This Can't End Well

71 Tweets (Runaway, 1984, Michael Crichton)

2011-04-01T21:10:00.000-07:00

(Written for the 5th Annual White Elephant Blogathon, hosted by Paul Clark at Silly Hats Only.)

1. How many best-selling authors are also pretty good directors? That's what always kills me about Crichton. I will assume he also had a 10 inch cock and his piss was literally a stream of gold.

I mean, studio suits let Norman Mailer and Stephen King direct films too. What the fuck was that about?

Did they really think sitting in a room all day with a typewriter is the same skill as managing a squadron of people and making a thousand decisions every minute?

(See also: Miller, Frank, THE SPIRIT. But no, don't.)

And yet, Crichton could do both. WESTWORLD, aside from an appalling media prologue, is a cold, controlled classic.

He may never have been a maestro (and maybe he knew that and that's why he went back to novels), but he knew where to put a camera.

He never, to my knowledge, embarrassed himself, though he may have come close with RUNAWAY, his feature from 1984.

The problem starts with the premise. Which is weird, because that's where Crichton shines, right?

An amusement park -- with real dinosaurs! An amusement park -- with super-realistic robots! An amusement park -- where Demi Moore sexually harasses you!

10. [But I kid. He really could find a good nut of a story and build something readable and marketable around it. No easy feat.]

But RUNAWAY: So it's just like our 1984. Except industrial robots are everywhere, building our skyscrapers, farming our food, making our dinners.

With the twist... that there is no twist. That's pretty much it.

When a robot goes haywire -- and regardless if it's a danger or not -- a special police division is brought in to put it down. Because that makes sense, right?

[Presumably, there are no unions in this world. That's the only thing I can think of. The robots done broke 'em up.]

Sure, when a robot somehow grabs a handgun with his claw and goes on a rampage, you're gonna need cop/robot specialist Tom Selleck.

But that's when we hit the next speed bump in this idea. Crichton doesn't want to repeat the simulacrums of WESTWORLD.

That's great, but the solution -- big clunky boxes that looked jury-rigged from Radio Shack parts -- doesn't inspire fear. Or interest. Or anything, really.

Seriously, they're never plausible as threats. Does a dry vac with a knife scare you?

[I'm reminded of the pool sweeper crawling out of the pool in PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 2, a silly moment in an otherwise good film.]

20. [Maybe they needed to compete with the crawling and self-immolating Ouija board in PA 1.]

And the robots that are actually trying to kill people have been fucked with by villain Gene Simmons. So Crichton's usual theme -- TECHNOLOGY GONE AMOK -- is hamstringed.

Crichton's LOOKER had a gun that blacked you out for a couple seconds, and that shit was actually terrifying (see: the car chase).

This one has a gun with heat-seeking bullets, which means either a) the non-Selleck target is killed or b) Selleck jumps behind a lot of walls and tables. It's self-defeating.

[Also, the bullet POV shots just look like a guy running around with a camera at less than bullet speed.]

On the face of it, Simmons is a good villain. Simmons is creepier here than with his KISS makeup, and he reins in the performance, letting the stillness and the glower do the heavy lifting.

But it turns out there's no character there. Just a basic motivation (greed, I *think*). No connection to Selleck, no surprising human qualities, nothin'.

Crichton tries to make up for this with a brief, ridiculous scene where a psychic (a *psychic*!) says that Selleck and Simmons are "like brothers".

That are hardcore rationalist like Crichton brings in a motherfucking psychic says it all, really.

And while another of Crichton's strengths is his use of technical or jargon-studded dialogue (here, the cop-speak), good God help us when he's tackling "the media".

30. He never met an arrogant, ethically-challenged new reporter he didn't like to hit us over the head with.

[I used to fervently believe the WESTWORLD prologue, with its painfully broad "man on the street" reporter segment, was studio-mandated. I'm no longer sure.]

But the biggest mis-step, and what probably accounts for its box office failure (and what also makes the film kinda interesting) is Crichton's visual conception of his world.

Let me put it this way: the director that came to mind while watching RUNAWAY was Damon Packard.

Packard makes very low-budget films, usually horror or SF in nature, transforming banal, everyday materials into something transcendent. It's rinky dink, but that's the point.

[In REFLECTIONS OF EVIL, he turns the ride queues at Universal Studios into a haunted, CARNIVAL OF SOULS-esque limbo through sheer gusto.]

Crichton, probably unintentionally, ends up doing something similar, on a Hollywood budget. (So I guess the joke's on him.)

As I said before, the robots are pure Radio Shack. They really deflate interest in why you're presumably watching this (robots go crazy!).

Crichton wants a "The Future Is Now" setting, but the flat lighting and Vancouver locations kill any visual excitement.

[Filming in Vancouver is the Hollywood equivalent of going through your mom's old dresses to put on a show in the backyard.]

40. There are very few fiery explosions, but a lot -- a *lot* -- of cheapy-looking exploding sparks. Crichton turns it into a motif: the final shot has Selleck kissing the Love Interest under a shower of 'em.

I submit that the real RUNAWAY and a theoretical version made by talented, film-obsessed preteens would be virtually identical.

But it's not a complete wash. Crichton, ultimately, is too talented to let it be.

The most successful scene is when Selleck has to remove an unexploded bullet from his Partner/Love Interest's arm.

Crichton nails the combo of tension & humor here, and the way the drama deepens the characters' relationship.

[Basically, this is the sex scene, only with Selleck de-penetrating his Love Interest.]

Of course, is it any wonder that the most successful scene dovetails with the director's past as a med student? [Realizing: Crichton created the show ER as well.]

Then there's Selleck's fear of heights, which, because of Simmons' flimsiness, is the real antagonist.

More time is spent with Selleck, up in an elevator on top of an unfinished skyscraper, fighting off robot bugs, then the final confrontation with Simmons.

I love how Crichton holds the camera on Selleck's ascent for, by modern standards, a long time. Current hack directors would fuck this moment up.

50. He really lets the fear sink in as the elevator goes up, and Selleck gets the room to play this scene quietly, through his body.

There's also a nice camera move as Selleck crawls across the roof of the elevator to peer down. It's the little things.

You know, say what you want about his writing or his ideas, but the man truly understood was dramatic tension, and how to wring it.

The baby's alone in the house -- with a killer robot! There's a bullet in her -- that could explode any second! Your son's heading down the elevator -- where acid-spewing bugbots are waiting for him!

It's silly, of course. And it works every time, damn him.

Finally, let's take a moment to praise, yes praise, Mr. Tom Selleck. What a completely unearned bad rap this man gets.

I feel like he's treated like a Hasselhofian joke, and basically because he dared to sport a moustache.

Every time he appeared on Friends, Entertainment Weekly had to make some snark-ass comment. And he was probably the best of the regular guest stars.

Truth is, had Selleck's career happened in the 50s, we'd be talking about one of the classic matinee idols.

60. He splits the difference between Wayne-style machismo and Grant-style affinity for verbal comedy.

If you want to see a guy singlehandedly raise a film from "meh" to "worth a look", watch RUNAWAY.

Only a few scenes have Selleck dealing with talking robots, but each one is a small gem of conversational frustration. See: Verbal Comedy.

There's a real subtlety to his performance; rather than emote MY WIFE DIED I'M DEPRESSED, he wears the tragedy like a comfortable coat.

He engages every actor, from hysterical Kirstie Alley to glowering Simmons, with, for lack of a better word, aliveness. Presence. Thereness.

Best Selleck scene: putting his son to sleep, and how both break spontaneously into chuckles when talking about the Love Interest.

It probably started as a blooper, but Selleck's so in the moment he transforms it into something truthful and real. Even moreso than the robots and the real locations, he grounds the film in reality.

[Also, let's enjoy the irony of the man starring in a TECHNOLOGY RUNS AMOK film becoming the spokesperson for TECHNOLOGY CAN DO ANYTHING.]

Yet, while I enjoyed the film, what kills it for me is that, really, there is no big idea or theme here.

No real subtext, that I could find; this film is pure WYSIWYG.

70. Not unlike that unfinished skyscraper or those bony little bugbots, it's just an skeleton that never got fleshed out.

Oh boo hoo, JURASSIC PARK dollarz.

She Gave Me The Golamine Beads: Ishtar (1987, Elaine May)

2010-06-14T20:09:00.000-07:00

(For the 4th Annual White Elephant Blogathon, hosted by Paul Clark at Silly Hats Only)

Not to make any excuses, but there's a reason the last entry in this blog was last year's White Elephant entry. In case you didn't know, I am now the father of not one, not two, but three kids. That's right, I now have a three year old and two eight month old babies, and things like blogs just aren't in the cards these days. So the following isn't quite the entry I want to write, but the only entry I'm capable of writing at this time.

So: Have people actually seen this film? Granted, it's not a hidden masterpiece, but the idea that this is some kind of comedy nadir is absolute rubbish, especially since Ashton Kutcher is still making movies. (May's MIKEY & NICKY is the hidden masterpiece, but that's an entry for a day that'll never come.) There's a number of theories as to how ISHTAR got its poisonous reputation (mostly dealing with star Warren Beatty's battles with the media), but it dovetails with my personal philosophy: everything that isn't the film -- the publicity, the gossip, the interviews with the cast and crew, hell, even the poster -- all of that is completely irrelevant. All that matters is the first frame, the last frame, and everything in between. Everything you need to understand (and if you wish, judge) a film is there, and all you have to do is look.

The following is less of a look then an extended glance -- it's not like I'm getting paid for this -- but I think there's enough there to suggest that there's much, much more to ISHTAR then as the punchline to an ignorant joke.

(Since ISHTAR is unavailable on DVD in America... er, what I'm saying is, pardon the crappy resolution and Swedish subtitles.)

Evolution of a song and a friendship. Through a series of cuts, we see the process by which they, paradoxically, create a truly awful song and come to gain respect for each other. "Shit, man, when you're on, you're on," says Hoffman about Beatty's terrible couplet. The first act is jumpy, jittery, a New York state of mind. Not only is a night of songwriting conveyed in a less than a minute through cuts, but this is actually part of an extended flashback. It feels very modern, and interestingly, this aspect completely disappears once the film relocates to the Middle East.

There's a Woody Allen quality to the first act, a bit like a late 70s Allen with the aggressive editing of an early 90s Allen. This is a particularly moody shot that wouldn't look out of place in INTERIORS or (if it was in black & white) MANHATTAN. Here, New York is associated with gloom, the dark, broken relationships and broken dreams. When the story moves to North Africa, the style changes -- the quick editing disappears and the colors brighten. Ishtar may be a dangerous place, but like its namesake, it's also a place of fertility -- rebirth.

(It should be noted that I'm still not sure if the fictional Ishtar is supposed to be a city or a country or what.)

Check out this great composition, like a widescreen Buster Keaton. Hoffman is planning to jump, and he's got a cops to the right and above him, and his parents to the left. Fitting that, at Hoffman's lowest point in the first act, the film's palette drops down to about three colors (blue, brown-grey, and black). (That red thing in Hoffman's hand is a pillow, and he'll get rid of that quickly.) Compare that to the multicolor of the market, below. Also compare it to the desert shots of the impending helicopters below, as well.

For a brief moment in Morocco, the two worst singer/songwriters in the world become stars. (See reaction below.) In a sense, it's a sham -- this audience is hungry for any entertainment, and any rendition of standards, delivered with gusto, is going to be received warmly. I think ISHTAR would win over most people if given a chance, and I think its secret weapon is its sweetness. Rogers and Clarke are dumbasses, and they're terrible singers and songwriters, but they're way too passionate about music to hate. They aren't in it for the money, they aren't con artists. They're deluded, sure, but who among us isn't? Point is, they're bringing joy to the audience, and themselves, and it's hard to dislike them.

And yet, there's a saltiness along with the sweet. These people aren't Moroccans. (Except for maybe that waiter.) Clearly there's a critique of imperialism (cultural and otherwise) going on here, with this audience having traveled thousands of miles to gobble up an entertainment they know by heart, and paying for the privilege. The film is overtly critical of American intervention in the Middle East, but for me, this is the moment that really works, where the film does two different things -- get us to empathize with Rogers & Clarke and critique what it is that they're doing -- at the same time.

Here's the introduction of Charles Grodin's character. Guess who he's works for. Go ahead, guess. That's right, he's a spook, and you can spot him a mile away. Smartly, in the very next scene, the film has the character come out and tells Hoffman's character that he works for the CIA. What's interesting is that in a movie about shifting and hidden identities (Rogers & Clarke are mistaken for tribesmen, Isabelle Adjani disguises herself as a boy, the talent agent becomes a peace broker, etc.), the two characters that are unambiguously static -- the CIA agent and the emir -- are the bad guys.

Hey look! It's Matt Frewer!

(Also, Fred Melamed is supposed to be in the film somewhere, but I don't think I'd recognize a 29 year old Sy Ableman.)

This is the reaction of an assassin after he accidentally shoots his own teammate. It's a brief shot, maybe a second long, but it's both funny, this spontaneous gesture of regret in (what I presume) is a hardened killer, and another indication of May's generosity towards her characters, even the unnamed ones.

I haven't seen A NEW LEAF or THE HEARTBREAK KID, but I wonder if May doesn't get enough credit as a composer of images. Along with that great composition for the suicide attempt, here's three stills from the big chase sequence. The various factions down on the street have just discovered that the rolled up rugs they think contain Hoffman and Beatty are empty, while the two are actually escaping above them.

May effectively splits the screen, a lower level and an upper level, and the action runs simultaneously. It must have been a bitch to pull off, but the effect is genuinely exciting.

A different angle, this time with the frame split horizontally, Hoffman and Beatty running across the roofs while commotion commences on the ground. This sequence alone reveals the sham that is the Michael Bay/Paul Greengrass run-and-gun style of cinematography.

A smaller action moment, but one that is just as effective. In a single take, Hoffman and Beatty see the American helicopters coming over the dunes to kill them, and they get ready to face them. This durational shot is the kind of thing that film can do that other art forms can't, and we lose something when we edit it down to half-percieved one-second images.

It's probably a stretch to correlate this horizontally-focused, limited-palette composition, one about impending death, with the suicide attempt earlier in the film. But to hell with it, consider it correlated.

"We didn't need a pencil!" Probably the emotional highlight of the film, and my favorite bit -- as certain death looms, they sing the song they composed earlier while dying of thirst in the desert, giddy at not having forgotten it. The friendship has been tested throughout the second act, with Hoffman thinking Beatty's a Communist spy and Beatty thinking Hoffman's an American one (that shifting identity thing again), but now that friendship has been renewed, strengthened.

Do they survive? Watch the film to find out.

I've only scratched the surface of May's (at this writing, final) film. I hope this post acts as a trail of golamine beads for some future writer, leaving a glowing trail out of the desert of neglect and towards the bright lights of critical re-evaluation.

Well, if golamine beads were real, that is.

Maybe I need a new metaphor.

Happy White Elephant Blogathon, everyone.

The Little Piece in Me Will Die: Nightmare City (1980, Umberto Lenzi)

2009-04-01T01:50:00.001-07:00

(For the 3rd Annual White Elephant Blog-a-Thon, hosted by Lucid Screeening.)

The effect of George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead on Italian horror is well-known, and can't be overstated. A huge hit in Italy, Dead spawned a cottage industry of cheap knockoffs, the most famous being Lucio Fulci's Zombie (known in Italy as Zombie 2, an unofficial sequel to Romero's film, retitled Zombie). Umberto Lenzi's Nightmare City is one of those cheap knockoffs, and it's only known because of Lenzi's participation in that other Italian cottage industry, the cannibal movie. I haven't seen Cannibal Ferox -- actual animal-killing doesn't interest me -- but based on the evidence here, it's probably monotonously paced, with only the meathooks of gore scenes (and the promise of more gore scenes) to keep eyelids from sagging.

The city in question is, based on the copious helicopter shots during the credits, somewhere in Europe, likely Italy. The story follows Dean Miller, or as Scott W. Black has dubbed him, Serious Television Reporter (tm) Dean Miller, as he covers the impending zombie holocaust, first as a member of the media, then as a increasingly-desperate survivor. There are other subplots -- the military's hilariously inept attempt to stop the zombies, the army general's wife's adventures in her own countryside villa, and a married couple who try to escape the chaos by, uh going camping. Again, the film's major fault is that nearly everything, from the attacks to the war room discussions to the "character development" scenes march to the same leaden beat. It's easy to miss the kind of bizarre touches you expect in a exploitation flick like this, such as the hero's tendency to throw things that explode for no good reason.

The film has only one good scene, and unfortunately, it's at the very beginning. Serious Television Reporter (tm) Dean Miller and his cameraman go to the airport to interview a Very Important Scientist arriving that day. When they get there, they witness the unscheduled landing of an unidentified plane. Sensibly, once the plane lands, the military surround it and await the passengers to disembark. Maybe it's just post-9/11 jitters, but there's definite tension in this sequence, and Lenzi does an good job building the suspense -- the confusion in the tower, the steady but nervous soldiers, the long, dead silence from the plane when no one answers when the army captain calls for them to open the door.

And then the door finally opens, and to Serious Television Reporter (tm) Dean Miller's surprise, it's the Very Important Scientist. He steps out, a little dazed, an odd look in his eyes... then pulls a knife from nowhere and stabs the army captain. And what immediately follows is the most dumbfounding sequence in all of zombie cinema, as a series of men in turtlenecks and leisure jackets, their heads lumps of black and red, file out of the plane clown car-style and attack the soldiers.

And when I say attack the soldiers, I mean with axes, knives, machetes, scythes, big sticks, and as if to say "hell, why not?", submachine guns. Fitting with the title, it's completely nightmarish, an incomprehensible burst of violence. The scene is downright Clowesian in its juxtaposition of ridiculous and brutal. (Unfortunately, the effect is undermined by the slightly puzzled look on Serious Television Reporter (tm) Dean Miller's face, as if he was witnessing a "funny" American Idol audition and not a terrifying massacre happening literally twenty feet away from him.) In the first ten minutes, Lenzi raises the stakes for his movie -- can he keep this level of intensity? Can he keep surprising us? Is this a forgotten and unheralded film that redefined the living dead movie underneath the noses of the Zomboscenti?

The answer to all of these, as always, is no, of course not, why would you even think that? The rest of the movie is a string of variations on that beginning, with diminishing returns. The zombies attack a hospital, everyone dies. They attack a TV studio that's broadcasting, live, some kind of Solid Gold-style show without a Dionne Warwick or pop music, and everybody dies. (Scott W. Black calls the TV show a "disco aerobics program", which is incredibly accurate and demonstrates how baffling it is.) Despite the zombies' ability to use weapons and tactics (such as turning off an elevator to trap their prey), there's absolutely no suspense in their onslaughts, just repetitions. Grab, slice, bite, eat, over and over again. If you see the zombies attack someone other than Serious Television Reporter (tm) Dean Miller, they're probably food.

By this time, the average reader is no doubt thinking, "Tactics? Guns? These aren't zombies". And the average reader would have a point. These aren't the usual zombie signifiers. On the other hand, Lenzi's undead drink blood, are indestructible save for head shots, and spawn more of themselves through the humans they kill. Regular zombies are mindless, and it's that mindlessness, along with their insurmountable numbers, that give them their metaphorical weight. Zombies that run, I would argue, are working on a different metaphorical level than their shambling predecessors, but zombies that move across the city, armed to the teeth, are no longer zombies. They're an army.

Is that what Lenzi and screenwriters Antonio Cesare Corti, Luis Maria Delgado and Piero Regnoli are getting at? The seventies and eighties were marked by Mafia violence -- is this their attempt to deal with Italy's inner turmoil via horror movie conventions? It feels possible. The violence comes from within the nation, albeit without warning, and the it corrupts, spreading from citizen. No institution is safe, not the media, not the government, not even the church. The last scene takes place in an empty amusement park, and even a place designed to make you forget your troubles is a deathtrap. For the filmmakers, Italy is killing itself, and for reasons that it can't even begin to understand.

There's a twist ending, hinted at not only in the title but also in some of the dialogue, but the real twist happened earlier, and was much more disorienting. Serious Television Reporter (tm) Dean Miller and his Doctor Wife hide out in a deserted lunch stand. The lunch stand is curiously decorated -- it's covered with what appear to be pictures cut out of magazines, shots of Elvis and Robert Redford (as the Sundance Kid) and the like. It appears to be some kind of American-themed eatery, which I suppose is something you might find in the Italian countryside, but it seemed odd nonetheless. After the requisite zombie attack, they leave the building, and I catch sight of a sign that reads "Hamburghers" (sic).

And it hits me. I'm in that Vertigo/Jaws tracking-backwards/zooming-in shot.

This isn't taking place in Italy. Oh my God. I'm back. I'm home. All the time, it was... America. The U.S. of A., all along. The disco aerobics program. The pictures of Elvis and Redford. The incompetent military. The scalpel-throwing doctor. The oh-so-symbolic amusement park. Dean Miller, for crying out loud. All American.

How did I miss it?

What does that say about me?

And the nightmare becomes reality....

Still Not A Player: Three Punishers

2009-02-06T13:13:00.001-08:00

(Here's the last column I completed for my ComiXology column, The Watchman. It was scheduled to go up not long after the debut of Punisher: War Zone, which was, I don't know, December 7th or something, which accounts for the references to Twilight. Please enjoy responsibly. Also, try not to count the number of Simpsons references.)

Here’s all you need to know about Punisher: War Zone, the latest (and likely last) attempt to bring Frank Castle to the big screen: the Punisher punches a guy through the head. Let me be clear: he takes his fist and through sheer force, puts it through some poor schmoe’s face and out the other side. Actually, you need to know one other thing: that’s not even the most jaw-dropping bit of ultraviolence the flick has to offer. You may now sort yourselves into ticket buyers, wait-for-the-DVD renters and Twilight viewers as applicable.

Based on the box office returns, angsty, baseball-playing, abstinence-loving vampires have it all over vengeance-obsessed vigilantes. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. The previous two Punishers made little impact (the first one, from 1989, was never released in American theaters), so there seemed little chance that this third swing would connect. Keith Phipps, in his Onion A.V. Club review, wondered why it was so hard to make a successful Punisher film — guy loses family, guy vows revenge, guy blows bad guys to smithereens, bada bing bada boom, right, Bart? But the conundrum of the Punisher is that he should work brilliantly on film and fail miserably in the comics, yet in practice it’s the complete opposite.

I never liked the Punisher. I hated him, actually, even when I was a pimply, nerdy teenager besotted with power fantasies, so it’s difficult for me to admit he ever worked well in comics at all. He just wasn’t interesting to me — when you read the monthly adventures of people who could fly or stretch or cast spells, a guy whose power was a working index finger lacked the necessary spark to separate me from my seventy-five cents. It didn’t help that his personality was as monochromatic as his costume, and since, unlike Spider-Man or the Hulk or Thor, he didn’t have an alternate identity (there’s no appreciable difference between Frank Castle and the Punisher), there’s no internal or external tension to the character. But more than that, he embarrassed me. Back in those ancient days of yore, when “Comics Aren’t Just For Kids Anymore!” think-pieces were just a twinkle in some editor’s eye, the Punisher was prima facie evidence that those four-color periodicals were trash, pornography of a sort, unserious at best and a danger at worst. In the 80s, Wolverine was the poster boy for dark antiheroes, of course, but he was always just one part of a bigger group, and it was that conflict between his rebellious cynicism and his teammates’ Utopian ideals that made him fascinating, and yes, tolerable. (Needless to say, I was no big fan of solo Wolverine stories.) Frank Castle, on the other hand was the promise of violence, but without any wit, charm or romanticism — just a grim, joyless slog. Between that and his obvious Marvel Universe problem — the absurdity of a guy with guns in a world teeming with Norse gods and planet-eating aliens — why would anyone take this character seriously, let alone read him every month?

The answer, I think, lies less in the content than the context. When he debuted in 1974 in the pages of The Amazing Spider-Man, he was a dim bulb with bad hair and a cool costume, a quickie comic book ripoff of Mack Bolan. Vowing to kill every criminal he could, he was, alas, easily manipulated into targeting Spidey by his partner, some no-name goon called the Jackal. (Hello, Frank? Your partner looks like a friggin’ demon. You’re shocked when he turns out to be the bad guy? Really?) Despite this ignominious beginning, the Punisher only grew in popularity until he exploded in the 80s, earning his own title. The reason, I think, was because the Punisher was of his time. By ‘74, Watergate was burning up the front pages, crime was rampant, gas prices were soaring, and the Vietnam War was still raging. The Summer of Love decayed into a winter of discontent, and naturally the culture pushed back, looking for someone or something to give voice to that intense (and decidedly white) anger at a world that seemed to be falling apart. America posed a question to itself, and got a bevy of answers in return: the Dirty Harry series, Death Wish (released only months after the Punisher’s debut) and in the comics, Frank Castle. The genius of the comic book system was that, despite the appearances of continuity, there are no real changes; you’re pretty much guaranteed the same thrill every time. As an expression of cathartic release, a rage against the revolving door prison system, a Punisher comic was the gift that kept on giving, month after month.

So it isn’t surprising that the Punisher, after a successful run in the conservative 80s, was at his lowest ebb in the go-go 90s, nor that he made a comeback this decade. (An unpopular war, governmental abuse of power, an energy crisis? If these trends continue….Ayyyyy!) And yet, this ability to rise to the national hum goes flaccid once the cameras roll. On the face of it, there’s no reason why that should be. The Punisher’s essential core is so potentially rich: Frank and his family, through complete chance, witness a mob hit, which results in their annihilation — except, through complete chance, Frank himself. He then becomes Death itself in order to exert some control over a random, unknowable universe that took everything away from him. (Another reason for his awkward fit in the comics — the Marvel Universe is a lot of things, but existential isn’t one of them.) That’s a great beginning for a film character, and once you strip out the superhero stuff, Frank Castle joins a long, storied history of heavily-armed justice-seeking cinematic protagonists.

That’s the problem, though, isn’t it? Frank is pretty much unique to the Marvel Universe; what differentiates the movie Frank from say, Sylvester Stallone’s Cobra?

2004’s The Punisher seemed primed for success, with a decent budget and solid character actors (Will Patton, Ben Foster and Thomas Jane as Frank), headlined by star John Travolta as villain Howard Saint. And it’s slickly made and reasonably diverting, stumbling only when ill-advisedly attempting to integrate a pair of bumpkins as comic relief and a down-on-her-luck waitress as a love interest. But as a Punisher movie, it’s like watching a series of studio notes, each missive hacking away at the character’s core. Thomas Jane is very much a capital-A Actor, on fire when playing big characters with accents (see: Stander), but when asked to play “normal”, he has all the charisma of a saltine cracker. (It’s telling that his best moment is undercover as a German arms dealer.) He’s fundamentally incapable of the kind of steely, reserved, iconic performance a character like this demands. Instead, Jane tries to bring a fully-dimensional portrait of anger and grief to the screen — he wants you to feel his pain — and the result is vaguely New Agey.

Even worse, Frank isn’t even a victim of bad luck, but is involved (albeit accidentally) in the death of Saint’s son. So Saint orders Frank’s entire extended family killed — not just his wife and kid, but parents, grandparents, cousins, their spouses, even kids with chicken pox. It’s as if the filmmakers didn’t think their protagonist was capable of a a one-man war against his antagonist unless literally everyone connected to him was dead. (“Just the wife and kid? I could see him maybe sending a strongly-worded letter, but murder? Nah…”) It’s supposed to raise the stakes, but all it does is raise eyebrows in disbelief. Furthermore, you know something is really wrong when Frank — who’s never called the Punisher, so I won’t either — goes about a revenge that’s slow and methodical, involving Saint’s wife, his gay consigliere and (I’m not making this up) portable fire hydrants. The film feels small, wrapped up in itself, inconsequential.
It isn’t until the end, after Castle finally takes his bloody revenge (a satisfying set piece that echoes Taxi Driver in its brutality), and the faux-Morricone score swells, that director Jonathan Hensleigh tips his hand as to what he thinks he’s doing. It’s a Western, you see. The civilizing “good woman”, the complete lack of police presence, the working-joe-versus-the-rich-guy class struggle, it’s all there, just transplanted to modern day. It’s an interesting conceit, but the filmmakers were so intent on making Castle recognizably human, and his world recognizably “ours”, that the film ends up unrecognizable as the Punisher.

The newest Punisher doesn’t make that mistake. The very first thing Ray Stevenson’s Punisher does is bust into a mobster’s dinner party and kill everyone dead, so quickly and efficiently and gorily that I’m sure each special effect was only a frame away from giving the film an NC-17. The ridiculous brutality of the sequence is reminiscent of McBain’s attack on Mendoza’s party celebrating the invention of Swank (“Ten times more addictive than marijuana”). That’s fitting — director Lexi Alexander wants to take the grim, joyless slog and push it into absurdity. It’s a comedy with exploding bodies for punchlines.

It’s a risky strategy, one that relies on a viewer’s ironic detachment towards violence. This is a movie that asks you to laugh at a moment when the Punisher blows a man’s face off with a shotgun in a one-take, Michael Haneke-esque medium shot. If your sense of humor bends that direction, it works, in a Jackass, “can you believe that shit?” kind of way. The problem with the movie isn’t the violence or the tone — one could say this is the most faithful of adaptations, taking a lot from Garth Ennis’ Punisher series. The problem is that it leaves Frank Castle, he of the perpetual Judge Dredd frown, on the emotional sidelines of his own movie. The villains Jigsaw (Dominic West) and his brother Loony Bin Jim (the always welcome Doug Hutchison) have the most developed and touching relationship in the film. When Jim gets a look at his now-disfigured sibling, he says he looks beautiful, and he means it. Yes, he’s crazy — especially when he gleefully destroys any mirror, including the one in the police interrogation room, so Jigsaw doesn’t have to see himself — but it’s a craziness that’s wrapped up within his genuine love for his brother.

But even that isn’t explored, and there’s really nothing else there. The action scenes are only moderately chopped and screwed, thankfully, but the screenplay is frustratingly loose. (Frank is told that Jigsaw is going to go after the damsel in distress (Julie Benz), but decides to mete out horrible death to a trio of parkour enthusiasts first, for some reason.) And after awhile, even its gleefully shocking violence becomes a bit of a joyless slog in its own right. Near the end, the film comes briefly to life and marches to its own beat, giving us a bizarro scene where Jigsaw and Jim deliver a recruitment speech to the various racially-segregated gangs, Patton-style. It’s like something out of late 60s Brian De Palma dropped into the middle of an action flick. It burns bright, and it fades just as quickly.

The 1989 version didn’t even have a chance to burn, bright or otherwise. Relegated to the dust bin of cinematic history — not only had it never had a theatrical release in this country, it’s also currently out of print on VHS and DVD — it’s considered a bit of a joke, with everyone’s favorite Iron Curtain pugilist Dolph Lundgren assaying the role of Frank Castle, complete with dyed black hair and Pointillist stubble. (He looks like the end result of a Cillian Murphy/Sylvester Stallone teleportation accident.) Aesthetically, it’s inescapably 80s. The performances are deep and wide and tall, the dialogue amusingly blunt (“Holy shit, the Punisher!” exclaims a television reporter upon seeing a dead mobster with a tell-tale skull knife in his back.) The budget seems to have been just barely big enough to qualify for a feature film, and it’s no stranger to Andy Sidaris-level silliness, including but not limited to ninjas sliding down on wooden amusement park slides. The opening credits rip off Night Gallery, for crying out loud.

All of this colludes to hide the fact that it’s by far the best of the Punisher movies. Written by Boaz Yakin (who would later direct the terrific revenge tale, Fresh) and directed by Mark Goldblatt, The Punisher has the tightest screenplay of the bunch, the scenes snowballing in intensity over the slim running time, never slowing down for tedious, “ironic” church attendance (War Zone) or “humanizing” Thanksgiving dinners (the 2004). It also moves away from focusing on the Punisher’s POV — early on, we follow a tracking shot through the sewer (the Punisher’s base of operations) to the back of his head. But we can’t get in, which is the point. Instead, the film goes for a wider view of the action, putting us in the shoes of his ex-partner (Louis Gossett Jr.), his remaining enemy (Jeroen Krabbé), and even his enemy’s only son (Brian Rooney). This kaleidoscopic approach gives the film a novelistic feel, as if the city itself was a character. In its own insane way, it kind of presages this summer’s The Dark Knight, in showing how a vigilante, if he does his job too well, ends up clearing the table for something worse to take its place. In this case, that’s the Yakuza, intent on eliminating the mob, anticipating the hysteria of Michael Crichton’s Rising Sun.

However, what truly sets this adaptation apart from the others is that it starts with the most sensible premise regarding Frank Castle: he’s a monster. In the opening scene, he’s presented like the killer from a slasher movie, going after mobsters like they were horny teenagers, not just with guns but with knives and rope as well. We’re asked to root for him, of course — he’s the guy that’s going to save the day — but we’re never asked to admire him. Lundgren is no one’s idea of a master thespian, but his woodenness and monotone play to the character’s strengths. This Frank Castle is dead inside, a hollow man with a few fragmented memories of a happier life rolling around in his shell, with only a single word — revenge — animating his tall, lumbering frame. (He’s actually less like a slasher than a golem.) The film has the good sense to not underline it, but the story’s premise is unusually humanistic for this character: having killed 125 people in five years and still trying to scratch that impossible itch, the Punisher finds himself trying to save lives instead of taking them, by rescuing the mob’s children from an encroaching Yakuza — the very kids who will likely become his future enemies. It’s the only film to throw such a monkeywrench into the Punisher’s shuttered world, forcing him to really think about how he’s lived his life and how he plans to continue it. Or end it. All of the movie Punishers attempt suicide or suicide-by-proxy, but Lundgren’s attempt — after killing Krabbé, he kneels before the man’s son and asks him to blow his brains out — is the only one that feels like it might actually happen. Goldblatt’s Punisher would never have won any awards, but it’s a fine movie, and in desperate need of critical rehabilitation.

The Punisher can never really have a happy ending. He has no endgame. There will always be crime and his family will always be dead. The best he can hope for is to die in battle, or else take his own life, if there really is a difference to him. And now that we appear to be entering an era where the watchwords are “change” and “hope”, qualities that have absolutely nothing to do with the Punisher, I suspect that Frank will have to go back into an undisclosed location for awhile. But after studying him so much lately, I can honestly say I don’t hate him anymore. He’s a fascinating character that deserves respect and artists to do him justice. I just don’t want to live in Punisher-friendly times, if I can help it.

"The Watchman" Ends!

2009-02-03T19:57:00.001-08:00

Well, that wasn't a bad run for my first time as a paid columnist. I mean, it could've been better, sure, but the fact that I was able to do it for approximately eight months and complete 17 articles (and one unpublished one) is, by my standards, quite the accomplishment. I figured when Laura arrived, I wasn't gonna get shit done, so, yay for me.

And I think some of those articles are darn good. I got a lot of kudos for my Dark Knight review, and I think the Iron Man and Hancock ones aren't too bad. I think the one I'm proudest of is my Tick retrospective, if only because I know just how much blood, sweat and pixels went into writing it. They aren't all good. The Wanted one is kinda lame -- I was hamstrung by my intense loathing of both the source material and the resulting film, and the Heroes one is (sorry, David) phoned in, which, admittedly, is more effort than the show's writers are putting into it. (Seriously, I stopped watching it about six episodes ago, mostly for time reasons, so I had my wife, who's keeping current, summarized what I missed. Five minutes later she was done, and I was still waiting to hear the cool parts.) But still, all of that was more writing than I had ever done since college.

So what happened?

I'll tell you what happened.

The fucking Spirit happened.

I went to the first showing Christmas day to get a head-start on the column, thinking I could get it out in two, maybe three days. Two hours later, I walked out of the theater, and even though I couldn't admit it to myself at the time, I knew I was done. It's not that the movie's bad -- oh, it's terrible, make no mistake -- it's that it wasn't bad in any interesting way. For nearly a day, I thought about it and thought about it, without putting a single word down, looking for something, anything to say about it that the average viewer of Frank Miller's directorial debut wouldn't find insultingly obvious.

And I couldn't think of anything.

This probably wouldn't be an issue for most reviewers. My problem was that my mandate was to write a column, not reviews, so I always tried to find something larger to write about, something beyond whether it was good or bad. (I'm not saying I always succeeded, I'm just sayin'.) But with The Spirit, there was nothing there but a list of the atrocities Miller committed against Will Eisner's seminal creation. It might've been good therapy, but it wasn't a column.

This wasn't what killed The Watchman for me. What killed it was when I realized that my experience with The Spirit was likely to be norm, and I'd just been very, very lucky until then.

Maybe I could've rolled with that, found a way to work through it, but The Watchman was supposed to be a side thing -- y'know, something to bring in some dough while I work on my art, man. But it began to take all my time, mostly because I feel if I'm gonna get paid for a piece of writing, then I damn well better put everything I got into it. That's an honorable attitude, I suppose, but an exhausting one too, and ultimately something had to give. I decided it was The Watchman. David Steinberger and Peter Jaffe were excellent to work for, and I have to thank them again for the opportunity. I hope they find someone who can take over the job, and maybe be the Johnny Carson to my Jack Paar.

Thing is, The Watchman wasn't the only casualty of my decision to focus on my writing. I'm giving up movies as well. Not completely, of course; I wouldn't miss the big screen adaptation of Watchmen for the world (my one regret is that I won't be writing about it for the column), and if I can find the time, I'll happily go to the theater. But the days of trying to cram down 200-300 movies a year (mostly to participate in the Muriel Awards) are over. These days, most of my free time will actually go towards books -- my ignorance of the classics makes me functionally illiterate, and since I plan on writing novels along with screenplays, that oversight needs to be corrected, posthaste.

So here's the new deal. Martin and I are coming along quite nicely with our screenplays and novels, and as a result, we've decided (foolishly?) to reactivate Spitball!, our old screenwriting blog. We're not doing the "let's write a screenplay together through a blog!" thing -- we finally realized that that was kinda retarded. Instead, it's going to be a general purpose blog about writing. Or something. We're still figuring it out. Go there and read up and find out for yourself.

The future of this blog is a bit hazy. I'm going to publish my last Watchman piece on Punisher: War Zone that never went up on ComiXology. (Thankfully so; I realized about a week ago that I made a huge error of attribution in it. Apparently, there being more than one director named Jonathan is very confusing to me.) The hipster part of me wants to turn it into a Tumblr-style blog, but then the smart part of me wonders what the hell difference that would make. I'll probably put some thoughts on Zack Snyder's Watchmen movie up here, and maybe some Muriel Awards stuff, but since I've decided that movies aren't really a part of my life anymore, I really don't know what's going to happen with it.

Uh, welcome back. Thanks for reading.

"The Watchman" Debuts!

2008-04-02T19:26:00.000-07:00

(Well, it actually debuted ~~two weeks ago~~ a couple months ago, but I've been busy.)

In case you read this blog and don't follow me on Twitter (and if so -- who are you?), I've been hired on at the new comic book site Comixology to cover comic book-related movies, TV shows and DVDs. It's called The Watchman, and I'm pretty damn excited about it -- not to mention it gives me an excuse to actually get out and see stuff in the theater for once, dammit.

Here's what's gone up, and what's coming in the next couple months [UPDATED 7/27/08]:

3/19 The Story of a Return (a look at Persepolis, the comic and the movie)

4/2 Slouching Towards Metropolis (The DTV Justice League: The New Frontier)

4/16 Joey, Do You Like Movies About Superheroes? (Superhero Movie and four-color comedy; this should've been on 4/2, but I fucked up.)

5/7 He's So Money (The Iron Man movie)

5/12 He Ain't Heavy, He's Racer X (Speed Racer; first-run movies are now going up immediately on the Monday after their debut.)

6/2 The Paperback DVD Supplement (The Fountain + Southland Tales)

6/16 Anger Management (The Incredible Hulk)

6/30 The Weavers: Wasn't That A Waste of Time! (Wanted)

7/14 Feeling Bullish (Hellboy II: The Golden Army)

7/26 Windows on the World (The Dark Knight)

~~And of course, I'll be covering the other big superhero movies, like~~ ~~The Dark Knight, The Incredible Hulk, Hellboy II, and Hancock~~ [UPDATE 7/27/08: Done, except for Hancock, which'll likely be posted when the DVD arrives.] Also, near the end of the year, I'll have columns up covering the filmed work of Daniel Clowes, Frank Miller (keyed to The Spirit), and Alan Moore (keyed to Watchmen, natch).

So please head over there and give 'em a read, and poke around the main site, too. Tell 'em the Dingus sent ya.

The Whitest Kid You Know

2008-04-01T00:51:00.000-07:00

(Seen for the White Elephant Blog-a-Thon.)

1. 10 Tracks of Wack: Kickin' It Old Skool (2007, Harvey Glazer) is a painful, painful movie. Not because it makes the easiest, laziest jokes every single time, or because it's full of stupid plot points, although it's that too. No, it's painful because it revealed that I have something in common, deep down, with Jamie Kennedy.

2. There's nothing wrong with the premise. Hell, I kinda like the premise. 1986: 12-year old Justin loves breakdancing and 12-year old Jen, and wants to win the big talent show with his crew but has to defeat his nemesis Kip in a dance-off. He tries to seal the deal by doing a super-tricky move, and ends up falling off the stage and into a coma. Twenty years later, he wakes up to find his parents in debt, his friends mired in mediocrity, and Jen betrothed to Kip. Can he win the big dance contest with his out-of-shape friends, against a new generation of dancers, breaking to a new generation of music?

3. It's hard to be a white, male, middle-class rap fan and not feel on some level that, as much as you might love the music, that you're always on the outside of it. A slight inferiority complex. Am I really getting it? It's like there's an invisible circle around the music, and it's not impermeable, but it's damn uncomfortable to stay there. To stay there is to be conscious of one's whiteness, and white people don't like to be reminded they're white. In one of the funniest and truest moments in Office Space, Michael Bolton rocks the Geto Boys while driving to work, but turns it down when he passes a black man on the street. Michael enters the circle and then quickly, quietly, exits.

4. You have a thirty-two year old protagonist who's just woken up from a coma, and the last thing he remembers is being twelve. Do you a) show the moment when the protagonist realizes that he's now an adult, that his life has irrevocably changed, that his body has irrevocably changed? Or b) blithely ignore that, cut from your bearded and groggy protagonist to your now clean-shaven and fully-recovered protagonist and go straight for the "MTV doesn't play videos anymore" joke?

5. Jamie Kennedy is two years older than me. He's made a film -- written and directed by others, yet it feels like an intensely personal project -- where the old triumph over the young. In one scene, an old homeless man (filling in for Kennedy -- don't ask) literally pisses on some young black krumpers. In the final battle, Kennedy has to out-dance a kid -- a kind of prodigy, cocksure in a way I don't remember kids being, real or cinematic, in the 80s. He's of his time. The kids I grew up with turned into the so-called Generation X, the first slackers. To display that kind of confidence, that kind of arrogance -- it wouldn't happen. But then, at that time, we were listening to Arrested fucking Development.

6. Why don't I keep up on rap music? Why have I drifted so far from it? 1986: Run D.M.C. Beastie Boys, License to Ill. Whodini, "Fugitive/Funky Beat". That's where it starts for me. That's where it started for a lot of white guys my age. That's where the memories are. It's easy to say that once it got all gangsta, we fell away from it, that we were only in it for the "fun", but we listened to N.W.A. too. So that can't be it. Is it simply because it's a young person's music, and we are no longer young? Nobody in America wants to admit they're too old for anything, least of all self-proclaimed music fans.

7. I can't even get my head around the scene where Justin's friend Aki (Bobby Lee) refuses to get back into the crew and proceeds to lay out what is essentially the entire history of racist Asian caricature in film, only to take it all back.

8. Logically, your protagonist, having spent twenty years of his life in a hospital, will not have any clothes at home that fit him. You're making a comedy, so you think it would be funny if he walked around in the kind of cheesy and iconic 80s outfits that people who lived in the 80s didn't actually wear. (You'd be wrong -- it wouldn't be funny -- but that's not the point.) Do you a) show your protagonist going to some kind of ironic, "Hot Topic"-style boutique, maybe spar with some emo sales clerk and actually buy his outfits? Or b) just put him in whatever the fuck you want, a new outfit for each scene?

9. Michael Rosenbaum, who plays Kip, the villain, is the secret hero of the piece. He's a prick, yes, but he's an adult. He responds to the prodigy's unearned swagger by spraying breath freshener in his mouth. He's contemptuous of Justin and his manchild routine, as he rightfully should be. That he's the only actor that appears to be alive to the possibilities of performance is probably not coincidental.

10. Do us aging white guys hold onto 1986 so hard because we feel rap moved away from us, or did rap move on because we held on so tightly to it? Columbus sails here and "discovers" it, much to the bafflement of the Native Americans. A signal that started in The Bronx finds its way, eight years later, to Modesto, CA and we claim it as our own. Justin wins the contest, "our" music and culture winning over "theirs". Stupid fucking white man.

Muriel Awards 2006: Best Breakthrough Performance

2008-02-16T19:32:00.001-08:00

(A little over a year ago, I wrote that I'd be posting my ballot for the 2006 Muriel Awards. I said "coming soon", and a year's pretty soon if you look at it, y'know, from geological point of view. Anyway, I'm going to post last year's equivalent category when the 2007 appears on Paul's site, with a few notes, including but not limited to "what the hell was I thinking?".)

BEST BREAKTHROUGH PERFORMANCE
1. Ellen Page, Hard Candy
2. Rob Brydon, Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story
3. Martin Campbell, Casino Royale

Yeah, this looks about right. Page, of course is getting hosannas (and an Oscar?) for Juno, but as good as she was, Hard Candy is the performance -- especially amazing considering the film is utter garbage, revenge porn shot like a fashion spread by David Fincher's little brother. I didn't know anything about Brydon at the time... and I still don't know anything about him. I suspect he's a known quantity in the U.K., but he was a fresh face to me. It probably helped that he reminded me of a British actor I know and worked with and admire. Also: does the better Pacino. Putting Campbell down as a director was a no-no at the time (it was intended for actrons) but I'd like to think my innovative and out-of-the-box thinking helped blaze a trail for this year's winner, Ben Affleck. Really doe, considering his slick work of the past, I really thought there was a roughness to Royale, a willingness to try something new, and I wanted to honor that. Let's see if he follows through with the next Bond, I'ma Feel Tiny Bit Better Once I Kills You. Other contenders I had written down: Dax Shepherd, Idiocracy (Funny, but y'know, David Herman woulda been better); Marina Vovchenko, 4 (Strong work, but I suspect I went with what I thought were more well-known names rather than "throw my vote away", so to speak, and I'm thinking that was dumb) ; and John Gulager, Feast (um, what?).

The Muriel Awards are Coming! The Werewolves are Here!

2008-02-07T09:39:00.001-08:00

But enough about that small-time Onion thing. The real deal is upon us -- The Muriel Awards. The Muriels are run by one Paul Clark, a former mob hitman and commodities trader who, after a fateful screening of Jules et Jim, traded it all away for the life of a cinephile. Now he roams the internet, extolling the virtues of foreign cinema and There Will Be Blood, conquering the planet one convert at a time.

Oh, and the Muriels -- simply the best year-end poll not named after a Canadian screenwriter. Actually, better, because I'm involved. The fun begins February 13th, in honor of my daughter's birthday, over at Paul's site, Silly Hats Only. I'll be introducing this year's winner of the Best Body of Work, as well as a few words on my more... unusual nominees.

So: Muriel Awards. 2007. February 13th. Be there. Or be octagonal.

Necessarily The 3rd Annual Onion A/V Club Film Poll Ballot

2008-02-03T11:06:00.001-08:00

(First off, congratulations to Dread Pirate Steven Carlson and Paul Clark for getting quoted in this year's A/V Club Film Poll, and congratulations to the three guys who won Best in Show. Wish it was one of us, but whaddya gonna do. So here's my ballot. I was genuinely surprised I got two mentions [Joshua and Superbad] -- while this year's blurbs were definitely better than last year's [save the one the made the final cut], there was a lot of... effort that went into these. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, but you can see the sweat stains here. Generally, I prefer the more casual kind of blurb, akin to the Dread Pirate's killer "Sacajaweas" line from last year. But the ones I can do that with rarely, it seems, are the ones that make my Top 5. Oh well, boo fuckin' hoo.)

1. Joshua: Joshua takes the universal experiences of having a baby -- the sleepless nights, the emotional ups and downs, the constant gnawing knowledge that you've been charged with protecting the defenseless -- and flips it into a horror movie. That would normally be enough, but director Ratliff takes it further, and suggests that these same babies may grow up to hate you for no good reason. We don't know what fuels Joshua's step-by-step dismantling of his nuclear family -- many clues are offered, but they all feel like red herrings -- but I think the key is his father, played by Sam Rockwell. Rockwell lets his natural, swinging-dick persona inflect his portrayal of an upstanding family man, letting us sense the self-involved lout underneath the caring husband. Coupled with his finance-industry job, it becomes clear that Joshua's goal isn't the destruction of his baby sister, but her salvation -- from their gauche parents, the kind of people who would create someone like Joshua.

2. The Host: Raised in the shadow of Jaws, we've been led to believe -- nay, told -- that the best monster movies withhold the creature until the last third. Leave it to the audience's imagination as long as you can, right? Bong Joon-ho bravely and brazenly demolishes this notion about ten minutes into The Host. A giant mutant tadpole emerges from the Han River and munches on riverside picnickers, creating a panic, all in broad daylight. It's a bravura sequence, crisply edited and shot with a steady hand, and displays more thrills and twists in a matter of minutes than most movies can muster in two hours. That Bong follows this sequence with the story of one family's loss and subsequent triumph while maintaining the excitement of a monster movie is nothing short of masterful.

3. Superbad: We witness a kind of apocalypse in Superbad, but it's a quiet, invisible one. Seth and Evan's world is a self-contained bubble, where life is an ongoing conversation, moving from phone to car to high school with the fluidity and weightlessness of a dream, and not even soccer balls are allowed to impinge on it. While there have been accusations of misogyny, they don't belong to the film -- Seth and Evan's world ends, not because of some tantalizing siren tearing them apart, but because their dreamworld dissipates on contact with the real thing. All that's left is to step onto the escalator and go down, down, down into the deep dark waters of commitment. Welcome to adulthood, guys. Go buy something.

4. 28 Weeks Later: I had trouble breathing by the end of 28 Weeks Later. It wasn't the relentless pace or the dread that seeps into every frame, although those didn't help. No, it was the claustrophobia -- the film is all boarded-up cottages and underground military facilities, enclosed streets and subway tunnels. Even the open countryside feels like a nightmarish trap, everywhere to run but nowhere to hide. But the worst of it is in not one but two jaw-dropping sequences, where we're constrained to the sights of a rifle and forced to witness death, almost participating in it -- once from far away, and once sickeningly, perversely close. Despite a final image that feels like a studio-enforced attempt to leave it sequel-ready instead of the grim note of uncertainty that it needed, 28 Weeks Later shook me like no other film this year.

5. Once: I suppose it isn't surprising that, in this age of dogmatic fandom, some people would think that loving Once is an endorsement of MOR folk-rock. What is surprising is the notion that, since Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová's songs aren't the second coming of "Thriller" or "OK Computer", any success or goodwill their characters receive is an outrageous contrivance. (As if, say, Celine Dion never sold millions of records.) Sorry haters, but the songs aren't really the point; the point is what they mean to the characters and how they feel when they perform them. What makes the film heartbreaking is that, for all the fearless soul-baring they do in their music, they just can't seem to open up to each other. It's a movie where the words "I love you" are never spoken, and their absence is a crushing void.

Not Necessarily The 3rd Annual Onion A/V Club Film Poll Ballot

2008-01-25T10:00:00.000-08:00

(Note: I was going to give up on sending comments to the Onion film poll this year, because I'd tried to write some blurbs this past week and just ended up frustrated. But today's the due date, and I thought I'd give it a Hail Mary by writing out some ugly paragraphs first and then working with that, maybe winnowing it down and rewriting 'til I had something good, or 5pm rolled around, whichever came first. So I sat down and ended up the with the results below. By the time I got to the third entry, I found myself, unintentionally, writing in the style of early Vern, but I went with it anyway, because Vern is brilliant. [My writing isn't brilliant, that is, but Vern is.] But I didn't want this first draft to go to waste, especially since it includes a bit about running zombies I've been meaning to write for about 3 1/2 years now. Enjoy. Oh, and serious SPOILERS, of course.)

Joshua is great because it is ambiguous. Is the formula poisoned, or is the dad just paranoid. The kid probably killed the grandma and the dog, but we never see it. Sam Rockwell plays the dad, and he's great because he's still the same Sam Rockwell type character, but now with a family and he tries hard to be a family man, but you can tell he's still a swinging dick, like Zaphod. He has some fancy important Wall Street investor job, and he admits he would've beat up his son in elementary school. I think the kid isn't a sociopath at all, but is pretending to be one. Like the piano recital where he intentionally plays Twinkle Twinkle Little Star all atonally. We're supposed to think he's going to kill his little sister, but he's just trying to free himself from his family -- and her as well. He doesn't think they love him. It's possible they don't, really. I think he wants to save his sister from being raised by this family. He hates this upper class without the class thing. The irony is the parents do, too.

The Host is great because it is scary and funny, like Jaws. It is the 21st Century Jaws. It's cool because, unlike Jaws, they don't hide the monster for 2/3 of the movie because they couldn't get it to work. They show it right from the get-go, attacking people on a bright sunny day by the river, where everyone is picnicking. It's well done and hardly ever looks like crappy CGI. What does CGI mean anyway? Computer, Graphics, and then "I". Incorporated? Institute? Anyway, instead of three guys on a boat who have to work together, it's a family without a mom that needs to come together to defeat the monster after it takes the youngest daughter. People have compared the family to the one in Little Miss Sunshine, but the grandpa doesn't snort heroin. He does die, though, and it's real shocking and sad. I don't know why it's called The Host. There's a subplot about how the Monster has a disease that's infecting people, but it becomes pretty clear that it's not true. I think it's just a story concocted by the government so the American government can come in and test this biological bomb called Agent Yellow, which is funny because they may as well have called it Agent Kill The Slants. (the movie is Korean.) The bomb and the Monster are even shaped the same, and both are from the American government (because some dipshit U.S. scientist made a Korean intern dump a bunch of chemicals down the drain into the river, which made the Monster). But that part isn't really important, what's important is that the Family is fairly normal and they get past their sibling squabbles and try to get the little girl back, but there's a twist at the end that says that Family isn't about being related to people but the people you bring close to you and are important to you.

Superbad is great because it is very funny. You can look at the poster and know everything you need to know about the movie. Three high school kids, looking awkward with their mouths hanging open, looking anything but super or bad, but there's the title right there underneath them. It's about how these three kids try to get booze for a late-night party to impress some girls. What's great about it is that while the three kids are dorky in their own ways, there's none of that movie high school clique bullshit where there are Jocks and Nerds and Cheerleaders and Goths and Foreign Kids and it starts to look like a White Wolf role playing game. The girls might be a little more popular than the three guys, but it's kinda hard to tell. One of the guys has that distinct Revenge of the Nerds look, but he acts like he doesn't. In fact, his part of the movie is how he learns to unlock his inner Superbad. The part of the movie about the other two kids is about how they're the best of friends but they're gonna have to move away from each other and take a step into maturity. I love how they're such close friends, one of them can walk into the middle of the other's P.E. soccer game and start a conversation like they were in the hallway or something. And everybody yells at that kid like he's done it a million times before. And then that kid kicks the soccer ball out of bounds, like ah fuck you. The two kids are Michael Cera from Arrested Development and Jonah Hill. Cera is always great, but I was really impressed by this Hill guy. He supposedly was in Knocked Up, but I don't remember him at all. I guess he couldn't make up enough "wacky" improv shit and was cut from the movie. Maybe he was trying to actually play a character, I don't know. But here, you can't help but notice him. The word that gets thrown around here is "volcanic". Cuz he's fat and loud. But it's true. He metaphorically explodes. It's like a filthy teen version of Laurel and Hardy, with Cera's sad bird-like face and Hill all sputtering fury. Oh, and I almost forgot to say something about the two cops. They're awesome. They don't take their jobs seriously and fuck with people and share in-jokes like they were still in high school. It's clear that they are the future versions of Cera and Hill if they don't move apart and grow on their own. They'll be in jobs they aren't suited for, kinda joined at the hip and not going anywhere. Funny enough, the cops hardly ever interact with Cera and Hill.

28 Weeks Later is great because it's fucking scary as shit. It's a sequel to a zombie movie that I think was one of those painted-on-film deals, like the Beastie Boys' "Shadrach" video. This is just film, tho. It's about running zombies. I'll come out and say it: I like running zombies. I know people bitch about them all the time, but they're scary to me. I think history and technology has passed the slow zombie by. There was a time when we didn't have 24 hour news channels and iphones and phone cameras and shit, and back then, you could believe slow zombies could fuck up the world. If you wanted to tell somebody about the slow zombies, you had to use a phone with a rotary dial. You know, you would dial a number then have to wait for the thing to spin back around before you could select the next number. (that's where the word "dial" comes from.) So of course, some slow zombie would eat your ass before you could get that last "1" in "911" out. But if slow zombies attacked today, it would be terrible for about five minutes. But by the next five, it'd be over. The cops and the firemen would take them out, there'd be phone camera pictures on the internet, people would send text messages to each other -- OMG ZOMBEEZ LOL -- and that would be that. Zombies have to be able to be faster than the fastest communication devices available. But running zombies? Especially the ones in that Dawn of the Dead remake, where a dead body would turn into a zombie instantly? Fuck that, it's over. You can't text shit, they're on you already. These 28 X Later zombies are like that. One drop of blood gets on you and you're a zombie. And then they fucking run after you. See, I'm a fat guy and can't run, so this is terrifying. I'd be like Uter in that episode of the Simpsons where he's trying to get on the bus before the Civil War re-enactors get him, and he can't make it because he gets that pain in his side that fat people get when they run. I been there. It sucks. Not the beating up, just the side-pain thing.

Anyway, what makes this zombie movie so good is that a) it's really fucking scary, like I said, b) the acting is particularly good, especially Robert Carlyle who's a guy who left his wife to die by the zombies so he could get away. He's rewarded for his cowardice twice -- once by being set up as a big-wig for the reconstruction of England, and once by getting himself infected by his wife, who turns out is immune to the zombie disease but can carry it around in her eye. This is also one of those movies that plays with your expectation about who lives and who dies. The filmmakers know you know who the big stars are, who's being made out to look like a hero and a badass, who you think is going to be sympathetic, and then they proceed to fuck with you in a surgically-precise manner. So between the running zombies, the way they kill off people unexpectedly, and just the atmosphere of hopelessness, this is one incredibly tense flick, almost suffocatingly so. I watched it in broad daylight on my TV and was shaking by the end. Oh, and there's one horrifyingly great scene that shows this is probably one of those Iraq War metaphors (what with the U.S. army coming in and occupying a place it doesn't really understand), where the zombies get loose in the "safe" area and sharpshooters are ordered to start picking off people, even though they can't tell who's a running zombie and who's just running cuz they're panicked and don't want to turn into a running zombie. That's fucked up.

Once is a great movie because it's a love story without the love story. That is, it's an unrequited love story. Well, no, it's not exactly unrequited, but nothing happens. People compare it to Before Sunrise, but I never saw it, so couldn't tell you. I think the biggest sticking point for people about this movie is the music. See, it's about a street musician who has some songs and some big dreams who meets this Czech chick who plays piano, and they enter a musical relationship that helps them both. Some people seem to think that, unless the music is the second coming of Thriller or OK Computer or something, then the whole thing is hogwash. Like no one anywhere liked anything that wasn't less than perfect. Like Celine Dion and Creed never sold millions of records. I'll be honest -- the music isn't anything I would ever buy. I don't hate it, it's just not my thing. But again, that's not the point. The point is that it means a lot to the guy and girl who wrote it. It expresses the stuff they couldn't express otherwise, I mean if they could, they would and wouldn't bother with songs or chord changes or stuff like that. You can see it in their faces when they perform. That's the point of the movie. The best part of the movie is when they first get together in a music store and he teaches her a song he wrote. She picks up on it almost immediately, and he goes from sitting in a music store strumming a guitar to all-out performing, forgetting where he is, getting lost in the music. I've never heard of this Glen Hansard guy before, but what makes it great is that he seems like a real musician and not an actor, probably because he is a real musician and not an actor. He comes across like some guy you might meet in a pub (British for "bar"), just a really friendly and down to earth guy who's got his problems but is too nice to worry you with them. I'm not as sold on the girl -- it gets kinda blurry as to whether she's playing the foreigner who doesn't know English and the foreigner who doesn't know English and so is having trouble with her lines -- but she sure can play the pianninny and you get, after that music store scene, why he might fall for her.

The irony is that while they meld perfectly when they perform and open themselves up emotionally, they can't seem to do the same when not performing, and two people who belong together end up apart. All it probably would've took was an "I love you", but they couldn't pull the trigger. It's a sad movie, but not too sad, and I think people have a problem with that, too. Like the two should've been crazy, throwing shit at each other when they weren't performing, but we've seen that before. There's probably truth to that kind of drama, but that seems like movie bullshit to me. This is more realistic I think. I'd call it a mumblecore musical, but the word "mumblecore" doesn't exist and is not a marketing term devised by hipsters to create a buzz around indie movies shot for $4.99.

Catsup, Part 2

2007-12-23T09:14:00.000-08:00

Part two in my attempt to recap all the movies I haven't already written about. I'm allowed to keep it to one sentence if I want. Funny that hasn't happened yet.

The Return of Count Yorga (1971, Bob Kelljan) [68]: Kelljan died too early with too few features under his belt to get a Taratinoized rebirth, but dammit, he deserves it. His three vampire films -- Count Yorga, Vampire, Scream, Blacula, Scream, and this, the Yorga sequel -- are all crude and shocking bits of pulp that hit like barbed wire wrapped around a two by four. What Kelljan lacked in subtlety, he made up for in aggressiveness -- his slo-mo running vampires, shock cuts and freeze-frames feel like they're dipped in nightmare. But while the first Yorga is severely crippled by the awful lighting and lumpy screenplay, the sequel (written by Yvonne Wilder, who also plays the deaf-mute housekeeper) is comparatively elegant. There's a definite feminist subtext going on, with focus on the Mariette Hartley character and the gaslighting of the housekeeper (quite similar to the same year's Let's Scare Jessica to Death), that contrasts well with the sexist original. There are lulls, and it doesn't always hang together perfectly, but the set-pieces make up for it. Kelljan tops the first Yorga's tense, gut-wrenching ending with a climactic sequence that's both exciting and dread-inducing, ending with two of the most terrifying freeze-frames in horror film history. That Kelljan never got to grow as an artist, and that his contributions to the mechanics of suspense are ignored by modern filmmakers, is a fucking tragedy.

Day Night Day Night (2007, Julia Loktev) [76]: Key image for me was watching our confused emo protag try on different outfits for her big day, and briefly donning a jacket with "Baby Girl" on the back. She rejects the jacket, but the she never really shakes off the label -- despite the deathly seriousness of her task, she's still a kid, really, incapable of understanding that she's not doing this for any great cause (pointedly, we have no idea what the cause is), but simply because she hasn't figured out who she is (pointedly, we have no idea who she is). This would've been impossible for Loktev to convey (at least, not without making a terrible film) without lead Williams, who does more with her body before six a.m. than most actors do all day. The first half is the best, all controlled, claustrophobic angles, yet comforting in their directness, not unlike the obscure cause that's been embraced by these masked men. Then she's let out into the "real world", the camera goes handheld, strangers start looking at the camera, and the tension, rather than heightened, is diffused (defused?) by the hustle and bustle. It's air squeaking out of the balloon, and while that's mostly the point -- the group's ideology crumbling against the chaos of modern existence, a life intended to be meaningful through sacrifice that suddenly loses meaning in the anonymous crowds -- it's still a bit of a drag. Good job with that last shot, though.

Zombie (1979, Lucio Fulci) [34]: Boring boring cool cool boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring cool cool how'dtheydothat cool boring boring boring boring boring gross gross gross boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring boring nice nice nice boring boring boring boring stupid stupid stupid boring boring boring boring boring boring dumb dumb oh thank god it's over.

Fright Night (1985, Tom Holland) [71]: Yeah, I know. This has 80s written all over it, from the hair and clothes, to the way the narrative is honed-down, in the Syd Field manner, to its bare essentials -- there can't be more than eight characters in the entire thing. Still, it enraptured me when I was 13 and still does today. Probably has something to do with a fondness for the Savant-as-Hero, the guy whose head full of useless trivia becomes a weapon against monsters. (Today we'd recognize both Charlie and Evil as a bona-fide geeks, but the movie can only situate them, vaguely, as outsiders, which is probably why we never meet any other kids, apart from Amy). But a monster movie is only as good as its monster, and Chris Sarandon's suave and menacing neighborhood vampire is just as worthy of an Aurora model kit as the Tall Man in my opinion. (Love how the film demonstrates his toughness -- stripping the wood off a banister with his fingernail.) And the disco scene, while a homage to Polanski's ballroom scene in The Fearless Vampire Killers, outdoes its predecessor in sensuality and just plain cinematic snap. Watch Amanda Bearse's Amy become a woman over the course of a cheesy synth-pop number! (Must I turn in my Hipster's Learning Permit if I admit that I found Bearse, pre-Married With Children shrew, kinda hot? Is it significant that we now know she's a lesbian?)

1408 (2007, Mikael Håfsröm) [22]: Here's what's wrong with this movie: the haunted room is omnipotent. It can do anything it wants with Cusack; he's powerless. How can there be any meaningful conflict if one character has literally all the power? The movie tries to make up for this lack of conflict by making the experience about whether Cusack will come to terms with his dead daughter, but you know what? That's not horror. That's Lifetime. Oh, and don't get me started on the Jackson/Cusack scene. Suckas act like it's the second coming of True West or some shit, when it's just a frickin' speed bump on the way to the CGI. Oh, and don't get me started on the CGI. There's a ghost from the thirties, and one from the fifties? Let's make them look like scratched up B&W film and Technicolor, respectively! Woo! Fucking hacks.

30 Days of Night (2007, David Slade) [65]: Here's what's wrong with this movie, and really, it's the only thing that's wrong (without necessarily implying that the rest is "right"): Thirty days is just too damn long for drama. The film does a terrible job of showing how weeks of avoiding vampire-induced death affects the characters physically and mentally, and just a terrible job of demonstrating the passing of time in general. (A "Day 15" title card just don't cut it.) There's very little difference between Day 3 and Day 30, and considering the ferociousness of the vampires, it starts to beggar belief that anyone would make it past day two. But then, what about the vampires? You tell me they got thirty days to eat everyone, and they haven't razed the entire town in a week? What, did they break into someone's house and find a copy of Berlin Alexanderplatz and think, "Well, when are we gonna be back here?" Yet, change the title to "Three Days of Night", and you got a winner. But I guess that isn't horrifying enough.

Hostel Part II (2007, Eli Roth) [59]: So Martin suggested that David Poland was paid by someone to have a shit fit over this, and damn, he might be onto something. Feels like Roth lost his nerve -- he could've really earned that shit fit, but instead backs away from most of the carnage (I can't even remember what happened to Bijou Phillips). All of the ideas here are good ones, from the gender switch to the focus on the torturers' perspective to the "money talks" ending. (Probably the best idea is simply showing the contrast between the boys' trip in the first movie -- an abbreviated sex comedy -- and the girls' trip, which is threatening long before they reach the hostel.) But Roth ultimately doesn't know what to do with his ideas, so the whole thing lacks any kind of depth. Everyone hits their marks, torture set pieces come and go (quickly), and then it's over. Bart tries valiantly to make his character work but can't make his third act change of heart believable. Best scene isn't even in the movie: on the DVD, check out the deleted scene "Rape Shower". Yeah, yeah, I know, sounds tasteless, but it's just two of the women talking. It's pretty funny and lends credence to the rumor that Tarantino has a hand in Roth's scripts.

Catsup, Part 1

2007-12-20T06:55:00.000-08:00

Whoah! Dusty in here. Smells funny, too. That's what happens when you leave a blog sitting out for so long, I guess.

Gonna attempt to cover all the movies I've seen since the last update, going in reverse chronological order, why not. Everything will get at least a sentence, in the approved Michael Atkinson mode, but that might be it.

WARNING: Some films may be SPOILED ROTTEN, of course.

No Country For Old Men (2007, Joel Coen & Ethan Coen) [82]: Terrific film, yada yada yada. Let's get to the real debate: Who's the protagonist? Now, understand that I'm talking about "protagonist", a pretty specific and wonky term (so be warned), used here in the context of studying screenplay structure, so I'm not talking "main character", "key character", "lead" or "supporting" characters or anything like that. And I say it's the Brolin character, if only for the simple fact that there's no story without him. The inciting incident (finding the money) and the first act twist (getting caught by the drug dealers) are about him. Without Brolin, Bardem has nothing to do but flip his gorgeous locks, and Jones can only putter around and philosophize. (Oh wait, that's what he does anyway.) That's what makes the last part so discombobulating. It's almost like the film itself starts looking, across space and time, for a protagonist to hang itself on, like a amnesiac child on a cosmic quest. Are you my protagonist? No, I'm just the wife of the protagonist, a side character. Are you my protagonist? No, I'm the antagonist, and all I can do now is kill side characters and get offed myself, now that I have no purpose. Are you my protagonist? I should've been, sonny, but I couldn't find the nerve.

(Of course, Martin McClellan will come in and destroy this argument. And God knows what Todd Alcott's gonna say when he gets around to it.)

The Mist (2007, Frank Darabont) [77]: Nice to see Darabont back to doing disreputable genre work, even if it is another goddamn Stephen King book. Script isn't as tight as his job on the 1988 remake of The Blob, and the "Do We Need The First 10 Pages" question rises again. (I left the theater during a preview to complain about the volume -- the trailer for Awake fuckin' shook the seats -- and when I got back, the family was outside with the tree. Didn't get a proper intro to the characters, but plotwise, nothing lost.) Tense and exciting, but Acting saves the day -- Braugher's character is incomprehensible, but holds it together through sheer talent, and Harden makes an intolerable character tolerable by playing to the cheap seats. Neither performance should work, but do. And great cinematography as well -- verité in the accepted shaky-cam style, but keeping spacial integrity, so fuck you Greengrass. Unfortunately, the ending doesn't work -- the decision comes too quickly, too easily, and then lead Jane is left to express something that's quite frankly inexpressible, yet gives us a rather unimaginative and empty Wail O' Anguish anyway. But 50s-inspired giant bugs are good enough.

Spider-Man 3 (2007, Sam Raimi) [73]: Why the hate, yo? So much better than number two, which was so tonally inconsistent it may as well have been South Korean. Feels like a random issue of the comic book, pulled off the rack circa '81, with a central conflict (Parker and Mary Jane's trouble relationship) that sings compared to the previous one, which was about... what was that about, again? Bitching about the landing of the black goo is stupid; it's clear that Pete's gone dark long before the suit does, making its arrival the period at the end of the sentence. Grace and Howard are well-cast, the former for his ingratiating smarm, the latter for her empty-headed cheer.

Hairspray (2007, Adam Shankman) [55]: More cheeky than I was expecting -- Watered down, if you will -- but Blonsky is awful. She has one look (naive wonderment), one move (a shoulder shake), and no presence at all. High school musical, indeed. Speaking of which, that Efron kid is the real deal (so I get why all the gay five year olds are crazy about him), and I like Bynes all grown up, thank you very much. (Not sure about the deep tan, though -- a foreshadowing of her character's sexual awakening, or just too long at Desert Sun?) Also: no dedication to Divine? For shame, filmmakers.

Mr. Brooks (2007, Bruce A. Evans) [57]: Hi, my name's Bruce A. Evans, and I have directed a feature film called Mr. Brooks. Perhaps you'd like to hire me to direct your next film? I can do low-key drama (roll scene of Costner and wife bantering in car), psycho thriller (roll scene of Costner killing couple in bed), action (roll scene of Moore fighting killers in van), stylized action (roll scene of Moore shoot-out in hallway) and wish-fullfillment (roll scene of Dane Cook getting throat slashed). And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Remember, when you think "directing", think Bruce A. Evans.

Grave of the Vampire (1974, John Hayes) [37]: I've seen this shitty movie three times. Three times. Why. Why. It's Danny Peary's fault, actually -- the glowing write-up in Guide for the Film Fanatic writes checks the movie can't cash, especially in the awful public domain version that seems to be the only way to see it. It's a good premise, admittedly. (Note to writer, Sopranos creator David Chase: Make this your next TV show.) But the Poverty Row production values, stiff acting, and point-and-shoot direction from John "Fomaldehyde Zombies" Hayes just sinks the entire show. One good bit, which we can blame on Chase: the half-vampire son opts to romance not the attractive, age-appropriate woman but the matronly, less pretty one -- yet it's clear to us, if not him, that he's just trying to get back at Vampire Dad.

Interview: Dan Gildark & Grant Cogswell of Cthulhu

2007-06-20T15:22:00.001-07:00

(This interview was originally done for ScreenGrab, and it appears on that site in a shortened form here. Many thanks to Peter Smith for letting me crosspost!)

Dan Gildark and Grant Cogswell premiered their debut film, Cthulhu, at the Seattle International Film Festival this last Thursday. A poetic adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", Cthulhu tells the story of Russ, a gay professor who returns to his hometown for his mother's funeral, only to discover that his family, and the town, conceal a terrible secret. Shot by cinematographer Sean Kirby (Zoo and Police Beat), It's one of the few recent horror films that doesn't draw directly (and solely) from the U.S. government's recent embrace of torture as foreign policy. Which isn't to say it's apolitical -- on the contrary, it's downright angry, finding the connections between religious extremism, homophobia, suburban sprawl, and global warming, but expressing them through the metaphor of Lovecraft's cosmic monsters.

Director Gildark is a graduate of the Northwest Film Center's film program in Portland, Oregon, and, according to the Seattle alt weekly The Stranger, created a series of film clips that MTV allegedly stole for the opening of 120 Minutes. Screenwriter Cogswell is a poet and author, and is the subject of Phil Campbell's book, Zioncheck for President: A True Story of Idealism and Madness in American Politics, which details his failed run for a seat on Seattle's City Council.

How did you meet?

DG: Those sex pages in the back of The Stranger. (Laughs) We've known each other for about fourteen years now. We met when we were both driving the bicycle cabs down on the waterfont. We became good friends, stayed friends over the years, went our different ways, got reacquainted...

GC: In 2003, my girlfriend broke up with me, I lost my job and my apartment, and I was living on his floor. The Iraq war was starting, and we were watching it on a little cheap black and white TV, which made it feel like Night of the Living Dead. I was at a point in my life when I was very open to doing whatever was next, and he said "I want to make a movie and I want you to write it." If I'd known how much work it would be I probably would have said no!

It's clear from Cthulhu that you had a lot to say, politically. Why did you decide to adapt Lovecraft for that purpose?

GC: We wanted to make a piece of art that said something about our alarm over the political condition of the country. And we wanted people to see it, we wanted it to be visceral and intense, but as a horror film, we didn't want it to be the same ol' kind of horror film, and stuff like Hostel -- that's torture porn. But I didn't feel there was a story coming on in me, so we started looking for things to adapt. I immediately gravitated to Lovecraft, who I read for the first time in 2000. I think he really reflects a kind of apocalyptic flavor of the times. My favorite story was "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", and the one that I felt would work best. Some are more atmospheric or beautifully written, but they're not movies. "The Colour Out Of Space" is his best story, but it's not a movie.

It seems to me that "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" has one of the Lovecraft's stronger protagonists, because what happens to him has such a personal cost, which you can't necessarily say about the other ones.

GC: Absolutely. What the story reminded me of, more than anything else, was friends of mine who are gay, who come from these backwoods towns and then escape to the city to make an adult life. And then, fifteen or twenty years later, they're in their thirties, and a parent dies, or the sister has a child, or whatever, and they have to go back and engage with that family and that place. One of Lovecraft's major themes, and I think "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" expresses this best, is the horror of heredity. So I was writing from that feeling of threat, but also the issues of heredity, of anxiety about having children, and I decided to merge the two things.

I also think it's interesting because Lovecraft was very conservative, so to take that and flip it...

GC: Lovecraft thought, perhaps correctly, that immigrants coming to New England were eroding the local culture that he felt a loyalty to. I don't personally have a problem with that (laughs). What I find eroding our world is the militarism and the entertainment state and the willful, blissful ignorance of global warming, which is really gonna bite us in the ass. It's not gonna make the planet unlivable, but it's gonna make it hard to live and civilization is going to be in a lot of trouble in the next 50, 60 years.

Unless you happen to be a fish person.

GC: Right!

Do you consider Cthulhu do be a horror film or a gay film?

DG: Yes. (Laughs)

Are you comfortable, then, with it existing in a kind of middle space?

DG: The genre films I'm most interested in are the ones that are indescribable, that move back and forth across genres. They aren't true horror in the traditional sense; they kind of skirt the edges. To call our film a gay film is misleading, but to call it a straight horror film is misleading as well, so it really is kind of a bastard version of those genres, which I'm totally comfortable with. It makes it hard to market, but anything interesting takes from different fields and doesn't try to be a purist art form.

Lovecraft is usually associated with the East Coast -- Massachusetts, Rhode Island. Why did you choose to film in the Pacific Northwest?

GC: Well, we live here, of course, but it's bigger than that. The film grew out of the town of Astoria, Oregon, at the mouth of the Columbia river. It's the oldest American town on the Pacific. It was founded right after Lewis & Clark came through. It's old, it's weird, it's creepy, it used to be a lot more important and now kind of a little meth town. Very Lovecrafty.

Furthermore, Diabolus Rex, the head of the American Church of Satan, grew up in Astoria. He dresses in immaculate black Victorian goth clothing, and he's got two four-inch long subcutaneous horns in his forehead. And he's really the nicest guy you could possibly imagine -- he does work with pitbull rescue and stuff. At the first public reading of the script in Portland, he approached me and asked, "Where are you filming this?" and I said, "Astoria" -- we were picking out locations as we were writing it. He said: Astoria is Innsmouth, and I'll tell you why. And he listed off forty-some parallels between Astoria and the town of Innsmouth, all true. In the the story and the movie, there are hidden tunnels underneath the town. Turns out, when Diabolus was a kid, his bedroom, which was in the basement of the house, entered into a series of tunnels the Chinese built in Astoria. I thought I'd made that up.

DG: It was very interesting for me to film the Northwest in general because everything you see is either L.A. or New York. To see imagery of another part of the country is a huge production value. A lot of productions are afraid of rainy locales because of continuity, but when it rains all the time -- there's your continuity. When I first started talking to my DP, we talked in terms of imagery we both understand and filmmakers we both liked, but we also talked about the painting that kept coming to mind: Goya's Laocoön. Very blue and grey. It has a very Northwest vibe to it.

GC: Naked guys wrestling with snakes-- that's what the movie's about!

In my previous post on Cthulhu, I wrote, "This is also the film that gained some notoriety by casting Tori Spelling, which turns out to be a wry joke if you're familiar with Lovecraft's "The Shadow Over Innsmouth". Was that intentional?

DG: The "Innsmouth look"? That's what you're alluding to?

Yeah.

GC: I think she's the sexiest woman I've ever met in my life! I really do. She's an unsual looking person, but there's a lot of unusual looking people.

DG: I knew she'd be right for the role. She can be funny, and serious, and we needed this seductress to come in. It's kind of a campy role, but we needed someone who could also take it seriously, and have the weight to carry it. I feel like she's a good actress who's been severely overlooked. She does these crappy Lifetime shows all the time, but she honestly could be a major contender and serious actress if she chose to do that.

GC: It's kind of a minor role, but it really is the pillar of the movie, in a way. If it were done badly, it would wreck the movie.

You're currently looking for distribution.

DG: Hopefully after the premiere we'll have some conversations. Know anybody? (Laughs)

Grindhouse

2007-04-09T11:06:00.000-07:00

Some really quick notes about Grindhouse (2007, Robert Rodriguez/Rob Zombie/Edgar Wright/Eli Roth/Quentin Tarantino) [overall: 81; Planet Terror: 66; Death Proof: 87]:

1. All of those complaining that it isn't grindhousey enough to be called Grindhouse: y'all're retarded. No one gives a shit, and more importantly, no one will give a shit in 50 years. It doesn't matter one fuck what it's called; all that matters are the films therein. Todd Haynes fucked up the Sirkian crane shots in Far From Heaven -- boo fucking hoo. Still a fine movie. You want a simulation, go play a computer game.

2. All of those complaining that the dialogue parts of Death Proof are boring: y'all're retarded. All of those complaining about Death Proof in general: y'all're fucking retarded. Recognize.

3. This is the first time I've enjoyed the presence of Jeff Fahey.

4. Rob Zombie, I love you, but put some effort into it next time. This isn't a White Zombie video. It's gotta look like a movie.

5. Now that that's out of the way, let's talk about what's really shocking: I think I finally understand Eli Roth. He thinks he's a horror director, he's been positioned in the media as a horror director... but he aint a horror director. He's a comedian. More than that, he's the straight guy equivalent of John Waters. This isn't to say that Roth's career -- which, to date, is one long "grosser than gross" joke -- has any kind of subversive quality (that straight guy thing again), simply that, like early Waters, he's out to film shit so disgusting, so offensive, that you simply have to laugh. (There's some pretty sick stuff in Planet Terror, but nothing can top Roth's climactic image in Thanksgiving.) While I don't think I've neccessarily underrated Cabin Fever -- I'm sure it's still crap -- maybe I've approached it, and him, all wrong.

Apologies to those who already figured this shit out.

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America Make For Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan

2007-03-29T13:31:00.000-07:00

A few short notes on Borat (2006, Larry Charles) [78]:

1. I assumed, after the huge hype, the blockbuster receipts, and the inevitable backlash, that this would never live up to the acclaim and derision. I was very, very wrong. Consistently hilarious -- they had me with "The Running of the Jew".

2. But, as Mike D'Angelo said of A Mighty Wind, there's something to be said for a joke that's been written over an improv. Not that there's anything wrong with Sacha Baron Cohen's improv skills -- how he's able to find just the right (wrong) thing to say and still look like a naif speaks to an incredibly twisted, brilliant mind -- but it's the stuff that's been planned (like the infamous nude wrestling scene) that really kill.

3. And yet -- while the nude wrestling gets all the hosannas, the scene that really stuck with me was the frat boy encounter. Not so much for what they say -- although the bald racism and misogyny is shocking -- but how the filmmakers manage to incorporate the improvised scene into the narrative. (Borat is on a journey to find and wed Pamela Anderson, and the frat boys disabuse him of the notion that she's a virgin.) Charles and Cohen set up a traditional romantic narrative arc -- boy goes after girl on a pedestal -- and let it grind up against the ugly flipside of that, the madonna/whore complex that both supports that narrative and undermines it at the same time. Pretty bracing stuff.

4. Also, this isn't satire. Sorry people. It's just a simple comedy, a road trip not unlike, uh, Road Trip, that just happens to have some modern comedic devices. If you're concerned about "regular folks" ambushed on film, two things: a) Allen Funt, and b) this has more to do with our increasingly mediated culture than any "contempt" on part of the filmmakers. If you don't like it, then make an effort to get rid of MySpace, camera phones, and Bush's warrantless surveillance program. Oh, you can't? Then tough, deal with it.

5. Most Valuable Supporting Player: Ken Davitian. I can only imagine what the conversation at his audition was like.

For The Ages: ScreenGrab Posts (3/4/07 - 3/10/07)

2007-03-23T11:31:00.000-07:00

After last week's frenzy of posts, things slow way down as the reality of Laura Mae takes hold. This week, I only have one solo post, a personal history of the Watchmen movie. Watchmen is my favorite book of all time, and I've been watching the progress (and non-progress) of this project for nearly twenty years; now that it looks like Zack Snyder is going to do it for realsies, it seemed like a good opportunity to ponder over the various versions that were never to be.

Also, ScreenGrab ran the Top 10 Most Dangerous Films of All Time; I contributed to the write-up on Orson Welles' It's All True.

300

2007-03-17T11:29:00.000-07:00

A few short notes on 300 (2007, Zack Snyder) [40]:

1. Fascistic, misogynistic, racist, homophobic... but ridiculously so, so that what should be offensive loops back around into the hilarious. Don't know about you, but I find it hard to take conservative political positions seriously from guys in leather speedos and capes.

2. Unfortunately, while the excesses of Frank Miller's Sin City are redeemed by the (accidental) leap into camp, nothing so alchemical happens here -- 300 remains earthbound. Despite that 90% (or whatever) of the film is CGI, there's never any sense that anything could happen. While Sin City convincingly created a noirish world, this looks like half-naked people wandering in front of matte paintings, proclaiming sub-Shakespearean dialogue. There's no feeling that these shots conspire to create a world; instead, it's like each scene exists in a bubble. You could argue that it accurately replicates reading a comic, each page and frame in isolation from the other, but then I'd ask, why would you want to replicate such a static medium?

3. Haven't read the comic, so I don't know how much can be placed at Miller's doorstep; nevertheless, I've said it before and I'll say it again: he's a terrible, terrible writer. He's the Ulitmate Fanboy in a way -- for him, the Manichean worldview can always be blacker and whiter, and the heroes can never be badass enough. Will the scrappy army of potters and blacksmiths be allowed a bit of dignity as they fight side-by-side with the Warrior Born? Jesus, of course not. What about the hunchback guy, whom we'll call Rudy? He'll pop up again when everyone leasts expects it and help save the day, right? Nope, outcasts need not apply. And this is what makes Miller such a hack: as cliché as it might be for the little guys to beat all odds, there's a reason why it's rock-solid storytelling. Impossible obstacles stacked against a barely-capable protagonist creates audience empathy. If you don't have that -- if all you have are Spartan badasses who can kill any foe, until, for the sake of an ending, they can't anymore -- you're left with arrogant, boring characters.

4. So what does this mean for Snyder's upcoming Watchmen adaptation? I have no fucking idea. It's still difficult to get a reading on Snyder as a director. This is being generous, but he's almost like a throwback to the studio days of the 40s, a journeyman director who gets out of the way of the story he's telling. Which is good news: if he's willing to let all the godawfulness of the 300 source material stand on its own, then presumably he'll let the virtues and pleasures of Watchmen do the same. Except: the journeymen directors of the 40s that we remember and admire, like Ford and Hawks, still managed to leave a personal stamp on the material. I'm not seeing that from Snyder, but maybe we just need some time and distance to gain some perspective.

5. I liked how Xerxes uses armies from all around the world to take out the Spartans, and when that fails, he's not above reaching into the Lord of the Rings and Hellraiser franchises to shore up the numbers. That's a leader who thinks outside the box.

Bonus! I'm going to go out on a limb and say that if, as reported, Gerard Butler is cast in the Watchmen movie, he'll be playing Jon Osterman, a.k.a. Dr. Manhattan. They'll do some funky body-scan type-thing on him and make Dr. M a CGI creation, of course, but everything else will be him. Reasoning? Well, he kind of looks like Osterman, and I don't think he has the force of presence required to portray the Comedian. You really need to feel the weight of history on the Comedian, and I can't see Butler getting that across. Now, Doc Manhattan, the guy who starts human, then starts to lose those qualities (along with his clothes) until he's kind of a blue blank slate? That I can see.

(Now watch, they'll make him Nite Owl or something.)

For The Ages: ScreenGrab Posts (2/25/07 - 3/3/07)

2007-03-03T14:49:00.000-08:00

A really active week for me, considering baby Laura is only about two weeks old.

This week, I have three YouTube videos with the loose theme of "looking for horror in the wrong places", each with a little bit of commentary: an episode of The Smurfs, a Greg Kihn Band video, and a Sprite commercial. I also found a really cool up-close look at the various media used in Children of Men, and two pieces of news/commentary, one about a possible upcoming Writer's Guild strike, and one about a local (Seattle) controversy surrounding a chopped-up movie review. Finally, there's a short heads-up post about a site that offers public domain movies free for the downloading.

Get readin', y'all.

For The Ages: ScreenGrab Posts (2/18/07 - 2/24/07)

2007-02-24T14:28:00.000-08:00

Sorry about the lack of new posts, folks. As you may have heard, I'm writing posts for the film blog ScreenGrab, and getting paid for it to boot. There will be new material here -- I swear on my mother's unoccupied grave. (Ideally, I'll be seeing both Zodiac and The Host in the movie theaters for film very soon.) But, to mark time until that day, I'll be posting weekly roundups of my ScreenGrab posts complete with links, so you won't have to bother with that Ebiri bitch.

Unfortunately, my debut week only included one post: a new column entitled The Film Buff's Book Shelf, wherein I review Kim Newman's classic (imo) survey of horror film, Nightmare Movies.

So far, this is the only entry in this "series", but I'm working on a piece about Bill Warren's Keep Watching The Skies that should pop up the week of March 11. Keep watching the blog!

The Descent, Silent Hill, The Wicker Man (2006)

2007-02-19T15:02:00.000-08:00

I was the only person, it seems, who was underwhelmed by Neil Marshall's Dog Soldiers. Yes, it was a pretty nifty werewolf flick considering the low-budget, but in terms of characters, story, etc., it came across as boilerplate as the Aliens-but-with-werewolves descriptor made it sound. (It was no Ginger Snaps. Hell, it wasn't even Ginger Snaps 2.) So despite the hype that preceded The Descent (2006, Neil Marshall) [50], I was skeptical.

And for about 80% of its running time, I was pleasantly surprised. The beginning is a little trying, going through the motions of lead character Sara's backstory trauma that's both shorthand and laborious. (Here's an idea, filmmakers: if, five minutes into your film we jump ahead "one year later", how about starting the actual movie one year later?) But then Marshall introduces his other female characters, and for awhile, it works -- a horror film with plausible (if movie-ish) women at its center, not teenagers or bimbos. Not even a nude scene! (Joe Bob Briggs must be apoplectic.) So, even as our quintet of spelunkers find themselves trapped in an uncharted cave due to the hubris of their leader, even as they find themselves stalked by carnivorous ghost-white mole men, Marshall keeps it low-key, never turning the women into invulnerable action heroes nor panicky headcases. And Marshall demonstrates an increasingly firm grip on suspense and action tropes. The monsters are probably unnecessary, but I was impressed by how genuinely scary Marshall makes them, with nothing more than make-up and camera tricks -- no small feat in our jaded, all-CGI-all-the-time age. Yet, while most have commented on the first reveal of the creatures (and it is well done), for me, the moment when one of the women attempts to bridge a chasm with ropes while hanging from the rocky ceiling by her fingers was the white knuckle scene du jour.

But then, in the last fifteen minutes or so, Marshall manages to lose me, not once, not twice, but thrice. (NOTE: Although anyone who reads my shit knows I'm pretty loose with the spoilers, I'm giving the warning here anyway, cuz these are big ones.) The first time is the resolution of a subplot between Sara and expedition leader Juno. In the beginning of the film, there's a quick shot of Juno and Sara's husband that clearly communicates that, yes, these two are having an affair. Amazingly, this is the only time that Marshall reveals this information, other than a throwaway line of dialogue later on from Juno, where she states that she "lost just as much" in Sara's car accident as Sara.

But then these moments of audience goodwill and respect are overwhelmed by that oft-used lazy bit of screenwriting, the accidental killing. While fighting off the creatures, Juno is surprised by Sara's friend Beth, and Juno accidentally slits Beth's throat. I really hate this bit of storytelling; I'm not sure I've ever seen it used where it felt natural and not like the writer dicking around with the audience. But that's not what lost me. What lost me was the film's insistence on making this killing which was clearly unintentional, some kind of moral referendum on Juno. Yes, she lies about it to the others, but one would think that, with monsters on their heels, it's forgivable. But no, there's a whole tortured sequence of events to bring Sara up to speed on Beth's demise, and Juno is increasingly painted, not as a adventuresome woman who made a mistake, but a villain.

And so what does Sara do when it's just the two of them left, trapped in the dark cave with a horde of monsters coming after them? Why, she slices Juno's leg and leaves her to die, of course. (Because saving it for when they make it out alive through teamwork would be too easy.) Any sympathy for Sara, any admiration for her strength gets tossed right out the window. I really have no conception of what Marshall was thinking with this. It simply isn't supported by anything in the movie, and comes across as audience-pandering bloodlust -- the seducer, the adventuress, the independent woman must die.

Then, to add insult to Juno's unnecessary leg wound, we are treated to Sara's escape from the cave and return to the car... which is a fucking "it was all a dream" fake-out. She's actually still in the cave, and hallucinates that she's with her dead daughter as the mole men howl from the darkness, minutes from their prey. So not only is our female protagonist consumed with jealous, homicidal rage, she's also so mentally weak, so fragile in a stereotypically "feminine" way that she suffers a psychotic break at the moment when the chips are down. Can you imagine an action movie where Schwarzenegger suffers a similar mental breakdown at the moment when he's about to save the girl and kill the villain? So what at first appears to be a action-horror movie with somewhat progressive elements turns out to be the same old shit. Fuck that.

I was also wary about Silent Hill (2006, Christophe Gans) [62], and rightfully so. Horror film? Check. Video game adapatation? Check. Radha Mitchell? Check. (I have no problem with the lovely Ms. Mitchell, but damn, she shows up in a lot of crap.) But for once, the conventional wisdom is wrong. The movie pretty much had me in its opening scene, a search for a sleepwalking little girl that's set in a series of locations that, when taken individually, seem natural enough, but when put together create a wonderful imaginary landscape: an overpass over a tiny creek that's just yards away from a yawning abyss. In other words, danger and madness lie just beyond the safety of the quotidian.

A few minutes later, Mitchell's Rose and her sleepwalking daughter Sharon have a picnic, an awkward scene that feels like it was written in a foreign language and then translated into English. By the time it ended with them falling asleep and then waking up again -- blatantly signifying that what we're about to see is, if not literally a dream, then something with the logic of one -- it dawned on me that, even before the gore arrived, I was watching a big budget, art-directed-within-an-inch-of-its-life Lucio Fulci movie.

So in other words, what follows is only for those with a taste for nonsensical oneiro-horror, like mid-period Argento or the first Phantasm. There's a reason why the town of Silent Hill is stuck in some kind of hellish other dimension, why Rose and Sharon are drawn there, why there's a child named Alessa who looks identical to Sharon, but really, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. And as Dread Pirate Steven Carlson points out, when we learn the solution to the central mystery, we belatedly realize that, logically, there's no good reason why Rose should be threatened with bodily harm, which seriously undercuts the horror of the premise.

Yet, while logic flies out the window, I bought into it emotionally, which is the only real requirement for oneiro-horror. (This is what separates your House by the Cemeteries, with its silly scares, from your Phantasms, where the fear of abandonment fuels every moment.) Regardless of the ill-concieved scenes (why is there a secret room behind a painting in a hotel?), the characters, however two-dimensional, are always on-point emotionally. Steve's point doesn't bother me because, while Alessa, the wronged child at the center of Silent Hill (both the movie and the place) needs Rose to exorcize her from her living nightmare, she's also an embodiment of unthinking rage, and she's going to strike at anyone who isn't safe within the church, regardless of their intentions. It's the characters' emotions that shape this world, not any fealty to notions of "correct" screenwriting.

I'll admit that part of my emotional involvement comes from the look of the thing. It's beautiful and evocative, even when showing a bent in half man crawling through a lavatory on his hands, leaving some kind of spreading rust disease in his wake. I particularly liked the shots of Rose driving through the wooded hills, which offer both a storybook quality and the sense of looking at America through a non-native's eyes. And then there's the town itself: shrouded in a fog of ash, cut off at all ends like the cabin in Evil Dead, full of crazy buildings and spaces, way too big for a small town, yet deserted, looking for all the world like a war zone.

(This last bit can't be coincidence. There's some Bush-whacking subtext at work in the film -- Silent Hill's downfall comes about because of a group of puritanical zealots, led by a woman named Christabella, commit a wrongful act -- and bafflingly, even as the town is destroyed, even as they huddle in the comfort of the church as the darkness they've unleashed surges around them, they steadfastly hold onto the belief that they were just and correct. It's doesn't map to Iraq perfectly by any means, but Avary knows exactly what he's doing.)

What's really striking is that the only important characters are female, and this isn't apparent until well into the film. (The two prominent male characters are given a useless, expositionary subplot; supposedly, Konami, the video game's publisher, on upon reading Avary's first draft, asked, "Where are the men?"). Whereas The Descent uses an all-female cast to give the illusion of something progressive only to indulge in the usual, stereotypical notions of femininity, Avary makes the main characters women in order to bust taboos about motherhood. Motherhood touches all of the main characters: Rose can't have children, so she's adopted Sharon; Dahlia gave birth, out of wedlock, to Alessa; Cybil, the cop that accompanies Rose into Silent Hill, is haunted by a kidnapping case that ended tragically. All of them are willing to go whatever length is necessary to protect their kids. At first blush, this looks like standard-issue sentimentality, especially coupled with the twice-repeated maxim, "to a child, a mother is God", intended to offer something "positive" and "human" in the face of flesh-eating bugs and skin-ripping, pyramid-headed monster men. By the end, however, it's clear that it's this very (reactionary) sentiment that has caused all the horror in the first place, from Rose's monomaniacal urge to help her daughter in any way possible, to Cybil's desire to make sure history doesn't repeat itself, to Christabella's outrage at Dahlia's pregnancy, which, by its very existence, spits in the face of her values. Only Dahlia seems aware of all this, aware of Christabella's blindness and hypocrisy, and aware that she could end the nightmare, but doing so would be to submit to the very value system that she's rejected. Rose takes her place, madly rushing to get Sharon back, never realizing that (with an ending that's a kissing cousin to the ones in Fulci's The Beyond and The House By The Cemetery) motherhood is tantamount to being a prisoner.

A few quick notes about The Wicker Man (2006, Neil LaBute) [36]: 1. This is either a nice bit of snark or the best stealth advertising campaign of 2007. Worked on me, regardless. 2. I'd love to report that LaBute's film has been misunderstood, and that it's a penetrating look at male privilege and gender power relations, but no, it's a misogynist load. I don't know what LaBute is trying to work through, but he aint there yet. 3. I never saw In The Company of Men, nor have I seen any of his theater work, so I don't have this perception of LaBute as a promising talent that's been steadily slipping. My first exposure was Nurse Betty, so he's always been a competent, borderline-hack director. That in mind: Theo Sez it's "almost unwatchable", but the problem is that it's compulsively watchable -- beautiful to look at (good job, location scout!), crisply edited, and, the uneven Cage aside, pretty well-acted, given the material. 4. But, oh, the material. Like Feast, it's a premise that's stuck in a ninety-or-so minute holding pattern, waiting for clearance to land. (Seriously -- I don't get why this story should be any longer than five minutes.) One character is written so poorly that any reasonable human being has to conclude that she is either in on the whole thing or stupid beyond belief. I don't know if it's to LaBute's credit that, with the depth of his loathing, I wasn't sure which was true. 5. Strangely, the YouTube clip above neglects one great laugh-out-loud moment. I won't totally spoil it, but it spins the overused character-suddenly-hit-by-a-vehicle gag into something so absurd, one could drop it into a Scary Movie with no alterations whatsoever.

Ce N'est Pas Une Update

2007-02-07T18:10:00.000-08:00

No, nothing new to post yet; not even baby pics. (Laura Mae apparently thinks she's leased a condo in that womb; the kid is severely mistaken.) But! Coming soon is a tripartite review of three "women's pictures", The Descent, Silent Hill, and the 2006 Wicker Man, as well as my Muriel Award ballot, complete with comments that were not submitted, because there was a cat on my lap.

We'll see you in two and two.

Mission: Impossible III, 4, Feast

2007-01-29T14:35:00.000-08:00

Here's a surprise: Mission: Impossible III (2006, J.J. Abrams) [76] doesn't suck. After seeing it in the theaters earlier this year, I took another look at it on video, fully ready to demote it from my top ten. It couldn't be better than the solid Casino Royale, could it?

Not only is it better than the Bond, it's even better than I originally thought. No, it's really nothing more than a trifle -- the intense opening promises a grimmer, grittier tale than what's delivered -- but it's a well-crafted one. I suspect an underlying reason why I prefer it over the new 007 is because I can sense the tectonic shifting required to "reinvent" Bond after forty-some years, and, as good as the result is, the strain shows. There's a self-consciousness that can't be avoided, what with the martinis, the cars, the women. Bond is constrained by his past even as they try to reinvent his future. M:I's Ethan Hunt, on the other hand, lacks any historical weight; the only continuity is Tom Cruise's boyish superstardom (and the cunning buisness sense underneath that persona). That, along with having a series of wildly differing directors each time lends the series to reinventing itself each time. (Both David Fincher and Joe Carnahan were attached to M:I 3 at different points; can anyone imagine them being allowed to shoot a James Bond film?)

So what does J.J. Abrams bring? Where De Palma brings his setpieces, executed with the soul of a technocrat, and Woo brought, well, his doves, Abrams brings a Spielbergian sense of pop filmmaking to the film. Undoubtedly this is due to Abrams' television history, and while some would hold that against him, it's just what the movie needs -- every character is, if not deep, then sharply and effortlessly defined, the dialogue is snappy (Laurence Fishburne delivers his bon mots with gusto), and each scene is built with a craftman's touch, making its necessary story points and moving on unhurriedly. Not exactly groundbreaking, but this kind of polish, which you see all the time in Hollywood films from the Fifties and earlier, seems more and more rare.

It almost goes without saying that Abrams also brings in Philip Seymour Hoffman. Hoffman's a kind of an insurance policy here; should things veer towards the too-near or the too-cute (and they do, with every good guy character given puppy-dog likability) Hoffman's no-bullshit indie performance style gives the film some seriousness as a counterbalance. (Admittedly, that seriousness is just another checkmarked item on a Hollywood blockbuster to-do list, but it's welcome anyway.) It's an odd sight watching these two actors play their scenes together -- even odder than watching them in Magnolia, or Hoffman vs. Adam Sandler in Punch-Drunk Love. Cruise is all about letting his stardom do most of the heavy lifting (and I don't mean that pejoratively), conveying emotion in an acceptable, abstracted shorthand, while Hoffman is about interiority, letting the audience watch him think. The end result isn't sparks; they actually kind of act past each other, or perhaps more accurately, the two approaches are locked in an unbreakable orbit around each other. Fortunately, this is mirrored somewhat in the plot, as Ethan thinks he knows everything he needs to know about Hoffman's Davian, but actually knows very little.

The same day I watched the slick craft of Mission: Impossible III, I also caught 4 (2006, Ilya Khrzhanovsky) [81], which is about as far on the opposite stylistic spectrum you can get without going into Brakhage, et. al. At turns hilarious and horrifying, it's a look at modern day Russia that feels like it's being made up as it goes along. Characters are introduced, then dropped; what seems like an important scene in the overall story turns about to be a footnote. (It's like the anti-Crash or anti-Babel in that regard.) And the style changes radically over two hours, starting with a Roy Andersson-esque opening shot, then sequeing into a somewhat stagy, dialogue-heavy bar scene, then shedding that and becoming a Dardennes Brothers-style existential look at the daily struggles of an extremely poor village outside of Moscow. (And that's really only the tip of the iceberg; The Great Sicinski can break it down for you further.) I can imagine some see this stylistic ADD as waffling or film student excess (it kept me constantly engaged, fwiw), but what Khrzhanovsky is getting at, I think, is that is to really show the reality of 21st Century Russia, one style, whether naturalistic or fantastic or symbolist (or even all in the same shot) can't cut it. And that reality -- capitalism run amok, so crazy that it literally takes bread out of the mouth of its people -- is pretty damn harrowing.

A few quick notes about Feast (2006, John Gulager) [33]: 1. Yes, John Gulager can direct. Thanks to him, the final Project Greenlight looks like a real movie -- you know, a story told in pictures. 2. Unfortunately, it's not a story worth telling. (Conflict of interest/sour grapes alert: My writing partner Martin McClellan and I made the Top 100 in Project Greenlight 3, which you can read about here. We never read the original draft of Feast, though.) The freeze-frame intro gimmick isn't that amusing and the structure is lumpy, with no sense of pacing or build-up. (There's no real logic to how the monsters attack -- I get the sense that they could break in and kill everyone in five minutes if they tried, but they don't simply because there's eighty minutes to fill.) 3. The shock humor doesn't work because there's no wit underneath it. The fate of the biker chick (played by Gulager's real-life girlfriend) is supposed to be edgy or something, but it genuinely offended me, and I'm not easily offended. 4. On the TV show, there was an unsuccessful audience preview, where it was revealed that the knuckleheaded audience wanted to know where the monsters came from, and the filmmakers struggled to come up with an origin scene for re-shoots. Guess what? No origin scene in the final version. Fuck you, test audience. 5. The best thing about the movie is the second to last shot, a long take (remarkable for this particular movie) that's quite funny and wouldn't be out of place in an old Kiarostami flick. I hope that Gulager makes another movie.

Miami Vice, L'Intrus, V for Vendetta

2007-01-26T14:20:00.000-08:00

Remember the Colin Farrell who stole scenes from Tom Cruise in Minority Report? What happened to that guy? He doesn't show up in Miami Vice (2006, Michael Mann) [38], but then, that's really the least of the film's problems. Ostensibly based on the TV show (which I never saw), the feature version is so bland, so lacking in distinction, it may as well be called Drug Bust!. We know the Mann m.o.: men who define themselves by their work, who have to define themselves that way because the world they live in is slippery, amorphous, and only they can bring meaning to it, while the whole package is delivered with operatic brio. This was best demonstrated by Heat, where his Dostoevskyian universe felt grounded in everyday banal reality, the grand philosophical crises of cops and robbers undercut, as in the famous robbery sequence, by the dull clack-clack-clack of gunfire.

But where Heat had actual characters to organize this worldview around, here he has department store mannequins named Sonny and Rico, and the drama required to bring his m.o. in focus is replaced by hot air and testosterone. Most scenes are standard issue my-dick-is-bigger-than-yours confrontations between our undercover heroes and drug lords, whose trust they want to earn. But there never feels like there's anything at stake. There's a middle-section romance between Sonny and Gong Li's assistant drug lord or whatever she's supposed to be, and we're expected to care because... why? They have hot monkey sex? All that's left is the visuals, which have been bafflingly heralded in most quarters. At the risk of sounding like A----- W----, I can't help but think this approval boils down to "Oooh, pink sky! I've seen that in real life!"

While there's nothing wrong with appreciating Miami Vice as a series of abstract images, it doesn't really hold up, because there's still an underlying reliance on Hollywood conventions of structure and closure. Had Mann really jumped in with both feet, Drug Bust! could've looked a bit like L'Intrus (The Intruder) (2006, Claire Denis) [70], a spy tale at turns haunting and frustrating. The story, as far as I can tell, is about Louis, an old man living in Switzerland, who is actually a Russian spy. His heart is going out on him, so he retires and arranges to have a heart transplant and, with a new lease on life, attempts to regain ahold of the past that slipped away from him while he was a spy. I think. The film is fragmented and impressionistic, so that summary is possibly full of errors -- and I've seen it twice.

(I want to pause to note that the first time I saw it was in a theater, and near the end, there was a projection problem, and the image started to darken, very slowly, over the course of ten minutes. Despite this, I was always enthralled, and if Louis' problem had been glaucoma, I'd never even known there was something wrong.)

Still, the plot is somewhat secondary. It's the succession of images that enthrall: a baby's smiling face, a dog chewing on a human heart, the black ocean, the oppressive weight and hugeness of a steam ship contrasted with floating ribbons dispersed in its honor. Between this and the monolithic score by the Tindersticks, the film creates a wonderfully oneiric mood, where the distinction between reality, memory, and dream dissolve. Yet this is also the source of my frustrations; at times, it's so cryptic, that it can feel like the movie is drifting off without you. The ending is particularly irritating -- no summation, no resolution, it just disperses the way it floated in. (Does this make me a hypocrite w/r/t my problems with Miami Vice? Then so be it.)

However, the emotional journey of Louis is never less than clear. Despite the occasional obfuscations, we discover just how isolated this old spy is, how pathetic his attempts are to engage with life again, not realizing that, despite his money, his connections, and his new heart, he is no longer the one in control. Louis returns to Tahiti to find the son he believes he has from a past affair (while essentially ignoring the one he has in Switzerland), and the people there play a trick on him. I can't decide if this trick is cruel or hopeful, but it definitely comes out of pity.

A few quick notes about V for Vendetta (2006, James McTeigue) [57]: 1. No, not as good as the comic. 2. Yes, it's been dumbed down, most egregiously in presenting V as an uncomplicated hero, where Moore always viewed him with some suspicion. 3. The direction is pretty clumsy -- repeating Evey's childhood trauma in the present, with the same exact camera setups comes across as comical, and the hectic opening, cramming too much in fifteen minutes, makes the film feel shallower than it actually is. 4. However, a few moments make their way from the comic more-or-less unchanged, like Evey's interrogation, Valerie's letter, and V's confrontation with the doctor, and the movie is stronger for it. 5. Still, I was shocked by how moved I was by the final sequence, invented for the film, where the army of Vs take off their masks, and some are revealed to be characters who had died earlier -- the one moment of fanciful unreality in a film that takes itself way too seriously.