Movie Review: The Hateful Eight (2015)

On a desolate plain somewhere in the American west, there's a cabin--a waystation, really--where a group of travelers have gathered to wait out a particularly nasty snowstorm.

John Ruth (Kurt Russell) is a bounty hunter shackled to his latest catch, Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh). Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson) is another bounty hunter. Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins) claims to be the new sheriff in town. General Sandy Smithers (Bruce Dern) is also there, along with cowpuncher Joe Gage (Michael Madsen), dandy Oswaldo Mobray (Tim Roth), and Bob (Demian Bichir), a mountain of a man in a huge fur coat.

And at least one--possibly more--of these strangers is lying about who/what they are. And a deadly confrontation looms.

Sound interesting? It's not.

In fact, The Hateful Eight is a tortuously slow, dull, uninteresting mess served up by cinematic magpie Quentin Tarantino, whose first few movies I loved to pieces, especially Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown, but whose recent output has left me cold. Those movies didn't frustrate, even anger, me, though, like The Hateful Eight.

Here, Tarantino has assembled a stellar cast, has set them down in a spectacular location and has shot the film using 70mm cameras handled by Oscar-winning cinematographer Robert Richardson.

Why, then, is this movie so goddamn dull?

Maybe it's because, after having gathered a great cast, several of whom have worked with Tarantino before, the writer/director doesn't give them much to do except stand around in period clothes and talk at each other.

And talk. And talk. And. Talk.

There are bursts of action, but these are so infrequent that viewers might be forgiven if they take naps between bursts. And the performances are so universally broad that the viewer could easily mistake The Hateful Eight for a live-action cartoon--with a lot more swearing and blood, of course.

I watched The Hateful Eight all the way through, hoping there would be a twist or explanation or something to redeem the nearly three hours I'd spent with all these unlikable, murderous folks.

But no such relief arrived. The pain only ended when the credits rolled.

Movie Review: The Thing (1982)

Remakes are a tricky business. If you adhere too closely to the original film, you lose a lot of the juice that ran through it (plus, people will point and call you a copycat). If you wander too far from the original, though, you risk alienating the very audience you're trying to attract.

So when John Carpenter, director of such horror classics as Halloween and The Fog, decided to tackle a remake of Howard Hawk's production, The Thing from Another World, there was a curious combo platter of elation and trepedation amongst horror fans: Would Carpenter hold close to the original short story by Joseph Campbell Jr.? To the original film? To neither?

Try a little of all of the above.

The story begins in the Arctic, with Norwegians in a helicopter hunting a German Shepherd with a rifle, shooting at the dog until it runs into a camp of scientific observers for protection.

What the observers don't know--what the Norwegians discovered, much to their horror--is that the dog is not just a dog: It's a creature from outer space capable of mimicking any lifeform it comes in contact with. Thus begins a fight for survival between the alien and the staff of the camp--and, ultimately, with said staff fighting with one another, trying to figure out who has been taken over by the alien and who, if anyone, is still human.

Carpenter's camera prowls the cold, desolate halls of the Arctic base, watching the remaining survivors become increasingly desperate until, by the end, there are only two--neither of whom is sure whether or not the other is an alien or not.

It definitely helps that Carpenter has populated this desolate station with numerous recognizable character actors, including Kurt Russell, Richard Dysart, Richart Masur, Wilford Brimley, Keith David and Donald Moffat. And the synthesizer score, surprisingly, isn't by Carpenter himself, but by master Italian movie composer Ennio Morricone.

Another terrific film for a cold winter's night.

Movie Review: The Donner Party (1992)

The wind blows. The snow drifts. Walking becomes an increasingly difficult chore.

A typical winter day in Chicago? Sure. But also the conditions dealt with, to varying degrees of success, by the Donner Party.

When I was in grade school, I used to tell a joke that was, at the time, hilarious to me: "Donner Party, table for four...wait...Donner Party, table for three?...um...Donner Party, table for two?" And so on.

This was long before I had any real knowledge of the Donner Party--what they'd gone through, the losses they'd suffered, how any of them survived.

Ric Burns--younger brother of Ken Burns, director of The Civil War, Jazz and The Roosevelts: An Intimate History, amongst many other television events--wrote and directed this documentary way back in 1992 for the PBS series American Experience. I saw it when it first aired and subsequently bought the DVD of the program. Unfortunately, like most of my DVD collection, it was lost when I had to abandon La Casa del Terror back in 2016.

But like so many other movies, I've been able to replace my copy of The Donner Party and gave it a view on a recent cold winter's night.

And it made me shiver, though not from the cold.

You likely know the basic story: A group of settlers, led by George Donner, left from Springfield, IL, in the spring of 1846. They tried to beat the onset of winter in the Sierra Nevada mountains. They failed. The snows set in and dumped feet of snow in the passes the Donner Party would need to travel through. The party bogged down, used up what little provisions they'd brought along and, eventually, resorted to cannibalism to survive.

There's much more to the story, of course, and Ric Burns, like his older brother, goes into great detail and uses a combination of period photography, new footage of the locations where the grisly events took place and interviews with experts on the subject, all narrated by David McCullough (who also handled the same duties on The Civil War) and with actors like Timothy Hutton, J.D. Cannon and Amy Madigan giving voice to the unfortunate souls.

I re-watched The Donner Party on Super Bowl Sunday--I didn't care about either team and have long since given up caring about the commercials--and found that, even in the relatively cozy confines of la Casa de Mama, I was more than capable of feeling a chill.

V-Day Review: My Bloody Valentine (1981)

In the tiny mining village of Valentine Bluffs, they haven’t held a dance on February 14 in years—not since the cave-in that killed a bunch of miners, pushed the lone survivor, Harry Warden, past the brink of sanity, and drove him to return a year later to murder the two supervisors responsible for the tragedy.

But now, two decades later, Valentine Bluffs is holding a dance again—and somebody dressed up as a miner starts tearing out hearts all over again.

Has the mad killer returned to town? Or has someone else donned on the gas mask and lifted the pickaxe again?

If so, who could it be? Is it T.J. (Paul Kelman), who moved away to California (presumably to become an actor), only to fail miserably and return to toil in the coal mine back home? Or Axel (Neil Affleck), the new, surly boyfriend of Sarah (lori Hallier), T.J.’s ex? Or affable Hollis (Keith Knight), the burly peacemaker and voice of reason? Or the police chief (Don Francks) or the mayor (Larry Reynolds), both of whom were around for Harry Warden’s original killing spree?

Sounds like the typical setup for yet another holiday-themed mad slasher film, doesn’t it? Well, in many ways it is, especially after those wacky “kids” (who, thankfully, are young adults instead of the usual dumbass teenagers) decide to hold their own dance--where else?--at the mine itself, where the body count rapidly rises.

What sets My Bloody Valentine apart from the average slasher flick, then or now, is the detailed setting--the film was shot in a real coal mining community in Nova Scotia, a rare case of a Canadian town actually playing a Canadian town rather than subbing for an American location --and the patience with which director George Mihalka and screenwriter James Beaird develop most of the characters before killing them off in gruesome ways.

(Some of the murders were so gruesome, in fact, that the film was censored, with anywhere from three to nine minutes of gore removed. A 2009 special edition DVD restored some, if not all, of the excised footage.)

It also doesn’t hurt that the miner outfit, with its gas mask, grimy jumpsuit and battered hardhat, is effectively creepy and does a fair job of hiding the identity of the killer--at least until enough victims have been perforated, boiled or otherwise mangled that the process of elimination becomes much easier.

Like so many other ’80s slasher films, though, the conclusion of My Bloody Valentine leaves open the possibility for a sequel--one which failed to materialize. However, also like so many other ’80s slasher films, there was a remake, serving up still more mayhem from the murderer in the miner’s mask, only in a much more explicit manner than the original ever could.

Movie Review: The World's End (2013)

I have never felt the desire to go on a pub crawl.

Walk into a pub and crawl out later? Sure. Done that.

Do a bit of impromptu bar-hopping? Yeah. Done that, too.

But venture forth with the intent of hitting bar after bar after bar until my liver bursts forth from my body and runs away screaming into the night? No. Just does not sound like fun.

Gary King (Simon Pegg) obviously feels differently. He considers the night he and his best mates from childhood spent making the attempt at the "Golden Mile"--the 12-pub run in their sleepy home town of Newton Haven, concluding with The World's End, to have been the best night of his life, even though he only made it through nine of the 12 pubs.

Now, 20 years later, Gary wants to make a go at the "Golden Mile" again, whether his mates--all of whom have grown up, gotten jobs, started families and/or gotten on with their lives--want to or not.

Through cajoling, coercion and sheer force of somewhat bleary will, Gary gets all four friends (Martin Freeman, Paddy Considine, Eddie Marsan and Nick Frost) to drive back to Newton Haven to spend the better part of an afternoon and evening working their way up the "Golden Mile." Along the way, there is much drinking (except for Frost as Andy, formerly an epic party animal--and Gary's best friend--and now "on the wagon" and only drinking tap water), much bitching (especially about Gary, who's still wearing the same coat and driving the same car he did 20 years ago) and more than a bit of confusion as to why so few people in their hometown seem to recognize them except for Sam (Rosamund Pike), the sister of one of the friends, the longtime love-from-afar of another and a one-time-only fling for Gary.

Up to this point, The World's End is more or less a typical "old friends revisit old battlegrounds and open old wounds" comedy with most of the cast underplaying while Pegg's Gary reaches for Captain Jack Sparrow-level scene-chewing glory. Then, something happens--well into the crawl, Gary gets into a fight with a teenage in a bathroom and discovers, much to his horror, that things (and people) have changed a lot in Newton Haven since he last passed this way--a LOT.

After that, The World's End becomes a different movie--it doesn't abandon the buddy-movie layer, but adds a whole other retro-'70s sci-fi layer that doesn't clash with the previous material, but complements it in surprisingly sweet and satisfying ways.

Or maybe not so surprisingly, since this is how director/cowriter Edgar Wright and partners Pegg and Frost usually work: start off in one, seemingly gentile and benign genre, then shift into something that wouldn't be out of place in a 1975 drive-in. Shaun of the Dead (one of the best films of any kind in the last decade) starts out as a slacker comedy and ends with a zombie apocalypse. Hot Fuzz is an amusing fish-out-of-water buddy-cop flick until a serial killer bounces into the mix. Here, everything's normal until it's not--which, as it turns out, is exactly normal for Wright, Pegg and Frost. An evening out with old friends reliving past "glories" becomes a fight for survival not just for them, but for the whole damn world.

It doesn't hurt to have solid support from the likes of David Bradley (as a crazy old coot who's not so crazy after all), Pierce Brosnan (as an old teacher of the boys who doesn't seem to have gotten any older) and Pike (who gets to enact a brief Die Another Day reunion with that film's James Bond, Brosnan). But, as usual, it comes down to the onscreen chemistry and timing between Pegg and Frost, and that is as strong as ever, even with them playing something of a role reversal, with Pegg loud and obnoxious and Frost levelheaded and calm. And as tempting as it is to accuse Pegg of overacting (remember the mention of Jack Sparrow earlier?), it's just as easy to credit him for a surprisingly nuanced performance: it's not Pegg who's overacting, but Gary, strapping on an antic disposition so his friends, all of whom seem to have their shit together (appearances have a way of being deceiving), won't catch on to how really and truly fucked up he is.

Except when they need him to not be so fucked up. After all, when the world's end may well be nigh (what, you thought the title was just ironic?), your oldest, best friends may be all you have, no matter how fucked up they really are.

Review: World War Z

From the earliest days of the narrative motion picture to today, studios have been adapting literary works for the big screen. And, for just as long, they've been changing those literary works to better fit the needs of the new/different medium. Most times, this comes down to tossing out a whole lot of narrative and hitting the essential/basic plot points--the Harry Potter films, for example. Sometimes this means changing major plot points to accommodate movie stars--compare the ending of the remake of True Grit starring starring Jeff Bridges to the original big-screen version starring John Wayne; one is very true to Charles Portis's novel, the other is not.

And sometimes, it means tossing out the literary work completely and keeping nothing but the title--the James Whale/Boris Karloff version of Frankenstein may be the best example of this, with Edgar G. Ulmar's The Black Cat (also starring Karloff) a close second. Little of Mary Shelley's novel was used for Frankenstein, save the title and the basic concept (a scientist plays God by creating life and suffers the consequences). The Black Cat uses even less of its source material, appropriating only name of Edgar Allan Poe's short story and adding a brief cameo by the titular feline.

My Point? The practice of changing/ignoring literary works while adapting them to the big screen is as old as the movies themselves, and it is possible to produce good--even great--movies under these circumstances.

World War Z, "adapted" in title/basic concept only from the best-seller by Max Brooks (son of screen legends Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft), is not a great movie. It is really not a good movie either, though it does have good moments in it, especially early on. What's somewhat baffling is why so much cash was dropped acquiring the rights to adapt World War Z when this zombie apocalypse could have been executed for far less.

Maybe it was the global scope of Brooks's novel--which bounces from the USA to Japan to Israel to South America--that appealed to star Brad Pitt and director Marc Foster. Obviously, though, they were turned off by the novel's narrative structure, which looks back on the war with the undead through interviews with people from all walks of life all over the globe (heads of state, soldiers, suburban moms, etc.); it's something like Studs Terkel's Working, only with a lot more zombies. Brooks used this structure for sometimes sly, sometimes obvious political/sociological commentary while not neglecting the horror elements of the story.

World War Z the movie, on the other hand, goes for a much more conventional, action-driven narrative while jettisoning nearly all of the characters and situations from the novel. Pitt stars as Gerry Lane, a retired United Nations investigator who's more than happy to spend his days making pancakes for his wife (Mireille Enos) and their two adorable daughters. Life is idyllic--and, therefore, doomed to change big-time.

And so it does--while driving through Philadelphia, Gerry and family get caught up the undead outbreak, with seriously fast zombies swarming through the streets and sinking their teeth into anything that moves (at a tasteful distance--this movie is, after all, rated PG-13). The family must now fight to survive long enough for Gerry's buddies at the UN can rescue them.

Said rescue comes at a price, though: The UN wants Gerry go back into the field and investigate the cause of the zombie plague and, hopefully, come up with a solution, and fast: the population of the world is dropping like a stone.

Up to this point, World War Z the movie is engaging, entertaining and involving--we care about what happens to Gerry, his wife and his kids. Unfortunately, once Gerry flies off to investigate the origins of the plague, the wife and kids--and, pretty much, any further character development--fall very much into the background, and action set pieces dominate the rest of the way.

The action scenes themselves are well orchestrated, with swarms of flesh-hungry fiends charging forward, spilling over walls and toppling buses. We've seen fast zombies before (28 Days Later and the remake of Dawn of the Dead, but never like this, acting in most scenes more like locusts or ants than individual monsters. That gives the action scenes a greater scale--it's almost more like a natural disaster than a zombie-made one--and lend some scenes an appropriately claustrophobic quality.

Unfortunately, the lack of individuality in such scenes also makes the action more anonymous and distant than in most zombie movies, where getting bitten by a single flesh-eater is as much an immediate threat as the multitudes of gut-munchers milling about in the streets.

Speaking of gut-munchers...we don't really see much of that in this movie. I'm hardly a gorehound, but if you're going to make a movie about a plague of flesh-eating zombies, we damn well better see them eat flesh. And we don't.

So not only are the characters robbed of opportunities to develop, but the monsters themselves are robbed of their most prominent threatening feature--some might say their only threatening feature--making it difficult to care about predator or prey.

There's a good--even great--movie to be made from Max Brooks's novel. This World War Z isn't it.

Where I Was Sunday Afternoon

I pried myself away from my air conditioner long enough to catch Captain America: The First Avenger at the New 400 Sunday afternoon.

What did I think, you ask? Here it is, even if you didn't ask:

Captain America is one of those comic book characters who, even though he's been around for over 70 years, hasn't fared all that well in live-action interpretations. The 1944 serial is exciting and all, just as long as you haven't ever read a single Captain America comic book in your life. If you have, though, you quickly realize that the screenwriters took the name of the character and that's about it. The pair of '70s TV movies are pretty awful--it's probably for the best that Cap was never picked up for a TV series--though the second film at least had the great Christopher Lee as a terrorist. And the less said about the 1990 version intended for the big screen but dumped on home video and cable, the better. (Two words: Rubber ears.)

In short, Captain America: The First Avenger could have been truly craptastic and still been better than every version that preceded it.

But it's not craptastic. It's not bad at all. In fact, it's the most enjoyable super-hero movie in a year drowning in them.

This Captain America takes place almost entirely in the 1940s (except from the modern-day sequences that bookend the film) and gets that period detail right (as you'd expect in a film directed by Joe Johnston, whose previous foray into super-hero territory was the underrated 1991 film The Rocketeer). While the screenwriters and production designers take liberties with Cap's story and costume (as you'd fully expect them to, especially with that costume, which was made eminently more practical and battle-ready for this movie), they remain true to the the main character: A skinny, sickly kid from Brooklyn who only wants to serve his country, but is turned down for enlistment again and again until a kindly German scientist (Stanley Tucci, in a sweet performance) physically transforms the kid into a super-soldier. Even in the body of a physically perfect specimen, though, he's still that earnest kid from Brooklyn, wanting to do the right thing and take the fight to the bullies who started it.

Chris Evans does a nice job underplaying his role as Cap/Steve Rogers, though that consequently means he's a bit dull. Fortunately, he's surrounded by colorful performances by crusty Tommy Lee Jones, smart and beautiful Hayley Atwell, tough-as-nails Neal McDonough and batcrap-crazy Hugo Weaving as Cap's nemesis, the Red Skull. Weaving's performance is the closest to over-the-top-and-back-again, but he's playing a superpowered lunatic with aspirations to godhood, so he can't really underplay and still convey the madness behind the Skull's wild eyes.

Most importantly, Captain America: The First Avenger is, for the most part, a fun summer movie (though there is some personal tragedy in there for Steve Rogers, and a whole new world awaiting him in the Avengers movie coming next summer). Sit down, chew your popcorn with your mouth closed and enjoy the air conditioning.

My Month at the Movies: January 2011, Part 2

In the midst of a busy weekend and before Snowmageddon 2011 begins, I did manage to sneak in one more film for the month of January, keeping my moviegoing streak alive at five weeks in a row. How unfortunate that said movie was...

The Green Hornet. This was one of those projects that had been "in development" for ages--in the past, George Clooney had been attached to star and Kevin Smith to write/direct--but it took Seth Rogan, star of comedies such as Knocked Up and Zack and Miri Make a Porno, to push it into existence as executive producer/co-writer/star as Britt Reid, crusading newspaper publisher who moonlights as the title vigilante with the help of mechanical genius/coffee maker Kato (Jay Chou).

Was it worth the wait? Not really.

Director Michel Gondry stages the action sequences nicely, and the film boasts a strong supporting cast (Tom Wilkinson as Britt's dad, Edward James Olmos as the dad's best friend, Cameron Diaz as the potential love interest, Christoph Waltz as the main bad guy).

Unfortunately, the only fully developed character is Britt himself, and he turns out to be the kind of obnoxious, loutish, insufferable jerkwad you wouldn't want to spend five minutes, much less a two-hour movie. Even after his father dies and Britt takes to the streets to beat the crap out of L.A. criminal scum, he remains an unrepentant, spoiled asshole, talking down to everyone from Kato to Lenore (Diaz) and babbling non sequiturs nearly nonstop.

(Much of Rogan's yammering sounds improvised. If that's the case, the director should have reined him in. If it was actually scripted like that, the screenwriter should have been fired on the spot...oh, wait...Rogan co-wrote the screenplay, didn't he? Never mind.)

Fortunately, I saw The Green Hornet in 2D, rather than the much-more-expensive 3D. My headache afterward would have been so much worse.

Also? The Green Hornet, which features numerous acts of violence (beatings, shootings, stabbings, crushings, etc.) is rated PG-13 by the MPAA, while The King's Speech, which no beatings, shootings, stabbings, crushings or anything untoward except a few expletives from the mouth of Colin Firth, is rated R by the same board. Ratings fail, MPAA.

My Month at the Movies: January 2011

As I noted recently, I saw more movies on the big screen last year than I ever had before (32), and my goal for this year was to beat last year's total.

So far, so good.

Last year, I didn't get to the theater until January 24, when I went to the Music Box to see Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (which I commented on here). This year? I saw my first movie on January 2. More importantly, despite the cold and snow--nothing like the East Coast is experiencing this year, but still more of each than normal for us--I've managed to get out to the movies once a week, exclusively going to matinees at budget theaters like the Davis (seen above) and the New 400 (seen below). (It's a lot easier to see four or five movies a month when you're paying less than half the typical ticket price.)

So, what have I see thus far? here's the rundown: Tron: Legacy. When I saw the original Tron at the (late, lamented) McClurg Court Theater, I was impressed with its production design and then-revolutionary CGI effects, but thought the plot was boilerplate adventure film fare: Go on a quest, save the girl, etc.

This sequel/reboot also boasts impressive special effects and production design, but suffers from the same overly familiar storytelling: Go on a quest, save the girl, etc. This time, Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund), son of long-missing computer whiz Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges, repeating his role from the original), gets sucked into "The Grid," the computerized landscape created by his dad and best friend Alan (Bruce Boxleitner, also repeating his role) and goes on the dual quest of finding his father and a way back to the real world.

Tron: Legacy does toss in a couple of tweaks to the formula, like giving Kevin Flynn an lovely and lithe apprentice (olivia Wilde), a thoroughly unnecessary digression into a Grid nightclub, where Michael Sheen does his best "Joel Grey in Cabaret" impression, and a younger, evil version of Kevin (who looks like Jeff Bridges circa 1985, but with the same dead eyes that all motion-capture figures seem to have). Otherwise, it's pretty much the same as it was 28 years ago. That's not a terrible thing, but not a terribly ambitious or compelling thing either.

Tangled. A cross-pollination between the storytelling and scoring of a traditionally animated Disney movie (think Beauty and the Beast and the more hip, glossy computer-animated movies of late (think the Toy Story movies), Tangled features the voice of Mandy Moore as Rapunzel, stolen from her parents as an infant and kept in a tower by an evil witch (Donna Murphy), who wants the baby for her youth-giving hair. When Rapunzel hits 18, though, she wants out of the tower and plots to escape using her famously long tresses as climbing. In comes a handsome rogue (Zachary Levi), who steals a priceless tiara from the king and queen and, almost by accident, Rapunzel's heart. Much dashing about ensues, with traps, escapes and Alan Menchen musical numbers.

Nothing groundbreaking or challenging, but nothing dull or pop culture-obsessed either, Tangled is a pleasant diversion. The kids in the theater enjoyed it. So did I.

The King's Speech. This may be one of those Oscar-baiting British movies with stiff upper lips and persevering through adversity and royal intrigue and all that, but it happens to also be a very good one, with Colin Firth as King George VI of England, who had a frightful stammer, and Geoffrey Rush as the unconventional speech therapist who helped him get over it well enough to speak to his subjects without choking to death on his own words. They're ably supported by an outstanding cast--Helena Bonham Carter, Guy Pearce, Derek Jacobi, Timothy Spall, Michael Gambon, Claire Bloom--but this is really a two-man show, with both Firth and Rush excelling. It's a shame that Firth is nominated as Best Actor and Rush as Best Supporting. They're equal performances--co-leads, really--and deserve equal recognition.

(Also: This movie, which features no sex or violence, is rated "R" strictly for language, specifically a scene in which Firth lets forth a string of expletives as part of his speech therapy. Way to protect the moviegoing public from, um, words, MPAA.)

The Fighter. I'm usually not a fan of Mark Wahlberg's reserved (i.e., wooden) acting style, but it perfectly suits his introspective, conflicted character in The Fighter, the based-one-a-true-story of boxer Micky Ward, who has loads of potential, but is hampered by his domineering mother/manager (Melissa Leo) and crackhead brother/trainer Dicky (Christian Bale). Mom keeps setting up fights that leave Micky mauled, and Dicky, a former boxer who once knocked down Sugar Ray Leonard, is too busy getting high to show up on time and train his brother properly. Micky's new girlfriend (Amy Adams) encourages him to break away from his family and get proper training and management, but can Micky turn his well-muscled back on his family (who, despite their incompetence, truly do love him), especially when Dicky gets busted and winds up in prison?

Bale and Leo give very showy performances, and even the luminous Adams is louder than usual (all three are Oscar-nominated for their roles). but Wahlberg's performance (which was not nominated) at the center of The Fighter hold it together--if we don't care about Micky's fate, nothing else will matter. But Wahlberg makes us care, conveying the frustration Micky feels at being caught between what's best for his family and what's best for himself with subtlety and quiet strength. Suffering doesn't always mean shouting. Sometimes, it means a glance, a shrug, a wince. That's acting, too.

There's still one more weekend to go in the month, and I'll try to catch one more movie, if only to keep the streak going. What will it be? Come back here Monday and see.

Movie Review: House (1977)

There's a lot to love about The Criterion Collection, the company that not only has issued many of the greatest films ever made on DVD and Blu-ray, including several of my personal favorites, like Pandora's Box, Beauty and the Beast and Gimme Shelter. However, they don't neglect more obscure movies in less reputable genres like, say, the horror film: They've issued deluxe editions of well-known genre favorites like M and Vampyr, as well as unsung classics like The Haunted Strangler, Fiend without a Face and White Dog. Any distribution company that can provide me with pristine prints of both The Seven Samurai and The Blob is going to get a lot of my cash. And they have.

But even my knowledge of Criterion's extensive, eclectic catalog couldn't prepare me for one of their latest offerings: Japanese director Nobuhiko Obayashi's 1977 effort, House.

In skimming online reviews of House I found that one of the words most commonly used to describe it was, oddly enough, "batshit," or some variation thereof. It's meant as a compliment: essay after essay declared this movie to be one of the looniest ever made by any director in any country at any time.

Having now seen House on Criterion's beautifully restored Blu-ray (as viewed on my brand-new HDTV), I understand calling it "batshit," "insane," "screwy" or any number of other adjectives that are synonyms for "crazy." However, that seems like a backhanded compliment, and possibly even unintentionally dismissive: House is many other things beside merely being "crazy."

So...what are those things, exactly? That's not so easy to nail down. Is House a horror film? Yes. Is it a comedy? Sort of--there are plenty of moments that are intentionally funny. Is it a satire? A parody? Pop art? Yes, yes, and oh hell yes. But even with all of that, there's something else going on here as well. Obayashi's combination of all of these elements turn House into a commentary not just on horror films, but on the Japanese film industry and, ultimately, on cinema itself.

The plot is almost beside the point, but nonetheless worth noting. A young schoolgirl named Gorgeous (because, well, she is) is excited about going on her summer break with her best friends/classmates. (All of them have character-defining nicknames as well: Prof is the smart one; Fantasy is the head-in-the-clouds one; Melody is the musical one; Kung Fu is the athletic one; Mac is the one who eats a lot; Sweet is the one who's, um, sweet.) When Gorgeous's movie composer dad comes home from his latest assignment in Italy with a new stepmom for her and the class trip gets cancelled, Gorgeous writes a letter to her aunt in the country, asking if they could all visit. Auntie writes back that she'd be happy to have them stay with her, neglecting to mention that the house is haunted by violent, hungry spirits who start picking off the girls one by one.

Sounds simple, right? Not exactly. Obayashi, a former director of TV commercials, imbues the whole affair with a dreamlike logic and progression, like when Gorgeous brings her new cat, Blanche, along on the trip and doesn't seem to think it strange that Auntie has pictures of a cat who looks exactly like Blanche all over her walls. Colors and compositions are bright and saturated--especially the blood. Scenes shift from live-action to animated to a combo platter of the two. Body parts fly everywhere--literally. The same tune is played or sung throughout the film by various characters, including the cat. (Yes. Really.)

All the while, Obayashi has fun with film conventions and cliches like the haunted house/vengeful spirit movie, the Japanese "pink" (i.e., soft-core) film popular at the time (the girls are in increasingly skimpy states of undress), cute-couple comedies, romantic war dramas, mad slasher movies...the list just keeps going.

The experience can be overwhelming--there's a lot going on in this House--but it's so visually rich and moves along at an increasingly frantic pace that multiple viewings are likely required to take in all that this delirious, phantasmagoric fever dream of a movie has to offer.

So yeah, House is indeed "batshit." And brilliant.

Review: Jonah Hex (2010)

Jonah Hex is based on a long-standing DC comics who, after having served the Confederacy in the Civil War and suffered many personal tragedies (one of which cost him roughly half his face), rides the Old West as a bounty hunter/mercenary. He's tough. He's mean. He's really good with a gun, knife or ax. And woe be unto him who tries to get around paying Jonah Hex his fee.

With decades of material to work with--especially the most recent "Jonah Hex" series written by Jimmy Palmotti and Justin Gray--making a "Jonah Hex" movie seems like a pretty good idea.

Just not this "Jonah Hex" movie.

The film is well cast, with a suitably snarly Josh Brolin as Hex; Megan Fox brings the pretty as Hex's prostitute girlfriend, Lilah; and John Malkovich as Quentin Turnbull, a former Confederate general with a hate-on for Hex, and the feeling is mutual. (Hex betrayed Turnbull's son to the yankees for targeting civilian;, Turnbull in turn executed Hex's wife and child). The costumes and cinematography look about right, and the heavy-metal soundtrack by Marco Beltrami and Mastodon is oddly effective.

Why, then, does this whole movie seem off?

As with most bad movies, the problems begin with the screenplay, which reads like a rejected episode of the '60s TV series The Wild Wild West (itself the victim of a bad big-screen adaptation). Turnbull has faked his own death (to get Hex off of his trail) is leading a renegade army around the country, killing loads of innocent people and assembling a super-weapon designed by Eli Whitney, but never fully constructed...until now. President Ulysses S. Grant calls in Hex to hunt down Turnbull, interrupting the bounty hunter's me-time with Leila and leading eventually to a literally explosive confrontation.

Unlike his comic-book counterpart, though, this big-screen Jonah Hex has mystical powers, like the ability to bring the dead back to life briefly for conversation. He also has a penchant for gadgets, like Gatling guns mounted on his horse. (If that poor horse turns its head the wrong way. Jonah's gonna have to find a new ride.)

The plot raises a lot more questions than it answers, like...How does Turnbull know about the super-weapon? How does Grant know about Hex and his animosity toward Turnbull? How does Turnbull know about Leila? How does Turnbull's psychotic, heavily tattooed henchman (Michael Fassbender) get all the way to the Southwest, kidnap Lilah and get all the way back so quickly? (Maybe Eli Whitney also invented the airplane?) Why do Jonah and Lilah love each other? (Maybe the sex is really good?) What's up with the super-weapon's golden glowing balls? Where did Jonah Hex's mystical abilities come from?

A rewrite (or two) on the screenplay could have fixed a lot of these problems. Throw in CGI effects that would be embarrassingly bad in a SyFy Original movie and an ending so ragged and blatantly tacked on that the editors would have been tossed out of film school if they'd submitted it as a class project, though, and you've got a movie that feels a good deal more like a work print than a finished product.

the character--and the moviegoing audience--deserved better.

Review: Toy Story 3 (2010)

I've probably told this story here before, but in the context of this review, it bears repeating:

When I was about 15, my mother decided that my toys should be donated to the family next door, which had several children and little money for toys. To this day, Mom maintains that I went along with this plan willingly. To this day, I maintain that I did not.

Maybe that was selfish of me. Maybe I should have recognized that I was too old to be playing with G.I. Joe or Mego Spider-Man and willingly handed them over to kids who had far less than I did, even though my family was far from affluent.

Still, the memory of that moment--and my subsequent extensive interest in collecting action figures in general, and replacements for the toys that Mom had given away that day in particular--made me fear Toy Story 3.

It's not that I expected a bad movie. Quite the contrary--the folks at Pixar rarely let me down, and I loved the first two Toy Story movies. But this one, with its story of the plaything of youth being given away because their longtime owner, Andy, is headed off to college and is way too old to be romping around his dorm room with Buzz Lightyear, Rex or Slinky Dog (only the ever-loyal Woody makes the cut to accompany Andy to campus), seemed designed to make me cry.

The rest of the toys are pitched in a trash bag and designated for the attic, but Andy's mom mistakes the trash bag for, well, trash and pitches them to the curb. Woody takes off after them, and everybody (including all of the aforementioned, plus Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head, Jessie, Bullseye, Barbie, Hamm and those weird little alien dudes) winds up being donated to a daycare center, where the toy in charge--a strawberry-scented, seemingly benevolent plush bear named Lotso Huggin'--assures the new arrivals that they'll be played with in their new home.

Woody, however, is determined to get back to Andy and makes his way out of the daycare center, only to wind up in the backpack of a sweet little girl named Bonnie and added to her collection of toys, including an Internet-savvy triceratops named Trixie, a husky-voiced unicorn, a hedgehog who thinks he's performing Shakespeare and a dolly named, well, Dolly. Woody still wants to get back to Andy before his owner heads off to college, but when his new toy friends tell him all is not as it appears at the daycare center, Woody has to decide: Stay with his new friends? rescue his old pals? Or give up what may be his last shot at being loved by the child who's loved him for so long?

This may sound like grim material--and, at times, it is--but there are lots of laughs and thrills along the way, as well as messages regarding loyalty to one's friends and knowing when, as painful as it might be, letting go is the best, healthiest thing to do.

So, was I right to fear Toy Story 3? Did it make me cry? Sure did. I was hardly alone, though--when the lights came up, more than a few theater patrons were using their popcorn napkins to dab away tears. Whether that was caused dredged-up memories, top-notch, emotionally charged filmmaking or, most likely, a combination of the two, only the individual filmgoers could say.

Wednesday Miscellania

What better way to get over Hump Day than with random thoughts from me?

*sound of crickets chirping*

Yes...well...anyway...

The last movie I saw: The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus. Terry Gilliam movies tend to be glossy messes overstuffed with imaginative, engaging visuals undercut by meandering, unfocused plots. They also tend to be star-crossed, with financing falls though, studios interfering with editing or, in this case, the lead actor, Heath Ledger, passing away mid-production.

Gilliam found a creative way around this sad problem, though: He cast three other high-profile actors--Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Ferrell--to fill in for Ledger in the scenes that take place within the imagination-made-sort-of-corporeal of the good doctor (Christopher Plummer). The device works reasonably well--Depp in particular gets Ledger's movements and vocal cadences down so minutely that it takes a moment to realize it isn't Ledger.

There are delights to be found here, including Tom Waits as a scruffy, smooth-talking Devil and Lily Cole as the gorgeous daughter the Devil here to collect from Parnassus. but the reality of Ledger's death impedes the fantasy and casts a pall over the whole production, especially since the script already contained musings on mortality ("Nothing is permanent," notes Depp's version of Ledger's character, Tony, "not even death").

Travel reading: Red Dragon by Thomas Harris. It amazes me that this book is nearly 30 years old. It further amazes me that, in all that time, I'd never read it. With all the graphic violence and psychological anguish on display, though, it was this passage that affected me the most:

[The note] said Birmingham police had found a cat buried behind the Jacobi's garage. The cat had a flower between its paws and was wrapped in a dish towel. The cat's name was written on the lid in a childish hand. It wore no collar. A string tied in a granny knot held the lid on.

In my case, there was no lid to tie on, only a towel--not a dish towel, but a royal blue bath towel I'd put in the "cat carrier" (really an orange milk crate with a hinged lid) so that Ms. Christopher would be reasonably comfortable. And it wasn't a flower between her paws, butt was her favorite kitty toys--one of those little burlap bags with the word "catnip" stenciled on the side that had long since its potency, though I'd rub it down with fresh catnip to make my Girlish Girl smile again.

Stealth Cattle Cars. This morning, I got a rude surprise on the CTA Brown Line. As I boarded the second car at Francisco, I looked around and realized that I was on a "Max Capacity" car--a car with seats removed to allow more standing passengers aboard, better known among regular riders as a "cattle car."

Usually, when I see that either the first two or last two cars of a train are "cattle cars" I dash to the closest "regular" car, but this time I didn't do that because I hadn't noticed the large orange signs indicating that it was a "Max Capacity" car. At the next stop, I got off and bunny-hopped to the third car of the train, only to discover that it was a "cattle car" as well. Furthermore, neither car had the typical "Max Capacity" signs on the outside of the car.

I didn't try scrambling down to the next car; I simply found a corner of the car, parked in it and fumed all the way into the Loop.

When I arrived at work, one of my coworkers who takes the Blue Line related a similar experience--she also wound up on a stealth "cattle car" and had to ride it all the way downtown.

Is it something CTA is only just doing because of the inclement weather (which usually drives up ridership temporarily), or is this a permanent shift in policy? If it's the latter--if I'm to play the part of livestock for every morning commute--then I'll be switching to Metra (the separate commuter rail system, which has two stops within long walking distance of La Casa del Terror) or trying to put together a carpool.

CTA may say that they don't have any options, that this is the best they can do. If that's truly the case, then their best isn't nearly good enough. Its true in retail, and it's true here as well: Serve the customer, or the customer will go somewhere else.

Review: Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007)

(NOTE: The following review was originally written for a movie review website to which I used to contribute an essay or two a month for about a year.)

In a summer sardine-packed with sequels, one of the least anticipated of the bunch is Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. This is understandable. The previous film, based on the famous comic book by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, was underwhelming, to say the least. It had decent action sequences and nice special effects, but the humor was labored, the romantic chemistry between the leads (Ioan Gruffud as Mr. Fantastic and Jessica Alba as the Invisible Woman) was almost nonexistent, and the story of how they (along with Chris Evans as the Human Torch and Michael Chiklis as the Thing) became the Fantastic Four took up about half the movie (Lee and Kirby dashed it off in about five pages).

This time around, though, director Tim Story and screenwriters Don Payne and Mark Frost get to the action a bit sooner. A meteor/comet/whatever starts zooming around our fair little planet, causing havoc wherever it goes: In Japan, a bay turned solid; in Egypt, there’s snow on the Sphinx; and in the mythical country of Latveria, the Fantastic Four’s old foe, Victor Von Doom (Julian McMahon), is revived after being assumed dead at the end of the last movie.

Normally, this would be something the Fantastic Four would be all over, but they’re kind of distracted right now, what with Reed (Gruffud) and Sue (Alba) trying to get to their oft-postponed nuptials, Ben (Chiklis) is getting cuddly with his blind girlfriend, Alicia (Kerry Washington), and Johnny (Evans) is compensating for his loneliness by dating one supermodel after another and arranging endorsement deals for the team. (His idea for the new team uniform looks like something out of NASCAR.)

When a tight-ass general (Andre Braugher) shows up (at Reed’s bachelor party, no less—rude, man), the team is thrown into conflict: Sue wants a “normal” life for their family, Reed wants what Sue wants, and Johnny and Ben don’t want to be cast adrift. All the personal stuff gets left off to the side when the big ball of light turns out to be the Silver Surfer, a cosmic-powered being who searched out suitable planets for his master, Galactus, to feed on. Next on the menu? Earth.

The movie really takes off (pun intended) when the Surfer is on screen. He’s one of the coolest characters Lee and Kirby ever created, and he’s wonderfully realized here, even with two actors playing him (body by Doug Jones, voice by Laurence Fishburne), coming off as an immensely powerful, graceful and conflicted creature who doesn’t want to fight the Fantastic Four (though he does a fair job of kicking their asses) or wreck our world but doesn’t have much choice.

The Surfer is just great to look at, and he gives this sequel something the original movie lacked: a sense of wonder. Amazing things were taken in stride in that first film. Here, eyes widen and jaws drop, and rightfully so, for the end of the world may well be nigh, whether it’s Galactus eating our planet or Doctor Doom making off with the Surfer’s board (and thus his power) for his own evil purposes.

Rise of the Silver Surfer retains the strengths of the previous film, like the dysfunctional-family dynamic of the team and exciting action sequences, this time played out on a global (and ultimately cosmic) scale. Unfortunately, the weaknesses of the previous film come along as well, like the lack of fizz in the romance between Reed and Sue (they seem to be getting married only because everyone expects them to) and the flat comedy.

Still, Chiklis once again comes through with a good performance (even though he’s buried under foam rubber most of the time) that gets across the Thing’s angst—the other members of the team can at least pretend to be “normal,” but what’s a guy who looks like a dried lake bed supposed to do? Evans also hits the right notes as the Torch, alternating between being a dick of a little brother and being a hurt little boy afraid of winding up alone. McMahon isn’t given much to do (he’s either under Doc Doom’s mask or makeup that makes him look a lot like Emperor Palpatine much of the time), but he makes the most of the few scenes he has where his face is actually visible.

Rise of the Silver Surfer is an improvement on the original Fantastic Four, and in a summer of bloated, lumbering sequels (yeah, Pirates of the Caribbean and Spider-Man, I’m lookin’ at you), it’s refreshing to have one come in at a tight hour and a half. Maybe by the third time around, Story and crew will get it all right. That this film makes me hope there will even be a third Fantastic Four is a pleasant surprise.

Review: Stephen King's The Mist (2007)

(NOTE: The following review was originally written for a movie review website to which I used to contribute an essay or two a month for about a year.)

I always preferred Stephen King’s short stories to his novels—all the character development and salty dialogue with a lot less rambling and wheel-spinning—and one of his most evocative shorter works is “The Mist,” a novella in which a violent storm damages a military base where some pretty freaky, ultimately unwise transdimensional experiments are being conducted, turning loose a fog bank filled with Lovecraftian nightmares on a small Maine town.

The first time I read “The Mist,” I was working as a freelance proofreader in an office building that afforded a perfect view of Chicago’s northern lakefront. As I read between assignments, I noticed out of the corner of my eye that the shoreline was rapidly fading from view—fog was rolling down the shoreline, swallowing first the suburbs in the far distance, then Lincoln Park and the attached beaches, then Oak Street Beach just a couple of blocks away and the Drake Hotel. Everything had been enveloped in a wave impenetrable white.

I put the book down and found some other way to entertain myself while the weather cleared up.

Writer/director Frank Darabont, who has adapted King’s work for the big screen before (The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile), is an ideal choice for this material. He has a firm understanding of the rhythms of King’s storytelling and verbiage and the strong visual sense to realize King’s frightening visions on screen.

What Darabont doesn’t have, unfortunately, is the ability to step back and objectively spy opportunities to prune King’s source material and ratchet up the tension.

He gets off to a good enough start, introducing key characters and situations with efficiency. David Drayton (Thomas Jane) needs to pick up supplies and groceries in town and takes his young son Billy (Nathan Gamble) and crank next-door neighbor Brent (Andre Braugher) with him. He’s in the local supermarket with an assortment of other characters—including Irene (Frances Sternhagen), an elderly teacher; Amanda (Laurie Holden), a young, pretty newcomer; Ollie (Toby Jones), a smart clerk; a couple of dim locals (William Sadler and David Jensen) and Mrs. Carmody (Marcia Gay Harden), a misanthropic religious fanatic—when the mist overspreads the area and nasty things begin happening to anyone unfortunate enough to be out in it. Some believe there’s something lethal just beyond the sightline, especially after a stock boy gets dragged off and eaten by tentacles (“What are those tentacles even attached to?” David wonders), but others, like Brent, refuse to believe any such nonsense and believe they should run for help, while Mrs. Carmody spouts about the wrath of God and blood sacrifice. Most trapped in the supermarket think she’s coo-coo for Cocoa Puffs, but after a few more deadly encounters with the otherworldly inhabitants of the mist, her talk of expiation starts sounding less and less crazy to some trapped in the store.

It’s the space between those deadly encounters where The Mist suffers most, though this space does allow the scares to carry more weight (rather than wearing the audience down with one shock after another) and provides plenty of room for the exploration of the ways in social order progresses, regresses, collapses and reforms into something much more ugly under the strain of disaster beyond comprehension. But while there’s opportunity aplenty for character development in these stretches there’s precious little, with lots of talking—or, rather, shouted threats and accusations from members of one faction at another.

Worst of the bunch is Mrs. Carmody, who’s such a crackpot from her first line on that even an actress as talented as Marcia Gay Harden can only make her seem remotely human; even the finest musician in the world can only do so much with a guitar that has only one string.

The Mist does indeed have some good fright moments, especially when the transdimensional horrors are only suggested (like when they press against a closed loading dock door or when seen as silhouettes through the haze), and its commentary on mob action is perfectly valid. But Darabont’s rigid adherence to King’s original story (with the exception of the ending, which Darabont expands to admittedly heartbreaking effect) causes the movie to tread water when it should move steadily forward, allowing carefully built tension to ease and ultimately dissipate. The time between fights with monsters could have either been cut down or put to better use, like more character development so we’d care more about their eventual fates.

The Mist is a good movie—and one of the best adaptations of King’s work, which has often suffered in less skilled hands. With some tightening, though, it could have been a great movie.

Review: Resident Evil: Extinction (2007)

(NOTE: The following review was originally written for a movie review website to which I used to contribute an essay or two a month for about a year.)

Resident Evil: Extinction begins with the world in a state of total collapse. The T-virus, that nasty little bioweapon unleashed in the original Resident Evil and spread throughout the improbably named Raccoon City in Resident Evil: Apocalypse, has now covered the world, turning the living into refugees and the dead into shambling, flesh-hungry ghouls. Some survivors search of a safe haven, while others—scientists with the evil Umbrella Corporation—try to figure out a way to either stop the virus or, at the very least, control and domesticate the undead.

Does any of this sound even a little bit familiar? Like you might have seen it in a movie before? Several movies, even? If so, it’s not your imagination, but rather the lack of imagination on the part of Paul W.S. Anderson, who wrote the screenplays for all three Resident Evil installments and directed the first. Not only does he continue mining the works of George Romero (especially Day of the Dead this time around), but he also lifts bits from George Miller’s Mad Max movies, X-Men and even Hitchcock’s The Birds.

But you don’t go to a Resident Evil movie for burning originality, do you? You go to see Milla Jovovich kick substantial quantities of zombie ass. And that she does.

Jovovich returns as Alice, the woman genetically altered by Umbrella to be super-strong, super-smart and, apparently, telekinetic—she now makes objects float in her sleep and can throw force fields when she needs to. She hooks up with a caravan traveling through the desert that Carlos (Oded Fehr) and L.J. (Mike Epps) from the previous sequel, as well as tough-as-the-proverbial-nails Claire (Ali Larter from NBC’s Heroes) and medic Betty (singer Ashanti). Meanwhile, in a bunker below the desert, the very, very crazy Dr. Isaacs (Iain Glen) is mutating the undead when he’s not creating clones of Alice for some rather pointless rat-in-a-maze experiments and dumping the bodies in a ditch afterward.

There are lots of fights with lots of zombies along the way, plus a final confrontation between Alice and Isaacs. And just in case you were wondering—yes, the ending does leave open the possibility of a fourth Resident Evil (pending box-office results, of course).

Despite the highly derivative script, Resident Evil: Extinction is fast-paced and action-packed, thanks in large part to veteran director Russell Mulcahy (who helmed the first two Highlander films), who keeps things moving while making the battles relatively coherent (unlike in the previous sequel, where it looked like the fight scenes were edited in a blender).

It also doesn’t hurt to have Jovovich, one of the most graceful and charismatic action stars working today, in the lead. Fehr gets to bust some zombie skulls as well, and Larter doesn’t have much to do other than scowl and shoot and look good doing it, so she does all the role requires of her.

Resident Evil: Extinction is, in many ways, the closest film in the series to its videogame roots. Characters run around, punch, kick and try really hard not to get eaten, which is all any player of the game would do. It may not be original--quite the opposite, actually—but it’s also tight, lean and brisk, and that makes it the best in the series so far--if only by default.

Monday Miscellania 11/9/09

Travel Reading: The Mammoth Book of Jack the Ripper. Unlike most books about the gruesome murders in Whitechapel in 1888, The Mammoth Book doesn't push forward a single candidate and scream "HE DID IT!" Instead, the editors lay out the indisputable facts (while simultaneously noting that, among "Ripperologists," there may be no such thing as an "indisputable fact"), flags suspect evidence and turns loose a whole slew of experts offering a wide range of opinions as to who may or may not have done it. It's a great place for a beginner to get an overview of history's greatest unsolved crime. It's definitely better than just about any of the movie versions. (!988's Jack the Ripper, recently issued on DVD for the first time by the WB Archive, is the most historically accurate, though it fudges enough details throughout to place it more appropriately in the "speculative fiction" category. 1999's From Hell is allegedly based on the exhaustively researched graphic novel by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, but bears little resemblance to the graphic novel, much less reality.)

The last movie I saw: The Men Who Stare at Goats. "Military intelligence" has long been accepted as an oxymoron, and nothing in this movie, an adaptation of Jon Ronson's nonfiction book, contradicts that view. However, director Grant Heslov, screenwriter Peter Straughan and most of the actors (Jeff Bridges, Ewan McGregor and Kevin Spacey among them) put so much emphasis on the wacky aspects of the story of a U.S. military unit that tries to employ psychic abilities in defense of our country that I fully expected Fozzy Bear to come on screen and yell 'WOCKA WOCKA WOCKA!" at me to punctuate the jokes. (As it is, the awful music score by Rolfe Kent pretty much does that anyway.) Only George Clooney, who plays psychic "super soldier" LynCassady, seems to know that with material this potentially outrageous, the smartest approach is to play it with a straight face. Consequently, not only are Clooney's scenes funnier, but his character is far more sympathetic; it's a lot easier to care about the fate of someone who genuinely believes something crazy and is crushed to discover it isn't true than it is to sympathize with someone who constantly winks at you as if to say, "Just kiddin', folks."

Monday Miscellania 10/12/09

Last Movie I saw: Whip It. Why did this movie fail at the box office? Was it resistance to the concept of Drew Barrymore as a director? (She does a relatively straightforward job--not bad for a first-timer, but with plenty of room to grow.) Was it a general lack of interest in roller derby? Was it backlash-by-proxy against Diablo Cody because Ellen Page starred in Juno? (At least one review I read felt the need to crack on RS while praising Page--Diablo-as-piñata has become the latest crutch for lazy film critics.)

Whatever. Whip It is an entertaining little flick--the plot is a cliche combo of "teen rebels against tight-assed mom" and "bad-but-plucky sports team becomes good enough to play for the championship," but it's more than slightly freshened by a remarkably deep cast (Page, Daniel Stern, Marcia Gay Harden, Kristen Wiig, Zoe Bell and Barrymore herself).

If you can't get out to one of the few theaters still rolling it, look for it on cable or DVD in a few months. It'll be worth it.

Travel Reading: Chicago TV Horror Shows: From Shock Theatre to Svengoolie. This history of local TV shows specializing in horror films given to me as a Christmas present by JB a couple of years ago, and it's been an off-and-on travel companion of mine ever since. Writers Ted Okuda and Mark Yurkiw ramble a bit--they could have used a good copyeditor.

They do, however, hit many the high points of my misspent youth, including Creature Features on WGN (with its creepy Henry Mancini theme music and that drawing of Lon Chaney from London After Midnight that gave me nightmares for years) and both the original Svengoolie, Jerry G. Bishop, and his successor, Son of Svengoolie, Rich Koz, who's still on the air every Saturday night, with bad movies and worse jokes. I couldn't think of a better visual comfort food.

Last, But Not Least: The Chicago Transit Authority announced today that as of February 2010, they're simultaneously raising fares (some as high as $3 per ride) and cutting service. So, we'll be paying even more and getting even less! Happy Monday, everybody!

The Last Five Movies I've Seen

Extract. Generally Speaking, I like the work of Mike Judge (creator of Bevis & Butt-Head and King of the Hill), and I love the cast, which includes Jason Bateman, J.K. Simmons, Kristen Wiig, Ben Affleck amd Mila Kunis, but Extract never really grabbed me. I giggled more than once, especially at Affleck as a bartender who thinks he's more worldwise than he actually is, and Simmons as a supervisor who can never remember his workers' names, more often calling them "Dingus" than by their real names (I've worked for guys like that). But the plots and subplots about sexual and professional frustration go nowhere very slowly. Not a bad movie--with the talent in front of and behind the camera, that would be damn near impossible--but not an engaging one, either.

Ponyo. Ponyo has neither the depth of character nor storytelling complexity of Hayao Miyazaki previous films, like Princess Mononoke or Spirited Away, but since it's aimed at a much younger audience (think five-year-olds), it doesn't necessarily require either. It does retain Miyazaki's visual texture, making his take on The Little Mermaid a delight for both the target audience and older folks who just appreciate beautiful, hand-drawn animation.

Pandorum. The premise--guys in space wake up from suspended animation without a fucking clue as to where they are or even who they are--is strong, immersing the audience in the characters' confusion and involving us in their quest to find out what's happened to them. Unfortunately, most of the scenes in Pandorum are so poorly lit that you can't really see what's going on, much less care. "What's happening? Is that guy dead? Wait...no, he's not...OK, now he's dead...I think." It probably didn't help that I saw Pandorum with a carload of friends at the Cascade Drive-In in West Chicago--it was very cool and much fun to go to a a drive-in for the first time in about 30 years, but a movie as dimly lit as Pandorum might not have been the best choice.

Halloween II. The only reason I saw this: It was the second feature of a double bill at the Cascade. The only reason I sat all the way through it: I've never walked out (or, in this case, driven out) of a movie before. Not Glitter. Not Howard the Duck. Not even the original Halloween II, which I consider one of my least-pleasant moviegoing experiences ever. This movie wasn't going to be the one to break me. But oh, it came so close. the best word for Rob Zombie's Halloween II is "wretched." It's a painful, joyless experience. And the Moody Blues should sue him for using "Knights in White Satin."

Jennifer's Body. I don't know what's more responsible for this movie tanking at the box office--the lousy ad campaign (which not only had crappy posters, but didn't even put those crappy posters on trains or buses or, really, any-fucking-where except the theater where I saw it), the poorly chosen release date (too far from Halloween to rope in the monster movie crowd and right up against a 3D animated feature, which wound up kicking Jennifer's ass) or backlash against screenwriter Diablo Cody. Whatever the case, it wasn't fair. Jennifer's Body is a throughly entertaining horror comedy with loads of Cody's trademark snappy, smartass dialog (if you didn't like it in Juno, you won't like it here) and a strong lead performance by Amanda Seyfried as Jennifer's best friend, who winds up saving the day and paying a tall price for it. (Also? She could only be considered plain and mousy when her costar is Megan Fox.) No, Jennifer isn't developed nearly enough as a character for us to care that much about her fate (odd that the title character is arguably the least engaging), and the actors sometimes stumble on that dialog (not everyone can be Ellen Page or J.K. Simmons, who also pops up here in a strange curly wig and with a hook for a hand). But there's plenty of blood for gorehounds, director Karyn Kusama keeps the pacing brisk and Diablo herself has a cameo (she's the bartender who serves Jennifer the red, white & blue shots). Jennifer's Body will find its audience on DVD, just like movies like Evil Dead found appreciative audiences on VHS.

Review: How You Look to Me (2006)

We see so many movies set on one coast or the other--in sunny, smoggy L.A. or crowded, noisy N.Y.C.--that it's genuinely refreshing to see a new film set somewhere in-between.

How You Look to Me is set in Louisville. (The last movie I can remember being set there is Return of the Living Dead.) Yes, this means we get plenty of shots of Churchill Downs, but we also get lots of great views of the rest of the city, courtesy of director J. Miller Tobin and cinematographer Michael Caporale, who make it look like a lovely place indeed.

It's the story of three grad students, all wrestling with romance. William (Bruce Romans, who also wrote the screenplay) is quite the playboy, getting it on with a cute redhead before meeting up with his regular "friend with benefits," Katherine (Kiersten Van Horne), but he doesn't know quite what to do when he meets Jane (Laura Allen), a fellow grad student he is instantly attracted to. William's best friend, Maurice (Kevin Butler) is in love with waitress Kris (Pacey Walker), and it scares him to pieces, while moody loner Park (David S. Jung) attracts the attention of goth chick Sara (Laura Elton).

Observing all this at a distance is their writing instructor, Professor Driskoll (Frank Langella), who likes horses and hangs out at the racetrack with the boys (since William's dad is a wealthy horse breeder). Driskoll seems to be suffering from some disease--we see him taking medication and he often seems frail--but that doesn't stop him from prodding his students to try harder; at one point he very theatrically tosses all their papers into the nearest waste basket. He also pushes William in particular to either invest more of himself in his writing or take a job with his brother at Churchill Downs. William and Jane, meanwhile, start a tentative romance between poetry readings.

The readings themselves play authentically, with some pretty good verse--and some pretty bad verse as well, though that's strictly intentional. The interior scenes are as well filmed as the exterior footage, giving the whole movie a believable, comfortable look.

Unfortunately, Romans's lead performance is anything but comfortable. He's flat and expressionless, even in very emotional scenes. You never get the sense that he's passionate about anything--writing, horses or any of the girls he's sleeping with (or wants to sleep with). The dialog he's written has a realistic feel to it, but he can't deliver it naturally. Butler fares much better as Maurice, looking genuinely tormented over what to do with his feelings for Kris, and Allen is effective and sweet as she conveys resistance to William's increasingly well-meaning advances. Jung's character is already reserved, but he uses that trait to his advantage, making Parks lengthy speech to William on a basketball court all the more surprising and profound.

Langella has, in many ways, the most difficult role in the movie, since he's the best-known member of the cast, but with little screen time. Still, he brings a quiet, gentle authority to a part that could have been an overplayed clichŽ; Driskoll is clearly a man with regrets who doesn't want William wind up in the same place, wondering what could have been if he'd just tried harder.

How You Look to Me concludes without definite resolutions to all of its storylines--kind of like real life--and passes as a pleasant, lovely-looking slice of life in a town we don't get to see enough of at the movies. Like William and Driskoll, though, Tobin and Romans could have tried a little harder--maybe cast someone as William who could better express the emotional range needed to make an audience really care--and reached something truly special.