The Crunchwrap Supreme's main advertising angle seems to be its portability. This is probably its best feature, unless you are a Taco Bell development executive and can sell it to the board based on not needing any new ingredients - it requires only teaching the employees the basic concept of origami.

The Crunchwrap Supreme (as always, Supreme in Taco Bell language means "sour cream") is basically a tostada with a tortilla wrapped around it. The ads present it as hermetically sealed, but mine was flawed, making it something less than conveniently portable.

Other than portability, wrapping a tortilla heavily around it serves one purpose, and that is illustrate the concept that if the first bite of any given Taco Bell burrito - a dry mouthful of warm crumpled tortilla - is so great, why not make a food item containing sixteen of them?

Rating: D

Topics: fast food, taco bell

"No matter what you believe, this movie will challenge you in some way," Derrickson said. "I don't know how you can watch it without coming away and asking yourself, or the person you saw the movie with, what you believe about the reality of the demonic, and therefore the existence of the devil and the existence of God."

Of course, as always, this is patently untrue. Scott Derrickson, as director, is invested in the sentiment, but unlike the usual rote press-junket hard-sells, he seems inclined to believe it. A self-proclaimed "orthodox Christian" filmmaker (writer of Urban Legends: Final Cut!, director of the occasionally praised Hellraiser: Inferno!) may be an unlikely candidate to make a well-balanced exorcism film, but Derrickson pulled off a surprise in his story of a sanctioned exorcising priest tried for negligent homicide.

Which is not to say by miracle or fluke. Derrickson and co-writer Paul Harris Boardman (his collaborator on Urban Legends and Hellraiser) have done their homework, and Emily Rose is rife with evidence that they understand the basic tenets of the genre. They establish visual and thematic motifs (corridors and clocks, the latter appearing in The Exorcist as well), they build character through audience-shared experience. Importantly, they understand something of the gender roles of possession film: Father Moore's defense lawyer is Erin Bruner, who as a woman is able to identify with Emily's vulnerability, knowing she herself is open to the same possessing influence. (Moore himself is a man of faith and not of science, and this allows him the priestly prerogative: to identify with the woman's open mind rather than that of the man of hard science.) It's a mainstay of possession film, and Derrickson lays it out clearly to the audience with Bruner placed in a faithful repetition of a traumatic flashback of Emily Rose's experience, with Bruner taking the role of Emily. The feminine (if not female) victim-hero central to horror film is downright crucial in possession film. The type of mind used in such film (the woman's mind existing as entity in distinct opposition to male mind, not through inherent characteristic but experience) - the gendering of openness and acceptingness, here mentally gendered thus due to blunt fact of physiognomy, means that Bruner can learn during the trial in a way that calculating prosecutor Ethan Thomas cannot.

Thomas is introduced in exposition as a devout Christian, a man who spends all his time in the church, and a shrewd sonofabitch. "Shrewd" is not a description that helps characters in possession film. Sight may help you, or compassion. Open-mindedness (of the intentional [intellectual curiosity, willingness to regain your faith after losing it previously] and unintentional [beset by supernatural or unexplained powers due to your unacknowledged possession of the open-mindedness characteristic] varieties) may help you. Faith will help you, though its price will always be high: your job, your life, a lifetime's peace of mind. It may bring salvation, or it may only bring understanding (in spirituo-faithic terms, this understanding often takes the form of resigning yourself to uncertainty forever, the only response to glimpsing a new world of non-fact-based realities [and this a bargain compared to the permanent insanity demanded by Lovecraft of his analogues]). Bruner is open-minded; Thomas is shrewd. Bruner can learn and...

Read the rest of the review!

Topics: horror, movies