Early December Review or something

Okay, it's been a while and once again I've been reminded that people actually read this blog so here are a few thoughts on the new movies I've watched in the last month or so.

First, real quick, I could use some suggestions on the design and color scheme - I went black for October because black is spooky, but in general? This gray isn't cutting it. I think I want to migrate the whole thing over to Wordpress anyway (any tips on that from anyone?) Anyway:

Big Fan: I saw this as a New Beverly double feature with The Wrestler, as both were written by Robert Siegel (who was also, weirdly, former editor-in-chief at The Onion). The double feature was useful in illustrating the contrast between the two movies, and why Big Fan, entertaining and well-acted as it was, kind of fell short: Both movies are about New Jersey losers who are associated with professional sports, but whereas The Wrestler left me touched and emotionally invested in the characters, Big Fan was made by a filmmaker who, ultimately, condescended to them - The Wrestler has its share of jokes at the expense of the sad-sacks in the lower rungs of the professional wrestling world, but this was tempered by genuine pathos and sympathy. Big Fan is basically all snark, all the time, tempered only by Patton Oswalt's genuine and sincere performance. 6/10.

2012: For reasons I don't quite understand, I've pretty much loved the previous movies in Roland Emmerich's apocalypse triptych (Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow) while hating everything else he's ever done (Stargate, The Patriot, 10000 BC). So I was planning to enjoy this movie too, which only a retarded fanboy would do, right? Anyway, as it turns out, the movie itself is pretty lame, with one major exception: the much-trailered sequence of John Cusack and co. driving around through Los Angeles in the midst of a superdeluxe earthquake pretty much rocked my socks off. What's wrong with me, that I should be so radically energized by the spectacle of literally thousands of people being crushed and whatnot? I don't know. But I have to admit that I find this sequence thrilling. 4/10

An Education: There's a certain class of movie that I've gotten used to, over the years, as the high-class snoozer - the kind of highly-regarded movie where you pretty much know, ten minutes in, what's going to happen by the end of the movie, so if you doze off for a few minutes here and there, it's pretty easy to pick up on what's happening. So since it was BLATANTLY OBVIOUS that Peter Sarsgaard was going to turn out to be a pseudo-pedophiliac cad and leave Carey Mulligan high and dry from his first (very creepy) scene in the movie.

Anyway, this movie isn't that bad, but the performances and direction are a lot better than the story itself, which is fairly mundane. 7/10

Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire: This one is interesting to me because it illustrates (like Transformers 2) that despite what all the screenwriting gurus say, audiences don't really care about story, because neither of those two movies really had 'stories' per se as much as they have compilations of scenes delivering what audiences want to see: CGI spectacle in one case, really good actors in scenes of heightened misery in the other. "Academy Award nominee Mo'Nique" seems to be inevitable.

As for the rest of the movie, even though Lee Daniels is obviously great with actors, he doesn't know much about storytelling or visuals and doesn't seem to have much of a vision beyond 'get all this awful drama up on the screen' which limits how impactful the movie can be to some degree. Anyway, not bad. 7/10

Fantastic Mr. Fox: If only Wes Anderson could have found a way to blend his unique style with something more family-friendly, this terrific movie wouldn't have flopped. Because it's basically just like every other Wes Anderson movie - ironic, formal, oblique, fetishistically detailed - but with puppets instead of live actors. Anyway, I very much enjoyed it as the latest entry into his world of upper-class world-weary whimsy. 8/10

Where the Wild Things Are: On the other hand, this one has a lot going for it (amazing performances, production design, creature effects, cinematography) but the story just totally fell flat for me. A big part was that I didn't connect to the kid - I was never a 'pretend to be wild animals and throw tantrums' kid, I was a 'sit quietly in the corner reading a book' kid, and never understood the other kind of kids. But beyond that, the story of this movie felt like an over-obvious pseudo-Freudian allegory for me. As soon as I saw the lead wild thing tearing shit up in Monster Village while the other monsters wonder how to deal with him, I got it. We all got it. 6/10

Gentlemen Broncos (2009)

This one is going to split viewers - or at least, the small number of viewers who get to see it since it's basically been dumped by the studio.

In each of his three movies, Jared Hess has walked the fine line between making fun of his oddball characters (Napoleon Dynamite, Nacho Libre) and empathizing with them and their unusual plights. Many have seen these movies as essentially mean-spirited and exploitative, making fun of these weirdos. Personally, I see Hess as being on the side of the dreamers and outcasts, but also recognizing that comedy comes from pain, and the most acute pain comes from social ostracism. And in each of his movies, Hess has balanced the pain with triumph - Napoleon wows his high schoolmates with his dance performance, Nacho wins the wrestling match, and in this movie Benjamin Purvis finds a way to make his loved ones' dreams come true. These are sweet, gentle-hearted movies that also happen to have a piercing eye for the absurd and aren't afraid of the occasional poop joke.

Anyway, Gentlemen Broncos, which sounds like it could involve gay cowboys eating pudding, is the story of Ben Purvis, a teenage sci-fi writer whose dreams run into two obstacles - absurdly pompous author Ronald Chevalier (Jemaine Clement, featuring the greatest accent on Earth) and a pair of low-budget teenage filmmakers who bastardize Ben's already bizarre story, which involves genital hazards and flying deer that fire missiles and yeast - it's all a bit hard to describe. Suffice to say that for me, Gentlemen Broncos was delightful, and if you don't want to see Sam Rockwell launching himself into the sky through the power of flatulence or Jemaine Clement ponderously explaining how sci-fi names can always be improved through the addition of '-onious' or '-anous', then I don't know what else to tell you. And Mike White as a longhaired creep with an ill snake? And Halley Feiffer getting a hand massage with too much lotion? Freakazoid bliss.

Hess's visual style has been compared to that of Wes Anderson, with an emphasis on centered framings and odd tangential details, but I realized in this movie that the two filmmakers are interested in radically different themes - Hess focusses on people in marginalized, out-of-the-way places, whereas Anderson focusses on people in the most chic and stylish places (who nonetheless are broken and lonely as well). And don't get me wrong, I love Anderson's films, but I absolutely find a huge amount of value in Jared Hess's resolutely anti-glamorous films as well.

8/10

October Review

Okay, so being unemployed for 3 weeks out of the month allowed me to watch a total of 38 horror movies, old and new, seen-before and never-seen-before. Yes, that disturbs and alarms me as well. Anyway, here's how they stacked up:

WORST OF THE WORST:
Canvas of Blood (1997)
Mind, Body & Soul (1992)
Danger on Tiki Island (1968)
Merlin's Shop of Mystical Wonders (1996)

BLAH
Superstition (1982)
The Horror Show (1989)
Final Exam (1981)
Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977)
Abby (1974)
Tormented (1960)
Night of the Demon (1980)

OKAY
Trick 'r Treat (2009)
The Burning (1981)
Galaxy of Terror (1981)
Zombieland (2009)
Graduation Day (1981)
Dr. Giggles (1992)
Blacula (1972)
Attack of the Puppet People (1958)
The Man from Deep River (1972)
Shakma (1990)
How to Make a Monster (1958)

GOOD:
At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul (1964)
Dog Soldiers (2002)
The House by the Cemetery (1981)
Fight For Your Life (1977)
Horrors of Malformed Men (1969)
Paranormal Activity (2009)
Phantasm (1979)
The Seventh Victim (1943)
J.D.'s Revenge (1976)
Dr. Cyclops (1940)
Cannibal Apocalypse (1980)

BEST IN SHOW:
This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse (1967)
Black Sabbath (1963)
The Exorcist (1973)
Curse of the Demon (1957)
Island of Lost Souls (1933)

Yeesh. Time to see some art movies or something.

The New Beverly All-Night Horrorthon 2009

God, I love the New Beverly, LA's grungiest non-porn repertory theater. This year, as last year, they showed an all-night horror movie marathon in the lead-up to Halloween and I was there, here's the quick rundown:

Dog Soldiers (2002): I had seen Neil Marshall's directorial debut before on DVD; on a second viewing it's still a pretty kickass action/horror hybrid, but at the same time some of Marshall's inexperience felt more prominent, along with the screenplay's seams. Either way, still a fun, smart little movie. 7/10

The Burning (1981): This should be the title for a horror movie about a skin disease, but it's actually a Friday the 13th clone produced by Harvey Weinstein, and like a lot of other movies from very early in the slasher era, it actually has its own identity and some strong moments. Still, not much to write home about, beyond the presence of Jason Alexander, Fisher Stevens, and (somewhere in there) Holly Hunter. 6/10

The House by the Cemetery (1981): This was when things really kicked in for me because of my love for the films of Lucio Fulci, the weirdest and least rational Italian horror filmmaker of the era. Like all of his movies, this one is loaded full of bizarre images only connected by fleeting dream-logic: mannequins losing their heads and bleeding, little girls appearing out of nowhere to give cryptic warnings, monsters that bleed maggots. Good stuff! The former owner of the titular house was a - get this - Dr. Freudstein. 7/10

At this point, the organizers showed three Tales from the Crypt episodes, and while they were fun, I think it would have made more sense to just show a single episode as a palate-cleanser. Three in a row was a bit much.

Superstition (1982): Probably the weakest movie of the night, and one that didn't actually involve 'superstition' per se but rather the vengeful spirit of a witch haunting a house and causing peoples' heads to wind up in microwaves and saw blades to fly across the room and kill people. I nodded off during the second half of this rather slow-moving movie and missed some of the explanatory stuff, but I don't think I missed much. 4/10

Fight For Your Life (1977): I had also seen this one before at the New Bev, basically a Last House on the Left variant with a vicious white racist (William Sanderson, in a great performance) holding an African-American family hostage and spewing the most amazingly awful torrent of hate-speech at them for an hour and a half. Of course it all ends with the family rising up and striking back at their oppressor. I wonder if, at the New Beverly, there was a single African-American person watching it last night or if it was all complacent white hipsters like myself. 7/10

Galaxy of Terror (1981): Probably not the best idea to put another very slow movie at the very end of the night, and this Alien-ripoff is pretty incomprehensible, but it still has Sid Haig chopping off one of his own arms, Grace Zabriskie captaining a spaceship and somehow ending up barbequed, and an attractive blonde actress basically getting raped and killed by a gigantic maggot. When you can't really tell if what you're watching is actually on the screen or just a product of your own movie-addled mind, you've had a good night. 6/10

Overall, a very fun night, although I wish that the programmers would range out a little further - a slew of '70s-'80s grindhouse movies is fine, but I'd love it if they could mix it up with maybe some '50s Hammer or something modern from France or Japan or maybe something more mainstream and classic in there - tossing in a John Carpenter or Wes Craven film alongside the no-name slashers. Anyway, 52 weeks to Horrorthon 2010!

The Avatar Trailer

Wow, this goes way beyond what I was expecting. Looking forward to it now a lot more.

June and July Update

I've developed this pattern of only posting two or three times a month, mostly involving a Youtube video and a post of short reviews starting with the phrase, "I apologize" so let's just move on from there with quick thoughts on things I've watched since my last review.

Drag Me to Hell. Something of a minor masterpiece, and pretty much the best studio movie I've seen this year. Sam Raimi makes movies that look like cheesy, insubstantial fun but actually have a spine of moralistic steel underneath - Alison Lohman's character performs a wrong, refuses to take responsibility for it (not unlike Mena Suvari in last year's Stuck) and winds up paying the penalty for it. That Raimi could make such a sturdy depiction of individual responsibility in a world that increasingly wants to deny such things - in a movie where an anvil drops on somebody's head and their eyeballs pop out - is some kind of triumph. 9/10

Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country. It's not an easy thing to make a comprehensible film out of a mass of character-less handheld video footage, and the filmmakers here found an ingenious solution, structuring their film around a framing story of one Burmese resistance member coordinating the flow of footage by phone and computer. It's a well-made and fascinating movie, still limited by its topicality to a certain time and place, but crafted strongly enough that it should retain watchability longer than other such political documentaries. 7/10

Up. Pixar's movies have settled into a certain familiarity, which is both good and bad - I kind of want them to exit their comfort zone a little bit more they have lately - only Brad Bird seems to be able to provide real surprises from within the Pixar formula. Still, entertaining, funny, and affecting (and better than Wall-E). 8/10

Terminator Salvation: Stupid and pointless. Just a series of rambling and expensive set pieces linked by a flaccid and poorly motivated narrative. Still, better than the incoherent and boring Wolverine thanks to a good performance from Sam Worthington and some legitimately okay action scenes. 4/10

Moon: Reasonably entertaining and well-acted, but kind of unimaginative. You can stick a guy on the Moon, and the only thing you can have him do is take part in yet another 'corporations are evil' bulldozer? Come on, David Bowie's son, show us something we haven't seen before. Here's an idea for the sequel: Two Sam Rockwells are good, but a dozen are better. 6/10

Land of the Lost: Misbegotten. I like the idea of creating a bizarre fantasy-landscape made of fragments of every era of history. Too bad they populated it with a pair of unlikeable idiots and a vacuous bit of female eye candy. 4/10

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Low expectations helped me to experience this movie as tolerable and not eyeball-gougingly awful. The narrative and characters make no sense to the point of being downright insulting to the audience (stepping through a door from Washington's Air and Space Museum to some Southwestern desert? Fuck you too, Michael Bay). But all of that is beside the point given Bay's command of spectacle, which he manages to deliver on. There are amazing, earth-shattering sights in this movie. Too bad they're still embedded within a very expensive commercial for Hasbro, GM and the U.S. military. Oh, and those racist Autobots? Soooooo amazingly racist. I can't believe that Bay isn't getting laughed out of theaters the same way M. Night Shyamalan and Brian DePalma have been in recent years. Also, I realize this may put me in the minority, but I find Megan Fox's appearance to be creepy and a little disgusting, like an overblown drag queen parody of femininity. I can almost imagine an actual good-looking women coming up to her and going, 'are you making fun of me?'. 3/10

Bruno: Sort of funny, but really only in an 'I'm so much smarter than those people on screen!' kind of way. I enjoyed Borat but only because it was more honestly outrageous and more warmhearted, factors that feel warmed-over and insincere this time. Sacha Baron Cohen is amazingly talented and a courageous performer - too bad he has so little interest in using his talents in the service of any idea larger than dividing his audience into the 'get-its' and the 'don't get its'. Ron Paul is a loony and a homophobe (apparently) but he deserves better than this kind of unfair ambush comedy. 5/10

And the most interesting old movies that I've seen lately:

The Sinful Dwarf (1973): A demented little person teams up with his faded showgirl mother to kidnap girls for a sex-slavery operation. You've never seen so much devious mugging in your whole life in this grimy, entrancing bit of schlock. 5/10

Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS (1975): Sort of a case study in cinematic S&M, watching a series of men being dominated by the towering, imperious Ilsa, as played by Dyanne Thorne, who winds up getting an appropriate comeuppance from her concentration camp wards. Probably more interested in terms of pathology, but like The Sinful Dwarf, something of a must-see for fans of '70s softcore kitsch, and better than its sequel, Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks (which played as part of a New Beverly double feature). 5/10

Ivan the Terrible Parts I & II(1944-46). Eisenstein's unfinished trilogy is an amazing achievement, an expressionistic political nightmare that extends beyond Stalin-era allegory into the realm of Shakespeare. I especially liked Part II as the film descended even deeper into realms of paranoia and lunacy. 8/10 and 9/10.

The Long Riders (1980). Another New Beverly viewing, a sort of rambling and not particularly focussed Western about the James and Younger gangs. Like the Andrew Dominik/Brad Pitt film from a couple of years ago, I don't think it makes a coherent statement about what it means to be an outlaw or a folk hero or anything like that. It does have a bunch of fun performances from the likes of David Carradine, Stacy Keach, and Pamela Reed, plus a fairly amazing Peckinpah-esque shootout sequence. 7/10

Hospital (1970). I've seen four Frederick Wiseman films now, and with each new one I feel like he's an essential, underrated American genius. The trick is subtlety: a lot of movies take on social issues, but not many use his strategy, seen here, of merely observing ordinary people and letting their simple dramatic situations illustrate the pedantic points that Wiseman wants to make. It's more effective than just interviewing the same people and letting a narrator fill in the gaps. 9/10

Hopefully more to come soon.

May Update

Yeesh, it's hard to keep up-to-date on this thing when I'm working 60-hour weeks. But enough excuses, here's a quick roundup of the last several things that I've seen:

Anvil: The Story of Anvil. Why the redundant title? Otherwise, it's a pretty good, if limited, picture of a couple of guys in mid-life crisis as they try to recover their glory days, basically a cross between American Movie and This Is Spinal Tap (down to the almost carbon-copy finale). I don't care much about heavy metal, but the movie is smart enough to gloss over the technicalities in order to linger on the elements that do matter, like working crappy day jobs and getting shafted by Czech promoters. I enjoyed it and it's funny and touching, I just wish it had gone a little deeper and not been quite so conventional in its storytelling arc. 7/10

Star Trek. Yes, I'm the guy (alongside Roger Ebert and Armond White) who didn't like J.J. Abrams' Star Trek. I want to say more about it separately, but for me it all comes down to Abrams' vision simply being less expansive and imaginative than what Roddenberry put into motion 45 years ago, and I thought it was frantic and pointless. On the plus side, we have good performances from most of the cast and one beautiful image (the Enterprise rising out of the clouds of Titan). 4/10

Adventureland. Sweet and funny, and richer and more complex than Superbad was. This makes me want to check out Mottola's other stuff, especially The Daytrippers, which I ignored back when it came out. My only gripe is with the finale, which seemed contrived and emotionally phony in a way that the rest of the movie hadn't been leading towards. Also, I hope Jesse Eisenberg grows into his horseface sometime soon. 8/10

Monsters vs. Aliens. Amusing, forgettable. Makes me wish that Guillermo Del Toro was directing his remake of Creature from the Black Lagoon. 6/10

Il Divo. Amazing visuals and an obviously excellent performance from Toni Servillo, playing Giulio Andreotti as a cross between Peter Bogdanovich and Nosferatu, but not being a student of post-War Italian politics, I didn't have any fucking idea what was going on in this movie. Not the movie's fault, obviously, but it was sort of like watching Oliver Stone's Nixon and only knowing that it was about a sweaty guy who had gotten into trouble about something, somewhere in politics, sometime in the '70s. To be revisited on DVD. 7/10

Tyson. Really fascinating stuff, and I like the strategy of simply structuring the film as a long, free-flowing first-person monologue, bringing us inside the head of an odd, but understandable and very human person. This film might just be one of the more avant-garde things I've seen in quite a while. And on the subjects of his domestic violence against Robin Givens and his rape conviction, Tyson gets enough rope to hang himself with. 8/10

Dark and Stormy Night. This is the newest undistributed film from Larry Blamire, the guy who made The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra. It's a stilted parody of the 'old dark house' movies of the 1930s and '40s. As such it's funny and entertaining but kind of an artistic blind alley - this is the kind of clever genre rehash that everyone accuses Tarantino of making, except without the creativity. Still, if you only see one movie this year involving a guy in a gorilla suit, a psychic in a turban, and a freak with two heads, this is the one. 6/10

More to come soon!

X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009)

Two things:

1) This movie has one of the most retarded titles in movie history. Worse than The Incredibly Strange Creatures that Became Mixed-Up Zombies or Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever.

2) This movie is a huge snoozy waste of time. I didn't care about any of the characters. All of the action sequences were mundane and tedious and the movie as a whole lacks a reason to exist.

Basically, it makes Brett Ratner's X-Men 3 look good by comparison. I hope everyone involved gets herpes, they should be able to afford plenty of ointments.

3/10

Nerd Alert

Full disclosure: sometime around 1993 or 1994, I won a Star Trek trivia contest at a convention, the prize being a free ticket to the next convention. So yeah, I'm an old-school Star Trek nerd of a pretty high order - not such a high order that I ever got dressed up as a Borg or went to Klingon language camp. But high enough that I do indeed know at least a couple of Klingon words (Qapla'!)

This is all to say that the new J.J. Abrams Star Trek movie has me feeling apprehensive. The Star Trek franchise is certainly in need of reinvention; Star Trek: Voyager and Enterprise increasingly leaned on the same episodic formulas of The Next Generation, and on references back to the older series - the most popular Enterprise episodes are loaded with references to aliens and storylines from the original shows, signs of a franchise miring itself in the past rather than looking to the future (ironically). But at the same time, I don't know that J.J. Abrams is the guy for the job of reinvention in any manner other than financial - he seems to be more interested in melodramatic plot twists, sex, and flash rather than the humanistic, progressiveness that was the true achievement of the shows at their best.

So anyway, I'm hoping for the best in the new movie but girding myself for the worst. In the meantime I've been catching up on a bunch of episodes from the original series, and here's my extremely nerdy list of my ten favorite original Star Trek episodes:

10. "What Are Little Girls Made Of?": Something of a sentimental favorite, but there's something that I find appealingly Lovecraftian about this episode, in which Kirk contends with a group of androids out to replace humanity with their own superior forms. Featuring Ted Cassidy, Lurch from The Addams Family, as the most ancient android.

9. "The Trouble with Tribbles": Something of an obligatory pick, but it holds up really well - a simple plot elaborated with great dialogue and energy.

8. "Mirror, Mirror": One of the siller story ideas of the whole series (and that's saying something) but played with such confidence that it's entered pop culture - a goatee is forever shorthand for an evil twin.

7. "Where No Man Has Gone Before": The series pilot has a different, colder tone than the series would eventually adopt, but this one also established one of the series' primary theses - that all of mankind's scientific advancements are meaningless without hanging on to our shared humanity - key to the post-Hiroshima age.

6. "The Enterprise Incident": A perverse spy thriller of an episode inspired by the Pueblo incident.

5. "Journey to Babel": A crowded, exciting episode with great intrigue, plus Andorians and Tellarites (remember, nerd here).

4. "Balance of Terror": A suspenseful submarine-esque thriller, joined with the humanistic observation that even the enemy has their reasons.

3. "Amok Time": One of the best Spock episodes features the perfect irony of the coldly logical Vulcan turning into a lustful raging maniac.

2. "The City on the Edge of Forever": Written by Harlan Ellison (if I write that he won't sue me), this one has a literary quality unique to the series, forcing Kirk into a classic dilemma between duty and romance.

1. "The Devil in the Dark": I pick this as the best original series episode because not only is it a terrific, well-crafted narrative, but it's also a perfect distillation of the ideals of the series, that the universe is a big place and that anthropocentrism can get in the way of truth and progress. Not to mention that the Horta, a living rock creature, is a pretty cool idea.

My runners-up:
"The Enemy Within"
"The Naked Time"
"The Galileo Seven"
"Arena"
"Space Seed"
"The Doomsday Machine"
"The Ultimate Computer"
"Spectre of the Gun"
"The Tholian Web"
"All Our Yesterdays"

And my picks for the five worst episodes:
"The Alternative Factor"
"Return to Tomorrow"
"The Omega Glory"
"And the Children Shall Lead"
"Requiem for Methuselah"

(and the one terrible episode that's so bad, it comes back around to become entertaining again: "Spock's Brain")

J.G. Ballard, 1930-2009

James Ballard reached his widest audience with Empire of the Sun, his memoir of his childhood during World War II, but I first discovered him thanks to David Cronenberg, whose film of Crash (the only good movie with that title) led me to the novel of Crash and also to Concrete Island and The Atrocity Exhibition - novels that are cold, detached, filthy, deranged, deterministic. They also represent frighteningly well the second half of the 20th century, that period when machinery and regimentation really took over the industrialized West. Ballard's triumph as a writer was to combine the radical pornographic defiance of William S. Burroughs with the modern post-War environment of parking garages, freeways, and reality TV.

The real triumph of his work, though, was the beating heart that permeated it - his was no attitudinal posturing, as his modern successors like Chuck Palahniuk can often fall into - Ballard was a traumatized intellectual, sharing his trauma, both personal and sociological, with the world. And for that, I thank him.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)

Seeing this movie again for the first time in several years, I finally figured out the two strands of filmmaking that it's attempting (without really succeeding) to synthesize. It's a combination of the bold visual spectacle and brainy, existential concepts of 2001: A Space Odyssey, mixed with the turgid melodrama and flatness of an Airport movie. I mean, it even looks like an Airport movie (above) - if the future contains that much gray and beige, count me out.

That the movie works at all is a tribute to the no-nonsense craftsmanship of director Robert Wise, and especially to the talents of composer Jerry Goldsmith. His score really does most of the movie's heavy lifting to instill a spirit of mystery, romance, and suspense into what is otherwise a movie with a loooot of scenes of our actors' faces staring at very expensive visual effects.

This is also one of the few Star Trek movies to actually feature a high science-fiction concept at its heart - most of the really popular movies are adventure stories, first and foremost, but this one actually poses questions about man's place in the universe, artificial intelligence, and religion when it's revealed that the all-powerful force threatening Earth is actually a 1990s Earth space probe has been transformed into a super-intelligent artificial lifeform seeking to touch its creator. And it would be all a lot more interesting if it hadn't already been done a decade earlier in the original series episode "The Changeling".



The movie's narrative is rushed and sloppy - of the movie's three main characters, Kirk, Spock, and Decker, only Spock has a character arc that's actually coherent and fulfilled, and the 'Voyager 6' idea is anticlimactic - but I still have a fondness for this movie thanks to the basic spectacle and joy of the thing. It's not great filmmaking, but it's still a good example of the intellectual seriousness and grandeur that Trek aspired towards, even with flaws.
7/10

Phase IV (1974)

I saw this over the weekend at the New Beverly in a beautiful 35mm print. It's funny how you just flat-out can't appreciate certain things until a later phase in life. Back about ten or fifteen years ago, when I rented Saul Bass's Phase IV, I thought of it as a mildly entertaining man-against-nature sci-fi movie. Watching it this time, my thoughts were something along the lines of, "Holy shit, how do you wrangle an ant and a praying mantis to cooperate in the staging of a f&*@ing tiny action sequence?"

In the post-atomic era, there have been a lot of movies in which humans fight nature-run-amok, but this is one of the few where the creatures (here, super-intelligent ants) are treated more sympathetically than the various human protagonists. There's a scene in this movie where a scientist presses a button and, outside in the desert, a thousand ants are covered in a yellow, waxy, smothering pesticide. Later the scientists use a sonic vibration weapon that causes, from the ants' perspective, the rupture of the San Andreas fault, with tiny rockslides crushing their miniscule bodies. It's all like a teensy version of Saving Private Ryan, complete with the wonderfully ridiculous (but nonetheless, perfectly staged with actual ants) scene in which the itsy-bitsy ant corpses are lined up in a tiny underground morgue.

Obviously, this movie wouldn't have been made without the influence of Stanley Kubrick and 2001, but it still represents a unique vision all the same. Phase IV is the only film directed by Saul Bass, who was mostly famous for having designed the title sequences of Vertigo and Psycho for Hitchcock and The Age of Innocence and Casino for Scorsese, but he was also one of the world's most successful graphic designers, coming up with the logos for United Airlines and AT&T, so it's not really surprising that his one film would have striking, innovative visuals. The above-ground drama is somewhat less compelling, with easy-going young scientist Michael Murphy contending with brusque, all-business scientist Nigel Davenport (he might as well just wear a sign reading "Cold Logic" around his neck) with a local teenage girl hanging around for no good reason - except that her presence allows Bass to indulge in a curious bit of micro-erotica, as the movie's Hero Ant, having escaped from a lab, wanders through her clothing and up and down over the contours of her sleeping body in one sequence.

The movie ends with one of those annoying '70s post-2001 'huh?' endings (pretty much the same ending as Star Trek: The Motion Picture) but this is a film about the cinematic journey, not the oblique destination.

8/10

Beverly Garland, 1926-2008

This is the time of the year when any number of talented, hard-working actors vie for awards in classy, glossy studio movies, so it seems appropriate to also remember the career of a talented, hard-working woman who worked in Hollywood for decades but is today best-known for My Three Sons and a handful of early Roger Corman movies - a realm in which good acting is even harder to recognize, when it appears.

I first encountered Beverly Garland in the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode/Roger Corman movie It Conquered the World, in which her husband, played by Lee Van Cleef, is helping an evil carrot from Venus try to take over the world. Passionate yet rational, Garland's character proceeds to take matters into her own hands, and marches down to its cave in Bronson Canyon armed with a rifle to eliminate the monster. What follows, while cheesy and ridiculous, is nonetheless a perfectly fine piece of film acting, bold yet committed and firmly aware of the genre and tone around her. You can see bits of her performance in this trailer, at about the 1:15 and 1:40 marks.

I mean, it's easy to look down at this kind of material, but committed acting is what audiences respond to, and if you find yourself suspending your disbelief in this movie, or The Alligator People or Not of This Earth, it's because of the hard work of Beverly Garland.

Rest in peace.

Forrest J. Ackerman, 1916-2008

I've been living in Los Angeles for seven and a half years now, and one of my big regrets is that I didn't make it to the Ackermansion while there was still time. In case you don't know what I'm talking about, the legendary Forrest J. Ackerman, who coined the term 'sci-fi' and set thousands of young minds alight with his Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine, transformed his house over the years into a teeming museum of Hollywood memorabilia and props, and would give jokey, pun-laden tours of his collection for tourists and fans. Until, that is, a few years ago, when he started selling it all off in advance of the inevitable, which has now arrived.

So I never got to meet Forrest J. Ackerman, but he had as much influence on the world of science fiction and fantasy literature and filmmaking as anyone in the last century - he was friends with Ray Bradbury and Ray Harryhausen, he inspired Stephen King and Steven Spielberg, and he was basically the spiritual godfather of the modern movie geek.

And now he's gone from us. He'll be missed.

Another Alphabet List

Mostly due to boredom, I decided to put together this list of my least favorite, most hated movies for each letter of the alphabet. And believe me, there's a reason why the likes of Pearl Harbor and Saw IV aren't on this list - the selectees are just that awful. ALso, please note that my choice for Y is, in fact, a perfectly OK Italian giallo thriller which is significantly better than the rest of the movies listed. Consider yourself lucky that most of them are obscure exploitation movies.

Aliens Vs. Predator: Requiem (2007)
The Brick Dollhouse (1967)
Crazy Fat Ethel II (1987)
Doomsday Machine (1972)
Emperor of Kung Fu (1980)
The Fog (2005)
Girl Gang (1954)
The Head Mistress (1968)
Invasion USA (1952)
Journey to the Seventh Planet (1962)
Killers from Space (1954)










Laserblast (1978)
Monster A-Go Go (1965)
Nightmare in Wax (1969)
The Omega Code (1999)
Psyched by the 4-D Witch (1972)
Queen of Outer Space (1958)
Red Zone Cuba (1966)
Severe Visibility (2007)










Teenage Zombies (1959)
The Undead (1957)
A Virgin Among the Living Dead (1973)
Wam Bam Thank You Spaceman (1975)
XXX (2002)









Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key (1972)
Zombie Nightmare (1986)

Rats: Night of Terror (1984)

I've been trying to figure out something intelligent and erudite to say about Ugetsu or Sansho the Bailiff, which I saw lately, but I honestly don't know what I could add beyond "they're very good", and I need to get to Wall-E, Hancock, and The Dark Knight at some point, but for right now I'll just deal with something easier and more fun, the latest piece of Eurotrash that I watched over the weekend.

My biggest guilty pleasures are bad horror movies, as long as they're not boring, and in the '70s and '80s the Italians were foremost in schlock cinema that managed to be at least halfway entertaining even while remaining total crap - my favorites include Demons, Nightmare City, Cannibal Holocaust, and just about anything by Argento or Lucio Fulci.

On the DVD for this movie there's an interview with director Bruno Mattei where he agrees that yes, most of his movies are pretty bad and if he could he'd like to reshoot them. (He's since passed away, so those remakes will have to wait for Paul W.S. Anderson's schedule to clear up). That said, even though it's a bad movie, Rats: Night of Terror kept me engaged enough through a single viewing. It starts with your standard post-apocalyptic bikers (obviously fuel economy is important to the motorists of the future) who wander into a town that's clearly some kind of Cinecitta backlot. Where this gang came from and what they do most of the time isn't clear, because there aren't enough of them to harass even a small colony of oil-drillers, like in The Road Warrior.

As it happens the town houses an abandoned science lab with a greenhouse, some corpses, and a lot of rats. Rats themselves aren't a very cinematic monster, like sharks or giant spiders, and the only way they really 'attack' the bikers is by scooping themselves into a box and convincing an off-camera PA to throw them at the actors, which happens over and over again as the movie continues. It's like that scene from Star Trek where piles of Tribbles landed on Kirk, and basically just as funny. The rats aren't even particularly scary - it's pretty easy at any given moment for the characters to run past them, or brush them away, but in the universe of this movie, it's par for the course to have eight or ten rats jump on you and then for the leader of your clan to decide the best way to help is to give you a blast from his flame-thrower. I mean, these people are so uncivilized, they have sex in front of each other, revealed after a curious, unexplained sound cue.The movie rubs its cast out one-by-one (deaths by flame-thrower, grenade, suicide, falling drunk down an open manhole, and being eaten by rats) until the only ones left are the ones with the futuristic names 'Video' and 'Chocolate' (yes, the movie's lone black character). They seem to be rescued by mysterious strangers in hazmat suits, and Video and Chocolate effusively thank them for being their new best friends, just in time for the lead hazmat guy to remove his mask to uncover a human-sized rat face underneath. Now this isn't a surprise in any way - in fact, the big surprise would have been if it was something else - but damn if there still isn't something creepy and uncanny about the intelligent eyes of a human staring out with malice from underneath a furry, pointed face. It's because of sporadic moments like this that the full 96 minutes of Rats: Night of Terror was worthwhile to me.

Let me reiterate, this is not 'good' cinema but it did entertain me,and I'll take a piece of engaging schlock like this over a piece of safe, studio-released horror product like this year's Prom Night or last year's The Hitcher - movies made to appeal to the PG-13 set with high production values and no ideas - any day of the week.

3/10

Hulk (2003) & The Incredible Hulk (2008)

I wanted to see the new one, so I revisited the Ang Lee one.

To me, these two movies are best analogized by food. The Incredible Hulk is proud to be nothing other than a Carl's Jr. Six Dollar Burger, it's totally a piece of product, of prepackaged responses, a collection of action sequences justified by a gummy connecting tissue of drama. Meanwhile Ang Lee's film from five years ago intends to be a juicy steak dinner with a little something for everybody, an expensive effects driven movie with a core of human drama. The problem is, Lee's film ended up being crispy on the outside and cold in the middle, overcooked and underdeveloped. For all of Ang Lee's ambition, it's the junky Louis Leterrier movie that more fully succeeds; and when it comes to a comic book movie about a man who turns into a giant green monster when he gets angry and smashes stuff, maybe the more simplistic Leterrier concept was the right approach all along?

Ang Lee's Hulk, his project in-between Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Brokeback Mountain, is the kind of movie that separates the cineastes from the boys. It's Lee's The Terminal, or his Kundun, or his Mission to Mars; a movie that fails with a mainstream audience but is of interest to the dedicated auteurists in the audience, to pick apart the themes and how they fit in alongside The Ice Storm or Lust, Caution. It's a thematically and visually interesting movie with strong performances from a good cast that nonetheless is kind of a drag to watch, thanks to a subpar screenplay. There are too many flashbacks, too much leaden family-based backstory for Eric Bana's Bruce Krenzler, who winds up with virtually nothing to do but react and mope between effects sequences. I see and respect that Ang Lee had a vision of the Hulk that was different from the traditional one, a Bruce Banner consumed by repressed Oedipal rage and inherited sins, but the film simply does a poor job of dramatizing and visualizing these ideas - I mean, maybe it would have been a good idea to actually show Bana get angry at some point in the movie, instead of merely having Jennifer Connelly tell us "I'm attracted to men with emotional problems" early on, right? Ambition is great but it's not enough to make for a good movie.

So after the clumsy exposition of Hulk, it's incredibly refreshing to watch the opening sequence of The Incredible Hulk, which consists of a simple, clean montage of the new, rebooted origin story, heavy with references to the television series of thirty years ago starring Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno. The opening five minutes of this movie are as clean and efficient a piece of moviemaking as you're likely to see all year. From that point on, the movie devolves into something pretty simplistic, a trio of decent action sequences connected by Edward Norton and Liv Tyler demonstrating virtually no chemistry and Tim Roth waiting to turn into a less well-designed CGI monster. The final action scene did give me a visceral thrill: after some 220 minutes of Hulk movies, finally, Hulk Smash! But cars getting thrown through apartment buildings and rubbery CGI will only get you so far under the guise of a director with as limited of an imagination as Louis Leterrier - fortunately he's smart enough to keep it short and simple, with the occasional joke ("You wouldn't like me when I'm hungry") so it goes down smoothly enough and doesn't trigger the gag reflex - at least after one viewing, which is probably all I'll ever give it. But you know you're probably not a good director when the star of another movie wanders in at the last minute and gives a more interesting performance than anything else that you've been laboring on for months and months.

Hulk: 5/10
The Incredible Hulk: 6/10

The Happening (2008)

(Revision Thursday 12:30 a.m.)
I love that M. Night Shyalaman, who likes to think of himself as a genius and the cinematic heir to Steven Spielberg, is in reality now making the world's most expensive student films. All the hallmarks are in The Happening: the overuse of close-ups, the bizarre gaps where characters should have dialogue but don't and have to fill in the dead air with odd facial expressions, the miscast actors who flail around not quite sure of what they should be doing, the jokes that fall flat and the scares that are hilarious. It's quite a bad movie, and only composer James Newton Howard makes it out with his dignity.

The thing about M. Night Shyamalan is that he isn't just content to be a storyteller. With the exception of the movie that put him on the map, The Sixth Sense, all of his films want to be mass-entertainment-with-a-message, and he does have consistent themes and ideas in his films. I would like to think that making personal, visually interesting films with thoughtful ideas that can also appeal to a mass audience is pretty much the height of success in film - I give Shyamalan a lot of credit for sticking to his personal vision when he could just make a slick, impersonal thriller every few years and rake in the dough.

The problem is, Shyamalan's ideas are pretentious and his themes are shallow, and he takes them wayyyy too seriously. Unbreakable, which I mostly like, is totally crackpot. Signs was released at just the perfect time to exploit the nation's post-9/11 paranoia and helplessness, pandering to those feelings while pushing an infuriating 'everything happens for a reason' message of blind faith. The Village suggests that modern civilization itself is corrupt and should be abandoned in favor of medievalism; and Lady in the Water promoted infantile egotism in the guise of whimsy.

In a lot of ways, The Happening wants to be as obnoxious as those others (SPOILERS): plants, infuriated by modern life and pollution, conspire to release toxins that drive humans to stop in their tracks and stab themselves, shoot themselves, jump off buildings, and take naps under riding mowers. It's an interesting concept that could have been a fun updating of Day of the Triffids, weighed down by Shyamalan's earnestness and humorlessness. It's a ridiculous premise, and a better director would have acknowledged the ridiculousness instead of making the whole movie a solemn cautionary tale, and the whole thing ends up riding off the rails.

But for all that, I can't find myself hating The Happening nearly as much as Signs or The Village or Lady in the Water. It's too stupid to be hated, and many scenes cross over into so-bad-it's-good territory. My personal favorite (SPOILERS again) is a short bit in a cafe where a woman is watching an online video on her iPhone of a man killing himself by walking into a lions' cage in a zoo and calmly sticking out his hands for the lions to tear off and eat. Ignoring the blatant product placement, the idea that somebody somewhere had the time to go home and upload this video, and the terrible special effects, we're still left with the bizarre idea that nervous lions would just start chewing away instead of pouncing or going for the throat. I mean, has M. Night ever seen a nature program? And this is a before we meet the hot-dog loving plant expert or get to the farmhouse owned by the crazy lady. I could go on, but you get the point: sometimes, there's no point in being angry at a movie, you just go for the ride. I just wish Shyamalan wasn't working so hard to give crazy auteurs a bad name.

(Revision) I want to add that there are scenes and moments in this movie that are totally effective and creepy. The whole opening sequence, starting in Central Park with unseen horrors just out of sight and the cavalcade of jumping construction workers, is terrific, unnerving and bizarre. Later scenes such as what happens to the cop's gun after he shoots himself are brilliantly conceived and executed as well. The problem is that Shyamalan doesn't connect these moments into a more discordant, disturbing larger framework, and the movie as a whole is only sporadically unnerving, and never truly 'scary' to me.

3/10

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)

A proper review will be up soon, but I wanted to provide the illusion of actually spending time on it first. Also I'll add that I like the movie just fine, although I'll admit it's kind of pointless, one more go-round lacking the insane kineticism of Temple of Doom or the personal emotional core of Last Crusade. But it's a well-crafted, fun romp with plenty of Spielbergisms.

(Updated, ramblingly, 5/24/08 1:18 a.m)
I think one of the key features of this film is that the Steven Spielberg who made it is a subtly different filmmaker than the guy who made the original three films in the 1980s. It's my belief that there's a pre-Schindler's List Spielberg, who made movies characterized by clean narrative storytelling, and a post-SL Spielberg, more formally inventive, more interesting in complicated and even perverse stories, less interested in giving his audience a purely entertaining movie experience - and this is the Spielberg people don't like when they complain about the bookend scenes of Saving Private Ryan, or the endings of Minority Report or Munich, or pretty much all of A.I. Spielberg's always tried to straddle the line between mass-market blockbusters and personal art, and he's gotten more self-conscious and direct in his artistic endeavors over the last couple of decades.

So, as that relates to Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the experience of it is substantially different from the experience of the older Indiana Jones movie - there's a distance, which makes me thing that Spielberg is kind of bored with the enterprise, doing 'one for them' to trade off against his Lincoln film and whatever else he does in the near future; and/or, that he's just not interested in giving his audience a smooth, pleasing experience, and the contrast between the older films and this one is thus more glaring. (In the same way, I think that Jurassic Park is a substantially less inventive, dynamic movie than The Lost World, but it offers a cleaner narrative and fewer narrative and thematic puzzles, and consequently JP is called one of Spielberg's minor masterpieces and TLW one of his flubs, but if you ask me, they're roughly equal in quality). At the same time, I don't think there's any way that this movie could have possibly seen as anything other than disappointing - we're talking about the fanboys, who basically just want to rehash the same experiences over and over again, and when something isn't the-same-but-a-little-different, they complain.

So once again, back to this new movie: I need to see it again to decide how I feel about it, but the range is limited: either it's a minor piece of work along the lines of The Lost World, a sequel made for trade-off purposes and thus essentially work-for-hire, yet containing some striking visuals, a terrific John Williams score, and the best Harrison Ford performance in at least a decade; or, there's a personal, subversive message embedded within it that I haven't cracked yet. If this latter is the case, the key is probably to be found in the movie's two most striking shots, which I realized today are mirror images of each other: the spectacular image of the mushroom cloud that Indy ponders, having miraculously just escaped; and the climactic image of the alien spaceship lifting off, disappearing into some other dimension, and leaving a wake of damage in its behalf. A contemplation of 20th-century scientific hubristic devastation?

More to write when I see the film a second time.

7/10

Explorers (1985) & Innerspace (1987)

Some lingering business after the Joe Dante festival at the New Beverly here in Los Angeles, I rewatched a couple more of his movies for the first time in a long time.

Explorers was Dante's follow-up to the wildly successful Gremlins, a story about three boys (including a young Ethan Hawke and River Phoenix) who build their own spaceship out of plans transmitted to them in their dreams and travel to an outer-space alien encounter. The pitch had to have been simple, a scaled-down kids' version of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Even though it looks like the perfect mid-'80s Amblin production, it surprisingly didn't involve Steven Spielberg at all, which makes me wonder if he passed on it after reading the screenplay and getting to the third-act twist where (SPOILERS!) the boys discover that the aliens aren't the same kind of Spielbergian transcendental figures of awe but merely a couple of teenagers themselves who've stolen the family spaceship for some joyriding around our planet, and who speak mainly in pop culture gibberish they've picked up from TV and radio transmissions.

My fuzzy memories of seeing this when I was 8 are of being totally jazzed at the movie's hour-long setup, hinting at a wondrous close encounter with beings unknown to us, yet possessed of superior technology and apparently mystical abilities, and then being confused and let down when it turns out that not only are the aliens banal, but they're actually kind of annoying. It's a perverse choice for Dante to make, to take some of the hot air out of the transcendental streak of pop sci-fi, and I'm sure it hurt the movie at the box office, just as his snarky sense of humor and unwillingness to give a mass audience quite what it wanted ended up throwing viewers out of Gremlins 2 or Small Soldiers. But the movie still ends on a transcendental, mystical note, meaning that ultimately Dante's experiment was to reframe the genre, to make a film less about escapism (each of the three boys is trying to get away from divorcing parents, poverty, etc.) and more complex. The results are mixed because, sadly, the aliens really are pretty irritating, but the film as a whole stands up regardless, especially thanks to Jerry Goldsmith's score.

Innerspace turned out to be a surprise flop for Dante, which is really a shame because it has just about everything you could want in a 1980s adventure-comedy: an engaging odd-couple pairing with the alcoholic, womanizing test-pilot Dennis Quaid injected into nebbishy Martin Short after a miniaturiation experiment is sabotaged by corporate bad guys; a great supporting cast including Kevin McCarthy and Robert Picardo; fun action scenes; terrific non-digital special effects of Quaid's capsule floating around inside Short's body; and Dante's standard wry sense of humor (my favorite bit: Kenneth Tobey sees Martin Short in a men's room, seemingly talking to noone, and says to him "Play with it buddy, don't talk to it"). The screenplay is a little ungainly, especially in its first half-hour, which I ascribe to a desire to cram the movie as full as possible with extra subplots and bits of business. But any movie that has a bad guy dissolved by the protagonist's stomach acid puts a smile on my face, especially when Dante punctuates this mini-cannibalism with a burp punchline.

Explorers: 7/10
Innerspace: 8/10