If The Hills Have Eyes '05 derives meaning from nuclear guilt, then The Hills Have Eyes 2 is born out of military regret. Minutes into the film, Buck Private Napoli offers a timid defense of his politics and his CONVERSATION NOT CONFRONTATION bumper sticker: he just doesn't think the President should lie so much. Our representative of the military, Sergeant Millstone (nice solid name), offers a reasonable defense - it's the Prez's job - and we have our basic party lines. Well, our highest-ranking representative available; there was a Colonel recently, but he was speared through the chest and thrown off a cliff.

Our highest-ranking military representative, in turn, will die, and sooner rather than later. Our next de facto commanding officer will get his soon after.

We know from Hills '78/'05 that this lanky leftist, whose moment of compassion just cost his entire squad their lives, is to be our centerpiece. The ne minus ultra of an inept squad, he has the longest possible character arc to violent retaliatory rage. Sarge disregards his mild insistence that his name is Napoli - and so PVT Napoli will henceforth be Napoleon: a great military leader.

(Sarge will also refer to Napoli as Private Pyle, longtime military shorthand for incompetence and naïveté, but in post-1987 cinema, also an optional assaultive nickname for a mind who can't handle it, ref. Full Metal Jacket.)

The Hills Have Eyes films ('78 and '05) are both about the journey from average guy (preferably pacifist) to victim to - well, not aggressor, but something resembling it: to violent defender, maybe, or unhinged, unwilling combatant. Both contain a point at which the beleaguered Doug goes into battle by necessity, but with full knowledge of his actions.

The Hills Have Eyes 2 considers a basic parallel, but doesn't quite have the same dedication. Napoleon can't entirely make up his mind - he starts expectably scared, gradually forced by circumstance to move forward. As leadership figures fall away, he rises to the challenge in baby steps, never really gaining momentum. He's pushed along, his reactions mildly, uselessly intelligent, but never as bright as we should expect from the skinniest, least gung-ho soldier in a squad, badly in need of a chance to prove himself. His Eagle Scout background is solely useful for a single knot. He continues his path not with growing, internalized frustration, but with uncertainty: he backs going into the cave, then favors going after the captured Missy. Later, he pleads with Amber not to go after Missy.

It doesn't matter much, really, because the defining moment for Doug comes at the end; we don't get to see what becomes of him. In 2005, Alexandre Aja recreated Craven's 1977 moment, roughly: the film's climax, at which our former pacifist bludgeons, viciously and uncontrollably, his prostrate opponent.

Nap reaches this point about an hour in.

Then Amber reaches it a bit later. Then Missy reaches it. Then Napoleon reaches it again.

It's not that a single downward bayonet stab is the same as an epic, red-washed freakout, but in a film series where the single key moment is a loss of control accompanied by a repeated bludgeoning of a fully horizontal opponent beneath a once-peaceful victim, a downward stab carries more than just another torsoful of M-16 bullets - and the Cravens and Weisz...

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Topics: horror, movies

Caution: contains basically complete spoilers of both Hostel and Part II.

HOSTILE TOO

Hostel opened to $20 mil, but both good and shocked word of mouth circulated rapidly, and it gained steam to wind up with a healthy take of $47 million, ten times budget. Hostel Part II opens to poor box office - only $8.2 mil with a second-week drop to $3m - and executives scratch their heads and wonder why only $8 mil worth of people want to watch Heather Matarazzo get flayed, having thought they understood the current marketability of graphic, torturous violence. Despite what was at the time huge enthusiasm, Hostel's IMDb rating has dropped over time to 5.8, with 11% of voters giving it a 10 and 14% of voters giving it a 1. Roth enjoys (and he does enjoy: "Well, when someone throws up while watching one of your movies, it's like a standing ovation") both a strong following and a rabid anti-fan base. His stuff does polarize, and it's not without reason. If it were only gorehounds going to watch the films, and Puritans staying home, it would make sense. Some decryers simply aren't up for the ride: in a recent Joe Carnahan blog, the director of Narc (R for strong brutal violence, drug content and pervasive language) and Smokin' Aces (R for strong bloody violence, pervasive language, some nudity and drug use) bemoans the state of the industry even while admitting he hasn't watched the films in question. But seasoned blood fans as well as Friday-evening teens are coming away with complaints.

***

It's not the torture, and it's not the porn. Roth's movies are widely regarded as ultra-violent, but a second viewing of either film will reveal significantly less actual blood than one thought the first time through. They're more violent than most, but less violent than some, so it's not a matter of sfx-and-prostheses extremity. They've got a healthy quantity of nudity, but the word 'porn' is thrown around pretty liberally (even in a non-"torture porn" usage) for a movie with less explicit sexual content than Scary Movie 2.


To find out what it is we're not getting from the film, we need to ask what we're looking for. If it's an exercise in sadism, who goes to see this movie in the first place? This kind of backlash means people are expecting something and getting something else, and the marketing and discussion of Hostel is very clear about what to expect. Audience members come in looking for sadism and torture. Aren't they finding it?


The issue must be in the reading of the film. Hostel looks not unlike certain types of film: a teens-in-peril, a hunting-humans, a wrong-turn thriller, and a slasher, and the conventions of these films serve with some accuracy to guide the viewer along. With the extended first act, Roth allows plenty of time to consider the sexual aspect. The sex/horror dichotomy seems to follow the slasher premise, leading to the obvious questions: is Roth saying the sex sets us up? That we follow sex so blindly? Minutes into the movie, our lead Amerikaner pushes open a brothel door to make sure a prostitute isn't being beaten, though of course we know it's just gonna be some kind of BDSM deal: indeed, the woman is hitting the man. It may hint that the woman preys on the man, as we find out later to be true, but the first, and...

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Topics: horror, movies

Right before I left for the movie, Larry Mantle had his civilized film guys on to deliver a few sentences on the week's new flicks. In reference to Alexandre Aja's comparatively high-end new remake of The Hills Have Eyes, one of them said that nuclear films, films about nuclear topics, used to mean something, but that this was just "cosmic gore."

Yeah, okay. It is pretty violent. I have a feeling, though, that if this guy watched Craven's 1977 version, he'd find the paint-red blood fake, dated, or campy. Of course, many civilized critics consider that film and its brethren to be flimsy, exploitative junk, and if our critic feels the nuclear aspect of the new film is irrelevant, surely he'd pick a similar bone with the original: the nuclear aspect is more explication there than anything else, just a premise to explain the presence of the family, absence of infrastructure, and appearance of Michael Berryman. An early draft of the script had the cannibal family the offspring of hippies - hence the names "Jupiter," "Pluto," and the other planets, and Craven has stated that the family wasn't really supposed to be mutants at all, but simply a wild clan living outside human law. Craven is much more interested in the family dynamic and devotes a scene to explaining why the family came to exist; his interest is personal, motivational, and familial. As has always been the case, he is deeply interested in fatherhood, and the gas station attendant's role in his son's fate is the motivating factor in the film's interest in setting types of families against each other.

Aja replaces this basic premise, using nuclear and radioactive fear as the primary factor in determining not just the mutants' location, but their reason for being. He too gives a character a short speech of explication, but this one is accusatory, referring to dynamics not familial but nuclear. The locations make it that much more explicit, not merely referring to an empty stretch of desert but bringing back the relevance of the testing grounds, from the hollowed-out scars of the desert to the creepy, somehow sensible locale of the climax.

These new mutants are a tricky bunch. For one thing, they're ugly. In 1977, Ruby was feral but kind of cute, and with that in mind, her appearance here comes as a surprise - so much for a remake of Part 2, predicated on Ruby's acceptance into society. Michael Berryman was always scary-looking, but he was sort of charming in the original Hills (his first major role), a little dim-witted, a little vulnerable, with his own personality, skills, and even - unusual for a movie villain - fears. (His connection with Beast works so well that it seems completely natural when it returns in Part 2.) The new Pluto (Michael Bailey Smith) is different - less developed, certainly, but very accurately what he is supposed to be - a large, strong, ugly, lumpen creation of radioactivity with questionable mental function. True, he doesn't have the sense of hurt that Berryman brought to Pluto, but what do we need to like him for? The new mutants don't really want to be liked. They don't rate character development; they don't talk much. The original family was a lot more verbose, but these mutants have less to say for themselves. Though most of them are capable, they converse with each other less, and when they speak now, it's more often to gloat; when they laugh, it's spiteful. Papa Jupiter's more personal reasons for being have...

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Topics: horror, movies

"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...

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Topics: horror, movies

DON'T BE SCARED

An underacted comic book film? Batman Begins is structured, at least for a while, around subtle, understated performances - Christian Bale, Liam Neeson, Linus Roache in a classy turn like Robert Burke with an imaginable interior. Roache's pleasant performance is more important than his screen time might suggest; as Thomas Wayne, his character must be of sufficient stuff that it must always show in young Bruce as he becomes himself. Bale's persona as Batman must always answer to the standard set by the elder Wayne - Batman himself is an ongoing attempt to answer the loss of the father, and if we are too easily tempted to extend that to an archetypal concept, we would do well to remember the individual case, not losing sight of Bruce Wayne's actions germinating always in his father.

If Batman prowls the night because his father was killed (much more the position of Batman Begins than any maternal concerns), it helps the sympathy value of his case if the father in question is an honorable, classy one, whose too brief time with young Bruce was sufficient to instill him with the solid ethical base required to guide him through his life, rather than the somewhat more cynical assertion that he creeps through the night doling out discipline because his father disappeared from the picture at an important age, leaving him only the most outlandish method of creating the discipline he needed from ages twelve through eighteen: by projecting guilt (his own, at his father's death) onto common thugs and low-lifes, then punishing appropriately. Batman doesn't take life; this was not a punishment his father would have likely considered appropriate. He only seeks to create a civil, caring, well-behaved city-family like the one he lost.

While these subtexts have always been there for the looking in Batman's comic-book world, they tend to be passed over, meaningless as they are. Batman as a series has drawn many of its strongest moments from the idea of discrediting them, from Batman exalting the higher functions: he eschews guns, avoids killing, utilizes gadgets and inventions, hones his mind to become The World's Greatest Detective, a title bestowed upon him for a long span. It's all tied together - probably not much of a stretch to wonder if some of that widespread philanthropic donation isn't compensation for an extensively guilty conscience, let alone for the damage caused to Gotham by his nightly adventures - but his emphasis on mental agility, even as he must by necessity practice its physical counterpart against the heat-packing criminal element, is his commitment to overpowering those dirtier psychological secrets.

To the film's credit, this 65-year, thousands-of-issues struggle is recapitulated in Batman Begins. The conflict is set up in the origin story, and while Batman Begins has the benefit of telling the story itself, superhero films fail if they stray too far; the origin must be visible from any point along the line, and Batman & Robin simply doesn't offer that connection. Batman Begins does, playing up the counterpoint to Batman's intellectual resolve, for even as he strives to overcome the guilt of his parents' death, seeking to serve Gotham out of superego morality rather than compensatory, low revenge, it reminds him and the viewer that a more visceral psychological factor is at work: when Batman Begins is about fear, it is at its...

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There's not much chemistry in Garden State, but maybe there doesn't need to be. If so many love stories are the right person at the (comically) wrong time, GS deals with not necessarily the wrong but not necessarily the right, possibly any (or at least any not clearly wrong) person at the right time. Sam doesn't cause a change in Largeman's life (though maybe she inspires him to keep it); she merely appears at the time it takes place, and if this is meant to convey fate, it more convincingly states that their meet-up (hook-up) is more about time than person. This is probably not the intent of director Braff; Natalie Portman's Samantha ("Sam," meant to mean 'quirky' name) is stocked with enough 'charming'-style idiosyncrasies that she's probably meant to signify uniqueness. Let us forgive her, though. If these quirks seem a little run-of-the-mill, they still signify a certain level of vitality, and a certain level of vitality combined with the primary factor - timing - is evidently plenty.

The film states early on (as early as the funeral) the familiar small-town (or hometown) trap, and puts Largeman back in the un/appealing haze of drugs/booze/high school girls; while it doesn't condemn it outright, it seems to be setting us up for the contrast of the sunnier world Sam will bring along. The portrayal is generous, though; it's easy to make the hometown party scene (the party scene and film scene both) completely unredeemable, but Braff lets it have a little appeal - the doting and at least somewhat genuine friends, the pretty girls, the allowance by Largeman of himself to trade his usual medication for more illicit kinds - and even if his smile is at least partly influenced by drugs and a large part by confusion, it's at least a small part drugs, booze, girls and home. Though he may be enjoying some part or parts of the experience, Braff presents it visually so as to remind us that even if it's a more pleasurable fog, it's still a fog, and maybe also proof that though this may be as far as he can get from his usual stumbly routine - ingesting medications designed to intensity feeling rather than nullify it - a fog is a fog.

The answer left to him is to seek the clarity somewhere between the antithetical fogs of feeling and unfeeling at either end of the spectrum. For this he needs to stop taking drugs. He does not need to meet a girl. If he should happen to do so, great, but his decision to leave his drugs behind is made before he meets Sam; he meets her only because he has already begun to enact the course of actions designed to free his consciousness from its pharmaceutical accommodations.

Is she a bonus prize, then, or is she the fated meaning? The latter comprises a high-demand series of assertions: that Largeman was destined to pull his act together and leave the drugs behind in the precise nick of time to return home where he would come across the girl destined to change his life in the brief window of time before he lost faith in non-drugged reality due to what would likely have been a series of strange and unfulfilling experiences with his father, his old friends, his hometown, returned to his fairly empty life and his fairly full medicine cabinet. This girl would be the only girl quirky enough to point out to him how weird and good his life might be. If the chemistry were a little better, that would be the assumed intent.
But there's not much chemistry in Garden State.

The result is that Sam does not seem the...

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Topics: movies

Come on, Christopher Doyle! Hero, a movie we've been waiting a handful of years to see on the big screen, is here at last in its Tarantino-sponsored American theatrical release, and it's been in the oven too long. The dramatic, moving story of some people who get in slow, really arbitrary fights for a murky, unexplained political justification, Hero has been acclaimed for, among other things, its caaaaaaarefully arranged visual presentation and Rashomon presentation. The two are tied together by roughly assigning a segment of story-retelling to a color palette depending on the character recounting it, its place on the truth-o-meter, and its theme. It doesn't work here, as it wouldn't have worked in Rashomon; in fact, it negates the point.

Crayola Presents: Hero is its own film and shouldn't be directly compared, but we can look at the telling-and-retelling motif the same way in both films. Would Rashomon have benefitted from a color wash on each segment? It's not an aesthetic argument, either - the idea is that without something literally or figuratively coloring the different stories, they take place in the same nebulous gray (neither black nor white, nor black-and-white) space of an unsubstantiated personal account, and if they all look the same to us, we don't know which version would have deserved to be impassioned red, nonjudgmental blue, fraudulent purple.

Now, Hero isn't trying to be eXistenZ. It's prepared to admit that some versions are true and some are false, but it's not entirely sure why. The concept of presenting a version of a story, illustrating the nuances of it, and then later retracting it isn't necessarily an unpleasant one. Presumably you might want to throw your audience off by giving them certain loyalties and interpretations, then causing them to reconsider their thoughts and choose to reverse their ideas later on. I'm not averse to trying to stimulate thought. Little of that is done here, though. Removing a scene that has been retold by a character is worthwhile, but Rashomon knows it teaches you about the character, not the scene. Watching a fight scene and then finding out it didn't occur - when the revelation means nothing to the development of the character beyond a very stock Surprise, It's a Twist! - means we have watched only a kata, a martial arts demonstration to show you what a fight might conceivably look like. If Hero starred Jackie Chan, okay, no problem, but a fight scene in a drama - especially an overblown, windy Zhang Yimou drama - must have some meaning and weight to it. This is to say nothing of sub-fight scenes, scenes (and there are several) that are tangential even to the fictional segments containing them. For a movie with pacing problems, this kind of padding is unforgivable; it seems Zhang Yimou was compelled to make a martial arts film where he really wanted a drama. This compelling force adds unnecessary fight after unnecessary fight, but no fight has any real energy or meaning.

If this wasn't bad enough, he slows them down. He slows them way down. He throws on color washes and computer graphics, but digitizing Jet Li into What Dreams May Come adds neither meaning nor all that much appeal. It's not without its moments, but enjoying a fight scene to find later that it didn't exist is not a way to get the crowd to like your characters, trust your storytelling, or warm...

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I watch some of the movie. It seems like an easy movie to criticize for its subtext, though I reserve a feeling that by the end it will disavow the subtext in a wholesome, hard-to-argue-with, but for now I catalogue the things I find troubling in this body-swapper about a 13-year-old put into a statuesque frame and forced to deal with the consequences. We are invited to ogle the cleavage of a thirteen-year-old (though she is in a thirty-year-old body). Thirteen-year-old goes to a club and guys grab their d--ks at her. Thirteen-year-old gets smashed on mai tais or something. 13 does a dance from when she was three.*

*Thriller was released in 1982. If this girl is 13 in 2004 or so, the math indicates pretty clearly she was -9 or so when it came out. Maybe this is moot and maybe it isn't; her would-be colleagues at the club, the 30-30 club, would have been just about the right age, would have been 8 or so when Thriller came out, and so it's not surprising that they have fond memories; I'll even buy that they know the moves. The only trouble is that if they were 8 and she was -8, it's not the same as the sixteen-year difference between 13 and 29; there are thirteen-year-olds and twenty-nine-year-olds buying the same albums right now. Right now somewhere in this country there is a thirteen-year-old buying an album, and right now somewhere else a twenty-nine-year-old is buying the same album. This is okay. One's ahead, or one's behind, or both saw the same video; it doesn't matter much. The trouble is that it's not a sixteen-year difference; it's a negative version of the same age. One age is positive and one is negative, one exists and one does not exist. The kid wasn't born when Thriller came out, and this point is not meant to make anyone feel old, it's to explain that she doesn't share the same space or that same experience. The only part she has in Thriller is in recycling, in an attempt by an aging MTV special-block-programmer, a VH1 Best-Of weekend planner, a backward-reaching party or wedding DJ not to supply 13 with a weird, great song she missed but to remind other MTV programmers and VH1 planners of the experience both of those programmers shared. There's no objection to 13 seeing it - the programmer is well aware of the MTV demographic even on a special nostalgic block - but her interest is tangential. If she adopts it (which she obviously has through some circumstance) the programmer will be pleased to see it, and amused, but it will appear a novelty, a cuteness of a kid catching on who was well into the negative numbers when the original broke. There's no question it doesn't truly fit her and that her claim on it is illegitimate. Like clomping around in her father's shoes: cute, funny, always verging on implying some poignant statement on the proportionate or disproportionate aging of both parties, but they never become her shoes.

(I thought maybe she was supposed to have been 13 in the year when the 30-year-old would have been 13, making this not a body-swap but a time-traveller, but if Thriller didn't hit until 1982, then this hypothetical 1982 13-year-old would have hit a 35 or a minimum of 34 in 2004, and that's being generous with the birthday. So back to the original thesis.)

13 shimmies her chest at Mark Ruffalo. This is the only way she can get people to come out on the dance floor. Everyone does the dance. Some guy strips in 13's apartment. 13 has 30-friends to slumber party to show they are...

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Contains extensive spoilers, sorry. Don't read it if you haven't seen it.

Okay, let's be up front about this. Kill Bill Volume 2 isn't as exciting as Kill Bill Volume 1. It sounds harsh, but in all fairness, there's very little that's as exciting as Kill Bill Volume 1. It's slower. I don't want to be sword-hungry action guy, but the flawless violence of the first film is nowhere near as present here; though the film does feature one of the best fight scenes since Raising Arizona, Tarantino has a different purpose here. Where only rating concerns and running time constrained the balletic thrill of Volume 1, Tarantino himself decides here that the impact should be different, and we understand it early on. As the Massacre At Two Pines edges closer, as Bill makes his ominous first appearance, as Tarantino has always excelled at making us antsy even before scenes in which we know exactly what will happen - as through Pulp Fiction, for instance, when the film so often leads up to what we have already seen - we might not be blamed (especially if we have recently seen Volume 1 [as intended]) for gearing up for a little of that same violence, even if we know the result to be a little one-sided, even if we have seen it opening both movies and played out in a variety of scenes in the first volume. When the Fox Force Five - sorry, the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad - makes their entrance, they approach not in a serious dramatic manner but a knowing one, almost a giddy one, and suddenly Tarantino goes the other way: the camera tilts up and to the side, and though I don't know why it's always got to be Madsen, it unmistakeably recalls that same tilt in Reservoir Dogs, documented pretty extensively as causing a fair amount of anxiety in viewers, many of whom later recounted seeing it differently. The gist of the thousands of words written about that scene is that viewers were far more disturbed than they would have been by keeping the camera on the action. Kill Bill 2 both bears that out and calls it into doubt on different occasions; this first tilt is the clue that the pain Tarantino will inflict over the course of volume 2 is more anguish than abattoir.

The eventual disposition of California Mountain Snake's eye might elicit both ewwws and ooze, but in the long run it's more a shot for visual effect and squirming purposes than one that will likely make any real psychological impact. Bill and B.B.'s recounting of the goldfish story, by contrast, seems to have some emotional impact in its distanced recounting, for all involved characters and ideally for the audience as well. The sticking point, and it's a rough one, is the shot that now opens two movies, of the then-Bride shot down by her baby. It's graphic (that is to say, it's violent, but more that it's very uncomfortably onscreen, and though DVD freeze-frame may not eventually bear this out, it seems much more so in the second volume), but the inverse-effect theory does not work here: it's the most emotionally painful moment of the film, and this in a film where the protagonist is more battered than Job, or Jude Law in Cold Mountain.

If Tarantino beats up Thurman pretty badly in the first one, he downright tortures her here; it may be a little less physical and more psychological than Vol. 1, but so too is the entire film, and overall it makes more sense than just as a marketing tool to cut the film in half. The pace is decidedly different, and it feels like...

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Make no mistake, Love Actually is a chick flick, but it's a good one. The title pretty much sums up the plot: love in all its forms at least all the forms the British could come up with. And despite the excessive nudity and American bashing (all Americans are easy; the President and American girls in particular and the British are tough and polite whereas Americans are crass and pushy) the movie was really fun and uplifting. I guess I am a little biased since I love Hugh Grant. I know he's a dork, or a fop as the British would say, but I love him anyway. Fortunately for everyone who doesn't harbor a not-so-secret affection for Hugh, the movie is not all about him.

Love Actually has ten separate plots all vaguely interwoven. I say vaguely because sometimes the relationships, and scene transitions, are clear and other times they are choppy. At first it was hard to follow the huge numbers of characters. In fact, often times it was hard to follow them. So here is a break down of the plots:

1. Hugh Grant plays the newly elected British Prime Minister who falls in love with the girl who brings him tea (Martine McCutcheo).
2. His younger sister Karen (Emma Thompson)'s husband, Harry (Alan Rickman) are going through some tough times and are evaluating their love for one another.
3. All the while, Harry is contemplating infidelity with his secretary, who is making advances at him.
4. Two of Harry's employees, Sarah (Laura Linney) and Carl are trying to start a romance despite her institutionalized brother's constant phone calls.
5. Yet another story follows the relationship between a recently windowed stepfather (Neeson) and his eleven year-old stepson.
6. His stepson has his own love story, with a ten year-old girl from his school.
7. "Just" Judy and Jack who are the body doubles for all the sex scenes in a movie go on their first date.
8. Colin Firth catches his brother and wife together and moves out to a château (in France?) where he falls for his non-English-speaking Portuguese maid (Lucia Moniz).
9. Billy Mack (Bill Nighy) plays an aging rocker who has a come back with a Christmas ballad, which is a cover of "Love is All Around".
10. Mark (Andrew Lincoln) who falls in love with his best friend's new wife, Juliet (Keira Knightley).

My favorite scene is Hugh Grant dancing alone to the Pointer Sisters "Jump for My Love" but it was one of many that had the audience laughing out loud. So there was no one lesson from this mammoth cast. Some characters fell in love, some get rejected. Overall the point was that love is all around and Christmas is a good time to show it.


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Rating: A-

Topics: movies

Note: This review contains unfair thematic disclosures which would be prohibitive to a natural reading of the film's intrinsic qualities.

If a movie can be just a tiny little bit dizzying, it’s Lost in Translation, a film that asks not only whether the gauzy ethereal stuff of Virgin Suicides can be transferred to modern day, to big city, and to Bill Murray, and finds that it can indeed, but on its own only for one shot, the first one, and forever after that only as a contrast, as it takes up its place in the scuffle between gauzy and gaudy. This unevenness is the story of the film, which gets a lot of press as “richly layered” but whose layers resemble more a chocolate layer cake than terrestrial strata – there are layers, to be sure, but they’re not miles long and sprawling, but rather neatly constructed and carefully stacked, and you don’t so much chip and dig through one to get to the next, but observe them all at once, marveling at how distinct each one is and how well it fits exactly below another.

But why refer to metaphor with metaphor? Especially when the story on its own will play so well with audiences, a story of Americans lost in a Tokyo which is both the star of the film and irrelevant. The story’s about the Americans, not about Tokyo, and so it could easily be in any of a number of other places, but it’s something about Japan’s specific brand of culture shock that grounds the film specifically as what it is; if it were in Thailand, it would get more Golden Globe awards, Cambodia, more worldwide bannings, Vietnam, more Time magazine writeups, Laos, much less box office. There’s something about Japan’s friendliness, about the degree to which America has absorbed sushi and Dragonball Z, that makes us think we should get Japan, and so even though the movie’s about Bob and Charlotte, it wouldn’t be the same movie if they ambled among the starving children of India, not by a longshot.

If that much is clear, then it’s naïve to ignore the setting entirely in our focus on the love story therein, but the Tokyo character is so perplexing, even comic in its incomprehensibility, that if a starving-children-of-India film colors a love story with hopelessness, and a political-oppression-in-China film colors its love story with struggle, and a Merchant-Ivory film colors its love story with repression, convention and waistcoats, then the Tokyo of Lost in Translation reflects its neon graphics down onto the love story with the same staggering feeling of being out of place that the city itself imparts on the vacationing Americans in the street below.

Or even the window above, in Charlotte’s case, for her elevated viewing of the streets is the time at which we are most unable to conjure up her fear of her surroundings. In her window she is bolder, less dressed (which is to say less guarded), and it’s less clear that she’s worried about Tokyo and more clear that she’s worried about herself. The city from up here is pretty, holds less sway, and it’s only when she ventures out into the crowds that she starts getting lost from her real troubles and finding new ones – but she tends to welcome these, at least at the start of each challenge and in theory, and it’s important that we never see her at any of a thousand Tokyo McDonald’s locations.

But she does run into trouble, and does get lost, and does have difficulty feeling things where she is. Whether they’re real – whether she’d feel lost and sad if her personal non-going-away, in-America-or-not problems weren’t in the back of...

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Topics: movies

Gather round, children, for the legend of Dr. Satan. In a place called Hollywood, a man who stole his name said that he had a ghost story to tell, and a studio (Universal) said they wanted him to tell his story, and that they would pay him to do so. When he told them the story, they said that they didn’t like it, and that they would not, as is the folk tradition, pass the story on to others, and Rob Zombie had to buy the rights to the movie back so he could shop it around to other distributors. MGM said they wanted it, until Zombie told Ben Affleck on the set of Daredevil that MGM would release it since they apparently had no morals, ostensibly in jest; the story was overheard (the film crew, there to shoot Zombie interviewing the cast for an MTV special, must have been eavesdropping), related on the MTV website and then in Variety, and MGM canned the project; Zombie was approached by Lion’s Gate, who finally released it.

The prevailing wisdom on why Universal, at least, refused to release House of 1000 Corpses is that it was overly gory and shocking, but viewing reveals that it’s not noticeably more gory than Ghost Ship, and there’s nothing shocking about it unless the viewer was expecting a Pixar film. Alternate explanations, then: Rob Zombie is a pretentious, self-indulgent guy who refused to make even the slightest alteration to his flick, or b) it really stinks and the studio didn’t want it. A combination of possibilities is that Zombie was under contract to release an R-rated film and Universal didn’t think it could be released as an R, which combines the gore/shock idea and the indulgence.

Zombie’s generally accepted and oft-boasted motivation was to revive 1970s shock horror, which is all well and good, but which in practice means of course Texas Chainsaw Massacre, of which 1000 Corpses is a loose remake, without character or surprise, and with doses of some really phony evil stuff which is neither particularly human-themed enough to be disturbing or realistic nor otherworldly enough to be creative. It’s placeholder evil, MacGuffin evil meriting just the briefest explanation before that explanation - and any possible sense - is scrapped, leaving its arrival so completely nonsensical that it’s unclear why it’s there at all, feeling like nothing so much as the fourth act of a one-act play.

As far as evoking the feel of the 70s, other than its shameless Chainsaw jocking, 1000 Corpses has going for it a sparse couple of straight sunlit shots, some lighting-processing-filter combination that recalls the questionable filmstock of much shock cinema without duplicating it, and used to effect it could have been enjoyable, even insightful in its reference, a formal updating of the lapsed years that does in a couple of shots what Zombie aimed for (and missed) in script, gore effects, and style.

Rob Zombie, for his part, cobbles the thing together in a way that makes it look like he’s still working on the More Human Than Human video he was working on in 1993 or so. In fact, the whole movie is an amalgam of Zombie throwing in bits of his own projects for the last ten years or so. He’s using the same music-video filters and camera tricks from White Zombie videos (not, probably, based on any horror music videos from the 70s, and lacking even the dated-effects charm of old Alice Cooper presentations). He adds, obtrusively, from his obsessions with Bela Lugosi movies, carny-kitsch, and the much more successful melding of the two found in Elvira and Ghoulardi. We get it, you like...

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Topics: horror, movies

Elvis and JFK battle a cowboy mummy in an old folks home - the premise alone should earn this movie good marks. Bruce Campbell stars in the role of Elvis. Things are sounding even better! Ultimately, however, despite the tremendous potential of this brilliant chemistry I left the theatre feeling that the film, ultimately, was just pretty good, and not as great as it could have been.

At parts the first two thirds of the movie seem to plod along in exposition, and the plot is utterly straight forward and lacking in the kinds of twists, turns, and plot development that should carry a movie through it's middle, leaving it with the feel of a movie that has a beginning, an end, and nothing in between. At the same time, plot does not seem to be one of the goals of this movie. Rather, it seems intentionally more just a hastily constructed platform to create a truly bizarre scenario and some very funny Bruce Campbell moments (although none quite as good as the best in Evil Dead II and Army of Darkness).

As a result, members of the Cult of All That is Bruce Campbell will still thoroughly enjoy this film simply for the fact that it combines Bruce Campbell's trademark one-liner deliveries with a portrayal of geriatric Elvis. Other performances in the movie were well done, but hopelessly overshadowed by Bruce Campbell's inconquerable presence. If you are not a fan of Bruce Campbell, however, the movie has the potential of becoming a bit laborious at times.

Rating: C+

Topics: movies

How does a movie that's only 75 minutes long have pacing problems? Somehow Darkness Falls manages. Act I proceeds at about average speed, normally if unenjoyably, and somehow stumbles directly into Act III, which then manages to drag on uninterminably. So the structure is kind of like this:

•Act I.

•First two-thirds of Act III.

•Middle 10-minute part of Act III.

•Another two-thirds of Act III.

•Fairly nonsensical special effects.

•Credits roll.

Darkness Falls devotes the least time to villain development of anything in memory, guarding against Unrefuted Champion status by positioning exactly two minutes of perfunctory, pretty much unrelated exposition at the very opening of the flick. Considering the overall length of the movie, this comes to an impressive two and two-thirds percent of screen time devoted to bad-guy development, which is probably a solid half of the time devoted to protagonist-development - so the percentages might be about right. Too bad the movie is awful. On the yardstick of recent movies about kids who see stuff that comes back to haunt them fast-forward ten-or-so-years later but nobody will believe them, Darkness Falls falls a distant second to They, and lest that sound too complimentary to either film, let it be clearly stated: They stinks.

Rating: D- (Darkness Falls: flat)

Topics: horror, movies

Pirates of the Caribbean is based on a Disney ride.

No, wait. Pirates of the Caribbean is, in fact, a Disney ride:

It's not really intended for people your age. There are aspects of it that are kind of kiddie, some hokey moments, and at times you feel a tiny bit embarrassed that you're there at all, instead of pursuing a more age-appropriate endeavor, or looking to get a frozen banana. The whole thing feels like maybe it's moving a little slowly - but then there are some neat parts, and you get caught up in it, and before you know it you're squinting in the sunlight again, and chances are good you had more fun than you expected.

Rating: B- (Best pirate movie in...uh, years)

Topics: movies

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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Mark Pellington is obviously the most aggressive cut/fade/dissolve/scene transition guy working on the major circuit right now, and Mothman Prophecies is a moderately interesting exercise in Shyamalanamism distinguished by its style, an application of slickness applied throughout - but nowhere more evident than in Pellington's use of shape-cuts to establish a kind of physically manifested motif.

Which is all well and good, if not especially revolutionary. It's Pellington's aggression that sets Mothman Prophecies apart, and the constant use of his preferred shapes and forms, so heavily used that it becomes less a stylistic choice than a defining aspect of the film: Pellington's going to use this cut, and he's going to use it a lot, and he's going to use it in so many ways and at so many differing levels of abstraction that you're going to come away with this cut as one of the major characters, to the point where it should probably get a screen credit.

Which is fine. The nicest way for the viewer to use this in some kind of constructive way, somehow to augment the creepiness (of which there's just a little bit), to tie the visual trademark to the atmosphere/plot (mostly the same here), is to watch it a second time. No matter how hard Pellington brought the transition in, how many consecutive cuts featured it and how closely you associated it with the first viewing, you find that Pellington brought it earlier, more, before you noticed it, and you start looking for more. You see the obvious ones, maybe enjoy the way Pellington sneaks it up before he bangs it out - but then there's another one, maybe. It's a little more subtle, but it's there. Then there's another - or is that naturally occurring? Too simple, formally, not to occur by chance in nature, even if no framed shot is an accident, and you start wondering not whether Pellington's doing it on purpose, but whether you're really seeing it in gnarled branches or it's just eagerness to see something that might be there, and any time a monster flick gets you wondering if you're really seeing something in gnarled branches, it's okay by me.

Topics: movies

I think it's pretty clear to all involved that the current system of test screenings really doesn't result in the most artistically rewarding film. The studio ushers in a bunch of people who fit the demographic range they would like to sell the film in question to, then adjust the film to try to appeal to as many people in the audience as possible. I'm not saying this process is always bad. If nothing else, it tells a studio that they shouldn't even bother trying to sucker people into seeing something truly horrible like Lost Souls or Slackers, giving them free reign to do a one-week release in February when only teenagers desparate to get out of the house will see it.

All this isn't to say you couldn't do a valid test screening - one that might actually help the filmmakers make a genuinely better film. Find some people who generally like the works of the screenwriter and director, people who like the genre in question, people who clearly understand what it is they're going for. Had they done such a test screening for Happy Campers, I like to think I'd have been in the test audience.

I've been a big fan of Daniel Waters for years. Not only did he write the brilliant script for Heathers (which has, sadly, not aged as well as I would have liked), but turned what could have been horrible throwaway trash into incredibly sharp, funny (if somewhat strange) films like Hudson Hawk and The Adventures of Ford Fairlane. His somewhat bizarre view of the world, along with some truly insipired casting choices, made Batman Returns not only one of the best sequels ever, but really gave Tim Burton the opportunity to make the strangest film he's ever done. He seemed to be Joel Silver's designated script doctor, putting him up pretty high in my pantheon of unsung Hollywood heroes, possibly surpassing Joe Dante.

Then he disappeared. A cowriting credit on Demolition Man (which, with a cast including Wesley Snipes, Sly Stallone, and Rob Schneider, was incable of being made watchable no matter what kind of script you had) Then nothing, for many many long years.

So I was pleasantly surprised to see a new credit for him show up on IMDB. And, even better, a camp movie! Who doesn't love a good camp movie?

Sadly, Happy Campers is not a good camp movie.

For those who haven't seen it, Happy Campers is the story of a bunch of sex-crazed camp counselors. Brad Renfro gets top billing as Wichita, who is supposed to be universally attractive, but otherwise, it's hard to get a handle on his personality. He's supposed to be a suave ladies man, but his behavior seems to indicate that he's possibly psychotic. He also puts a frog down a girl's bathing suit, which may be suave for a five year old, but not for an allegedly college aged guy. Then again, the people who think he's suave are mostly the campers, so maybe it's all relative.

Dominique Swain plays the goody goody girl. I guess Alicia Silverstone has pretty much priced herself out of everyone's budgets, so the roles that she should be playing are getting picked up by Ms. Swain. It's pretty much the same character she's played in everything I've seen her in (which is more than I'd like)

The movie's main flaw (aside from the always bad writing device of allowing all the characters to narrate) is an inability to focus...

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Rating: D

Topics: movies

The Coen Brothers have done it again!

If by "it" you mean "made another soulless, self-referential piece of pastiche," then you'd be exactly right. Once again, the Coens indulge their love of film noir, and, techincally, manage to get it almost exactly right. The film looks perfect. There are lots of vertical shafts of dark and light. Billy Bob Thornton's face is full of interesting shading. Visually, the film moves as though it were actually made 50-some years ago (with a couple exceptions -- the Coens can't indulge their Busby Berkeley-by-way-of-MTV visual impulses for an entire shoot, apparently, so the film does break character in a few spots, thereby ruining the one aspect of the film they managed to get right)

But once you get past the visual aspect, The Man Who Wasn't There has some flaws that run very deep, starting with the performances. Not Billy Bob. He does a great job of expressing virtually no emotion and, in doing so, manages to retain his dignity throughout the film. Sadly, the same cannot be said for most of the supporting cast. Michael Badalucco, Jon Polito, and Tony Shalhoub all seem more than willing to portray shrill, shrieking charicatures instead of actually, you know, acting. I'm sure it's not their fault. The Coen Brothers have shown, over the years, a remarkably ability to get otherwise decent actors to complete forgo any attempts to make their character seem even vaguely like a real person. While this approach works fine in lighter comedic works like Raising Arizona, it becomes disconcertingly annoying in a "drama" like this.

As annoying as the acting is, the hamhanded attempts to wedge existential/postmodern thinking into the movie hurt. I mean, caused physical pain. Tony Shalhoub's defense attorney going on and on about Heisenberg was truly painful. I understand the idea of interpreting classic film noir as the closest filmic version of existentialism, and even claiming it as the first mass-culture rumblings of postmodern discontent, but to be so blatant and explicit in shoe-horning the "content" into the film is not something to be rewarded with praise, but solely with scorn.

Rating: D (Not actually a film noir, but a shallow facsimile thereof)

Topics: movies

Is that what kung fu has come to? Latest American Jet Li flick trying, I guess, to one-up Black Mask. Nothing new here. First-time director Chris Nahon, instead of studying the greats (Li does Lee in Fist of Legend), takes all his hints from American directors working with Hong Kong stars, and so instead of getting the Jet Li of Twin Warriors, we get an Americanized version, which is not to say Li is Americanized (though of course they find a way to call him Johnny in the flick) so much as to say that the direction is like the direction in other recent American-HK flicks. Nahon takes all his cues from The Replacement Killers, and Antoine Fuqua isn’t exactly 1992 John Woo; 1999 John Woo isn’t exactly 1992 John Woo, though at least he knows the source material. Fuqua, a music video guy, destroyed Replacement Killers by losing the action: he fired a lot of rounds, but he failed to ground the action, opting instead for what he considered the kineticism of quick-cut, and for some unfortunate and unknown reason, this, along with early US/HK collaborations like Simon Sez (what?) became the style of the American HK. Simon Sez, made by a legit HK director, Ringo Lam, seems to have been taken at face value by the Fuquas of the world, but Lam was never as much of an action director as a gunfire man. Jet Li needs his directors to have seen his old work.

As if aware of the need for some old-school, non-Propaganda Films street cred, Kiss of the Dragon builds on the rep and skills of Luc Besson, co-writer and producer, and as La Femme Nikita and Leon (The Professional) are thematically the building blocks here, Besson's hand is heavy, down to his favorite gags: the laundry chute, the police station, the elevator kick, the hand grenade.

Kiss of the Dragon does have some news, and the news is the kill shot. If the plot is rotten, the dialogue worse, the camerawork shaky where it needs to be solid (literally, not judgmentally), and the action Jackie Chan one scene and 100% Besson the next, Nahon's Faces of Death interest in the portrayal of the grisly demise seems to be what sets him apart from Fuqua.

The deaths are gruesome, and in fact their over-the-top quality is the only aspect to set Kiss of the Dragon apart. Here are a few: look away if you're squeamish about destruction or giving away the point of movies.

Besson's laundry-chute escape, lifted straight from La Femme Nikita, goes one step beyond: the grenade (missile) doesn’t just force Li (Parillaud) into rapid escape, but blows one henchman apart, sending legs fluttering (?) slo-mo to the ground and eliciting the first of many Eeeewwws from the audience.

The neck snap, a heavy staple of US action film for years, enjoying a resurgence since its use in Total Recall, is used here to serious effect, and Nahon has enough faith in it to use it twice in a single scene, a daring move which is upheld only through very creative use in a WWF kind of tombstone move fairly rare in the "serious" action film.

The movie's point, in a lot of ways, is the Kiss of the Dragon, revealed at the end to be the final kill, when we learn that Jet Li is skilled in the ancient and mystical art of David Cronenberg, and Nahon's insistence on showing us the whole thing, even without any semblance at all of Roger Avary glee or James Bondish tongue-in-cheek, is revealed to be his ultimate justification for making this movie: the willingness to show...

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I should probably start off, in the spirit of full disclosure, that my overall outlook on the world has been overly influenced by Archie Comics. It wasn't until fairly recently that I realized that variations on the "Chinese Food is great, but I'm always hungry a half-hour later" observeration are not considered humorous by the world at large. Nor do others seem to notice if I insert a dimly-remembered line from an old Archie comic into daily conversation. For much of my life, my standard response to "Tell me something I don't know!" was "Boiled rudabegas cure bunions," which always produced confused looks, but never once did anyone say, "Hey! I remember that issue of Josie and the Pussycats! I remember when Melody said that to Pepper!"

Clearly, I don't hang out with the right sort of people.

Anyway, that brings me to the recent movie adaptation of Josie and the Pussycats. I am clearly the sort of person who will take umbrage with the fact that Pepper is not in the film. Nor is Alexandra a witch. Nor does she have a cat with matching hairdo. Nor is Alan M. a stud. Nor is Alexander a sleazy, Reggie-esque cad. These are the sorts of comic-to-movie translations that tend to drive fanboys like me up the wall (Are there Archie Comics fanboys? I mean, ones who can drive and don't live with their parents?)

Obviously, I went into this film expecting to be worked up into a righteous fervor. I was hoping to storm out screaming, "How dare they put Carson Daly into a Josie movie?" Truth be told, I only managed to maintain this attitude about five minutes into the film. Maybe it was the fact that I had just sat through Joe Dirt and a swift kick to the teeth would have seemed like a pleasant treat. Maybe it was the Kay Hanley songs, which, short of letting Lisa Mar sing Sean Tollefson songs, was about the best we could hope for as far as musical backing goes. Maybe it was Rachael Leigh Cook (Admitting that I actually like Rachael Leigh Cook is equivalent, in my mind, to driving around town in a recently purchased Pontiac Aztek -- a public admission that the entertainment monoliths can shove anything down my throat and I will not only buy it, but scream for more.)

Whatever the reason, I found myself really enjoying the film. Rachael Leigh Cook is very nice to watch (Although she has developed some bizarre tics. I'm not sure if this is her idea of "acting" or if she's tweaking on speed.) Tara Reid was much better than expected, though, at this point, I think the engagement to Carson Daly weighs much more heavily in my mind than any of her performances. The biggest treats are, not surprisingly, Alan Cumming and Parker Posey, both of whom have superb track records of brightening up every film they are in (granted, there wasn't much they could do for Spice World and You've Got Mail, respectively, but just imagine how those would have been without them)

The film does drag a bit in spots, mostly due to three characters the screenwriters apparently felt obliged to bring over from the comics (Alan M - Josie's boyfriend, Alexander - The Pussycats' manager, and Alexandra, Alex's sister and Josie's rival for Alan's affections) They really serve very little purpose. Alan should have been built up a little more as a love interest (and recast, incidentally -- scrawny James Spader lookalikes are not believable as the hottest boy in Riverdale) Alex and Alexandra could...

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Rating: B

Topics: movies

After several years of reading the Los Angeles Times, I had gathered the impression that Hedwig and the Angry Inch was, far and away, the single greatest musical ever made. I seem to recall that there was an article concerning the musical at least once a week. Something about John Cameron Mitchell. Something about the Stone Temple Pilots perfoming as The Angry Inch in various clubs around Los Angeles. Something about the impending movie adaptation.

Of course, having now moved to the deep provinces of New England, coverage of Hedwig has certainly dropped off. Disappeared, rather. So, the movie comes out with no advertising, no notably press coverage, no word of mouth, nothing. It did, however, show up at the local art theatre here, where it was scarcely populated. I'm sure the subject matter is a tough sell with vacationing bankers from Hartford, but it's really unfortunate because Hedwig deserves all the praise that has been heaped upon it.

In short, Hedwig and the Angry Inch tells the story of Hansel, a young East German rock fan, who has a botched sex change operation (becoming Hedwig), marries an American army officer, moves to Kansas, gets dumped, hooks up with a 17 year old named Tommy, writes a bunch of (great) songs with him, then watches him become world-famous rocker Tommy Gnosis, while he has to play at buffet restaurants. All this is told in flashback, mostly to the audiences of the aforementioned buffet restaurants.

A lot of people have been comparing it to Rocky Horror Picture Show which is really unfortunate. Hedwig really isn't about camp. Yes, the characters dress in absurd glam rock costumes, but within about 10 minutes, it becomes very clear that this movie really isn't about style at all. The whole movie revolves around characters, not costuming. There's never really a moment where the characters take the time to point out how "outrageous" their costumes are; it's just the way they dress. The whole film does an amazing job with pastiche without irony.

This lack of irony is probably most apparent in the songs. It's pretty hard to pull off a song entitled "The Origins of Love" (and containing references to deities from Norse, Greek, and Egyptian mythology) without pointing out how absurd and corny the song is. But the characters accept the song as-is and, more importantly, so do we. It's a really good song. Yeah, the lyrics are cheesy, but the song rocks. Just like good glam rock should.

Yes, the film has problems. It bogs down a bit towards the end. The final sequence is either boring (as some think) or the high point of irony-free pastiche of 70's mystic imagery (as I think). I can't think of another film that has no problem assuming that people are fairly familiar not only with traditional interpretations of Gnosticism, but also the more recent theory that all of alchemy is an attempt to unite the male and the female. I admire any film that assumes (correctly) that much of its audience.

Rating: A-

Topics: movies

I once asked my old boss, who owns a comic book store and hundreds of thousands of comic books, why comics appealed to him. "In comics," he said. "You can do anything you want to. Characters can seamlessly have the appearance of flying. If you want to go to the moon, you can be there in the next panel."

Though computerized special effects are now approaching believable detail, comics and animation remain the only media where this is reliably true. It’s a fact that The Simpsons uses to absurd advantage. Waking Life, the new film directed by Richard Linklater, seeks to push that envelope, however. Instead of taking a live-action film into the possible worlds opened by animation, though, Linklater uses the movie to point out the differences - and the fuzzy line - between the two.

Linklater shot the film on a bouncing hand-held video camera, then gave the result to a group of animators, who painted over the backgrounds and characters, at times underscoring or exaggerating their real-life features. The result looks like animation but, in retaining so much naturalistic human detail, is also clearly a portrait of real life.

Live-action films that incorporate animation give themselves a lot of options for the fantastical. Linklater and his animators largely refrain, however, from flying epithets, surreal backgrounds or anything that would not appear in the real world.

Only occasionally, as when a character mimics a god throwing a thunderbolt and the trail behind his arm resembles lightning, do such manifestations appear. And even then, these symbols are literal interpretations of the discussion or action. When a character complains that she is tired of feeling like nothing more than an ant, she does not sprout antennae - though in one subtle touch a man does appear as a chimpanzee.

This restraint is particularly notable given the fact that the movie is about the differences between dreaming and the waking life of the title. Though more than 20 animators are each given a scene, the movie’s palette, mood and tendency toward abstraction stay relatively consistent.

The closest thing the movie has to a star is Wiley Wiggins, who reprises his role as Mitch Kramer from Linklater's Dazed and Confused. Wiggins wanders a bizarre world marked by strange encounters, receiving advice, confession or a lecture at every turn. The first third of the movie is almost entirely made up of several long monologues, some from real-life philosophy professors.

Just as the movie is starting to collapse under these speeches - both long and deep - a mystery emerges. Wiggins is unsure whether he is awake. Clearly some of the scenes he sees, like the bedroom discussion between Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, are dreamt. Then he wakes up, wanders the streets, goes into the subway and watches TV like a waking person, only to discover he is still dreaming.

It is in this context that the lectures that begin the movie take on meaning. And once he realizes he is dreaming, Wiggins, with the advice of John Christensen, who died after appearing in the movie, is able to manipulate his surroundings and ask the people he meets how they feel as nothing more than figments of his imagination.

Deeper questions emerge too. One character Wiggins meets has a great idea for a soap opera, but it’s nothing Wiley would have ever come up with by himself. Where did it come from? And as Wiggins cannot wake himself, he begins to get the sneaking suspicion that he, like the dead, may never...

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Rating: A-

Topics: movies

To get a sense of the power actor Brian Cox presents, it's useful to watch two movies: Hampton Fancher's The Minus Man (1999) and Michael Cuesta's directorial debut, the new film L.I.E. It's also worth noting that Cox was the first Hannibal Lecter in 1986's Manhunter.

In The Minus Man, Cox seals the movie as an apparently well-adjusted, small-town man who is in fact going crazy, tormented with fantasies of his departed daughter.

In L.I.E., Cox has is haunted not by girls but little boys. As Big John Harrigan, a wealthy, popular Long Islander, he is tempted to take advantage of gay boys, offering them needed emotional support while often extracting psychological abuse. The movie's most sublime moment comes in a totally confused expression on Cox's face that embodies this conflict as a young man, Howie Blitzer, seeks his embrace.

Howie, 15, the movie’s protagonist, has recently lost his mother, the family anchor, in a car crash on the L.I.E. - the Long Island Expressway. We get the sense his father, a breadwinning asshole caught up in a legal scam, is never around for the erudite but naïve boy.

Howie's friends, including Gary, who is known to all but Howie as a "salami swiper" - a male prostitute - hang out near the freeway, under high-tension power lines or behind strip malls, smoking, swigging beer and talking tough. While James Dean was clearly older than the high schooler he played in Rebel Without a Cause, these boys look much younger, their braggadocio undermined by the whitebread world around them.

Cuesta, who shares writing credits with two others on the movie, has an eye and an ear for these suburban brats, who are fascinated by bodily functions sexual and excretory but also by the greater possibilities of life. His Long Island of watered lawns and homogenous high schools could be ten minutes from any big city.

Howie's "sensitive" nature is never addressed head-on. Rather, Cuesta attacks the doom that all boys - even Howie's father - face in these amoral environs.

Howie joins the boys on their burglary sprees, breaking into wealthy homes and, like the children they still are, heading for the refrigerator. Gary soon takes Howie under his wing, and the tension building between them rings familiar to former teens of any sexual persuasion.

From his salami escapades, Gary knows that Big John's house holds some valuable treasures, so he and Howie break into it during John’s birthday party. Though they escape, it's not long before Big John puts a few things together and is hot on Gary’s trail.

As John realizes that Howie is not really responsible for the theft, however, their relationship deepens. At first the elder tries to seduce the younger, offering him rides in a mint Cutlass, but it is not long before their positions are reversed, as Howie quotes Walt Whitman to the elder statesman.

Both quickly realize that Howie needs support more than anything else. Abandoned by friends and bullied at school, Howie is completely alone. As his father's legal and financial worries spiral (implausibly) out of control, Howie is left on his own.

Like Todd Solondz's Happiness, L.I.E. lifts the stone of society, putting the gross and disgusting that slither below on uncomfortable display. While Solondz seems content to point at the squirming creatures, Cuesta feels the Howies of the world...

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Rating: A-

Topics: movies

I don't know about you, but I have certain expectations about films that involve the following motifs:

 · Elvis
 · Vegas
 · Robberies
 · Seedy Drifters
 · Duffel Bags Full of Money
 · Old Caddys with Fins

I expect long, slow shots of cars driving through the desert landscape. I expect blues-flavored bar rock on the soundtrack. I expect truly sleazy femme fatale types.

What I certainly do not expect is really bad throbbing techno and astoundingly cheesy "avant-garde" editing. These elements work fine in certain genres, but the low-budget desert road/heist movie really does not need an MTV makeover. People have been ripping off John Ford and Sam Peckinpah for years to make these movies, and I see no reason to stop now.

Demian Lichtenstein has done wonders to setting back the public perception of music-video-directors-turned-feature-film-directors all the way back to the early days of Russel Mulcahy. I can only hope the next time David Fincher walks into a trendy Silverlake club and see Lichtenstein doing blow off a hooker's chest, he gives him the beating he so richly deserves for not only inflicting this vile piece of cinema on the American public, but for making all of us just a little less likely to see a film when the promo materials describe it as "a bold first feature from a respected music video director." How does directing freakin' Sting videos qualify you to blow $62 million of Warner Brothers' money?

Maybe I'm being too hard on the guy. Clearly he has no concept of genre convention, nor does he have any idea how to pace a script (which he allegedly co-wrote) He did have the good sense to cast Kurt Russel, but, then again, that may have just been accidental, given that he also cast Kevin Costner and David Arquette. And who told him Courtney Cox would make a good femme fatale? Is there still someone out there who thinks the stars of Friends are bankable?

The more I write about this film, the angrier I seem to be getting. I'd better stop now before I get into legally actionable material...

Rating: D- (Not even a good dumb movie)

Topics: movies

As a devoted insomniac, I find myself watching a lot of television late at night, which means I have, for the most part, three options.

Infomercials.

Porn.

Bad horror films.

All things being equal, I will choose the bad horror film, and have so chosen for the past ten years or so, which means I have seen way too many bad horror films of every conceivable variety.

So believe me when I say that Kolobos is a bad horror film.

Five people agree to be on a reality TV project where they are put in a house and filmed. Being as this is a bad horror film, they all get murdered in not terribly creative manners. The directors occasionally try and give the film a little Williamson-esque self-referentiality, in which the characters talk about how bad horror films are, but soon give up on that in favor of over-the-top slicings and dicings.

Is there any reason to watch this, you might ask? Not especially. It's no worse than most of the bad horror films out there. The plot kinda falls apart at the end, and the special effects (such as they are) are nothing to write home about, but if you're looking for something to lull you to sleep, it's not bad.

The one vaguely noteworthy aspect of the film is Promise LaMarco who plays a hipster/fast food worker. I would put down as much as $5 that, within five years, she has a part on a sitcom or comedic drama (e.g., Northern Exposure, Gilmore Girls) as a wacky townsperson. She's certainly the only actor in this film that caught my attention. Unfortunately she gets chopped up about thirty minutes into the film, at which point I had a pretty hard time staying awake. Would it have been that hard to do an on-the-set rewrite (presuming there was, in fact, a script) and bumped off the bland blond a