This loathsome exercise combines the worst aspects of nu-metal horror and mid-budget cop thriller, and if it's redundant to say "not in a good way," then certainly not in a casual way. It seems to have actively sought out the stupidest parts of each genre in an institutional gray-brown mess featuring the least inventive bad guy/s in memory, and possibly the most tenuous explanation of evil in the history of horror film.

Stephen Dorff is as bad as he was in Blade; Stephen Rea plays it like he's working on a drunken impression of Geoffrey Rush at his campiest - he must have prepared by watching director William Malone's last outing, House on Haunted Hill. To say that a performance falls far short of Geoffrey Rush in House on Haunted Hill, well, it's saying a fair bit.

Why combine these aspects of horror and cop thriller? No one but Se7en has ever really pulled it off, and so many individual horror and cop flicks of recent years have fallen prey to the most embarrassing conventions of genre theory that I can't imagine willingly embracing probably the second-worst mistake of crime thriller and the #1 pitfall of horror.

Fear.com shapes deeply its Ringian ancestry, and in the end I hate to invoke the name of that film, lest folks who enjoyed The Ring be inclined to seek out f.c for its Ringlike qualities, but steer clear; better to see a dozen semi-flawed straight remakes (see The Ring, 2002) than one sodden bit of thievery stretched on the decaying skeleton of the worst genre cliches.

Rating: F-

Topics: movies

Adaptation is a flight of ego, an indecisive film that will forever stand as a testament to the incredible power of quitting. No film I can recall approaches this for the sheer power of its unshakeable devotion to failure, one which so thoroughly disavows the merits of its characters, its origins, its structure and itself.

Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief is a lovely book. It's not sprawling New York stuff, but rather rambling, ambling, hopeful in its constant willingness to stray from its ostensible point of origin if it thinks it might discover something along a side path. Kaufman pays it a little face value, and to draw a parallel between The Orchid Thief's willingness to explore and the necessity of Kaufman's unwillingness to stick to The Orchid Thief is to give an unnecessary amount of credit to Kaufman. Adaptation is not an homage, as this would imply, but a stab at the book, reading less like a valiant struggle to give the book its due and more like a constantly repeated assertion that the book is nothing, is wispy and unworthy of having its events recounted or document[arize]d, and no matter how strong we may labor to believe that Kaufman is devoted to the book, it's hard to keep up much faith in that belief as he returns again and again to himself instead.

Many films have given their share of jabs at the art, or lack thereof, of the script. Hollywood satires abound, but seldom has a film cut so deeply at the heart of the screenwriter himself, and never has one personally wounded so deeply the inevitable failed scribe. It's not that Kaufman is alone in his conceit, which he plays here as self-doubt, a potentially honorable yearning to do justice to the material, to respect the audience and the centennial of cinema; countless writers have attended screenwriting seminars, and while many for money, some, it must be true, for art. Even this, though, isn't the problem. Adaptation isn't much interested in the money; while Charles is jealous of Donald's payday, this petty squabble can't begin to compete with Kaufman's love affair with his own self-hate. This, too, will resonate, with failed screenwriters, with successful ones, with everyone watching who envisions himself more neurotic than he really is. If we accept that Kaufman the writer is as neurotic as Kaufman the character, then we validate the neurosis' own yearning for recognition; if we decline to accept it, we buy into the artifice of the film, the then-supposed exaggeration of Kaufman-the-writer's little personal quirks in the service of trickery, of movie 'creation.'

Kaufman has Kaufman condemn himself; he decries the technique as, among other things, indulgent. It can't, by any but the most casual of viewers, be construed as charming or cutesy, and it can't, by any but the most unacclimated of critical viewers, be thought of as anything new or metatextually interesting. It's Kaufman's insistence that he is giving up. Absolutely par for the course, as this movie is a paean to giving up, over and over again. Nearly any plot point, of any size at all, is someone giving up on something. Kaufman gives up on the idea that The Orchid Thief can be a faithful movie. Given the chance anyway, he gives up on the idea that he can write it. He gives up on a girl, several times consecutively. He gives up on the script again. He writes some beginnings and throws them away. Even the movie's successes...

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Topics: movies

So, right off the bat, I should state that I know the members of this band, so I may be a little biased. But damned if these guys don't rock. This album's short - 5 songs, one of which consists mostly of eardrum-rending squealing courtesy of the lead singer's Buchla synthesizer - but right now this is on my top 5 for the year list (and, yes, I know it's only March, but it's been a good year, so it's a competitive list).

Obviously, I'm the right target for this - any band that falls somewhere inbetween JSBX and Nation of Ulysses is going to go over very well with me. So, wanting to make sure I wasn't completely alone here, I passed the CD around to a handful of coworkers with generally good taste. Most of them compared the band to one of the various heavily written-up garage rock bands, which probably bodes well for the Mae-Shi's future.

Sadly, the album isn't really getting a lot of distribution, since it's being burned and printed by members of the band. However, if you're curious, you can listen to it absolutely free at The Official Mae Shi Website. I recommend "You Can't Do That With an Axe" which is probably the best spazz-rock song I've heard in many years. If you live in the Los Angeles area, I'd also recommend seeing them live, though earplugs might be recommended (given the afore-mentioned eardrum-rending capabilities of the Buchla).

Rating: A

Topics: albums