The Girlfriend Experience (2009)

In doing press for his new movie, The Girlfriend Experience, director Steven Soderbergh summed up the theme in one sentence: "Everything in life is a transaction."

I remember back in 2000 going around with my parents when they were in the market for a new house. Part of the process involved signing on with a real estate agent. My parents picked Rosie, a nice enough lady in her 40s with shalaqued lips, a no-nonsense hairdo, a permanent smile, and a penchant for pantsuits and dangly earrings.

She was there ostensibly to represent my parents' interests, but my Dad (a suspicious guy at the best of times) very soon noticed that she would only show them houses near or at the very top of their stated price range. My dad began insisting she broaden out in the choices she was presenting to them. She did so reluctantly, and when my parents finally settled on a place that was more in the middle of what they were looking to pay, she tried -- not quite forcefully, but with an unmistakeable air of disdain -- to talk them out of it.

Her motives were clear; the more my parents spent, the higher her commission.

What I found interesting then -- and what I started thinking about while watching The Girlfriend Experience -- was Rosie's approach. We knew her for a sum total of probably three weeks, but she acted as though she was an old family friend. She tried to flirt with my dad (and, awkwardly, with me), talked quilting with my mom, told us all about her husband and kids. But she was, frankly, a bit of a shark. I don't blame her for it. She had a job to do.

That line between salesmanship and a sort of icky false intimacy is one I'm sure we've all experienced at some point. Whether when buying a car, dealing with a waiter or waitress working just a little to hard for his/her tip, signing up for a gym membership, or during any other number of small day-to-day transactions, we've all been there. Hell, most of us have been, at least once or twice, on the other end of that equation.

But where does it end? Where's the line between a business relationship and a "real" relationship? Where does manipulation of someone for a particular reward end and true intimacy begin?

At what point, in other words, do we become whores?

That's the obvious (and, frankly, not very original) theme of The Girlfriend Experience, and Soderbergh tries to get at it by centering his story (for want of a better word) on an actual prostitute. Chelsea (Sasha Grey) is a high-class escort, one of the really expensive ones who provides not just sex but companionship (the "girlfriend experience" of the title). She listens to you bitch about the economy. She strokes your hair and tells you how much she enjoys seeing you. She asks after your wife and kids. She makes careful note of your likes and dislikes, and is sure to agree with you no matter what you say. She stays the night and lets you buy her breakfast in the morning. And she leaves with an incredibly fat envelope stuffed full of cash.

Chelsea is a blank slate, and for most of the movie I (probably unfairly) chalked this up to the assumed limitations of the lead. Grey has made quite the name for herself in the porn world as a sort of existentialist, Godard-worshipping, philosophy-quoting, self-empowered sex goddess. All those things are great, but they do not necessarily equal "great actor." What we get here is a cold characterization that, for the first three quarters of the movie, seems to have all the psychological depth and emotional vitality of a piece of well-spoken lawn furniture.

The movie is presented through a series of transactions, whether they be Chelsea entertaining a client or trying to get help building her website, her personal trainer boyfriend Chris (Chris Santos) selling fitness sessions, various job interviews, business proposals, or Chelsea's slightly hostile lunch with a journalist. These transactions don't stop at the front door. Every ostensible moment of intimacy between Chelsea and Chris seems as hard and self-directed as her numerous trysts. Even Chelsea's dinner with a more experienced escort friend and Chris's bar conversation with a chauvenistic buddy seem frought with all sorts of competition and undercurrents of callous self interest. These negotiations reach their nadir when Chelsea is talked into servicing an "erotic connoisseur" (an incredibly creepy Mark Jacobsen; you can seriously almost smell the fumes coming off of him) in exchange for a good review on his website. The end result of this last is grimly predictable.

So, of course, Soderbergh is saying that, in the end, we've all got a bit of the whore in us. Fine. Point taken. The obvious (and -- again -- not very original) question becomes: what's so different, then, about Chelsea and what she does for a living?

Soderbegh puts this all together in a loose, achronological style reminiscent of a not-so-busy 21 Grams. Scenes are presented out of order. The tail of one scene does not necessarilly have anything to do with the next. A climax might come twenty minutes before the setup. This approach is interesting, but borders on gimmicky and can be incredibly frustrating since there's so little initially to grasp onto emotionally. Who are these people? And why should I care?

Soderbergh is not a director I tend to get all that excited about. There's a coldness to his work that I just don't find very appealing. As much as I respect him, I almost never really enjoy his movies. The Girlfriend Experience is no different, and Soderbergh's use of Michael Hanake-esque wide shots and uninflected long takes adds to the overall chilly and analytical tone. I can't say I was ever bored, exactly, but I was not really all that engaged.

So I was all prepared to dismiss The Girlfriend Experience as another one of Soderbergh's little formalist experimentations and Grey as an interesting but not all that promising mainstream actress. But then -- just as I was checking out -- they sank the hooks in. I have to give them credit. They were one step ahead of me the whole time, and when toward the end we start to see a few cracks in Chelsea's perfectly composed facade and the movie takes a couple quick (and thankfully unmelodramatic) turns, the cumulative effect of all those previous transactions lands a surprisingly devastating blow. Just seeing Grey finally laugh, much less cry, sort of took my breath away. I was not prepared for that, and I salute them for it. They got me.

Soderbergh claimed in an interview (I don't remember which one, unfortunately) that he did not come into The Girlfriend Experience with any preconceived notions about the escort world, and that he doesn't judge Chelsea for what she does. That sounds nice, but I'm not sure I really buy it. I'm not sure it's really possible, in our culture, to not judge either Chelsea or Grey for their respective careers, no matter how progressive and hip we want to think we are. I certainly did. Even Chris, in the heat of an argument, resorts to calling Chelsea a "hooker." Soderbergh may not want us to think it's him calling her a hooker...but, really, it is. Chelsea may be no different, ultimately, than any of the other uber-capitalist characters in the movie, but where she ultimately ends up is sort of where you would expect her to given her livelihood. No new ground paved there.

Overall I can't say this is a great movie, but in the end it was a pleasant surprise. Grey has apparently just directed her first porn movie (called, if you're interested, The Fuck Junkie), so it doesn't seem as though she's leaving that world behind any time soon. That's fine, but I'd like to see her take another crack at mainstream film down the road. She's got some chops.

It's worth mentioning, by the way, that there's no actual sex in this movie, and only the briefest seconds of nudity. So don't go in expecting to get your jollies off, unless you're into lots and lots of talking.

Terminator Salvation (2009)

I realized a very important thing about halfway through Terminator Salvation: I don't care.

I don't really care whether this movie lives up to the seminal original film from 1984 or its ostensibly superior 1991 sequel. I don't really care that the third one was a joke. I don't care whether Christian Bale is a believable John Conner, or if Anton Yelchin works as Kyle Reese. I don't care that Linda Hamilton's only appearance is through pre-recorded tapes left to her son, or if Arnold only shows up as a CGI behemoth. I don't care if the time-travel stuff makes sense.

I just don't care.

This, I should say, is a relief. Because I thought I would care. Those are the type of things I usually get all worked up about. Maybe it's just because I'm getting older, or maybe it's because it's such a nice summer day, but it just seems to me that life's too short. Apparently I'm not quite the geek I thought I was.

Terminator Salvation is a decent summer blockbuster. It's not great, but it's better than I expected it to be. Sure, I gave up on trying to figure out the plot (something about how some guy with a peekaboo Australian accent who may or may not be a robot is trying to help Christian Bale save his future father and how some guys in a submarine are trying to blow up Skynet, and how the big scary robots are alternately massacring and abducting the few human beings left on Earth for purposes beyond the screenwriter's ability to explain or the audience's ability to comprehend) about fifteen minutes in. But I enjoyed the movie thoroughly for what it was, even though -- four days or so later -- I can barely remember a frame of it.

Here are the few things I can recall:

1) Anton Yelchin, who I really despised in Star Trek, is surprisingly okay as the teenaged Kyle Reese. He's no Michael Biehn, but then he wouldn't be, would he? He's Michael Biehn fifteen years or so before he gets sent back in time to knock up John Conner's mom. I sort of bought it. Or at least as much as I needed to buy it to enjoy the movie. Hell, he's certainly no worse than whatshisname who played Anakin Skywalker.

2) It seems like McG and his DP (the guy Bale yelled at on set) watched a lot of Children of Men before they made this. Which is good. I liked the washed out, monochromatic color pallette, and I really appreciated that -- when they could -- they went for the long take rather than the rapid-fire edit.

3) Christian Bale is now officially the most boring actor on Earth. What happened to the guy who did American Psycho? Hell, what happened to the guy who did Swing Kids? I'm so totally over him.

4) Sam Worthington seems like a pretty decent actor, but they should have either cast an American in the role or just let him keep the Australian accent. Because what the fuck was that?

5) If you have some feral little mute girlchild following you through the post-apocalyptic wilderness, either cut her loose or eat her. Because she's just gonna drag you down.

6) Isaac Kappy makes every movie better. Seriously. Don't believe me, just watch Beerfest and Not Forgotten. I actually applauded when Isaac came on screen. Unfortunately this was in LA, so I got a lot of dirty looks. But it was worth it.

7) The killer robots are cool. And the Arnold cameo is actually pretty fun, even though it makes absolutely no narrative sense whatsoever.

8) Michael Ironside must actually be a cyborg, because he looks exactly the same as he did in 1980 when he did Scanners. I was happy to see him, though. If only they had found a way to fit in Lance Henriksen and Clancy Brown...

9) Even post-nuclear holocaust, New Mexico doesn't look all that different.

I really don't have much to say about this movie. If you check your expectations at the door, it's pretty entertaining. But I'd probably wait for Netflix if you have a good home theater or the dollar theater if you don't. Not a must see by any means.

JCVD (2008)

In the midst of all the Oscar hooplah surrounding Mickey Rourke's performance in The Wrestler last year, another comeback by an 80s/90s movie star in a similarly hyper-self aware art film kind of flew under the radar.

JCVD, a Belgian film starring Jean-Claude Van Damme as himself, was pretty universally praised by all four or five people who managed to see it in theaters. The critics, in particular, went positively apeshit. Entertainment Weekly gushed about its supposed similarities to Being John Malkovich, Roger Ebert called it "surprisingly transgressive," and the Portland Oregonian saluted Van Damme's "...angry, vulnerable and occasionally devastating performance..."

Many critics singled out the actor's six-minute, tearful monologue near the end of the movie: a tour-de-force piece of cinematic eye candy that meanders through JCVD's family problems, the troubles besetting his career, his drug addiction, his fear of death, etc. "I've done nothing!" JCVD bellows, snot dripping from his nose and tears squirting from his eyes. Nice work, particularly considering who it is we're watching. It really kind of is a sight to behold.

For the record, though, the monologue is my least favorite part of the film. Beyond the "holy shit" factor of recognizing that it is, in fact, Jean Claude Van Damme sitting there, I just didn't buy it. This is not a criticism of Van Damme's performance, which really is pretty extraordinary throughout the film. I tried to imagine how I would feel about the scene if it was another, more "legit" actor (say a Sean Penn or a Christian Bale) delivering the exact same speech, and I decided that -- at the end of the day -- it just didn't work. The writing is forced. The moment simply isn't earned, and it threw me completely out of the movie.

So there's the contrarian in me finding something to hate on. But that's all I've got. This is by no means a perfect film -- certainly not as powerful as The Wrestler -- but it really is shockingly good.

JCVD, in the movie, is a washed-up 47 year-old action star reduced to doing cheap, direct-to-video action movies in far flung Eastern European countries (in point of fact, every single one of Van Damme's movies between 1999's Universal Soldier: The Return and JCVD has gone straight to DVD). He's trapped in a bitter battle with his ex-wife over the custody of his daughter, who clearly wants to remain with her mother (supposedly this actually was the case with Van Damme's son). He's broke, and tired, and not quite the physical specimen he used to be. There's a bravura, single-take movie-within-a-movie action sequence that opens the film and which cleverly climaxes with a piece of the set toppling over, Buster-Keaton style, and the disengaged Japanese director calling for another take. JCVD, exasperated, whines about how difficult it is for him -- an over-the-hill actor -- to complete even one take, let alone two. The director, unmoved, simply sits there behind the monitor throwing darts at a picture of the Hollywood sign and prattling on, through an interpreter, about the "symbolism". JCVD stalks off in disgust.

When JCVD returns to Belgium for a much-needed vacation, his lawyer informs him that his last check has bounced. JCVD calls his agent to see if he can get an advance from the producers of his next project, and the agent tactlessly informs him that said producers decided to cast Steven Seagal instead because Seagal promised "to cut off his pony tail" for the role.

His back now firmly up against a wall, JCVD wearily poses for a photo with a couple excited video-store clerks and then goes across the street to a post office. Shots ring out moments later, and a police officer sees what appears to be the movie star blocking the entrances and taking hostages.

So has the Muscles from Brussels finally snapped?

To say more would spoil a wonderfully intricate plot that alternates almost seamlessly between gritty crime drama, action movie, dark comedy, a devastatingly pointed deconstruction of JCVD's persona and his place within popular culture, and -- finally -- a quiet and remarkably unobtrusive rumination about what it means to be a hero in the real world versus the movie world.

Like The Wrestler, what makes this movie work is the honesty ... yes, honesty ... of the lead performance. Director Mabrouk El Mechri clearly has a hard-on for Martin Scorcese and Paul Thomas Anderson, and he favors long, unbroken takes and carefully choreographed StediCam shots to Michael Bay-style rapid editing. This allows Van Damme to really sink into the role.

Two quiet scenes stand out. One involves JCVD berating his agent for his short-sightedness, and the other has JCVD sitting in the back of a taxi and being chided by the driver for his "rudeness." In both of these scenes the camera remains completely still and never once cuts away from Van Damme's face. Both times the actor manages to deliver a performance that feels breezy and tossed off in a way that looks easy, but that any real actor will tell you is actually brutally difficult to pull off.

El Mechri is clearly an actor's director as much as he is a cinematic stylist, and all of the other performances are consistently strong. The two video store geeks and the curmudgeonly taxi driver border on caricature, but they are the only real dissonant notes to be found. Everyone else in the movie -- from the people in the post office to JCVD's parents to his sleazeball agent and his weary lawyer -- does solid work. I particularly enjoyed Francois Damiens (a French actor who happens to be a dead ringer for the young Richard Dreyfuss) as the police inspector tasked with coaxing JCVD out of the post office. His is the role that, in a lesser film, would be played with maximum Pacino-style bluster. But Damiens approaches the part with a light and laconic touch that serves as an anchor to a story that could easily have found itself drifting into ludicrousness.

Like most movies of this type, the plot doesn't really hold up to logic once one really stops to think about it. But that doesn't matter. Like The Wrestler, this is a movie that lives or dies based on the lead performance. And that performance is more than strong enough to bear the weight of whatever minor flaws there may be in the script.

My worry about JCVD is the same worry I have for The Wrestler. I fear that audiences and -- maybe even more importantly -- producers and filmmakers are going to dismiss these performances as one-offs or anomolies, and won't give either Rourke or Van Damme the chance to shine again in another like-minded movie. It would truly be a shame if Van Damme -- who, I believe, has now more than proved himself as a real actor with some actual talent (who knew?) -- is kicked right back into the straight-to-DVD action movie ghetto that he's inhabited for the last decade.

Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006)

Scream, like Pulp Fiction two years previous, was a good film that just about ruined an entire generation of movies that came after.

For every genuinely clever, post-modern dissection of the horror genre that followed in the ensuing years (I was always kind of partial to The Faculty), we had dozens of Urban Legends, Disturbing Behaviors, I Know What You Did Last Summers, Screams 2 and 3. The list goes on and on. The horror genre damn near sunk under the weight of all that film-school snark. There were occasional glimmers of something different -- a Blair Witch Project here, a Sixth Sense there -- but Scream and its many one-eyed bastard children left the genre with nowhere to go except torture porn and half-baked remakes of nonsensical Asian spooky-kid movies.

For me, the slasher subgenre itself pretty much died with Scream. Sure, we’ve had a recent run of glossy Michael Bay-produced remakes (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in 2003, this year’s Friday the 13th) and a couple other feeble death-rattles here and there (usually, it seems, starring Eliza Dushku), but Scream showed pretty definitively that slasher films had long before become a parody of themselves.

That, as they say, was that.

So you’ll pardon me if I was a little skeptical when, at a party, I was told about Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon.

The movie purports to be a Blair Witch-style documentary about the title character, a wannabe slasher in a world where Freddy Krueger, Michael Myers, and Jason Vorhees are all real. Leslie -- who seems pretty normal and perfectly charming on the outside, at least until the cracks start to show -- idolizes those guys, and he has set his sights on his own “survivor girl”. Improbably, he has allowed a graduate film student, Taylor (Amanda Goethels), and her crew to follow him around with a camera as he trains for his “special night.”

Hence, we are treated to a scene of Leslie practicing his cardio so he can perfect running while looking as though he’s doing the scary slow walk that masked killers are expected to do without getting winded. He introduces Taylor to his pet turtles, Church and Zoe, and matter-of-factly mentions that he “only keeps pets I can eat.” We meet Leslie’s mentor, a retired (?) 70s slasher who is married to an impossibly hot younger woman (there are strong hints that she was his own once-upon-a-time survivor girl) and likes to sleep in a sensory-deprivation chamber in his back yard. Leslie shows us, from a distance, his own apparently virginal survivor girl, and we get to see how much gosh-darned fun he has freaking her out. He even enlists Taylor and her crew to help him one night behind the diner where Kelly works.

Leslie sees himself as a necessary evil. Without him, his survivor girl would never discover her true potential. In his world view, he’s the psychotic yin to her cherubic yang.

Behind the Mask is a little bit Scream, a little bit Blair Witch Project, a lot Man Bites Dog. If it all sounds way too clever for its own good, it kind of is. But I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. The movie knows its references better even than Scream did, and director Scott Glosserman and co-screenwriter David J. Stieve clearly have more reverence for the genre than actual slasher progenitor Wes Craven (Craven has always seemed pretty ambivalent about his role as horror icon, and he famously only agreed to do Scream if Miramax would finance and distribute his “serious” movie, 1999’s Meryl Streep Oscar bait Music of the Heart).

Behind the Mask actually gets more to the heart of what slasher films really are all about -- where they come from, what they represent -- than Scream did. And it’s funnier.

Unfortunately, when the movie switches in the final act into an actual slasher movie and reveals its “twist” (which any self-respecting horror fan should see coming about three minutes in), it loses some of its steam. Here Glosserman is too reverential. The camera work, music, and acting all feel lifted directly out of any generic late-80s to mid-90s horror movie. But that spark that drove the film forward is gone. In its last twenty minutes or so Behind the Mask feels a little like a star slugger who gets thrown out at home plate because he assumed he’d hit it over the wall and so decided to jog in after rounding third base.

Still, overall, I have to say this one was a pleasant surprise.

Burma VJ: Reporting From A Closed Country (2009)

I think most people in this country, when they heard about the massive political protests in Myanmar, or Burma, back in September of 2007, probably had a reaction similar to mine: "Wow, that's cool."

And when we started getting scattered news reports here and there about the government crackdown on the protesters -- the raiding of monestaries, the beating up and murder of Buddhist monks and university students -- we had the opposite reaction: "Wow, that sucks."

But, because the Fall of 2007 was when Marion Jones had to give back her gold medals for doping, and that Polish guy in Canada died after he got tasered in the airport, and Benazir Bhutto returned to Pakistan after living in exile and promptly got shot, and suicide bombs were going off all over Iraq and Afghanistan ... well, we kind of forgot all about it. If someone mentioned it in a conversation, we probably all pulled some image that we had seen in a news report of some angry monk (like the one pictured above) or some army thugs marching down a city street out of the soup of our subconscious. But, I'd be willing to guess, that image and memory was probably pretty fleeting. And then we were on to whatever else we were thinking about that week.

I'm not trying to be some sort of self-righteous scold, wagging my finger and sniping about how Americans just don't really care about the rest of the world. I'm right there too. We do care, but -- like anyone -- we tend to think we have our own problems. And we did. Iraq and Afghanistan were both getting worse. The economy was starting to look a little rickety. There were the "will he or won't he" questions about whether Obama was going to throw his hat into the presidential ring. Dane Cook was wanting us to go see Good Luck Chuck. Most of us don't even really know where Burma is, or why those monks were so pissed off. So we moved on.

Part of the equation, I think, is the 24-hour cable news cycle. Turn on CNN at any time of day and they're probably gonna have some segment about some shit going down in some part of the world with palm trees and large, Socialist-style concrete buildings. Flip over to Fox and it'll be some pretty blond teenager missing in the Caribbean. It's hard to keep track of who's who and what's what and why we should worry about this story versus that story.

And -- and this may just be me -- if there is news footage available, I instinctually think, "well, it can't be that bad, can it?"

I mean, if they are letting reporters film it, then it's probably pretty contained. Right?

Right?

Wrong.

Of course, I know that. But without actually experiencing what it's like to be a reporter in harm's way, I tend to go to my default happy place and imagine all the shit I've seen in movies. Woody Harrelson in Welcome to Sarajevo. Sam Waterston in The Killing Fields. Handsome, rugged men in fishing vests, carrying large Betamax video cameras, standing in some dingy office while an Army Colonol who probably looks a lot like Craig T. Nelson pounds on his desk and yells at said ruggedly handsome man for making his job more difficult. Call it the Dan-Rather-in-khakhis effect.

The last thing I imagine is "Joshua."

Joshua is the faceless (and nameless) hero of Anders Ostergaard's new documentary Burma VJ: Reporting From A Closed Country. And when I say hero, that's exactly what I mean. Joshua calls himself a reporter, but what he really is is a revolutionary. A native of Burma, he is armed with a little handicam video camera that he has to hide in bags or tucked into the crook of his armpit. He has a network of similarly heroic Burmese "reporters" who do the same thing. They get footage -- ten seconds here, twenty seconds there -- of the myriad brutalities waged by the military junta (affixed with the painfully euphemistic moniker "State Peace and Development Council") that has controlled Burma with an iron fist for the last twenty-some years.

Joshua and his comrades smuggle the footage they can get out of the country, either to Thailand via courier or over the Internet, in the hopes that CNN or the BBC will air some of it and -- hopefully -- spark outrage around the world. They also use a television station in Scandanavia to beam the images back into Burma so the opressed population has an alternative to the state-controlled media that screams about "BBC sabateours!"

If they are caught, they face life in prison. Or death.

Ostergaard's documentary is comprised largely of this footage, and its cumulative power is devastating. Joshua's network happened to be on the ground during the September 2007 uprising (even though Joshua himself was forced to flee the country beforehand and was left to coordinate things from Thailand), and they captured it all in real time. The power of this movie -- much like The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, Kim Bartley and Donnacha O'Briain's 2002 documentary about the attempted coup against Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez -- comes largely from that feeling of watching history unfold right there in front of you. The Burma uprising (and the documentary) starts literally with one man standing on a street corner and holding up a sign before being whisked away by plainclothes military intelligence officers. It ends with hundreds of thousands of Burmese -- including thousands of Buddhist monks -- filling the streets, and the brutal government reprisals that eventually quashed it.

The movie is interesting in its depiction of life under a repressive government. We see hints of it here and there -- the fear in the eyes of Burmese citizens riding a bus, the sudden screeching public announcements that are periodically issued over loudspeakers -- but it's all under the surface, an almost invisible part of life. When the protests start, there is a stark matter-of-factness to them that is jarring and even a little alienating. But things eventually build to a feeling of near ecstasy when it seems that they might work, and then a sense of anger and terror when it becomes clear that "the generals" are having none of it.

It's not a spoiler to reveal that the end result of the uprising was failure, at least in the short term. Monks -- revered by Burmese society -- are brutalized and even killed. Students are beaten and shot. Joshua's "reporters" are taken into custody. But the movie leaves us with a queer feeling of optimism, as Joshua prepares -- undaunted -- to return to Burma and start from scratch. Right or wrong, naive or not, you can't help but feel that it's only a matter of time before he and others like him succeed.

If I have any complaint about this documentary, it's the same one I did with The Revolution Will Not Be Televised and other docs like it: the music. The power of the images and Joshua's voice-over are more than enough without the constant, ominous, and -- frankly -- manipulative thudding of the soundtrack.

But that's a minor quibble. This is one of those must-see documentaries that, if enough people see it, could lead to some real action. Whether that's the case or whether we all have another collective "wow, that sucks" moment remains to be seen.

Clay Pigeons (1998)

I like Vince Vaughn. I always have, even in the first thing I ever saw him in ... which was, unfortunately, The Lost World.

What I've always liked about Vaughn -- and what I feel like filmmakers are only now, since Old School, really starting to figure out how to use -- is the weird mix of movie-star looks, goofy affability, and undercurrent of downright creepiness that he brings to the screen. There's just something a little off about the guy, and it's hard to put a finger on what it is. He's like the neighbor who lives in the apartment downstairs who always has a big smile and a friendly wave, who makes weird noises at night, and who seems like he should be a player with the ladies but who never seems to have a girl around and who you think might actually be some kind of weird diaper fetishist or something. The Psycho remake may have been an embarrasing load of shit, but I thought Vaughn made a pretty excellent Norman Bates.

Clay Pigeons is one of the only other movies I've seen that really takes that Vince Vaughn ... er ... charisma and puts it to maximum use. He plays Lester Long, a guy who may or may not be a cowboy but who is definitely a serial killer.

The movie concerns Clay (Joaquin Phoenix, not doing anything spectacular), a small town mechanic who's been sleeping with his best friend's wife, Amanda (Georgina Cates). When said friend kills himself and tries to frame Clay for murder, things go downhill fast in a way that is very much inspired by the Coens' Fargo and Blood Simple.

This movie is nowhere near as good as either of those. The filmmaking itself is okay, but uninspired. The tone is all over the place, unable to decide if it's a neo-noir crime thriller or a black comedy. Joaquin Phoenix is, well, Joaquin Phoenix. Cates is laughably bad. Scott Wilson looks like he's about to cry every time he's onscreen. About a half-hour in I was getting pretty bored.

But then Vaughn saunters into the movie with his cowboy shirts and ten-gallon had, and that's when the movie takes a left turn and starts to really cook. He's like No Country For Old Men's Anton Chigurgh if Chigurgh had a reedy high-pitched laugh, a wink and a smile, and an easy way with the ladies.

There's no new ground being paved here, but Clay Pigeons is worth catching up with if you remember fondly that whole wave of late 90s indie-style, wannabe-cult crime movies (A Simple Plan, Red Rock West, Out of Sight, etc.) that seemed to spring directly from the loins of Fargo and Pulp Fiction. This isn't the best of the lot, but it's pretty solid. Watch it for the scene where Vaughn tries to seduce Janine Garafolo's snarly FBI agent in the bar, if for nothing else.

Martys (2008)

I'm a horror fan, and I have been since I was about six years old. But, I don't know. Maybe I'm just getting old, but I'm really having a hard time with this newfangled "torture porn" thing.

If you saw Funny Games and were offended, or you thought Hostel went way over the line, I'd suggest that you stay as far away from Martyrs as you can.

That said, this French film (lumped in with the "New French Extremity" movement, which includes filmmakers like Gaspar Noe of Irreversible infamy and Catherine Breillat of Romance and Fat Girl) is meticulously -- if not perfectly -- crafted. Director Pascal Laugier has an eye for the disturbing image that I haven't seen since Takashi Miike (Audition). I can't exactly say I liked this film, but I can appreciate what Laugier is trying to do. This is the rare movie that actually hurts to watch.

We start with young Lucie, a just pubescent girl who has escaped from some sort of torture factory. We see her, covered in blood and bruises, her hair cruelly hacked off, running barefoot and screaming down an industrial street. Believe it or not, this is actually one of the least upsetting moments in the film.

Lucie is sent to an orphanage, where she is clearly still suffering from the trauma of what was done to her and believes she is haunted by some female-looking creature that likes to stab her with things. She manages to make a single friend, a sympathetic (and perhaps more so) girl named Anna.

Cut to 15 years later. A seemingly normal family -- Mom, Dad, two teenage kids -- are sitting down to breakfast. There's a knock at the door. Dad goes to answer. Lucie, now an adult (played by French/Chinese actress Myléne Jampanoï), stands there brandishing a shotgun. Within minutes the entire family is dead. Lucie picks up the phone and calls Anna (Morjana Alaoui) to tell her what she's done.

To say any more would risk ruining a movie that -- as unpleasant as it is -- is full of some pretty ingenious twists and surprises. Even as it gets more and more ludicrous, it is never less than completely engrossing.

It would be easy to dismiss this film as pure sadism. But -- as is the case with one of my favorite novelists, Jack Ketchum -- I think Laugier is up to something else. He rubs our noses in some pretty extreme stuff, but there is always an undercurrent of self-righteous rage to every beating, shooting, stabbing, etc. It's like Laugier is screaming at us: "Look! Look what we're capable of!" without ever letting us enjoy it. The violence is never shocking in the eye-gouging Hostel sense, or amusingly baroque in the Saw sense. It's just brutal. In this respect, I think Laugier has more in common with a thoughtful provocateur like Michael Hanake (Funny Games, Cache, The Piano Teacher, etc.) than someone like Noe, whose meanspirited Irreversible seemed to revel in the cruelties being inflicted upon the characters and the audience alike. Here, you get the feeling that Laugier really feels his characters' pain. And he wants us to feel it to.

I'm not someone who believes watching movies can really do that much to change someone's consciousness. But Martyrs did give me pause, and lead me to reflect a little bit on real world situations like the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and what's happening in Darfur, as well as the real (and underreported) human slave trade in Europe and America. It's easy -- in this age of waterboarding -- to start to view torture and cruelty as something abstract, an idea to be discussed on political talk shows. I give Laugier credit for at least trying to rip the scab off the wound, even if it is only in the context of a really fucked up horror movie.

I'm not going to go so far as to actually recommend this movie. I don't want the hate mail. But, if you've got the stomach for movies like this, you can do far worse.

Star Trek (2009)

First off, let me get something straight. I am not a Trekkie. Or a Trekker. Or whatever else Trekkies have started calling themselves to make themselves feel not quite so nerdy.

If I sound at all defensive about this, it's because I am. For most of my childhood and going into college, people have always automatically assumed that I'm a Star Trek fan. It's not that I have anything against Star Trek, exactly ... it's just that, well, fuck you, no, I'm not a Trekkie!

(Of course, my love of the new Battlestar Galactica and how it, um, made me cry a bunch of times is well documented, so I am fully aware of how silly and hypocritical it is for me to get worked up about the Star Trek thing. But whatever).

So I went into the new Star Trek movie with some concern. I like J.J. Abrams. I thought the trailer looked pretty cool. It seemed entirely possible that I might enjoy this movie. And if I did, what would that mean for my meticulously constructed self image as an irredeemable Treknophobe? Gulp. It's sort of like the gay high-school quarterback who gets to college and realizes he doesn't have to keep acting like a homophobic douchebag because, well, nobody really cares. It may be for the best for everyone involved, but it's still a scary prospect for said quarterback.

So, I finally went and saw the new Star Trek. Not on opening day, of course, where people might see me. I went on a Sunday morning with a couple friends, so I wouldn't feel like some sort of weirdo in a trenchcoat getting off on green alien porn. I sat there in the dark theater and tried to relax.

And, by the time the credits rolled, I felt pretty okay with the whole thing. Sure, I liked the movie. But no, it's not the greatest thing I've ever seen. I didn't get infected with some Trekkie virus. I'm not reordering my Netflix queue to catch up on all the TV seasons and movies I've so far managed to mostly avoid. My identity is safe.

Star Trek is, like Batman Begins, an origin story, and like most origin stories it spends a good portion of its narrative capital setting up the world (or worlds) and reintroducing us to beloved (or, in my case, not so beloved) characters. We meet James T. Kirk (Chris Pine), a ne'er-do-well Iowa farm boy with a dark family tragedy in his past. We meet Spock (Zachary Quinto), struggling from childhood to repress his human emotions in favor of his Vulcan logic. Kirk is recruited by Enterprise Captain Christopher Pike (Bruce Greenwood) to enlist in Starfleet, and we get the sense that he does it at least in part because he likes Uhura (Zoe Saldana), a young cadet who doesn't seem to have much use for him. On the way he befriends a nervous and irrascible young doctor, Leonard McCoy (Karl Urban). Et cetera, et cetera...

And then, like most of these origin stories, Abrams and his writers, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, try to backload a whole bunch of plot in the second half of the movie. This is usually the fatal flaw in films like this, and it is definitely clunky here. But it works better than I would have expected.

What works:

The casting. Almost across the board, Abrams managed to pick actors who are able to embody the essence of who we believe these characters to be without resorting to caricature. I was particularly impressed with Pine's performance as Kirk. As a nonfan I'm probably unqualified to say this, but he feels like Kirk, even though he rarely if ever tries to Shatnerize the role. We get the charm, the fearlessness, the intelligence. But Pine also lays a foundation of hurt and anger that gives Kirk a deeper resonance that I certainly don't remember from any of the other movies (granted, I haven't seen any of them in years ... see, still defensive, right?).

Quinto is also quite good as Spock. Like Kirk, we get the sense of some dark stuff simmering beneath the surface, and when he explodes it's like dynamite.

I enjoyed all the other performances, particularly Urban's McCoy -- which comes the closest to mimicry but is still fun and effective nevertheless -- and Simon Pegg's broadly comic but underused interpretation of my namesake, Scotty. Saldana is effective as Uhura but is unfortunately subject to that great curse of female characters in movies like this: she only seems to exist so that Kirk can want to screw her. Hopefully if there is a sequel they'll find something more for her to do.

The only performance I didn't like was Anton Yelchin as Chekhov. The accent didn't work. At all.

I also have to mention Eric Bana as the baddie, a renegade Romulan ship's captain from the future. This is the type of underwritten but over-the-top role that can be deadly for an actor. I'm not really a huge Bana fan, and I thought he looked kind of silly in the trailer, so I wasn't expecting much. But onscreen it works. Bana personifies all the simmering, under-the-surface rage that Kirk and Spock are trying, in their disparate ways, to supress. He seems to have walked in from a different movie altogether, and he brings a real menace to the role that I found surprising.

The tone: it's sort of de rigueur these days to make these big "reimaginings" all dark and gritty (see Christopher Nolan's Batman movies and Michael Mann's new Miami Vice). Generally, I'm all for that. The darkness and grittiness is a large part of what I love about the new BSG, after all.

But, of course, that's not Star Trek. Abrams, Orci and Kurtzman find the perfect balance between grounding the characters in some sort of emotional reality (or as much as movies like this allow), while at the same time keeping things fun. The humor was especially surprising to me. Pine and Urban bring a lot of levity to their roles, which allows Quinto to brood without getting too precious. Pegg, obviously, is very funny, and even Quinto and Bana are allowed a couple laughs.

I think if they'd gone all BSG with this, the hardcore fans would have rebelled. But they add just enough edge to make people like myself happy.

What doesn't work:

Surprisingly little, as it turns out. As I touched on before, my big beef with the movie is the way they try to cram all the actual (and pretty complicated) story into the end of the film. They manage to construct a plot that ties pretty nicely in with all the backstory, but the beats are rushed and they use the worst possible elliptical technique to dump information: Leonard Nimoy's extended cameo as Old Spock from the Future, sent here (apparently) to magically meet up with Young Kirk and explain a whole bunch of shit to him so that he can go and fulfill his destiny, or whatever. I know it's a bone for the fanboys, but really? Didn't we all learn our lesson from Watchmen?

That said, however, there are only a couple moments here and there where things bog down. Abrams keeps things moving at a brisk if not exactly breakneck pace, and he displays a unique talent for allowing character development to happen in the middle of a big action scene.

Overall, as a nonfan I'd say they did about as good a job on this new Star Trek as they could have. Certainly better than I expected. If you're going to see it though, I'd say be sure to catch it in the theater. I have a feeling that it might not hold up as well on the small screen.