Puppy Love

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

Virtues for the Vicious

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

Rich Girl Fucks Bum: A Picture in Motion

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

Of Love and Music and Beauty and Magic

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.

Eine Symphonie des Screaming Preteens

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

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

Ordinary People

Forgive me if this is short, but The Time Traveler's Wife belongs to an elite crop of films that drain the fucking life out of me. Within ten minutes of the film starting, I knew this would be a difficult slough. The opening scene could have kicked off with a terrifying sense of predetermined tragedy, like flying a hundred miles an hour towards a brick wall that you can see from a mile away.

Instead, let me illustrate the opening scene. Young Henry is riding in the back seat of his mother's car. They're enjoying the December evening and singing Christmas songs like happy mothers and sons do. In the distance we see a truck swerving. Panic fills the atmosphere as Henry's mother tries to get off the road. Suddenly, something starts to happen to Henry. He's disappearing. The young actor looks panic-stricken, his mother unable to handle the unfolding crises. Suddenly it's two weeks earlier. Henry is standing naked in his living room, looking at himself sitting on the couch with his mother and father. The camera does a lovely pan around the room. Henry begins to disappear again. He reappears on the snowy side of the road in time to see his mother's car hit the truck and erupt like a fucking volcano. Henry screams out for his mother, but he's grabbed from behind by a stranger. It is Henry as an older man with a ridiculous hair cut and an American accent wholly unconvincing. Eric Bana, you just got that much more difficult to defend. He tells young Henry that there's nothing he can do to save his mother and then begins to disappear.

What a great scene, right? WRONG. This scene could have been edited together with sharpness and punch, it could have been horrifying and tragic. Instead it's flabby and poorly conceived, as if every shot in the sequence has just one fatal error, one badly constructed idea. Like inserting useless CGI, or having the car erupt like a fucking volcano, or the part where Future Henry arrives with his shaved head and tattoos and space ship.

There's no doubt that this film aimed for Epic Romance, and like all 19-year-old dudes, I like myself an Epic Romance. I was quite taken with The Curious Case of Benjamin Button last year if for no other reason than I hadn't seen a well-made, well-acted film of the Epic Romance variety in a while, and it gives me a good reference point on why this film can go to hell.

First and foremost, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was about Benjamin's arc. We caught glimpses of Daisy's arc across her life span, and that gave the film an epic feel. Second, Curious Case was about the gravity that brought Benjamin and Daisy back together time and time again, but how their young foolishness threw the relationship away over and over again until they were in their 40's. In The Time Traveler's Wife, Henry and Clare get together in the first scene they meet. What's left? I'll TELL you what's next: boring relationship turmoil. Will they ever decide on a name for their kid? Are they going to have pork chops or garden salads for dinner tonight? Whoops, Henry time-traveled. I'll put his dinner in the refrigerator in case he comes back tonight. YAWN.

But what's the most important part about a romance? The fucking romance. Nothing romantic ever happens and the time traveling adds nothing to their relationship. They don't feel like soulmates, they feel like an average married couple stuck in a freshman English major's wet dream. All they ever do is talk about how they're soulmates instead of demonstrating it like a proper romance does.

Maybe the writing could have worked if the actors had been better, but I doubt it. Rachel McAdams does little more than stand around and look pretty and be static and boring, while Eric Bana gives the worst performance I think I've seen all summer. After I was such a big fan of him in Star Trek (apparently the only big fan of him in Star Trek) and Funny People, he seems to be working hard to undo all my praise.

The dude looks completely out of place in the real world. He's too damn pretty. He looked perfect as an evil Romulan general, or an over-confident yuppie, but standing there with normal people pretending to be a normal person, he doesn't look right. And his accent. Jesus fucking Christ his accent. I loved his accent in Munich. I loved the holy hell out of his speech patterns in Star Trek, and I thought his Australian accent gave him an air of innocent intimidation in Funny People. But holy dicks is this thing putrid. It never gets better and I never was able to tune it out. It's just a grating American accent from someone who is quite clearly not an American.

The only nice thing I can say about this movie is that it's prettier than it should be. I just don't even want to write this anymore. I don't want to look it over it or copy-edit it. I just want to be done with it and write a bunch of articles as fast as humanly possible so that I can bury this entry and never have to think of this movie again.

2/10

Love Will Tear Us Apart

Tom is not the victim.

Tom is only a victim of his own sensibilities and romantic outlook on life. It's not to say that Tom's outlook on life is bad, it's that it's idealistic and he leads himself into situations where he can only get hurt. Tom's real fault is that he is shallow. He begins to like Summer because she likes The Smiths, and in his mind, that makes her stand out. A lot of people like The Smiths, and it's nice to find a woman that you have things in common with, but Tom mistakes similar tastes in music with deep compatibility.

This isn't a slight on the writing in the film, it's a bear hug for the writing. I'm not pointing out a mistake, I'm pointing out something that the writers purposefully inserted that nobody I've talked to about this movie seems to understand.

Tom says as much himself towards the end of the film. His real revelation is that he's unassertive; he hasn't been in enough relationships in his life and he's come to romanticize them because the closest thing he has to real experience is movies and music and watching his friends' supposedly happy relationships, and he's so old and inexperienced that those have replaced his actual romantic sensibilities.

As a result, he seems incapable of making a serious assessment about the relationship and seen himself and Summer for what they really are: desperately wrong for each other.

I open with this because everybody on the planet has seen the movie and came away with incorrect conclusions about Tom's character.

For those of you who don't know (ha ha), 500 Days of Summer follows Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) from his meeting to his breakup with Summer (Zooey Deschanel) and up to his acceptance, in total a tally of 500 days.

Tom is a great protagonist. Like another great protagonist earlier this year, the whole film is filtered through his eyes. That means when we see his relationship with Summer and it seems so perfect and idyllic, it's not because it actually way, but because Tom refuses to remember anything that wasn't perfectly idyllic. Because of this, Tom is the perfect surrogate for the average male who has experienced a similar breakup. He reacts in a way that every man does. Lethargic rage, denying it, absurd fantasies.

The film is so stylized because that's how Tom's brain is functioning, and the essence of every aspect of the relationship is so perfectly captured by director Marc Webb. The morning after they first have sex is a giant dance number, the most perfect dramatization of of the first wave of infatuation.

Marc Webb's bag of tricks is shoulder-deep. Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel are marvelous, Deschanel in particular, who plays the ultimate manic pixie dreamgirl. But Deschanel's performance elevates the material out of cliche. She's a realistic human being, likely to remind you of someone you know and make the drama of the film all the more poignant. But while Deschanel brings depth to a certain aspect of the film, the whole film relies on Joseph Gordon-Levitt's performance and he is typically fantastic, which is wholly unsurprising; in the years since I first saw Brick I have followed his career with great interest and he hasn't done anything to disappoint me so far.

The decision to make a romantic comedy from a distinctly male perspective is inspired. So few romances appeal to men, but not because romance doesn't appeal to men at all, but because romances are generally geared toward a feminine sensibility. Men have a completely different set of neuroses when it comes to love and a different way of dealing with a break-up. It's almost violating to see it on the screen because it's something that we've never been exposed to this well before.

This is one of the strongest, most sincere and most realistic films about breaking up I've ever seen. It belongs with the best films on the subject, a pantheon ruled by Annie Hall and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

And comparison to those two films is high praise indeed.

9/10

Because I'm poor and live in the middle of nowhere

I won't be seeing 500 Days of Summer until next week, at which point it would be completely useless for me to review it because everyone on the fucking planet will have seen it already. That won't stop me from reviewing it (probably), because I have a will of iron and I, like most critics, won't let something like irrelevance keep me from writing 10,000 word diatribes on formalisms that I am probably misunderstanding and that the average viewer (or pier of mine who I've forced to read this) will give a bean about *.

While we patiently await my shallow, pedantic review, let's ease the suffering of the stab wound I've likely inflicted to get you to read this with a video that was recently brought to my attention.

This video was brought to my attention this morning, and I have been watching it over and over again. Mostly because the stimulating effect of a video will keep me from falling asleep, where I'll only have more fever-dreams about the Dutch. But this video rules; who knew Joseph Gordon-Levitt could dance like that? He's like an angel.

A clogging angel.



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And this is topical because I just reviewed G.I. Joe and need to cleanse my pallet.

* I just made that up. Is that cool?