Jennifer's Body (2009)

There's an intriguing gulf between those critics that liked Jennifer's Body, and those who hated it.  Generally, those who loved it tend to harp upon the film's philosophical intentions and subtext as the reason for the film's season.  Negative critic's reviews were essentially "this movie dumb and not scary fart."

Guess which side I'm on!  Jennifer's Body does contain a number of quasi-interesting ideas and subversions of the horror genre, but as a horror-comedy film, it is complete shit.  It's sort of a cautionary morality tale about what happens when you watch stuff like Suspiria and The Lost Boys and take a ton of notes about the symbolism in the sets and the roles that characters play, but completely neglect what made those films such good entertainment in addition to their cultural viability.  Cody and her director, Karyn Kusama, created a horror film with a mediocre amount of brains, but literally no heart.

The plot essentially revolves around three dull high school characters: Whiny nerdgirl Needy (Amanda Seyfried, continuing the tradition of casting attractive women as lame girls because GLASSES), her long-time bff, super popular cheerleader Jennifer (Megan Fox), and Needy's quasi-nerdy boyfriend Young Neil Chip (Johnny Simmons).  Things quickly go to shit when Needy and Jennifer go to a concert of evil satanic independent rock people (alot of reviews cast them as indie, but it's unclear how Cody intends to portray their genre since they sure as hell don't sound indie, and they make reference to Maroon 5 as their artistic and financial goal), who kidnap Jennifer as a sacrifice to Satan for stardom.  The process then makes Jennifer into an evil demon who has to feast upon the blood of a dude every month or otherwise her otherworldly makeup disappears or something.

Hey, did you catch that?   Has to eat dude's blood EVERY MONTH?  Quite the hilarious tweezt, eh?  If you disagree, well strap in, because  the entire film is full of those cute little surface twists and symbols with no real meaningful message.  I'm assuming that alot of critics thought the intellectual exercises were totally clever and brilliant because they think the horror genre is an endless wasteland of girls getting raped with knives or ghost knives.  Jennifer's Body really does feel like critic food, designed to appeal to some mythical subsection of people that never watch horror movies and think they're intellectuals because they read three articles by Pauline Kael.  The one thing Jennifer's Body does do competently is making you think that the messages aren't really subtle, but you're just really smart for figuring them out, like we're 5 years old and at our church's Easter Egg hunt.  Oh, everyone's just sort of a victim in a different way!  My god, it's like Diablo Cody wrote a love letter to me and I have the secret decoder ring!  Jesus Christ.

I'd probably be more hospitable to the film if there was more to it than "Be Sure to Drink Your Ovaltine and High School is Really Confusing to Girls," but holy shit there isn't.  As horror, it completely fails.  Again, for all the horror that Diablo Cody has purportedly ingested, she apparently missed the twin concepts of terror or suspense.  You know what is going to happen at any given point in the film, and when it does happen it's just some cgi teeth or shadows that shows just enough that you know what is happening (bye implied horror) but not nearly enough that a brownshirt gorehound is going to be impressed (bye overt horror).  As far as I can tell she's going for some sort of exploitation vibe, but there's nothing really violent enough or sleazy sexy enough (unless you count seeing the top half of megan fox's body double's butt as sleazy sexy enough) to count as even a clever inversion of exploitation cinema.

Some people would probably characterize this complaint as saying that I'm just some gross male that can't handle my horror films straying from conventions.  But there's a difference between doing something genuinely creative and different in horror (for example, Dead Ringers or Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer), and just having a movie where a demon girl kills some guys and that's about it.  Removing familiar conventions and replacing it with dead static doesn't mean that the director is challenging the system, it means you just directed Aeon Flux and have no idea how to direct horror effectively.

And guess what it also completely fails in comedy too.  Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried, regardless of their acting talents, are completely ill-suited for Cody's style of dialogue.  While I disliked Juno, Ellen Paige and Michael Cera at least seemed to adapt to the sub-mental rhythm of Cody's wacky word phrases and turn it into something of their own.  Here, the two women just sort of splurt out stuff like "oh that lead singer is SALTY," always emphasizing the wacky words because that's the joke right????  I get a sinister feeling that Cody probably preferred the actresses becoming dialogue tubes to what happened with Juno, because holy shit there are so many scenes of them talking and talking and talking and it's never funny or clever just some goddamned future spaceman language you'd hear in a five dollar tor book.  It also doesn't help that literally no one is going to believe that Seyfried or Fox are in high school, so now we just have people my age talking like Microsoft Mary ate a bucket of Mad Libs.  Johnny Simmons fares a little better since he talks like a normal human being and you can pretend he's in college.  The only actually funny people in the movie, Amy Sedaris and JK Motherfucking Simmons, get like two scenes each where they just sort of move the plot along.  Are you fucking kidding me?

I guess what ultimately galls me about this film is how it's somehow treated as something greater as a horror genre film by some people simply because it refuses to be entertaining and instead spin its english grad thesis wheels.  For example, look at this fucking paragraph by some dildo on Movieline:

Horror and teen comedy are two genres proven time and again to be invulnerable to reviewers (when they’re even screened for reviewers). Put them together, though — especially in a semi-satirical fashion that turns the first genre’s sex-and-death conventions on their heads — and you get a whole lot of dickheads sniping that Body didn’t do enough to adhere to convention. “Jennifer’s Body falls into the dispiriting category of dumb movies made by smart people, in this case a glibly clever writer and a talented director who think a few wisecracks are enough to subvert the teen horror genre,” wrote the Boston Globe’s Ty Burr. Sigh. 

Could it use a more knockout horror blow by the end? Sure it could. Could it be funnier? I guess so. But: That’s not the movie Cody and Kusama wanted to make. It’s ultimately a movie about two teenage girls’ misadventures in victimization — literally (Jennifer's attack by the rock band), thematically (theLast Girl trope of horror movies), and culturally (the media's exploitation of survivors). The jokes are virtually incidental to the friction imposed on women who happen to be two sides of the same coin. Who’s the monster, and who made the monster? Sorry if you wanted Heathers with demons, fellas. Equipment’s cheap these days; perhaps make your own?

SEE IT DOESN'T MATTER THAT THIS MOVIE IS A WARM TURD BECAUSE DIABLO CODY HAS A MESSAGE.  Here's a hint, clownshoes: a horror film can be entertaining and scary and have some clever ideas at the same time!  A friend reminded me of Teeth, which holy shit inverts horror genres and also manages to have some pleasing gore and grossly funny scenes.  Of course, every critic referred to that film as "genre" (and therefore not worthy of serious discussion) because it dared to be entertaining. Two years later, the same people totally nodded at Kusama's pronouncement that Jennifer's Body is totally post-modern horror because nothing surprising or scary or funny happens.

Is it possible to be anti-intellectual when your targets have no actual intellect?

Overthinking Terrible: Woody Allen's Anything Else

Anything Else was so bad that it forced me to question whether I actually like anything Woody Allen has actually done.  This is partially because it's been years since I've seen a Woody Allen film, during that time when I actually paid attention to movie books and tried to keep pace with the hipster towards important films.  Anything Else, unlike the film's incompetent psychologist, peeled away my mental layers until I had to face uncomfortable truths, like David Mitchell in Peep Show:

"Did I really enjoy watching Annie Hall?  Or was I just bamboozled by what all those movie books said how he captured the New York lifestyle?  I don't even like New York.  Or do I say I like him because I'm afraid I'll sound like an anti-semite?  But I like Mel Brooks without hesitation!  Oh no, my series is getting increasingly darker and less humorous!"

Ultimately, I faced my demons and still laughed at Annie Hall clips on youtube ("why don't you get William F. Buckley to kill the spider?"), but my insecurity operated from the fact that Anything Else, unlike other modern Allen movies I've disliked such as Match Point, operates like some gibbering, half-formed clone of a classic Allen film.  All the elements are there: performer-based improvisional comedy, New York eccentricities, sly reference humor.  The problem is that Anything Else takes these concepts and reduces them to their lowest, lamest form, for reasons I'll get to at the end of this review.

The movie operates from the standpoint of Jerry Falk, played by Jason Biggs (yeah remember him?????).  He is a writer who you'll never actually care about.  His only recognizable trait is his total lack of backbone towards all the negative forces in his life, including his girlfriend, played by a visibly regretful Christina Ricci.  He is friends with a HILARIOUSLY idiosyncratic jew, played by Allen himself.  Jason Biggs bitches about stuff for the entire movie, his girlfriend doesn't have sex with him and then has affairs, he moves to California.  That's literally the movie.

Of course, the plot is never really the point of any Woody Allen comedy, but is merely there to set up a framework for funny dialogue and references, but there's almost nothing of the sort in this film.  The worst offenders are probably Jason Biggs's endless fourth-wall monologues to the audience.  Five minutes do not go by  without all action stopping so Biggs can walk around in the set, talking in a faux clever manner about all his issues like a Franzen/DeLillo character after four generations of imbreeding.  Biggs is obviously not equipped to portray this sort of humor, treating the scenes like he's guest-hosting Punk'd.  While Biggs' lack of talent is part of the problem, he's also completely miscast in Allen's suffering Jew.  The film demands someone that looks like they've been shit on their entire life, and nothing about Biggs suggests a total wimp.  Ironically, Biggs might have been a funnier presence if Allen had given his character more bite than the whipped puppy dog that just rolls around whining for tru luv.  That is to say, Biggs would have done better in portraying the original type of Allen protagonist rather than some weird version created by equal parts pressure to make a more teen friendly film and Allen's own obvious misogyny in viewing the "nice guy" archetype as a character people should root for.

Pretty much all the other actors have their humor wasted too.  Ricci is talented, but her portrayal of Allen's nightmares about a dominant feminine personality never quite works.  Throughout the film, we're implored to view her as some mysterious siren that is irresistible to men, but while she's certainly attractive, one never reaches the dichotomy based on the scenes we're given.  For example, after a disastrous attempt by Biggs to rekindle the relationship in a hotel room leads to a visit to the ER, we're treated to a scene where she's examined by a doctor while she's writhing around and flirting with him.  In addition for the scene lasting far too long for the minuscule amount of cuckold humor it produces, it's hard to see why her actions make her so alluring.  There's a sort of a difference between sirens and sluts, guys.  Ricci does her best, but Allen's direction was obviously determined to make her into a one-note hag who is responsible for all of the problems in the relationship, so eventually she acquiesces and evilly quips about how she had sex with another dude to know whether she could have orgasms again.

Allen's character is the best in the film, but that's not a hard hurdle to jump.  Allen plays a wacky, paranoid Jew who miserably teaches at a public school and stockpiles guns and supplies for the return of the Nazis.  It's an amusing enough character, but as the film progresses and Allen gets progressively more violent towards the world and hateful towards Ricci's character, the humor is soured.  Alot of film critics wanted more of Allen's character, which honestly makes me wonder if they understood Allen's films.  It'd be as if Walken's character in Annie Hall suddenly had 40 more minutes of screen time.

All this makes me wonder who the audience in this movie is supposed to be.  The ostensible answer is the teen market, but while that's certainly how the studios marketed it, it's harder to see that as Allen's intent.  Many of the references are clearly not intended for the kids (for god's sake, there's a reference to The Exterminating Angel), and while I guess if you squint really hard, you could call it a romantic comedy, it is a damn black one.  At the same time, the relationships and characters are so one-note that no mature mind is really going to be tickled by what is going on.  Do you see where I'm going with this?

No, it's not aliens.

Moreso than alot of directors, Allen's always used his films as pretenses to help him deal with whatever issues present in his life.  We'd get to see the director's neurosis laid bare, we'd laugh at the inner mind of a funny dude, everything was cool.  I'm not sure if the process started earlier than Anything Else, but this film is a pretty awkward glimpse into someone who still believes he is funny, but is only capable of nervous distaste for everything around him. In retrospect, this helps explain Match Point, which was at least capable of matching a dark tone with a dark subject matter. Woody Allen doesn't care about whether you found this movie funny, this is his ten million dollar therapy session and I guess you can watch but it's going to cost you.

And while that's interesting from a psychological standpoint, Anything Else is still a shitty fucking comedy.

Lufia & the Fortress of Doom

I really shouldn't like this game.  Lufia & the Fortress of Doom, like fucking goddamned Breath of Fire 1, represents the bad side of the supposed "golden age" of snes rpgs.  Released by Taito at about the same time that BoF was disgorged by Capcom, it's sort of depressing to realize that at this point Squaresoft had released both Final Fantasy IV and Secret of Mana, while Atlus had put out Shin Megami Tensei.

Lufia is the living definition of generic jrpg.  It's possibly even more generic than BoF, which at least had some clunky character fusion dynamics and multiple party members.  Lufia gives you four party members the entire game, so I hope you're willing to put up with their kooky adventures for like 25-30 hours.  There is exactly one side quest, which is a glorified fetch quest that in the later stages reaches near impossible levels to complete unless you break down and take out an faq.  Combat is basic as imaginable, even having the (every baby console gamers rage now) "targetting an already dead enemy group leads to a missed attack on air" trait.

Easily my biggest problem with Lufia, though, lies within the graphics, especially in dungeon areas.  Here's an easy to understand pie graph that details literally the proportion every non-overworld area in the game where you fight a monster:

It should also be noted that when I say caves, I'm not fudging the numbers and including variants on the cave theme, like maybe some crypts or a dragon's nest or something.  No, they are all goddamned caves with the same elements in all of them, the biggest change being that some have a slightly different color scheme.  I take back all the mean stuff I said about Breath of Fire having unimaginative settings.  At least BoF had those cool rats running around in the caves.

And yet.  And yet.  While eventually I just went FUCK THIS SHIT to BoF, I played through and beat Lufia with a bare minimum of teeth gnashing.  What gives?

Challenge, for one.  I can't think of a single point during my illustrious BoF journey where I felt vaguely threatened by the baddies.  Lufia, on the other hand, is very good at utterly wrecking your life.  The vast majority of battles in the game force you to consider the capabilities of all your party, adjust tactics, and then scream at the monitor when 3/4s of your party is paralyzed and slowly picked off.  It's a good thing the battles are generally fairly engaging, because the game's encounter rate is patently ridiculous.  Sometimes there's some mercy, but I experienced multiple instances of "step fight step fight step fight" phenomena.  As noted above, the biggest challenge in fights is usually derived from status effects, which roughly 2/3rds of the monsters in the game have the ability to inflict, often casting on the entire group with a 50/50 chance of success for each member.  DO THE MATH, and shake your fists at the heavens.

One should note that this challenge factor does not apply to bosses.  While they can hit hard, they also seem to be more obviously designed to challenge your party's specific capabilities at that time, rather than a designer coming up with an enemy that is sort of annoying by itself and suddenly the game decides you need six of them.  The final bosses are especially jokes, with several of them casting magic and status effects that might be threatening if you didn't have a magic mirror spell that doesn't fade away after it is hit.

With such challenge, one naturally looks for any sort of advantage, and here comes what really kept me going for thirty hours: trying to figure out the game's bizarre stat system.

Nothing you do in Lufia seems to really affect your character's roles.  Your main guy is the dude that hits things hard and has alot of buffing magic, the green haired guy hits things really hard, the blue haired chick casts magic and gets hit really hard, the yellow haired chick also casts magic but has an enemy group-affecting bow.  It took me the entire game to eventually learn this, but there is no tinkering with what your characters do.  In one of the more humorously cynical motions by whoever was in charge of mechanics, there's even a set of color specific rings that correspond to each character's hair color and naturally bend towards that character's statistical strengths.

But say you do what the game wants and just give your dudes the equipment they're supposed to have.  The game doesn't care.  There's never a point in the game where you get some piece of equipment that makes you feel like a king badass, even for a little bit.  Most successful jRPGs succeed by effectively hiding your limited choices through lots of distracting bells and whistles.  Lufia proudly hangs a picture on your wheel stating that "no enemy will ever be more complicated to kill than 'have girl hit it then have a dude hit it' so keep buying those swords we've already adjusted enemy defense."  In addition, the game's RNG for damage taken and received is large enough that if you really did a sword that meaningfully affected your mean damage, it's going to take awhile to calculate.

In the midst of all this, we have the rings.  Lufia stuffs your face with rings.  Some are obvious, doing various stat buffs that naturally affect nothing.  But others I was never able to figure out.  The hell is a "Fly Ring," I ask no one in particular.  The game sure doesn't want to tell you, as it certainty doesn't change your stats.  But it's worth 2000G!!!  That must be pretty important, right?  It was only after I finished the game with all my rings taking up a full page in my 5 page maximum that I learned that the Fly Ring made you stronger against flying enemies, and most of the other unexplained rings had similar, utterly worthless bonuses.  Jesus Christ.  It's a testament to how awful the lack of explanation of equipment is that Taito apparently felt bad enough about it that Lufia II leaves no leather helm un-lored.

Perhaps the worst thing, stat-wise, was the conundrum of agility.  The strangest part of Lufia's combat system is that while you generally start out your battles by giving everyone a command, one combat starts flying, your character's turns and actions appear seemingly appear at random.  Sometimes my executioner green guy would attack first, other times he would go last.  This wouldn't be such a problem if not for the whole "no enemy means whiff" and the fact that one screw up can easily mean, at the very least, spending more minutes of your life on the magic screen, trying to wrangle the malevolent cursor to actually heal your people.  So, in total frustration, I ended up placing as much agility boosting power on my bow-user, even feeding her all the microscopic agility boost potions, since theoretically that means she would go first and I could soften up as many bads as possible.  

If anything, she was even slower.

Ultimately, I guess I did sort of hate Lufia, but perhaps out of residual guilt of Breath of Fire, I kept going.  In retrospect, it probably would have been easier to pay some young boys money to put on a puppet show of the plot so I could get all the amusing references in Lufia II, which after playing for roughly fifteen hours I can say is so far second only to Chrono Trigger for favorite SNES rpg.  oh boy a review where I don't have to grit my teeth and bitch, fun

Gutterballs (2008)

It's a rare film that contains a pretty equal amounts of elements that I really enjoyed, and elements that I found completely awful.  Gutterballs is making me glad I decided that review scores were for pill-munching dandyheads because any arbitrary grade I gave this movie should wouldn't feel right.  This movie is a gory butterfly trapped in a autistic amateur's cocoon, and I just want to cut all the dumb bullshit away and let it fly, fly away.

Gutterballs is about a slasher in a bowling alley.  It's Canadian, and very gory.  The victims are all awful, either scenesters of various stripes, punk greaser types, or vapid ladies who exist to waggle their boobs around.  In a movie like this, the audience doesn't care about character traits or motivation, we just want to see the blood and cuts come at a steady pace, and in this respect, the movie doesn't disappoint.  Once the murders start, they keep coming at a constant ten minute pace, like the world's most perfect 50-year-old jogger. And for this, I applaud.  The kills hit about every possible way you could murder someone in a bowling alley, and then some, and they're all creative and messy.    Detailing them is probably the only spoiler I care about in these kinds of film, so suffice to say that while they were bloody and messy and pretty cringe inducing, it's another positive tick for this movie that none of the kills went for that gross psychological terror angle.  I mean, people are begging for mercy and all that, but the camera is focusing on the disemboweled guts and not a crying face, if that means anything to you Hostel-raised wippersnappers.

I also have to give a kudos to the soundtrack, as was done by Gianni Rossi, who had a hand in the faux disco prog shit that all horror nerds love about 70's Italian horror.  I'll admit that I only heard of the movie after downloading the soundtrack and grooving to some pure 80s nostalgia.  The wikipedia page on the movie had some malarky about it originally having a "who's who" of canadian rock, and I think everyone who has watched that movie can breathe a sigh of relief that that shit fell through.

Okay so what was awful about this movie.

SOUND.  For a movie with a soundtrack that makes me feel all warm inside, the actual production values on non-soundtrack audio were beyond awful.  Everything is muffled, distant sounding, and colliding together.  One looks forward to the death of the characters in the film moreso than normal because the early scenes of the film are an unending stream of Canadian drama kids all trying to talk over each other.  It's less of a problem than it could be, since all of the dialogue, as far as could be made out, was the sort of banal improvisational troupe exchanges you'd see in some ten-dollar cover charge theater in Portland.

RAPE SCENE.  This isn't really a spoiler, as the summary of the film on any site includes the notice that there's a rape.  What it doesn't say is that the rape is not some standard, exploitive "oh no aiiiie awkward angle shots occasionally showing a boob and a scary leering rapist face" rape scene that, while pretty gross, is sort of a part and parcel of a certain segment of the horror scene.  No, what we get is the answer to a theoretical question of "what if some not really that great filmmakers were challenged to do a rendition of the Irreversible rape scene in a bowling alley's arcade room?"

I didn't hate the rape scene because it was overwhelmingly brutal and honestly kind of uncomfortable to watch with my girlfriend, to the point that I just started looking at the arcade machines* because holy shit was this scene going on for way too long and hey what are they doing with that oh my god.  Really brutal rape scenes can work, or at least have a sort of internal logic, with certain kinds of films.  These kinds of films do not remotely include Gutterballs, which is at all other points a fun little throwback to 70's giallo inspired slashers. Those kinds of slashers do have rape scenes, but they are, let's be honest here, usually for the excuse of titillation and not much else.  There is nothing titillating about the Gutterballs rape scene, which is just really weird and off-putting for a film that otherwise seems to have its tongue firmly implanted in its cheek.

Amazingly Awful Ending!  I'm not going to spoil the ending since there's already a summary on wikipedia that goes into excruciating detail about the fifteen palm in face twists, but suffice to say it is a total goddamned mess.  It's true that giallo slashers love their shocking twist endings, but while the ending of Deep Red amazes you and the ending of Phenomena shocks you in delight, the ending of Gutterballs just forces the viewer to throw up their hands in realization that the subconscious part of every true horror watcher that cynically predicts the dumbest obvious twists was totally correct this time.

All in all, Gutterballs is worth watching if just for the great gore and inspired soundtrack.  Just don't feel bad about skipping minutes of cinema at a time.  The life you save may be your own, unless you're near a ball polishing machine.

* true fact: in one of my not-so-proud moments, I pointed out the 4-in-1 neogeo arcade machine while it had metal slug on attract mode to my girlfriend.  She wasn't impressed. ;_;