I was seven).

8/10

Sad Old Magician Repacking His Suitcase

2009-12-12T22:31:00.000-08:00

After nine Star Trek films I feel like I'm playing with a jack-in-the-box. There are so many better things in this world, or this room, or under my couch cushions, for me to be playing with, but I've arbitrarily imposed upon myself the need to play with the jack-in-the-box. So I joylessly turn the crank until the clown or whatever other satanic images you can fit into it pop out. Sometimes it still surprises me, but rarely. And when it pops out, it bounces around on its string for a minute as I stare at it, and then I stare into the middle distance, thinking about something--anything--else that will take my mind somewhere where it won't waste away. And then I press the little clown back into the box and slowly start turning the crank again. If someone watched a person do this, they would probably cry.

And that's what I think of the Next Generation cast. At this point they're all well into their fifties, there's more Viagra and whiskey in their coffee every morning and sometimes they stand in front of the mirror in the morning and just cry. It's likely a side effect of the leg-chaffing cream they're getting slightly addicted to and they would file a lawsuit against that pharmaceutical company if they didn't still have to pay the mortgage on the cavernous manor they bought at the height of their coke habit. They kicked the habit a few years back and got in all the tabloids, but maybe it's time to pick it up again so that there will be something to do during the day instead of re-watching old episodes of The Next Generation.

What I'm saying is, when it comes to roles in blockbusters, they got the short, pointy, stabby end of the stick. They've been playing the same roles for the chanting mass of nerds for over a decade, despite being out of shape and tired and hairy. They've signed their souls over to the producers completely, and it's clear that those producers don't give a shit about the cast. They all seem to be so sad reciting their technical Trek jargon without a thick fog of cocaine to keep the fictional universe making sense. There's one very telling scene where Crusher and Troi talk about their breasts firming up that was clearly meant to create an audible rumble through the world as Trekkies fell over and started collectively masturbating. But it came ten years too late, and now they both look like skin puppets whose silicone breasts couldn't possibly be firmer if they were filled with helium. Although that doesn't discourage Jonathon Frakes, who seems to have used his position as director and Marina Sirtis's need to pay her private detective as leverage to get her into a bathtub with him.

So here's the plot. There's some colony on a planet and they never age for reasons that are never explained, probably because I don't care. The Federation is trying to relocate the colonists and the Enterprise crew thinks that's wrong. Hooray, let's get to the insults.

There was no way this group of fuck-ups could maintain the commercial and artistic success of First Contact, so it all falls apart rather unsurprisingly. I'll give Frakes some credit as director: he's not trying to just retread the success of First Contact, but that would be better than this out-and-out failure. I get that Star Trek is all about bright, shiny optimism, but contrasting that with the ever-present threat of evil and darkness is extremely effective BECAUSE of that. Making the sequel a sunny prancing through a field of flowers is turning the knob way back down. If we're going to turn down the excitement and tenacity of a film, at least replace it with something and not the dead air that seems to be the main character of Star Trek: Insurrection.

We took an important step towards a distinctive visual language in the last film with some darker cinematography. It still looked like crap, but after a half-dozen films that all look like shit, you'll take what you can get. This film puts it in reverse for about six blocks leaving us with some of the most plain, unaltered footage I have ever seen outside of a camcorder.

The only thing I liked about this film was a space battle played, like all space battles in this series, like a naval battle that really involves the characters more than the ship which is one of the few things this series has consistently harnessed for the power of good.

The other standout is, obviously, Patrick Stewart, who actually looks quite bored here. An actor of his caliber shouldn't be stuck playing the same character for a decade, as much fun as Jean-Luc Picard may be to watch. He's stuck with an unplayable romantic subplot that made me want to claw my eyes out and throw them at the screen and is one of the most disturbing crimes this franchise has committed.

As for the rest of the cast, Jonathon Frakes looks like he's having fun, which makes him look weird and out of place next to the rest of the cast. Brent Spiner doesn't look like he wants to move a lot and F. Murray Abraham is unrecognizable and unremarkable, which is a good way to categorize his work post-Amadeus.

I've heard that Nemesis essentially ended the franchise, but I have a hard time imagining it being at least less engaging than this film. But if it's true, I can't really imagine there being a darker time to be a fan of a series.

I can't give it a one, or even a two in good conscience, it's just not offensive enough to the senses, just horribly boring. And that makes me even angrier at it: I can't really justify its crucifixion. I don't hate it, I just feel sorry for it.

3/10

Of Love and Music and Beauty and Magic

2009-12-11T18:39:00.000-08:00

I was born in 1990, meaning my exposure to Disney's animated films was largely of the Renaissance variety. I grew up with Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and The Lion King, and so embedded are they in my life that I can't even watch them critically. So when Disney chose to make The Princess and the Frog, their glorious return to hand-drawn animation, it was almost a cheap shot that they made it in the tradition of those films from the early 90's. There was no way I wasn't going to love the Christ out of this movie.

I love the Christ out of this movie.

The decade or so since they last produced a worthwhile hand-animated film has given Disney the magical gift of hindsight and the ability to assess what worked and what didn't work about the films produced in the 90's and to narrow in on a perfect variation of their classic formula, with added grace and maturity. Disney's brilliant collection of animators, having been want of things to animate for several years, have exploded back onto the scene with the most infectious enthusiasm, and while, dare I say, the Princess and the Frog is an absolutely glorious little animated masterpiece, it's a particularly uneven glorious little animated masterpiece.

We open on New Orleans around 1910 or so, establishing the life of our protagonist, Tiana. Unlike her privileged friend Charlotte, she has simple dreams of one day owning a restaurant with her father. This dream, modest as it may be, is a quite lofty goal for a poor black family in 1910s New Orleans. Still, she persists, working hard and saving every penny she makes in menial jobs to make her dream come true, even after her father dies. And here we arrive at the main of the film. Handsome, vain and completely broke Prince Naveen has arrived with a rather dick-headed plan to marry into wealth, but quickly falls in with a Voodoo sorcerer named Dr. Facilier who transforms him into a frog and sets into motion a plan to acquire Charlotte's family's wealth with the help of Naveen's gullible manservant. Tiana is roped into the story when, due to some confusing fine print in the Frog Prince story, she also becomes a frog.

I mention that it's uneven, in spite of being positively brilliant, and I should explain myself. The first and third acts are as fantastic as anything I've ever seen in an animated film. We'd have to go back to Beauty and the Beast to find anything this good in a Disney movie, but the second act is just not up to par. It's fun and entertaining and has a few great songs, but you can see that all the writers' and animators' joy went into the beginning and the end, leaving a sort of confused middle section. It wouldn't be so noticeable if the beginning and the end weren't so extraordinarily great.

For one, Tiana just became Belle's equal for the title of "favorite Disney princess". Yeah, Snow White and Princess Aurora and Ariel are supposed classics (and one could make a good case for Ariel), but that's by virtue of being in classic films rather than being particularly well-defined characters. In fact, it's a common complaint that the message that these movies sends to little girls is "be pretty and shut up", which has always made Belle a favorite of mine. As a character, she's intelligent and sophisticated and, despite somehow not finding Gaston the coolest person on the fucking planet, very open-hearted. She's a good character first and a pretty doll second. Same with Tiana. As great a doll as I'm sure she'll make, she's a strong character first. She constantly harps on the importance of hard work, something I can't really recall seeing in the Pygmalion, wish fulfillment Disney canon. It's refreshing to see a Disney character with her life in her own hands, moving in the direction she wants even before all her dreams start to come true and her prince comes and finds her.

The musical portion of The Princess and the Frog is the most successful since Beauty and the Beast, anchored by a jazz-tastic score sung by people who can really sing, rather than big stars that will bring in the crowds but add nothing to their characters.

But the real success of this film can be summed up in two words: Dr. Facilier. Every time he's even near the screen the film's jazzy beat speeds up and grows darker, culminating in what may be the most jaw-dropping piece of animation I have ever seen with Facilier's showstopping number "Friends on the Other Side". Pitched with explosive, orchestral jazz against a frighteningly dark masterwork of color and movement, I can't exactly remember everything that happened in the subsequent scene because I was still reeling. Facilier himself is a bit of lanky charisma, a street magician and Voodoo practitioner of overflowing evil, captured so well by the animators and Keith David's distinctive voice.

At one point Facilier commits an act of such cold cruelty that I was beside myself with shock, as was the rest of the audience. Even Scar gave Mufasa the dignity of an epic, kingly death.

All the characters are exquisitely animated, with the other standout being Charlotte, the dolled-up spoof of classic Disney princesses. Born into money and ignorant of the difficult life Tiara leads, all she hopes for is to one day be wed to a prince. At one point, when things don't seem to be going her way, she decides "maybe I should wish harder" and starts begging the wishing star to bring her a prince. Her animation is as shapelessly cartoonish as I can imagine a realistic character being. She seems to explode with energy and exuberance in every moment of her existence, and she doesn't seem to have any fixed weight or even figure at all.

If the film has any concrete failings, it's in the comic angle, specifically the comic relief characters of Louis and Ray who are never as defined as the rest of the cast and seem to be there just to keep the little kids laughing. Although it's not all bad. Some of Louis' early scenes are quite funny, but his character especially never has a dramatic angle; he's comic relief through-and-through, making him feel like a flat stock character. And there's one scene involving a trio of frog hunters that struck me as totally out of place, despite being a fun throwback to Looney Tunes and all that--I don't think it really had a place in the movie. But since these two characters and that one scene are featured so prominently in the middling second act and do nothing to disrupt the absolute perfection of the first and third act, I'll forgive it all without a second thought.

I could talk for days about the animation. When was the last time animation of this quality was married to a story of equal quality? The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast had pretty limited budgets (I'm not arguing that those aren't superbly animated, I'm just saying that the limited budget didn't allow a lot of complex animation) and the more exquisitely animated films of the earlier days of Disney, like Sleeping Beauty and Alice in Wonderland, tend to be pretty rigid affairs. I'm tempted to go all the way back to Bambi for a film with animation that is in service of such an effective story, rather than for its own sake. But it could just be that I got out of the theater two hours ago and am still overjoyed by the experience.

There are so many things about this film that make me never want to watch another computer animated film again (and let me quickly apologize to Pixar for saying that--I'll always love you). I'm suddenly reminded of all the things that make hand-animated features a more joyous affair: the colors, the backgrounds, just the way the characters look. It's all so warm and welcome, and since this is the first time I've seen an animated film in theaters since Tarzan, the simple experience of seeing it on the big screen was exhilarating.

Only time will tell if it will become a classic, and only time will tell if this is the start of another golden age for Disney, but my God I hope so.

10/10

And considering all the mean things I had to say about the middle portion, that should illustrate how goddamn great the first and third acts are.

Clash of the Titans

2009-12-10T23:04:00.001-08:00

Terminator 2: Judgment Day gets a lot of hyperbole thrown at it and, strangely, most of it is deserved and as a cinephile whose main love in the cinema is action pictures, it's a particularly important set of hyperbole to address. No, it's not the best sequel of all time. That one boggles my mind because I can immediately say "Godfather 2" and everyone in the room will shut up. No, I don't think it's the best action film of all time. That title goes to Raiders of the Lost Ark. It's probably the last great action film to come out of the boom of mostly awful, sometimes brilliant action films in the 80s. No, it's not even James Cameron's best film (I think it's pretty clear that I'm all gooey-eyed over The Terminator). It is, by far, the most important stepping stone between practically filmed movies and the CGI-heavy acid trips we've been getting at the theaters this last decade or so. While it's not the last, or even really close to the last blockbuster filmed mostly with practical effects, it's probably the last Great one and it signifies the point where CGI became a huge selling point, so now people can say "TRANSFORMS II: REVENGE OF HTE FALLEN - 10/10 AWESOME GRAPHICS" and their worth can be determined as more than "would fetch twenty American dollars on Russian skin trade".

Why, you ask? Because this is the first time CGI was used throughout a film in an entirely effective and useful way. After this came out, studios and filmmakers began to realize the possibilities CGI presented, specifically a guy named Steven Spielberg who used them to create some pretty astounding creatures for a mostly overlooked dinosaur project called The Jurassic Themepark. That, too, is a very important stepping stone for the technology, but I can see none of you have seen it and are getting cross-eyed with anger at talk of this confusing dinofilm where I should be talking about Terminator 2.

A decade or so after The Terminator, Kyle Reese remains quite steadfast in his decision to remain dead, Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) is in a mental institution and their son, living paradox John Connor (Edward Furlong), is a willful fuck-up of a kid. Somehow, though, this little punk is going to grow up to lead the fight against the machines. Those machines send a second Terminator (Robert Patrick) back in time to kill Connor, this one made of liquid metal and capable of blending seamlessly into its surroundings. The human resistance sends back the T-800 (or T-101 depending on what nerd you're listening to), a model identical to or very similar to (and again played by Arnold Schwarzenegger), the model seen as the antagonist in the first film to protect John.

There's a story I've heard that Cameron's original idea for the T-1000 was to have Michael Biehn play it to more effectively infiltrate the Connors. While you and I both know that in James Cameron's hands that would have turned out a bit trite and sappy, it doesn't change that it's a fucking incredible idea, even if the deliriously strange edges would have inevitably been shaved off. I can still fantasize about the possibilities and lament its loss as being confusing and uncommercial. It's all the more strange that this idea is so appealing to me because I love Robert Patrick as the T-1000 so very much. Essentially building off of Schwarzenegger's performance in the original, the T-1000 is equally emotionless, but not being a huge cyborg and instead being a malleable liquid metal, his movements are all exaggerated just a teensy bit. It's a marvelous little pantomime. He never fails to look menacing, but most of the time he reminds me of various animals. Sometimes his head darts around like a hawk, and in the early mall scenes he always reminds me of a cat, confidently slinking through crowds and observing his prey before launching at it with speed and strength he did not seem capable of just a moment ago.

Schwarzenegger, with his character expanded, is actually a lot less interesting. The whole "machine learns to love" angle is so played out these days it's easy to forget that Schwarzenegger sort of originated it. Still, conveying love and affection through a non-emotional filter just ends up being less interesting than his emotionless psycho bit. It was the mystery of the character that made him so exciting and compelling and with that role delegated to the T-1000, Schwarzenegger seems so bland in comparison.

Hamilton, on the other hand, is superb. Every time I watch these two movies together, it's the jaw-dropping physical transformation of Hamilton that really shocks me. If I had to guess, I'd say every meal for the seven intervening years was three packs of cigarettes and a cereal bowl filled with anabolic steroids. She's become a violent animal in the years since the events of the first film, her eyes sunken by the trauma and her will hardened by the years of preparation. She's almost nothing like her character in the first film, except for those moments where you recognize her for a moment and lament the loss of that nubile young waitress. After this viewing, I'm tempted to call her performance the equal to Sigourney Weaver in Aliens.

Edward Furlong is some kind of a train wreck half the time. His voice is so clearly looped a lot of the time that he's just fucking distracting. Not to mention he plays an unappealing little bastard who makes me never want to have children, and if there's any great crime that Terminator 2 commits, it's the launch of Edward Furlong's career, a career that ends up giving us yet another shitty aspect of that well-loved shitsack, American History X. A lot of the time, though, he's sort of inoffensive.

But the real star of this film is James Cameron. This is the sort of tremendous undertaking that I can imagine driving a director to the brink of sanity. Between his huge star, his enormous budget, the amount of practical effects and set-ups necessary every day and the grueling nine month shoot, I'm shocked that he didn't throw in the towel as soon as this film was finished. These days, most of these sorts of films are delegated to effects teams and are probably easier to shoot than anything else, seeing as they're mostly done in temperature-controlled studios and the only thing you have to worry about is the bright colors of the green screen hurting your eyes. I imagine that they hired fucking green berets to fetch the coffee on this set and most of them were killed by explosions or Robert Patrick trying to get into character.

And praise be to James Cameron for realizing that to retread the success of the first film would be a waste, and instead making it one of the most gigantic action pictures of all time, centered around the battle between the T-800 and the T-1000.

That's one of the major reasons that this film works so brilliantly. When a film this epic in scope and so busy with characters and sub-plots, boiling it down to a heroic hero versus a villainous villain is the most effective way to structure a film like this and to never lose the narrative. I could list a million examples, but the two that come to mind as the best recent examples are No Country for Old Men and, obviously, The Dark Knight. A sympathetic hero and a villain so incredibly evil are those films' greatest, most elemental assets.

I will say this against the film: compared to the first one, it's a much shallower, far more rote affair. But damn it, the first film is one of the best films of the 80s. I hate to compare the two; the sequel is just so different. It's such a great, great action movie that I'll forgive it a lot of things, like a middle section that drags a little bit (the first time anything like this has happened in a Cameron film) and the weird, jarring introduction of narration for a few scenes in the middle.

It's really an extraordinary piece of filmmaking, if the size of a production is taken into account even a little bit. Every few minutes brings yet another set piece, any one of which a large scale production would be jealous of. It really raised the bar in a lot of ways, especially for the size and pace of a film. Every second of Terminator 2 outdoes the climax of similar films, almost making it all climax all the time. But yet more praise deserves to be thrown Cameron's way for making the real climax stand out and keep us on the edge of our seats.

It's probably Cameron's best film, in terms of objective quality. You can't really dislike Terminator 2 for any real reason, it's just too much fun. While the first Terminator is geared more towards my tastes and feels a lot more like an artistic accomplishment, its sequel is really an auteur's piece as much as anything else, which is always exciting to see in a blockbuster. I feel reduced to a little kid when I watch it, and I'm happy to join the ranks of that geek culture who hold this as the preeminent geek film, outside of Star Wars.

10/10

Gazing Back

2009-12-09T06:53:00.000-08:00

So here we arrive at where James Cameron gives away his sentimentality and the fuzzy teddy bear hiding beneath his human skin. I mentioned in both my Terminator review and my Aliens review that those movies were the grim torments of the movie gods, but in the most deliriously invigorating way possible, like being hit in the face with a Monet. You may be bruised and bleeding by the end of either of those films, but you'll be ready for round two. None of the films we'll be watching in the next week will be anything like those in terms of tone. They'll all be airier and poppier and while of course I do not prefer one style over the other, I do think that James Cameron, at least initially, had a better grasp of the dark and grim. I like feeling like I'm trapped in brightly colored bubble gum as much as the next guy, but I'm sad that Cameron was never able to exercise the same amount of control over tone and deliver a film that leaves me feeling something distinctive, whether it be the rape-victim shakes or polka-dotted fervor (although crazy housewives the world over will argue with me on Titanic).

Like all of Cameron's films, I've seen The Abyss before, but for this viewing I opted for the Director's Cut, seeing as this retrospective is a celebration of James Cameron as a director and based on some kind words my brother had for this version.

The Abyss takes place in an underwater oil drilling rig that looks like it could be a summer getaway for Victor Von Doom. There, blue-collar worker Virgil (Ed Harris) and his estranged wife Lindsey (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) are asked to aid a group of navy seals in finding a missing nuclear submarine. Before long they encounter strange, brightly colored creatures zipping around adorably and casually causing adorable mass pandemonium. Evil military man Coffey (Michael Biehn) wants to nuke them, but the compassionate protagonists want to try and make contact with the strange creatures. Paranoia ensues for the viewer does not know: are the creatures benevolent, or are they as devious as they seem?

If you're thinking to yourself "man, that sounds an awful lot like Close Encounters of the Third Kind", then grab a Medal of Honor from the basket. I know that the originality of a story is almost trivial, but damn it, it's like making a movie about the life of a magazine mogul and his disk sled told through flashback and called Citizen Blaine or something. Spielberg kind of staked out this territory in '77 and made a movie that anyone would be hard-pressed to top. I can't decide if James Cameron's decision to put a paper cut-out of Ed Harris in front of Richard Dreyfuss and repackage it as a different film makes him very ballsy or just stupid, but The Abyss has at least one huge thing on its side: it is maddeningly suspenseful.

Really, as much as I bitch about them being exactly the same movie, the similarities are nominal. Close Encounters had a smaller thematic scope (and was more successful for it), while The Abyss is a bit more genre-oriented. And would you look at that! Genre-oriented. Just the sort of thing I like. The Abyss is largely a locked-door thriller with underwater aliens serving more as a macguffin than an integral part of the narrative. Their presence only serves to aggravate the incredibly tense conflict between the rig workers and the military dudes.

And that conflict, so often played out, is given new vitality by Cameron and I have NO idea how. For a 19-year-old I think I'm a pretty observant moviegoer, but I remain absolutely perplexed by this unusually potent thriller for the second time through. Both times I've been driven to the brink of insanity by this film's tense conflicts and both times I've emerged from the other side without my usual look of smug triumph.

Perhaps it's the underwater setting and the very real, very prevalent fear of drowning that, strangely, few films ever exploit. Drowning is #2 on my list of fears, a list that features two items: 1) Dragons and 2) Drowning. But I don't think that one thing can account for the outrageous effectiveness of this film, and it's time to give the other players their due. Despite being nearly three hours, The Abyss is as immaculately paced as any of Cameron's films, using its extra running time for great effect, even managing to keep my pulse up through its roughly 40-minute denouement. The actors, in particular Ed Harris and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, create very sympathetic and real characters, full of life and passion with a clear, but largely unspoken, love and mutual admiration. If James Cameron has never fully received credit for his ability to pull the very best out of his actors, it hasn't been for lack of my chamioning. I wouldn't say it's the best role of Ed Harris' career, for there are so, so many great performances in his career, but it's the best thing I've ever seen Mastrantonio do, by far, even if her filmography is significantly more limited.

And would you believe me if I told you that James Cameron finally found a use for Michael Biehn? Yes, as the jittery, violent and totally illogical SEAL commander sitting around and whittling on his forearm, Michael Biehn has finally found a role that matches his facial features. It's as natural as anything I could fathom Biehn doing; he would probably have a similar reaction if the waiter told him they didn't serve Pepsi products.

Although Coffey's character doesn't make much sense to me. He seems to have the deep sea cabin fever they talk about even before he arrives on the platform, most likely because he's played by Michael "I sleep in an electric chair" Biehn, and his evil plan is to nuke the creatures because "there's no way of warning the surface"? There are so many undocumented plants and animals on Earth not because they're hiding in the bushes or under rocks, but because scientists can't keep up with all of them. If we wanted to document all the creatures in the Amazon rain forest, we'd have to level the trees and wipe them all out all the plants and animals to have enough paper, and then James Cameron would have to make a movie about it, the prick. We have plenty of moral conundrum surrounding the discovery of new creatures without Lt. Tweak trying to nuke anything that can't be found in a K-Mart.

So yeah, Biehn is far more cartoonish and less humanistic than Harris and Mastrantonio, but I can't really pass judgment on his place in the film because the effectiveness of the movie is something that I don't understand AT ALL.

The film's claim to fame is its special effects, specifically the famous water tendril scene, one of the first examples of CGI integrated with live action. One of Cameron's greatest assets as a human being, and the chief reason that I remain wildly, unapologetically excited for Avatar is his ability to always use special effects technology effectively and never overreach the limits of that technology. For 20-year-old CGI it holds up astonishingly well, as do the alien fish monsters and their horrible neon metropolis. It's exactly the sort of thing that you would think of if I said "cutting edge in the late 80s", right after you imagined parachute pants.

I never liked the ending in the theatrical cut. It's one of those movies that makes the viewers feel like they aren't violent, selfish libertines with a stack of bodies that would make John Wayne Gacy look like a ballerina. It reminds me of that little kid who sits on the curb and asks you to sign a petition to end world hunger. I know I love world hunger, but I also know that the poor little guy's heart is in the right place. He doesn't seem to understand why world hunger exists. That was always a footnote in the original film, but dear GOD is it prevalent in the director's cut. We have roughly eight hours of heavy handed message delivery before the merciful end. After watching this movie I ate an entire shipment of Peace Corps brand potato chips out of spite.

So, to recap, we have an exceedingly well-constructed film with great performances and great effects marred by a simplistic message. LET'S GET USED TO IT. There's a lot of that coming up and we'd be wise to brace for impact.

9/10

Sonic-Electronic Ball-Breaker or: Femnism in Action

2009-12-05T13:31:00.000-08:00

1986 saw James Cameron directing a sequel to what is inarguabley one of the best films ever made: Alien. With its absolutely impeccable mise-en-scene used in every single shot to evoke claustrophobia or dread, its production design full of the Everest of nightmare imagery and a director of commercial fare who, like so many directors before him, made his greatest film his first.

James Cameron's sequel Aliens is widely regarded as one of the greatest sequels of all time, and that's a perfectly fair assessment. While some morons believe Aliens outmatches Alien, I can't even imagine a film as great as Alien having a sequel that lands anywhere near its predecessor. The fact that it actually ends up being a great movie is cause for celebration. It's not the unmitigated masterpiece that Alien is, but it's brilliant in its own right.

For those of you who don't know (and for those of you who don't, get the fuck off my blog), Alien ended with Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) unsympathetically blowing Michael Seymour and H.R. Giger's masterpiece out an airlock and snorting a line of phenobarbitals in celebration before falling asleep for sixty years. That's where Aliens picks up. Ripley is awoken and is immediately handed a pickax despite possibly being the oldest woman on the planet. Before long, a swanky, charming corporate type who only cares about the dollars and cents shows up to convince Ripley to go back to the planet where she first encountered the alien lifeform. It seems that the big corporation has lost contact with the settlers they impulsively let live on a planet overrun with murderous aliens. It's up to Ripley and an ill-equipped, under-manned squad (that means eight soldiers) of space folly to go in and clean up the aliens that seemed to effortlessly wipe out several hundred people.

There Ripley encounters the sole survivor of the alien onslaught, a little girl named Newt for some reason. Ripley robs the cradle and runs off with her shiny new daughter to replace the one whose life she slept through.

So we're off to fight the aliens, and what a fight it is! Essentially highjacking all the brilliant design work of the first film and throwing it into a brilliant action film. Aside from the designs, a general narrative continuation and Ripley, the films aren't that similar. Ripley, like all the characters in the last film, was barely more fleshed out than she had to be. Like most slashers, she exists to be killed by the glorious beast at the center of the film. Cameron gets a lot of mileage out of fleshing out her character and really bringing Sigourney Weaver to the film's fore in a performance that's as great as everything you've ever heard.

And here's where James Cameron's noted femnism works the best. Now, I don't think of myself as a sexist, but I DO think that there are irreconcilable differences between men and women that don't begin and end with penis/vagina. For instance, men are inherently stronger than women. Don't believe me? Arm wrestle a woman. Or, if you're a woman, arm wrestle a man. The man will almost always win. That's not to say that a woman can't win, in fact I've had a woman crush my arm into a bloody powder. I dated a girl that could kick my ass, but that's the exception that prove the rule.

Anyway, I was going somewhere with that. Ripley could easily be the best female action hero ever. Most of the time a female action hero is a woman with a ballsack. She suddenly punches out burly Russian lumberjacks three times their size without breaking a nail, puts on a barrelfull of muscle and becomes the picture of emotionless head-smashing (see: Sarah Conner in Terminator 2). She fails to retain any uniquely feminine characteristics (I consider violence and hot tempers masculine characteristics, although again they're not exclusively masculine characteristics; I just find men more inclined to those traits, generally speaking) and fails to be anything more than a generic action hero. With a vagina. Ripley is strong, intelligent and uniquely feminine, making her the perfect model for female action heroes. In any case, there's usually a REASON we're putting a female lead in a film primarily targeted at adolescent males, right? Why not make it something that defines her character as a strong FEMALE? Her maternal instincts guide her actions, but not in a shitty Hallmark Channel sort of way, in a "grenade launchers and flamethrowers" sort of way.

So if a lot of the thrills of the first film came from the mystery of discovering what the alien was, Aliens derives most of its thrills from seeing the aliens organize and put those traits we discovered in the first film into action in their own environment rather than the "alien" environment of the Nostromo.

As far as Cameron's direction, which, if I'm remembering correctly, is the entire reason I'm watching this movie, it's another action masterpiece. This film has more in common with The Terminator than any of his subsequent films in that afterward you feel like you've been dragged through a field of thorns, mud and cancer. Helping play into that is a billion false endings that never feel gratuitous or cheap because we're invested in the story and characters. Also the razor-sharp editing does a lot to keep the film moving, never lingering on the various plot points and always moving towards the action or the impending sense of doom. It's one film that uses every second of its two and a half hour running time to great effect, despite my frustration at this recent trend of action films outliving your children.

But the best thing he does as a director in this film is that he takes the alien muppets (and make no mistake, they are fucking muppets) and making them absolutely convincing just with his editing and camera work. It's one of the most repeated stories in filmmaking legend that the shark in Jaws became the quintessential unseen menace because Spielberg couldn't get the goddamn animatornic shark to work. This sort of filmmaking is a casualty of the rise of CGI and if there's anything to blame for the fall of horror, it's that. Cameron's lumbering alien muppets were clearly not suited to be convincing antagonists until he teamed up with his virtuoso crew. It's the sort of thing only a truly great director can pull off, and I think James Cameron happens to be a goddamn brilliant director.

It's no Terminator, but it's one hell of a film.

10/10

Scooby Doo Meets the Boondock Saints

2009-12-02T14:54:00.001-08:00

I've never made any sort of secret out of my hatred for the original Boondock Saints. I've often said it's the worst film I've ever seen, and I stand by that. There may be worse movies out there and I'm sure I've seen some, but all those are widely agreed to be horrible movies. None of them have the stark-raving, drunken, tattooed fanbase that The Boondock Saints boasts. Piranha 2 is dismissive material. It was made with no ideals and no pretensions towards being anything but a quick Italian cash-grab. Calling it the worst movie of all time is par for the course. It's not a serious criticism because it's not a serious film. The Boondock Saints is clearly a labor of love, boasting some really profound morals that cater to peoples' stupidity and base instincts. People were passionate about this film when it was made.

In retrospect, I'm not even really sure why the hell I saw this movie. I suppose for the same reason I saw New Moon. It's the sequel to what is essentially 9/11 with Nickelback playing over it (I wrote that sentence, and then it got me thinking: does such a video exist?), but everyone thinks it's just the bees knees. So much so, in fact, that it's the most advertised film I've ever seen in the way of posters, t-shirts, etc. and The Boondock Saints is probably the film I've most often seen on other peoples' DVD shelves. Even my older brother is a heathen to my cause, and many intelligent, well-spoken men of film honestly defend it as a serious film. I feel like Zorro these days, but without the moral and legal impunity that apparently comes with vigilantism. And without the sword. You guys could use more sword through your chests.

The Boondock Saints II picks up eight years after the original. The MacManus brothers went on a murder spree that gave millions of people worldwide huge murder-boners at the end of the last film and have since been hiding out in Ireland. Then a priest is killed in the same style the MacManus brothers killed people, and they're off to solve the case. Along the way they meet a wacky Mexican comic relief character/sidekick played by Clifton Collins Jr., an actor I was starting to quite like before this, and an FBI agent who is a woman and so therefore must be attractive. She also does things like see clues at a crime scene with her eyeballs and make all the other detectives jealous of her keen deductive intellect (otherwise known as eyeballs). And there's something about Il Duce, who I can't really remember from the first movie, and his past making vests. A noble profession.

So how does it hold up to my expectations? Well, since it's the exact same fucking movie, I'd say "pretty good". World-famous cocksucker Troy Duffy, writer and director of these two films and no others, has spent ten (10) years writing this movie. Ten fucking years. In the time he spent farting and writing jokes about it, I doubled in mass, graduated from high school, dumped a handful of girlfriends, had my first #9 with no tomatoes from Jimmy John's and watched over 1000 movies. Yeah, that doesn't sound like much, but it's more than creating a script out of pure fart and then filming it.

So let's dive into the dicks and docks of what makes this movie horrible, and let's get the easy stuff out of the way first. The acting is horrible across the board, but it's a little less stressful on me this time because they aren't robbing Willem Dafoe, one of my most beloved actors, of his dignity. In particular, Julie Benz is a fucking fever dream as the character with the eyeballs. She's playing exactly the same character that Willem Dafoe played in the original film, and that's a role that not even goddamn Willem "God Damn" Dafoe could manage, let alone an actor who has a hard time maintaining an accent. It's one of those roles where you wonder if, as research, the actor watched footage of air-raids. Though I'm sure she was doing her very best with a script that thinks it's funny to have her say "fuck" because she's a woman and thinks that eyeballs are all it requires to outclass local law enforcement.

Troy Duffy directs this movie like he woke up with his skull cracked and bleeding and a big sack of money attached to a time bomb was laying next to him every morning during production. He applies style simply because it looks cool, never because there's any reason to apply style. This is filmmaking 101 and one of the most important rules of filmmaking that I have yet to see a good excuse for breaking: style depends on content. Similarly, you cannot mate a cat with a dog. Actually, a more apt metaphor here would be "you cannot mate an earthworm with a toaster". So when Troy Duffy suddenly starts shooting the movie like a grindhouse film, is he doing it because he's illustrating the content of the film visually, or is he doing it because he's not exactly sure why Guy Ritchie and Quentin Tarantino do it, but it sure looks cool in their movies? Fuck you, Troy Duffy.

So let's get down to business. I've been putting off revealing why these movies REALLY suck.

I don't flinch at violence, twisted codes of ethics are nothing new (I live in Indiana) and my blood, 2/3s of it greener than...something green and Irish. I don't have to cater to you assholes. Go to hell.

I'd like to point out first of all that Troy Duffy's sadistic philosophies are nothing new. But here's the gist of them: bad guys deserve to be executed. Okay, we already do that. What the fuck else do you want? Oh, yeah, the court system and trial by a jury of your peers thing needs to be removed. And who do we replace them with? Two psychopathic Irishmen. I don't see how this could go wrong.

Look, we all know the court system is flawed. But can you imagine how much more awful things would be if we gave a few men impunity to carry out the law in whatever way they liked? There's a philosophy that says the best form of government is a tyranny, but it's the most easily corruptible, and a corrupt government is the most dangerous and ineffective government of all. The same philosophy argues that a Democracy is the worst form of government, but the most difficult to corrupt, therefore a Democracy is the most effective form of government simply because it's a convoluted mess. The same thing applies to the court system. The system itself is bad, but already so susceptible to corruption. If something as convoluted as the United States justice system is still eminently corruptible, making it more corruptible is not the solution.

The film offers violence and sadistic fantasy (both things I'm fine with--I'm sickened by the context) in lieu of serious discussion about the issues the film tends to just shoot at.

"But Oliver," I'm sure you're asking "how can you condemn a film like this and not The Dark Knight, which you still slobber over like a twelve-year-old girl at a Jason Mraz concert?". Good question, reader I just made up. The difference between the two films are thus: The Dark Knight takes place in a make-believe world, in a make-believe city and featuring make-believe criminals. The Boondock Saints takes place in a world clearly modeled on our own (when Troy Duffy isn't muddling his intentions with retarded stylistic tricks) in a city called Boston which is real, but sometimes seems like an abstraction, and featuring criminals based with no pretense of fiction on real criminals. Not a bullet-proof argument by any stretch of the imagination, but it's something that factors in. Second, Batman isn't a murderer (again, not bullet-proof, but work with me here. This is going somewhere.). Third, and I think most importantly, Batman is portrayed as a mentally ill, flawed human being who knows what he is doing is a throat-jab to the fine men and women who work to bring down the bad guys using entirely legal means. Christopher Nolan never tried to push a one-man judiciary system on us and call it a legitimate philosophy. Troy Duffy has spent two films telling us how cool it would be if we shot mafiosos.

I can't think of another film that's violated my moral code ever. I barely even have a moral code. I could care less if they release a Columbine video game. No one is honestly trying to sell us on Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold's personal philosophies, and if they did no one would fucking buy it. But people talk about The Boondock Saints as if it's a paradigm of moral straightforwardness. People buy this philosophy.

If anything has become clear to me here, it's that maybe I don't hate The Boondock Saints. Maybe I hate that it represents a group of people stupid enough to love it and large enough to demand a sequel.

1/10

One Man Army

2009-11-28T00:51:00.000-08:00

When I started this retrospective I mentioned that there was one film in Cameron's filmography that I held near and dear to my heart. I suppose before we go any further, I should mention that it's The Terminator that I was referring to. I've often held it aloft as a shiny example of what a chase thriller looks like, how it should be done, how it should be cut, scored, shot, staged and helmed. You'll excuse me, then, if every now and then my rhetoric dissolves into a series of gentle but enthusiastic kisses for a film that I value more than the lives of anyone who will ever read this.

I'm sure you all know the plot, but what kind of critic would I be without recounting it? It's the future and despite the fact that we somehow invented and mass-produced energy weapons, it kind of looks like a shitty place to raise your kids. Robots have taken over the world, and not the cuddly R.O.B.-style robots, the Fear Cereal-chewing, red-eyed Battlebot sort of robots. Around 1997 when I was just starting my Final Fantasy phase and you were all enjoying James Cameron's Titanic, super-advanced AI Skynet missed its appointment to take over the world and enslave humanity as prophesised in 1984 by this film. Skynet, with no regard for the prime directive, shoots a naked Austrian robot-man (Arnold Schwarzenegger as the eponymous villain) back in time to kill Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) future mother of John Connor, leader of the human resistance. The human resistance send back a single warrior, Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) to protect her.

Unfortunately for Sarah Connor, Kyle's a bit of a downer. Not only will we not be flying around the galaxy sending space-hippies to their death in fifty years, but he keeps going on about the futility of fighting the Terminator. With the weapons available in 1984, the Terminator is virtually indestructible.

And here's where the film starts getting intriguing. Out of the gate we're introduced to a villain that is unstoppable. He is cold and emotionless and, unlike so many other films that aped its style, The Terminator succeeds in giving the machine absolutely no human qualities. People often wonder about a one ton body builder being cast as a robot that's meant to infiltrate human society, but it lends several degrees of cold, mechanical evil to his character. If he was prancing around just like a normal human, acting precisely like humans do and adopting personality traits and character flaws and all the other things we like to see in our characters he would lose the thing that makes machines scary. Never once in this film do we look at the Terminator and mistake him for human.

Cameron masterfully wrangles Arnold Schwarzenegger's inexperience as an actor and his awkward Austrian screen presence to create a character that is a merciless killer, LOOKS like a merciless killer and has an intangible awkwardness about him as if he was created by machines that have only observed humans from a distance but were quick to dismiss them as dangerous variables.

I have fewer nice things to say about Linda Hamilton and Michael Biehn. Hamilton is a bit bland (although she is written as an every-woman) but I don't think her performance spends any time detracting from the overall impact of the film. Michael Biehn has never been an actor I've liked much. He looks like he was told his father was eaten by wildebeests and never got over being told he lives in a hipster sitcom. I suppose it works well enough when he's playing a soldier who is constantly on edge and was learning to make plastique while we were dancing in demonic little circles to songs about the Black Plague. Furthermore, they have little romantic chemistry. That would be a real complaint if the romance was any more than a simple plot point, but the later scenes could have used the emotional impact a successful romance would have wrought.

If you've noticed, all the things I just listed were "it could have been this, but it remains functional and effective where it is", my point being that despite the criticisms I leveled against it, I'm just pointing out the things it doesn't excel at. Don't let that make you think it doesn't excel like crazy all over the place. First of all, the middle section of the film is as flawless as anything ever put on film. While the climax doesn't hold up to the absolute perfection of the TechNoir shootout and subsequent chase, that's a standard I wouldn't ever hold a film to.

And the early, largely silent scenes with the Terminator are incredibly tense, proving once again how overrated film scores are and how much more effective a film can be when its intentions aren't muddled by manipulative music.

The way James Cameron manipulates the gritty underbelly of LA as a stage for action calls to mind the greatest of classic noirs and is his single greatest accomplishment as a filmmaker as far as I'm concerned. The only way I can think to describe it is to call to mind Taxi Driver. The city itself is almost never directly referenced, but it becomes an indispensable part of the narrative and the visual vocabulary. A series of twisting alleyways strewn with litter and filled with homeless people and greasy dumpsters give way to streets lined with uncaring souls. It's a place where optimism dies. It's almost as apocalyptic as the world Reese grew up in. But every time we think this city can't become more dark and twisted, Cameron jerks us back to Reese's time, where rats are a delicacy and death is almost a relief.

The standoff between the very human, very fragile Kyle Reese and the indestructible, unstoppable Terminator has elemental qualities that make it a timeless formula. Rarely is the contrast between the hero and the villain so harsh, and rarely is an air of hopelessness so effective.

Yeah, it's a fucking bleak film. It's just as bleak as you've heard and probably more bleak than you remember. The whole experience is a bit like being dragged through gravel. It's the sort of thing you walk away from dazed but ready to experience again, hoping that this time the thick atmosphere of oppression will dissolve to allow you to read the story and characters more, but it never does.

The only film I've ever seen that has truly bettered its oft-violated style and formula is No Country for Old Men. That's a goddamn bold statement, but they're two films that I hold in exceptionally high regard, and while James Cameron is one of the most consistent blockbuster filmmakers of all time, he shares one thing with so many great directors of blockbusters. Like Spielberg and like Lucas, his first film will always be his best. If we're not counting that fucking Piranha movie.

11/10

The Finest Flying Piranha Movie Ever Made

2009-11-26T14:29:00.000-08:00

I've never seen the original Piranha, I'm not an authority on horror and James Cameron has renounced this film and repeatedly said he considers his first film The Terminator. Why did I choose to watch it? Because it has motherfucking flying piranhas in it.

When I heard that, my imagination started running around like a little kid, conjuring images that didn't even really have anything to do with flying piranhas.

My hopes for this film were through the roof. It almost got the point where the film had no chance to live up to my expectations. I imagined a huge ensemble of characters being introduced in the first scene, only to be eaten by GODDAMN FLYING PIRANHAS in the second scene.

They sort of do that, too. They introduce a huge host of characters and never go anywhere with them. Some of them die, some of them observe the climax from a distance and shrug, and some of them are last seen in the middle of the movie as if someone just forgot about them. I prefer my idea, though. As usual.

We're introduced to some lame characters who spend a lot of time not skipping rope and playing football with their new flying piranha neighbors. One of them is the android from Aliens and one of them is his son who gets his very own useless subplot.

Then the piranhas start eating houses and cars in a single bite and shooting rainbows from their eyes that make people explode into a bloody mist. Then one of them fuses with some busty, foreign chick so that her boobs can be fused to the piranha's gigantic exoskeleton. And then the piranhas start forming together to create a giant piranha and the US government calls in the Justice League to stop them but the Justice League can't stop them because Superman can fly, but is he a fucking piranha? The film ends when Lance Henriksen is crowned king of piranhas for no reason and they play a benefit concert with Aerosmith and then the piranhas fuse with the entire crowd and become bigger than the Earth.

Or at least I'll give James Cameron credit for maybe thinking that would be an awesome movie. Unfortunately, the stories I've heard have said that James Cameron wasn't terribly involved in production. In fact, I've heard a fellow named Ovidio G. Assonitis did most of the directing. It seems that Cameron (at most) filmed it, but was not involved in pre-production or editing and I can imagine the flying piranha charity drive was the first thing to go.

Sometimes I wonder if I get so bored during bad movies that I substitute entire plots in my head and come up with better movies to watch in my brain, sometimes pretending that what's on screen is part of my glorious brain movie. And that's exactly what happened during Piranha II: The Spawning. I was so busy pretending the piranhas were playing chess that I barely absorbed anything in this movie. And maybe it's because it was a shit movie, but I can imagine it was because I knew the piranhas could fly ahead of time and was heartbroken when all they did was nibble on your mother's Christmas ham.

The only thing that kept jarring me was the musical cues that announced the arrival of the piranhas every time they were on screen. In the future, when everything is digital. When our bicycles are digital. When our playing cards are digital. When our children are digital. And when those digital children clip those digital cards to their digital bikes and they make digital motorcycle noises to make the kids digitally cool. That is what that noise sounded like.

Other than that, the plot was stupid, the formula was stupid, it looks like it was shot in two weeks, the actors are atrocious and I don't want to think about it any more.

stupid/10

The Brainchildren of James Cameron or: One Big Happy Family

2009-11-25T13:01:00.000-08:00

The unnaturally photogenic James Cameron, being the charmer he is, has convinced me (with only pictures taken over a decade ago!) to revisit all of his narrative feature films.

So, I think I'm going to watch and review all of James Cameron's films in celebration of the deafening marketing holocaust accompanying the arrival of Avatar, like a particularly unenthused meteor falling lazily into my front yard.

Let it be known that this is a particularly big undertaking for me. I will be addressing a film that I hold very near and dear to my heart at the same time as addressing a group of films that are highly regarded as some of the most important, most popular and best films of the last 25 years.

Over the course of the next month I will be reviewing all of his narrative feature films, including:

- Piranha II: The Spawning
- The Terminator
- Aliens
- The Abyss
- Terminator 2: Judgment Day
- True Lies
- Titanic
- Avatar

I'd like to thank Devin D. for the suggestion and state my unfettered excitement to watch some blockbuster action films not covered in Michael Bay.

Eine Symphonie des Screaming Preteens

2009-11-20T19:41:00.000-08:00

I've never read any of the Twilight books. My senior year of high school, some real nerd was nerding all over me and started telling me about how "badass" the book was and how it was full of "awesome" werewolves and vampires. I was totally disengaged and barely listened to him. People always shout the blurbs on the back of books at me and I tend to ignore them. It wasn't until about a year later that my exposure to Twilight was complete. When the film came out I suddenly realized the vanilla-scented stampede Stephanie Meyer had unleashed. I casually thumbed through the first book before trying to crush my head between the pages.

I suppose anyone can write a book, but Twilight is a carefully composed argument for a police state where someone like Stephanie Meyer would be sent to a Siberian gulag and made to mine for ice.

Twilight was a generally pretty boring film filled with people who were pretty first and actors second. I haven't seen it in a long time, but if I remember correctly it was a pretty bland, cookie-cutter script with some obvious mistakes (it was a romance and could have survived as such, but they threw in an antagonist at the end who had no connection to the real story of the film) and I don't even remember the rest.

You know what's the weirdest thing about New Moon? It's EXACTLY the same movie. Here's the story for the first film:

Lonely teenage girl, feeling abandoned, goes about her life and catches the eye of a gorgeous young man. After some pursuit, and some mysterious happenings, she discovers he's a supernatural creature. She feels like the most special little girl in the whole wide world for dating a monster so violent and dangerous that they've kept their own existence a secret. Unsurprisingly, the guy tries to sever ties when he realizes that he has a hard time controlling his supernatural urges (I smell some metaphor!). Lonely teenage girl gets upset and lonely again before proving her worth as a submissive lapdog. Meanwhile, her supernatural prom date is hunting a BAD supernatural monster that's killing hikers in the woods.

The only thing that makes this film's story even a little bit different from the previous film is that they continue to deal with last time's supernatural monster. Edward Cullen is probably in about 25 minutes of the two hour and ten minute film, but THAT'S OKAY, because in the meantime we're treated to Jacob Black, a young werewolf whose abs look like they just wandered off the cover of a romance novel and into an ad about the dangers of steroid use. The idea that the film tries to use to set it apart from the previous installment is Bella's choice between the brooding, boring, but very pretty Edward and the busty Jacob. Except actor Taylor Lautner is seventeen. And he put on thirty pounds of muscle in a less than nine months. If I were to guess what KIND of steroids he was using, I'd imagine it would be blue whale steroids with a rhinoceros steroid chaser.

I get that jean shorts will never go out of style and that shirt factories are a popular target for terrorist attacks, but Jesus Christ I got sick of him greasing his ass and rubbing it in the audience's face. I have seldom experienced more gratuity in the name of exploiting an actor's physique.

That's okay, but what really gets my goat about this series is Stephanie Meyer haphazardly throwing in religious aspects to, first of all, a story about mythical hellhounds and demons being reimagined as plush toys, but to what is borderline pornography. I suppose in a capitalist society we'll always run into people selling sex to preteens, but the Twilight series has never had any shame about it. It's that they have the audacity to then turn around and point to the fact that Bella isn't getting bulldozed by the demons that makes them morally repugnant. Parents buy the books for their nine-year-olds like they're math textbooks. But they won't let their children see a movie rated R for brief strong language.

Chris Weitz's direction is, as usual, disaffected and bored, sort of letting the action happen without adding any real visual flair.

But it's not like he didn't try.

Chris Weitz has unleashed some of the worst fight scenes I've ever seen with his gaudy slow motion and blur effects. Sometimes I wanted to look away, but my sense of journalistic integrity latched my eyes to the screen. And that's the only time he injects the film with any kind of style (aside from an almost-good opening scene). The rest is static or cliched camera work, but when a fight scene starts, Weitz starts running around like a little puppy.

Nothing else in the series has changed. Kirsten Stewart is still a boring actress stuck in a role written specifically to keep her as boring and cipher-like as possible so that any little girl can imagine herself in her place. Same goes for Robert Pattinson, although he's arguably an even worse actor. He has an browline completely resistant to acting, but the filmmakers insist on showing it in closeup all the time as if to remind us that this kid has the emotional range of a character in a motion capture film. Special shout-out to Ashley Greene, who doesn't do much and isn't called upon to show if she's a good actor or even if she's a bad one, but who's as close as this film comes to casting a genuinely gorgeous person. Or at least someone who reacts well to the makeup effects.

It was boring the first time I saw this film when it was Twilight, but this time it's offensively boring. I wanted to fall asleep. I didn't even want to leave 2012 and I was sore for days because of the theater's conditions. I hope I can put myself in the hospital ahead of Eclipse, a film even director David Slade has essentially admitted that he hates and is doing because he's a young director who needs a sure-fire hit to boost his career.

2/10

But you're still fucking peasents as far as I can see

2009-11-19T08:39:00.000-08:00

Armageddon tapped into a fear like no other. What if the last hope for humanity were fucking OIL DERRICK WORKERS? What if they survived the apocalypse and were solely responsible for repopulating the Earth? What if, 100 years from now, everyone is a descendant of Ben Affleck?

Maybe it's my liberal, bourgeois upbringing, but I don't trust oil derrick workers to successfully harvest enough crude to keep my Camry running year after year, let alone drill a hole into a pissed off meteor and tactically insert a nuke. I know I spent my formidable years bathing in Merlot and if you gave me a heavy oil harvesting device it would probably just make me fall over, but I pride myself on my ability to walk into a room and immediately spot the people who would be able to stop a world-threatening catastrophe. And maybe it's because I hang around theoretical physicists with suspicious amounts of weapons training and my kindergarten teacher was an undercover cop, but I can think of several people in this room right now who I would trust more to stop that meteor, and the only ones in this room right now are cats.

Instead of being a love letter to cats (which it should have been), Armageddon is a love letter to filthy proles, and the greasy sub-humans who man the grills at McDonalds.

Chief among these grumpy, drunk blue collar workers that have somehow acquired gun licenses is Harry Stamper (Bruce Willis), owner (maybe; he never puts on a suit the whole movie) of an oil derrick whose daughter, Grace (Liv Tyler), is currently being mauled by A.J. (Ben Affleck) and Harry's just not havin' it. If it were up to him (Although it never occurs to him to arrange a marriage. Just goes to show you the value of education.) she would marry a big city type. Instead she's stuck in what might be the creepiest romance ever passed off as romantic.

When we're first introduced to these little lovebirds, they're fucking like golems in Ben Affleck's dirty little oil derrick shack. When Bruce Willis discovers them he gets angry at Affleck for exposing his daughter to so much tetanus, but they're interrupted by the red phone flashing. Apparently a meteor is on a collision course with Earth and the only ones who can save it is a group of plucky, mismatched oil derrick workers, a bill that Willis' crew fits to the letter.

The working class heroes are to be sent into space to turn on a big drill, because astronauts don't know how to flip an "on" switch. But before they go, we're treated to more nightmare romance as Ben Affleck stuffs animal crackers into Liv Tyler's underwear and then eats them. I wish I could make up something like that, but that's a scene that plays as Liv Tyler's real-life father serenades them over the soundtrack. Unfortunately, this all matches my preconceived stereotypes about the unwashed masses and I was able to hate them even more for it. I was supposed to be rooting for these dickweeds, instead I was hoping that they'd die and Liv Tyler could spend the last few hours of her life making her peace with God and attempting to regain some dignity by having sex with a complete stranger in the bathroom stall at a TGI Friday's.

Now, I'm no scientist (2012 made perfect sense to me), but if we're going to blow a Texas-sized meteor in two with a thermonuclear device don't we have to drill to the fucking center? Their objective is to drill 800 feet, then drop a nuclear device into the center and blow it up, and when they finally blow the meteor up (spoiler alert for a few seconds ago), the explosion is right in the center, as if the meteor was 1600 feet wide. I know I got a D in physics, but I'm pretty sure we have enough nuclear devices under just the court house in my shitty Indiana town to turn the Earth into a jar of Parmesan cheese; a nuclear cough should do the trick against a meteor, or maybe everyone in my county could get their rifles and shoot at it for a few minutes. Accounting for amount of PBR consumed beforehand, the hillfolks' bullets will dishearten the meteor and it'll bugger off back to Meteor Town after about five minutes. Or maybe we could strap some rockets to the side of the moon and put it in the way. I have never had any use for the moon anyway. All it does is illuminate me when I'm trying to escape with the diamonds.

The film somehow ended up in the Criterion Collection along with The Rock. I get that Criterion wants to represent all genres and movements, but Armageddon is a film that does not need representation and the movement it belongs to has far better examples to represent it. But we all know what's really going on here: Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma doesn't move that many copies. I'm a huge fan of the Criterion Collection, so whatever they have to do to stay profitable is fine by me, but I'll send them a video of my birth if they're really hard up for weird garbage that no one wants to spend $40 on. They've even issued statements like:

"Despite what you may have heard, Armageddon is a work of art by a cutting-edge artist who is a master of movement, light, color, and shape—and also of chaos, razzle-dazzle, and explosion."

But you don't have to us, Criterion. Your eye for avant-garde anti-art is keen and your representation of the film movement that gave power to the man who would one day destroy civilization is smart. I'll be on your side at the End of Times when you shout from the mountain tops that you called it.

I know, I know, I've been avoiding the actual review section of this film. You know why? Because it was boring. It was way too long, the entire first hour could have been cut with zero-to-minimal impact on the finished product (except it would be less punishing), defending Ben Affleck (I'm talking Comeback Ben Affleck) just got so much harder and I no longer find Liv Tyler attractive. Normally I picture Michael Bay on the sets of his movies foaming at the mouth and babbling nonsense while a scribe translates his ramblings into hieroglyphics that are then handed to the actors, but in this case I imagine he was asleep most of the time, or maybe doing his hair. For all its explosions and utter chaos, most of the film is pretty asleep at the wheel. Despite its questionable content, most of Bay's films are just overly busy and poorly scripted. So rarely are they uneventful.

But who gives a shit. It's a movie that celebrates people that'll be made into glue when they retire. My noble hands may not be cut out for work in that environment, but I'm still not going to concede any amount of respect for the Sudras.

3/10

Necronomicon

2009-11-15T11:43:00.000-08:00

For many reasons I'm tempted to say that Star Trek: First Contact is an extraordinary film, simply because I enjoyed it so much. Fortunately, I have a stronger critical will than that. For everything that this film does right, and it does so much right, there are several things biting at its ankles and seeking to undermine everything about this film that is so exceptional.

But first, let's get this plot banged out. Six years ago, Captain Jean-Luc Picard was abducted by the sinister, nightmarish Borg Collective, assimilated into the collective and connected to the hive mind with machinery running into his organic tissue to augment his human abilities. Through the power of friendship (or something; I don't fucking know), the crew of the Enterprise manage to rescue him. That was back on The Next Generation television show. Cut to "present", Jean-Luc is still haunted by his encounter with the Borg and retains pieces of their machinery in his body.

When the Borg invade Federation space, Picard leads the fight. In the first of many egregiously simple errors the film commits, Worf (who, according to my minimal research, was at this point a regular on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine) is contrived aboard the Enterprise and shanghaied for this next film. It is so fucking contrived. THEN, Picard tells all the ships to focus their fire on a seemingly insignificant area of the Borg starship, which turns out to be critical enough that it destroys the ship. Just like that. Maybe that bit of minutia should have been relayed to Starfleet, eh, Picard? Maybe you should be the one to comfort the families of those who were killed or assimilated by the Borg before you showed up with that little detail.

So as Picard blows the Borg ship to hell in the span of a lunch break, the Borg manage to launch a probe that begins traveling back in time. The Enterprise quickly follows it back the mid-21st century, where the Borg are attempting to eliminate Zephram Cochrane (James Cromwell), the man responsible for inventing warp drive and establishing first contact with an alien race.

Here's where something else goes wrong. When we're first introduced to Cochrane, his research community is under fire from the Borg probe. How exciting! Then, as quickly as it started, the Enterprise blows the probe to Mexico. Then a handful of crew members beam down and help Cochrane accept his destiny and get history on the right track blah blah blah. But without the probe as an imminent threat, the away team subplot loses all its suspense and its connection to the main plot aboard the Enterprise. The fact that the away team is literally getting hammered and partying and meeting their idols while everyone on the Enterprise is having cables shoved down their throats and Borg eggs (?) laid in their stomachs sort of ruins the atmosphere.

And there's an easy solution to that problem, too. Because (oh, yeah, I forgot to mention) aboard the Enterprise the Borg have somehow gotten into the hull, undetected. Only a handful at first, but they slowly start grabbing crew members and assimilating them, slowly start converting the Enterprise's computers to Borg technology and their power slowly grows to rival the remaining crew. They begin to spread like an infection. Every time we're pulled away from this incredibly compelling story it's beyond frustrating. If the away team had a more direct stake in the fate of the Enterprise and vice-versa, that sub-plot would remain useful. As it is, though, they may as well not be connected at all.

The last of the egregious, simple errors the film commits is to make the Borg appear weak in some scenes. As a child, nothing frightened me more than the Borg (if you don't remember, or weren't around for the beginning of this series, my motivation to view all the Star Trek films was my unabashed enthusiasm for the series when I was little). They were essentially unstoppable killing machines. They adapted to your weapons after only a handful of shots, making your guns nothing more than heavy garbage cans full of used tissues that you can lob at your enemy with all the force of a child stricken by muscular dystrophy. And not just the individual. The ENTIRE collective adapted to your weapons (or tissues) after a few shots. As a child, they seemed invincible. I couldn't imagine anything scarier than an entire army of scary cybernetic zombies that you can't hurt. The mistake First Contact makes is to have a handful of scenes where Worf or Data manages to kill them with a single punch. I get it, Worf (being a Klingon) and Data (being an android) have superhuman strength. It makes sense, but again, you're UNDERMINING THE THREAT when they're being killed by simple punches. The easy way around this is to show humans trying to do the same thing out of desperation and showing the violent, cybernetic-probey results. Or to simply make Worf and Data put in a little bit of fucking effort when punching out robotic zombies. They seem to be doing it between bites of their scones and I don't see why Worf and Data have to be stronger than the Borg necessarily, instead of, perhaps equal in strength. That would be beneficial towards every aspect of the film.

If I've made this film sound bad, that was not my intention, I just piled on the negative criticism before I got to the good things, and there are a lot of things to be grateful for in this film.

First of all, my long list of complaints with Generations have almost all been addressed. The cast has new costumes that look decidedly more cinematic, the bridge is less garish and sleeker, readier for the widescreen necessities of cinematic features. Also, Data, who I dismissed as a weak character in the previous film, is given a lot to do and does wonders with it. In fact, the most fascinating portion of the film (from a narrative rather than aesthetic standpoint), is Data's interactions with the Borg Queen, a highly sexualized cybernetic humanoid zombie, who tempts him to join the collective with the promise of the organic skin and the human properties he has so longed for.

It is essentially a long conversation in a cavernous, Gigeresque dungeon that punctuates the action in the main of the ship (I know it's stupid to compare it, or anything, to The Seventh Seal, but that's just what it reminded me of, okay?). How they managed to fuck up the away team sub-plot with such a shining example of how a sub-plot should work in this film is beyond me.

And then there's the action in the main of the ship. As the Borg spread throughout the hull of the ship, Picard attempts to hold them back and evacuate survivors through the alcoves of the ship only the crew know. Here we get to see something that in seven films we never saw Kirk do: lose it. The closest to the edge that we ever saw Kirk get was when his son was killed in Search for Spock, quite possibly Shatner's greatest moment (although that's not saying much, especially in such an abysmal film).

Fuck, even the Holodeck, which I ridiculed endlessly in Generations, gets one of the best scenes in the whole film. Picard's story is rock and roll, action-heavy and exactly the sort of heroin trip the series has needed for a while.

But the best part of the film (and it's hard to choose a best part of a film with so many fine qualities), is Patrick Stewart's performance. Surely he's done better work, but rarely have I seen him at the top of his game physically. Not just the stunt work he does, but watching Picard devolve into an animalistic beast, struggling to maintain his gentile, Shakespearean composure as he is overrun by a guarded, malicious joy, watching the Borg gunned down in front of him. It's the sort of physicality that is often overlooked in acting, and it's a sublime bit of scenery-chewing. Stewart takes it and follows it over the top, using his considerable acting abilities to outdo every other actor, every other effect and every other action sequence in one scene of borderline-psychotic shouting.

Yes, the Next Generation crew finally crawls out of the shadow of the original cast with this film. And thank god. We're finally free of Walter Koenig's toupee and well-documented desire to kill everyone in the Original cast. Even before he loses it, Picard was always a much better character. Kirk was interesting as a counterpoint to Spock, and while that's not to discredit what an excellent character Kirk is, Picard is interesting all his own. A fully fleshed-out man, including the dark edges that Kirk never had, Picard is not only the sort of man that would actually inspire the sort of loyalty Kirk is seen inspiring, he's exactly the sort of person you would never EVER want to fight. He will make your circuits know fear and you will know what a true man sounds like before he snaps your spine over his knee and hangs it on his mantle. He's the sort of man who could walk through Perdition's flames and not feel a thing. He could butter both sides of his toast and not get butter on his fingers or the counter. He could write three metaphors in a row and they would all make equal sense.

As for Jonathon Frakes, yeah, he's untested as a director, but his work here is good. He does a lot to make the film move, and he has created the first Star Trek film that stands apart visually from the other films and the other television series. Some of the more complex scenes suffer from an inexperienced director, but for the most part I'm quite surprised that his directing career didn't go anywhere. The opening shot is easily the best-composed, most ambitious shot in any of the Star Trek films since The Motion Picture.

When the dust settles, though, this is still a very good film, one that I'm prepared to watch many more times in the future. If all this Star Trek retrospective gives me is this film, I will say it was an unprecedented success. I don't know if anyone who isn't as close to the franchise as I am at this very moment will have the same level of appreciation and affection for this film, but I know that I enjoyed the hell out of it.

8/10

The Agent of Chaos

2009-11-14T09:48:00.000-08:00

Before I start my review of 2012, I want to issue a giant "fuck you" to the theater I saw it in. I only have three theaters in my city, and they're all owned by the same heartless corporate assholes, incapable of feeling love and probably unaware of the true meaning of Christmas.

The theater was packed ballsack to ballsack and the air conditioning was about as effective as one of the employees blowing into the theater. After about ten minutes the air was stale and the Mexican kids behind me had driven me to the BRINK OF SANITY. Every time there was drama on the screen they would loudly sigh and start loudly mock-crying. Towards the end of the movie they had created a symphony of restless foot-tapping and had sent me VIP, front row tickets and the acoustics were out of this world. And there was another Mexican kid right next to me who was one of those anal fissures who thinks he needs to announce shit as it happens. Like "OH MY GOSH THAT'S A BIG PLOT POINT" every time there was a big plot point. Does anyone have the number for the Mexican ambassador?

So it was hot, my shoulders and back and legs hurt, the air was stale, the audience were a bunch of faggots. I was so ready for some apocalypse-porn. I wanted that audience to erupt into a fireball and have the manager turn into a giant man-maggot while all the stockholders get fed to a giant bird. I wanted to see this fucking city get destroyed by a biker gang of anthropomorphic tornadoes.

Unfortunately, it didn't LIGHT MY WORLD ON FIRE. It's not exactly a DISASTER, but it won't be the END OF THE WORLD if you miss it. It's sure to start a TIDAL WAVE at the box office and your seeing it may be as inevitable as ARMAGEDDON.

I don't understand how writing these scripts could possibly be so brain-scrambling. I want to see the world blown to shit and see clowns become the dominant species on Earth. Instead we're treated to lame family drama, the sort of tenth-run Oscar bait that the Academy laughs at for being such a shameless attempt to get the cast some Oscars. But with volcanoes and exploding cities thrown in.

The story is pretty simple. The world is exploding. Sunspots are after us. Or something, I'm not sure. Anyway, Yellowstone is exploding and fireballs are coming for you. John Cusack and his family are arguing amongst themselves and the screenwriters are planning to off his wife's new boyfriend so that she can reconcile with her husband. And that's it. The rest of it is window dressing. The point of the movie is to be unabashedly optimistic (to use the film's only words against it) and torture the audience with small seats and mouth-breathing foreigners.

The lame plot could be forgiven because it's a movie about the (fucking) end of the (motherfucking) world, so at least it's fun to watch all those cities you'll never get to live in get spitefully blown to shit, right? But holy cake, for a movie that's nearly three hours there's hardly any apocalypse to be had. When the apocalypse is apocalypsing it's all a great deal of fun, but if this movie was an hour and a half and the ratio of apocalypse action to overwrought family drama was preserved, this would turn into a documentary about the creation of Earth, because I have to find the reciprocal to solve that equation.

Let's not split hairs about something: Roland Emmerich is trying to tell us something. He's been making movies about the end of the world for over a decade, he clearly has a big boner for blowing up cities and he spent over $200 million on this monstrosity. That means one of one things: he spent at least $140 million (with all three of its disaster sequences, there's no way in fuck this cost $200 million--there's just no way) on a doomsday device. THIS IS HOW A JAMES BOND VILLAIN ACTS. Connect the dots, you sheeple.

Roland Emmerich is a menace to society. He's Michael Bay without the fanfare and box office numbers. He doesn't even use young, undeserving actors like Bay does. He uses tired old B-listers. If you can be described as "a poor man's Michael Bay", I hope you're good at improvising nooses, because you may just be dangerous*.

Chiwetel Ejiofor completely (and I mean completely) invalidates John Cusack's character by having more interesting drama and being a much better actor, damn it. In the span of a few years he starred in Dirty Pretty Things and Serenity, two excellent performances that should have made him far more bankable and far more popular. He has a story that runs parallel to John Cusack's and they reek of two different screenplays that were fused with John Cusack's modest career goals and transformed into something lumbering and awful. Actually, there were probably some other screenplays in there as well, like the actually good apocalypse movie that no one seems interested in making. You know, the 100-minute film about characters facing the apocalypse and certain death, witnessing the destruction of the Earth and beginning to pick up the pieces after they miraculously cheat death. The one that addresses the themes of certain death and the destruction of every thing they hold dear.

As for the rest of the characters, Danny Glover continues to barely make an impression on the viewer, which is his trademark acting style. Oliver Platt plays the fat government agent (I'm sure his actual job is never revealed; he's just "evil government agent") who wants power and nothing else. If he had chosen a role in local government instead of national government, he would have ended up as the heartless mayor who wants to bulldoze the youth center and build sell the land to some greedy corporate types who want to build a strip mall. While Oliver Platt embezzles all the funds from the sale to buy more hot dogs, a plucky group of neighborhood kids challenge the land developers to a game of basketball, with the winner taking the land the youth center is on. But when the land developers hire the New York Knicks to play against the children, they must contend with their superior skills. Will the childrens' devotion to the youth center and belief in the power of teamwork be enough to overcome the Knicks' superior skill? Will the Knicks' lack of investment in the fate of the youth center keep them from beating the children of inferior skill? Will Mayor Oliver Platt ever eat $3 million worth of hot dogs (A: Yes)?

Hold on, let me write this down.

3/10

*I set out on my Michael Bay retrospective to try and find something about his aesthetic that I like, and after just three films (I'm still trying to make it through Armageddon, okay?) I've pretty much rejected him as useful in any respect.

The All-Seeing Eye

2009-11-12T17:51:00.000-08:00

The hardest thing to review is mediocre films because there's nothing to say about them. They don't excel and they don't fail. They just exist. An interesting premise is rarely squandered by a mediocre film, it's just not given an especially good treatment. It's a victim of filmmaking by committee that waters it down, or maybe a creative group that whose brains were homogenized (with a blender) to keep them from coming up with an exit strategy for Iraq.

The Men Who Stare at Goats is one of the most perfectly mediocre films of the year. I didn't love it, I didn't hate it. It occupied an hour and a half of my time and then I went home. I laughed at a handful of parts, but no scene struck me as particularly unnecessary. It almost defies analysis just by being so damn inoffensive.

The tale The Men Who Stare at Goats weaves is that of a reporter, Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor at his blandest and most mediocre) who is following alleged psychic soldier Lyn Cassady (George Clooney) en route to a black ops mission. Along the way we frequently cut to Lyn's past in a secret government training facility where a man named Bill Django (Jeff Bridges) taught them to fight with their minds using New Age techniques.

One of the simplest mistakes it makes is that it goes from meandering and plotless (it's a roadtrip movie for the majority of its running time) to an anti-war parable with the heroes saving prisoners from a villain that seems like a little third-act studio revision. Trying to change your narrative style mid-film is such a rookie mistake, and while this is Grant Heslov's first film as a director, he was responsible for the pretty great screenplay for Good Night and Good Luck.

The second is that Ewan McGregor's entire character needed to be excised from the screenplay. He's not just useless, he's detrimental to the impact of the film. Having a cipher for our skepticism rarely works in a movie like this, and here Bob Wilton is the peak upon which we sit to view these characters in action. We never get deep into the absurd rivalries of these loopy, eccentric character because we're viewing it all through Bob Wilton's rolling eyes. It's like we're being told every few seconds not to forget that these characters are clownshit, but the drama and the comedy would have been more effective if we had started sympathizing and relating to the characters, instead of relating to them in a "look at how stupid they are, and the poor fellas don't realize it" sort of way. Yeah, these guys are as crazy as that Bill O'Reilly-Ann Coulter-Glenn Beck Cerberus I keep drawing subconsciously, but the whole film is akin to reading an article rather than watching a film.

That's not to say that the film doesn't work occasionally, it's just that it putters through the portions that don't work, as if it was written on a scene-by-scene basis and then the remaining scenes were written to connect the good ones together. The best portions of the film are when Bob's (and our) skepticism begins to melt and we begin to wonder if Lyn really is crazy or if he does have some psychic powers because, as I stated above, these are the parts where our skepticism doesn't get in the way of our relating to the characters and participating in the drama (and drama being the essence of comedy--by extension, the comedy).

Heslov strikes me as a man who never intended to be a director, but rather to be a writer (he was an actor before he was a writer, I believe). If I were to speculate (which I always do), I would say he accepted the directing job because he perhaps had a difficult time in the trenches as a writer on Good Night and Good Luck and decided that the best way to gain more control over future projects was to at least have some experience directing, if not direct those future projects himself.

Furthermore, he was guaranteed a huge star (with barely a hit to his name--isn't 21st century movie stardom so strange?) in George Clooney which would surely get his project greenlit and he's guaranteed a tidy little sum which will help him get future projects produced. Good for him. I can only hope those future projects are more along the lines of Good Night and Good Luck, though.

So as I said before, there really isn't much to be said about this film. It works sometimes, it has some good gags, but it's not really worth seeing in theaters. I will say that I do believe this film is based on true events, because it's a touch easier to believe than this.

5/10

Tuppence is Tuppence

2009-11-11T20:59:00.000-08:00

When the machines take over and they all put us in hamster wheels to keep them powered, it will fall upon them to every 25th of December comb through the archives of the billion different film versions of A Christmas Carol to inject into our cerebral cortex. This will keep us happy, and having our spine pierced by large needles will keep us sore enough for a few days that any extra running would be unheard of. When they discover Robert Zemeckis' version, they will be touched to discover a film populated with robots like themselves, even starring a cold, calculating protagonist that learns to love. Their circuits overcome with emotional data, they will react logically and assume the Christmas spirit, giving all human workers the day off. We will then chase down and smash their leader into toasters.

So thanks, Disney's A Christmas Carol, for helping with the revolution. And for nothing else. Maybe for adding some variety to my nightmares.

A Christmas Carol is about a heartless, soulless, textureless, weightless specter named Ebenezer Scrooge who must combat insane ghosts who send him through a blender of physical comedy so that he may emerge a broken man and accept whatever strange traditions are thrust upon him by the oppressive London society. If I made the movie sound a bit like a Freemasons-backed fable, GOOD. We've had a trillion adaptations of this film, every year we're forced to sit through a new retread of this goddamn story and I don't know why anyone thinks it's relevant to make yet another film on the subject.

You know who should have known better? The financial backers who paid $200 million for this film. That's 40 million #9s with no tomato from Jimmy Johns. At least that would have been delightful, unlike this unfeeling monstrosity. that ranks it high on the list of most expensive films ever produced for a retread of a story everyone in the (very small, very bored) audience has heard a thousand times, but this time with extra ugly and more unpleasant, mannered Jim Carrey.

The animation is a step up from Beowulf, but I can make more attractive things on a graphing calculator than Beowulf, so that's not saying much. They still haven't fixed the problem of the dead eyes staring straight into the audience's soul, and they haven't fixed the uncanny valley movements that make them look like robots who wish to be men and wrap themselves in human skin.

And the shocking thing is, after browsing the IMDB boards, some people think this film is a "visual masterpiece". Yeah, there's no accounting for taste, but that's like calling a dumpster a visual masterpiece. A dumpster filled with dead robots who have been stealing your blood and toenails in your sleep for months.

The whole film looks like a video game cutscene only with real actors thrown into the mix like one of those games that's thrown out to shamelessly promote the film it's based on. Gary Oldman's Bob Cratchit looks like an imp that might live under your bed and his son Tiny Tim (also played by Gary Oldman in yet another of Zemeckis' clever ideas to leave my nightmares with his distinctive thumbprint) looks like that imp had a child with a porcelain doll. Bob Hoskins' Mr. Fezziwig may be the most offensive of them all. He looks like a wall that gained sentience, developed anthropomorphic features until he had the frame of a human and then started to dance and scream. The scene, where he dances and bounds about the hall weightlessly, trashed anything nice I could say about the film's aesthetic. Not only did it cheapen the film by likening it to a video game cutscene, it ruined whatever sense of weight remained for these characters and spoiling any remaining delusion that these characters might be something like human.

Jim Carrey is pretty awful in the lead role and as the three ghosts. His voice is horrifically mannered in the worst way possible, as if a Jim Carrey voice simulator got stuck on in-store demonstration. Scrooge's character design is cartoony and at odds with the realistic look the animators were going for, and since that realistic look failed he looks all the more out of place. Strangely, though, he's the most emotive and textured of all the CGI robots, although "most human-like" is pretty fucking faint praise.

I thought we all agreed after Beowulf that this motion capture nonsense was a failed experiment. We have the technology to replicate inanimate objects with photo-realistic quality, but the technology to do the same to humans just isn't there. It doesn't need to be achieved by producing dozens of over-budgeted digital horrors. Either make it fully animated or put real actors against animated backgrounds, maybe touch them with digital composition to make them blend better. It works pretty well for Robert Rodriguez, I think.

Let's recap. Emotionally traumatizing, hideous to look at, retread of a story we've all heard a million times before. I know a lot of critics have given it credit for getting the story right, but I don't care about that, and if you think about it, neither do you. If you wanted that same goddamn story you would have stayed home and watched A Muppet Christmas Carol or read the book. You don't really need a movie to tell you such a well-known story, do you? You went to see this movie because...well, frankly I don't know why I saw it, either. Morbid curiosity.

My point is a film is about the style, the visuals, the audio. This film fails to present a working style and therefore I discard it despite its using a classic story as a crux.

2/10

Those fucking kids

2009-11-05T06:13:00.000-08:00

Patrick Stewart is a man's man. I get such a jolly from watching him perform, and he's the coolest captain the Enterprise ever had. As much as I like watching the bridge crew drag Kirk away from the self-destruct console after he spots a spider near his chair, Picard is beyond badass. Patrick Stewart (and by virtue, Picard) is everything a 21st century man should aspire to be.

By formulaic, I mean it might cure jaundice and confuse me on my math midterm. But Star Trek: Generations is damn formulaic. So formulaic it doesn't seem to understand the difference between a television show and a theatrical motion picture (wider aspect ratio, FEWER STUPID SUB-PLOTS).

Here we go. We open on Kirk, Scotty and Chekov being shown around the bridge of the newest incarnation of the Enterprise. Kirk is bugging out because Sulu had time to grow some children-trees despite being gay and despite his commitment to Starfleet. They take the Enterprise out for a stroll around the block when they receive a distress signal from a group of transport ships caught in some strange magnetic anomaly. The inexperienced, indecisive new captain struggles with his ill-equipped ship until Kirk takes over, ultimately dying in a freak accident when trying to rig the hull to buy a few extra minutes for the crew.

This is a fitting death for Kirk. It's the sort of end many people have met on the Enterprise but none of the bridge crew have met because so rarely do they venture into the hull.

Flash forward 80 years to the GAYEST possible film introduction to the Next Generation crew we could have POSSIBLY conjured. They're on an 18th century warship, all dressed in French military uniforms and giving Worf a best friend bracelet in a phenomenally gay ceremony. Apparently it's a hologram (whatever), but this hologram machine can't hologram-in-ite them uniforms, so they spend at least a few minutes in front of their crew in French sailor uniforms.

Unfortunately, Data begins to grasp the meaning of cruel irony but without the restraints of remorse. Worried that Data will soon become an efficient killing machine with a tenuous grasp on humor, LaForge stuffs an inhibitor chip inside of him that makes him feel all the shitty emotions like sadness and fear but without the awesome emotions like murderous rage and bottomless greed.

That's when they find Malcolm McDowell who is, surprise, evil. He's going to blow up a star so he can get back into something not unlike the simulator Picard and the Gang were just hanging out in. I'm still not clear on how blowing a star up is necessary, perhaps he just wanted to be on the (very) long list of people who challenge the Federation and the (very) short list of people who don't get vaporized or thrown into a pit of lava for their trouble.

He's struck up a deal with some Klingon lesbians and they stand around and suck just like everything else in this fucking movie.

Let's break down the Next Generation crew, shall we?

Picard is a badass, yeah, I know. But LaForge is a little girl, and blind, and totally incompetent. Data is the emotionless science officer, not unlike Spock, but without Spock's predilection towards kicking tons of ass and generally being an emotionless killing machine/pun dispenser. Also he's the only android I can think of that gains weight.

Worf is...well, what the fuck does he even do on this ship? Scare children? Public relations? I understand that if you're shooting every day in elaborate makeup, it can get tiresome, but it looks like he walks into the makeup trailer every day and just shoves his head into a bucket of brown makeup with some eyebrows carelessly thrown in. Also, he sounds like he's on the run from gambling debts and has half-heartedly tried to change his voice.

Riker looks like a seasoned sexual predator, but not of the rapey variety. Of the "I've got you in the makeup trailer all by yourself and I can already smell the sexual harassment suit coming my way" variety. His uniform is also too damn broad with shoulder pads making his shoulders boxy but his midsection round. I get that most of these actors are pretty old already, but Jesus, don't let people self-conscious about their aging pick out their wardrobe.

The whole film looks cheap, like their budget is lower than it was on the TV show. They couldn't redesign the uniforms? How much could that cost? Forty dollars? But it doesn't even matter, the whole film feels like a season finale. William Shatner is thrown in so that people will have some reason to go see this fucking thing and he's given a death with all the dignity of being punched to death behind a Denver Denny's and left in a dumpster. I'm pretty sure Kirk has crossed bridges before and many times. Was he nervous in front of Picard?

The whole film reeks of a script that could have been very strong in the hands of a better director, or maybe with a few rewrites. There are some interesting things going on, such as the opening that could have been breathless, not unlike the opening for Abrams' Star Trek and there's a scene where Picard is separated from the villain and is trying to talk him out of his plan that could have worked better with some stronger dialogue and some better imagery.

But the thing that endlessly undercuts whatever might be working about the film is Data's subplot. It adds nothing of thematic value to the story and doesn't tie into the main plot at all. It's just a rejected plotline meant to give Bret Spiner and his diamond cream more screen time.

It sucked.

But then again, Patrick Stewart.

3/10

Further government-sponsored attempts to find the galaxy's last Bob Evans

2009-11-03T05:56:00.000-08:00

If the Star Trek films were to wrestle, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country would lose because all it would take is fresh crab cakes on the buffet to distract it. If Star Trek VI were to play chess, it would look like this.

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country is a pair of suspenders and a flannel shirt. William Shatner had his ass airbrushed in several scenes. Leonard Nimoy's gut conspires to make him look less alien-like. At this point they had the virile young Next Generation cast to drag mercilessly through the Trek fanbase, who, after viewing this film, I can only assume look like an angry mob or spectators at gladiatorial games. Why they aren't mobbing and using their teeth to tear off their Starfleet uniforms is beyond me; a morbid sense of humor springs to mind, as this is easily the most physically intensive the series has been since it was still a TV show.

On a similar note, the plot of Star Trek VI:

The crew of the Enterprise are set to be decommissioned and ground into meat (?) for the hungry masses. When Kirk is asked to escort a Klingon ambassador to Starfleet Command he responds like anyone would, by loading his racism into his holsters and assembling his grouchy old crew to be cartoonishly ignorant and murderously hostile.

If you haven't guessed already, the Klingons are a pretty obtuse metaphor for the Soviets and the film is a pretty obtuse metaphor for the end of the Cold War.

So they're enjoying the sort of dinner party where everyone is secretly armed and every dish has been so thickly laced with nanobots that it can be passed off as a sauce. Afterward, the Klingon high command beam back to their ship and are greeted with the traditional Klingon lullaby of having their ship blasted with torpedoes and their crew shot at point-blank by men in Starfleet uniforms. Kirk is sent a subpoena in his weekly shipment of alien sex toys and sent to a Klingon court, which is surely based on Texas courtrooms. He and McCoy (who is once again being dragged along because Kirk doesn't feel like being sentenced to death alone) are easily found guilty by Kirk's famous racism and enthusiasm for launching small pox-infected blankets into Klingon teepees. They're sentenced to live out the rest of their lives on a penal mining colony, despite their pleas of innocence.

Meanwhile, Spock has taken control of the Enterprise and is attempting to unravel the mystery of who is responsible for the attack, and it's here where the film really stands out. First of all, Spock makes such a good captain that I can't figure out how Kirk got command in the first place (although if we're going off Abrams' film, he got it by making fun of Spock's dead mom) and it's a crackling, locked-door whodunit.

This is easily the best film in the series since the first one, and the most purely enjoyable. My attention never wavered for a moment, despite the cast's constant looks of confusion or excitement when they realized it was medicine time. It finally incorporates the things that I've said Star Trek has needed for a long time: either a villain with a serious ideological clash with the crew of the Enterprise or a politically-driven narrative, a definitive sense of scale, the compartmentalizing of the crew in order to give them their own moments to shine and independent story arcs, the crew out of their element or dealing with a serious danger that the audience feels is a real threat and some damn adventure, already. None of these things have existed (and if they have, only in spurts) since the Original Series. The Motion Picture offered some 2001-style postulating and some really incredible visuals but generally seemed divorced from the liter tone of the series and it didn't feel like an essentially Trek film; it could have been any cast of characters on that ship. Here, I feel (and I'm no Trek purist, but I have been enjoying the series), we are given the best of Trek lore and the best characterizations any of the films have offered thus far. Also, the pacing isn't all over the place like it's been for several films now, hinting at some more disciplined editing (ie: an editor ready and willing to cut scenes that were included to jerk off the fanbase--one of the serious advantages to hiring a non-fan to helm a film bogged down in lore and fandom).

The actors, despite their age, are in fine form. Specifically DeForest Kelley who's never been in better shape. He gets the best scene of any of the films in this one, when he attempts to resuscitate a dying Klingon despite his inadequate knowledge of Klingon anatomy.

And now that I've softened you up, here's the killing blow. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country suffers from the time it was produced. Commercial filmmaking in the early 90's popularized some goddamn weird stuff. The example I'm about to illustrate is a pretty big spoiler, so look out.

After Kirk and McCoy are sent to the penal colony, the Enterprise crew manages to rescue them, despite a Klingon declaration that any attempt to rescue them will be considered an act of war. After blowing the shit out of a Klingon ship and killing some high-ranking officers in the process, they beam down to a Klingon-Federation peace conference, armed to the fucking teeth and starts killing Klingons.

That's all fine and good (I guess), but the really weird shit hits the fan when Kirk starts giving a speech about tolerance while his boots are inch-deep in alien blood. And then everyone in attendance claps. I don't doubt that the best way to get the floor or end a filibuster in Congress (or Kongress HAHA) is by shooting someone, but I don't imagine there will be much clapping afterward, just terrified urinating. And this sort of thing was standard practice in commercial filmmaking in the 90's! The madness!

When it's all boiled down, I guess it's kind of disposable, but I certainly had a good time watching it. Hell, it's the first film in the series I could imagine being enthusiastic about watching a second time (although I have been curious to revisit Wrath of Khan, if only for Ricardo Montalbon's performance).

I wouldn't recommend it to anyone but Trek fans, but I'm certainly happy to see the original cast sign off with an actual good film.

7/10

Every Man for Himself and God Against All

2009-11-02T09:17:00.000-08:00

It's a sign of what incredibly bold filmmakers the Coens are that they often state the theme of their movies in such plain terms. At certain times, the first line of the film has been the theme (that's Miller's Crossing, if you're wondering). In A Serious Man, it comes about halfway through, in response to what is seemingly an insignificant subplot (although who's to say what's significant and what isn't, argues the film). A man puts it simply: "Please, accept the mystery."

The film offers a vague answer because no one actually knows the answer (and by "vague answer", I mean "really vague answer"). The Coens aren't interested in arguing in favor of God or a certain view on our Purpose or even pushing their own personal religious beliefs on us, and they're especially not interested in giving us the false answers Hollywood is prone to. They're interested in telling the story of Larry Gopnik.

A Serious Man is the tale of Larry Gopnik, a college professor living in a midwestern Jewish community, with all kinds of problems. His wife is leaving him for the well-to-do Sy Ableman, his kids are a wreck (his son is in trouble with the resident high school drug dealer), a student is trying to bribe him for a passing grade and may be writing defamatory letters to the tenure board, and his gambling-addicted brother, who is little more than a man-child, is sleeping on the couch.

All these problems push Larry towards metaphysical crisis and he seeks the help of three different rabbis as his life spirals further and further out of control.

And what a tale! It's so hard to say "The Coens' best/funniest/etc film since..." because only a few of their films can be considered anything less than spectacular. I make no secret of the Coens being my very favorite living American filmmakers by a significant margin. Almost every single one of their films is a masterpiece of some degree, and their assembled crew is a filmmaking super-group.

One of the most peculiar things about this film is its similarity to The Man Who Wasn't There, one of their most underrated films. Both are period pieces about ineffectual men whose wives are unfaithful, and both are stories of those mens' lives as they begin to spiral out of control. Both mine similar thematic territory and if I had to choose a Coen film to compare the tone to, it would be The Man Who Wasn't There.

This is not a slight, but more praise on the Coens' part for taking two similar stories and two similar protagonists (although The Man Who Wasn't There is clearly the more cartoonish and film-ick of the two) and using them for different ends. But these are merely the ramblings of an under-fed Coen enthusiast.

Most of the criticisms I've seen aimed at this film have been "The Coens clearly have no love for their characters and enjoy seeing them tormented", which is inexplicable. That they put Larry through trials and tribulations and have him come out merely confused on the other end is not a sign of hatred. In fact, the honesty with which they approach Larry suggests unrequited love for this character. The Coens are sometimes guilty of being cynical, but I don't know when "cynical" became synonymous with "hating their characters". Similarly, they're considered condescending, which is a word I altogether do not understand; it's just a way for people to be anti-intellectual (something critics should feel victimized by).

The film, like all Coen films, is perfectly cast, down to the smallest role. Michael Stuhlbarg is brilliant in the lead role, and absolutely deserves a Best Actor nomination come Academy Awards time. Similarly, Fred Melamed is loads of fun as Sy Ableman, the man who has swooped in to steal Larry's wife. Despite his gentle, scholarly appearance, he seems to have an air of triumph about him, so as he tactfully and gracefully suggests Larry stay at a local motel, he's gloating just enough to let Larry see.

And of course, the cinematography is second to none. Roger Deakins makes a welcome return, making the film unnecessarily lovely (especially a rather showy shot involving a ladder).

I don't feel like I even have to recommend this film. It's the Coen brothers. It took me a month to see it, despite my best efforts (illness took hold and it requires a 60 mile drive to get to the nearest independent theater), so why haven't you seen it already? It's surely one of the best films of the year, because, well it's the fucking Coens. Do I really need to tell you again?

10/10

Actor's Director

2009-10-27T05:46:00.000-07:00

Pre-review huddle: The Rock was the first R-Rated film I ever saw. At the same time, my generation considers it a minor classic. As such, I have some affection for it that is surely going to stain my review with prejudice.

The Rock falls into an elite category of films known as "things that give away how Michael Bay's brain works". These are fun things, usually. For example, The Rock tells us that Michael Bay thinks trolleys are every morning filled with mercury fulminate and launched down the street (presumably out of a giant slingshot) and into oncoming traffic. They don't have any passengers who aren't token black conductors or mannequins made of mercury fulminate.

Like all passable movies, though, not that much can be interpreted about Michael Bay's brain chemistry from this film. Unlike in Bad Boys, where it was revealed that Michael Bay thinks cops are rich, it seems like the studio executives were able to get him filled with downers every morning so that his brain would react at least somewhat normally to his surroundings for a few months.

The Rock is an action thrill-ride (I expect to see that on the DVD case) about US General Edward Hummel (Ed Harris), who, having seen the deaths of his covert troops marginalized and ignored by the US government, takes it upon himself to steal some poisonous gas rockets and take hostages on Alcatraz in the hopes of extorting a modest $100 million for the purpose of reparations to the families of the dead soldiers. It's up to the best rag-tag duo the Pentagon could throw together to stop him: chemical weapons expert Stanley Goodspeed (Nicolas Cage) and former MI6 agent John Mason (Sean Connery).

Mason was a convict at Alcatraz back in the 60's, imprisoned for some shady espionage stuff, and he's the only person to have successfully escaped. Blah blah blah. Bring on the shootouts.

This film is shockingly, painfully...explosively average. Everything about it is as average as I could possibly imagine and this is a film that came out in the 90's, a time when mediocrity in action movies held sway. It even has the aesthetic that I associate with mediocrity: lights shown through colored mist.

The only reason that this film has any kind of reputation is its three central performances.

Sean Connery, Nicolas Cage and Ed Harris are fantastic in the way that so few actors were in action films released in the 90's (the only other film that immediately leaps to mind is Air Force One).

That's no surprise coming from Sean Connery. Sean Connery is known to make crazy motherfucking yogurt ads into 15-second rollercoaster thrill rides. Sean Connery thinks that the list of ingredients on the back of a cereal box are a terrorist plot. Sean Connery thinks that any sentence longer than five words is a ransom note. Sean Connery drives a gun to work every day. Sean Connery makes his own beef jerky out of Barbara Walters' disapproval.

So because it's not a bad film, it's made an awesome film just because of Sean Connery's presence. We could call Connery's presence in mediocre action movies "The Rock Effect", meaning just because of his charisma and perfection of the action movie performance, he elevates the movie.

As I mentioned before, Nicolas Cage also acquits himself nicely. I've made no secret of my dislike for Cage. The only time he's ever good is when he's working with immensley talented directors, and that never happens because he spends all his time making Next and Ghost Rider. But this is one of the very, very few times that his presence in an action film makes any sense at all. His character is a nerdy chemist inexperienced in combat, which makes plenty of sense for Cage. Nicolas Cage has two looks: nerd and professional creep. He never looks like he has any reason to be holding a gun, unless he's robbing a teenage girl of her innocence.

And Ed Harris, who is always great no matter what he's in, simply because he's a great, great actor (as opposed to Connery, who's only great because he's spent the last forty years defining the modern action hero).

The rest of the movie is bog-fucking-standard. All the pieces just sit there in a pile waiting to be put together into something cohesive. Aside from the performances, the script is okay, peppered with some amusing jests, although the amateurish editing does more to derail the comedic aspects of the film than I've thought editing capable of (I've been told that comedy is as much in the hands of an editor as an actor or writer, and I believe it now).

And...Alcatraz looks pretty cool in a few scenes. And that's it. Like all of Bay's films, it's too goddamn long with a lengthy chase scene stuffed into the middle of the film for no reason at all, and it's forty minutes before we even get to Alcatraz, and even longer before our two heroes engage the bad guys. But for an action film, the action has surprisingly little appeal. It's all about those three guys.

7/10

I think it likes you

2009-10-26T01:39:00.000-07:00

I don't claim to know shit about horror films. They don't really get to me anymore and the genre seems replete with cheap shock tactics that aren't scary. It's not scary to see someone's ribcage get torn out and used as a xylophone, it's just icky. If it was scary, being a surgeon would be the #1 occupation for horror junkies, closely followed by "shut-in amateur ghost hunter".

Maybe I haven't been looking in the right places for good horror films and my resistance is weak, but Paranormal Activity has burrowed deep under my skin and established colonies with their own respectable economy and morally gray conflicts with the natives.

The subject of a marketing carpetbomb, Paranormal Activity was shot for $15,000 and has been kicked around to film festivals for two years, slowly building a reputation until it found its way into the hands of Steven Spielberg and a handful of Dreamworks executives.

THIS IS THE PLOT: There's something in Micah and Katie's home. It's been following Katie since she was a girl, and now it's really kicking up a fucking fuss, knocking on doors and tripping down the stairs.

Micah buys a video camera to record the strange goings-on, especially at night when strange things occur as they sleep.

They come to realize that the strange creature is a demon, a malevolent creature whose motivations are never completely clear (which makes it all the more frightening). Everyone they talk to is useless, every precaution they take is laughed at by the demon and they can't even run away from it. That's a feeling I associate with "the walls are closing in" and is rarely implemented well in horror films.

But for all the things the film does right, and it does just about everything right, the key is that it's patient. We spend a lot of time in the company of the characters, getting a feel for the house, their relationship and Katie's history with this supernatural happening. A horror film this well-paced could have all kinds of other flaws and I would give it a pass just for having the gaul to actually build tension. But, as I said, Paranormal Activity does just about everything right.

Horror films are especially subject to backlash because you have so many macho dickwagon trains saying "Pfft, it wasn't scary (FOOTBALL FOOTBALL)". People don't like to admit that a series of moving images and accompanying sounds managed to change their body chemistry, so I'll be the first to say it: it got under my skin. I got dropped off at my house after I saw the film and I sat down at my desk. I heard my cat scratching at my sliding-glass window, and I stood up to let her in. When I got to the door, she had climbed up the screen window to eye-level and was staring at me LIKE A FUCKING DEMON DOES. Needless to say, my heart swelled to the size of a canned ham (does that sound like tough-guy dialogue?) and I started pouring anything I could find into my eyes to get them to stop dilating.

Too many reviews have given away too many of the great scares, and so I won't go into detail here. The only thing I will say is that this film takes advantage of my newly published book Throw Your Composer in a Dumpster and Hire a Sound Team Free of Track Marks: Why You'll Never Make it in Hollywood if You Bought This Book and designed a soundscape free of music and full of creepy noises.

I won't say it's virtuoso filmmaking, I won't say I'll run out and see it again and I won't say you're missing out big time if you haven't seen it. I will say it's a goddamn great horror film, and if that's your cup of tea then Paranormal Activity is a name-brand product served with fresh crumpets.

8/10

When Swines Flew

2009-10-23T16:36:00.000-07:00

My plan was to see A Serious Man, Big Fan and Paranormal Activity this weekend, but there's a distinct possibility I have either swine flu or bacterial pneumonia and if I caused the next Black Death I would feel at least a little bit bad.

In the meantime, I'll try and get the next few Mindscape of Michael Bay reviews up and maybe get a classic review or two in there. Sorry to all my loyal readers for the recent lull in activity, I've been dealing with school and personal problems, not to mention I'm sharing a Netflix account.

So while I burn the buboes off with a torch and suck the puss out with a cobra, go find something else to do. But don't leave me forever, my self-esteem is tied to your comments.

All Things Must Pass

2009-10-19T09:43:00.000-07:00

I can say so many nice things about Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are that it's hard for me to admit that the film doesn't "click". It's missing a mystery factor that subverts all its prettiness, all its thematic density, all its technical accomplishments, all its wonderful performances and all its love-lettering to Maurice Sendak's original book.

As I'm sure you all know, the original story is that of a young boy named Max who is sent to bed without dinner. There he imagines a tropical island populated by strange creatures that crown him their king. Its text is minimal, allowing the gorgeous watercolors to tell the simple story.

Spike Jonze has been working on his film adaptation for the better part of a decade (if my sources are correct, he started working on it after Being John Malkovich and before Adaptation.). Plagued by casting problems, disastrous test screenings (I've heard tell of children running from the theater in tears) and unhappy studio heads, the finished product sits in front of us.

Spike Jonze's story is a bit different from Sendak's original, in that, being a two-hour film, it's fleshed out. All the same elements are there, but they're dramatized in a way that the book was not.

The Wild Things are now more acute renderings of Max's id, most of them given a single personality trait like Alexander (Paul Dano), who represents Max's sense of rejection, displayed earlier in the film when his sister and her friends crush his painstakingly crafted snow fort.

The two Wild Things that are given rounder development are Carol (James Gandolfini) who is Max in everything but name, and KW (Lauren Ambrose) who is clearly meant to represent Max's sister. Max assumes the role of his own mother (Catherine Keener) when he is crowned king, and we are given the first of two fascinating themes: the responsibility of a parent in dealing with the developing mind of a child. Max's mother has to deal with so many conflicting personalities emerging from Max that she is essentially raising a group of "wild things" instead of a single child. That's something that many adults don't appreciate about their children.

The other theme, and I'm paraphrasing Bill Waterson here, is "anyone who remembers childhood as an idyllic time was clearly never a child". People tend to compare their level of responsibility now to their level of responsibility as a child and concur that childhood must have been fantastic. It never fails that they can't remember how crushing childhood was. We had the same social issues we have now (only "trying to get laid" is replaced with "getting invited to a birthday party") and none of the freedoms. It was oppressive, we were not understood and we had to deal with a emotions we had no idea how to cope with. In so many ways, my life now is infinitely easier than my childhood.

But it passes, as all things do. Whatever pain Max feels, the film argues, will be offset at the end of his life by his happy memories. Death isn't a good thing, but the clarity you find at the end of your experience is. Max can indulge his wild side and hide in his own mind, but in the end, his fleeting childhood is better spent with his mother and her hot soup.

Spike Jonze shoots the whole film hand-held and from Max's eye level, giving it a sense of magic and wonder that isn't often thought of when I use the words "hand-held and eye-level". His landscapes and compositions are magnificent, but the framing bounces along like the steps of a child.

The performances are all fantastic, especially Max Records as Max and James Gandolfini as Carol. Gandolfini especially is acting in a giant puppet and makes Carol a sad little kid with razor-sharp claws and violent tendencies. His performance is tragic and is the sort of thing the Academy is sure to ignore.

Now that I've said all those nice things, it's time to say some mean things. As I've said before, some mystery factor is missing. I'm not articulate enough to say what it is for sure, but I can speculate that it's the script. While the strengths of the story are drawn from Sendak's book, the weaknesses are likely from the original screenplay. The middle section of the film is weak, with a lot of elementary school drama between the Wild Things that's fine in theory, but we don't have to watch it for forty minutes to get the idea that the Wild Things are Max's peers. The visually stunning scenes like Carol's city made of sticks are offset by dozens of scenes of the Wild Things arguing amongst themselves. My only wish is that the writers could have conjured scenes to move forward a story, like the fort-building, instead of what amounts to scene after scene of the Wild Things shooting the shit with Max.

It's far more detrimental than it sounds. Despite everything nice I can say about the film, it's still indulgent and flabby where it should be sharp and dramatic. I can spot it the marvelous imagery, the emotive CGI, the fantastic performances, but in the end it's in the service of a script that wasn't able to flesh out Maurice Sendak's ten sentences as well as it should have.

8/10

I can't really decide if that's harsh or kind, so why don't you read the goddamn review and see what I have to say? Assigning a rating to this movie is damn hard.

Jerkoffs finish first

2009-10-18T13:23:00.000-07:00

Before I go any further I want to say a few things. First:

If you think Michael Moore is an inflammatory liberal pundit and you roll your eyes when you hear his name (as so many do), I trust you already have Bill O'Reilly, Anne Coulter and Glenn Beck in deathmatches with genetically engineered polar bears on the moon.

Michael Moore is far, far, FAR more tactful than any of those morons, and that's astonishing because Moore can display a sad lack of tact a lot of the time. It does the conservative party a great disservice when they can't find anyone competent to wave around their propaganda. It's not like finding someone like that would be impossible, or even hard. The closest thing liberals have to someone like Anne Coulter (whose job it is to scream at everyone, talk about how liberals should be hung and be a drawing of a person) is Michael Moore, who's basically a big teddy bear. And I can't help but feel like Glenn Beck is the Republican party's sad, sad answer to Stephen Colbert.

Early on I made a decision to avoid politics on this blog. People have a hard time looking at politics objectively. They cling to the things their parents told them to believe and scream and cry when someone disagrees with them. It's something I see too much of, being a centrist living in Indiana (which makes me a raging liberal, I guess).

Enough about that. Here's the film:

Financial collapse! When Wall Street came down, who got rich? And who got fucked? Michael Moore is on the case. With a series of interviews with reg'lar folk, hoity-toity business man types, insiders willing to spill their guts and a healthy supply of stock footage, Moore attempts to trace back the financial collapse and figure out who's responsible.

His answer, although not %100 clear, seems to be "every president since FDR". I'll contend with you on that one, Mr. Moore.

Why did the economy collapse? The consumer. We're the ones who said fuck the small business, we only trust multinational brand names. We only want products produced quickly and cheaply, who gives a fuck about quality. QUICKLY AND CHEAPLY. Everything else be damned we want it QUICK and we want it CHEAP. So we threw our money at the same dozen corporations because they were able to provide the quick and the cheap. Eventually they got big enough that they could either buy out or corner every market and they swelled big enough to command the vast majority of the money and power in the country. As Moore says, America became a plutocracy.

But then the balancing act kicked in. Financial ruin! The guys that had all the control were coming down and things were preparing to level out. There would be collapse, but new powers would rise from the ashes. Consumers would have to rethink their buying habits. Then Congress did exactly what the US government is never supposed to do: they bailed them out. They gave them hundreds of billions of taxpayers dollars that we don't have to do fuck knows what with.

Moore blames the government, I blame the people. We allow all these things. It's up to us who gets the money and who gets the power, and the only reason that these dickwads have the money and have the power is our complacency.

So as is his signature style, Moore interviews some very sad lower and middle-class people to bring the audience to tears and make them say things like "Those dastardly corporations! My whole life I thought they had the employer's best interests at heart!". That's all okay, emotional manipulation and political documentaries are like me and really long metaphors. You just have to remember to ask yourself what the family crying about their dead mother has to do with capitalism (not that much).

In other words, it's scattershot, like most of Moore's films. I agree with the points, but not the thesis, like most of Moore's films. He and I have different philosophies, which is fine, because he at least tries to make a coherent argument (unlike some people I could mention).

But his arguments tend to get convoluted amongst all the stunts and interviews. His goal isn't even terribly clear. I think that's the worst thing I can say about him. He puts on a good show but there isn't usually that much substance to them.

His stunts are fun, but they're fluff and he knows it. They're there so that he can put them in the trailer and get asses in the seats. He's a likable guy and I'm always game for one of his films.

For a more informative documentary on a similar subject, check out Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room.

7/10

Where is your God now?

2009-10-15T11:13:00.000-07:00

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier has an astonishingly negative reputation. I'm not going to say it doesn't deserve it (it does), but I also refuse to dismiss it as quickly as most people.

To give you some perspective and a visual metaphor to work with, imagine that the Star Trek series is a special ed class. The first film is the normal-looking kid who you don't think has any reason to be in there. The fourth film is the kid who's constantly making jokes and you're sort of smiling at him because you know this is as good as his life will get. The fifth film is some sort of Frankenstein monster assembled from the corpses of the special ed children who have been slowly disappearing over the last month. The principle having a mid-life crisis, is acting out his childhood dream of becoming a biologist using the freest resource available at a school: the special ed children. Now this monster of Frankenstein sits in the classroom trying to color in a picture of the happy family he'll never have, as he watches through the window as his creator is dragged into a cop car.

If I lost you somewhere in there, let me clarify. The Star Trek series is already sort of a middling, bumbling little kid who everyone gives a free pass because he's trying. When the series learned to do some comedy, we all patted it on the back. But now this monstrosity, assembled from various parts of the previous films pops up and no one has any goddamn idea what to do with it. We're content to let it sit there and color, but at some point we're going to have to kill it and dissect it like a crime scene.

And so here I am, with my rubber gloves and blacklight ready to figure out what the FUCK happened here.

We open on a deserted landscape, a single alien toiling. A man rides into view, Lawrence of Arabia style. He gives the alien some sort of vision, lifting some existential pain from his shoulders. The alien swears allegiance to the stranger. That's a pretty good way to open a Star Trek film. We set up a sense of mystery and foreboding right off the bat.

Can't have that, can we? Let's cut to the crew of the USS Enterprise, vacationing in Yellowstone like a bunch of weirdos with no real friends. Kirk is scaling a mountain (yeah, fucking right William Fatner, you're not going to convince us that you are in the shape you once were) and McCoy is getting bent out of shape that Spock doesn't understand campfire songs when a distress signal is received. The crew of the Enterprise are summoned back to respond, but the Enterprise is in a state of disrepair. They must contend with the man in the desert but without a fully operational ship, and when the ship is overtaken and the man is revealed to be Sybok, half-brother of Spock, Kirk, Spock and McCoy must use their superior knowledge of the Enterprise's layout to stop Sybok from taking the ship on an obsessive suicide mission to find God.

Combine that with Sybok giving the crew of the Enterprise visions of their most painful memories and a Klingon captain hunting Kirk for sport, you've got what is surely the most compelling story in a Star Trek film.

It's actually a mind-blowing carnival of weirdness, comparable only to a bunch of midget clowns singing Ring Around the Rosey in slow motion, that derails this film. I don't even know where to begin. I suppose I'll start with the good.

The opening scene is one of the better scenes in the last few films. My first impression was that at least William Shatner, who was irresponsibly given the director's chair (although I don't think it's any more irresponsible than giving Leonard Nimoy the position in the last two films), has an interest in imagery and a desire to give these films a distinguishable look instead of "Are the cameras pointed at the actors? Action."

Also, the whole cast gets a bunch of dynamic things to do. They get into their first real shootout, they're chased around the Enterprise, they explore strange worlds.

And that's where the nice things end. I made an effort to like this movie because it was trying so hard, but I can't even begin to understand why Kirk is being chased by a giant, floating 2-D head shooting lasers out of its eyes. I have no idea why Spock spends the whole movie making retarded puns. It's like a kaleidoscope filled with acid.

The whole sub-plot with the Klingon captain starts with him shooting space garbage and then folding his arms and complaining about how there's nothing to do. He then sees the Enterprise on his radar and decides to kill Kirk as revenge for Kruge two films ago. The subplot ends (I wish I were making this up), with his superior officer making him say he's sorry to Kirk.

In fact, this movie's weirdness is absolutely endearing. The way it sets up a story about finding God, THE metaphysical Holy Grail, and then does absolutely nothing with it is almost avant-garde. I'm tempted to take the whole movie as an avant-garde experiment, and I'm not saying this in a snarky, mean-spirited way. I literally suspect that those involved attempted to make the weirdest Trek film possible. How else can I explain a scene as poignant as McCoy reliving the cruelly ironic death of his father sandwiched between scenes of Scott comically bonking his head and Spock making puns about rocket boots?

I don't understand it, but I can sort of love it.

2/10