Showing posts with label film reviews. Show all posts
Showing posts with label film reviews. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Slasher Big Battel: Hell Night (1981) vs. Black Christmas (2006)

So here's the story of two slashers that almost made the grade.

Hell Night certainly starts off like it's going to make that grade.  The first half of the movie, establishing the plot of a frat/sorority combo hazing initiates by making them stay in a mansion that was the scene of a family massacre, is great.  Most characters are likeable, nonstandard types who speak dialogue that is fairly clever, sets are appropriately spooky, and there's an undercurrent of suspense deep enough that you almost don't mind that nothing in the film has happened for like 45 minutes.  After all, they've gotta have some pretty spooky scares and satisfying kills lined up in their coat pockets, right?

It's at the 45 minute mark, when stuff occasionally starts to happen, that you notice a certain problem with this film.  You know those scenes in famous horror movies when a victim is slowly moving down a hallway or staircase, the camera slowly tracking behind them as they take one small step after another, and you're left wondering what's going to happen, and then AGGGGGH????  Imagine that, except it's happening every scene and usually leads to nothing happening.  This isn't even an exaggeration.  No staircase, hallway, or hedge maze is safe from 5-minute walkthroughs of agony where the character steps, turns their heads, steps again, pretends to be scared about something we don't hear, steps again, and GOD IT IS JUST A STAIRCASE CAN YOU PLEASE JUST WALK DOWN IT MORE THAN A STEP A MINUTE

I understand the "reasoning" behind the decision.  Hell Night really wants to bring in an element of Gothic horror, in the grand scheme of Byron, Dark Shadows, and a million other films about people wandering around in spooky houses with vague dreads skulking about.  The director even has everyone wearing (i mean aside from the token slut but who cares) period clothes in some effort to trick our minds into thinking that it's perfectly okay to have a 4 minute cave exploration that is literally just two corridors filmed at different angles over and over again.  But there's a fine line between "classically raising tension" and "clearly just trying to pad film length because if any of these people moved at normal speed we'd have been finished with this shit thirty minutes ago."  In other words, if you're going to meld traditional slasher style with something out of a forgotten Vincent Price film, you actually need to include some traditional slasher style in your idiot soup.

It also doesn't help when the primary party in all this wanderdashery is Linda Blair.  I mean Linda no disrespect, but holy god I hope that her acting fee wasn't the reason that the sfx budget in this film is limited to "fake stabbing pitchfork and dollar store monster mask."  Every other actor is clearly enjoying themselves in the picture, but Linda clearly hates everyone and everything around her, viewing the film as just another paycheck summoned from the wailing of a thousand nerdy fans of the Exorcist.  And the only thing to distract us from a chubby 30-year-old pretending to be a sexy coed are slow walks and probably the lamest death scenes imaginable.  Granted, 1981 and everything, but the murders just feel like afterthoughts: "oh no something scary guess I should get my neck snapped or something."  Worse is the fact that deaths somehow get progressively lamer, going from workmanlike beheadings and stabbings to "get bonked off camera" and "most unsatisfying defenestration ever."

If it sounds like I hated Hell Night, that's not true!  I'm hurt by it, since the first half is so goddamned good and spooky and fully deserving of the hype people seem to set towards it, but then the second half devolves into some sort of weird parody of what was excellent before.  Don't do that, films.  My heart, she holler.

Black Christmas, on the other hands, seems to exist purely as the least hype movie in existence.  Critics hated this movie with a white hot passion, and pretty much everyone seems to have followed suit.  I can virtually guarantee that, after watching the remake of one of the grandpappys of slashers, that most of these people just read a summary of the original film and decided that REMAKE EQUAL BAD ARRRRRGH.  Black Christmas is not a great movie, but lumping it in with shit like "Anything from Platinum Dunes" just shows how banal and uneducated most critics are about horror films that aren't presented as some GENRE DEFYING MASTERPIECE.  Let's be clear here.  Anyone who started their review with some adulation of the original are talking out of their butts.  The original Black Christmas was a massive inspiration for alot of movies I love, but taking it on its own merits, there's so many goddamned problems with this movie.  Bored actresses, boring deaths, scenes that go nowhere...wait.  Let's not talk about this anymore.  I feel weird.

What I find so weird about reviews trashing the remake is that they generally treat the film as basically identical to all the other horror remakes released at the time.  You know the type: PG-13, a completely soulless plot where like 3 people get killed, an unceasing feeling that your life is slowing draining out as you watch some CW actress run down another corridor.  While Black Christmas has significant issues, being a pale cookie cutter remake is not one of them.  The plot operates fast as hell, there's a genuinely funny black humor throughout, and while not especially gory, it gets the job done.  The actresses are still CW garbage, but the movie rightfully notices this and thus paints them all in as unflattering a light possible.

Black Christmas is not really a good movie.  The plot is occasionally too ridiculous for its own good, and there's roughly thirteen subplots that seem to go absolutely nowhere since it's basically impossible to identify any of the actresses among each other.  Making actresses unlikeable still doesn't really help with their lack of acting chops, and there's tons of confusing offscreen deaths that ruin the flow of the film.  Still, considering it was made during the second half of the 2000s (destined to be known as possibly the worst time for horror since the 1910s), whatever.  Go watch it on comcast on demand.  It's FREEEEEEEEEEEE.

Sunday, October 30, 2011

Zombie Apocalypse (2011)

Zombie Apocalyspe is a stupid mess.  It's clear that there was virtually no budget to speak of, the director and cinematographer had no camera shots available at any time aside from "mid range of fronts" or "mid range of backs," the actors were literally one step above community actors, and the plot just sort of wanders around a map before arriving at the payoff scene that is like spending your life savings at a slot machine only to realize it only dispenses those gross little chocolate coins Jewish people have during holidays.

Despite all that, I'd put it in the upper 50th percentile of trashy zombie films and/or Syfy originals.  Hell, let's say upper 75th percentile.  What gives?

The biggest reason is sort of a damning with faint praise, but have you have seen budget zombie horror?  Zombie Apocalypse is bad, every element of it barely working, but goddamn at least it could be called a horror movie with trashy action that barely works.  Compare this to something like Monster Ark, where you spend a good half of the movie of people talking about the Bible like it is a mysterious artifact only read by madmen and gods, and then segue to people waving their airsoft M-16s at a greenscreen for the other half.  Zombie Apocalypse had the good graces to interrupt scenes of people walking empty streets and CGI explosions to include zombie battles, and while those battles are entirely shoddy CGI (PHOTOSHOP THAT BLOOD SPURT HARDER), they're at least entertaining enough for me to have finished the movie stone sober.  The plot is followable and does have a destination and doesn't try to overextend ambition beyond what it can barely accomplish.

The acting is bad, but at least when they're not being forced to speak utterly awful lines (ARE THERE ANY HUMANS IN THERE), there's sort of a fun awkwardness to their acting, being fully comfortable (Ving Rhames and that chick from Spartacus: Blood and Sand that wanted to ride Crixus's bone included) in being in a terribad zombie film, as opposed to, say, the Day of the Dead where it appeared Nick Cannon and everyone else was being filmed at gunpoint.  The only exception to this is Taryn Manning, whose sullenness in the film is pretty clearly not just acting, but she's virtually a non-entity in the second half of the movie so who really cares.

Indeed, especially for an Asylum film, there's a fairly intelligent apportioning of focusing on characters that you can almost care about, as opposed to the usual Asylum practices of giving the meatiest roles to people who don't know how not to glance nervously at the camera every five seconds.  Maybe they hired an editor with a soul, who knows?  Perhaps the best part (spoiler but again who fucking cares) concerns the role of "token educated dude who in zombie film parlance means he is a flowery dipshit who quotes a line from Wordsworth and acts like he's hot shit.  Of course, he's easily the worst character in the film and one prays for his death, but as the halfway mark, you feel like he's somehow going to make it to the film.  Even worse, he has an awful romance scene with another survivor and now you're virtually sure he's going to survive SO MAD.  But then he gets bitten (due to his own dumbassery), and turns even before he can do anything heroic!  It's a really rare moment of schadenfreude fanservice coming out of nowhere, and while it was probably unintentional considering the rest of the script, one must take what they can get.

So is it worth watching?  There's certainly better zombie films out there, but there's far, far, worse.  If anything, this is a positive step for Syfy and Asylum, so we may as well be nice enough about it as possible.

Saturday, October 15, 2011

A Film that Dares to Call Itself "The Thing" (2011) (spoilers because fuck this movie)

Fuck this fucking movie.

My gut knew it wasn't going to be pretty.  Especially when I found out the screenwriter was the same person that wrote (get ready) the Nightmare on Elm Street remake.  But did I know how ugly?  Did I have the slightest conception of the depths that it was going to slobber and fuck over my memories of the Carpenter version?  No.  I was like those Lovecraft protagonists (minus an authorial transference of casual racism), realizing something was wrong but that the breadth was far beyond my grasp, so at the end all I can do is laugh like Sam Neill at the end of In the Mouth of Madness.

Part of the problem can be traced to the whole boneheaded idea of trying to remake The Thing by doing a prequel of it.  In doing so, you've stepped into crazy murky waters, as you're ostensibly creating a new plot while having to sort of hug onto the original plot for protection, like a baby bear with worms.  Not at all surprising in retrospect, My Least Favorite Screenwriter in History handled this the same way he did with the Nightmare remake: Clumsily patch favorite scenes from the original to a shoddy original plot, then go completely off the rails with a wretched ending with enough plot holes to hide a universe destroying morphing race spaceship in.

I'll say one thing and one thing only, as it's the only reason this film got anything resembling positive reviews: it's competently made and acted in.  But hey so was the Nightmare remake, and honestly if you're giving any credence to horror films because of the quality of their effects then go the fuck away.  I guess I can also say that the only thing God I am Going to Punch You Screenwriter-San does right is that he also manages to avoid any romantic subplot, so kudos laced with rat poison for that.  Unfortunately, this leaves the plot.  The opening thirty minutes function exactly how you'd expect, for better or worse.  Spaceship found, alien excavated, science does some retarded shit, alien breaks out and ohhhh nooooo.  Since this was strictly paint by numbers plot wise, I was just sort of bored here.

Then we have the first major divergence from the original.  As you may or may not recall from Carpenter's version, the time period between when the crew first sees the alien in action to when they realize its full capabilities was relatively short.  Here, there's a 30 minute period of Dr. Ramona Flowers going "oh no guys something wrong" and all the dudes going "haw haw we're males."  It makes sense logically, but it's still boring as hell, as that time period is people just shuffling around grumbling at each other.  Then eventually the alien reappears and get ready for a descent into total incompetency.

Some of you are probably anticipating me bitching about the alien being quick.  Honestly, I don't fucking care if it's fast or not, especially as it was the same sort of awkward shambler that we saw in the Carpenter film, there probably would have been not a single moment of tension in the film.  What I do sort of care about is that the alien looks pretty fucking shitty.  The remake Things are generally a simpleton's version of what they remember the Thing from Carpenter's version to be mixed in with nixed Silent Hill designs: full of giant teeth and weird arms going everywhere and decidedly not really scary.  Everything is just clean looking and stupid, missing any of the nightmare unfamiliar murkiness of the original.

So we find out that the alien can mimic, and we settle back.  Finally, some of dat sweet paranoia that made Carpenter's version so goddamned good.  All the characters are in the room, and...wait, they already developed the test?  Okay.  And some guys just escaped, all right, lots of opportunity for potential infections to be developed and questioned later and wait they already revealed the Thing and now it's just an extended chase sequence and what the fuck is going on

Of the many things that pissed me off about this remake, it's this.  I think even Hawk's version had more time devoted to the quidessential feeling that nobody could trust each other, the isolation exemplified within Antarctica.  Instead, one gets the feeling that Holy Shit I'm So Goddamned Worthless at Everything Guy watched the Carpenter version and thought "boy, look at all these people talking, this is so boring, I'm gonna cut this stuff down to like fifteen minutes so I can get to what people really care about, why that ax was in the wall!"  You think I'm joking, right?

“It’s a really fascinating way to construct a story because we're doing it by autopsy, by examining very, very closely everything we know about the Norwegian camp and about the events that happened there from photos and video footage that’s recovered, from a visit to the base, the director, producer and I have gone through it countless times marking, you know, there’s a fire axe in the door, we have to account for that…we're having to reverse engineer it, so those details all matter to us ‘cause it all has to make sense.”
— Eric Heisserer describing the process of creating a script that is consistent with the first film.[17]

HOLY SHIT WHO FUCKING CARES.  THANK GOD MY IMAGINATION ISN'T ALLOWED TO CONCEPTUALIZE ANYTHING ANYMORE, WHOO 2011 SPRING BREAK HAND ME THAT GRENADE IT'S TIME FOR THE TRUE JAGERBOMB.  

So the remaining 30 minutes of the movie are literally just a space monster slasher.  It's not even a good slasher, but people running in rooms as a giant Thing monster also runs around in rooms and occasionally kills people and less occasionally recreates the kitchen scene from Jurassic Park.  Near the end, one of the monsters takes an ATV to get back to the mothership, and it says alot about the success of this movie that I was fully expecting a Space Mutiny style chase sequence to close things out.  But don't worry, instead we have an Alien ripoff where the lady is menaced by the Nilhilanth from Half-Life but then she shoots him in the weak point.  Then she walks out of the spaceship with her Not-MacReady while he is holding the flamethrower and then he puts the flamethrower in the truck and then the lady kills him because he is ACTUALLY THE THING AND IF HE IS THE THING WHY DID HE NOT KILL HER WHILE HE HAD THE FLAMETHROWER AND WAIT ARE THOSE CREDITS WHAT THE FLYING FUCK

oh

oh wait

so here's a helicopter guy and he's seeing the thing 

and there's the dog from wait wasn't that infected like at the start of the film why is it running out now and I guess that's the most FUCKING INEPT WAY YOU COULD DO A REACHAROUND TO THE ORIGINAL FILM GOOD JOB MR SCREENWRITER

In conclusion, this is what really galls me.  You have a screenwriter going "hurp durp gonna tie up all these loose ends," to aspects of the Carpenter version I don't really care about, while at the same time just creating obvious, ridiculous plot holes to tie other stuff together that I also don't really care about, all while leaving the quidessential themes of the previous films out to die in the Antarctic wilderness.  The Thing is a triumph of autism and boring fanboyism over imagination and creativity, so really just fuck this movie.

...One other thing.  For all the hubbub about how the screenwriter, director, and producer watched the film a million times, they seemed to miss something that would have allowed an ending that would be both creepy and an actually creative twist on something.  Re-watch the opening of the Carpenter version.  Do you notice something about one of the two Norwegians on the plane?  One of them is completely covered in clothes and never says anything, so the gender is indeterminate.  It would have been entirely possible to have Winstead return to camp, completely devoid of emotion, then get shot at by the last Norwegian, then see the dog, have them get into some convenient helicopter and as they pull out, she pulls the clothes around her.*

It's so goddamned obvious that I can't think of why you wouldn't do it and instead leave her for some indeterminate fate.

Unless.

No.  That's not possible.  It can't be.

No.  

No. 

"I, Eric Heisserer, Screenwriter Extraordinary, can see it now! Ramona Flowers and MacReady, the ultimate duo and...maybe something more ;)"


NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO


*Edit: On watching the opening again, it's less clear whether the person on the left shows their face or not.  It's more likely that the one on the left was the one that was shot by the Americans, but with the constant film cuts, one could conceivably argue that the two switched positions, so that the "uncovered" face on the right seat threw the grenade and ran (with gun now in hand? WHATEVER) while the uncovered searched for it and was blown up.  It's awkward, but certainly makes more goddamned sense than anything in the remake.

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

The Nightmare on Elm Street remake was really goddamned bad.  This isn't surprising for anyone.  Perhaps due to that lack of surprise. I didn't really see any critics expend too much thought on the badness.  After all, it's a horror remake produced by Michael Bay's company, Platinum Dunes, which brought out flaccid remakes of Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Friday the 13th.  Literally no one is going to be swayed by anything said about a movie like this, a husk floating on an ocean of stupid teenage buying decisions.  And yet, there's some interesting kernals to glean from this film, which is a shining example of the present trend of modern, studio-backed horror films bringing absolutely nothing lasting to horror canon.

After finishing the movie, I took some time to watch various scenes from the original Nightmare on Elm Street. What's interesting about Craven's version is, for the most part, the scares are telegraphed fairly well in advance.  By this, I mean that while something scary might happen, generally it comes out of some sort of lead-up.  For example, take the death scene of Nancy's blonde friend from the start of the movie.  The earliest sense something is really wrong is when you see the garbage can lid roll from the fence and hit the ground.  There's a good two seconds of the lid rolling before it hits the ground.  Only then do we see Freddy, and not in some quick-cut closeup, but in the distance, a shadowy vision.  Of course, there are sudden jump scares (such as when Nancy runs into the Freddy hall-monitor), but for the most part, scares are delivered by the impact of the images, not simply by impact.

Guess what I'm trying to say about the remake!  Every single goddamned scare in the remake is some sort of lameass "ooooo things are sort of creepy when is the spooking happening huh huh huh NOWWWW BOOOOOOO VOLUME SO LOUD GONNA PISS OFF YOUR NEIGHBORS."  If you're the kind of idiot that freaks out during "scary" video games (truth Amnesia is fucking garbage) and want some more of dat fear factor, then by all means rent this movie because there is not a single five-minutes scene without something like Freddy jumping out of a pipe or a little girl getting a monster face happening.  For gentle viewers that need something more than loud sounds to scare them, prepare to, at best, be gently amused as the movie does its best to imitate your high school's haunted house.  Nothing, of course, is going to stick with you.  I'm not even 24 hours from when I finished the film, and already all the scenes are sort of awkwardly merging and fading together, one after the other, with nothing valuable to remember a week from now aside from "god how do you manage to not include one affecting scene even 976-EVIL II managed that."

The plot is sort of the worst of both worlds as far as remakes are concerned, somehow both mechanically reproducing scenes from the original and adding unnecessary, stupid as fuck complications to the plot.  The first two-thirds of the film are basically the same as the original, save for the previously mentioned jump scares being fucking everywhere, and that Nancy's boyfriend is now a fat ugly Robert Patterson.  It was about at this point I said, "god, can they not do anything original in this movie aside from adding dream scares going no where?"

My girlfriend murmured, still watching the movie, "so you wish for them to alter the plot?"

"Sure, I mean it can't be any worse than what I'm already seeing."





















"GRANTED"

"FUCK YOU WISHMASTER"

The film suddenly swerves into new territory at the last third of the film, and boy is it a total mess.  It is now revealed (spoilers I guess) that the remake wasn't happy with Freddy pre-demon biography being "creepy dude who did bad stuff to children."  No, in keeping with the Bay philosophy of leaving nothing to the imagination aside from the full extent of your slackjawed stupidity, it is agonizingly demonstrated that Freddy was in fact a total baby rapist.  The remake tries to trick you by implying at first that hey maybe Freddy was just an innocent victim of childhood overimagination but I can't imagine someone thinking there was a possibility of gray morality in a shitty horror remake, so that's given up like fifteen minutes after.

Of course after the interminable backstory parade the film can't come up with a cleverer way of dispatching Freddy than the "okay I will bring him out of the dream with the power of HUGZ" idea (which was by far the weakest concept in the entire original film), except now Fat Ugly James Patterson remains alive instead of being eaten by his bed.  I don't even know why they kept him alive because he is awful, except probably they couldn't figure out a way to make a blood puking mattress into a cheap scare.  Then ending jump scare because fuck this pissy earth.

Ultimately, I just want to talk about what happened with Freddy.

I don't really mind the new design.  After all, the iconic Freddy is substantially different from the original film's version, which was almost never seen in full light (presumably because the make up was bad, or Craven's reaction to not being able to make Krueger into a skull monster as he originally planned.  The voice, while hokey in its modulated deepness compared to Robert Englund, isn't bad.  The problem is that the remake apparently couldn't decide between the original, dread-filled Krueger and the later sequel's wacky, joking spouting Krueger, and thus decided that what was needed was a jerk Freddy who talks as much as the later iterations, but doesn't make jokes but just acts all weird and rapey.  In other words, they decided the best version of Freddy was the Nightmare on Elm Street 2 version.

Oh yes, the rapey.  So, from a strict perspective, I guess this isn't that surprising.  After all, Freddy has always been more lascivious than most other horror icons, "I'm your boyfriend now" and all that.  And yeah, Craven apparently wanted to make Freddy a child molester before cooler, more intelligent heads prevailed.  That doesn't change the fact that, like pretty much anything else in this movie, making Freddy into a rapist ruins everything good about the film series.  It also doesn't help that the only real ramifications of this change is now we have to have a scene where the main character sees pictures of herself being abused and then get changed into a weird fetish dress (which afterwards I realized was the same one used in Freddy's Dead so I don't even know anymore).  It's just some sort of rat dropping on top that in this hokey, ineptly filmed disaster we also have to get the feeling that the director thought he could even broach real life serious topics.

were it not that I have bad horror...

Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Fright Night (2011)

So how long has it been since I said I unequivocally enjoyed something????  The Fright Night remake is a good horror movie.  Not great, but not that far from it.

Much credit for this goes to the writing.  Much of the dialogue and sight gags manage to toe that line between being attractive to teenage moviegoers while also throwing bones to dedicated horror fanatics like myself.  That is to say, everything is very "fun" in this movie.  For example, there is the inevitable Twilight joke, but the reference is cleverly handled and quickly removed, while a lesser film would have not stopped going BOY THESE VAMPIRES SURE AREN'T LIKE THOSE SPARKLEPIRES HUH HURR HUR HURR.  Some things slowly fall apart by the end of the film (as in 50% of everything out of David Tennant's mouth, but more about that later), but by then you're impressed with the actually scary parts and everything sort of works out.

Most of the actors and actresses are terribad, but who cares?  I couldn't remember what almost anyone looked like in the original until I rewatched the trailer, but I certainly remember Jerry.  In both Fright Nights, it's a basic truth that while you maybe don't want to see the mortals die, you're way more interested in what this suave and very dangerous Nosferatu is all about.  And by gum, Colin Farrell pulls things off, wisely avoiding aping Chris Sarandon's portrayal and instead shooting for a sort of insular suburbia demon, feeding on people in between viewings of Jersey Shore.*  In some respects, it was probably a conscious decision to fill the movie with relative no-names (OH WAIT THAT GUY WAS CHEKHOV WOOPS), as then the audience will then rapturously await the next scene with Farrell, which are expertly spaced out so we aren't overloaded on his character.  The editor was also brilliant enough to severely limit McLovin's scenes.  I think I speak for everyone intelligent when I was initially timid about the film based on the trailer showing that dude all over the place, but really he's there for like 20 minutes so it's all cool.  Also, fun fact, when you try to make that dude look scary, he just sort of turns into Zoolander.

Unfortunately, no great writing nor editing can save us from perhaps the most unnecessary 3D additions ever conceived.  I'm echoing the choir, but why in fuck's sake would you do a 3D film where every important scene in in the dark?  I don't feel that the 3D effects really harm the film, as both me and my girlfriend ultimately had a grand time laughing at the movie's desperate attempts to justify the use (FREE TSHIRTS FLING), but it still seems weird, and probably says alot about the slow waning of this current horror age that the studio executives felt this movie wouldn't get enough box office sales without such a gimmick.  Shames, shames.  On the other hand, this probably means less torture horror, so hooray!

Really, my only complaint is about Tennant, and I realize it's kind of stupid.  KIDS THESE DAYS wouldn't understand or care about the concept of late-night horror shows, so I get that they had to change the role of the older vampire hunter helper.  But couldn't you have gotten someone better than a vague Criss Angel parody?  I can't think of anything better, but that's why I'm writing shitty blogs like this.  What I could suggest would maybe be a little less Han Solo bitchery.  Did Roddy McDowell complain this much in the original?  Probably not, but even if he did, I'm pretty sure he was less of a ponce about it.

Fright Night is a pretty good movie.  It occupies that same place as the Dawn of the Dead remake, not necessary in any sense of the word, but still fun and scary to watch and certainly heaps better than anything featuring girls crying into cameras as needles are pushed into their knees or whatever.  And it's certainly a more necessary remake than GODDAMNED STRAW DOGS WHY WOULD YOU REMAKE THAT WHY FUCK YOU AMERICA

...excuse me.



*In between amusing little details like that and the understated theme of the foreclosure crisis helping vampirekind, I confidently state that Fright Night is a hundred times more effective parody than Red State is going to be.

Wednesday, July 20, 2011

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.

Thursday, July 14, 2011

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. ;_;

Sunday, May 29, 2011

Slither (2006)

James Gunn, let's level.

I think you're probably a pretty cool guy.  I thought Dawn of the Dead worked out really well, and you're obviously more legitly into horror films than Aja or Roth or uh I don't think there are any other memorable recent horror directors.  So, please take this review with all the possible love you can associate from it.

I don't really care one way or another if Gunn had actually not seen Night of the Creeps until he finished filming Slither.  I find it kind of hard to believe, if just for the fact that the edited version was shown on my local FOX and UPN stations ad nauseum during the 90's, to say nothing of the USA and TNT networks before they became bland holes where dramas go to die or get in the missionary position with Law and Order.  But let's assume that somehow he never watched it.  Here's the quote from Wikipedia which really bothered me:
However, Gunn has stated that David Cronenberg's Shivers and The Brood were the two biggest influences on the story in Slither, along with the manga Uzumaki by Junji Ito.
what.

I can accept Shivers was an influence, in the stupidest way possible.  I occasionally forget that the movie involved weird worm things, but the vague psycho-sexual angle, sure.  Whatever, it's honestly not a very good movie which is only mentioned because Cronenberg fans are tiresome auteur morons.  But The Brood?  There really wasn't even a hive mind in that film if one stopped to consider a few things.  I'm not going to get into Uzimaki, except to say I guess "inspiration" now means circling all of Ito's full page images in red pencil and writing "FUCK YEAH" on the margins.

I mention this first because Slither really doesn't seem to know what it ever wants to do.  One strong reason for believing Gunn is that Night of the Creeps is drastically more successful as an homage to horror than Slither.  The former seems completely at ease throwing around casual horror references and casual sadism, but Slither just won't stop winking at me, hoping me to acknowledge that it totally knows all about what scary is but any minute now a parameter is going to change.  That's not to say that Slither doesn't have amusing parts, but they're usually awkwardly appended in between plot advancement.  Stuff happens, Michael Rooker does something realistic which is sort of amusing I guess, then other stuff happens, so on.  You could have removed around 80% of the jokes and the movie would have happened the same way.  It also doesn't help that Creeps was effectively parodying both older horror and the same teen scream drek that was being produced around it.  Slither is purely backward looking, maybe afraid to offend the twin devils of mental sadism and twice-warmed over slashers that plagues the genre today.

And speaking of Michael Rooker, oof.  Maybe I'm alone in this, but what happened to him after Henry?  I guess one doesn't want to get typecast as a singular personification of mindless evil, but is "diluted as hell mixture of Bruce Campbell and Tom Atkins" really that much better?  Your horror comedy sort of has a problem when the most likeable character is the selfish and greedy mayor, and you cheer when the designated folksy symbol of order is about to die.  Then there's the female characters, of which James has two types that have shown up in all of his goddamned films.

1) Protagonista, who has no real personality aside from what is ascribed by other characters and occasionally does strong stuff to show that she is not really a weak woman.
2) Teenage Girl Filmed with Weird Sexual Angle, who is both normal and quirky and does strong stuff fairly regularly to show that she is not really a weak woman.
(oh yeah I guess there was a slut in Dawn of the Dead whoops)

I'm apparently in the minority as far as my feelings towards this film, as a majority of critics loved being hit over the head with OKAY IT IS TIME FOR A JOKE.  It makes sense in a way, Slither is that sort of horror movie that critics love, creative enough that critics can feel like they're seeing some big paradigm shift in the genre, while not weird enough that anyone is taken out of their comfort zone.  Slither does get stars for at least avoiding ever getting emotionally attached to its subjects and thus completely dropping the humor ball (sup Shaun of the Dead), but honestly, everything about the movie just feels conventional and safe within the context of horror.  You can occasionally see some attempts to really show how UNCHAINED FROM HOLLYWOOD HE TRULY IS with stuff like having kids or characters in the vein of harmless friendly supporting character getting killed, but that's predictable in its unpredictability.

(Spoilers about as far as a movie like this can really have spoilers)  The best example of this problem is at the end, where a SHEEPLE horror director would have had the possessed zombie people wake up after the slugs died.  But nope, they're apparently all dead.  I'm sure Gunn was really banking on this really upsetting people, but neither my girlfriend nor I really gave a shit, because at no point in the film was there anything that made us give a shit about this town.  Like the rest of the film, Gunn seemed more intent with shocking us with laughter or some other terrible buzzword phrase instead of considering what might make a film scary and funny -at the same time-.


Slither's not a straight up bad film in the level of alot of the stuff I talk about on here, but it was just such a monumental letdown, yet another in the line of false pretenders claiming to "revitalize" the horror comedy (though Slither was better than Hatchet, if we're ranking).  At some point we'll probably find someone willing to take on the subgenre without falling back on the conventions of years past, but until then, I'm just gonna wait for someone to thrill me.

Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Hunter Prey (2010)

I watched Hunter Prey on Monday.  I wasn't really sure if I wanted to do a review of it.  I mean, yeah, it was a good movie, but it seemed to be getting a decent amount of praise and it was on Netflix Instant so what was the point nobody likes me anyway.

Then I watched a fourth of Terminator: Salvation and I was all HOLY SHIIIIIIT NO WE GOTTA DO THIS REVIEW

Hunter Prey is by that guy that did Batman: Dead End, which was that fan film where Batman fought the Alien, then the Predator and everyone on Internet 1.0 had no idea what was happening ROMS WHAT ARE DOSE.  Dead End wasn't great by any means, but it was a dorky derivative concept done about as well as you could hope for, and that's exactly the game behind Hunter Prey.  It's hardly doing anything new or interesting, but it's somehow nerd food of the highest order.  If you're the target audience you're probably going to like it just for the fact that it's exactly the sort of crappy movie you thought about with friends, except look it was actually completed.  On thinking about this, it's sort of brilliant that the film avoided anything resembling innovation: it would have destroyed the illusion that we're seeing our subconscious nerd scenarios come forth and play on the computer screen.

This might sound like damning praise, but consider the state of modern science fiction films.  While there's occasionally gems like Moon, generally we get either brainless action films that think they have something to say, or hifalutin REALLY MAKES YOU THINK DONTIT shit done by people who read Ender's Game and think that plot movement is a luxury.  Hunter Prey just aims to tell a story, and fuck it, that's what it does (pretty well).

The plot, in keeping with the nerdishment (get it bros), is basically a collection of sci-fi conventions just different enough that your mind feels clever for recognizing what the director is ripping off without being totally put off by the concepts.  We start off with three space ranger dudes dressed in "totally not clone troopers" gear chasing after a prisoner who crashed their ship and they have to get back by the time rescue arrives because he has the ability to blow up their world!  Yeah.  Thankfully, in keeping with how Dead End went, this plotline resolves itself in about 30 minutes with a twist that you'll probably see coming if you watched a given minute of the film beforehand.

Again, let's give some credit.  The director clearly saw that the target audience would figure out what was going on almost immediately, so he just shrugs his shoulders, gives some action shots, then proceeds to the twist.  Let's compare this to fucking Salvation, which despite having a perhaps even more obvious twist, keeps going and going under the presumption that no one is going to figure out that the convict guy who signed his body to Cyberdyne and then wakes up fifteen years into the machine wars without knowing what is happening is actually a cyborg.  And when it's finally revealed, all the characters are like NO WAY and we get like twenty more minutes of Christian Bale altering the script and argggh this fucking movie.  Hunter Prey gives the surprise, and then just moves onto the rest of the film.  What a nice movie!

Everything about the film, visually wise, is pretty much fun.  You know the movie was filmed in Mexico or something like that, but the scenery is still great, and while there is cgi twin suns and dumb shit like that, it's not obnoxious HAY LOOK ITS AN ALIEN WORLD OOOOO type of thing.  You probably know what I mean, right?  Props are silly (behold the alien computer that is connected by a headphone jack), but the film doesn't spend much time with obnoxious technobabble.  Which is probably for the best, as the aforementioned computer is one of the two bad things about the film.  You see, the computer was pretty clearly ripped off of Cortana, the purple AI lady from Halo that got progressively sluttier as the series progressed.  While there's no sexy holograms here, there's the same weird romantic tension between one of the space rangers and the computer, and it's really hard to tell if we're supposed to just be laughing at a guy being attached to his Vista OS or if it's really intended to be some sort of clever flirting but really just some awkward PUA disaster.

What's the other bad thing?  ENDING.  Without spoiling, after the initial twist, we get roughly 40 minutes of really fun interplay between the two opposing sides, some nice action sequences, conversations that aren't embarrassing, just a nice little sci-fi romp.  Then we get to the final scenes, lots of twists, and while straining credibility, one is still willing to play along.  But then we get to the final pivotal action.  Initially, you think it makes sense, but thinking back, you realize it runs completely contrary to everything forever.

IN SPOILER:  For those that have scene the film, you probably get that I'm talking about the fact that Blue Guy didn't shoot the human, and then just lets the human get the coordinates of the alien planet because uh.  I can sort of get the second thing, as it leaves a sequel open and while it seems kind of insane to give the coordinates, there's probably yet another twist in the wings.  But the first?  No, man.  The human asked why he didn't shoot, and he says "because you didn't" or something like that.  But the problem with that is that it's clearly established that the human didn't shoot the last guy because he needed some way to get the computer or otherwise he wouldn't find the coordinates.  Blue Guy clearly knew this from his talks with Not Cortana, and yet just lets him go.  What.


Ultimately, in a world where there are people defending Terminator Salavation, there's a real need for good, fun science fiction that isn't taking itself hell of seriously.  Hunter Prey, as mentioned above, is a good movie, fanservice for nerds without making one feel like a total creep.

Sunday, March 27, 2011

a briefish defense of John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness


A HERO: ah, okay
I'll do an impassioned defense of prince of darkness as recompense
A FOOL: :p
why are you doing it, again?

THE HERO: what doo you mean
MINDLESS: who are you defending PoD from?

EZEKIEL: the haters
guess you don't understand internet

The more I think about it, the more I think that Prince of Darkness, Carpenter's sullen middle child in the Apocalypse Trilogy, is my favorite Carpenter film.  This isn't some underhanded complement of Carpenter's other films, but rather the extent to which I fucking love Prince of Darkness.  Unfortunately, most tiresome horror nerds will blather about whether Halloween or The Thing is the best, and consign Prince of Darkness to "yeah it was pretty silly" and depending on whether we're dealing with hipster horror nerds or not, someone will point out that DJ Shadow argh fuck all of you.

I'm going to go on record here.  I believe that, especially with Carpenter slowly oozing back into cinema (I am literally too scared to see his newest films, especially with the vague hope that his "Masters of Horror" run means NO MORE CHILDREN OF THE DAMNED EVER FUCKING AGAIN), there will be a critical reevaluation of Prince of Darkness.  The basic critical line on the film goes from viewing it positively as a wacky, silly, occasionally scary spookfest and negatively as a too wacky mess with a boring cast.

Generally, I've seen people express the "plot is too goofy" argument by restating the plot in a tone typically reserved for eye-rolling college professors talking about science fiction.  "Oh, so there's a big green vat of liquid, and that's the ultimate evil, and it possesses people by pouring green stuff in their mouth.  Riiiiight."  It's sort of the offensive version of when writers try to explain their story outline to you and stop out of embarrassment.  STOP THE PRESSES, WEIRD IDEAS SOUND PRETTY STUPID WHEN OUT OF THEIR ELEMENT.  Sure, the Possession by Ecto Cooler is silly no matter how you look at it, but it's also not entirely out of place in this sort of movie, which attempts to conflate absurd concepts with a genuine sense of dread.

"From Job's friends insisting that the good are rewarded and the wicked punished, to the scientists of the 1930's proving to their horror the theorem that not everything can be proved, we've sought to impose order on the universe. But we've discovered something very surprising: while order DOES exist in the universe, it is not at all what we had in mind!" 

Generally, when horror movies attempt to introduce intellectual concepts in their film, they have to dress it up in the most obvious clothes possible to make it clear that HEY THIS SCARY IS SUPPOSED TO BE SMART.  There's nothing smarter in Cemetery Man than in Prince of Darkness, but because the former makes it very clear that its an arthouse film, and the latter masquerades itself in genre conventions, idiot critics who are more interested in fellating Fellini miss the point.  Putting it another way, alot of people attack Prince of Darkness because the weird things aren't weird enough to register as truly thematic.  But if the film went for the truly grotesque, it would undermine the movie's tone, of ordinary becoming something still within intellectual grasp, but ultimately horrible.  The scares: worms, homeless people, late 80s word processors, none really changed, but far more dangerous than before, especially if you pull back the curtain and see what's controlling all of it.

Of course, before this ordinary but unimaginable horror, we have ordinary and unimaginative characters.  Critics have attacked the characters as uninteresting and clunky, but I'd argue that this was at least a subconscious decision by Carpenter.  The film is not operating in a "Good vs Evil" basis, or even a "Fodder and Protagonist(s) vs Evil," but "Evil vs. People Unequipped For This Shit."  Both the rational scientists and faithful priest are completely helpless before what they're facing precisely because of its closeness to normal things.  The irony of the film is that the characters would have had more success versus hellhounds and beholders than some homeless people and a laughing black guy, and that's what makes the movie work.  The closest they come to understanding is when they're asleep, and the more rational they attempt to approach their situation, the worse things get.  The tepid opening scenes of laughable romance show how completely unprepared the main characters are for anything approaching substance, and the only time anyone approaches doing something right is when they just go "fuck it" and let emotions take over.  Of course, the ending suggests that emotions could possibly fuck everything up anyway, so who knows.

I guess all I'm saying is that Prince of Darkness scares me because it's not about killer supernatural squids or guys with big knives, but that the slightest shift of reality can send the ordinary into a ludicrous terror engine that we are not going to be able to deal with.

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Nightmare Alley (2010)

I think one reason I really like anthology horror is that it's generally harder to screw up than your typical horror feature.  It's like a short story: all you have to do is introduce your characters, do some buildup, then get to the scares and/or gore and move on to another three-hit combo.  All the basics are laid out to you, just watched Creepshow or either of the Trilogy of Terror films and move on from there.  Of course, the ease one can film anthology horror really heightens my bad reaction when I see a bad example of the sub-genre.

Enter NIGHTMARE ALLEY.  The first worrisome sign is the fact that the film boasts seven scary tales, but it only seventy minutes.  Okay, I think.  It's a little on the short side, but that means more gore and doom per minute, right?  So here's the opening story, which I'm going to describe in detail for some important reasons.

We start with some homeless guy walking in a longcoat that kind of reminds me of The Hitchhiker, which is the last pleasant thought I'm going to have for the rest of the film.  We then cut to two punks (?, see picture below) discussing crazy stuff like moshpits and faggots and how they love to beat up everyone and fuck pussy also faggots suck maaaan.



Then the homeless guy appears next to them and offers them the newest issue of NIGHTMARE ALLEY in exchange for a cigarette.  The punk kids then proceed to denigrate butt rock some more, which for some reason enrages the homeless guy to the point that he pushes one of the kids to a wall and knifes him then pees on the corpse and I begin to really regret watching this on a lark.



The other punk guy, who ran, hides by a garbage dumpster, then proceeds to read the new issue of NIGHTMARE ALLEY.  We see that NIGHTMARE ALLEY is apparently one of those awful 90s indie comics that were drawn with color pencils and a severe lack of talent, and that it shows the punk READING THE COMIC AND THEN GETTING HIS HEAD CUT OFF and guess what happens next.

(also, note that the guy actually says "holy shit" as opposed to "huh," which really harms the presaging legitimacy of this comic)

You may be thinking: "wow, that was pretty dumb, but it's an opening story and I'm sure they get better."  Here's the thing: they don't.  The three-minute film about a killer bum and an evil comic book is easily the best thing this film had to offer.  The reason for this is pretty simple.  For a film where the stories are on average only ten minutes long, they somehow take forever for something to happen, and when it does happen, it's predictable and dumb.  Each story is introduced by a pale-faced guy in a top hat that I'm guessing is supposed to harken back to the Cryptkeeper, but the former's monologues are more along the line of "boy, that really sucked for that guy, our next story is about a guy who's about to have his life really suck."



Every story on here is basically the same awful garbage.  Sure, the plots are slightly different, but they all feature the hallmarks of terrible indie horror:

RPG dialogue:  By this, I mean that every line sounds less like it came out of a real human's mouth, and would be more at home in some 16-bit rpg's blue dialogue box scrolling across the screen.  It's got that stilted, poorly executed diction that is probably an equal result between the screenwriter being hopelessly incompetent and the actors either being too scared to adlib or having the worst improv skills imaginable.

All my friends are actors now:  Granted, this isn't always a bad thing, but it sure as hell is an issue for NIGHTMARE ALLEY, as every person in the film is either a fat, unappealing male or a fat, unappealing girls who want to look like Bettie Paige.  There is exactly one person in the film who isn't either horribly nervous or trying to get over their nervousness by yell-acting.

Nothing going Nowhere:  As I mentioned above, despite each story being around ten minutes, it's amazing how NIGHTMARE ALLEY manages to fuck up pacing so bad.  For fuck's sake, a majority of the stories have filler scenes, such as "guy talking to his cop buddy about nothing relevant whatsoever " or "girl fiddling with silverware for thirty seconds," "other guy walking through dollar general," and of course an endless plethora of cars going out of driveways, down roads, and then back to the same driveway.  On the other end, when you finally get to the scares, they're just as underwhelming.  I'm not saying that scares need to be some big budget feast, but if your story's climax is beyond the reach of your cash reserves, one either needs to rewrite the story or find an entertaining way to suggest things.  For example, say the climax to your "cowboy zombie" story involves zombies entering a town and devouring it, but you didn't get the permit to do the scene in time!  Some filmmakers would find intelligent ways to get the idea across that didn't scream WE'RE BROKE, such as merely showing the zombies approaching the town, or showing a spooky aftermath.  But NIGHTMARE ALLEY is beyond such pitiful conventional theories, and just pans across the skyline of some tourist ghost town while dubbing in burning noises and screams.  

Some internet reviewers have tried to defend the film under the premise of the fact that it's not taking itself seriously and uh the director clearly likes horror movies so leave it alone bro.  And really, it's not fun kicking around a production that never had a chance to begin with.  On the other hand, this was the first thing that came up when I looked for reviews on the movie, so I don't even know anymore what I'm dealing with.  I guess it's nice that the director is having fun with this sort of shit, and I would have enjoyed it more drunk out of my mind watching it with friends, but that's also the case with 12 Oz Mouse.  Is that what you want, NIGHTMARE ALLEY?  To be on the same level as 12 Oz. Mouse?

Actually, you probably shouldn't answer that question.

Saturday, February 26, 2011

The Social Network

This really, really wasn't a movie for me.  The target audience is basically your middle-tier Facebook user, the one that doesn't post a million terrible status updates but still joins mawkish "I DUN CARE ABOUT WHAT YOUR BABY DID" groups, laughs at people playing Farmville but coo when they get gifts or receive 50 birthday wishes.*  It did seem pretty disinterested in paying attention to old-guard internet lamers like me, what with people referring to blogging when there was only terrible shit like Livejournal, or treating Livejournal like some sort of proto twitter.  It's dumb to bitch about stuff like that, and hell, maybe the screenwriter was trying to make some secret point about how technology really doesn't change our social habits no matter how many oh-point-ohs we stumble into.  All I know is that it threw me out of the movie.  But then, the movie didn't seem to be interested in helping me deal with the incongruity, instead treating those mid-2000s like a slightly lamer present day.  The Social Network is the first movie that really stuck into my age.  The only real silver lining to that point is that this movie is going to be The Net level dated.

While hearing "Friendster" just irritated me, what ultimately led to my disliking this movie more than Inception (MICRO REVIEW: Like every other Nolan film, fun action sequences supporting d33p plotlines designed to encourage the most ephemeral thinking possible) was Fincher's hellbent desire to have his film both ways, as your stereotypical genre film and some great thinking man's drama. 

Most of the movie is in the former mode, though including lots of rapid cuts and narrative barrel rolls so you don't get confused and hesitate about discussing the DEEP ASPECTS of the film.  Don't be deceived by those cool camera angles and smooth dialogue, The Social Network doesn't really want you to consider the sides of the drama.  All the cinematic tricks are ultimately just long shadows on the 2-D characteristics: ZUCKERBURG TORTURED GENIUS, TWINS ENTITLED JERKS, JEW NAMED EDWARDO MORAL CENTER OF FILM, NSYNC LITERALLY GROWING DEVIL HORNS AND DEVIL BONER.  The entire film is just Fincher putting some late 90's AI programs into a chat room, recording the log, then having a rewriting staff render the material presentable to a generation that allows Ke$ha to live because of irony.

Then, after roughly 115 minutes of biopic brouhaha, we get the big reveal from a blandly attractive two-year legal associate, exactly the sort of demographic that Fincher expects will understand the brilliant subtext of things and who eats these important films with relish of the gods: blah blah guess what guys it's all actually really complicated like a creation myth the digital age redemption.  It's brilliantly retarded, in a way, like if the final scene from Citizen Kane was replaced with Welles' fat older self telling the audience that he has to return to his home planet.  Of course, it's also the ultimate intellectual copout, santa claus winking when the kids realize he's actually real, I thought those archetypes were the extent of the human experience but I guess there's more to this story after all OF COURSE THERE IS YOU STUPID FUCK

*: you might wonder what the upper tier of facebooks users are.  the answer is

Monday, December 27, 2010

Grace (2009)

Well, it took a decade, but I've finally found a horror movie with a worse climatic breakdown than American Werewolf in London!

Okay, let's back up.  As I've noted waaaaaay before, I have a love for movies about the evil children, so I've been looking forward to Grace for some time.  The trailer was creepy as shit, there was tons of buzz at the festivals, and look at that fucking poster!  I had waited to watch this movie with my mom, as she's a OB/RN and breastfeeding consultant, so I also got the inside scoop on what this movie got right.  (fun fact:  despite what is said near the end of the film, olden time breastpumps made out of brass and glass do not work as well as a modern Medela electric!)






(minor spoilers ahead in this paragraph)  Grace involves a pregnant, vegan lady who decides to get a delivery via weird New Age midwife (who is, unusually, also a doctor from Columbia).  Unfortunately, things rapidly go wrong, as she and her husband are in an accident that kills the latter.  It seems clear that the baby is also dead, but the wife decides to continue waiting a few weeks for a delivery to occur, and glory be, the babby is alive.   Except not really.  Oh yeah, and it also doesn't really like milk.  Can you, intelligent reader, determine what is going to happen?  Hint:  there's also a subplot about the dead husband's mother and her doctor meddling around.

There's alot that works really well.  Jordan Ladd nails the weird mix of grief, postpartum depression, and blinding exhilaration over the miracle birth.  Most of the artsy shots aren't too awful, especially the gradual degeneration of the marital home and flypaper surrounding the crib, though by the third shot of the mother doing something while the television played some slaughterhouse documentary, I felt a little ridiculous.  Up until the final sequence of events, the movie manages to juggle the various subplots, all basically dealing with how crazy bitches are, fairly well.  I was also pleased that (minor spoilers I guess) the aforementioned "Grace" isn't some evil demon baby, but instead the movie draws its horror from the extremes of the parent/child relationship.

And there's the effects.  One gets the impression that the director saw Dead Ringers about a gazillion times, as while the gore is gross, it's gross neither in the lurid cartoony 80's slasher way nor the emotionally manipulative torture horror way, but in the "oh god this is boring right into the lizard center of my brain" way.  All is very unsettling and uncanny as the best domestic horror pictures seem to do, and right to the end I was pretty much pumping my fist at the movie as it slowly rounded the track, never letting up until holy shit what the fuck happened.

Grace was originally a short film, and it really explains the utter abortion (hurr) of the ending.  Everything about the movie, in retrospect, shows a great idea that could only be sustained until it came time to close the whole thing up.  Then, the movie suddenly warps from a creepy study of motherly instincts to a tone of wackiness more at home in a classic Texas Chainsaw Massacre sequel.  I get the unfortunate feeling that the filmmaker recognized the dissonance of tone, and inserted in there as some easy attempt to broadcast a message about something, but FUCK THAT. 

Gasland (2010) v. Winter's Bone (2010)

Indie films love to portray poor white people.  They allow us, the privileged audience, to get equal parts pity and superiority at those people who would smoke meth and still make jokes about the Wii into 2011.  Generally, the strokes are broad and stereotypcal, a pastiche of the butt-raping mutants from Deliverance with maybe some idiot god character like the guy from Sling Blade.  It's easy to write, and you don't have to worry about offending actual hicks, since even they can laugh at the gross parody of their lives, and even if there's some uncomfortable truth, they're used to/levelheaded enough not to worry about how a movie that no one important is going to watch represents them.

Gasland, a documentary about the effects of natural gas mining in rural America, and Winter's Bone, a sort of film noir set in the backwoods Ozarks, present two diversions from the usual portrayal.  Gasland does its damnedest to show its subjects as JUST ORDINARY PEOPLE and fails pretty miserably, but Winter's Bone, in being willing to show the actual ugliness of those people were know crouch in rural lands, but don't like to think about, humanizes them incredibly well.

To be fair, I think people should watch Gasland.  I have trouble believing the full extent of the film's thesis that natural gas drilling is probably about to kill America, but the truth is probably far closer to that end of the spectrum than the gas company's bordering on parody advertisements implying that natural gas is SO FUCKING GOOD LOOK AT THE JOBS AND HELPING ENVIRONMENT.  Having the family home on the Fayetteville Shale means we've been assaulted by print and television ads by Chesapeake Energy for years, and it's pretty depressing how most neighbors literally had no trouble believing that gas drilling would have no ramifications.  I'd be lying if I wasn't amused by the fact that the same racist WHITE MAN IS THE SMARTEST GENETIC KING subsection of people are basically modern Indians staring gap-mouthed at shiny baubles courtesy of our energy kings.

While I enjoyed the message of Gasland, especially since it's so far the only film actually looking at what's a fairly important environmental problem (while at the same time we're probably at our twentieth documentary about Wal-Mart good job there you stupid fucks), there are some significant problems, and they can all be traced to this guy:

Meet Josh Fox, the writer/director/host of the film.  The initial problem is right at the start of the film, where he tries to portray himself as some sort of man of the country, giving a backstory about being born to hippie parents who built some magical house in the New York/Pennsylvania countryside.  The impetus for the film, he claims, is that the gas companies offered Josh a huge amount for leasing the mineral rights on this home (for those unversed in gas, essentially the rights to drill in your land).  Although the film never says he lives in the house, there's enough shots of him walking through the HALLOWED HALLS to imply this is the case.  Of course, a quick google reveals that Josh actually lives in NYC as the manager of some theater

Of course, there's nothing really wrong with that.  I'm smart enough to know that documentaries manipulate the audience's emotion through subtle background changes as much as any film.  What is the problem is that this discrepancy is merely the start of Josh Fox doing his fucking best to convince us that he has some sort of connection to the rural instead of being some PoMo, Franzen reading dickurbanite.  Josh, on the behalf of someone who has lived in rural Arkansas for almost all of his life, let me state that while you may fool your fellow cityfolk, you are not fooling anyone who regularly passes by overgrown yards with five or more broken down cars in front.  In addition to being at one with the Earth and guys unironically wearing cowboy hats, he also does a fair share of wacky documentary filmmaking shots designed to tickle critics' bellies.  You could probably have a drinking game/suicide pact based on taking a shot every time Fox shows some scene of environmental devastation mixed in with some calming, incongruous music track.

What bothered me more about the film is that general lack of interest in studying the science of things, and more in sensationalizing the problem.  Literally the first two-third of the film are just Fox traveling to different people's houses, where they show him wellwater that is killing livestock or tap water that can be set on fire.  It's striking stuff, but it goes on far longer than it needs to and doesn't really explain the at-large problems of gas drilling.  And while this is the first large-scale film about the problem, it's not like there haven't been studies done about gas drilling, but the interviews Fox has with professionals rarely seem to disseminate any useful information.  I guess we didn't really need you to continue that interview with the college scientist from San Antonio about how emissions from natural gas are worse than automobile emissions in the same area, Mr. Fox.  I understand things had to be cut so you could show a scene where you play a banjo in front of a holding tank while wearing a gas mask.  Priorities.

The movie really hits bottom when he tries to deal with people aligned with the gas interests.  He's literally ignored by the actual companies.  In one interview, the person eventually shrugs and leaves when Fox tries to push his luck and get to the tough questions.  When he actually does get to spar with someone (the head of some western state's environment agency), Fox seems utterly blindsided by the interviewee's doublespeak.  Every question leaves giant holes that the politician gleefully flies through.  Eventually, in a pretty facile attempt to imitate Moore, Fox holds out a bottle of contaminated well water and goes WILL YOU DRINK THIS THE GAS COMPANIES SAID IT WAS SAFE TO DRINK, to which the interviewee metaphorically pats Fox on the head and sends him back to his seat.  Shortly after this the movie ends with some New York state politicians asking genuinely tough and difficult questions to gas interests, which makes me wonder if Fox actually thought his own interview went well enough that he could compare it to the ending.

Let me repeat: you should watch Gasland.  Even if you already know that fracking is a dangerous game, it's still worth watching just to see the interplay between the hipster and the rural man.  The rural people featured plainly recognize Fox's origins, and play the same game with him as any group of economically challenged people do when dealing with a wealthy or influential stranger who believe that he/she is the only one that's able to help them.  That's not to imply that any of the people in the film are exactly lying about their problems, but as someone who's spent alot of time in legal aid work, the worst attitude to give to disadvantaged people, and the one John Fox portrays, is the guileless "I'm helping these simple people because  no one else can save them from their plight."  It insults them in the presupposition that they're helpless, and there is no group more manipulative than those you presume  to be powerless.  You can almost hear the snickering when mystery families call Fox on his walkie talkies for  super sekrit midnight meetings.  Fox portrays his subjects as just good country people, and in reducing them to two-dimensional martyrs, ironically damages the power of his film.


Compare this to Winter's Bone, which is essentially Ozark Noir.  Winter's Bone tells the story of a 17-year-old girl who is in charge of two younger siblings, a helplessly addled mother, and a living situation rapidly turning towards destitute.  The girl finds that her father has skipped on his bail for meth production, and that what was used to pay off the bail was the family's property.  What follows, like any other good noir, is a gradual journey of partial, though not total, discovery and an assorted cast of disreputable characters.

Like most of my positive reviews, it's hard to say much stuff about it, especially as it has been reviewed on the same positive points by much better critics.  There were some negative reviews on rottentomatoes, largely focused on the dual tones that it was somehow exploitative against poor rural people (I'm assuming these are the same people that got huge boners for when Fox went to shots of some rancher staring into the distance of his sad natural gas habitat), and that it was just grim for grimness's sake.  This is kind of a surprising accusation, since considering the subject matter, the movie is actually fairly restrained in how it handles the various aspects of backwoods ugliness.

If I have any real problems with the movie, it's that the movie slightly bungles the method to which it handles the increasing revelations.  Without spoiling anything, the second half of the movies features just one too many scenes where the heroine learns things by people just visiting her and showing her what's going on.  While noirs are supposed to have an aspect of events being beyond the protagonist's controls, it's a little off-putting when the reveals are literally just a series of facts placed in our lap.  Granted, the heroine investigated in the first half in the movie, and there's a decent explanation for the change of tone, but it's still slightly annoying.  To spoil from The Third Man, it would be as if the hero just spent the second half of the film sitting at a police station and at the end was told "oh hey we found Cotton in a sewer and shot him you can go now" CREDITS.

But don't let my stupid complaint stop you.  Winter's Bone is seriously fucking excellent, and as noted above, really seems to understand the mindset of its subjects and the desolately beautiful setting that everyone is trapped in.  I tried watching The Road with my mom a few days later, and just gave up halfway through to catch the last movie in Lifetime's Perfect Sunday Marathon (a literal series of movies about crazy clingy bitches going after perfect males) as all the ridiculous overt emotional manipulation that that film attempted was just worsened by remembering how genuinely affected I was by the end of Winter's Bone, and how that movie didn't have to show people crying or STARIN' HARD every five minutes to remind me I'm a human being.

(seriously, I'm not going to review The Road because I couldn't finish it, but I'm not sure if I hated it because I didn't like the book but I thought I didn't like the book because of the stupid writing style not the subject matter but now I just don't know because the biggest emotion I felt during the film was worry that this was directed by the Coen Brothers but whew it was just a crappy rip-off of their style)