Redacted (2007)

This is how you know what kind of Brian DePalma fan I am - I made it to the last theatrical screening of his widely hated new movie in Los Angeles on Thursday night, where a well-meaning woman was handing out anti-Bush flyers inside the lobby as if they were 3-D glasses. Or maybe I'm just obsessive-compulsive. Either way.

So, Redacted. The first thing to say is that, like almost all of DePalma's movies, it's better and more interesting than he's given credit for. On the other hand, it's still artistically limited - for years now, DePalma has been more interested in having his movies operate on an intellectual and formal level than in terms of basic narrative storytelling. Gone are the days of Carrie and Blow Out when he could combine both in a satisfying way. Redacted is more interested in being a piece of self-conscious apparatus, a movie that film students can pick apart for layers of subtext and political significance, but not something that anyone is going to want to watch for fun after a long day of work.

The plot is largely similar to DePalma's 1989 Casualties of War: Soldiers stranded far from home in the hell of war react in one of two ways: animalistic aggression and passive acceptance, culminating in the rape of an innocent young girl. Redacted shrugs off the benefits of the traditional narrative and well-drawn characters of Casualties and instead aims at something trickier, more harshly interrogative and Godardian. DePalma fractures his movie into a series of autonomously produced videos - a French documentary, Arab television broadcasts, a Marine's self-made war diary (he wants to get into film school), Jihadist web propaganda, and surveillance cameras. It's a cute idea, but it also illustrates a point: when everyone can make their own videos, everyone can be the star of their own performance piece. There is no objective authenticity to be found except through the mass collective of all these individual pieces of video, and everyone is the 'star' of their own show, with the result that everyone - including the sympathetic characters - wears a facade. In the end, it's not the rapists who are the bad guys of the movie, but the 'good guys' who allowed the rape to take place. In the final scene of the movie, one of the 'innocent' bystanders, back home at an engagement party, cries about the horrors that he witnessed in Iraq - but he's crying for the camera, putting on a show for the benefit of his own self-pity. It's not the thugs who are the bad guys of this movie, it's the people who should know better but stand by and allow atrocities to happen.

All that said: it's a movie that's more interesting than good. For all of DePalma's panopticon trickery and indictment of himself and his audience in the horrors of the world, we still have a movie with stiff and unconvincing acting (another Brechtian ploy?) and a general lack of emotional flow. I appreciate this movie but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who isn't a DePalma completist.

UPDATE: Armond White has reviewed this movie, and he's pissed. His rambling, lengthy comments are revealing, I think, of what must be a bitter sense of betrayal - this is the first DePalma movie that Armond hasn't been able to say something good about, after praising The Fury and Mission to Mars as masterpieces and Wise Guys and Bonfire of the Vanities as underrated.

The Republican YouTube Debate

Okay, some random thoughts from watching most of the CNN/YouTube debate tonight:

Rudy Giuliani: Starting to have more problems. He may have hit a ceiling among voters who won't get beyond his pro-choice, socially liberal positions (at least he has the conviction to stick to these instead of pandering to the right wing). But as he goes along and has to face the issues from his personal life, his responses will get more brittle and angry and his support will bleed away.

Mike Huckabee: Very charming and folksy, and I'm not surprised to read that he's rising quickly in the polls. He also seems to be a legitimately decent guy with a talent for relatively straight talk and a good sense of humor. Too bad he doesn't believe in evolution and is generally on the wrong side of every substantive issue, but I'd have a hamburger with him.

Duncan Hunter: Why is he still around? He's just trying to avoid embarrassment at this point and waiting for an excuse to drop out.

John McCain: I kind of feel sorry for the guy. He's had a long and honorable career serving his country, got smeared by Bush and Rove in 2000, and his face is lumpy. If you put a gun to my head and made me vote for a Republican I'd probably choose him because I think he's probably the most authentically principled of the bunch, and I have a lot of respect for his steadfast stand against torture. But his positions are increasingly unpopular with his party and he doesn't have a lot longer to go.

Ron Paul: The zealot. Like Ross Perot or Ralph Nader he's fun to listen to for the sake of outrage and catharsis, but he has no business pretending to be a viable candidate for leader of the free world. He sounded borderline-insane when he was given a question about the New World Order. The kids seem to like him.

Mitt Romney: This man seems to have no core convictions beyond the unshakeable certainty of his own self-importance. He's an empty suit who will apparently say anything to please any audience, as was made clear again from his statement from a decade ago that he looked forward to the day when gays could serve openly in the military, but "that was a different time." His total misunderstanding of John Edwards' "two Americas" theme and his refusal to agree that waterboarding is illegal under the Geneva Convention were frustrating as well.

Tom Tancredo: Didn't get a lot of time, which is no great loss.

Fred Thompson: Lacked energy and looked like he would rather be somewhere else. I expect him to drop out pretty early in January so that he can start collecting residuals from Law & Order reruns again.

For the record, my favorite candidate currently is John Edwards, but I'll vote for any of the four leading Democrats.

The Mist (2007)

So close...

I've been a big Stephen King fan for years (a habit I picked up from my Mom) and I've been looking forward to an adaptation of this one for a long time. It's one of King's best short works, suspenseful and rich in nightmare fodder, a great example of the kind of stories he does best: in which madness and terror (here in the form of an extra-dimensional monster-spawning fog) are unleashed into the unsuspecting normal everyday world of suburban Maine.

Frank Darabont would seem like a perfect choice for this material. Even though his first three movies were earnest and old-fashioned (I'm assuming - like most people I never saw The Majestic) his early career was as screenwriter on Nightmare on Elm Street 3 (the good sequel) and the remake of The Blob. So he's a seasoned director with a background in horror and Stephen King, the movie should have been great, right?

The first problem with the movie is a certain self-importance that you probably get after your first couple of Academy Award nominations. The Mist should have been a fast-paced, nasty little monster movie, and to a great degree, it is. But Darabont falls into the Rod Serling trap - not content to just let his audience have fun, he tries to draw the deeper meaning out of his material. Again, not something I want to dissuade filmmakers from doing, but it weighs the film down a touch more than it should. Additionally, Darabont should have taken a page from the Paul Greengrass school and made his crowd scenes a little more chaotic and noisy. The crowd in this supermarket are pretty quiet and well-disciplined for a group who just popped out to get some soup for dinner and find themselves suddenly facing Cthulhu's spawn.

And then there's the ending... (SPOILERS).
Basically, the hero, David Drayton (Thomas Jane) shoots his friends and son in order to spare them the horror of being eaten by monsters, only to have the U.S. Army show up thirty seconds later as the Mist retreats. Darabont has altered King's original open-ended conclusion in order to end on a more significant, emotional note, a sort of Shyamalanesque sucker punch. It sort of works on an intellectual level and it connects to Darabont's other movies - basically, Darabont is telling his audience not to give up or give in to despair because hope could be right around the corner. But since this concept hasn't been firmly established earlier in the film, it doesn't have the impact he wants it to. I don't want to say the ending is a failure, but I don't think it really works, either. When you shoot a cute little kid in the head in a mainstream American movie, you better make damn sure you do it right.

All that said, I still thoroughly enjoyed this one. The monsters are nicely Lovecraftian, Darabont gets good work from his cast, including Marcia Gay Harden as the almost unplayable Red State villainess; and the waking-nightmare quality of King's underlying story comes through. Darabont hit a solid double with this one, I was just hoping for a home run.

Beowulf (2007)

Robert Zemeckis, come back to live-action filmmaking. While we appreciate your pioneering efforts to expand digital technology, you could also leave that work to music videos and commercials, where dead-eyed characters can roam around in CGI landscapes for thirty seconds at a time. Do you really want to be working in product testing for the rest of your career?

So the point is, Zemeckis's Beowulf is a disappointment, in spite of a sprinkling of fun visuals. Mostly the failure stems from Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary's lackluster screenplay, which is full of plot holes and has a very dry, perfunctory, just-get-to-the-next-plot-point feel to it, not to mention the thinness of Beowulf himself as a character. Oddly, for an IMAX 3-D film, the world of this movie is distant and uninvolving. It feels like the whole movie only takes place in the same three or four locations and with five or six characters, curious for a type of movie limited only by imagination.

In contrast, not long ago I rewatched Richard Lester's The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers, a pair of super-low-tech swashbucklers from 1973-74. Neither movie has a dragon or any sea monsters, but they have so much more life in them than Beowulf, which is arid and limp by comparison. In contrast in the other direction, I hated 300 from earlier this year, but it was more successful in at least being thrilling and stylized in an original way, without the pretenses of having a deeper meaning and at a fraction of Beowulf's cost. That said, I don't hate Beowulf so I'd still give it higher marks for not making me angry, as 300 did. But on the level of simply providing cheap thrills, Zemeckis's movie falls short.

This is definitely a case where the technology gets in the way of the storytelling, and where the story has been altered and expanded unnecessarily for the sake of an additional action set piece or two. Too bad but at least it's better than The Polar Express.

Lars and the Real Girl (2007)

Yeah, it's sweet and well-made and all, but I'm gonna be something of a skeptic on this one. For one thing, I think there's something basically dishonest about a movie that has as its premise 'a man falls in love with a sex doll' and then goes to great lengths to make sure that its audience knows that there's no actual sex happening, thank you very much. The movie wants to titillate you but not creep you out, and as far as that goes it manages to walk that line but there's still a persistent denial at the movie's center that I find annoying. Basically, I wish that David Cronenberg had directed this.

My other real problem with the movie is that, as brilliant as Ryan Gosling's performance is, it's very heavily interiorized, which means that there's very little external conflict. The drama of the film is basically watching Gosling's Lars and waiting for him to come around and get with the program, and there isn't really much in the way of external drama to affect him or shake him up properly, which I would call a dramatic failure. We observe Lars without ever really feeling what's going on in his head (so I guess he's got something in common with Frank Lucas, for me).

Finally, there's a common trope in movies about romantic loners where there's always an unrecognized romantic possibility just around the corner. It's kind of a lame cliche.

(PS: I saw this movie a month ago but I'm writing about it now because I haven't had enough time yet to fully process No Country for Old Men and have anything interesting to say about it except that it's nice to see the Coens back again and the ending is odd. More later.)

Celebrity Sighting of the Day

Weird Al Yankovic, waiting to cross at the intersection of Franklin and Hillhurst in my neighborhood. In L.A. you mostly see celebrities in fancy public places like movie theaters or bars so to just see Mr. Dare to be Stupid tooling around on foot was especially odd.

Who else wishes he would bring back the moustache, by the way?

Lions for Lambs (2007)

Even though the trailers made it look annoyingly preachy and didactic (you could say, Haggis-esque), I'd have to call this one a must-see. In its own way, Robert Redford's new film seeks to transcend the polarizing national debate over the War on Terror and find new, common, American purpose. Apologies if my review ends up sounding Armond White-esque but I think he's right about this one in his own review.

In an anonymous California University, an old-school liberal professor (Robert Redford) interrogates a well-off but lazy student about the nature of his cynicism. In Washington, a promising young Republican Senator (Tom Cruise) gives an exclusive interview to an established reporter (Meryl Streep) about a new strategy to defeat the Taliban. And in Afghanistan this strategy is implemented using two Marines (Derek Luke and Michael Pena), both former students of Redford's. It's a talky movie, but it's never a boring one because of the constant stimulation of strong dialogue, acting, and ideas, and because the stakes are simply too high to be boring. Redford lays it all out on the table: Western Civilization, as led by the U.S. government, is in a war against angry medieval idiots. What are you going to do about it? In the movie's most potent moment, Cruise literally asks Streep and by extension, the audience, "Do you want to win the war on terror?" a question which hangs in the air, never resolved. The big surprise of the movie isn't that it takes strongly liberal positions, but that it challenges liberals to move beyond the miserable failure of the Bush administration and look forward to envision success on the global stage with whatever President takes over on Jan. 20, 2009 - success that I don't think that selfish isolationists like Dennis Kucinich or Ron Paul have the vision to conceive of.

For a while now, I've been wondering how it's possible for a movie to truly be progressive and actually have an impact at the same time, when so many well-intentioned movies simply play to their own choirs or are ignored by the public. Even though it looks like Lions for Lambs is going to be the latest one to be shrugged off, it deserves a lot better, especially in its central question: what are you, the American viewer, comfortable at home, going to do? Anything? This is classic Hollywood liberalism at its best, urging the complacent viewer out of his or her torpor and into their best possible self, the kind of thoughtful, principled progressive liberalism seen in movies from High Noon to A Man for All Seasons to Good Night and Good Luck (even though I'm sure Armond would probably disagree with all three of those). Redford is telling us that we need to get beyond the sloth that cynicism breeds and get off our butts, simple enough.

Dan in Real Life (2007)

This was a pleasant surprise. It was rather cheaply advertised as something much more zany and Robin Williams-esque than it turned out to be, when it's actually very low-key and charming in an almost effortless way, thanks primarily to breezy lead performances from Steve Carell and Juliette Binoche, plus the three very good actresses who play Carell's daughters. (My favorite single moment: Carell's middle daughter screaming at him, "You are a murderer of love!") And Dane Cook isn't horribly obnoxious, so that helps too.

A curious omission from the movie, though, comes from the movie's premise, where 'Dan in Real Life' is supposed to be the advice column written by Carell's character. Curiously, the fact that his character is alleged to be an advice expert is almost forgotten by the movie, except for a couple of moments in the opening credits where we see Dan working and dispensing obvious, sub-Dr. Phil-level advice like "Hide your couch potato's remote control!" No wonder Dan has so many personal problems of his own.

The basic premise of the movie is affirmatory, one of those movies that seeks to affirm to the audience that they should relax, take a little me time, drink some tea. Usually I don't care for these kinds of movies because they tend to verge towards blandness and introversion, but when it works, it works. Also, Carell builds his library of awful white-guy-dance scenes.

The Writers Strike

My friend Rachel Axler writes for The Daily Show and, in her free time from marching around in front of Rockefeller Center next to a giant inflatable rat (?) she wrote a piece for the New York Times. It's not an in-depth argument for the necessity of profit-sharing from New Media income streams, but it is free Daily Show humor until the strike ends. Enjoy!

Blade Runner: The Final Cut (1982/2007)

First of all, a quick apology to anyone who cares for my lack of posts lately. Being unemployed has ironically resulted in less free time for blogging, as I've been catching up on other tasks and looking for new work. (No, I'm not on strike. My former employers ran out of money and let me go.) Anyone need an editor or assistant editor?

Anyway, the new version of Blade Runner. This is one of those movies that I've never seen eye-to-eye with the rest of sci-fi movie geekdom. When I first rented Blade Runner sometime in the early '90s I was bored stiff. Yes, the movie is and was a triumph of visual imagination, thanks to the work of Ridley Scott, cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth, and production designer Lawrence G. Paull, but Roger Ebert had it right back in his original 1982 review when he called it "thin in its human story" (In his new review, Ebert capitulates and suggests several improbable, over-reaching theories about the movie). And he was right: Harrison Ford's Deckard is barely engaged in the movie's plot and doesn't have much substance beyond being an archetypal film noir detective. Of the supporting characters, only Roy Batty (the amazing Rutger Hauer) and J.F. Sebastian (William Sanderson) have any real life to them. It's as if the oppressiveness of the futuristic urban dystopia that the movie takes place in has sucked all the life out of the actors - and not in a good 'the movie is about a future where life is meaningless' way but in a bad 'I'm bored watching Joanna Cassidy get killed because I don't know anything about who she is and why I should care about her' kind of way.

The new version also adds in (SPOILERS) new evidence to support the idea that Ford's Deckard is himself a Replicant, which I honestly find more confusing than revelatory. Why would the police hire a Replicant to track down and kill other Replicants? Why is Deckard so much weaker than Roy or Leon if he's one of them? On a thematic level it's more interesting for a human Deckard to be contrasted with a Replicant Roy, falling in love with the Replicant Rachael (Sean Young) and breaking the human-cyborg taboo line. So the faint orange glow Ridley Scott has added to Harrison Ford's eyes in a shot or two seems like a bad addition, a confirmation that takes away from the mystery of the text.

All this griping aside, I enjoyed watching the movie on the big screen for the first time, and I've developed more respect for the movie over time. Not enough to call it a classic or a masterpiece, but enough that I don't hate it anymore.

I also think it's interesting that Ridley Scott basically invented Wong Kar-Wai's style years before As Tears Go By.

American Gangster (2007)

A lot of stuff happens in this movie, from drug busts to bribery to courtroom eruptions to Chinchilla coats being tossed on fires, but not very much of it really seems to be thematically related to some larger point that the movie is trying to make. It's a movie with a lot of sound and fury, but ultimately, signifying not much of anything.

The great American crime movies, The Godfather I and II, Scarface, and so on burn with the passions of their lead characters, take their power from their ambitions and uncertainties. I couldn't really tell you what makes Frank Lucas, Denzel Washington's character, tick. He gets a couple of minor subplots - buying a house for his mother, coping with the established Italian mobs - but sorry to say, it's a pretty shallow depiction of an interesting person. Russell Crowe's Richie Roberts has a little more to do, but again, very little of his screentime seems pointed towards building some larger conception of what crime and crime-fighting in America are about. So anyway, I was moderately entertained by all the flash and ridiculous outfits, and Washington has at least one terrific outburst involving a blood-stained carpet, but I was left generally unsatisfied.

The supporting cast is pretty strong, especially Chiwetel Ejiofor, Ruby Dee, and Josh Brolin. On the other hand, Lymari Nadal as Lucas's Puerto Rican wife is pretty bad and I could barely make out anything said by her, Armand Assante, or the RZA.

Horror Movie Roundup 3

One more and then it's time to see serious Fall movies again:

Watching The Descent a second time, I was slightly less enamoured of it. The action and scares are still good, but the problems I had with it before didn't go away - the drama and characterization are still weak, and the movie has a crappy ending which the director apparently prefers to the truncated American-release version. While it's hard for me to begrudge any director their preferred cut, I have to say to Neil Marshall that he should have gotten over himself. Not every movie needs to be a hard-hitting expose of the human soul, and if you can't pull it off, cut your losses and keep it short. I'm not saying The Descent's human arc is an utter failure, but it's not nearly as interesting or as fresh as Marshall thinks it is (he admits on the DVD that the ending is ripped off from Brazil). Still, excellent tension and thrills and the only recent movie set in a cave that is at all well-shot in terms of lighting and geography, so good job.

The Reaping is utter garbage. It's as bad as a studio-produced horror movie can be, which means that there's enough eye candy in terms of visual effects and famous actors to keep you from noticing how rancid the story and subtext are. Hilary Swank, who apparently is cashing in while she can, plays a former minister-turned-miracle-debunker who travels the world to tell people that when they see Jesus in a tortilla, it's actually toxic hallucinogens from the local chemical factory. All well and good, but she needs to learn the error of her ways, so somewhere in Lousisiana a bunch of crap happens that mirrors the Plagues of Egypt. In the end (spoilers!) it turns out that the town are all evil Satan-worshippers and the pretty little girl (surprise!) isn't evil after all, but Hilary should have an abortion to get rid of Satan inside her pregnant belly, both sides of the political spectrum are happy: the Right gets to see Jesus win, and the Left gets to see a town of intolerant hicks get wiped off the face of the Earth. I don't want to discuss this movie any further except to say that it made me wish I was watching Nicolas Cage in The Wicker Man (NOT THE BEES!), so there you go.

Finally, I rewatched the original Universal Frankenstein (very good and ground-breaking) and Bride of Frankenstein (one of the absolute best horror movies ever) in the first half of the month, so I caught up on the third in the series, Son of Frankenstein, this week after not having seen it in several years. It's a movie that's hard to take seriously if you've ever seen Young Frankenstein, from which it steals a lot of elements, mainly the false-armed police inspector played by Lionel Atwill in the original and Kenneth Mars in the parody - I mean, Atwill almost does all of the same absurd, jerky-armed things as Mars, lighting cigarettes and playing darts and everything. Son of Frankenstein constantly verges on self-parody in the inspector scenes, and the rest of the time it's tedious, spending more time with Basil Rathbone's over-enunciating Frankenstein spawn than on Boris Karloff's final appearance as the monster. Also the kid playing Rathbone's little boy is intensely obnoxious and awful in a way that we don't see in movies anymore, thankfully. But it still hits all the notes of angry villagers and evil henchmen and so on that I can forgive it, even if it is the Frankenstein movie that finally displays Sequelitis.

I've been thinking of applying ratings to these reviews, so I'd give The Descent 7/10, The Reaping 3/10, and Son of Frankenstein 6/10.

Horror Movie Roundup 2

A few more, as promised:

Nightmare City is one of the many cheap Italian-produced zombie movies made after the major success of Romero's Dawn of the Dead. The first of these spawn was Lucio Fulci's Zombie, which is okay but something of a letdown; Zombie's trailer promises a zombie meltdown in New York City but then the actual movie mostly takes place on a rural Caribbean Island. Nightmare City fulfills that promise and takes place in a modern, unnamed Western city. Technically they aren't 'zombies' but rather victims of 'nuclear contamination' which has destroyed mens' brains, given them a thirst for blood, and caked brown gunk on their faces. Like so many Italian horror movies from the 1970s and '80s, it's a movie that privileges action and spectacle over coherence and narrative sense, which means that things happen for no reason, like the existence of a TV dance show so that women can be chased around in their leotards and attacked by zombies. It's fun in a cheesy, grindhouse kind of way.

I had seen The Innocents once before but it seemed like a good idea to revisit it again when I found out that Deborah Kerr had died. It's a handsome movie, well-acted by Kerr and well-shot by cinematographer Freddie Francis, and a pretty good adaptation of James' The Turn of the Screw. However, I question the approach taken here in adapting the story's ambiguities. The movie feels like it's trying very hard to be superior to the character of Kerr's Miss Giddens, condescending to her sexual repression and hysteria. And that's why I think this movie is ultimately inferior to its next-door-neighbor, Robert Wise's The Haunting, which is about many of the same things but remains closer and more emotionally connected to its main character, Eleanor, and her problems, and more willing to indulge in the pure pleasures of the horror movie, with the bulging doors and creaks and jolts and so on. The Innocents, in trying to be so purely psychological and tasteful and genteel, falls a little short for me. Kerr is great, though.

Like everyone, I've seen The Silence of the Lambs a bunch of times and it's become an influential, landmark film. The weird thing about it is that it really straddles the line between the highbrow and the low-brow - I don't know of any other Academy Award-winning movies that include a character escaping from the police by disguising himself under a dead man's face - and then forty-five minutes later, we're laughing that he's about to murder and eat a guy.

The movie exists on two different planes - there's the sensitive, emotional half of the movie that focusses on Clarice Starling, her childhood traumas, and her efforts to try and get by in a male-dominated society, coupled with Brooke Adams as the victim down in the bottom of the well. Then there's the half of the movie where you have a superhuman, hyper-intelligent bad guy named Hannibal Lecter who the audience falls for. Demme sews these elements together pretty seamlessly, but when you really get down to it, Hannibal Lecter, the serial killer who's smarter and more cultured than you are and therefore transcends the category of mere murderer doesn't really belong in a movie that purports to be a real, psychological portrait of authentic serial-killers and victims. He's a sophisticated, archetypal cartoon character, which Ridley Scott realized when he made Hannibal and reconfigured that movie into an over-the-top fairy tale.

There's no way to verify this, but I have a pretty strong feeling that Jonathan Demme was embarrassed by having created the biggest horror icon since Freddy Krueger, and took pains to only make serious-minded liberal movies and documentaries for the rest of the 1990s.

More to come soon.

Horror Movie Roundup

Here are the last few things I've watched on video:

Marebito (2005) is an entertaining enough Japanese horror movie from the director of the Ju-On/Grudge movies. It was obviously made fast and cheap, which gives it a sort of giddy energy but also means that in the home stretch the story devolves into something routine. The first half is the best part, as a deranged cameraman (Tetsuo's Shinya Tsukamoto) explores the nature of fear, wanders into the Tokyo sewers to find a Lovecraftian fantasy world, and brings back a mysterious feral girl. There's a little self-critique inherent in a movie about a man staring at video screens trying to understand the nature of terror, but this trails off into cliche by the end of the movie too. Aside from the weak third act, though, fun stuff with some juicy imagery.

I had never seen The Lost Boys (1987) before. I can see why it was a hit - it moves along briskly and has good performances from the leads (Jason Patric, Kiefer Sutherland, and the gape-mouthed Corey Haim) even though none of their characters are very interesting and the story is pretty predictable. But the movie succeeds on its own terms well enough, and the kids manage to somehow steal enough Holy Water to fill a bathtub and melt a vampire with. The movie's subtext - the bad kids in town are all vampires - is right out of a 1950s movie.

Speaking of which, The Bad Seed (1956) would have fit right in if it had been made in the 1930s. It's painfully stagy, barely 'opened up' from the original stage play and full of flowery monologues and one character who gets two whoppingly grandstanding drunk scenes and all manner of flowery overdramatics, so it's not really a surprise that Charles Busch does the DVD commentary track. There's a little bit of outdated discussion on the nature vs. nurture debate - here, the evil little girl Rhoda (Patty McCormack) was apparently born that way, thus reiterating the 19th century notion that the lower-classes were inherently worthy of their place in life - but the debate is basically just a veneer for outdated melodrama. There are some good moments where terrible things are not visualized, but only heard/spoken of (what happens to Henry Jones, for example) but on the whole this movie would be a good candidate for a remake.

More to come - Nightmare City, The Silence of the Lambs, and The Innocents. And at some point I'll endure Saw IV, too.

The Top Fifteen Liberal Horror Films

At Libertas, you can be amused and scared at the same time at what passes for intelligent discourse on film in Conservative circles - specifically, their list of the top fifteen Conservative horror films. William F. Buckley, this is not. I mean, some of these are jokes, right?

Horror has been called an inherently reactionary genre, because so often it's typically about our fears and the quest for 'normalcy' in a world gone mad. And some movies are inherently 'conservative' - Libertas is correct about Fatal Attraction and Friday the 13th - they both espouse a Conservative perspective. (They're also both bad films). But the list is also indicative of what Conservatives are afraid of - women, sexuality, science, the Social Contract. (The fact that Libertas doesn't include any Cronenberg movies, who is loathed as a reactionary by Robin Wood, is indicative of a basic lack of film-criticism literacy, and even though I love The Brood, it's more than a little misogynistic.)

At the same time, there are plenty of progressive horror movies and TV, because fears can run the political spectrum, and because the genre is also about exploring the realms of possibility - physical, mental, and spiritual. Anything written by Rod Serling counts, to the extreme of several obnoxiously liberal Twilight Zone episodes. Any movie by George A. Romero counts, visualizing the hypocrisies and hollowness of modern society with scathing wit. Plus, there are great liberal horror movies on Libertas' list. Craven's Last House on the Left, while expressing the reactionary fears of a post-60s generation worried about the basic collapse of civilization, still shows that revenge is a horrible thing, damaging to the soul and basically unproductive. And then there are the movies which are so great as to transcend politics, including The Exorcist, which spouts some deeply reactionary ideology within a structure that nonetheless is one of the scariest and most effective horror movies ever made (credit goes to William Friedkin for translating William Peter Blatty's nonsense into art). And I don't believe in organized religion, but the final scene in the church at the end of the original War of the Worlds gets me every time.

So with all that in mind, here are the Top Fifteen Liberal Horror Films:

15. Deathdream (1974)
A young man returns from the Vietnam War transformed into a bloodthirsty zombie - but the prevailing mood is sorrow and anguish. A much better version of the same basic story that was told in In the Valley of Elah.14. The Blob (1958 & 1988)
The teens are the only ones who can save the town from the spreading evil when the authority figures are too full of themselves to listen.

13. It's Alive (1974)
Unregulated environmental toxins start turning perfectly normal babies into killer mutants.
12. Candyman (1992)
Our history of slavery refuses to stay buried as residents of Chicago's ghettos pay the price.

11. 28 Weeks Later (2007)
Military groupthink proves inadequate to the threat of mass chaos, and actually makes things worse despite the best efforts of individual soldiers. See also George Romero's The Crazies (1973)

10. The Shining (1980)
Your standard story of patriarchal-power-run-amok.

9. Street Trash (1987)
Chaos reigns supreme under the poverty line in Reagan's America, where homeless and mentally ill Vietnam vets go crazy and murder each other.8. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956 & 1978)
Individuality-stealing monsters seek to impose their will on everyone else.

7. Audition (2000)
Take that, Salaryman! This is what you get for objectifying women!

6. The Devils (1971)
Corrupt politicians team up with the Church to destroy a man through slander, fanaticism, and torture. This one's almost too easy but the film isn't out on DVD, and is therefore slipping into obscurity even though it's brilliant.5. Carrie (1976)
Repressive religious sentiments team up with pathological fear of female sexuality to explode into a mass bloodbath. The perfect 'return of the repressed' movie.

4. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
The terminal stage of capitalism is reached - cannibalism. (See also The Texas Chainsaw Massacre II, where the victims are turned into chili.)

3. Night of the Living Dead (1968)
Civilization crumbles and The Man doesn't know how to deal with it, from the bureaucrats in Washington to the bald guy in the basement.

2. Psycho (1960)
The tyranny of the dead past, in the form of Mother.
1. Dawn of the Dead (1978)
Consumer society as a necropolis, a magnificent epic horror movie in which society's basic ills implode in on themselves.

Happy Halloween weekend to everyone.

Cannibal Campout (1988)

Now I'm the first to agree that some bad movies are very entertaining to watch - this is not one of them. This is just plain awful, one of the ten worst movies I've ever seen, which is saying something.

It was shot somewhere in New Jersey, which we learn in the movie's first scene, when the Jerseyest girl in the world puts on a bright pink headband and leg warmers to go jogging before she abruptly gets murdered. From there tt's basically a Texas Chainsaw Massacre ripoff - four college kids get in a van for a road trip and run afoul of a family of murderous flesh-eaters. All well and good, except that then the movie fails to do anything - it's not scary, it's not funny, it's not dramatic. It's kind of gory, but so what. This movie's contribution to horror iconography, Jet Helmet Man, falls flat.
Also, the movie is insanely cheap. Now I'm not one to hold a movie's tiny budget against it, if something interesting is going on, but this is just a bunch of New Jersey kids running through the woods - they didn't even get a real house to chase each other around in, just a State Park and the occasional abandoned shack. And it's shot, apparently, on VHS. So there comes a point, in one of the rape scenes, where the cinematic illusion is so thin that it's like watching a sociopath's home movies. This means that suddenly the movie takes on a scarier subtext, but not one that the filmmakers were intending. Watching an ugly kid from New Jersey play-act his Leatherface fantasies is dispiriting, at best.

I can't believe I wrote even this much about it.

Rox vs. Sox

Well that's kind of a surprise after a season in which the Rockies managed to just squeak into the Wild Card spot and the Mets collapsed after seeming like a pretty sure thing. I'm kind of a sports dilettante but I've always liked the Red Sox as underdogs against the evil Yankees, but too bad for them - they already won a damn World Series.

Any other topics of interest?

30 Days of Night (2007)

This one kind of feels like a missed opportunity, due to a certain basic lack of filmmaking competency, and it's kind of shocking to realize that Sam Raimi's Ghost House Productions has now released five horror movies and they've almost all sucked.

Quick plot synopsis: a band of vampires descends upon the town of Barrow, Alaska, which is above the Arctic Circle and thus dark for 30 days in the middle of Winter. For some unexplained reason, nobody in the rest of the world seems to think it's strange that they suddenly lose contact with an entire town of people for a month, which means Sheriff Josh Hartnett and estranged wife Melissa George have to fight them off.

The biggest problem with this movie is simple narrative disjointedness. The story stops and starts, nothing flows together, we don't really get to know any of the characters beyond the headlining three or four. It feels like there may have been a longer cut with more character beats (like showing how the residents of Barrow spend their time in-between story beats, eating canned food and being cold and miserable in hiding) but these were cut to the bone to make the movie shorter. Bad idea because the story becomes uninvolving and tedious as a result.

The second biggest problem with the movie is casting: Josh Hartnett is stiff and unconvincing as always, and only Danny Huston (who's great) really seems suited for his role, as the feral leader of the pack of vampires (correction: Mark Boone Junior is pretty good too). Ben Foster officially crosses the line, for me, from 'interesting' to 'annoying' with his performance in this movie.

The final major problem is basic directing: wayyy too much of this movie is shot in close-up, a standard problem for inexperienced directors. I also don't care for the overabundance of digital mattes and fake snow, especially after seeing the real thing not long ago in The Last Winter - standard Hollywood insistence on comfort over detailed realism. Lastly, the movie's ending is a ripoff of the similar, perfectly realized end of Guillermo Del Toro's Blade II.

On the other hand, I do like the make-up and performances of the vampire characters, rendered as vicious and wolf-like (although the one vampire with fake blood on his mouth for most of the movie would surely have wiped his face at some point during the month). Also, the action/gore beats are pretty good, including some pretty vicious vampire killings including (SPOILER!) one nasty little vampire kid whose death will almost certainly be extended in the inevitable director's cut. And I do have a softness for horror movies set in snow, no doubt about it.

Vincent Price in Pit and the Pendulum (1961)

(This is a contribution to the Close-Up Blog-a-thon sponsored by The House Next Door.)

There are a lot of ways to consider great acting, and as far as I'm concerned one of the best at what he did was Vincent Price in dozens of sci-fi and horror movies for five decades. If the minimalistic, emotionally grounded Method approach of someone like Marlon Brando is filet mignon, then Vincent Price is a slightly greasy hamburger - you know it's not really good for you, but damn if it isn't still pretty damn good. Price raised ham to the level of fine art.

The best vehicle for Price's acting range in a single movie is probably Roger Corman's Pit and the Pendulum (spoilers from here). Price is Nicholas Medina, a tremulous man scarred after a lifetime of living in the same cavernous castle filled with torture implements, Nicholas's father having been part of the Spanish Inquisition. For most of the movie, Price is in full-blown Poe anguish mode, tormented about the possibility that his recently dead wife (Barbara Steele) might have been buried alive. This is how Nicholas looks for most of the movie:
Note that even Price's 'pathos' is at at least 8 or 9 while everyone else in the movie has their performance scaled around 5.

As it turns out, Nicholas has reason to be nervous, because his wife has faked her own death as part of an elaborate scheme to drive Nicholas crazy and steal his fortune. After Barbara Steele emerges from her tomb and chases Nicholas around the castle for a bit, he's basically catatonic. But after the reality of the deception sinks in (with the help of a little added taunting from his wife), Nicholas's demeanor changes dramatically, which Corman shows in a single, uncut shot:






It's like watching the Grinch's heart expand three sizes. That supple transition from terrified and cowed into malevolent, purposeful, and joyously vengeful is the real climax of the story for me. This is Nicholas for the rest of the movie, and the way I like my Vincent Price: a magnificent, silky villain, bigger than life but under complete control of his face and voice.

Cracked's "10 Most Asinine Movie Twist Endings"

Cracked.com (when they reinvented themselves as a website did they abandon Sylvester the Janitor?) has up a list of their 10 worst twist endings. Fortunately, I haven't seen all of these movies, but I'm happy to agree with the lousiness of Stay, High Tension, Signs, and Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes. I do want, however, to stick up for two movies on their list.

Secret Window isn't really a narrative thriller as much as it is a sort of goofball tongue-in-cheek one-man-show for Johnny Depp. Maybe it makes more sense in the original Stephen King story, where it's more clear that the story is sort of inventing itself as it goes along, but here I enjoyed the movie's oddball deadpan logic.

The Forgotten is sort of a second-rate X-Files rip-off, but it's hinted visually throughout the movie that there's something stranger going on than a mere Lifetime movie. It doesn't make logical narrative sense, but it makes emotional movie sense, which I think is generally more important, plus it means that we're plunged into a surreal nightmare world with some indelible imagery. Plus, I would say that neither movie's ending is really a 'twist' in the modern M. Night Shyamalan sense of the word, intended to make the audience suddenly gasp before the credits start to roll - both are hinted at far in advance of the ending and seem like logical developments rather than paradigm shifts.