"Resident Evil: Afterlife"

Catch it before it wanders off the front page, my review of Resident Evil: Afterlife is live over at Twitch. It's about what you would expect given the limited narrative aspirations of the series, as Glenn Kenny so astutely observes, they're "the most subtext-free of any zombie movies."

It's perhaps this that keeps me coming back to the first and third movies: they're uniquely a collection of moments, sometimes interlinked, other times not, that feel like a free-flow blast of whiz-pow scenes that verge of being describes as non sequiturs. More than anything else I feel attracted to the empty calories the one might be into Mallomars or White Castle burgers. In moderation, it's not too bad for you and for a moment they provide a respite from complexity. Resident Evil as a film franchise isn't over-burdened by any particularly weighty thoughts, save to maintain fidelity to the long-running game series and present a few over-the-top action set pieces that, for my tastes, peaked at the laser grid in the first entry.  





The third film in the series, Extinction admirably recreates this sequence as one of a series of traps for one of the infinite Alices revealed at during the opening of that film. It's a shame Afterlife does away with this plot point early on in its running time (the Resident Evil films: where the important plot bits bookend the actual meat and potatoes of the movie).  

I just made the connection that this being the 4th movie in the franchise it's directly cribbing from the 4th movie in the game series (at least 4th chronologically with regards to the canon), which also took a wild left turn away from the conventions of the previous entries in the franchise. The games scaled back their reliance on the Umbrella Corporation as the prime villains, changed the setting, the flow of the action, and even did away with zombies as the primary enemies (the Ganados of 4 and 5 are mind-controlled humans).

The Losers, Cop Out, and the Value of Good B-Movie

...that's not to say either of these deservedly unsuccessful recent Warner releases fit in that category so close to my heart: the "good B-movie." With the release of Machete this week and the continued success of The Expendables, it felt like as good a time as any to think about what makes a good B-movie and what makes something like The Losers or Cop Out happen to the viewer. The failure of the latter examples stems from, I'm afraid a lack of commitment somewhere down the line to being a B-movie.

In the case of the Losers, it seemed that at some point up the pipe someone decided that a story about a bunch of hardened soldiers out for revenge against the conspirators that ruined their lives needed to be a PG-13 affair. Not so much. If anything, The Losers could have stood to have been a bit more ruthless, pulpy, and downright nasty. Instead, what came to the screen felt scrubbed and sanitized. Not to get too far into comparing source material and adaptation but it felt like all the juice (for lack of a better term) had been drained in the translation. Gone was the nervy paranoia of the Vertigo series by Andy Diggle and Jock as well as the harder edge of the characters. Gone was the nearly silent femme fatale Aisha, only to be replaced by the chatty film counterpart.

I have no objection to talk - it's why I thought I'd give the pretty-much hated Cop Out a chance. I hoped that Smith, who gives good talk in his movies, would deliver the goods in a buddy cop comedy that was a nice homage to the Lethal Weapons of yesteryear. Smith, and really everyone involved, feels under committed here. There's not a single laugh to be had and the action is - well, it'd be kind to call it lackluster. It all seems to be built on familiarity and perhaps the assumption that seeing Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan interacting will be enough to generate comedy cold. Or something, I don't really know what anyone was thinking with this mess. It's pretty terrible and on second thought I'm not sure what I was thinking checking this one out. Maybe it was the choice of a KRS-One cut for the trailer.




Respect to KRS-One. 
 
With that in mind I thought I'd share some virtues I'd love B-movies to adhere to: 

Don't be ashamed of being shameless. Big emotions, lots of violence, and sex should be judiciously applied, where appropriate. And if aren't ashamed of being shameless...

When looking at some of Cronenberg's early work, or Cameron's*, or even all the way back to Val Lewton, you'll find that none of them were afraid to go big with the elements of their stories. 

Make sure all that emotion, sex, and violence counts. 

The best second-tier entertainments are always about the payoff. Cronenberg, Cameron, and Lewton's movies typically have a hell of a payoff.


Don't be afraid to screw around with your genre. 

I LOVE twists and turns in genre flicks and outright mashups precisely because they bring something unexpected to the table.  


Actually know your genre. REALLY know it.

It's something I'm trying to do with my own writing: increase the breadth and depth of my film knowledge so that when I have something to say about genre it's coming from an informed place. 

*I'd argue that Cameron remains a b-movie director who just happens to excel getting the budgets for his visions. For all the pomp and seriousness of films like Avatar and Titanic they still feel like

Scott Pilgrim vs. Me

For your pleasure, I've articulated my thoughts about Edgar Wright's latest over on my Shot for Shot column at Comics Bulletin.By the way, I actually had the chance to interview the comic series writer, Bryan Lee O'Malley a little while back and he had some interesting things to say about the books.

As such things tend to go, it's not my final word on the subject. I took in a second showing on Sunday just to give the movie another shake, and maybe let the richness of the experience take over. Unfortunately, I think I came away with more problems than pluses the second time around:

• The problem of "compression" I noted in the review feels even more present the second time. In a lot of ways it feels like a hurried race to the finish: get as many plot points and fan service from the books in before the final scene. 
• Brie Larson's Envy Adams just doesn't do it for me. While I think the film is populated with good to excellent performances (Kieran Culkin being the top of the heap) Larson's vamping is cranked up to an unbearable "11." When she reads her lines into the phone in her first scene I was cringing, I couldn't take it. 
• Am I the only one to notice that ex #4, Roxy Richter never gets named in the film? Or did I miss it at some point? 
• Speaking of, Mae Whitman has a lot of fun with the Roxy role but at some point it seems like someone told her to drop or scale back the Southern accent for her fight scene.
• Occasionally (just once in a while, mind you) I was bugged by some of the incidental game-related sound effects that were unattached to any kind of visual cue. That is to say, occasionally there'd be a brief 8-bit beep or chirp accompanying something like walking or whatever and it caused me to look around for the jerk in the audience with the cell phone.
• I would very much like to buy the soundtrack and score, but both are only available (in MP3 form, I mean) via iTunes are exorbitant rates (something like $16 a pop). 
• Back to Larson, her performance notwithstanding, her stage presence during the Clash at Demonhead concert scene is pretty great, and it helps that she's accompanied by the strongest track in the movie.

Backlash, Thy Name is M. Night Shyamalan

...Or at least, that's my impression after observing the audience reactions to the trailer for Devil, the new M. Night Shyamalan-produced thriller directed by [REC] re-makers John Erick Dowdle and Drew Dowdle. The trailer played before both Inception and Scott Pilgrim and in both cases audiences were kind of rolling with it until Night’s name popped up on the screen and that’s when the laughter started. From there, audience members in one screening started shouting out potential twists for the movie or generally tuning out and chatting with their friends.

Now, both audiences were college-age crowds in a college town. Still, this is kind of a big deal for the master filmmaker’s cachet at this point and if this isn’t the actual death knell for his reputation it’s at least on life support. And it’s unfortunate, because Devil doesn’t look half-bad in a kind of Red Eye/Joy Ride sort of way. It feels like one of those lean little thrillers that has a couple of good surprises you’ll talk about with your friends after the fact that should be a solid, medium-tier performer when it drops in September.

But with Shyamalan’s name attached that doesn’t appear to be in the cards anymore. His reputation has become toxic, and the idea of sitting through one of his films has (for me at least) little to no appeal. I just don’t want to deal with his formulaic upending of formula, if you know what I mean. The prospect of yet another self-serious movie where the plot is stifled out of the characters like some kind of horror-movie version of Crash makes me want to run screaming out of the theater.

And again, this is kind of a crap reaction to have to the movie since for all intents and purposes Shyamalan is simply the producer on the damned thing. Hopefully for the brothers Dowdle, the trailer will be recut before the movie’s release (and in advance of any television spots) to minimize or maybe even omit the Shyamalan connection.

My Thoughts on Inception and Level Design is on Conducive Chronicle

Wherein I talk a bit about a little movie you may have heard of and how a certain multibillion dollar industry still doesn't get no respect. You know what to do if you want to read it.

Besides being fairly happy with this piece I'm also reminded that I need to check out Inception once more before the local theater takes it off of the prime screens. Say what you will, the movie demands scrutiny. As a critic and a fan of whirling things I think I owe it another chance to get its hooks into me.

There's a piece on criticism coming out of all of this - I just can't quite articulate it yet to my satisfaction. It'll come to me, I'm sure.

On Girls Playing With Fire and Frank Castle

Over at Twitch, I've got a review up of the plot-heavy and character-light The Girl Who Played With Fire, the second in Stieg Larsson's Milennium series of films.  Go over there and read that, if you'd please.

I wanted to harp on one point that I brought up in my review that's stuck with me since seeing the movie recently and that's the mostly useless, practically forgotten outrage found in the film, specifically with regard to sexual violence committed against women. It's one thing the be a show like Law and Order: SVU whose whole point is shock-outrage-drama, but it's another entirely to be about a bunch of social activists with left-leaning politics whose whole thing should be, you know, fighting the system and representing the poor, abused, and underrepresented.

Instead, it takes the wrathful violence tact via Noomi Rapace's Lisbeth Salandar, the script contriving to get abusers in her hands for the purposes of righteous vengeance, which, if anything, makes her Frank Castle in Garth Ennis's brilliant Slavers arc, but stripped bare of the latter's outsize, mad dimensions.  That is to say, he's a monster - one with a need to inflict punishment based on trauma, stripped of his emotions due to a lonely, nomadic existence. The difference between Lisbeth and Frank is that Lisbeth is just getting started while Castle has been at it for decades and the paint's starting to peel.

The Slavers pits Frank against a gang of Eastern European sex traffickers whose simple, direct, and particularly ruthless brand of sex slavery have created something like a factory system for breaking and controlling girls. Likewise, The Girl Who Played With Fire has Lisbeth tangentially dealing with those involved in sex trafficking (from the demand side) but here's the difference: Ennis's Punisher arc deals with a monster in the world of men while Lisbeth exists largely in a vacuum. Like Castle, she's largely a monster, a would-be torturer and killer, but it almost seems like the story doesn't care.

Perhaps in the books there's some kind of profound realization that this girl is fucked up - more than just her day-to-day fucked up - but I wouldn't know having not read them. On the screen though it feels like cheap, right-wing thanatos at odds with the left-wing rabble rousing within which the story seems to be set. Lisbeth's acts against her tormentors and the tormentors of others would maybe carry a bit more heft and not have the stink of cheap catharsis if the world she occupied wasn't so broadly written, with a nearly endless parade of male sexual victimizers, womanizers, and assholes. Ennis, by contrast, places his character in more or less the "real" world: we see a social worker who's horrified by Frank's methods even if the results save lives, and a couple of cops trying to play things at the middle, at least one trying to get something out of his involvement with a serial killer of criminals. Ennis uses a finer brush and as a result the picture has more detail. Sure the people Frank kills aren't worth living, but what Frank does to them is typically horrific.

I never get that with Lisbeth - it's all cool surfaces and tough schtick and it gets really boring really fast.

Tucker Stone does a brilliant breakdown of the most powerful and oft-repeated moment from that arc, and I'm not sure I could do it equal justice.

Devil In the White City and Why I Haven't Reviewed Inception

So one of my all-time favorite novels, Devil In the White City, is available via Google Books. For those of you who haven't read it, I'd encourage you to do so.

Larson's brilliantly-crafted historical novel about the Chicago's World Fair and its unfortunate coincidence with the murders of serial killer/con man H.H. Holmes uses the conceit that nearly every word of dialog in the book is known to have been spoken by the historical figures to which they were attributed via correspondence and interviews. It's such a clean and clear way of maintaining verisimilitude, and it was surely and exhausting process for the writer, who is of course no stranger to historical fiction with his Isaac's Storm and Thunderstruck dealing with life and other calamities for different sets of real-life figures of the 20th century. Actually, thinking about his depictions of real-life architects Daniel Burnham and Fredrick Law Olmstead has generated another piece - this one about game design with regards to Christopher Nolan's Inception - it should be live presently on Conducive Chronicle.

This sideways approach to the film instead of an actual review has a great deal to do with my lingering uncertainty about it - I just haven't decided if I like the damned thing or not and it bears revisiting sometime in the near future. I had a similar reaction last year to Inglourious Basterds which was finally resolved through a second viewing - like Roger Ebert I couldn't decide if I was seeing one of the best movies of 2009 or one of the worst (I ended up wholeheartedly in the latter camp, all things said and done). At the same time, my feelings about Inception are complicated somewhat not only by the admittedly dense experience of seeing the film but because I've read so much about the damned thing in the weeks preceding and following its release.

In fact, it's caused me to revisit how I'll be dealing with coverage of movies which I'm anticipating in the future, specifically with regard to reviews and even more pointedly when I plan to write one of my own. While it can be argued that the rich discussions of film before and after their release generate more interesting conversations and appreciation of movies, it also has the unfortunate consequence of coloring the experience beforehand. How much less would I have appreciated Inception if I had not read positive reviews from Devin Farci and Roger Ebert or alternatively, how resistant would I have been to it if I'd read David Edelstein or A.O. Scott's skeptical take-downs? All I can say is those reviews, read (foolishly) prior to seeing the film have had the side effect of making it difficult for me to process the movie critically and independently.

The Prognosticators, or How I Wish I Coul Give Up The News

So it only took me 23 years, but I finally saw James L. Brooks' romantic comedy/satire/frightening gaze into the tea leaves, Broadcast News (1987). Having seen this masterful, nearly perfect movie, the only real fault I can find within its 133 minute running time is that it wasn't pessimistic enough about the future of news broadcasting.

I feel woefully undereducated in Brooks' filmography, having only seen As Good as it Gets (which had to grow on me) and Spanglish (which I have a bit of sympathy for, even as I can't quite bring myself to like the damn movie). 

I'm not interested in reviewing the movie here - it's developed a well-earned reputation on its own, thank you very much. there's just a cool bit of parity here given that I just interviewed a young documentary filmmaker as part of the New York Asian Film Festival. During my conversation with Tetsuaki Matsue, he talked a bit about objectivity/subjectivity and reporting - the idea that with both documentaries and the news one can't escape from creating a story.

What I got to thinking about after seeing Broadcast News and reflecting on this interview is that with documentaries, one can be forgiven for entertaining a little, playing to the crowd as you try to lay down some kind of position piece or narrative with actors, stakes, and consequences. Where it get downright diabolical is with news reporting (this is all Media Studies, 101, forgive me, but I'm just riffing on my recent experience) where the need to create a narrative has intruded on the so-called objective attempt to present the facts.

Events now become binary, with opposing forces and equal weight given to each side of the conversation, which is kind of a false premise when sometimes the other side is actually just full of it. Worse, reporting has become the "fake tears" scene from Brooks' script writ large: news personalities have so thoroughly injected themselves into the narrative, we're now asked to care about how they feel about the news (and to in turn interpret current events through that prism).   

It was just something that sort of bummed me out after watching the movie - seeing how far we've moved into what was just 25 years ago satire.

Pagina Perdida?

I'm not really sure what to make of this trailer for Pagina Perdida which found itself in my inbox this morning. Here's the copy from production company Sanglat Films:

Surrounded by an intriguing scenario and inhabited by strange characters, "Lost Page” ("Página Perdida") is an abstract film, the result of a powerfull visual dimension created by Lucas Moreira added to the experimental electro-acoustic music of Marcelo Armani.

Produced by Sanglant Films and Department of Culture of São Leopoldo.

Bodyguards, Assassins, Boys on the Run, Live Nude Girls, and Michael Jackson

Over at Twitch, I review a couple of films currently screening at the New York Asian Film Festival (you're going, right?). First up is the historical martial arts epic, Bodyguards and Assassins, director Teddy Chen's attempt to add and action-packed chapter to the life of Chinese revolutionary leader Dr. Sun Yat Sen. Next up is the romantic comedy (?) Boys on the Run, which makes a great case for more genre fluidity and ambiguity in relationship movies. Finally, I had a chance to see director Tetsuaki Matsui's documentary about the late Japanese porn starlet Yumika Hayashi, Annyong Yumika, which attempts to make sense of the enigmatic actress' life after the discovery "lost" Korean-Japanese co-produced adult film.

Despite being wildly different, both Bodyguards and Yumika are unexpectedly linked by ideas about public figures and their approachability. Bodyguards approaches this at a right angle with the mostly implied presence of Dr. Sen in a film ostensibly about his struggle for Chinese liberty. But each character in his ideological camp "speaks" for the good doctor and attempts to create a picture of the venerated, but ultimately unknowable figure. Chen's film shies away from showing Sen's face (although there is a key scene with his mother which I suppose acts as an emotional stand-in) but ultimately it's admiration at a remove.

Then there's Yumika where the very public, very popular porn star nonetheless leaves an absence where her life should be. Underneath the analysis of a fairly silly, kind of horrible "discovered" porno is the sense that no one really knew this woman and Matsui spends 2 hours trying to capture some essence of her onscreen through the recollection of her lovers and colleagues.

Yumika was a performer and her career and persona were ultimately forms of performance and to a certain extent so was the persona of Dr. Sen, who has over time become an idea of a person. I wonder how many years before the same effect overcomes Michael Jackson, who was actually a living ghost for about 15 years as he retreated from public view. After his death, after the late-night jokes, after the contentious struggle for his kids what will remain is the idea of the performer which has almost overnight shed the taint of more than a decade of decline and scandal. We don't know about him than we did before but our impression of him has shored itself up into something concrete, something definite that we identify as performer, or Performer.   

Anyway, check out the reviews and think a little about celebrity and illumination. 

Two From Denmark: Fighter and Princess

Two movies I've been anticipating for a while are Anders Morgenthaler's animated revenge thriller Princess (2006) and Natasha Arthy's Bend it Like Beckham for the kung fu set, Fighter (2007).

Princess is an odd package on paper: August (Thure Lindhardt) is a priest whose porn star sister has recently and left her damage but smart 5-year-old Mia (Mira Hilli Moller Hallund) to care for. Shocked by the emotional harm done to his young niece, August embarks on a mission to erase any vestige of his late sister's porn career while working his way towards her lover/boss, Charlie.



Using traditional animation, CG, live action inserts, and grainy camcorder video the story follows August on his quest in the present while giving viewers hints about how the rift formed between the formerly close brother and sister. The camcorder views in particular (always from August's perspective) show his compulsion to document his sister, no matter how sketchy the situation.

August is a bit off - he hates pornography (with good reason, in this case) but he also seems deeply, profoundly broken in his own way, even before his sister's exploitation. In flashbacks - which are sometimes accompanied by a distracting CG trip through August's synapses - he's always the observer and never the actor. Morgenthaler and co-writer Mette Heeno's script has a tendency to keep August's camera rolling when it should not be (particularly in the tense, confrontational second scene with the landlord).

The present-day sequences show August attempting to connect with Mia, even trying to gain a measure of catharsis for her by allowing her to participate in the revenge against her exploiters and abusers. The script is a little unclear on how many people mishandled this unfortunate child - I think it was just one character, but August seems to believe Charlie was involved as well.

The movie's position, I think, is that Christina and Mia's exploiters should be destroyed absolutely and completely. The two that we see, Preben (Tommy Kenter) and Sonny (Soren Lenander) are essentially vile gangsters. Charlie remains elusive but we understand from the shrine he has built for Christina in the local cemetery that he's a grotesque.

The viewer gets a Death Wish vibe from the whole thing, with the very capable August taking down these unsympathetic scumbags, working his way up the food chain. Even the cops are somewhat on August's side, opining that Preben and Sonny are lucky they're getting any help at all. August's attacks against the pornographers (and later their gun-toting henchmen) are fairly stylized, with the camera following the trajectory of bullets and crowbars as they hit their mark.

The film ultimately becomes exploitation cinema, all things considered, with its blood red-tinted focus on the violence and the almost playful nature of August's vengeful outing. Consider the scene in the warehouse early in the film where he has Mia pouring the gasoline while her stuffed animal prances in the background (a common conceit is that Mia thinks her stuffed bunny, Multe, is alive).

Why was animation chosen as the primary method to tell this story? According to IMDB it's about 20% live action and 80% animation - that sounds about right. Obviously, there's the appeal of splitting the past from present via format but what did it serve making the present animated? I suppose as a practical consideration, animating the film allowed the filmmakers to execute some of their more visceral set-pieces (how else could they afford to show the destruction of a city block of porn shops?). Still, there's a sense of the fantastic to the events given the slightly stylized nature of the characters and Mia's inner world being manifest through the ever-present Multe that creates distance instead of drawing you in. The split between the "real" (August in the past) and just plain moviemaking distracts more than it attracts if that makes any sense.

What do we make of the character's fate at the end of the movie? Or the friendly porn starlet who aids Mia in the mansion? The very final scene would hint that August's quest was just and redemptive while the acts themselves and their physical repercussions would tend to read as an outsized reaction on his part. I think in crafting such a strange brew of film styles and focusing on the delivery method of the content, the creative team perhaps got a little muddled in the actual, you know, content of the content. Ultimately Princess comes off as a revenge pic of the sex and murder genre - think 1979's Hardcore with George C. Scott or the original Get Carter. Unfortunately it puts up so many layers between its lead and its message that the movie is difficult to get behind.



Fighter similarly has a problem with a somewhat inscrutable lead. A coming-of-age Kung Fu film should be an easy sell to me but the script and performances never really generate any sort of relatable or believable tension. Instead, we get a retread of of numerous teen girl empowerment films which aims for grit but hits melancholy.

It's about Aicha (Semra Turan) a high school student cool to her strict Muslim parents' aspirations for her to become a doctor. The tomboyish lead would rather be practicing martial arts and watching grainy interviews with the late great Bruce Lee, though. The tension is obvious well-worn - traditional immigrant culture (her family is Turkish) vs. modern opportunities for a girl in the west. Writer/director Natasha Arthy and co-writer Nicolaj Arcel's script just dresses it in martial arts drag.

I've mentioned before that Aicha is inscrutable: some of that is from a script that's vague on exactly what her character wants but the other part is Turan's performance which is incredibly internal. Aicha spends a lot of her time literally running between locations and keeping her eyes down and mouth shut when she gets there. Of course she opens up a bit when she joins a Kung Fu club run by the Hong Kong mainstay Xian Gao (Crouching Tiger, Fong Sai Yuk a.k.a. The Legend) but that liveliness is more the result of well-choreographed if choppily-edited fight scenes.



The movie only seems alive during the wire work-heavy action scenes (which culminate in a tournament that's more Fight Club than The Karate Kid) but for the remainder of its running time the story is on autopilot. The story can barely muster any surprises or variation on the type of film, instead coasting on the formula. If you guessed her father was an ogre, her mother was knowing and disappointed, and that she had an older sibling who was the family's pride and joy then you were right on all counts. Is there a Danish boy outside of her traditional community who has her eye? You bet, but in this case it's the slightly slimy Emil (Cyron Bjorn Melville) whose character is never really given anything beyond an overtly sexual interest in Aicha.

I can't fault the look of the film, however. The grime and grit of the lower class Denmark estates are convincingly visualized through lots of handheld camera work and a high level of grain in the image.

The trailer for Princess:



Fighter's trailer:

Two (NOT) to Watch: Deadgirl and Grace

I recently checked out these two much talked about horror features on DVD and found both to be sorely lacking.

Deadgirl (2008) (not to be confused with 2006's excellent The Dead Girl) is about two high school outcasts and the dead girl they find in the basement of an abandoned asylum. The catch: she's not quite dead and can't quite die.

The two friends, Rickie and JT (played by Shiloh Fernandez and Noah Segan), are a pretty miserable pair from the beginning but the plot attempts to drum up sympathy by giving the former a pretty crush for him to gaze at longingly for much of the running time, even as things start to get pretty messy down in the basement. The plot attempts to wring extra tension from JT's rather abrupt descent into depravity and Rickie's inability (or unwillingness) to pull his best friend back from the brink.

On paper there's a lot of interesting things to explore in terms of slippery slope morality, the power dynamics between friends, and the use of sex as a form of power. In particular, the relationship between JT and Rickie should be an electric current running throughout the entire film. Unfortunately, the piece devolves into the realm of "gore-sploitation" so quickly (look, everyone - guys having sex with a gnarly corpse) that any emotional shock is quickly undercut by the juvenile attempts to gross viewers out.

The production values are strong and the gore effects are actually quite decent but the casting is horrible with one of the oldest looking crowds of 17-year-olds in recent film memory and overwrought, very broad performances by the entire cast. The only member of the cast who really acquits themselves is Jenny Spain in the thankless role of the Deadgirl. The only one not playing to some warped high school cliche template she goes full bore with an uncomfortable mix of sexuality and primal ferocity.



Next up is Grace (2009), a film with a bit of a built-in rep thanks to some walkouts and vomiting during its time on the film festival circuit.

This natal horror film deals with Madeline (Jordan Ladd, sleeping through the role) whose husband and unborn child are killed in a car accident. Determined to carry the child to term she(and everyone else) is shocked to learn that the child (named Grace, natch) isn't as dead as they all believed.

Being a horror movie, this can't go well.

Vegan Madeline quickly learns that her little girl isn't interested in milk and has to get a regular supply of the red stuff in increasingly gruesome ways. Meanwhile, her isolation and increasingly erratic behavior starts a power struggle with her unhinged, control freak mother-in-law, Vivian (Gabrielle Rose, willing to bare her teeth and everything else in this role).

The concept here is much thinner as the story travels the familiar horror path where stories like Pet Sematary have long since and much more interestingly tread. Perhaps if the lead weren't sleepwalking through the role the film might have made more of an impression.

As it stands, the film is a dull-eyed mess that kind of happens and then ends.

Both films have especially nice posters, though.

Deadgirl Trailer



Grace Trailer



See Cronenberg's delightfully weird The Brood (1979) instead:



Or Cemetery Man for another take on the girl who just won't die:

Heading Back Into "The Mist"

I saw Frank Darabont's adaptation of Stephen King's "The Mist" back in its summer release back in '07 and kind of hated it. It was that rapid-build kind of hate as well where you like it marginally in the theater and by the time you hit the exit you're convinced you've somehow been... I don't know, swindled?

The film was is a "hell is other people" piece about a small New England town and the thick mist that covers it after a mysterious storm. The townies and some vacationers end up holing up in a supermarket when they learn that the mist is inhabited by all manner of vicious creatures from somewhere else. Of course as a microcosm of American values and types (the elitist lawyer, the noble artist, the barking mad evangelist) it's only a matter of time before conflict breaks out between the natives.

The ideological gulf is between Tom Jane's pragmatic artist character and Marcia Gay Harden's bible-thumping Miss Carmody. Harden's character spins the events in apocalyptic-mystic terms, equating the monsters with divine retribution due to the litany of complaints one gets with any zealots: people are having the "wrong" kind of sex, abortion is murder, cats are sleeping with dogs, etc.



Carmody was painted in such broad strokes that it took me out of the movie when some of the townspeople started coming around to her side of things by the midway point. Harden gives a foaming at the mouth, foul, bitter performance (note, I'm not qualifying it as "good" per se) and it felt like a cheat on the part of the story to generate artificial tension. By the end of the film some of her followers are calling for human sacrifice in their panicked need to assuage a conception of God closer to King's "Children of the Corn."



So why did I rewatch it recently? I can't really answer that in any satisfying way. I was compelled to take it in again, though. Two years out the acting is still rough (Tom Jane's last scene unintentionally gets a laugh), the CGI is still dodgy, and Mrs. Carmody is a broad as ever but somehow it kind of works now in a way that it didn't back in '07.

I'd say part of it - if I'm being honest, most of it - has to do with the seismic emotional shift the country has gone through post '08 election or at least the cable news version of the national attitude anyway. We seem more balkanized than before and some on the right appear just plain mean. In particular, the religious right has been co-opted by some of the most vitriolic voices in the Pat Robertson mold. Some of the most nasty thoughts have been given voice recently by religious leaders (which happens with any real cultural sea change) but what's most appalling is that there are too many nodding their heads in agreement or at least not calling bullshit.

There's a real feeling of blood in the water right now with the people who've been sharpening their knives for years waiting for some kind of ultimate confrontation between the people and the state, black against whites, or Christians vs. everyone else enjoying the increasingly hyperbolic and hostile mood out there.



The emotional violence of yesterday is becoming the actual violence of today. Just a couple of weeks ago it was a Baptist minister praying for the death of the President and today it's the discovery of the body of a Census Bureau employee hanged in a cemetery with the word "Fed" written on his corpse.



It remains to be seen how much of it is the cable news cycle giving voices and legitimacy to fringe elements but there's an element out there, increasingly vocal, that mimic the sentiments of the Mrs. Carmodys of the world. That is, they're the folks that believe that "something's not right" with the country, and wouldn't mind a little bit of bloodletting to get America back to the "good old days" (i.e. cultural hegemony, minorities "in their place," and a simpler black and white moral spectrum).

Also, as overwrought as the ending to the movie is, there's some subtle, maybe even accidental comment there about how leaving the crazies to it and bugging out will get you nowhere. Those final apocalyptic moments get kind of silly with Tom Jane's extended "noooooooooooo," and I can't dispute that at all. At the same time, it's kind of poignant - the sense that the loudest, craziest voices have won out and forced the voices of reason to beat a hasty, bloody retreat.



Again, "The Mist" hasn't suddenly become transformative art but it has become very much of the moment.













Please note the images I selected from the recent Teabagger rallies were selected with a Google search for the words "teabagger + racist." These are intentionally slanted images but it was alarmingly easy to find them to justify my point.

"I assume you know who we are."

Last weekend I checked out both Inglourious Basterds and The Baader-Meinhof Complex. Both are stylistically two fairly different movies. But without the intent of denigrating or elevating either one I must say that on a certain level the two films are incredibly similar thematically.

On the surface they seem wildly different - QT doing his movie-movie thing about World War II and the power of big "c" Cinema. Some quibbles notwithstanding I'm beginning to feel like it was one of my favorite movies of the year as a cumulative effort (but more on that in another post). As for BMK, it a rousing action film wearing the skin of a counterculture 60's action film about the extreme leftist sentiments sparked by Western intervention in Vietnam, the perceived police state mentality of the German government, etc.



But look deeper and it's evident that both are movies about appearances and rep. In a 9.1.09 posting titled "Real of fictitious, it doesn't matter..." Jim Emerson makes a very thorough dissection of IG and the role of reputation and appearance throughout the film. Emerson postulates (and I agree with his analysis) that Tarantino crafts characters whose reputations precede them, noted by nicknames ("Aldo the Apache," "the Jew Hunter," "The Bear Jew") and even self conscious asides by the movie itself (notably Stiglitz's introductory vignette).

This common thread is shared by BMK which follows the Red Army Faction (RAF) terrorist/revolutionary group in its heyday in the late 60's and early 70's. Part of their mandate - one shared by the Basterds - is to strike fear into the German power structure, creating tension and demoralization of what they perceive as immoral and even inhuman oppressors. Point of fact, part of the RAF propaganda explicitly described the police as pigs and effectively declaring open season on the men in uniform while at the same time dissuading attacks on "the workers" (i.e. civilians).


While the RAF leadership doesn't have evocative nicknames like the Basterds, their identities are known and they have very public faces. In fact, one of the most effective tools in ultimately rounding up the RAF leadership was a sort of "catch 'em all"-style wanted poster with images of the known members of the outfit displayed with x's marking the ones that had been captured of killed by the authorities. Pay attention to the trailer as well - as much as it comes through there in the actual film there's a very pervasive rock star/outlaw swagger to the early exploits of the RAF. It's a handy bit of synchronicity that the fashions of the group members echos some of the styles seen today (skinny jeans, form-fitting clothes with a retro vibe) that's at odds with the proletarian aims of the group.


Indeed, for all its talk of anarchic abolition of controlling capitalist systems, the RAF was incredibly well-marketed in its day, with frequent distribution of flyers bearing the group's logo. Compare and contrast this to the Basterds' unique form of propagating their fear message which involves marking German survivors with swastikas on their foreheads. This act serves the double purpose of forever unmasking the Nazi soldier while also acting as the guerillas' calling card to the German people.


There's also the question of authenticity - it comes up a couple of times in Basterds as subtext (maintaining a pretense of authenticity to survive) and is part of why the characters/historical figures of BMK struggle. Shoshanna Dreyfuss a.k.a. Emmanuelle Mimiuex must maintain the mask of the Gentile to avoid extermination while Andres Baader strains in every scene to prove how dedicated he is to the proletarian struggle, often exploding at his compatriots for what he perceives as their lack of authenticity. In the middle of the film, there's even a moment where the BMK leadership doubts the authenticity of a group member and defames the person in order to have them liquidated.



The point of similarity between the two films simultaneously creates a contrasting effect as Taratino gives us these larger-than-life figures whereas by the end of BMK the characters have been reduced to an extent after making themselves mythic. One of the last lines in the latter film has the speaker telling the assembled group that their heroes weren't victims or victimized - that they weren't martyrs but instead subjects of their own choices. In this manner, we the audience and the assembled group listening to the aforementioned speaker learn that the BMK leadership was neither a cause to follow nor objects to be edified.

This Land is Our Land (Get Outta Here Aliens!)

Having just seen District 9 this weekend I have to come down on the side of critical consensus and say that I found it to be an exhilarating experience that was very much of the moment. "Of the moment" means that the plot doesn't hold up to greater scrutiny after the fact, with some story elements remaining poorly-explained or outright ignored (particularly with regard to the central issue of the use, value, and application of the Prawn technology).

Still, the exuberance of the thing - the energy of the action, the humor invested in the many situations protagonist Wikus Van de Merwe stumbles or is thrown into - makes it work in a way that the recent Star Trek reboot worked.

One thing that has left me a little irked since the movie bowed was the insistence (critically, at least) that the movie is a parable for Apartheid when it instead feels reflective of the recent immigration crisis experienced in South Africa. For a time there reports would pop up on CNN about attacks by SA locals on immigrants from Zimbabwe and other displaced persons and it was actually pretty hairy. According to this NY Times piece from 2007 something like 3900 illegal immigrants we being deported weekly. They were viewed by locals and preexisting immigrants as a challenge to low-wage jobs and homes in informal settlements. It was all about hustling to get a place on the totem pole even if it's at the bottom.

If I recall correctly the violence reached a fevered pitch sometime in the middle of 2008 with immigrants being burned out of their homes or even killed but in the time since nothing about the issue has really popped up on my radar.

Obviously, I get that Apartheid is the more recognizable cultural issue* from the area that still has resonance to this day but it doesn't really jibe with the issues presented in the film. Plus, I kind of feel like this "good immigrant/bad immigrant" story is thematically richer today across all borders. Not just in the U.S. but in any country where the poor feel they have to duke it out with the recent arrivals - the fear that the "unwashed masses" will somehow wash over everything that has been built before by the "good" immigrants (i.e. the ones that were there first).



It puts me in the mind of Miriam Colon character from Sayles' Lone Star - a successful Latina businesswoman and Mexican immigrant who had pretty much convinced herself she was born on this side of the border and had no compunction talking trash about anyone else trying to cross the border. The script painted her as a fairly nasty character made so by an initially hardscrabble life after the death of her husband.

I'm curious as to how much co-screenwriter Neill Terri Tatchell Blomkamp were conscious of the immolation of Zimbabwean immigrants and the violence and all that when they were putting the script together. Blomkamp's Alive in Joburg short was shot/released in 2005, around the time that the massive wave of Zimbabwean immigrants were crossing the border into South Africa. I suspect it had to have at least been somewhere in his mind during the making of both the short and the current feature.



*It should be noted that directed Neill Blomkamp has gone on record as saying that he's not trying to make an "issue" and that his District 9 is more of a big action film with some sociopolitical undertones kind of informing some of the narrative.

The Generation and Culture Gap (Increasingly a Divide)

[ETA: Mr. Kenny has pointed out via his own blog that I misspelled his name. My apologies. However, this isn't actually about you per se but instead about this generational hostility that seems to be on the rise in the critical community.]

The [film critic] blogosphere has recently been up in a tizzy about the perceived dwindling of the collective intellect. The failure of movies like "The Hurt Locker" to gain major financial traction while "Transformers 2" makes more money than God have led some critics and writers to blog extensively about the dumbing down of film audience.



A.O. Scott launches the opening salvo over at the NY Times.

Roger Ebert becomes exasperated, calling it a Gathering Dark Age.

Jeff Wells gets all Wells on our asses and calls the current generation Eloi here.

And of course, it becomes point-counterpoint with Drew McWeeny formerly of Aint It Cool News weighing in and later, Glenn Kenny in a response devoid of the name-calling and cutesy inserts of incendiary film shots.

Past the name-calling and the "cute" use of counterpoint images (Wells in particular is fond of his Morlocks and Eloi) is a relevant and tricky question: as a society (and I'm talking about the U.S. only) are we coming apart at the seams, getting slow and dumber as some critics insist?



Bill Maher recently ran down a list of the educational failings of the U.S. - how the man on the street (according to recent survey data) is unable to provide the name of his Senator, the purpose and text of the Bill of Rights, or even about the history of their own country. This is a pet topic for Maher, who insists that we've long been in a swift slide into mediocrity or downright stupidity. Maher's complaints join the resurgence of the unfortunate "culture wars" which seem to crop up during times of crisis.

The connective thread between this and the movies is the idea that subjective increasingly trumps the objective. Facts don't matter - feelings do. "I know what I know, facts be damned."Debate becomes a matter of who shouts loudest longest. Because "G.I. Joe" makes money hand over fist, that doesn't make it an objectively better film - just one that makes a lot of money. At the same time, it doesn't objectively mean audiences are dumber - it means that visually and tonally it touched on something audiences were seeking.



This whole discourse isn't an and/or prospect of one either being slow or in the know - it's a more nuanced thing that many in this argument (both about film and in the broader cultural space) tend to neglect.

Among Maher's statistics it would have been useful to post a comparison showing whether the number of Americans knowledgeable about the facts and functions has increased or decreased as opposed to say, 1960. Instead, he wrings his hands and shakes his head at the failure of the country making the facile point that being intellectually incurious is, you know, dumb.

Maybe there's a segment of the population that refuses to learn, know, or grow beyond its limitations. Maybe there also a segment that has been left behind by an inadequate educational system. Maybe people see summer tentpoles because it's part of the shared annual cultural experience from May to August. Maybe the most ignorant of us are the most visible thanks to endless re-airings of their shouting matches and shenanigans.

All I'm saying is, I don't know if it's as bad as many are trying to make things out to be. I think there is a gulf that separates generations and we all reach a point where we look at those younger than us and wonder, "why?" It's nothing new, it happens as one generation ages and the other comes of age. Populist tastes will make money hand over fist but it won't kill independent voices and work.

I don't know.

I distrust the insistence among the deeply religious that evolution never happened or among some of our citizens that our President is both a non-citizen and a Muslim with a Socialist agenda for our nation (apparently with reparations being the motivation for his actions and policy). But that's not really the generational divide so much as an artificial cultural gap widened through repetition.

"They hate you and think you're ignorant!" "They're smug, Socialist scum!"

There's little to no modulation in opinion. It's binary. It's them or us. Sometimes there are wrongheaded notions about actual facts but the answer isn't approaching the other side with either condescension or insults. You don't convince the young that there's interesting, non-mainstream cinema out there for them by insulting them. Furthermore, you don't get the guy who's convinced that our President isn't from here to change his mind by rolling your eyes and walking away.

I guess this whole thing is an exhaustion with smug. I want to be smarter. I want people to be smarter, but I also want us talking to one another instead of pretending that the so-called other side/age group/whatever doesn't mean anything.

Anyway, comment, think on it, ignore.

Better still, start coming up with solutions instead of talking about how much better things were way back when or elsewhere. We're in the now, so goddamn figure out how to make it work.

(Not a) Film Review: Drag Me To Hell

T.G.F.B. Edition!*

• Star Alison Lohman was a very game participant through all of the trauma director Sam Raimi put her through.
  

• It should be noted that most if not all of the violence directed towards the heroine is entirely non-sexual. It's not punitive violence for a character expressing her sexuality or having a good time. She does something wrong and she spends the next 90 minutes paying for it.

• This is key, because it takes the movie from making the viewer an accomplice through titillation to allowing the viewer to relax and enjoy the events on display.

• Having said that, the script spends a LOT of time shoving things in its lead actress's mouth or otherwise covering her in fluids.
  

• It's an incredibly loud movie with Raimi cranking things up to somewhere around 11 (15 during the "dinner party" scene). Most times it seems to work, although it can be a little exhausting for the audience.
  

• Nominee for most menacing handkerchief of all time.

• It was weird watching a Sam Raimi film without the on-screen participation of either Ted Raimi or Bruce Campbell. (This is excluding the dramas Raimi has worked on in the past)**
  

• Wow, this was a hard PG-13.
  

• This might be setting back U.S.-Gypsy relations by a few years.

• Small thing but I really loved the text used for the opening and closing title.
  

• It's been noted elsewhere but I'd like to chime in in favor of the use of practical effects. There are a couple of CG moments (but not excessive). I miss the good old days of practical makeup, gags, and gooey effects.
  

• This touched off a note of nostalgia and sent me back to watch my copy of Army of Darkness. Yeah, I still love it.

• I need for Amy Adams, Isla Fischer, and Alison Lohman to never star in a movie together. For some reason I confuse them all visually in what I like to call the "Tom Jane/Aaron Eckhart Effect."

• I didn't really have much use for Justin Long until the closing moments of the film. He essentially embodied "boring boyfriend" for most of the movie.
  

*Thank God For Bulletpoints
** According to the fine people at the IMDB Ted Raimi was in the movie in a "blink and you'll miss him" moment.

Film Review: Terminator Salvation

The full review is up on the Comics Bulletin site. With that, I've done more thinking about a "Terminator" movie than I have since 1991.

(Not a) Film Review: Terminator: Salvation

A full review will be appearing tomorrow on the Comics Bulletin. It was decidedly Not Good but here are a few thoughts about what I saw (in no particular order):

***Mildly, slightly, kind of spoilerish points if you haven't seen any of the trailers. I mean, like if you haven't paid ANY attention to the promotion of this film.***

• The movie was a weird battle of the accents with Australian-born Sam Worthington and British-born Bale attempting to mask theirs in a sort of gruff approximation of middle America. (It was bothersome enough to remind me of the Family Guy bit about Liam Neeson attempting to bury his own magnificent accent anytime he plays an American).

• Moon Bloodgood threatens to be this generations Tia Carerre: attractive and exotic enough to jazz up your movie but not terribly interesting otherwise.
  

(Pictured: Bloodgood in Terminator: Salvation)

(Pictured: Tia Carerre - Celebrity Mudfighter)

• Can we do away with the shorthand of action characters becoming sympathetic by looking into the dewey eyes of a mute moppet?

• I would love an artbook filled with the mechanical design from the film. It seemed to be where a lot of the passion for this project went (or at least where it was most productively focused).

• Do the events of this film and John Connor's reactions to the new breed of Terminators mean T2 never happened? I worry this is the kind of thing that will keep me awake at night.
  

(Have we lost this rad little bastard to continuity?)*

• It seems really easy to traverse war-torn California in 2018. Characters seem to be able to just hop their way to their destinations without much trouble, zipping from L.A. to San Francisco as the plot requires.

• Between this and Reign of Fire I regret to say that it's in the latter that Christian Bale makes the most interesting post apocalyptic leader in charge of a rag tag group of survivors against an implacable, deadly force.

• Helena Bonham Carter wasn't a name that floated to the surface too often in the prerelease discussion of the movie. It was a surprise seeing her name in the opening credits and odder still to see how she was used in the movie. Her appearance was... distracting.

• I'm trying to recall the last time I enjoyed a film score by Danny Elfman. It sucks when you're the guy complaining about the band's new sound because you miss the old sound, but seriously, I miss Danny Elfman's old sound. He seems misplaced in recent films.

• I hope I'm not projecting, but the audience seemed deflated at the end of the movie. Usually at the end of a big film like this there's a burst of applause (one of my pet peeves, but still). Here, everyone rushed out the second the credits started. The call outs to the previous movies and jokes didn't elicit very many responses either.

• Seriously, there are like 6 references to the previous film. Only a few really work, whereas the others kind of happen - used only to remind us that they "get" that these movies occurred in the same universe.

• It's such a relentlessly joyless movie. Compare it to the other three (yes, even Rise of the Machines) each of which was energetic, in parts humorous, and generally about living people trying to overcome the odds. Here it's this sort of dour humanity dedicated to survival in the abstract as a way of defeating the machines. I think maybe this is my biggest gripe with the film all things considered because it robs the movie of any essential life and makes the entire experience a grim, gritty, slog.
  

* It's disheartening Googling photos of celebrities who aren't working as much anymore. 9 times out of 10 the internet just wants to remind you of how much weight they've put on or how bad their hair is now.