Blood Has Been Shed, Jerry...

Best of 2010

2010-12-20T13:30:00.000-08:00

I'm not going to include the generally required "Worst of" list here because I haven't seen, read, or listened to enough stuff to feel like I reliably know what ate shit the hardest. I will include a couple disappointments, however, things I was really looking forward to that let me down.

Also -- for the same reason -- calling this a "Best of" list is probably somewhat deceiving. I missed a LOT of stuff this year. These are simply the things that stuck out in my mind the most.

Best Movie: Shutter Island

Yeah, I'm surprised by this one too. Looking back at Wikipedia's list of films released in 2010, it's impossible not to be struck by how weak this year really was for movie fans. Granted, I missed the Banksy documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop and I haven't seen The Fighter or True Grit yet, but even if those are as brilliant as everyone has been saying they are, 2010 still sucked the big one for movies.

Objectively speaking, Inception and The Social Network are probably the better movies. But if I'm going to be 100 percent honest I have to say Shutter Island is probably the film I had the most fun with this year. It's minor Scorsese, to be sure, and deeply flawed. But I loved the energy and Scorsese's complete committment to the movie's pulp, overwrought tone and story. You can just feel the fun everyone was having making this. Mark Ruffalo's understated performance manages to anchor an otherwise wildly histrionic experience, and Michelle Williams' gooseflesh-inducing final scene still sticks with me.

Honorable Mentions: The Social Network, Un Prophet, Inception, 127 Hours

Biggest Disappointment: Black Swan

I was really looking forward to this one. The trailer made it seem like it was going to be Darren Aronofsky at his Pi/Requiem For A Dream mind-exploding best. Instead it's merely a decent, mostly watchable thriller with a half-baked script that borrows liberally from much better fare like Repulsion and a central performance (by Natalie Portman) that is one of the most irritating things I've seen onscreen since Jar-Jar Binks.

Best TV: The Walking Dead

The above scene encapsulates everything I love about AMC's new Frank Darabont-produced zombie saga. After too many years of watching my beloved zombies reduced to a joke and a silly punchline in movies and books, finally we get something that -- like Romero's original Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead -- actually takes the idea seriously. Think about it: a zombie apocalypse is about the most horrifying concept anyone can think of. To survive you're not just forced to shoot shambling, flesh-eating ghouls ... you'd have to put a bullet in the brains of your friends, your brothers and sisters, your husbands and wives, maybe even your children.

Zombies aren't funny. Zombies are tragic.

The Walking Dead does for zombies what Battlestar Galactica did for space operas. The show has moments that are truly thrilling and genuinely scary, but the overall tone is one of contemplative sadness. That phrase may not sell the show to the more ADD-prone amongst us, but for a zombie purist like myself it came as a truly welcome breath of fresh air.

Honorable Mention: Sons of Anarchy Season 3

Best Book: The Passage by Justin Cronin

I already wrote a pretty long review of this one, so I won't say too much about it here. Suffice it to say that this book works in much the same way as The Walking Dead. It takes an over-familiar horror concept -- in this case a vampire apocalypse -- and elevates it to something that approaches high art. This book pretty much single-handedly renewed my faith in the possibilities for horror fiction.

And it's the first in a trilogy! I literally cannot wait for the second installment.

Honorable Mention: Full Dark No Stars by Stephen King (you can also read my review of this one)

Biggest Disappointment: The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest by Stieg Larsson

The last in Larsson's immensely popular Millenium trilogy was a decent enough book, but ultimately it was kind of anticlimactic after the superlative The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played With Fire. Lisbeth Salander -- one of the most badass heroines in the history of modern fiction -- spends most her time in a hospital bed or a courtroom. As much as I enjoyed the book, overall I'd have to say it was a big letdown. This is probably because it was not actually meant to be the end of the trilogy, but became so after Larsson's untimely death. Here's to imagining what could have been...

Best Album: High Violet by The National

This came out of nowhere for me. I read a little blurb about these guys in Rolling Stone that said they were influenced by Nick Cave, so I downloaded it from iTunes figuring it'd be something I'd listen to once and forget about. Instead, it hasn't left my earphones for more than two weeks at a time. The album is a simple, gorgeous, and melancholy wonder. I listened to it nonstop while reading The Passage, and I think the pairing improved both the album and the book for me. The second track, "Sorrow," can still bring a tear to my eye if I'm in the right (or wrong) mood.

If you haven't taken the time to listen to it yet, do yourself a favor and give it a spin. If it doesn't pluck at your heart strings, you're probably either a serial killer, a politician, or you work on Wall Street.

Honorable Mention: Grinderman II by Grinderman

Best Home Video Discovery: (tie) Moon (2009) and The Wire (2002-2008)

All I'm going to say is that Moon might be the best movie I've seen in ten years and The Wire is the best television show, ever. You might disagree. But you'd be wrong.

Book Review: "Full Dark, No Stars" by Stephen King (2010)

2010-11-16T19:15:00.000-08:00

Warning: some spoilers below

As much as I love, love, LOVE Stephen King, I'll be the first to admit that, even at his very best, he can be kind of a clumsy writer. Much as King himself described the late, great Robert E. Howard (of the original "Conan the Barbarian" stories), King tends to wield his considerable talent as bludgeon rather than a scalpel.

But, while he will never be a perfect writer, he is -- at his best -- a near perfect storyteller.

Full Dark, No Stars is a case in point.

The problem with Big Steve -- can I call you Big Steve? Thanks -- is that, as soon as he turned into a Bestsellasaurus Rex (his phrase), he appeared to believe that he really didn't need an editor anymore. I've always bristled at the oft-stated cliché that Steve could publish his laundry list if he wanted. But, as much as I hate to admit it, it's true. And, as time went on, the books just got longer...and longer...and longer...

Last year's Under the Dome was heralded by many as a return to form. It garnered (ridiculous) comparisons to The Stand. I disagree. It was good, but it wasn't great. The closest Steve has gotten to greatness in recent years was 2002's From a Buick 8, which -- aside from an absolutely godawful final chapter that I have since tried my best to block from my memory -- was taut, tight, original, and very scary. It was also the shortest book he had published in a long, long time.

Even though he has become so known for his massive, phonebook-sized tomes, with the exception of The Stand(1978), It (1986) and maybe Bag of Bones (1998) , most of them grow more exasperating than exhilarating as they ramble on (two of them -- 1987's The Tommyknockers and 1994's Insomnia -- are damn near unreadable).

This is what makes Full Dark, No Stars the first true King classic in probably about 15 years. It's a collection of novellas, much like the masterful Different Seasons (1982) and the very-good-if-not-quite-masterful Four Past Midnight (1990). This is the length where King is at his best. Most of my favorite King stories -- The Body, Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, Apt Pupil, Secret Window, Secret Garden -- appeared in one of those two books. My other favorite King story, The Mist, is another novella first published in Kirby McCauley's Dark Forces anthology (1981) and reprinted in King's own Skeleton Crew (1985).

Add to that list at least two of the stories in the new collection. This is King at his leanest, meanest, darkest, Bachman best.

The first, longest, and best story in Full Dark, No Stars is 1922. Told in the first person in the form of a written confession by Nebraska Farmer Wilfred James, 1922 is a black-as-pitch examination of how apparent good fortune can lead to catastrophe. Wilfred's wife, Arletta, comes into an inheritance of 100 acres from her dead father. Arletta wants to sell the land and move to Omaha to open a dress shop. Wilfred wants to add the land to his own 80 acres. An immovable force meets and unstoppable object. Eventually (no spoiler here, this is revealed on the first page), Wilfred convinces their fourteen-year-old son, Hank, to help him murder Arletta and dump her body into an old well.

This being a Stephen King story, things go disastrously awry. The punishment meeted out to Wilfred, Hank, and Hank's innocent girlfriend Shannon is as tragic as it is absolutely horrifying. Supernatural elements aside, it's also all strangely plausible, rooted in the truth of 1920s Midwestern farm life.. King is a master at finding horror in everyday objects and situations, and in 1922 such things as a cracked drain pipe and a lady's hatbox gain almost totemic significance.

And, of course, there are the rats. I've never really had a fear of rats before, but I do now.

Steve follows this with Big Driver, a 70s-style rape-revenge fantasy that thankfully stays away from the inherent exploitation elements (Steve depicts the assault itself in just a couple pages, wisely getting in and getting out as quickly as possible) and instead focuses on the trauma and the aftermath. The lead character, Tess, is a semi-successful mystery novelist assaulted and left for dead on her way home from a lecture. Instead of reporting her attack she instead decides to exact her own justice. Steve makes a lot of the disconnect between Tess's fictional, light-hearted murder mysteries and the true horror of what she has experienced.

The story rings some false notes (there are a couple twists and turns that had me shaking my head) and wraps up altogether too neatly, but King paints a portrait of trauma that is both harrowing and heartbreaking, and you'd have to have a heart of stone not to cheer Tess on when her simmering rage inevitably turns to murder.

Fair Extension, the third and shortest story, is the only one that sort of feels like fluff. Streeter is a miserable man in his early 50s dying of cancer. He meets a stranger by the side of the road who may be the Devil himself. Ole' Scratch offers Streeter a deal: he'll give Streeter a "life extension" if he agrees to fork over 15 percent of his income (it seems Satan has lost interest in souls and is instead looking for Caribbean tax shelters). The catch is that Streeter has to pick someone to receive all his bad luck. Streeter picks his best friend from childhood, Tom Goodhough, a successful businessman with a perfect family whom Streeter has secretly hated for decades.

The story is a breezy and entertaining black comedy, but there's very little substance to it. We get to see Streeter's life improve as Tom's falls apart in Biblical ways. That's about it. What I did like, however, is how Steve essentially turns the old Faustian morality tale on its head. We keep waiting for Streeter to get his comeuppance. It doesn't happen.

The book ends with A Good Marriage, which is Steve's meditation on Dennis Rader, the BTK Killer, and how his wife claimed to know nothing of his murderous ways. Probably the less said about this one the better. Again, Steve very astutely stays away from most of the seamy details of the killings and instead focuses on the sheer horror of what it would be like to find out that the sweet, attentive husband you have shared a bed with for more than a quarter-century might actually be a psychopath. The story unfolds in some nice, unexpected ways, and leads to a conclusion that is -- while predictable -- ultimately satisfying. In many ways, it's the quietest of the four stories. It's also probably the most chilling.

I have no illusions that Full Dark, No Stars is going to be the start of a Stephen King renaissance. I'm sure his next book will likely be another bloated, overplotted brick. I'll read it anyway, and I'm sure I'll (mostly) like it. But until then, I'm thankful to have a little taste of the old, transcendent King that I have yearned for for so long.

A few thoughts on the response to "SEND"

2010-11-15T11:47:00.000-08:00

SEND (2010) from Trifecta+ Entertainment on Vimeo.

I sort of feel like trying to write a really good story is a bit like conducting surgery while blindfolded. You hack away at the thing, hoping you don't hit an artery and kill it. You try to find the infected appendix or whatever it is you're looking for by touch alone and take it out.

And sometimes your hand slips and you stick your scalpel into a bundle of raw nerves.

That seems to be what's happened with "SEND."

I went to see a play back in August -- "Trust," by Stephen Dietz -- and I was floored by this one scene. One character confronts another about his infidelity. Glasses are thrown. Accusations are hurled. And my jaw was on the floor.

The actress in that scene was Amelia Ampuero, and I immediately had the thought that I wanted to do a movie with her where I would just put the camera on her face and let her do her thing. It seemed sort of crazy, like something you think about and right away realize won't work at all.

But then -- and this is just the way my brain works, folks -- I suddenly had this image of her covered in blood and talking about eating a rat. To steal my favorite metaphor from Stephen King, my Muse took a big old crap on the top of my head and the idea was there, whole and pretty much fully formed.

That's it. I initially thought this would just be a little web video, something I could post quickly while we were finishing up some of our larger projects. I figured it would be, at most, ten minutes long. I hammered out a draft that came out to about thirteen pages, sent it to a few friends for feedback, and contacted Amelia to see if she was interested.

Once Amelia agreed to do it, I incorporated some of the notes I had gotten from friends and started fleshing out the script. It began to bloat over the coarse of a few drafts, ending up at about twenty pages. A little long for a web video, but whatever. It would still be super easy to shoot, which was what I was looking for at that moment. Some people would stick with it, I figured, and some wouldn't.

As far as the content itself, as I saw the story taking shape I realized this had the potential to be a really striking and unsettling little film if we did it right. I liked that. I thought the movie would fuck with people. That's good. I like to fuck with people.

The shoot went well. Amelia was incredible, as I knew she would be. Mary's makeup was stunning. I started thinking that maybe this was a bit more of a "real" film than I had initially figured it would be.

I sort of knew I had a tiger by the tail when I started editing it last Monday. Amelia's performance was absolutely riveting. I found myself just sitting and watching it rather than working on it.

But I still had no idea.

After I posted it on Friday, I watched as the number of views climbed up to 100...then 300...then suddenly 1,500...3,600...finally over 6,000. Over 80 people reposted it on Facebook. An untold number sent the link to their friends via email. It wasn't exactly viral, but it was on its way.

Then the emails started rolling in. Amongst all the "way to go"s and "that was awesome"s that you expect to get from your friends, I started getting email after email from people I didn't know. Most of them seemed to be from women, many of them mothers. They all told me the movie made them cry. One woman told me that, immediately after watching it, she went and hugged her kids and then called her husband while he was at work to tell him she loved him. Yet another told me the movie was making her "rethink the way I'm living my life."

To which my response was "...uh...what?"

And then I got this email this morning:

"hi. you dont know me. a friend sent me a link to your movie Send and I just felt like i had to write to you to express my gratitude. I felt you made this movie about me. a year ago i split up with my husband. It has been a nasty divorce and i have at times even contemplated suicide, only not doing it because of my kids. but then I saw your movie and it made me realize what is important, and i cannot thank you enough. thank you thank you thank you"

(I wrote back and asked the sender -- who will remain anonymous -- if I could reprint that here. She said yes.)

I just don't know what to say to that.

I don't want to overstate this. I know we didn't cure cancer or anything. We made a movie. I guess all I can say is that I'm absolutely floored, humbled, and completely overwhelmed by the response. As a writer and filmmaker I've never experienced anything remotely like it before.

One thing I absolutely must say, though, is that I refuse to take credit. Sure, I think I wrote a pretty good script. But I had help from friends, who were not shy about telling me what worked and what didn't.

Really, this movie only exists because of Amelia. It was watching her on stage that inspired me to write it, and it was her performance in the film that, I believe, has led to the response that it has had.

And, of course, there's my beloved Trifecta team. There's Mary's makeup. You truly have to see it to believe it. There were Bust's costumes and guns, which is what gives that last scene the boxer's punch that it has. And -- even though I sort of shot this one myself -- there was Corey's invaluable advice and help with the lighting.

Beyond that, I don't really have anything else to say. I really, honestly had no idea. Sometimes you just stick your blade into a bundle of nerves, that's all.

Two new albums by Grinderman and Dead Confederate

2010-09-26T14:36:00.001-07:00

Grinderman - "Grinderman II"

When Nick Cave stepped away from his piano and picked up a guitar in 2005 and started writing the messy, blues-punk songs that eventually coalesced into his 2007 side project Grinderman, it was clear that the dour Australian was looking to break from the bleak confines of The Bad Seeds and have himself a little fun. Grinderman was a welcome departure, even for die hard Seeds fans like myself, completely tossing aside the Gothic melancholia of his regular band (at least in its more recent outings) and harkening back to his snarling days with seminal Aussie punk band The Birthday Party in the early 1980s. With the album's first single, the viciously hilarious "No Pussy Blues," Cave showed the world that he could still cut loose and have a laugh.

Now he's back with Grinderman II. Where Grinderman was a fun but ultimately pretty depthless diversion, the new album is probably Cave's best and most vital new music since the Bad Seeds Nocturama in 2003. At the very least, it's a marked improvement over both the first Grinderman album and the Bad Seeds' somewhat lackluster Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! (2008).

Announcing itself with a roar from the very first track, the absurdly titled "Mickey Mouse and the Goodbye Man," Cave and his crew have managed to craft an album that has all the gnarled, messy punk-rock swirl of their first effort along with the brooding Apocalyptic menace of The Bad Seeds at their best. Whereas Dig had a few good songs sprinkled amongst a lot of filler and Grinderman sort of ran out of steam about three quarters of the way through, Grinderman II stays taut and focused until the very last note. This is music from the id. There's nary a misstep here.

And if you haven't seen it yet, you must check out the completely unhinged video for the album's first single, "Heathen Child" (NSFW). WTF?

Grinderman - "Heathen Child"
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Dead Confederate - "Sugar"

Dead Confederate are a really solid band from Athens, Georgia, who have never quite lived up to the promise of their first self-titled E.P. in 2008. That collection of five songs -- from the gloomy swagger of their first single "The Rat" to the bludgeoning stomp of the E.P.'s closing track "Shadow the Walls -- just came out of nowhere and crushed me. I don't think it left my earphones for about five months.

Their first full length album, Wrecking Ball came out at the end of that year, and had some real highs and lows. They re-recorded "The Rat" and somehow managed to sap the song of its energy, and other tracks like "Yer Circus" and "Heavy Petting" felt like half-baked filler. But they nailed it with "It Was A Rose," "Goner," and "Start Me Laughing." They were sort of dismissed by critics as Southern neo-grunge, but really at their best they were loud alt-country with a bite, displaying aural flourishes drawn from influences as disparate as Skynyrd and Floyd, Nirvana and Joy Division.

Their just-released second album, Sugar, is an odd departure. Noticeably absent are the alt-country touches that defined their sound early on. This record is much more rooted in late 80s/early 90s post-punk -- undoubtably influenced in no small part by their association with J. Mascis of Dinosaur Jr., with whom they toured last year and who makes a guest appearance on the album's first single, "Giving it All Away."

It took me about three listens to decide that this is actually a much stronger album than Wrecking Ball, which for all its assets can be a singularly frustrating experience to listen to all the way through. Where Wrecking Ball featured some real standout tracks but didn't cohere as an album, Sugar doesn't feature any one song that will jump out at you but somehow comes together magnificently as an entire work.

There's something weirdly fractured and unpleasant about this album ... and I mean that as a compliment. The songs drone and crash without any real obvious sense of purpose, but then somehow it all just comes together in the end. There's very little of what you could call a hook anywhere to be found, and yet the album as a whole has a strange momentum and builds a dark, almost schizophrenic mood that, by the end, seeps into your pores. It's what Sonic Youth and Fugazi do at their best.

Unfortunately, the one glaring weak spot on the album is the single. The song just kind of jangles along and then ends without any real impact. The only thing moderately memorable is Mascis's buzz-saw guitar solo. If it hadn't been for that, I would have said they should have just that one on the cutting room floor.

Luckily they've released another video for a much better song, "Run From the Gun." Check it out.

Is it possible to fall in love with a blogger I've never met before?

2010-09-15T18:41:00.000-07:00

Yes.

Hyperbole and a Half, by Allie Bosh

I might be a little late to this party, but this blog is funniest goddamn thing I've run across in a very, very long time. Allie is a multi-talented wunderkind, able to write hilariously disturbing and oddly touching stories and wield MS Paint like it's a weapon.

She's like Don Hertzfeldt, but with more heart.

And she's hot.

I don't even remember how I stumbled across it, but I'm now thoroughly addicted. I want to blame this on the stomach flu that's kept me in bed most of the day, but I've literally gotten nothing done today beyond reading and rereading her posts, perusing the photos on her Facebook page, and secretly plotting how I'm going to move up to Montana and somehow break up her and her boyfriend (what's his name? Duncan? Whatever).

Yes, I am now officially an Internet stalker.

So in the interest of regaining a small piece of my dignity, I'm going to try to pretend that this post isn't merely a desperate ploy for Allie's attention and mention a few of the other blogs and websites that get me through my day.

Fuck You, Penguin

www.fupenguin.com

Sadly, I think this one might be dead. There haven't been any posts since November of last year.

But who doesn't want to yell at pandas and tell them they're stupid? I know I do.

If you haven't seen it, it's worth going through the archives.

Lamebook

www.lamebook.com

This one is alternatingly hilarious, disturbing, and deeply depressing. Sometimes while reading it I'll hurt myself laughing and sometimes I'll tremble in fear and weep for the future of humanity. Usually when I'm done I feel really horrible about myself and the rest of my species.

But it's like crack. I just can't seem to quit.

And speaking of crack...

Cracked

www.cracked.com

Probably my most visited site on the Internet (second to Wikipedia, of course). Funny, weird, and surprisingly informative. I enjoy the videos (particularly the ones by Michael Swain) and the web comics, but it's the lists that keep me coming back over and over again.

Some of my favorites:

5 Popular Zombie Survival Tactics (That Will Get You Killed)
The 7 Most Horrifying Museums on Earth
The 17 Most Unintentionally Hilarious Propaganda Posters

Most of these websites can't really be defended as anything other than a waste of time, but I've found that Cracked is actually great for research and has inspired more than a few story ideas. So suck it.

The Daily Beast

www.thedailybeast.com

Okay, so maybe now I'm feeling a little defensive about my Internet habits. But I do go to this one regularly for my politics and news fix. It's not as up-to-the-minute as The Huffington Post or Politico, but that only gives it the added bonus of having articles that are actually well-written and contextualized.

Playground of Doom

playgroundofdoom.blogspot.com

Hey, I know this guy!

Doesn't matter. I still genuinely get excited every time Dusty posts a new blog. It's like getting a little snark-filled Christmas present in my Facebook inbox.

It doesn't hurt that Dusty and I have similar sensibilities (Inception aside). But I love how he approaches reviews of things as diverse as Machete, Five Easy Pieces, and The Hand with the same snap wit and lack of pretension (a lesson I should probably take for myself), and that he's not afraid to turn the snark on himself.

And -- sorry Dusty -- he's also the ultimate contrarian. He literally does not give a shit what you think. Awesome.

For some other cool blogs written by people I know, check out Cinewise by Gurur Sarbanoglu; A Modern Girl's Guide to Surviving the Apocalypse by Mandy Connor, Dana Horgan, and Bridget Tyler; and The New Jonny Transit Blog by Jon Curtis.

Cee-Lo's "F*ck You" and the joy of a good novelty song

2010-09-01T21:10:00.000-07:00

Cee Lo Green "Fuck You"
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I'm not gonna lie. Cee-Lo's "Fuck You" might be my favorite song ever.

It seems to be a lot of people's favorite song ever actually. Last I heard it had hit something like two million views on YouTube within a week of it's release.

This, to me, is the very definition of the perfect novelty song.

1) It's catchy. Oh, is it ever catchy.

2) It's funny.

3) It's kind of naughty in a "I can't believe he did that" sort of way.

4) It's actually a pretty good song.

So in honor of this monumentally awesome track, here's my list of my top 5 novelty songs of all time.

And no, there won't be any Weird Al Yankovic on this list.

Ben Folds - "Bitches Ain't Shit"

The effete white dude doing the acoustic cover of the hardcore rap song has been a novelty-song cliché since about the mid 1990s, when it seemed like everyone suddenly discovered irony.

I was first introduced to this phenomena as a college radio DJ with Dynamite Hack's cover of Eazy-E's "Boyz N The Hood", which is pretty funny, but Ben Folds actually comes close to transcending the whole idea of the novelty song with this track. The mournful piano actually adds a certain melancholy weight to the rank misogyny in the lyrics. It's funny and ironic, sure, but kind of creepy too.

Anthrax and Public Enemy - "Bring The Noise"

Hard as it is to believe now, once upon a time the idea of a heavy metal band and a rap group getting together to record a song was nearly inconceivable, sort of like Jews for Jesus or Mormons for Jack Daniels and Strippers.

Now, in the post Limp Bizkit wreckage of our sad little lives, whatever novelty was to be had in the concept is long gone. But I still love this song. I don't care what you say.

See also Anthrax's first foray into rap with "I'm the Man".

William Shatner - "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds"

The amazing thing was that, at the time, this wasn't meant to be funny. People thought that this would really turn Shatner into some sort of art poet pop star or something.

Luckily, Shatner figured it out later and has crafted a nice little second career making fun of himself on Priceline commercials and Conan O'Brien.

And speaking of Star Trek...

Leonard Nimoy - "The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins"

The less said about this the better.

Moving on.

Vincent Laguardia Gambini - "Take Your Love and Shove It"

This is my personal favorite on this list. Joe Pesci playing his character from My Cousin Vinnie embarking on a second career as a potty-mouthed lounge singer. What more do you need?

Death and Rock in Seattle: "The Gits" (2005) and "Kurt & Courtney" (1998)

2010-08-31T13:49:00.000-07:00

Seattle was the center of the music universe in the early 1990s. The scene led to maybe the most profound paradigm shift in mainstream rock and roll since the British invasion of the 1960s. Having the words "Seattle band" come before your name could almost guarantee you a record deal. Bands from the scene (most famously Soundgarden, Pearl Jam and Nirvana, but also groups like TAD, Screaming Trees, and the Melvins) repurposed the fury of punk and combined it with the groove of heavy metal to create something new and seemingly vital and, for a short time at least, filling a much-needed void. The musicians were snarly girls with dreadlocks and nose rings and angry guys with stringy hair and goatees. They wore flannel, Converses and torn T-shirts, and they uniformly rejected the lip-gloss-and-leather-pants excess of 1980s cock rock. Bands like Poison and Warrant and Nelson and Winger spasmodically went the way of the Dodo. Earnestness and "authenticity" were fashionable again.

And then it all fell apart.

Two violent events, occurring within about a year of each other, brought about the near immediate death of the scene. The first was the brutal rape and murder of Mia Zapata, lead singer of The Gits, in 1993. The second was the suicide by shotgun of Kurt Cobain, the closest Generation X had to a genuine John Lennon figure.

A pair of critically acclaimed documentaries chronicle these two events. Nick Broomfield's Kurt & Courtney came out in 1998, when the wounds were still pretty raw. Kerri O'Kane's The Gits appeared in 2005, long after the dust had settled.

The Gits is a pretty standard rockumentary tribute to Zapata, combining archival concert footage, photos, and talking heads spouting platitudes about how influential the band was and how amazing a person and singer she was. It's too bad the movie isn't more adventurous, because the subject matter is fascinating. The Gits were one of Seattle's best undiscovered gems, right on the verge of cracking the mainstream, when Zapata was killed. They were a pretty straight-forward hardcore punk band and weren't really part of the adjacent (and largely rival) grunge scene. Zapata's skill as a singer was truly astonishing. She was sort of a snarlier and bluesier Patti Smith, and her powerhouse talent and her generous support of the bands that came in her wake helped give birth to the Riot Grrrl movement (which included celebrated girl punk bands like L7, Bikini Kill, and the direct Gits-disciples 7 Year Bitch).

The first half of the documentary follows the band's rise, from their early days at Antioch College in Ohio to their dominance of Seattle's punk scene. Her former band members expound on Zapata's brilliance, and the musicians from the other scene bands like 7 Year Bitch and DC Beggars talk at length about her influence. It's all fairly banal stuff, with a few amusing anecdotes thrown in (the most charming moment is a clever montage of her various friends lovingly impersonating her gravelly voice). But it's the concert footage that shows the truth of her abilities. I'm sorry, but the woman could sing.

The story takes it's unfortunate turn at Zapata's murder. Zapata was walking home from a bar after spending the night hanging out with members of 7 Year Bitch when she was accosted, beaten, raped, and strangled. The police searched for nearly a decade for the killer, operating on the assumption that it had to have been somebody she knew. Men from all over the punk scene were interrogated, and the women walked around in fear, not knowing if the killer moved amongst them. The camaraderie of the scene was shattered, and -- as one interviewee said -- almost all the bands broke up within a year of her death. The magic, as they say, was gone.

I wanted O'Kane to really dig into the psychology of that dark time, but -- as is the case in the first half of the film -- she's content to just skip over the surface. The only real emotion we see is from Zapata's father (who seems like the best and most loving dad a hardcore punk girl from Kentucky could ask for) and from 7 Year Bitch singer Selene Vigil, who -- years after the tragedy -- seems still shaken by the death of her friend and mentor. But O'Kane just keeps pumping out the platitudes about how awesome Zapata was, and after awhile you're left with the sense that she must have been the Mother Teresa of Seattle's punk scene. No one has a single unkind or complicating thing to say ab out her. I'm sure she was as lovely a person as everyone says she was, but O'Kane never really finds a way to humanize her. She leaves her as a martyr and an idol, not a person.

There's a happy ending, of sorts, when the police finally make an arrest using DNA evidence 10 years after her murder, but the impact of that final turn is muted by the fact that O'Kane never really brings home the pain of her loss.

Still, with all its flaws, The Gits is worth a watch if you have even a passing interest in the subject. As I said, the concert footage alone is worth it.

Nick Broomfield's Kurt & Courtney is the much more stylish film. Broomfield has a much stronger sense of cinematic language, and he largely eschews the conventions of the talking-head documentary. He moves the camera, for one thing, and rather than just showing us the interviews he gives us all the awkwardness of the first meetings and introductions (my favorite is Kurt Cobain's old high school teacher, who yells at the filmmakers as if they're tardy students before finally settling down and agreeing to the interview). This gives the film a lived in, organic feel and adds to the sense of verisimilitude ... which is important considering that Broomfield's film is less a tribute and more a piece of conspiracy-theory agitprop.

"I didn't have an angle on the story," Broomfield says in what has to be one of the most stupendously disingenuous statements in the history of documentary filmmaking. "I was just trying to find my way through it." Yeah. Right. I call bullshit on that one.

Broomfield is an excellent craftsman and he knows how to structure a narrative. In Kurt * Courtney he tells three stories simultaneously: that of Kurt Cobain's rise and fall, that of the Courtney Love's alleged involvement in his death, and that of himself -- the poor camera-wielding David versus the Goliath that is Courtney Love and the Hollywood media machine -- battling to get his film made.

Broomfield's main thesis (although he denies it) is that Courtney Love had Kurt Cobain killed to protect her financial and professional interests. To prove his point, he travels the country (okay, the West Coast) and interviews a bunch of crackpots and junkies, each of whom has his or her own story to tell. The most fascinating are Cobain's clearly drugged-out best friend (who may have been in on the plot, Broomfield slyly suggests), Courtney Love's estranged father (who is convinced she had him killed and is apparently making as much money as he can off the accusations), and -- of course -- Eldon Hoke, otherwise known as "El Duce." Hoke was the lead singer of the notorious "rape rock" band The Mentors (they made GWAR look like a Disney attraction), and he claimed that Love offered him $50,000 to kill Cobain. He lived a squalid, hillbilly existence out in Riverside, CA, and at the time of his interview he looked to be about 39 going on 60. It's not hard to believe this guy could have killed someone, even if his story stinks like a rotting fish in the noon sun. At one point Broomfield asks Hoke how Love had suggested he commit the deed. "Blow his fucking head off!" Hoke shouts, clearly giddy at the idea. "That's the way it's done!"

Interestingly, Hoke was struck and killed by a train just a few days after his interview, which of course threw a whole mess of gasoline on the already raging conspiracy-theory fire.

To be fair to Broomfield, he doesn't really try to convince us that these people are anything but crackpots and junkies, and he gets a lot of narrative mileage out of the growing uncertainty surrounding his quest. "I no longer knew whether anything anyone was telling me was true," he says at one point, and you can just about hear the thunderclap going off on the soundtrack. The only person who seems unquestionably honest is Cobain's beloved aunt Mary, an ever-smiling and hyper religious woman who seems so homespun and saintly as to be almost creepy. I wondered if maybe she had wandered in from a forgotten episode of Twin Peaks.

Broomfield is cut from the same cinematic cloth as fellow agitprop documentarians Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock, and he knows the benefit of having a good villain. When Broomfield finally confronts Love at a swanky ACLU dinner in Los Angeles, it's impossible not to think of Moore raging at GM chairman Roger Smith at the end of Roger & Me. Like most of Moore's movies, this film is shamelessly manipulative, embarrassingly narcissistic ... and pretty damn effective. By never outright stating that he thinks Love killed Cobain and by allowing himself to (on camera, at least) question the veracity of the evidence like a true journalist, he manages to create a pretty convincing argument that, at the very least, the question itself isn't completely insane. He uncovers enough genuinely weird stuff to make one wonder.

And, whether or not she actually had Cobain killed, Love is unquestionably the villain of this movie. Broomfield's idea seems to be that, at the very least, she probably drove him to suicide (another former lover of hers pretty much says as much). No one is going to walk away from this movie mistaking her for a nice person.

Whether or not you believe the conspiracy theories, Broomfield's documentary is pretty interesting and, in its way, genuinely thought provoking. But, please, take it with a grain of salt.

The Girl Who Played With Fire (2009)

2010-08-25T16:57:00.000-07:00

There's been a lot of hype about the upcoming American adaptation of Swedish author Stieg Larsson's international bestseller The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. The film is based on a bonafide literary phenomenon, set in an exotic location (Sweden), and sports an A-list director (David Fincher), a solid movie star (Daniel Craig), and -- now -- a mostly unknown actress (Rooney Mara) thrust into a virtuoso role that has become a feminist icon worldwide.

So -- as all the book's fans go apeshit, both pro and con, about what Fincher may or may not do with this material -- it's easy to forget that these movies have already been made. And been made pretty damn well, at that. The Swedish movie version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is already a major smash worldwide (with over $100 million in box office) and has received a ton of critical acclaim.

The sequel, The Girl Who Played with Fire has just been released in the U.S. and the final, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest will come out in the fall.

I liked The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo well enough, but nowhere near as much as I liked the book. The filmmakers did about as good a job as they could have condensing the massive story into a single film. It was gorgeously shot, well acted, and solidly directed. But it kept me at arm's length in a way that the novel didn't. Somehow I didn't quite connect to the characters the way I wanted to. The whole thing fell just a little bit flat to me.

The Girl Who Played With Fire is an even more ungainly book to try to turn into a film. It has a lot more action, sure, but it's all wrapped up in an absurdly convoluted plot with what seems to be an entire platoon of brand new characters to wrap your head around. Where Tattoo was at heart sort of a standard locked-room mystery, Fire spans all of Sweden and features about eight different storylines all bashing into each other like a massive game of bumper cars.

Don't get me wrong; I absolutely love the book for all its flaws. But I wasn't entirely clear how exactly it could make the jump to the big screen. I was pretty nervous about how it would work.

So it's with a sigh of relief that I can report that not only is Fire a much stronger film than its predecessor, but it's actually an improvement in many ways over the original novel.

The key to the success of both the novels and the films are the two leads: Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), a crusading journalist and ladies' man (and obviously an idealized version of Larsson himself), and Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), a brooding anarcho-punk computer hacker with the iron will of a Roman Centurian and the social skills of a bar napkin. Tattoo was about introducting these two opposites so that they could solve a twisted decades-old murder mystery and, eventually, fall into bed together. They make one of of the most compelling crime-fighting duos since Holmes and Watson, Fraser and Diefenbaker, and Simon and Simon.

Where Tattoo was about bringing Blomkvist and Salander together, Fire is about keeping them apart. Salander's on the run after falsely being accused of murder, and Blomkvist must desperately try to clear her name. Meanwhile, there's a bunch of stuff about sex trafficking, Russian double agents, a lecherous lawyer with a secret, a Swedish biker gang, cops being led down the wrong path, and -- at the center of everything -- a murderous blond giant who can't feel pain and who beats people to death with his bare hands.

Rapace is far prettier and much more voluptuous than Salander is described in the books, and in Tattoo that threw me a bit. Lisbeth is described at being so slight that she's often mistaken for a boy. Seeing the statuesque Rapace fill the role felt a bit like watching Angelina Jolie try to play Hermione or something. That took some getting used to.

Nyqvist looks more the role, but the first time around he just sort of disappeared for me. His Blomkvist in the first movie felt a bit like a sketch rather than a fully developed character, and the heat and eventual deep bond that develops between him and Salander just never quite rang true for me the way it did in the book. And without that bond, there's not much else to hang your hat on.

Fire features a different screenwriter and director (Jonas Frykberg and Daniel Alfredson), and I think they deserve credit for digging deeper and finding that heat that lives at the heart of these stories, which is even more impressive considering that in this film Blomkvist and Salander share a total of about two minutes of screen time together. Nyqvist finally seems to settle into the role, finding the complexities that exist in the books and pushing past Blomkvist's too-cool exterior to the troubled firebrand underneath. He captures both Blomkvist's unyielding sense of integrity as well as his at times alarming and even dangerous well of arrogance.

Rapace is the real revelation, however. She did a fine job in Tattoo, but I had a hard time getting past her beauty, and her makeup and wardrobe felt like a glamour photographer's interpretation of what an anarcho-punk computer hacker should look like. She's just as beautiful in Fire, but Alfredson wisely dresses her down for much of the movie, giving her a stringy mop of hair rather than the hipster coif from the first film, keeping the Goth makeup to a minimum, and generally clothing her in baggy T-shirts and sweatpants. This gives Rapace room to scratch past the surface of the character, cracking through Salander's snarling exterior and showing the aching vulnerability and the deep loneliness that lurks beneath. For the first time, I felt like I was actually watching the Lisbeth I had fallen in love with in the books.

And I have to say I was very pleased with the casting of German actor Mikael Spreitz as Niederman, the aforementioned murderous blond giant who it turns out is much more deeply connected to Salander than anyone could imagine (dah dah DUM!). Nierderman is an absolutely terrifying character in the book, but he could have easily become a cartoon in the film. Spreitz manages to capture not only Niederman's brute physicality, but his viciousness, his intelligence, and his oddly childlike vacantness as well, and all with a bare minimum of dialogue to work with. He turns in a truly towering (pun definitely intended) performance.

But about that lumbering plot?

Larsson wasn't really a master plotter. In Fire in particular, he relied way too heavily on coincidence and narrative convenience. Frykberg and Alfredson do a really stunning job of streamlining his unwieldy text and actually make some very noticeable improvements to the material. They trim the fat and restructure the story subtly so that it feels almost plausible. They establish the many side characters through action and behavior rather than exposition and backstory (until the end, when the backstory becomes crucial to the plot). It's a still a fairly ludicrous story, but at least this time you spend less time thinking about how ludicrous the story is.

Some fans are inevitably going to howl that the film merely skates over the surface of the material and offers a sort of Cliffs Notes version of what Larsson was trying to get at. The film is certainly far less concerned with the political and social commentary that compelled Larsson (an avowed leftist and anti-misogynist) to write the books in the first place. This is to the film's advantage, however, because Larsson's biggest weakness (aside from his at times lazy plotting) was his tendency to launch into eye-roll-inducing speeches to make his points. All that substance remains in the film, but Frykberg and Alfredson simply choose not to bash us over the head with it.

It's hard to know how, if you have only a passing knowledge of the books or the first film, you might respond to this movie. My dad saw both movies without reading the books, and he seemed to enjoy them quite a bit. But I have a feeling many people will be left somewhat cold without the foundation of the books to guide you through all the different characters and the serpentine plot. But I'd say give it a shot, and then go back and read the books for all the cool stuff you missed.

Jonestown: The Life and Death of the Peoples Temple (2006)

2010-08-23T21:51:00.000-07:00

"My wife died in my arms, and my dead baby son was in her arms, and I held her and I said 'I love you, I love you, I love you' because it was all I could say...She died in my arms, man."

"I never believed in Heaven in my whole life, you know, that's not the way I operated. But when I think of Guyana, when I watched the sun rise and stuff, I actually thought there was a Heaven on earth. And now I can't believe in Heaven anymore."

"I ain't never used the term suicide, and I'm not never gonna use the term suicide. That man was killing us."

All three of those quotes are from the closing minutes of Jonestown: The Life and Death of the Peoples Temple, and all come from survivors of the Jonestown massacre, where 900 people commited mass suicide (if you can call it that) at the behest of one of modern history's most infamous and diabolical cult leaders.

Stanley Nelson's 2006 documentary on the subject is pretty standard fare in many ways: lots of archival footage and photos, juxtaposed with lots of people talking. It could have been made by Ken Burns.

It's still likely to be among the most horrifying movies you'll ever see. The film takes us through Jones's life, from his beginnings as the cat-murdering, hyper-religious son of an itinerant alcoholic up through his early days as a pentacostal preacher, to the founding of the Peoples Temple and its subsequent relocation from Indiana to Northern California. Along the way Jones transforms himself from a pretty typical revival-tent preacher to a political powerhouse holding court with San Francisco's liberal power elite to something markedly and diabolically different.

What the film accomplishes so well is providing the context for Jones's rise and fall. He was a product of the Civil Rights movement, and the Peoples Temple at first seemed to be a progressive, integrationist utopia. Jones welcomed everyone: black, white, young, old, clean, sober. But as the years went on and Jones's megalomania, paranoia, drug abuse, and personal depravity began to take over, the Peoples Temple became a world unto itself, a little mini North Korea, belligerent and obsessed with their perceived victimization. When San Francisco's major newspaper finally prepared an exposé of the many abuses taking place within the church, Jones uprooted his followers and shipped off to Guyana, where they went about trying to create a true Communist utopia in the jungles and completely went insane.

We all know what happened next. California Congressman Leo Ryan -- accompanied by a bevy of aides and news reporters -- made a trip to Jonestown at the behest of Concerned Relatives, a group of former Peoples Temple members who still had family caught in Jones's spiral of psychosis. Jones and his followers put on a good show for the congressman, singing and dancing and praising Jones, but when people started passing notes to his aides indicating that they wanted to leave, the shit hit the fan. Ryan was stabbed and then he and several others were gunned down on a dirt airstrip while trying to make their escape. That night Jones compelled his followers to drink the Kool-Aid.

The bare facts of the case are terrible enough, but Nelson managed to unearth a treasure trove of never-before-seen archival footage of Jones and his followers (much of which had been classified by the CIA), and he secured interviews with a number of former Peoples Temple members and survivors of the massacre itself. Their matter-of-fact analysis of what happened -- what drew them into the Temple to begin with, and how it all went wrong -- will make your heart ache and your skin crawl. Jones was a charming but truly depraved individual, and some of the details of what he and his most hardcore followers perpetrated -- both at Jonestown and before -- are absolutely gut-wrenching to hear.

The footage of Ryan's visit and his subsequent murder is equally riveting, and the way Nelson assembles it you'll feel almost as though you're watching the events unfold in real time. After the Jonestown inhabitants throw a massive (show) festival for his delegation on his first (and only night) in Guyana, Ryan addresses the crowd with a big politician's smile and tells them that, from what he has seen, Jonestown appears to be the best thing that has ever happened for them. The crowd erupts in spontaneous cheers and applause that builds in intensity until it resembles one of Hitler's rallies at Nuremberg. Ryan stands there with that smile still plastered as his face, waiting for the din to die down, and the look of horror that slowly fills his eyes the true insanity of what he is witnessing sinks home is absolutely chilling.

The true show-stopper -- and the thing that will likely keep you awake at night -- are the never-before-released audio recordings of the suicide itself. I think most of us probably always assumed that Jones's followers went placidly and lemming-like to their deaths. This couldn't be further from the truth. Many were compelled to do so at gunpoint, and those who resisted were either shot or had the poison injected directly into their mouths.

Really, you don't know horror until you have heard 900 dying people (including children) screaming and crying as Jones intones "Please, please, die with a degree of dignity. Quickly! Quickly! Quickly! Quickly!"

This is the second time I've seen this documentary, and what struck me this time is how skillfully Jones -- an avowed Communist who admitted towards the end that he was using the trappings of religion solely to suck people in -- went about creating a true Stalinist dystopia. Like Orwell's Animal Farm, you could view the rise and fall of The Peoples Temple as a little microcosm of the Soviet Union. His methods -- the literal cult of personality, the purges, the eventual forced collectivisation and church (state) controlled production of goods, the culture of paranoia, and Jones's increasingly militant public broadcasts -- were taken directly from Mao/Pol Pot/Kim Il-Sung playbook.

Jonestown: The Life and Death of the Peoples Temple is a truly disquieting look at how one charismatic psychopath can turn nearly 1,000 people's good intentions into a slaughterhouse.

New blog

2010-08-18T20:12:00.000-07:00

Hey guys. If you're interested, I'm starting up another blog where I'll be periodically posting some of my short stories, both new and old. Some of these stories go back more than fifteen years!

I've got about thirty old shorts sitting on my computer. I'll probably try to post about one a week.

The blog is called "Dead People Talking," and you can read the first post by clicking the scary dude below:

Top 5 horror movies (you've probably never seen)

2010-08-17T15:26:00.000-07:00

Okay, so it might be a little harder to avoid zombies on this list. But I'm gonna try.

The Changeling (1980)

Directed by Peter Medak
Starring George C. Scott, TrishVan Devere

A classic, atmospheric, and almost bloodless ghost story that carries hints of 70s political thriller, The Changeling stars George C. Scott as a celebrated composer who relocates to Seattle after the death of his wife and daughter in an auto accident. He leases a mansion from the local historical society and...yep...discovers that his new house is haunted.

There's nothing strikingly original about this movie, but what sets it apart is the level of craft that went into making it. Director Medak knows how to milk a quiet beat for all its worth, and he knows how to pull some real dread out of the simplest images. Even a rubber ball bouncing down the stairs is turned into one of the scariest shots you'll ever see. Trust me.

And if you try to tell me later that you didn't leak a few drops into your undies during the seance scene, I'm going to call bullshit on you. Liar.

Exorcist III (1990)

Directed by William Peter Blatty
Starring George C. Scott, Brad Dourif

Wow, another George C. Scott movie. I could just make this list my top 5 horror movies starring George C. Scott.

On second thought, I'd be compelled to mention Firestarter and none of us wants that.

Anyway, I can smell your skepticism coming at me through your computer screen like a wet fart. Trust me, this is a good movie. It was written and directed by the original author, and it's connection to the first film is tangential at best.

What Blatty does so well here is not shy away from the long take or the extended monologue and/or dialogue scene...two things you almost NEVER see in horror movies anymore.

And this is the film that cemented Brad Dourif as one of my all time favorite actors. Just check this shit out:

That's the stuff right there.

John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness (1987)

Directed by John Carpenter
Starring Jameson Parker, Donald Pleasance

The second in Carpenter's so-called "apocalypse trilogy" (falling in between 1982's The Thing and 1995's In The Mouth Of Madness), Prince of Darkness is generally considered the weakest of the three (although Mouth certainly has its detractors).

And generally I'd agree. A lot of this movie doesn't work. For one, casting one of the Simons from Simon & Simon as your lead is, in retrospect, a good way to date your movie. And much of the plot is simply confounding.

But Carpenter lands on enough solid ideas and images here to make it worth a watch. It will definitely get under your skin, even if you don't have any idea what the hell is going on. And it's about as successful as updating Lovecraft -- in spirit if not in fact -- for the modern era as any other film I can think of.

And, besides, it has Alice Cooper in it. So how bad can it be?

Parents (1989)

Directed by Bob Balaban
Starring Randy Quaid, Mary Beth Hurt

You read that right. This movie was directed by Bob Balaban.

And yes, I mean this Bob Balaban:

If that's not enough to intrigue you, then hopefully the concept of a young boy in the 1950s discovering that his perfect suburban parents are, in fact, cannibals, will do it.

You'd be forgiven if, reading the above plot description and looking at the movie poster, you'd think that this was Balaban slumming while doing some Troma-style splatterfest. You'd be forgiven, but you'd also be wrong. This movie is damn near an arthouse film. It's slow, understated, and it very effectively puts you inside the subjective reality of a little kid who may or may not have an overactive imagination. And it's actually pretty damn creepy.

Good luck finding it, though. I saw it once about 15 years ago when a friend and I rented a worn out VHS copy up in Paonia Colorado. I think it was out of print even then, and it never made the jump to DVD.

Martin (1977)

Directed by George A. Romero
Starring John Amplas, Tom Savini

Hey look, I made it all the way to the end without including a zombie movie!

However, this masterful vampire flick was written and directed by the godfather of all zombie movies, George A. Romero. he made this one between 1968's Night of the Living Dead and 1979's Dawn of the Dead.

Like Parents, Martin is a surprisingly understated movie, more rooted in psychological drama than straight-out horror. Martin (Amplas) is an awkward young(?) man who believes himself to be an 84 year old vampire. He's been sent to Pittsburgh to live with his Old-World cousin (Elyane Nadeau), who has taken it upon himself to save Martin's soul before killing him.

We never really know for sure if Martin is, in fact, a vampire. It doesn't matter. The unknown Amplas manages to maintain our sympathy, even when he see him killing people and then "doing the sexy stuff" with them after.

What Romero gives us here is a delicately realized character study of a damaged and psychotic man, whether he be an immortal bloodsucking fiend or just a troubled youth from one of the world's most royally fucked-up families.

Honorable Mentions

Carnival of Souls (1962)
The Signal (2008)
Jack Be Nimble (1993)
Session 9 (2001)
The Brood (1979)

Top 5 horror novels (you've probably never heard of)

2010-08-11T14:12:00.000-07:00

Picking up where I left off with my last post, here's my list (in no particular order) of the top five horror novels you've probably never heard of.

Again, no zombies.

Thomas M. Disch - The M.D. (1991)

If John Irving ever decided to write horror, he might come up with something like this.

Thomas M. Disch started his career as a fairly celebrated author of "outsider" science fiction back in the 1960s (The Genocides and Camp Concentration being his two most well-known books) before switching to horror in the 1980s and 1990s and penning an equally celebrated quadrilogy of novels set in his native Minnesota.

The Businessman (1984) is the first and probably the best known of these, but he really hit his stride with The M.D.. It's a bizarre Magnificent Ambersons by way of Stephen King sort of book that follows a young boy named Billy Michaels from his Kindergarten days up through his teen years and ending with his massive success (and downfall) as a celebrity doctor.

Early on, Billy meets a figure that appears to him as Santa Claus but later reveals himself to be the Greek god Mercury. Mercury gives Billy a caduceus -- a twig wrapped in snakelike vine, with a mummified bird tied to the top -- that grants him the power to heal. The catch is that for ever person he heals, Billy has to recharge the caduceus by causing someone else harm.

The M.D. is at once epic and deeply intimate, and the details of Billy's life and his eccentric, dysfunctional family are finely drawn. It's also a viciously cynical book that alternates between some truly disturbing images and ideas, unexpected pathos for the characters, and Disch's razor-sharp and sometimes cruel sense of humor. The inevitable tragedy in the last third of the book is Shakespearean in proportion, but you never lose the sense that Disch is cackling all the way to the last page.

Ramsey Campbell - The Doll Who Ate His Mother (1976)

Campbell is a British writer who is absolutely revered by horror fans and virtually unknown by everyone else. The Doll Who Ate His Mother is his first novel, and not his best. But there's something about the youthful naivete behind the prose that is fascinating and more than a little disturbing. Campbell comes up with some pretty squalid ideas and images here, and he doesn't quite seem to realize it. I don't know why, but there's a certain charm in that for me.

The story concerns a young Liverpudlian woman, Clare, who is involved in a terrible car accident. Her brother is killed, and a mysterious figure runs off into the night with his severed arm.

Later, a sleazy true crime writer who believes the arm snatcher to be a former childhood friend of his aproaches Clare and enlists her help in tracking the man down.

This story is structured more like a mystery, but there's something weird and feverish about the prose that elevates it to the realm of dark fantasy, and the details as we learn them grow increasingly nasty, definitely tipping the scales toward horror. This isn't a particularly gory or violent book, but there's something pervasively icky about it all the way through. "Quiet depravity" is the best phrase I can think of to describe it.

Jack Ketchum - The Girl Next Door (1989)

I don't usually recommend this book, for fear that people will lay siege to my house with pitchforks and torches.

A fictional retelling of the Sylvia Likens story, The Girl Next Door is one of the most brutal, violent, and harrowing books I've ever read. It's like American Psycho if Patrick Bateman was a 12-year-old kid and without all that business about expensive shampoo, fancy restaurants, and Whitney Houston.

What makes this novel so effective, however, isn't the depravity (which Ketchum actually toned down a bit from the true story) but the seething sense of outrage that boils beneath Ketchum's matter-of-fact prose. Ketchum explained in the forward to the novel's reissue that he rarely writes supernatural horror because people are what scare him, and that his response to being scared is to get mad. When you read The Girl Next Door, you'll believe it. As vicious as it is, there's nothing exploitive about it. And when -- preceeding a particularly nasty bit of violence -- the narrator breaks the fourth wall and tells us that he simply can't bring himself to describe what happened, you get the sense that it's Ketchum addressing us, not the character.

Phil Rickman - Curfew (1993)

Known as Crybbe in the UK (I guess the publishers thought American audiences wouldn't go for a book titled with some strange Welsh word), Curfew is one of those pretty classic "strange shit happens in a rural town with dark secrets" sort of stories that horror novelists have been milking at least since the days of H.P. Lovecraft.

Crybbe is a little Welsh backwater nestled mere kilometers from the English border. The only distinguishing features are the Tump, a prehistoric man-made mound of indeterminate purpose, and the odd ritual of ringing the bell in the church tower every night to signal an ancient curfew.

Max Goff is a ruthless and impossibly rich record producer from London who descends upon the town with two ambitions: to resurrect the ancient standing stones that have been methodically removed over the centuries and to stage a huge, kickass rock concert celebrating the spirit of the Earth or some other such New Age bullshit.

Goff hires a local dowser to find the original locations of the standing stones. When the dowser is killed in a mysterious car accident near the Tump, he proceeds undeterred. The townspeople grow more and more nervous as the concert date approaches.

And then, of course, hijinks ensue.

What sets this book apart from all the others like it is the way Rickman, a truly masterful writer, evocatively draws us into the world of the Welsh/English borderlands and lets us get to know its many dour inhabitants before ever-so-slowly ratcheting up the creep factor to near excruciating levels. This is one of those long, rich books that you can just live inside of for weeks.

T.E.D. Klein - The Ceremonies (1984)

T.E.D. Klein is a semi-mysterious and somewhat legendary figure in the horror world. He is strikingly non-prolific, having published only two books, The Ceremonies in 1984 and a collection of novellas titled Dark Gods the following year. He's also really, really, really damn good.

I actually prefer Dark Gods to this book, so if you're interested check it out here. Regardless, The Ceremonies stands tall as one of the few unacknowledged masterpieces of "literary" horror.

The book is split into two parallel stories. The first follows Jeremy, a graduate student in literature who moves to a seemingly idyllic town in New Jersey dominated by a strange religious cult to work on his thesis. The second concerns Carole, a naive young woman trying to make her way in New York City. Both characters are linked by an odd and menacing little old man named Mr. "Rosie" Rosebottom.

Over the course of more than 500 pages, the two stories gradually (excruciatingly so, some might say) converge as we come to learn more about Rosie's demonic agenda for both Jeremy and Carol.

Klein is a deliberate and understated writer whose work echoes not only Lovecraft, but the classic dark fiction of authors like M.R. James and Algernon Blackwood. If you're looking for quick and cheap scares, this isn't the book for you. But Klein's prose has a way of burrowing slowly and surely under your skin. The only other writer I can think of who does this better is Patrick McGrath. You'll find, as you turn the pages, that it's the smallest little details that make your skin crawl, and it's the accumulation of these details that eventually builds into a surprisingly affecting novel that is bound to stick with you.

So long as you stay with it, that is.

Honorable Mentions:

Thomas Tryon - Harvest Home
Fritz Leiber - Our Lady of Darkness
Poppy Z. Brite - Drawing Blood
Thomas Tessier - Rapture
Kim Newman - Jago
John Skipp and Craig Spector - The Scream
Joe R. Lansdale - The Nightrunners
Dan Simmons - Carrion Comfort
Bari Wood - Doll's Eyes
Robert Marasco - Burnt Offerings

Inception (2010)

2010-08-07T23:52:00.000-07:00

Warning: Mild Spoilers

I had to think about this one for awhile before I wrote about it.

Say what you want about Christopher Nolan's new epic Inception. Bloated, sure. Confusing, absolutely. Overcooked, probably. Does it all work? No.

But you can't deny the ambition behind it. It's a film that was clearly made by an intellectually curious mind genuinely trying to discover something new. For a Hollywood summer blockbuster with a budget topping out at $160 million in this age of megastupid crap like G.I. Joe and Transformers, that's damn near miraculous.

I'm not even going to try to sum up the plot, because to do so would be an act of pure futility. Most of you, if you haven't seen it, probably already know the basics: Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a Man With A Past who makes a dubious living hacking into the dreams of corporate scions and stealing information. This heist-of-the-subconscious is called "extraction." But then he's made an Offer He Can't Refuse by a Japanese energy tycoon (Ken Watanabe) and assembles a team to do the seeming impossible: hack into the dreams of the heir (Cillian Murphy) to a rival corporation and plant an idea rather than to take one. This is called, predictably enough, "inception." So Cobb hires an architect (Ellen Page) to design the dream, and a bunch of other dudes to do some other stuff. And we're off to the races.

Nifty idea, right? And kind of unworkable, when you get right down to it. In the hands of a lesser talent (say, oh, I don't know, Michael Bay), it would have been a big steaming mess. But going in I knew that if anyone could make sense of this, it would be Christopher Nolan.

Rather than try to dissect what this movie's doing or make sense of it (which, until I see it about eight more times, would be pretty much impossible), I'm just going to list what I thought worked and didn't work.

1. Dream Reality

Some critics are knocking this movie for not really pulling off the "dream logic." I think this is kind of a bullshit criticism, to be honest. Dreams are inherently impossible to capture within a narrative, filmic context. As soon as the imagery is made literal by a camera, the whole thing falls apart. The only two films I can really think of that come close to capturing the sheer insanity of what a dream actually is are Adrian Lyne's Jacob's Ladder and David Lynch's Lost Highway. All the other attempts I can think of have always felt overly schematic to me.

Nolan -- as schematic a filmmaker as has ever existed -- knows this, I think she he's not really going to try. Inception doesn't attempt to capture the chaos, absurdity, surrealism, and naked emotional force of our most powerful dreams. Rather, he presents an off-kilter constructed reality more similar to what we get in The Matrix. And this is the point. These aren't "dreams" as we're accustomed to thinking of them. They are created, by the characters and for a very specific purpose. We are given levels within levels within levels of reality, one inside the other like those Russian nesting dolls, as we descend deeper into Murphy's (and, simultaneously, DiCaprio's) subconscious.

It's no accident that the whole concept of "architecture" plays a major thematic and narrative role here, and the constant imagery of stairs and elevators reinforces this. It's not about experiencing a dream-state, but rather deconstructing the very idea of reality, time and perception, and in an analytical way. This has been Nolan's obsession (even in the Batman films) since he began making movies. Go back and rewatch Following if you disagree.

2. Story Structure

This is where Nolan really lives and breath, and in that sense the screenplay to Inception is meticulously crafted. It's not really a puzzle movie the way Memento is, but it's incredibly dense and has about a million moving parts to keep track of. It's pretty amazing how clear Nolan is able to keep everything. Unfortunately, the only way he seems to be able to do this is to resort to a nearly constant stream of exposition. But whatever. Like he himself said recently in an interview, heist films are the only types of movies where the excitement itself comes from the exposition. It's about knowing the details of how everything's supposed to work, and then seeing it all fall apart. And at it's heart, Inception really is a heist movie.

3. Character Development

I -- and many others -- have always said that this is Nolan's weakness. A Christopher Nolan film is all about the ideas, and the characters sort of exist to further those ideas. As such, they are often only half-alive. In Inception DiCaprio's main personal motivation mirrors that of Leonard (Guy Pierce) in Memento. Each man is trying to deal with the grief and the guilt of losing his wife (Jorja Fox in Memento, Marion Cotillard here). In both films, the emotional resonance of the personal tragedy is subsumed by the need to use the tragedy to propel the plot.

Personally, I'm okay with that. I give Nolan a bit of a pass here. I don't go to one of his films expecting to have my heart strings plucked. His movies are about the head and not so much about the heart.

What saves him is his ability to attract top-notch actors who manage to pull what heart they can out of the thin writing. Pierce managed to turn in a pretty devastating performance in Memento that builds slowly over the course of the film. I'm always surprised every time I watch it how affecting it actually is.

The same is true here. DiCaprio doesn't have the light touch Pierce did. He broods, Christian Bale-style, pretty much from the first frame, whereas Pierce made the more interesting choice to play laconically against Leonard's inner turmoil, thereby making the moments of intensit, where the turmoil manifests itself pop that much more. But DiCaprio brings an intensity to his best work that can be utterly gripping (see The Departed and Blood Diamond), if a little one-note. I would have preferred something a little less scowly -- less Marlon Brando and more Robert Mitchum -- but overall I'd say it mostly works.

Cotillard, in the thankless role of the dead wife who exists only in Cobb's mind, manages to be incandescent in every scene, and with very little to do. I have to admit I fell in love with her a bit myself here. It's because of her that this movie is as powerful as it is.

I also have to give a shout-out to the future Mrs. Scotty Milder, i.e. Ellen Page. I've pined for her pretty much since Juno (I know, I know. At least I didn't say Hard Candy). Her character here is pure plot, but she still provides that light touch that is so sorely missing from DiCaprio's performance. Long story short, I love her. The end.

Everyone else is uniformly strong, particularly Tom Hardy (Bronson) as the most roguishly charming of DiCaprio's fellow dream hackers. The only disappointment for me was Joseph Gordon-Levitt. He's okay, but I've become so accustomed to him being great in things like Brick and The Lookout that he underwhelmed me.

4. The Special Effects

What can I say? The Dark Knight really established Nolan as a A-list action director, and it did so with a refreshing dirth of "look at me Ma!" CGI. There's more in Inception, but Nolan wisely keeps it to a minimum. Many of the most impressive set pieces -- the fight in the rotating hallway, the van plunging into the water, the avalanche -- were done practically.

When Nolan does go for the big CGI sequence, he goes all out. We've all seen that shot of Paris folding up on itself in the trailer (which is too bad, really, because it kind of takes away from the "wow" factor when you actually see the movie). The ruined city-scape toward the end is truly mind blowing. And there's one shot involving a train (if you've seen it you know what I'm talking about) that actually made me recoil in my seat. But he uses this stuff only when he has to. Nolan has proven himself to be a real visual stylist, and he knows how to use his big bag of tools effectively and sparingly, to propel his ideas rather than simply show off.

5. The Music

I'm usually not a fan of huge crashing soundtracks. I may be the only person on earth who kind of can't stand John Williams' score for Star Wars. So I was surprised by how effective I found James Horner's work here. Once the movie really gets going the music never lets up, which normally would drive me batshit, but for some reason it actually added to the experience here. I can't really say why. I have a feeling, though, that it might irritate me on repeat viewings.

So that's my very broad take on Inception. I don't think it's the ground-breaking, awe-inspiring masterpiece that so many people claim it is. I also don't take the contrarian view that it's an overblown piece of shit (sorry Dusty). In the end, if I was to grade it, I guess I'd give it an A-, with several points added for the sheer balls it took to get it made in this environment. This is a huge summer movie that you can actually talk about once it's over. I'll give my kudos for that every time.

Top 11 songs about heartbreak

2010-08-07T15:12:00.000-07:00

I was in Los Angeles about a week ago and I rented a car. I forgot to bring my auxiliary cable for my iPod, so until I was able to make it up from Culver City to the Radio Shack in Hollywood, I was stuck listening to LA radio.

Whoever had the car before me left it on some hip-hop/R&B station. I don't remember much about the song, but suffice it to say that it featured an Usher clone going on and on about how he wanted some girl back who he had screwed around on. The song was so syrupy, sophomoric, and overproduced as to be laughable, and it reminded me of this:

NSFW due to David Cross ass at the end, among other things

I giggled all the way up La Cienega to 3rd Street, at which point Kanye came on and I shut the radio off. But that song -- along with my earlier post about the five albums that changed my life and my newly rekindled obsession with Jim Croce -- got me thinking about hearbreak songs, and how hard they are to do well. No genre of popular music is more susceptible to cliché and unintentional hilarity.

Occasionally, however, a musician manages to find that nerve and work it like a boxer working a kidney. You try to resist, but by the end you're reduced to a blubbering mess.

So here, in no particular order, is my list of the heartbreak songs that actually kinda work:

Jim Croce - "Operator (That's Not The Way It Feels)"

I already talked at length about Croce in my last post, so I'll try to keep this short. What makes this song so effective is the specificity of the story. It's just a guy talking to a telephone operator and wanting to place a call to his ex-girlfriend. We don't know anything about their relationship, other than that she ran off with his "best old ex-friend Ray." We don't know what happened or who was at fault, so we're able to imprint our own experiences onto the back story. Meanwhile, we're just left with this guy, standing in a phone booth and trying to talk himself into making a call that, deep down, he knows he doesn't want to make. He wants to wish her well, let bygones be bygones, but he just can't do it.

"Operator, can you help me place this call? Because I can't read the number that you just gave me," he says. "There's something in my eyes, you know it happens every time."

We've all been there, in some fashion, I would guess.

In the end, he tells the operator to forget it. "You can keep the dime," he says. No lyric has ever summed up the resigned defeat that follows a nasty breakup better than that.

Johnny Cash - "If You Could Read My Mind"

Sometimes it's really not the song itself, but rather the person singing it and what their own story brings.

Just before he died, Johnny Cash recorded this cover of Gordon Lightfoot's...uh...classic from the early 1970s. The lyrics are interesting, but are the sort of abstract singer-songwriter stuff you found a lot of in that time.

But if you listen to this and remind yourself that Cash was nearly blind and bedridden when he recorded it, a broken man who was still mourning the death of his wife of 35 years, June Carter Cash...well, worlds open up.

The delicate guitar, the plaintive strain of his haggard, old man voice ... Don't tell me that when he sings "But stories always end/And if you read between the lines/You'll know that I'm just trying to undersand" he's not thinking about June and his own imminent death.

The Ramones - "The KKK Took My Baby Away"

And now for a change of pace.

This is another one where the song itself is really secondary to the back story. Anyone who knows anything about the Ramones knows that uber-leftie Joey and super-rightie Johnny really, really, REALLY hated each other. They hated each other pretty much from the start, but things only got worse after Johnny stole Joey's girlfriend. So Joey wrote this song out of revenge. And Johnny knew it. And they stayed in the band together for years afterwards.

This isn't one that's likely to make you misty eyed. But imagine these guys onstage at CBGBs doing this song and staring daggers at each other, and at the very least it should make you pretty uncomfortable.

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - "Still In Love"

This is the second creepiest song that's going to be on this list (wait for the next one). It starts with a mournful, tinkling piano and a droning guitar, and then Cave comes in with this:

"The cops are hanging around the house/ Cars outside look like they've got the blues/ The moon don't know if it's day or night/ Everybody's creeping around with plastic covers on their shoes..."

Um, what?

The song goes on for awhile, and then we get to the chorus -- "you might think I'm crazy/ but I'm still in love with you" -- and that's when you realize the song is about a murder-suicide.

And then you go take a hot shower.

Moving on...

Pink Floyd - "Don't Leave Me Now"

If that last one didn't give you the shivers, this one (off of "The Wall") is bound to.

Coming after the shrieking rock-star freakout of "One Of My Turns," we find Pink (Bob Geldoff in the movie, probably Syd Barrett in real life) begging his girlfriend (or wife, maybe) not to leave him.

The music drones and drones and drones, and Roger Water' warbles lines like "Oh babe...don't leave me now...how could you go...when you know how I need you...to beat to a pulp on a Saturday night...OH BABE...WHY ARE YOU RUNNING AWAY?"

I can't think of another song that feels like a more thorough portrait of insanity. I'm guessing that Mel Gibson can relate.

Brenda Lee - "I'm Sorry"

This one is kind of hard to explain. It's definitely schmaltzy. But something about the combination of her voice, the crooning chorus behind her, and the melancholy violins just sort of plucks at my heart strings. What can I say?

I also find it interesting that it's pretty clear in the subtext that it's about how she screwed around on somebody. That seems kind of daring for a pop song of that era.

Lefty Frizzell - "Long Black Veil"

Country music offers some of the worst offenders in the cheesy/clichéd heartbreak genre. It almost seems as though a secret cabal in Nashville issued a decree sometime around 1953 that no songs would be allowed that didn't involve a cowboy crying into his beer and/or moaning about how his woman done him wrong. All other ideas are penned up and shipped off to the musical equivalent of Siberia.

But occasionally a good one kind of sneaks in under the fence and makes a break for it.

The neat trick of this one is that it's a ghost story, and the heartbreak isn't the narrator's (he's dead), but rather belongs to the woman he left behind. He looks on from up above (or from down below...he did screw his best friend's wife, after all) and relates the story with a cool, wistful detachment that somehow makes the tragedy hit home that much harder.

It's Frizzell's laconic delivery that makes the song work. I've heard covers -- even Johnny Cash's -- which play toward the melodrama rather than against it. Frizzell just gives us the facts, and in doing so he manages to craft a song that is both creepy and strangely powerful.

Charley Pride - "Does My Ring Hurt Your Finger"

Here's another one, like the Jim Croce song, where the simplicity of the story really works in this song's favor. And, like Frizzell, Pride's uninflected vocal performance gives it a weary, almost cynical edge that plays nicely against the minefield of clichés that accompanies all of these country ballads.

The National - "Sorrow"

"Sorry's my body on the waves/ Sorrow's a girl inside my cave/ I live in a city sorrow built/ It's in my honey, in my milk..."

That kind of achingly twee sentiment could have made this song go horribly awry, but when coupled with the minimalistic approach to the music and singer Matt Berninger's softly rumbling baritone, the feeling the song evokes is of the quiet hollowness that accompanies heartbreak rather than the drama of the heartbreak itself.

The central idea is summed up in the chorus -- "I don't want to get over you" -- and the music builds to just enough of a swirl around it to drive that sense of loss home, while keeping restrained and staying just a few steps shy of sentimentality.

Altogether, this is one of the most beautifully rendered sonic portraits of a man lost in the sea of his own regrets that I can remember.

The Beatles - "Rocky Raccoon"

This may seem an odd choice. I think most people look at this song as a gentle parody of the type of cheeseball country ballad I was lamenting before.

But, like the Brenda Lee song, there's just something about McCartney's voice and the simple, melancholy guitar that makes this one resonate for me in a way that even McCartney himself probably didn't intend. He pretty much drops the satire as soon as he stops aping Merle Haggard after the first few verses and slides effortlessly back into his trademark falsetto. As goofy as it is, this manages to be a weirdly affecting song about a poor kid who tries to stand up for the woman he loves and gets a bullet in the side for his trouble.

The Pogues - "Fairytale of New York"

I don't think I even need to say anything about this song. It's essentially perfect. I could listen to this, and only this, for the rest of my life and be perfectly happy.

In Memoriam: Edwin Houston Harrison, 1908-2010

2010-08-04T13:18:00.002-07:00

Hey, guys. I hope you'll indulge me a little bit here.

My grandfather, Edwin Houston Harrison, passed away last night at the age of 102.

I kind of wanted to say a few things about him. Okay, a lot of things. This is sort of a weird venue, I guess, but it's the only one I have. So here goes.

Like most people, I imagine, I didn't really know that much about my grampa when I was a kid. He had lived several lifetimes before I was a speck on anyone's horizon. By the time I came along he was retired and motoring around the country with my grandma in their old silver pickup truck and travel trailer. The earliest memory I have of him is being up at Vallecito Lake outside of Durango, Colorado. He was talking to my brother (who was probably 13 or 14 at the time; I might have been two or three) while loading fishing poles into the back of the truck. I didn't even really know what the poles were for, but I knew it had something to do with fish and I remember being really mad because I couldn't go with them.

My grampa was the strong and silent type. Grandma was as vivacious and bubbly as could be. She talked a mile a minute, usually at top volume, and she had an infectious laugh that rolled out of her like the tide. So Grampa probably just figured he'd let her do most of the talking and keep himself to himself.

Consequently, I never really heard all that much about him or what had gone on in his life before I showed up. I knew he had been born on a farm in Oklahoma, and that his first wife had died shortly after giving birth to my Uncle Eddie in the 1930s, and that somehow he and my grandma had ended up in Los Alamos during WWII and that he had something to do with building the roads.

That was about it. To me he was just my grampa.

I don't know why I'm making that face

He was 16 years older than my grandma, so when she passed away back in 2006 I think he was more shocked than anybody. That was the first and last time I ever saw my grandpa cry. It was also, incidentally, the only time I remember him telling me that he loved me. I didn't mind. He wasn't a demonstrative guy, and I guess it had always been understood.

After Grandma died I decided I wanted to get to know Grampa a little better. So I borrowed a camera from a friend and I recorded about seven hours of interviews with him about his life.

Grampa's earliest memory, he told me, was living in a half-dugout on his parents' farm outside of Olustee, Oklahoma. His dad was a homesteader. They had 160 acres that they had to make workable ("proved up," as my grampa said) before they could own it outright. In the meantime, they lived in a one-room cabin, half dug out of the ground, with wooden planks for walls, thatch for a roof, and blankets and old newspaper for insulation.

One winter, when my grampa was about two, they had a nasty blizzard and his dad had to bring the chickens and one of their calves into the dugout so they wouldn't freeze to death. Grampa -- who was about 98 at the time he told me the story -- said he clearly remembered the icicles hanging from the calf's eyelashes.

That's him on the right.

Grampa was the oldest of nine kids (all but his youngest sister Johnny have passed away). He had the misfortune of trying to go into farming himself just as the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression hit. He married his high school sweetheart, Verna, rented a tractor and a plot of land south of Olustee, and got to work.

But it was no good.

"I made good crops down there, but you just couldn’t sell them," he told me. "I sold cotton for six cents a pound and wheat for 31 cents a bushel. That doesn’t even pay to harvest it. I had to give that up.”

in 1933 Verna gave birth to one son, Jimmy Dean, who died at birth. My uncle Eddie was born in 1936. The (possibly apocryphal) story my grandma told me when I was a kid was that two weeks after the baby was born Grampa went into town to buy her a pair of slippers. He came back to find her dead, probably of a blood clot.

I tried to ask Grampa about that when I interviewed him. He just grimaced a little and said "I don't really want to talk about that." So we moved on.

The farm went belly up, and Grampa bounced around for a long time looking for work. His family took in Eddie while he was out on the road. He started with construction in Oklahoma, mostly on roads, and before long this took him all over the Southwest doing contracts, mostly for the military, as the country geared up to enter WWII. He worked in Roswell for awhile, and El Paso, and in 1940 he found himself in Gallup building concrete "igloos" for the armory.

One day, during his lunch break, he met a pretty young waitress at the local Greek restaurant named Paula "Polly" Gonzales. She was 18. He was 34.

Grandma and Grampa both told me the story of their meeting about a year or so before she died. Unfortunately this was before I had the idea to put this stuff on film, so I don't remember all the details. The one thing I do remember was thinking that it sure sounded like he was dating someone else at the time. Grandma called this mysterious other woman his "friend".

When I pressed them on it, they just kind of gave each other a sly little look and laughed.

At any rate, they were married a few short months later on December 9, 1941, two days after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Grandma and Grampa with my Uncle Ron

And years later

My Uncle Ron was born in Gallup. The three of them moved around for awhile, landing again in Roswell, then moving onto Hobbs, Ft. Sumter, back to Oklahoma. They were living in Albuquerque when a friend of his from his time in El Paso told him about a mysterious new government job up in a place north of Santa Fe.

There wasn't a lot of housing up in Los Alamos at the time, so Grampa went into a bank in Santa Fe and got a loan for $1,500 to buy a travel trailer. They towed it up the hill in their Buick sedan, and they lived in that trailer for several years.

Grampa was one of the first eleven civilians to work in Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project. He started in the auto pool as a mechanic.

I asked him what he thought the Trinity test and Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Did he have any inkling of what was brewing up there?

He didn't seem to understand the question. "Didn't think anything of it," he said. "We all just did our jobs."

Los Alamos ended up being the place where they would stay. After the war my Grandma gave birth to my mom (they were still living in the trailer at the time). They sent for Uncle Eddie, got themselves a house, and Grampa started working with the Zia Company building the roads all throughout town. He retired in 1973 as Superintendent of Roads, Labor and Mechanics.

Once retired, he and Grandma bought themselves another travel trailer and hit the road for about fifteen years or so. I came along in 1977. By then they had pretty much decided that Vallecito Lake was their favorite spot, and in the mid 1980s they sold the travel trailer, bought a mobile home in a little retirement community near the lake, and settled there permanently.

I've never talked to my brother or my cousins about this, but I would hazard a guess that my experience with my grandparents was very different from theirs. I'm the youngest. They're all sort of clumped together in age, and I was a late comer by about a decade. Grandma and Grandpa were traveling a lot when they were kids, and since there were so many of them they had to share.

By the time I wasn't still peeing my pants or eating the Play-Doh, they were pretty much settled in Colorado. I sort of had them to myself.

Yep, that's me again

I used to go up there for a few weeks every summer, either with my parents or by myself. I remember how cool it was, even in July, surrounded by all those pine trees. I remember the sound of the birds, always there, and how I used to sleep out on their covered porch and lay awake at night and watch for raccoons.

My grandma used to take me to Bingo with her once a week down at the little community center in the trailer park. I won $5 once. I think that was the happiest moment of my life up to that point.

I remember that they used to have a drag show once a year, believe it or not. I only saw it once, I think. All the old timers would borrow their wives' dresses and scarves and gloves, throw on a wig and put on stockings and rouge and ruby red lipstick, and then go strutting their stuff on the catwalk. The old ladies would hoot and holler and throw things and generally laugh themselves silly.

When my grampa came out from the back, wearing a purple dress and a long blond wig and two bright dangly clip-on earings, my eyes were the size of cookie tins and my jaw hung wide and loose like a trap door. This was my grampa, after all. A man's man through and through. I knew he was supposed to be part of the show, but I don't think I believed it until I saw it.

Grampa saw me sitting there in my grandma's lap, my face agog and full of naked wonder, and he smiled a crooked little smile that let me in on the joke. "Can you believe I'm up here in this ridiculous get up?" that smile seemed to say.

And then he tipped me a wink. I just about died of laughter.

Mostly, though, I remember the fishing.

Yep, I finally made it out there on the lake with him. By this point my brother was off at college or maybe living in Albuquerque, so it was usually just the two of us. He'd wake me up unceremoniously well before dawn. I'd groan, then smell the eggs or the toast that my grandma had made for me, pull myself out of bed, wipe the sleep from my eyes, and stumble into the kitchen to have a mostly silent breakfast with the two of them. Then my grampa would say something like "best get to it now," and my grandma would give me a thermos with hot chocolate when I was younger, coffee when I got a little older, and a plastic baggie full of her homemade chocolate chip cookies (the best I've ever had, let me tell you) and banana bread.

Then I'd pull on my shoes and trudge out after him to that old silver truck and we'd drive the couple miles or so down to the lake, neither of us talking much but Grampa occasionally singing a little bit under his breath. I'd sit next to him and yawn happily and watch as the sun started to peek its head up over the rim of the mountains.

We would get to the wharf, and Grampa would josh a little with the guys there, and one of them (usually a kid) would go out there and tow his boat back to the dock. We'd climb in, and I'd always be a little bit scared when I'd put my foot onto the bottom of the boat and feel it rock a little on the water. But Grampa always put a thick hand on my shoulder to steady me, so that was all right.

Then we'd charge out to the middle of the lake, and when he decided we were far enough out we'd let our lines out. I'd stare at the reel as the line unspooled into the water, making a soft and reassuring whir-whir-whir sound as it went. It was lead line, color coded by the number of feet. First blue, then red. When it would get to the yellow I'd thumb the catch and it would stop.

Grampa would shut off the motor and we'd sit there waiting. And waiting. And waiting. He always let me sit up at the front of the boat, so I'd lean back in my seat and put my feet up on the middle bench and just watch the line as it twitched a little, teased by a twig or maybe a slow current under the glasslike surface that I couldn't see.

After awhile, Grampa might start singing a little. I usually couldn't understand what he was saying. His Okie accent was so thick as to be almost a caricature, and whenever he sang he'd exaggerate it a little. But I loved the sound of his voice.

Sometimes we'd talk a little bit. He'd tell me about the different kinds of fish: Coconi salmon, rainbow, brown trout, the occasional pike near the shore that could cut your line with their sharp little teeth. He'd tell me how the fish got there, and how he knew what part of the lake to go to each morning to get the maximum number of bites.

Sometimes he'd tell me stories. I think it was out there on the lake when he first told me about Monkeyjack and Rawhide and Bloody Bones -- who came to snatch little boys out of their beds when they're bad -- thereby scaring the bejeezus out of me but also probably inadvertently helping spur my lifelong love of monster stories.

One day he taught me how to yodel. There was no one else out there, so there was nobody we could bother. We sat there, shouting "yodel-i-oh-i-oh" at the mountains, daring each other with each yell to be just a little bit louder...a little bit louder...and hearing our voices rocket back at us across the water. I remember thinking it was kind of like magic.

Then we'd get a bite. "Heyup!" Grampa would say, and I'd bounce up and down in my seat, full of excitement and always for the first few seconds not quite remembering what to do, and then I'd grab my pole and start to reel in. Grampa would coach me, tell me to ease up when I needed to and let that sucker think he was gonna get away, tell me when to pull and when to let him swim. I'd watch the line change from yellow to red and finally back to blue, and then the clear leader would emerge with the shiny spinning lures (Grampa called them "twizzlers"), and after that, by golly, there'd be a daggum fish!

"There it is!" I'd shout, and Grampa would grab the net and I'd try with all my might to fight that thing up to the surface. Sometimes the fish would get away. But usually not. Usually Grampa would just scoop it up and drop it to the floor of the boat, and we'd watch it flop around there for a bit before throwing it into the cooler. Then Grampa would fix my bait and fire up the engine, and we'd let the line out and do it all over again.

Let me tell you one of life's great secrets: Nothing tastes better than a fresh fish you pulled out of the water yourself.

Eventually, as the years went on, it got harder and harder for them to stay up in Colorado. The closest hospital was over in Bayfield, which was twenty minutes away. Grampa fell off the roof one winter while clearing snow and banged himself up pretty good. He wasn't seriously hurt, but I think that was what convinced him and it wasn't too long after that they decided to sell the trailer and head back to Los Alamos. My Mom and Uncle Ron bought a little house for them.

Without a lake nearby, he was pretty much done with fishing. So he took to doing work on the house instead. He was in his late 80s or early 90s when he built the back patio, mostly by himself (Uncle Ron and my cousin Kenny helped with the roof). He was losing a lot of his strength by then, so he devised a system of pulleys and levers to help lift and move things. That still blows my mind.

After the patio was done he got to work on his garden. He was in his mid 90s, I think, when he really tackled it in earnest. When we were preparing his 100th birthday party two years ago, I put together a little video slideshow to show to the guests. The only picture he cared about was this one:

That's the patio he built

When my Grandma died, it was a shock to all of us. She had been in great health, still walked a mile every day, and seemed to be bouncing back nicely after surgery on her knee.

This is the story that I remember hearing. I might not have all the details right, but I think I got the gyst.

Early one morning, while it was still dark, Grandma woke complaining of a strange pain and a feeling of heat in her shoulders. She and Grampa discussed what they should do, whether they should call the ambulance or maybe call my Mom to take her to the hospital. But they decided they didn't want to bother anyone. Grandma drank a ginger ale, thinking that would make her feel better, and they went back to bed.

When my Grampa woke up later, Grandma was in the bathroom. Grampa went into the kitchen, fixed himself something to eat, and talked to my Uncle Ron (who was by then living in St. George, Utah) on the phone for a bit. After getting off the phone it occurred to him that Grandma had been in the bathroom for an awful long time.

He went to check on her and found her slumped against the door, blocking it so that he couldn't get it open.

He called my mom, said something to the effect of: "Your mama fell down in the bathroom and I think she's dead."

I was interning at LionsGate in Los Angeles at the time. My dad called me and told me what happened, that my Grandma Polly had passed away. It sounded like a heart attack. This didn't seem possible; before I left two months earlier she had seemed as bubbly and vivacious as ever. I immediately booked a flight home.

When I made it up to my grandparents' house the whole family was there. Grampa came into the living room from kitchen, tottering on his increasingly unstable legs. His eyes and cheeks were wet with tears.

"How're you doing, Grampa?" I asked. I had no idea what else to say.

"Not too good, Scott," he said, and he grasped my hand and squeezed as hard as he could. His voice was thick and shaky. "Not too good at all."

We sat there for awhile, all of us, numb, not talking about much in particular.

Finally, as I was getting ready to go, I went to him and put my arms around him and kissed him on the forehead. "Bye, Grampa," I said.

"Bye, Scott," he said. Then: "I love you."

After Grandma was gone, the burden of caring for him for the next few years fell mostly to my mother and my cousin Kenny. Grampa insisted on staying in his house and -- for a guy edging out of his 90s -- did remarkably well for himself. But he was getting weak, and none of us trusted his legs.

Eventually Kenny moved in with him and helped care for him. I have to say, I think my cousin acquitted himself heroically. I don't know if I could have done it.

Grampa continued to get weaker and weaker, and before long he wasn't able to do much with his garden. So he mostly sat and watched sports (on mute, because he didn't give a wit what the announcers had to say, he could follow it just fine, thank you very much), did his crosswords, and listened to his religious shows on the radio. It was during this time I got it in my head to interview him on camera.

Finally, about a year ago, he went to live with my aunt and uncle in Utah. Kenny was preparing to get married, and it was getting too hard for my mom to be there all the time without living with him.

After Grampa left, I didn't talk to him much. He was almost impossible to understand on the phone, for one thing. But, to be honest, I just didn't really know what to say.

Grampa with my mom on his 102nd birthday in Utah

About a month ago he developed pneumonia. He had had a lot of trouble breathing for years, and at his age the strain was just too much. His throat was full of phlegm and he could hardly swallow, so it became next to impossible for him to eat. My mom told me about the only thing he could keep down was one bottle of Ensure a day.

My mom and I talked to him on the phone this past Sunday.

"How're you doing, Grampa?" I asked.

"Not too good, Scott," was the reply.

As always, it was hard to understand him. But we talked for a bit, and he was delighted to hear that I got a job teaching. He wished me luck.

"Take care of yourself, Grampa," I said when we signed off. I didn't understand what he said in return.

That was the last time I talked to him.

It was only later that I realized what I forgot to say. So I'm going to say it now.

I love you, Grampa.

I hope you're well wherever you are, and that there are plenty of fish to catch and flowers to tend to.

I love you.

And I miss you.

Goodbye.

Quicktake Book Review: "Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk" by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain (1997)

2010-08-03T13:04:00.000-07:00

In the mid 1970s, future Spin Magazine editor Legs McNeil was just a burnout kid from the outer boroughs of New York City who -- with friends John Holmstrom and Ged Dunn -- put together a fanzine so they could hang out with their favorite band, The Dictators.

The fanzine was called Punk Magazine. It became a cultural touchstone and (if McNeil himself is to be believed) gave a name to an underground culture and music movement that was just starting to bubble up as a reaction against hippies, disco, and the growth of stadium rock.

More than 20 years later, McNeil put together this book, which is a collection of interviews with everyone from Lou Reed (The Velvet Underground), Iggy Pop (The Stooges), Wayne Kramer (the MC5), Patti Smith, and about a million others, going back to the early 1960s and narrating the chaotic rise of a movement that -- like all movements -- wasn't really a movement at all. These kids had no idea what they were doing or where any of this would lead. For them it was all about sex, drugs, puking, sleeping in gutters, hustling at Times Square, taking more drugs, talking shit about each other, getting stabbed by their girlfriends, puking some more, and occasionally playing some music.

McNeil doesn't contextualize very much, and he doesn't try to make this book comprehensive. He just lets the people involved speak for themselves. This is about how punk rock was born, and -- with the exception of a few epilogues toward the end telling us where some of these characters would end up (most of them not well) -- the narrative pretty much stops at the 1980s. We don't hear anything about Southern California hardcore, post-punk, emo, or any of the offshoots that sprung out of the original scene. The Dead Kennedys aren't even mentioned, much less Green Day.

But, like McNeil's subsequent oral history The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry, Please Kill Me provides a fascinating and unvarnished look at the details that made up the movement, such as it was. McNeil and McCain wisely narrow their focus to a few pertinent characters: primarily Pop, Kramer, Smith, Dee Dee Ramone, and Johnny Thunders from the New York Dolls. But they include snippets of interviews from literally hundreds of people (I really appreciated the appendix at the end listing all the participants), and in so doing manags to create an almost anthropological study in how a subculture like this comes to be. It's fascinating to see how disparate the influences were -- hot rod racing in Detroit, Warhol's Factory, the gay underground in New York City, just to name a few -- and how, over the course of years, it all coalesced into something that was, while not entirely cohesive, certainly a musical and cultural a paradigm shift.

And we get great stories on such topics as the birth of CBGBs, Malcolm McLaren's disastrous stint as the Dolls' manager, Handsome Dick Manitoba's feud with Wayne County, the squalid and doomed romance between Nancy Spungen and Syd Vicious, and much more.

And, yes, there's lots of sex, drugs, blood and vomit.

Highly recommended.

The 5 albums that changed my life

2010-08-01T12:05:00.001-07:00

Partly inspired by Dusty's excellent and always entertaining Playground of Doom blog -- as well as my own realization that I just don't care as much about talking about movies as I did when I started this thing a year ago -- I've decided to retool "Blood Has Been Shed Jerry" into a general all-purpose review and pop-culture blog.

The fact is these days I've been reading books and listening to music -- and following the trials and tribulations of one Ms. Lindsay Lohan and one Mr. Mel Gibson -- way more than I've been watching movies.

So, in that spirit, here's my first music blog.

Every one of us has four or five albums that affected us so thoroughly when we first encountered them that they've become infused into our DNA. These albums may be undisputed masterpieces. There are plenty of people of my parents' generation who would point to The Beatles "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" or Dylan's "Blood on the Tracks" as the records that define that era for them, and no one would argue.

But sometimes these are just records that found us at the right time and, regardless of quality or critical consensus, managed to find some soft spot in our souls to poke at. Maybe they got us through a breakup, or helped us get our sea legs at a new job, or defined one wild and crazy summer. We could be talking about (in the case of one ex-girlfriend of mine) Abba's "Greatest Hits." Or Metallica's "Master of Puppets." Or maybe the soundtrack from West Side Story. Doesn't matter. We cling to these records like they're a ratty old stuffed animal or a poop-stained security blanket, and it doesn't matter to us that Rolling Stone only gave them two stars.

This list is probably a combination of both masterpieces and security blankets. I'll let you decide which are which.

Here are the Five Albums That Changed My Life, ranked chronologically by when I discovered them.

1. Pink Floyd - "The Wall" (1979)

This is it, the big daddy, the one that looms above all others for me. Nothing has ever come close.

First, a bit of context. This has been my favorite album for over 25 years. That's only impressive when you realize that I'm 32 and you do the math.

That's right: I was rocking out to "Comfortably Numb" and running around jumping on the couch and screaming "WE DON'T NEED NO EDUCATION" when I was six. That's what happens when your brother is 12 years older than you.

I got my first Walkman cassete player when my parents and I road-tripped the country one summer around when I was in the first grade, and the first three tapes I had were Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Green River" (just missed this list by a nose), some greatest hits collection by Chuck Berry ... and "The Wall." These tapes were my introduction to the very concept of rock and roll. The first two were purchased at the same Walgreens or whatever where my dad got me the Walkman (presumably to shut me up in the back of the car).

The third came from my brother some time after we got back, recorded off his scratchy double LP and wrapped up as (I think) a Christmas present.

To this day, I can't really say what it is about this record that shook me so thoroughly. I've explored Floyd's catalogue backward and forward in the years since, and I can very articulately (and pretentiously) deconstruct "Dark Side of the Moon" for you, go on and on about its varied sonic landscape and its obsessions with mortality and insanity. I can tear into "Wish You Were Here" and blather about how it's a mournful meditation on fame and (yep) insanity. I can talk about poor lost Syd Barret and the shadow his acid-fueled meltdown cast over the rest of the band. I can talk about Roger Waters and his daddy issues. I can tell you exactly why I think David Gilmour is a better guitarist than Clapton.

I could also bore the piss out of you by going through this record song-by-song and telling you everything I think you need to know about it. Did you know "The Trial" wasn't Roger Waters' idea, but rather a last-minute suggestion by producer Bob Ezrin? Oh, you don't care? Sorry. I'll stop here. Just listen to it, and then try to tell me that when Roger Waters shrieks about worms eating his brain in "Hey You" or when Gilmour tells you (in the voice of the psychotic Pink) to wish "our colored cousins" a safe trip back to Africa in "Waiting for the Worms" that the hair on the back of your neck doesn't stand up.

I love many, many Pink Floyd albums ... but it still all boils down to "The Wall" for me. This is probably in no small part simply because it was the first, and a gift from my brother, who when I was six was infinitely more badass than anyone else I knew. But he also gave me The Scorpions "Blackout" and Dire Straits' "Money For Nothing," and I'm not going to sit here and tout those as a life changers. "The Wall" has stuck with me through the years and through all my different phases (the jazz phase in the eighth grade, the death-metal phase in college, the alt country phase from two or three years ago). It won't let me go.

The emotional core to the album is distilled in Roger Waters' scream that immediately preceeds the "we don't need no education" refrain from "Another Brick in the Wall (Part II). There's something about it that just cuts into me like a blade.

For a band so often dismissed as space rock, there's an open-wound, primal howl quality to "The Wall" that was (and is) unlike anything I'd ever encountered before. It's both deeply personal and acidly political. It's theatrical as well as introspective. It's about rage. And pain. And, yes, insanity. It's not Elvis being a hound dog, The Beatles wanting to hold your hand, or Bill Haley rocking around the clock. It's not even the Sex Pistols sneering about the Queen.

Forgot the smelly stoners and the laser shows at the casinos. This is rock and roll reconstituted as a bloodletting.

I love it. Twenty five years later and I still can't get enough.

Bob Hoskins rules

2. Jim Croce - "Photographs & Memories: His Greatest Hits" (199-?)

I imagine all of you out there, eyes wide and shaking your head and going "WHAAA?" But before you judge, listen to this:

Now tell me that isn't the prettiest goddamn thing you've ever heard. And if a lump doesn't rise in your throat when Jim tells the operator that "you can keep the dime," I'm sorry to tell you that your heart is nothing but a shriveled prune hanging limp and useless in the dank black cave of your chest.

Still not convinced? Try this one:

If that didn't bring a tear to your eye than there's nothing I can do for you. Go torture a puppy or whatever else it is you do for fun.

Croce was one of those sort-of folkie early 70s singer-songwriters like Harry Nilsson, Cat Stevens and Harry Chapin. He was born in South Philly, rocked possibly the world's single greatest mustache and had himself a pretty solid little career there for a few years. And then he died in a plane crash in 1973.

There wasn't much that set him apart from the singer-songwriter pack beyond the fact that he was just better than the rest of them. Most of you, if you've heard of him at all, probably know the humorous uptempo slices of urban life like "Bad Bad Leroy Brown" and "You Don't Mess Around With Jim." Good stuff, sure. But for me he really only came to life with his heartbreak ballads. He was an excellent singer with a warm, lived-in voice and an instinctual sense of melody that could pluck emotion from your heart with the precision of a surgeon's fingers.

This stuff borders on schmaltz, to be sure. But there was something so genuine, so unironic, about him that, whenever I hear a song like "Operator" or "Lover's Cross," I simply believe him in a way that I don't with almost any other singer-songwriter from the era.

As far as the album itself goes, it was just one of those cheapo compilations that my dad bought one day at Price Club back when I was in middle school. He played it when we got home, and I fell in love with it and pretty much stole it from him after the first listen (this was the era of Nirvana and New Kids on the Block. The fact that THIS was my favorite CD for about three years should tell you everything you need to know about my social standing in those days).

I even remember the track list:

1. Bad Bad Leroy Brown
2. Operator (That's Not The Way It Feels)
3. Photographs & Memories
4. Rapid Roy (The Stock Car Boy)
5. Time In A Bottle
6. New York's Not My Home
7. Workin' At The Car Wash Blues
8. I Got A Name
9. I'll Have To Say I Love You In A Song
10. Lover's Cross
11. One Less Set Of Footsteps
12. These Dreams
13. Roller Derby Queen

Eventually I made it to college, got a lip piercing and dyed my hair black and started listening to extreme European death metal. I went to about a million shows by bands like Cephalic Carnage, Broken Hope, Wicked Innocence, and Macabre. I got punched in the throat, punched another guy in the throat, had a fat guy fall on my knee and bend it backwards, watched a dwarf throw a metal folding chair across the mosh pit and knock a guy out. I was (excuse me while I puff myself up for a moment) a hardcore motherfucker.

Yep

But late at night, by myself, I would lay in my dorm and put my headphones on and go to sleep to Jim Croce.

Sometimes I still do.

If you don't like this you're probably a Stalinist

3. Korn - "Korn" (1994)

Back in 1995 I was in Rare Bear Records in Santa Fe picking through the used CDs when I came across the album you see above.

This was well before "A.D.I.D.A.S.," "Freak on a Leash," the lame-ass duets with Fred Durst and The Pharcyde, the "nü metal" label, the hip-hop pretensions and posturing, the Family Values stadium tours, and the constant MTV/TRL rotation. Korn had not yet become the cartoon godfathers of one of the lamest movements in popular music that we've ever had the misfortune to suffer through. They had yet to give birth to (shudder) Staind, (shiver) Papa Roach, and (vomit) Crazy Town. They were next to unknown. There were no band photos that I recall in the album booklet. Radio and MTV was having nothing to do with them (I later heard rumors that the "Blind" video showed up on Headbangers Ball a few times, but I never saw it).

I so wanted to look like Munky when I was 17

The CD was priced $5.99 and I thought that creepy-ass photo was pretty cool, so I bought it. I didn't get to listen to it until I got home (CD players in cars were still a novelty back then), and by the time I'd made the drive I forgot all about it. Then, a week or so later while cleaning off my desk after school, I found it in the pile and threw it into my CD player, not really expecting much.

It's hard for me to admit, knowing what we all know now about where this would ultimately lead ("I did it all for the NOOKIE, the NOOKIE..." seriously, Fred, fuck you), how powerful that first spin was. When coming up with this list I knew I needed to pick at least one metal album and I was really tempted to go with Faith No More's "Angel Dust," which was my favorite CD from a much better band. But if I'm to be truthful, nothing I stumbled across in high school came close to this album's ability to inflict pure blunt-force emotional trauma.

I remember sitting there on the edge of my bed with my eyes wide and my jaw hanging open as Jonathan Davis shredded his vocal chords and tore his heart out and (metaphorically ... I think) cut his wrists open and bled pus all over my virgin eardrums. It was like listening to the musical equivalent of bowel cancer ... and I mean that in the best possible way. Remember, this was still the grunge era, Green Day was just hitting the big time, Kurt Cobain had just eaten his shotgun, and Eddie Vedder and Trent Reznor were the closest we came to having bonafide tortured artists to look up to. So "Korn" was a total revelation. I didn't realize music could be so ferocious, so ugly, and yet so nakedly vulnerable at the same time.

When, on the bullied-kid memoir "Faget", Davis screams "I'm a FAGGOT/I'm a FAGGOT/I'm NOT a FAGGOT/You motherfucking QUEERS", my head spun around like Linda Blair's in The Exorcist.

Jeez

This wasn't macho, homophobic posturing and it wasn't pouty, Cure-style moping. This wan't Trent suffering beautifully in Sharon Tate's Hollywood Hills mansion. This was a guy in real pain, possessed by an all-consuming rage that seemed to bubble up like magma from the furnace of his soul. His voice was a howl from the abyss. He sounded like a dog being fed through a wood chipper.

And -- like millions of high school kids discovering The Who or The Stooges or Black Sabbath or Hüsker Dü or Nine Inch Nails or (these days probably) Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance for the first time -- I was overwhelmed by the feeling that "this guy gets me."

Keep in mind that I was really just a sort of tubby, somewhat socially awkward kid with a mullet and a good family. The perspective of years has made me see that, even if he got me, I certainly didn't get him. I had no idea what pain really was ... certainly not the kind of pain he was screaming about. But there was a rawness and a truthfulness to the record that rattled me way down in my bones. When you're 17 and looking for someone to put a form to whatever weird tornado you have going on inside you, that shit matters.

"Korn" introduced me to the possibilities of what heavy music could do. It didn't have to be a bunch of posing tough-guy bullshit. It could be an open wound. I imagine that what I felt the first time I listened to the CD was a little bit of what Johnny Ramone must have felt when he discovered The Stooges' "Raw Power."

I'm in my thirties now, and I still listen to this album occasionally, once every two or three years maybe. It's hard to plug back into what it meant to me when I was that pissed-off misfit kid. I can still enjoy it, sort of, in a pure nostalgia sort of way. But Korn lost me with their follow-up, "Life Is Peachy," which felt like a pale attempt to recreate the first album, and by the time they got to the sad joke that was "Follow the Leader" I was pretty much over them.

But I remember that first spin. The moment was fleeting, sure. But it was real.

4. Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - "No More Shall We Part" (2001)

My first encounter with Nick Cave was Metallica's cover of "Loverman" on the "Garage Inc." album. I loved it, so I ran out and bought the Bad Seeds' "Let Love In" (1994) and "Murder Ballads" (1996). And I found myself a new hero.

These two albums are pretty spectacular. They're melodic but harsh, rooted in both blues and punk rock, and Cave displays a singularly dark lyrical sensibility that I -- coming off of my years as a death metal fan -- plugged into right away.

These albums, to me, were more punk than punk, more death rock than Cannibal Corpse could ever be. They reconstituted the whole idea of goth and made The Cure and Joy Division completely irrelevant.

So at first I wasn't entirely sure what to make of "No More Shall We Part." Gone, it seems, was the snarling provocateur who delivered such classic lyrics as "I'm a bad motherfucker don't you know/ But I'll crawl over fifty good pussies to get to one fat boy's asshole" (from "Stagger Lee" off of "Murder Ballads").

Heh

Nope. That Nick Cave seemed to have departed. Now he was crooning stuff like this:

I hadn't yet heard this album's predecessor, "The Boatman's Call" (1997), which was his follow-up to "Murder Ballads." "Boatman's Call" and "No More Shall We Part" are transitional records. Cave had (mostly) kicked his heroin habit and had his poor heart broken by P.J. Harvey. These were records made by a broken man trying to rediscover himself.

Therein lies the brilliance. Cave -- always a shameless raider of classic Americana -- found his solace this time in gospel, and even though there's nothing I would call overtly "Christian" about this record, he does tap into a spiritual depth that was largely lacking from his early work. "No More Shall We Part" is at once introspective and soaring, ruminative and anthemic.

Indeed

After the dirge-like "Boatman's Call," Cave also managed to find some joy in the music again, and he buckled down and tackled his songs with a discipline he'd never shown before. As sad as it is, there's something truly wondrous and minimal about a song like "The Sorrowful Wife." When the guitar crashes in halfway through, my breath never fails to catch in my throat.

He even regained a little of his swagger on songs like "15 Feet of Pure White Snow."

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Fifteen Feet Of Pure White Snow
Uploaded by EMI_Music. - Music videos, artist interviews, concerts and more.
I've had nightmares that looked like this video

It took me a while to really "get" this album. But when I did it grabbed me by the nuts and shook me around like a pitbull. Finally I saw Cave as not merely a provocateur, but as a bonafide poet.

He opened my eyes to whole genres of music I had never really been interested in before. Classic country, Southern gospel and blues, Irish folk ... Cave drew from all of it and crafted a record that is, to me, nearly perfect from start to finish.

5. The National - "High Violet" (2010)

Sometimes an album itself is not life changing, but rather the soundtrack to change. Maybe you're breaking up with someone, or recovering from an illness, or reading a book that stirs your soul, or experiencing a renewed burst of creative energy. Or, in my case, maybe it's all of the above.

Whatever the event or events may be, if you happen to be listening to something new at the time, it can imprint itself upon the experience and become so intertwined with it as to be completely indistinguishable.

These are the records that get you through the shit you need to get through. They may not open your mind exactly, but they give you what you need when you need it.

The life changers, the "Sergeant Peppers" and the "Blood on the Tracks," are your teachers.

These records are your friends.

Such is the case for The National's "High Violet" for me. I hadn't even heard of these guys until maybe three months ago. The review in Rolling Stone sounded kind of interesting. Inspired by both Joy Division and Bruce Springsteen? Shit, I thought, I gotta check that out.

So it's kind of hard to say whether or not my love for this record is really based on merit. But whatever. This is the best record I've come across in nearly a decade. And I'll be damned if they don't sound like Springsteen crossed with Joy Division.

A five-piece from Cincinatti now based in Brooklyn, The National is fronted by a guy named Matt Berninger who, if I remember correctly, was something like an investment banker or a stock broker who pretty much joined the band on a lark.

My new man crush. I could stare into those eyes for days...

Something about Berninger's voice haunts me in a way that I can't say I've ever really experienced before. It's like Nick Cave's, only dipped in honey and lined with velvet. There's an easy casualness to his singing style -- like a guy mumbling over a cup of coffee just after crawling out of bed -- that somehow makes it so much more affecting.

And, lyrically, he's able to grab onto an image or phrase and toss it off in a way that makes it sink in like little droplets of absinthe. "I was carried to Ohio in a swarm of bees," he sings on "Blood Buzz Ohio." I have no idea what the hell that means, but I'll be damned if it doesn't stir something.

And when he croons "I don't want to get over you" in "Sorrow" .. yeah, I get that. As, strangely, I do when he says "I was afraid I'd eat your brains, because I am evil" on "Conversation 16." That's the singularly weirdest lyric on an album full of singularly weird lyrics. But he sort of throws it out there and moves on, leaving you to shake your head and wonder if you really heard it. And the more you listen it, the more you nod and say "yep. Been there."

Musically, I wouldn't say The National pave any new ground. But the melodies match Berninger's voice perfectly, creating something rich and dark that simmers with a barely restrained heat like a pot just coming to boil.

I've so far avoided diving into The National's back catalogue because I know that there's no way the older albums will hit home like this one did. Only the upcoming years will tell if "High Violet" sticks with me the way the others on this list have. I mean, there was a time, between the ages of 10 and 11, when I truly believed that Queensryche's "Operation: Mindcrime" totally was the story of my life thus far. So who knows how I'll feel in a decade?

But I know that when I look back on this time, Berninger's voice will be what I remember.

Honorable mentions (in no particular order)

Led Zeppelin - "IV"
David Bowie - "Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars"
Metallica - "Master of Puppets"
Faith No More - "Angel Dust"
Massive Attack - "Mezzanine"
Creedence Clearwater Revival - "Green River"
Johnny Cash - "Live at Folsom Prison"
Tool - "Undertow"
The Beatles - "White Album"
Leonard Cohen - "Greatest Hits"

Splice (2010)

2010-06-21T11:08:00.000-07:00

Warning: mild spoilers ahead

Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum): I think you're making a mistake. I think you really want to talk to me.
Ronnie (Geena Davis): Sorry, I have three other interviews to do before this party's over.
Seth: Yeah, but they're not working on something that'll change the world as we know it.
Ronnie: They say they are.
Seth: Yeah, but they're lying. I'm not.

With these words, David Cronenberg let us know exactly what his seminal remake of The Fly (1986) was all about. Seth Brundle was a twitchy New York hipster living in one of those lofts usually reserved for artists and junkie musicians, a bit intense and somewhat asocial but no more so than your average Silverlake barhopper, who thought he could rewrite the laws of physics just because he wanted to. 1980s yuppie hubris taken to the nth degree. Needless to say, it did not end well for him.

Splice, the new movie from Cube (1997) director Vincenzo Natali, really wants to be The Fly. I mean really, really, REALLY. And in Sarah Polley and Adrian Brody, Natali has not one but TWO twitchy hipster scientists with rock star egos. Their Elsa and Clive (classic horror fans, feel free to groan at the hamfisted reference) have turned gene splicing into a Barnum and Bailey circus, and they're chomping at the bit to take the next step and begin working with human DNA.

Where Cronenberg and Goldblum managed to infuse Brundle with an intensity and an animal reservoir of anger that made his subsequent transformation into "Brundlefly" seem as much a spiritual metaphor as a piece of science fiction, we're supposed to know that Elsa and Clive are rebels because they have emo haircuts and a penchant for plaid suits and rose-colored sunglasses (one of the best unintentionally hilarious moments comes when we meet Clive's brother, who looks nothing like him except for the identical My Chemical Romance-lite mop).

These people are ROCKERS (Clive listens to some truly awful heavy metal in his car). They don't got no use for authority, man. So when their corporate overlords forbid them from making a human/animal hybrid, they go ahead and do it anyway...and to an A-Team style montage backed by the most boring electronica soundtrack since Spawn no less.

I'll go ahead and say it now: Splice is an absolutely terrible movie. It takes itself way too seriously, has dialogue that sounds like it was written by a third-grader, has two of the most annoying central performances in recent memory (yes, even more annoying than Get Him To The Greek), and nothing any of the characters does makes any goddamned sense whatsoever.

But, until it takes a gratuitously ugly turn in the last ten minutes or so, it's also pretty frickin' hilarious. When one of the characters actually utters the line "I don't know who you are anymore!" after catching another character having all sorts of dirty nasty animal/human hybrid sex on the floor of a barn, the audience I saw it with was rolling in the aisles.

The only character who has even a hint of substance is the hybrid herself, DREN (Delphine Chanéac). In her own weird way, she's kind of endearing, and there are one or two moments that are actually sort of maybe a little scary. There's a kernal of an interesting idea here, buried behind the piss poor execution. Oh well.

I can't really recommend this movie at all. Just rewatch The Fly instead. But if you feel like getting really wasted and going to laugh at a movie at the dollar theater, I guess you could do a lot worse.

Book review: "The Passage" by Justin Cronin (2010)

2010-06-19T13:51:00.000-07:00

Warning: Mild Spoilers Ahead

I know this is meant to be a movie review blog, but I've decided to break from my usual format and talk about a book. This is for two reasons:

One: Most of the movies I've seen recently have just kind of sucked. And not sucked in the way that would be fun to write about. Get Him To The Greek? Meh. It's hard to muster the energy. Even films that I enjoyed, like MacGruber, just don't seem to warrant a lot of discussion. I know I sort of scraped the bottom of the barrel with my Date Night review, so I didn't want to put you guys through that again.

Two: Justin Cronin's new novel The Passage is one of the most incredible books I've ever read.

Anyone who has ever heard me talk for more than five minutes probably knows that Stephen King's The Stand is my favorite novel of all time, and that I treat it nearly as a religion. It looms over its next closest competitor, Thomas M. Disch's equally apocalyptic The M.D. like the Sears Tower over the surrounding Chicago skyline. What makes both of these novels so great -- beyond the artfulness of the writing, the breadth of the characters, and the expansiveness of the authors' respective visions -- is the fact that both King and Disch used the basics of a horror story setup as a springboard to tell a much larger story, as a means to an end rather than an end unto itself.

To reduce either of these books to the label of "horror" is sort of like saying The White Album is a pretty good rock-and-roll record.

As someone who's been reading horror fiction seriously for more than two decades, I've never come across another novel that even approaches either of these masterpieces. So you'll understand how disconcerting it was for me when, about halfway through, I realized that The Passage might not just come close, but could actually sprint right on past like that South African runner whom everyone thinks is really a dude. In the end, it didn't. Not quite. But it sure made a race out of it.

To sum this thing up in a couple paragraphs would be a grave injustice to what Cronin has done here. Like any fantasy story, the plot -- when boiled down to its barest elements -- can't help but sound kind of goofy. So take this synopsis for what it is.

The story starts in the very near future (it's never exactly said when, but I'm guessing around 2018) with Amy Harper Bellafonte, the six-year-old daughter of a homeless prostitute named Jeanette. Once upon a time Jeanette was a waitress at a roadside diner in Iowa who fell for the dubious charms of a traveling salesman. He's described thusly:

"Amy’s father was a man who came in one day to the restaurant where Jeanette had waited tables since she turned sixteen, a diner everyone called the Box, because it looked like one: like a big chrome shoe box sitting off the county road, backed by fields of corn and beans, nothing else around for miles except a self-serve car wash, the kind where you had to put coins into the machine and do all the work yourself. The man, whose name was Bill Reynolds, sold combines and harvesters, big things like that, and he was a sweet talker who told Jeanette as she poured his coffee and then later, again and again, how pretty she was, how he liked her coal-black hair and hazel eyes and slender wrists, said it all in a way that sounded like he meant it, not the way boys in school had, as if the words were just something that needed to get said along the way to her letting them do as they liked. He had a big car, a new Pontiac, with a dashboard that glowed like a spaceship and leather seats creamy as butter. She could have loved that man, she thought, really and truly loved him. But he stayed in town only a few days, and then went on his way. When she told her father what had happened, he said he wanted to go looking for him, make him live up to his responsibilities. But what Jeanette knew and didn’t say was that Bill Reynolds was married, a married man; he had a family in Lincoln, all the way clean over in Nebraska. He’d even showed her the pictures in his wallet of his kids, two little boys in baseball uniforms, Bobby and Billy. So no matter how many times her father asked who the man was that had done this to her, she didn’t say. She didn’t even tell him the man’s name."

This is right on the first page. There's nary a vampire in sight.

What this should tell you is that Cronin's a real writer, possessing an artful grasp of language and a deft touch with the little details (“leather seats like creamy butter”) that make the characters, the environment, and the situation come alive on the page. I love horror fiction, but you just don't find writing like this that often.

Six years later, Jeanette's on the skids (Cronin very sensitively walks us through how a basically good person can end up in such desperate straits after a series of bad but understandable choices). Following a terrible night that ends with Jeanette killing one of her johns in self defense, she throws in the towel on even trying to be a mother, has Amy pack up her things in her battered Powerpuff Girls backpack, and drops her off at a Memphis convent before hitting the road.

Meanwhile, an FBI special agent named Wolgast has been traversing the country, gathering up death row inmates and spiriting them away to a top secret military compound high in the Colorado mountains, where a mad virologist named Jonah Lear and a shady special ops agent named Richards are working on an experiment dubbed Project NOAH. On an expedition into the darkest heart of the Bolivian jungle, Lear discovered a virus that reactivates the dormant thalmus gland, possibly unlocking the key to eternal life. The inmates are to be used as human guinea pigs, and they (known, somewhat religiously, as the Twelve) are transformed into a cadre of super strong vampiric mutants that glow in the dark and can rip rabbits (or humans) apart with their razor sharp teeth.

Lear requests a child -- preferably an orphan -- for the next phase of his experiment. Wolgast retrieves Amy from the convent, but can’t bring herself to take her to the compound. They hit the road. Richards mobilizes his thugs to find them. Long story short, Wolgast is thrown in a cell, Amy is injected with the virus, the Twelve mount a bloody escape, and the world comes crashing to an end.

Ninety-two years later, what may be the last remnants of the uninfected human population have established a small, straggly colony in the mountains east of Los Angeles. Their existence is brutal, and they survive only through vigilance, ingenuity, and the use of century-old military technology that keeps the huge floodlights lit at night and the creatures (called variously virals, smokes, or dracs) at bay.

One day a girl, maybe 16 and strangely impervious to injury or illness, wanders into the colony. She’s the first "Walker" anyone has seen in years. She has a microchip and radio beacon buried in her neck. The information on the microchip suggests that she's at least a century old.

The beacon leads to a repeating signal somewhere in the Colorado mountains: "If you find her, bring her here."

Thus sets the stage for an an epic, cross-country quest every bit as gripping and terrifying as Frodo's journey across Mordor.

Cronin is a pedigreed literary novelist (he has the awards, the job in academia, and the low book sales to prove it), and his dive into genre waters has brought with it considerable hype. Anyone who has followed the press knows the (too cute by half) story of The Passage’s birth: Cronin's 9-year-old daughter expressed her concern to him that his previous books weren't "interesting enough," and requested that he write something about a little girl who saves the world. Indulging her as she tagged along with him on his daily jogs, he played a "Design-a-Novel" game with her, shooting ideas back and forth and building out the story from the ground up. When winter fell and the jogs stopped, he realized he had something.

"Everything a man does in his life he does in some ways to impress a girl," he said in an interview, "and she was the girl I wanted to impress."

Gag. Like I said, too cute by half. But whatever. What matters is that Cronin has brought his considerable literary talents to bare here, building a world that feels fully realized and characters that exist with all the depth, complexity, and contradictions of real people. The Passage reads like a horror novel written by a guy who doesn't really know the genre. This could have lead to something woefully pretentious and even insulting to horror fans, but in Cronin's hands it becomes one of the book's greatest strengths. Characters like Wolgast, Sister Lacey at the convent, and Amy herself could have easily slipped into stock archetypes, but Cronin finds their humanity and draws it forth from the pages like a dowser drawing water from rocky soil.

The first third of the novel concerns the setup that leads to disaster, and Cronin wisely takes his time with it, establishing a world much like ours but just a few years more corrupt. The U.S. continues to be mired in neverending wars. The government has limited interstate travel and has turned the country into a vast surveillance state. Most disturbingly -- considering what's going on right now -- New Orleans has been depopulated and declared a Federal Petrochemical Zone (the only thing still in operation there are the oil wells) and the Gulf of Mexico has become an acrid waste.

Wolgast is a cog in this corrupt machine, diligently doing his job and trying to forget the dead child and angry ex wife he has left behind. But when he is told to bring Amy in, the last sliver of his humanity rebels. The bond that grows between the bitter agent and the little girl in his custody is truly touching without being sappy and leads – many pages later -- to a heartbreaking conclusion.

Cronin also wisely ellipses the time between the escape of the Twelve and the grim future that lies a century hence. He gives us snippets of our world's collapse (the infection spreading like cancer outward from Colorado, the military bombing the cities in an attempt to contain the virus, California and Texas seceding from the country in a last-ditch bid to defend themselves), but he doesn't dwell on it. This is a smart move, because anything he came up with would have been a tired retread of what King did in The Stand 30 years ago.

Instead, he gives us Auntie Jaxon, an old woman who was a little girl at the time of the collapse, and her reminiscences of being shuttled across the country in a train full of children to the hastily constructed compound that becomes the First Colony. There's something endearing about Cronin's notion of a group of largely abandoned children somehow providing the seeds of a new civilization. When Cronin picks up the narrative again, Auntie is an ancient and her great-great nephew, Peter Jaxon -- a young man charged with maintaining the Watch (manning the compound's battlements and looking for any sign of the virals) -- becomes the central character.

Like Project NOAH and Amy's life during the Time Before, Cronin renders existence in the Colony with exquisite detail. The new cast of characters (including Peter's troubled brother Theo and Lish, the militaristic orphan who mans the battlements with Peter and who may or may not be in love with him) come roaring to life. We grow comfortable in the First Colony, start feeling at home there with the many Jaxons, Fischers, Patels and Chous, and when things inevitably come apart at the seams (precipitated by Amy's mysterious arrival and a plague of nightmares that may not just be dreams) we feel the tragedy of the Colony’s undoing as acutely as we do the collapse of our own world. When Peter, Lish and others hit the road with Amy for the arduous journey to Colorado, we can feel their loss of the only home they ever knew.

It's during this journey -- in the final third of the book – where Cronin begins to struggle with the material. His prose becomes ever so slightly more overwrought, and he resorts more and more to "fate" (less charitably "coincidence," and even less so "narrative convenience") to propel the story forward. When our characters find themselves in an apparent haven (actually called "The Haven") of survivors in southern Nevada, Cronin overplays his hand a little, telegraphing too soon the truth of this place that seems too good to be true, thereby sapping the power from the final revelation of what The Haven is all about. It was only in these pages that I began to grow impatient with the story.

But he recovers nicely. As the characters move into Colorado, he throws some unexpected curveballs and delivers a powerful climax before giving us an open-ended conclusion that manages to be heartfelt without sinking too deeply into the saccharine.

He then delivers a sucker punch on the last page that will literally take your breath away. Thank God this is supposed to be the first in a series, because I'm almost literally dying to know what happens next.

Cronin has been widely praised (most notably by King himself) for putting the scare back into the vampire story. But this isn't really his goal. Parts of the book are inarguably very frightening, and Cronin displays a Hitchcockian knack for building suspense. But the overarching tone of the book is one of deep, aching sadness (I'd suggest listening to, as I did, The National's High Violet while you read it. If there has ever been a better marriage between album and novel, I don't know what it is). The virals themselves barely resemble vampires as we know them, and Cronin impressively balances the terror at what they are and what they can do with the tragedy of who they were.

As someone who still daydreams about someday writing the perfect horror novel, it would be easy to resent Cronin for this book. Here's this literary douchebag who wandered into MY genre after goofing around with his daughter and managed to write perhaps the best horror novel in two decades. And he makes it look pretty damn easy.

Asshole.

But in the end I'm grateful for this book. If you're a horror fan -- or just a fan of good writing that can sweep you away -- you will be too.

Date Night (2010)

2010-04-09T23:31:00.000-07:00

I can appreciate a well-done screwball comedy as much as the next guy, but generally speaking Date Night is not the type of movie I'd go out of my way to see. But after last night's traumatic film-watching experience (read my review of Dear Zachary if you don't know what I'm talking about), a goofy Tina Fey/Steve Carell romcom seemed like exactly what I needed.

Date Night strolls down the well-trodden path worn by such classics as North By Northwest and Adventures in Babysitting: a couple "normal" folks (here a New Jersey couple played by Fey and Carell) stumble into an overplotted mess of intrigue and flying bullets. The suspense (such as there is) and the comedy comes from their utter bewilderment at finding themselves in such a direct-to-video predicament. They're in over their heads, and blah blah blah blah blah...

The overplotted mess itself doesn't really matter. What matters is whether or not our leads are A) funny, B) likeable, and C) at least quasi-relatable. While certainly no classic, Date Night mostly succeeds on all three counts.

Fey and Carell are Claire and Phil Foster, a bored -- and boring -- married couple living in the burbs outside of New York. They're the type of people who forgo sex if it means having to remove one's mouth-guard. In a vain attempt to keep the coals burning in their relationship, they schedule weekly date nights at a local chain restaurant...but even there they have a hard time talking about anything other than the birthday presents they have to get for their kids' friends. In other words, they're hopeless.

What could be (and should be, based on the rote script and uninspired direction) an insufferably smug and patronizing look at the deadened zombies supposedly shambling through the suburbs is rescued by Fey and Carell, who manage to keep their performances a hair's breadth above complete caricature. Sure, we get glimpses of Liz Lemon and Michael Scott here and there, but these are smart performers, and they wisely opt to err on the side of keeping Phil and Claire grounded (at least until the shit hits the fan). When they crack each other up imagining the conversations being had by their fellow restaurant goers, we see the hint of the shared sense of humor that brought these two together in the first place. We get an impression of two people who are bored by their circumstances, but still basically love each other and -- perhaps more importantly -- like each others' company.

After learning of the impending divorce of two of their friends, however, the freak out a little bit and decide to put a little more effort into their next date night. Spontaneously driving into Manhattan to try to get into a chic seafood restaurant that demands customers reserve their tables a month in advance, they end up impersonating another couple -- the Tripplehorns -- on the reservation list. The sudden thrill of mostly benign "oooh, we might get caught" danger provides a bit of spark, and we see a glimpse of the probably mischievous college students they once were before life (and kids) wore them down.

Then a pair of hitmen show up, thinking they are the Tripplehorns, and hijinks predictably ensue.

Like I said, what happens next only matters inasmuch as it gives Fey and Carell more opportunities to comedically bounce off of each other. There's something about a stolen flash drive, a corrupt DA (played by an always great William Fichtner), a brooding mobster (played by a phoning-it-in Ray Liotta), a pair of corrupt cops (Jimmi Simpson and Common), two decent cops (Taraji P. Henson and some other guy), a lowlife couple (James Franco and Mila Kunis) whose relationship amusingly mirrors that of Claire and Phil, one of the most stupid/funny car chases I've seen in awhile, and -- funniest of all -- a perpetually shirtless Marky Mark (Mark Wahlburg, to those younger than me) as a special ops guy whose pecs make Claire get all tingly and Phil "want to kill myself". There's a ridiculous climax that involves a hilarious Fey/Carell pole-dance in one of those seedy strip clubs that I suspect only exist in the heads of Hollywood production designers.

But all that extra business is just that: business. It's window dressing. In the end it all comes down to Fey and Carell. And -- while neither of them reach the heights they've proven themselves capable of on The Office and 30 Rock -- they deliver.

Date Night is a two-star movie elevated by at least half-a-star -- maybe more -- by its lead performances. I wouldn't say to rush out and see this right away. But if you happen to be stuck in a soul-deadening suburban marriage and you're looking for something to kill a couple hours, you could do way worse.

Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father (2008)

2010-04-09T03:31:00.000-07:00

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

You may or may not have noticed, but I haven't posted any reviews of anything for over three months.

This isn't because I've forgotten, or because I decided to give it all up and go farm Alpacas up in Colorado or something. The reason is simple: I just really haven't seen a movie worth writing about. I started an Avatar review, then realized I had nothing to say and gave up. I considered an Edge of Darkness and Book of Eli review, then decided not to bother. I even thought of writing something short and sweet about The Crazies, and then was immediately distracted by something shiny and forgot all about it.

But here it is, 4:40 in the morning. My stomach hurts. My eyes are red and swollen. My throat is filled with a lump the size of a golf ball. I've been lying here in the darkness of my bedroom for the last hour and a half trying to make myself think of something -- anything -- other than the film I just saw. And I can't do it. This thing has burrowed into my gray matter like a rat, and it's just sitting there chewing away at the wiring.

Some movies get under your skin. Others bite. This one puts a fishhook into your testicles and gives a good hard yank.

This movie will crush you. Oh my God, will it crush you...

Back in 2001 Dr. Andrew Bagby was 28 years old. He had just abandoned a miserable surgical internship in Syracuse in favor of a general practice internship in Pennsylvania. Life was finally looking up for the guy. He had broken up with his fiancé a few years previous -- had gotten his heart thoroughly broken, in fact -- and wasn't feeling too good about himself, so while attending medical school in Newfoundland he had started an ill-advised relationship with Dr. Shirley Turner, a two-time divorcee and absentee mother thirteen years his senior.

But now that he was in Pennsylvania, he was ready to move on with his life. He and his fiancé had managed to maintain a friendship, and he was slipping into his new internship like a glove. The only thing left to do was somehow break it off with Turner, who everyone around him thought was crazy but who he still had some affection for. He tried to let her down easy -- Andrew Bagby was a good guy, and the last thing he wanted to do was hurt her. So he broke it off as gently as he could and put her on a plane back to Iowa, where she was living at the time. When she landed she immediately turned around and drove 1,600 miles back to Pennsylvania and demanded he talk to her. Being the good guy that he was, he agreed. They met in a nearby park. God knows what was said between them. She shot him five times and then drove back to Iowa. Then, coldly and calculatedly, she left a message on his answering machine telling him that she just wanted to say hi and that she loved him.

It just so happens that Bagby's best friend from the age of seven was an aspiring filmmaker named Kurt Kuenne. Not knowing exactly what to do with his grief, Kuenne picked up a camera and started interviewing everyone he could -- Bagby's parents, his extended family in both Missouri and the UK, his friends, his acquaintances, his colleagues. He wanted to learn everything he could about the friend he had lost. In a way the project was a form of denial. As he says in the film, he was on a mission to bring Andrew Bagby back to life.

Meanwhile, Turner managed to flee back to Newfoundland before the American justice system could get its hands on her, and she very quickly revealed that she was pregnant with Bagby's baby. David and Kate Bagby -- Andrew Bagby's grieving parents (he was their only child) -- immediately decided to sue for custody, sold everything they owned and moved to Canada. The baby was born, and Turner named him Zachary. Kuenne redirected the focus of his film as a sort of open letter to Zachary in hopes that it would help him get to know the father that was stolen from him.

The Canadian justice system decided that it was okay to let a suspected murderer out on bail and allow her to raise her child while it drug its feet on extradition. David and Kate gritted their teeth and negotiated with Turner for rights to visit their grandson while the custody battle moved with excruciating slowness through the courts. Turner used it as a means to further torment the parents of the man who committed the mortal sin of breaking up with her, extorting them for diapers and baby food money and essentially strong-arming them into going on playdates with her and her son so they could spend time with him. If you ever wanted to get a hint what it might be like to talk daily on the phone about birthday parties and babysitters with the woman who murdered your only son, this movie gives you a pretty good idea.

Kuenne trudged along with his personal project, obsessively interviewing seemingly anyone and everyone who knew Andrew. He combed through countless hours of home videos, countless piles of photographs. What emerges is a portrait of a man who any one of us would have been proud to call a friend. In death, as we know, just about everyone becomes a saint in the eyes of those who remember him. Certainly there must be a degree of that happening here. But at the very least, it becomes clear that Andrew Bagby was nothing short of an honest-to-God, bonafide Good Dude. We all have a friend like him, the guy (or girl) we grew up with who just thinking about makes us smile, even ten or twenty years later. The person you can go a year without speaking to and then pick up the phone and talk to like it was yesterday. No less than six men say they were planning to have Andrew be the best man at their wedding. That tells you something.

As we get to know Andrew, we also get to know David and Kate. If Andrew Bagby comes off as a saint, they are nothing short of heroic. The Job-like level of their suffering is nearly impossible to comprehend. They continue to play nice with their son's murderer, stoically putting their dwindling trust in the Canadian justice system and always dreaming of the day that Turner will finally be locked up for good and Zachary will be theirs. Kuenne walks us through the the tortured Canadian courts, where one bad decision leads to an absurdist, Kafka-esque comedy of errors that is about as funny as a nail gun shot to the forehead. When Turner is released on bail a second time because a sympathetic judge doesn't believe that her crime (First Degree Murder, we silly Yanks like to call it) indicates any sort of threat to society, you'll want to put your fist through a wall. When little Zachary is once again returned to Turner's poisonous bosom, you'll want to tear your hair out and scream.

And when the inevitable happens, you will.

The letter-to-Zachary construct is a manipulative filmmaker's trick. I won't argue with that. But it works. Kuenne uses it to bypass the tropes of your average true-crime documentary and to re-center the film's focus where it belongs: on the life that was lost and on the human wreckage that that loss has left in its wake. You come to love Andrew -- or at the very least understand why he was so loved by everyone who knew him -- and you come to look upon David Bagby and Kate with nearly Divine awe.

Kuenne manages to create a convincing polemic in favor of victim's rights, as well as a vision of human evil that will curdle like rotten milk in your stomach. But mostly, he has penned a crushingly heartfelt love letter to a dead friend, and to the shattered family his friend has left behind.

Watch this movie. Watch it and then pick up the phone and call your buddy from high school. When you're done catching up, call your parents and tell them you love them.

Watch this movie. But don't watch it before you go to bed, or you'll find yourself awake -- hoarse, sniffly, and red-eyed -- at five in the morning just like me.

My Favorite Films of the Decade

2009-12-28T14:19:00.000-08:00

Since taste is so subjective -- and because I'm fully aware of the fact that there are plenty of movies out there from the last decade that I haven't seen -- I'm loathe to call this a "Best Of" list. Rather, let's just say that these are my personal favorites, the ones that compelled me to go back for a repeat viewing.

So here goes.

1. Let the Right One In and The Signal (both 2008)

Directed by Tomas Alfredson (Right One) and David Bruckner, Dan Bush, and Jacob Gentry (Signal)

2008 reignited my passion for horror movies after a slow, nearly decade-long falling out with the genre, and it was these two films -- wildly different but each brilliant in its own way -- that did it.

I saw The Signal first, and I walked away convinced I wouldn't see a better horror film for at least another decade. Conceived by a collective of independent Atlanta filmmakers working with prosumer equipment, the movie is told in three elegantly interlocking parts, each written and directed by a different person but all forming a cohesive -- if utterly demented -- whole. The story is deceptively simple: a strange electronic signal delivered through TVS, radios and cell phones turns all of the denizens of a fictional American city into homicidal maniacs. I don't want to say anything more about it for fear of spoiling the experience. Just trust me when I say this is the most original and thought-provoking American horror film in years. And it was all done for a budget of about $200,000.

So when I saw Let the Right One In some months later, I was stunned to discover that it was even better. Austere, chilly and deliberate where Signal is heated and frenetic, Right One manages to do what Twilight, True Blood, Thirst, Underworld, and all the other "vampire chic" movies and TV shows in recent years have so far failed to do ... make vampires scary again. The swimming pool scene toward the end is worth the rental price alone.

2. The Business of Fancydancing (2002) and Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2001)

Directed by Sherman Alexie (Fancydancing) and Zacharias Kunuk (Atanarjuat)

NOT SAFE FOR WORK!!!

I don't really like the term "indigenous film" because it smacks to me of white liberal condescension, but I think it's worth noting that two of the best independent films from the early part of the decade came from Native American (or Canadian) filmmakers using the then new medium of digital video.

Fancydancing was written and directed by novelist/poet/screenwriter Sherman Alexie, and it follows Seymour Polotkin (Evan Adams), a gay Native American poet living in Seattle, as he returns home to the reservation he grew up on to attend a childhood friend's funeral. The film comes off as one part documentary, one part traditional narrative, and one part visual poem. It will creep under your skin without you even knowing it, and the quiet but crushing ending can reduce even the most macho dude to tears (trust me, I've seen it happen).

Atanarjuat is a very different film. Written and acted entirely in Inuktitut, it is the cinematic realization of a centuries old Inuit myth about the title character. Director Zacharias Kunuk provides almost no narrative context for non-Inuit audiences, choosing instead to toss us head-first into the story, and he uses the DV format to lend the film a sense of both immediacy and reality. The result is a movie that feels in some ways like a Maysles brothers documentary. Yet Kunuk still manages to create a stunning visual landscape, wringing images out of his video camera that a studio cinematographer would envy. It's a long movie, and slow going, but well worth it.

3. Michael Clayton (2007)

Written and directed by Tony Gilroy

The directorial debut from screenwriter Tony Gilroy (Dolores Claiborne, The Devil's Advocate, the Bourne trilogy, among others), Michael Clayton was sort of lost in the shuffle during a powerhouse year that offered up such lauded (and I would argue overrated) films as No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood. Critics had nice things to say about it, but audiences didn't really notice and all the available Oscar buzz got sucked up by the Country/Blood showdown.

Granted, a legal thriller about a cynical lawyer (George Clooney) confronting the depths of corporate greed is familiar terrain oft-traversed by the likes of John Grisham and Scott Turrow. But that's selling this movie short. Michael Clayton is oh-so-much better than its legal-thriller genre origins would suggest. Click on that clip I posted above, close your eyes and listen to Tom Wilkinson's opening monologue, and try to tell me that this isn't the work of an A-list screenwriter operating at the absolute top of his game. Michael Clayton is the type of straightforward movie that Hollywood does best, when it can get its shit together.

4. Shaun of the Dead (2004)

Directed by Edgar Wright

This is the movie that singlehandedly destroyed my beloved zombie subgenre and forever dashed my aspirations of making a truly scary, super-serious zombie movie like the ones I grew up on. After receiving the Edgar Wright/Simon Pegg treatment, I just don't think zombies can ever be taken seriously again.

But that's okay, because this movie is so friggin' awesome I can't be mad at it. Smart, silly, and -- yes -- even scary at times, Shaun of the Dead injected a much-needed shot of comedic tough love into an admittedly (begrudgingly, on my part) tired formula. The film transcended parody and proudly entered the pantheon of great horror comedies, unceremoniously batting Return of the Living Dead aside like a rag doll and knocking An American Werewolf in London off its long-occupied throne. And we all must now bow before it.

5. Memento (2000)

Written and directed by Christopher Nolan

The backwards-unfolding structure of this movie could have been a hopelessly irritating gimmick, but writer/director Christopher Nolan used it to craft a brilliant exploration of the very nature of memory and identity. And he managed to make a pretty awesome neo-noir thriller as well. Memento is now considered an undisputed classic, and it's as stunning to me these days as it was when I first saw it almost ten years ago in the theater. If you haven't seen it in awhile, go back and give it another watch. I promise you'll see things you missed the first time around.

Plus, it has Joey Pants. You can never have enough Joey Pants in your life.

6. Little Children (2006) and House of Sand and Fog (2003)

Directed by Todd Field (Children) and Vadim Perelman (House)

I grouped these two films together because of the presence of the generally amazing Jennifer Connelly, but it says something when you stop and realize that hers isn't the strongest performance in either film.

Little Children, directed by Todd Field (In The Bedroom) and adapted from a novel by Tom Perrotta (Election), was criminally unappreciated upon its release. A seemingly familiar tale of suburban infidelity, it's both funny and tragic, deleriously sexy, and is wonderfully acted from start to finish. It reintroduced us all to Jackie Earle Haley, whose turn as pedophile Ronnie James McGorvey is so alternately creepy and heartbreaking that it will leave you breathless, near tears and desperately wanting a shower. And Kate Winslet's pretty good, too.

House of Sand and Fog is probably the better film (although I'm partial to Children). Connelly and Ben Kingsley soar as two broken people battling each other and their personal demons in a tug-of-war over a repossessed house. There's nothing funny about this one, and the conclusion left me shaking in my seat. This is a movie that cuts to the bone.

7. Zodiac (2007)

Directed by David Fincher

David Fincher fans expecting another violent bruiser like Se7en or Fight Club were largely disappointed by the slow-paced, talky, and necessarily open-ended Zodiac. What they failed to realize was that this is a mature film for grownups, and it's less a serial killer movie than an old-fashioned, 1970s-style newspaper movie. Granted, I was predisposed to like it because of my already established fascination with the Zodiac Killer (which came from reading the book by Robert Graysmith, who's portrayed in the movie by Jake Gyllenhaal), but I still fly in the face of movie-geek wisdom by maintaining that it's Fincher's best. And, besides, it comes with my favorite movie soundtrack since Natural Born Killers.

8. Brokeback Mountain (2005)

Directed by Ang Lee

I almost didn't post this trailer, since it -- along with the theme song and the "I wish I knew how to quit you" line -- have been reduced to an unfortunate parodic shorthand in the years since. But watching it just now reminded me how much I love this movie, which for my money is one of the most starkly effective works of cinema I've seen. Masterfully directed by Ang Lee (robbed at the Oscars by that hack Paul Haggis) and adapted from an Annie Proulx short story by veteran writer Larry McMurtry (along with writing partner Diana Ossana and frequent Lee collaborator James Schamus), this is the movie that reminded all of us that Heath Ledger could act. He may now be forever remembered as the Joker, but this is the performance that stole my heart (and I'll thank you to stop your snickering).

9. Grizzly Man (2005) and The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009)

Both directed by Werner Herzog

Werner Herzog has proven to be one of the most fascinating documenters of human folly and psychosis that cinema has to offer (this probably comes from all that time he spent hanging out with Klaus Kinski back in the 70s). In his documentary Grizzly Man, he focuses on a real-life crazy person: Timothy Treadwell, a failed actor who got it into his head to go to Alaska and hang out with a bunch of hungry grizzly bears all summer without any means to defend himself. He did this for years, proclaiming over and over again that he would die for his beloved bears. And then one of his beloved bears decided to eat him, along with (sadly) his girlfriend, who Treadwell drug along with him on his delusional adventure almost against her will. Herzog mixes Treadwell's footage with interviews and his own acerbic commentary, and he presents a vision of this story that is both funny and tragic, occasionally sympathetic and at times downright cruel. In true Herzogian fashion, we can't help but think the celebrated German filmmaker is reveling a bit in the tawdry details of the story. And who can blame him?

If you doubt that, then look no further than his latest...er...opus, The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. Ostensibly a remake of Abel Ferrera's...um...classic indie from the early 90s, Bad Lieutenant is nothing BUT tawdry details. I'm not sure I can really defend this choice as one of the best films of the decade, but I will say that I had more fun with it than almost anything else I've seen in the last ten years and it's so gloriously, stupendously demented that I couldn't not mention it here. Nicolas Cage is far from my favorite actor, but what he does in this movie is simply mind-blowing. It really has to be seen to be believed.

10. A History of Violence (2005)

Directed by David Cronenberg

I really tried not to overfill this list with dude-oriented movies about sex and violence, but what can I say? I like what I like. That said, as movies about sex and violence go, David Cronenberg's adaptation of the graphic novel by John Wagner and Vince Locke is curiously flat in the depiction of both. That's because Cronenberg has spent a career working his way through weirdo, existential horror movies on an endless quest to explore the frayed edges reality and examine the ways humans find to create their own reality. Violence isn't really about violence at all, but rather about how a man can -- through sheer force of will -- become someone else entirely. Cronenberg and Violence star Viggo Mortensen explored similar thematic territory with their somewhat less effective followup, Eastern Promises. That was a good enough movie, but I think Cronenberg really said all he needed to say on the subject with this one.

11. Infernal Affairs (2002) and The Departed (2006)

Directed by Andrew Lau and Alan Mak (Affairs) and Martin Scorsese (Departed)

I can't get away from this list without mentioning Andrew Lau and Alan Mak's Hong Kong crime thriller Infernal Affairs and its American, Scorsese-helmed remake The Departed.

It's unfashionable to say one prefers The Departed to Infernal Affairs, and it's true that Departed is sprawling and messy next to the cold elegance of Lau and Mak's original. It's also true that Departed is seriously marred by a "what-the-fuck?" performance by an eternally phoning-it-in Jack Nicholson. But, after living in Boston for a couple years and having subsequently become obsessed with the real-life tale of Boston gangster Whitey Bulger, around which Scorsese and screenwriter William Monahan refashioned their story, I have to say I prefer The Departed. The film captures the language, feel, and texture of Boston in a way that no other film I've seen has before it (take THAT, Mystic River), and -- Nicholson aside -- the performances are nearly pitch perfect across the board. Even Vera Farmiga shines in a role that by rights should never have been written.

Is it crazy to think of The Departed as the final part of a trilogy, preceeded by Goodfellas (1990) and Casino (1995)? I think not.

12. In Bruges (2008)

Written and directed by Martin McDonagh

NOT SAFE FOR WORK!!!

I'm not going to say a whole lot about this one. If you watched the clip above you get the idea. In truth, Martin McDonagh is a brilliant playwrite -- nasty, profane, and funny, sure, but with a surprising capacity for spiritual depth and a truly genius touch with character -- and In Bruges is a startlingly solid first step into feature filmmaking (his Oscar-winning short, Six Shooter, is even better). Watch out for him in the future.

13. This Is England (2006)

Written and directed by Shane Meadows

I've mentioned this movie and talked about Meadows before, so I'll try not to dwell. Meadows is one of the most exciting filmmakers working in England today, and his semi-autobiographical film about the rise of the at-first benign skinhead movement and its corruption by the racist National Front is as eye-opening as it is entertaining. Thomas Turgoose is a firecracker as the young lead, Shaun, and Stephen Graham is absolutely chilling as Combo, Shaun's vicious mentor in the ways of English nationalism. This Is England is like a rich, raw wound needing to be bled.

*****

There are a lot more movies I'd like to talk about, but this post is already ridiculously long so I'll just give a quick shoutout, in no particular order, to:
The Last King of Scotland
American Psycho
Dancer in the Dark
Ginger Snaps
High Fidelity
Requiem for a Dream
Traffic
Ghost World
Waking Life
Adaptation
City of God
Spider
Amores Perros
Battle Royale
21 Grams
Cabin Fever
Dogville
Elephant
Kill Bill Vol. 1 and 2
Love Actually
The Station Agent
Willard
Swimming Pool
Wonderland
Session 9
Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy
The Royal Tenenbaums
Sideways
Monster
The 40-Year-Old Virgin
Brick
Caché
The Constant Gardener
Dog Soldiers
Inside Deep Throat
Jarhead
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
Land of the Dead
Match Point
The Proposition
Six Shooter
War of the Worlds
Wolf Creek
The Assassination of Richard Nixon
Before Sunset
Collateral
Dawn of the Dead
Downfall
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Hotel Rwanda
The Lost
United 93
Clerks II
The Prestige
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan
Volver
Stranger Than Fiction
Blood Diamond
Children of Men
Pan's Labyrinth
Dead Man's Shoes
An Inconvenient Truth
The Science of Sleep
The Lookout
Death Proof
Sunshine
Death Sentence
Eastern Promises
No Country For Old Men
Beowulf
The Mist
Juno
There Will Be Blood
Cloverfield
The Ruins
WALL-E
The Dark Knight
Burn After Reading
Milk
The Wrestler
Donkey Punch
Coraline
Gomorrah
State of Play
District 9
Inglourious Basterds
Zombieland
Brothers
Avatar (sorry, Gene)
No End In Sight
Waltz With Bashir
Narc
Hard Candy

Brothers (2009)

2009-12-05T00:33:00.000-08:00

Tobey Maguire and Jake Gyllenhaal at the Los Alamos ice rink

WARNING: SOME SPOILERS AHEAD

In the interest of full disclosure, I should preface this review by saying that I'm actually in this movie. More specifically, the back of my head makes its major motion picture debut for a grand total of about eight seconds during the big funeral scene toward the beginning.

So I was maybe a little predisposed to like it. Not only am I in it (sort of), the majority of the movie was shot right in my home town. For those of you who grew up somewhere like New York or LA, that's not probably not a big deal. But for us Hilltoppers, it's kind of cool. Even movies about Los Alamos (like Roland Joffe's 1989 film Fat Man and Little Boy) aren't usually shot there.

Brothers, directed by Jim Sheridan (My Left Foot, In The Name Of The Father) and a remake of Susanne Biers 2005 Danish film Brødre, tells the story of Sam and Tommy Cahill. Sam (Tobey Maguire) is the good brother, a star athlete married to his high-school sweetheart Grace (Natalie Portman) and father to two adorable little girls (Bailee Madison and Taylor Grace Geare). He's also a decorated Marine on his way back to Afghanistan. Tommy (Jake Gyllenhaal) is the bad brother, recently paroled after doing a three-year prison stint for armed robbery. Grace isn't Tommy's biggest fan. Neither, it seems, is Sam and Tommy's stern alcoholic father (Sam Shephard).

When Sam's helicopter goes down in Afghanistan and he's presumed dead, Tommy tries in his clumsy way to fill the void left by his absence. He does this at first by getting drunk and calling Grace at three in the morning to come pay his bar tab. Oops. After this inauspicious start, he slowly and inevitably steps up to the plate. After enlisting three friends to remodel Grace's kitchen and spending time with his nieces, Grace -- almost reluctantly -- begins to thaw. Brother and sister-in-law grow ever closer. Eventually, Grace and Tommy spend an evening together smoking pot and reminiscing about Sam. One thing leads to another and, in a weak moment, their emotions (unsurprisingly) get the better of them.

Before long Tommy -- a crude but well-meaning facsimile of his lost brother -- has, without quite meaning to, supplanted Sam's memory in his grieving family's hearts.

And then Sam comes home.

There has been a lot of bitching and moaning about how the trailer gives too much away, and before seeing the movie I would have agreed. After seeing it, we'd all be forgiven for thinking we know exactly what this movie's about: bad brother sleeps with dead good brother's wife, good brother (not dead after all) comes home and, after finding out bad brother and wife got their freak on, flips out and goes on a shooting spree.

But, now that I've seen the film, I have to say that trailer was actually a pretty clever bait-and-switch on the studio's part. Obviously they want to sell this as either a sexy melodrama, a taut suspense movie, or, preferably, both. But Brothers isn't really about any of that. It's not about infidelity any more than it is a thriller about a psychotic soldier with a gun. What it's about is family, and the way war can bend and twist a family into something tortured and unrecognizable.

Sheridan cuts back and forth between Grace and Tommy's domestic life stateside and Sam's harrowing experience as a Taliban prisoner. The potential second-act "oh shit" movie moment of finding out Sam's fate is neatly sidestepped. When Grace receives the call that he's alive, Sheridan handles the moment with nothing more than a ringing phone and a look on Portman's face.

Sam returns a changed man. Haunted by what he's seen and done and carrying a yolk of guilt around his neck that not even his Vietnam vet father can understand, he projects all his fury and self-loathing outward at Grace and Tommy. Whether or not his wife and his brother actually slept together is beside the point. Sam, desperately looking for a place to put his rage, convinces himself of such. He coils up amidst his increasingly concerned family like a tightly smiling snake ready to strike. Grace, Tommy, and the girls are soon terrified of this unfamiliar and maybe dangerous stranger who has appeared in their midst.

In movies like In The Name Of The Father and In America, Sheridan has proven himself to be one of the most exacting chroniclers of familial nuance that cinema has to offer. So it's no surprise that the most convincing parts of Brothers involve the family. Each of these characters could have been stock, but Sheridan and screenwriter David Benioff's eye for detail saves them, and Sheridan leads his cast to some of the finest and subtly affecting performances of their careers.

Portman has never been one of my favorite actresses. She has always seemed so deliberate and hyper-intellectual to me, and her performances have tended to feel like a bundle of ticks and actorly "choices" rather than fully realized characters. Here, in the thankless role of the grieving wife, she manages -- finally -- to eschew her tendency to overthink. She inhabits Grace thoroughly. Grace's pain is almost entirely internal, and Portman lets it bleed out here and there through looks and gestures. When she does cry, the work she and Sheridan have done to keep Grace firmly grounded makes those bigger moments ring true. Later, when she tries to reach out to Sam, the tangled mess of love, torment, guilt, and confusion seems to seep right out through her pores.

Gyllenhaal manages to keep Tommy from drifting into caricature. Tommy is charming, well-meaning, a little flaky, and more than a little devilish. He's also all twisted up with his own Freudian rage and font of self loathing. It would have been easy to go over the top, to hit the dark notes too hard, but Gyllenhaal wisely keeps it simple. The chemistry between him and Portman is thick, but they keep it throbbing at a low hum rather than letting it cycle up to a high whine. When their resolve finally crumbles and they give in to their temptations, the moment is deceptively small but deeply resonant.

The only real false notes for me in Gyllenhaal's performance are the two or three times the script calls on him to play drunk. A wise actor -- okay, Miguel -- once told me that the biggest mistake an actor can make when playing a drunk is to "act drunk" because actual drunks, by and large, try to act sober. Gyllenhaal, unfortunately, goes for the easy choice and you can just see the "acting" all over the screen. Just compare what he does to what Shephard does after the funeral scene, and you'll see what I'm talking about.

Shephard, for my money, is the best thing in the movie. His character -- the stern military father constantly comparing his two sons -- is the most fraught with potential for cliche and melodrama. And the script, to be honest, doesn't do him any favors in the early bits (I almost groaned aloud during his rote "why can't you be more like your brother" moment). But Shephard is a pro and he manages to pivot away from our expectations, presenting a flawed man struggling with his own pain who loves both of his sons deeply but just doesn't quite know how to say or do the right thing. After Tommy starts proving himself to both Grace and his dad, Shephard's scenes with Gyllenhaal ("How'd you get so handy?" he admiringly asks as Tommy puts molding on the cabinets) are textbook examples of how less is usually more and what's not said can be more powerful than what is. Later, when he recognizes that Sam is struggling and stumblingly tries to reach out to him, you just want to give the big guy a hug.

The lion's share of the capital-A "ACTING" burden falls, of course, on Maguire, who has to go from loving husband and father to dangerous psycho in just under two hours. This is where Brothers both soars and falters. I had an animated discussion with the folks I saw the movie with afterwards, who felt that they just didn't buy his character from the start. He never seems to really connect with either Portman or his children before he ships out, and so the impact of his loss on the family is not quite felt. My friends were never really rooting for him to come back, they said, which lessened the impact of his return.

I could see their point, but -- whether intentional or not -- the stilted nature of his performance felt true to me. Sam is a professional soldier who, it's suggested, has been away before. It seems not only plausible to me but almost necessary that he would struggle, even in the absence of the trauma later inflicted upon him in Afghanistan, to completely plug back into his civilian life. The same would be true for anyone, military or not, who was away from his family for extended periods of time. I would imagine that most of the men and women currently serving overseas right now would identify with his struggle.

However, the question of whether Maguire -- eternally geeky, awkward, and seemingly light as a feather -- is believable as a Marine at all is debatable. I bought it...just. One of my movie-going compatriots suggested it might have worked better if Maguire and Gyllenhaal had swapped roles. I'm not sure I could buy Maguire as a paroled ex-con any more than I buy him as a soldier., but having seen Jarhead (2005), I can agree that Gyllenhaal would have made the more convincing Marine.

Sheridan's touch with the family dynamic is near perfect, but he stumbles badly when he turns his attention toward Afghanistan. It didn't help that I kept noticing how much "Afghanistan" looked like the outskirts of Albuquerque, but even putting that aside I was just never quite able to buy into the reality the film tries to present. Every Afghanistan scene feels like a different movie, complete with mustache (or beard)-twirling Taliban baddies and tired war-movie dialogue ("Give them nothing, Private!" Sam shouts at a fellow prisoner who's being tortured. "Your life depends on it!"). Sheridan and Benioff seem not altogether interested in really capturing the verisimilitude of war, so they try to shorthand those scenes as much as possible. Unfortunately, that means that when Sam is finally pushed into an irredeemable act of violence the moment is simply not earned.

That makes it even more impressive, then, how much power is in the film's punch after Sam arrives home. What Maguire puts forth in the last forty-five minutes or so of the movie is amongst the most haunting screen acting I've ever seen. Four simple scenes stand out to me. In the first, Sam -- utterly unable to connect with his civilian life and desperate to rid himself of the guilt chewing away at his fevered brain -- tries to talk his commanding officer into sending him back to Afghanistan. "I've just been thinking about my men," he says, smiling and trying to hide the flowering madness that lurks behind his eyes. In the second and third, Sam very quietly confronts both Tommy and Grace about their relationship. "I can forgive you," he tells Tommy...and we almost believe him. Again, Sheridan does more here with looks than with dialogue. The third scene features a birthday party set around a dining room table, and it's one of the scariest scenes you're likely to see in a movie this year.

Sam is a ticking timebomb, as the saying goes, and when he finally blows (again, no spoiler here; it's all in the trailer) the look of utter disconnect in his eyes as he rages is both terrifying and utterly heartbreaking.

Upon leaving the theater, I have to admit that overall I was a bit underwhelmed. I described Brothers as two-thirds of a decent movie and one third of a very good movie. But the damn thing put its claws in me and had me tossing and turning all night. I still think, in a stronger year, Brothers would probably have a hard time getting nominated for an Oscar. This year, however, I wouldn't be surprised to see it at least get a nod. When it's good it's very good, and it has moments where it actually approaches great.

I have no idea what the film's commercial prospects are. The conventional wisdom, after notable failures like In The Valley of Elah and The Kingdom, is that films concerned with either of the current wars (Iraq or Afghanistan) are destined to fail at the box office. Nobody wants to get bummed out when they go to the movies, the thinking goes. But in Brothers Sheridan deftly avoids the temptation toward politics (as much as is possible, at least) and keeps his lens focused squarely on the human drama. You could probably call Brothers an anti-war movie if you really wanted, but it's far from a polemic. In light of President Obama's decision to send 30,000 more troops into Afghanistan and the recent tragedy at Fort Drum, I think Brothers is as fitting and sober a tribute to the men and women in the U.S. military and their families as Hollywood is likely to offer.

The Men Who Stare At Goats (2009)

2009-11-07T13:25:00.001-08:00

WARNING: SOME MILD SPOILERS AHEAD

I'm sort of enjoying this later-period George Clooney. In both last year's Burn After Reading and the just-released The Men Who Stare At Goats, Clooney seems to be shooting for a subtler, more A-list version of William Shatner, cleverly tweaking his movie-star image and his rugged good lucks for the sake of comic absurdity.

Goats is the sort-of directorial debut of actor/screenwriter/producer Grant Heslov. I say "sort of" because I looked him up on IMDB and saw that he has actually directed a few things before, none of which seem to have gained any real notice. But with Goats (probably because of his Clooney association, with whom he co-wrote Good Night, and Good Luck) he's rocketing out of the gate with a solid pedigree film crammed full of bonafide movie stars (Clooney, Kevin Spacey, Jeff Bridges, Ewan McGregor).

The comedy, based on the book of the same name by journalist Jon Ronson, purports to be the mostly true story of a top-secret group of New Age "supersoldiers" -- led by a Dude-ified Bridges as Bill Django-- formed in the 1970s and trained in the art of psychic warfare. The story revolves around a sadsack journalist named Bob Wilton (McGregor) who somehow manages to convince one of these soldiers, Lyn Cassady (Clooney), to let him tag along with him on a covert mission into Iraq in 2003. Throughout the drive into the desert Cassady tells Wilton all about the history of the "New Earth Army", which is revealed though a series of meandering but basically amusing flashbacks. We're introduced to a motley crew of possibly batshit "psychics" including Django, the naive and hippie-dippy General Hopgood (Stephen Lang), the certifiably nutsoid Gus (Stephen Root), and the sublimely oily Larry Hooper (Spacey). We witness the rise of the New Earth Army and its eventual corruption and demise under Hooper's Machiavellian stewardship. Meanwhile, Wilton and Cassady stumble into a few scrapes -- including getting kidnapped, riding along with a bunch of cowboy Blackwater douchebags (led by Robert Patrick, who seems to be channeling the spirit of George W. Bush), and almost dying of thirst in the desert. All the while, Cassady repeatedly attempts to demonstrate his "superpowers" to the skeptical Wilton, with generally anticlimactic effect.

The movie is pretty amiable, and it has only the barest hint of a narrative to hold it together. Watching it meander toward its conclusion is certainly an amusing and, most of the time, agreeable experience. But there is something slightly discomfiting about the tone. Heslov seems to want to make a biting Three Kings or M.A.S.H.-styled satire, but he doesn't really have the strength of his convictions so he relies largely on slapstick for the comedy. The movie wants so desperately for you to like it that it smiles at you when it should show teeth, caresses when it should cut. The modern-day framing story is set in the early years of the current Iraq War, and the light approach to what should be relatively heavy subject matter (all the psychic nonsense aside) left me feeling a little queasy. A car being blown up by an IED is used for comic effect...and it is funny, until you stop and realize that this shit is still going on right now.

Particularly unpleasant -- in light of the recent massacre at Ft. Hood -- is a scene in which a young New Earth Army recruit, whacked out on LSD, stumbles naked across an Army base and starts shooting. To be fair, Heslov and the studio can't really be blamed for the unfortunate timing, and the scene itself is not meant to be funny. But the relatively quick shift back to farce left a sour taste in my mouth.

Overall, I'd give The Men Who Stared At Goats a mild recommendation. Clooney's performance alone makes it worth the price of admission. He plays Cassady like a slightly crazed and sun-blasted Clark Gable, and manages to hit all the right comic notes without ever quite tipping into caricature. He's able to elicit laughs with a mere twitch of his eyes (I just about peed myself during the "sparkly eyes" moment). The same can't be said for Spacey and Bridges, however. Their performances -- while funny -- are much broader and more conventional.

I really hope Clooney keeps channeling his inner Shatner for many years to come.

BONUS: Dead Man's Shoes & This is England trailers

2009-11-07T01:40:00.000-08:00

Judging from the several (okay, four) Facebook messages I received after I posted my last review, it seems I stoked some interest in Shane Meadows. It also seems I misspoke a bit when I referred to him as "...one of the finest and least talked about filmmakers working today." That's not exactly true. In Britain, it appears he's talked about a great deal. Over here, though, he continues to fly under the radar.

Also, before I wrote the Dead Man's Shoes review it didn't occur to me to check and see if This Is England is also on Netflix Instant Viewer. It is. And, in all honesty, it's the superior film. So watch them both. They're awesome-tacular.

It was further suggested that I should mention some of Meadows' other films -- particularly his acclaimed A Room For Romeo Brass (1999), which also stars Considine. I saw that one not long after it first came out, and I remember enjoying it. He also directed Twenty Four Seven (1997), Once Upon A Time In The Midlands (2002), and last year's Somers Town. I haven't seen Midlands or Somers Town yet, but I believe they're all available on DVD.

Anyway, in an effort to keep your interest piqued, here are the trailers to Dead Man's Shoes and This Is England, courtesy of YouTube.

My The Men Who Stare At Goats review will be up shortly.

Dead Man's Shoes (2004)

2009-11-06T19:30:00.000-08:00

NETFLIX INSTANT VIEWER HIDDEN GEM #1:

Dead Man's Shoes is a deceptively simple little revenge film. You would be forgiven if, after reading the Netflix plot description, you dismiss it as something you've probably seen before.

In a nutshell: Richard (Paddy Considine), a British soldier and war veteran, returns to his tiny hometown in Northern England where he at first threatens and then brutalizes a group of local thugs who perpetrated a nasty and dangerous prank on his mentally disabled younger brother (Toby Kebbell).

If you've ever seen the Michael Caine classic Get Carter (1971) or the Charles Bronson anticlassic Death Wish (1974) -- or have even a passing knowledge of them -- you can probably guess where this goes.

But the opening credit sequence -- a series of 8mm home movies scored to Smog's mournful "Vessel In Vain" -- should tell you right away that writer/director Shane Meadows is up to something slightly different here. Meadows and Considine take this pulpy genre construct and use it to explore some pretty heady themes of grief, rage, and familial guilt and resentment. What promises to be a fun and nasty thrill ride will end up breaking your heart.

Meadows is one of the finest and least talked about filmmakers working today. Like all true directors, he understands that the root of a great film lies in the performance. In both Dead Man's Shoes and his followup This Is England (2006) -- a harrowing journey through the history of England's skinhead movement and its corruption by the rise of the National Front -- Meadows demonstrates a knack for matching the right actor with the right part (Considine here, the terrifying Stephen Graham in England). These aren't showy performances, but they'll hit you hard.

Meadows' style is not quite verité, but -- like Alejandro González Iñárritu (Amores Perros, 21 Grams, Babel) -- he uses verité to create a gritty and fully realized environment, and then blends it masterfully with a more traditional narrative approach. Like Iñárritu, the effect can border on histrionic at times. But, unlike Iñárritu, Meadows knows when to quit. He refuses to pound us over the head with social commentary, instead letting it bleed organically through the characters and the story.

Dead Man's Shoes is a simple movie, but you're unlikely to find a genre film this emotionally rich being produced on this side of the pond. Check it out.

The Fourth Kind (2009)

2009-11-06T12:09:00.000-08:00

WARNING: SOME SPOILERS AHEAD

There are all types of bad movies.

There are so-bad-they're-good movies like Con Air (1997), Road House (1989), and Independence Day (1996) that throw themselves upon you so shamelessly with their brazen ridiculousness that -- like a three-legged weiner dog desperately humping your leg -- you kind of can't help but love them, at least a little bit.

There are so-bad-they're-unwatchable movies like Batman and Robin (1997) and Van Wilder 2: The Rise of Taj (2006) that should really just be shot behind the woodshed or drowned in a river like a bag of kittens.

There are B movies. There are Michael Bay movies. There are Larry the Cable Guy movies.

And then there are movies like The Fourth Kind. These are the worst because -- like an abusive boyfriend -- they knock you around for awhile and then come back with a sly smile, a sparkly little trinket, and a solemn promise to do better. You give them another chance, and they just knock you around some more.

The Fourth Kind begins with Milla Jovovich walking toward us through some foggy Tim-Burtonesque woodscape and flatly intoning into the camera: "I'm actress Mila Jovovich, and I will be portraying Dr. Abigail Tyler. This film is a dramatization of events that occurred in October of 2000. Every scene of this movie is supported by archival footage. Some of what you're about to see is extremely disturbing."

Oooh, creepy. This kind of "based on a true story" bullshit is a time-honored tradition in horror movies, starting at least with John Larroquette's equally bullshit (but much more effective) opening narration at the beginning of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974): "The film which you are about to see is an account of the tragedy which befell a group of five youths ... Had they lived very, very long lives, they could not have expected nor would they have wished to see as much of the mad and macabre as they were to see that day..."

First-time writer/director Olatunde Osunsanmi tries to freshen up this convention by taking it a step further and having his lead actress break the fourth wall. He keeps it going by introducing each new character with a Chyron giving his/her name and the name of the character ("Elias Koteas [as] Dr. Abel Campos" for example). The movie then cuts repeatedly back and forth between the "dramatization" (featuring recognizable if not exactly A-list movie stars) and supposed "archival footage" (featuring unknown and often faceless actors). It's sort of like The Blair Witch Project meets Unsolved Mysteries on crack.

Osunsanmi tries his damnedest to keep this conceit going, and he never once misses an opportunity to jump cut between the two modes or to go into a really awkward split screen and overlap the dialogue. It's an interesting strategy at first. Then it's just obnoxious.

The movie purports to be a retelling of an "actual series of events" that took place in Nome, Alaska about a decade ago (this is all news to the people of Nome, apparently). A beautiful young psychiatrist (Jovovich) -- still reeling from her husband's unsolved murder -- discovers a pattern in her patients' recurring nightmares about an owl and decides to put one of them under hypnosis. The guy promptly freaks out and kills his family. The town sheriff (Will Patton) -- who seems to harbor some sort of inexplicable grudge against her (I guess he's annoyed that she keeps bugging him to solve that whole my-husband-was-murdered thing) -- forbids her from hypnotizing any more of her patients. She ignores him and hypnotizes another guy who promptly freaks out, levitates, and snaps his own neck.

And then things get weird.

It's no spoiler to say that this movie revolves around alien abductions. As a card-carrying weirdo freak who's into such stories and who spent four years of college in Alamosa, CO, with the specific hope of seeing a UFO, I was impressed by how much they got right in terms of the mythology. I was unimpressed, however, by how much they got wrong in terms of, you know, filmmaking, acting, writing, and basic storytelling.

There are a few effective moments here and there, and -- like the abusive boyfriend's apology -- they kept me hooked and hoping that the rest of the movie would get better. The footage of the psychiatric sessions and the hypnosis is genuinely freaky, as is the audiotape recording of Dr. Tyler's own apparent abduction. In other words, pretty much all the crap they crammed into the trailer. That stuff's easy, though. If you crush a baby's skull in a car door on camera, you're bound to get a reaction from the audience. The film completely misses on all the difficult stuff -- the character motivation, the cinematography, the story structure, etc -- that actually makes a good movie.

And, as awkward and overcooked as it is, I liked Osunsanmi's faux-docudrama approach. With a little (okay, a LOT) more restraint, it could have been effective. I almost expected The Fourth Kind to be some sort of parody of TV shows like Unsolved Mysteries and Monster Quest. That could have been fun. Alas, I think it's meant to be taken seriously.

The dialogue is, by and large, never less than atrocious. It's all either overheated melodrama or clumsy and amateurishly delivered chunks of (generally useless) exposition. The acting is a notch better than the script deserved, but that's the best you can say for it. Jovovich proves once again why I just can't really take her seriously as an actress. Even a solid veteran like Patton sinks under the weight of this thing. Weirdly, the unknown actors in the archival segments are even worse, which destroys all but the thinnest thread of verisimilitude the movie might have otherwise had. The only person who emerges mostly unscathed is Koteas, who could probably infuse a reading of Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking with the slithery charm of an Internet pederast.

The story ceases even trying to make sense after the first act, instead contenting itself to hopscotch from spooky scene to spooky scene with very little to offer in between. Osunsanmi tries to manufacture some sense of drama during the down time by having his actors either stare portentiously into the camera or scream at each other. It would be laughable if it wasn't so headache inducing.

There's not much more to say about this one. Just leave it alone. You deserve better.

Where the Wild Things Are (2009)

2009-11-05T15:26:00.000-08:00

In the interest of full disclosure, before I start this review I have to admit that I was never really all that in love with Maurice Sendak's seminal 1963 children's book Where the Wild Things Are.

In retrospect, this seems a little strange. A story about a weirdo little kid with an overactive imagination, disenchanted with his day-to-day existence and yearning to sail off and romp around an island with a bunch of monsters should feel like autobiography. But for whatever reason the book never really grabbed hold of my imagination the way it did some kids. I remember liking the basic idea and thinking the pictures were pretty cool, but that was about it.

Right before the Spike Jonze/Dave Eggers film adaptation came out a couple weeks ago, I went to a Borders and thumbed through a copy of Sendak's original to see if the adult-me could figure out why the book fell with such a thud on the kid-me so many years ago. It surprised me how clearly I remembered the pictures, but it didn't surprise me how narratively slight the actual book is. For a budding writer like myself (I was putting together my own little text-heavy picture books when I was six), the cool pictures and those ten lines of prose just didn't cut it.

The book essentially goes like this: little Max gets in trouble, little Max gets sent to bed without dinner, little Max runs off to the land of the Wild Things, little Max and the Wild Things swing from some trees, little Max gets bored, little Max goes home. The most interesting stuff was completely left out. What exactly happens when Max and the Wild Things start running through the woods? Do they kill and eat things? Do the Wild Things ever threaten to turn on him? What?

The Neverending Story (1984) was (and is) one of my favorite movies. Thematically, it's almost exactly the same as Where the Wild Things Are. I wore out my VHS copy with repeated viewings over the years, but I don't remember cracking open my Wild Things book more than once or twice. The difference was, of course, that in Wild Things nothing really happens. In The Neverending Story a whole mess of shit happens. I couldn't have put it this way at the time, but there are stakes.

When I went to see the movie, I was vaguely curious and not really expecting to have a strong opinion either way. I didn't figure I'd love it or hate it. I just wanted to see what they came up with. And, to be honest, my first impression was that I was underwhelmed. Needless to say the film looked amazing, and it's clear from the first five minutes that little Max Records is a real find. But the story still felt pretty thin to me.

Then I went to sleep that night and dreamed about it. And when I went to sleep the next night I dreamed about it again. Somehow the movie stuck with me in a way the book never did.

I don't have a lot critically to say about this film, because my reaction was largely impressionistic. Yeah, Jonze and Eggers provided a genuine narrative framework, not only to Max's real world (he's the youngest child of a divorced single mom, and he desperately wants his sullen teenage sister's approval) but to the imaginary world he escapes to. The conflicts (completely absent from the book) that erupt between Max and the Wild Things deftly mirror the conflicts going on back home. Overly clever and on the nose, sure, but to harp on that seems to me to miss the point.

What makes the movie work is the way in which Eggers and Jonze slyly nudge the audience back into a child's-eye-view of reality. The Wild Things themselves -- surly Carol (voiced by James Gandolfini), distant KW (Lauren Ambrose), morose Ira (Forrest Whitaker) and his irate girlfriend Judith (Catherine O'Hara), Carol's best friend Douglas (Chris Cooper) and perpetually picked-on Alexander (Paul Dano) -- all think and behave with the logic of children. They're neurotic, affectionate, imaginative, jealous, and occasionally temperamental.

Max, of course, fits right in. He bonds immediately with Carol (I have to admit that hearing Tony Soprano coming out of the creature's mouth was pretty distracting at first) and KW, the two of whom are eye-rollingly obvious reflections of Max and his distant sister. Carol is jealous because KW keeps wandering off to hang out with a couple mysterious friends on the other side of the island (this leads to one of the movie's funnier and more bizarre reveals). By trying to be friends with both, Max inadvertently exacerbates the problem. Meanwhile Judith and Ira are jealous because Max -- their newly elected king -- seems to favor Carol and Douglas over them. His solution, of course, is to propose a dirt-clod fight. "Good Guys" vs. "Bad Guys." You can guess where that leads.

I can't quite articulate what it is Jonze and Eggers -- along with their actors -- do to make this feel like a genuine reflection of childhood rather than an adult's feeble attempt to mimic childhood. It's a pretty diaphanous thing they pull off, hard to wrap one's head around in any sort of intellectual way. Somehow they manage to tap that well and slop the memories out. Whatever it is they do and however they do it, it works.

At the end of the day, I wouldn't call this a brilliant movie or any sort of masterpiece. I still think it's pretty slight. The themes, beautifully and lovingly presented as they are, are pretty small and terribly obvious. To my mind the film still lacks the richness, emotional resonance, and fullness of imagination that The Neverending Story had in spades.

Of course, that might only be because I saw that movie when I was an actual child, rather than a guy in his 30s trying to remember what childhood was like. If I had seen this movie as a kid, I don't know if I would have felt any more strongly about it than I did the book. Maybe. Maybe not. Who's to say?

But as an adult who feels more and more disconnected from that hyperimaginative child I used to be with every inch that my gut expands and my hairline recedes, Where the Wild Things Are touched a soft spot on my heart I didn't expect.

Donkey Punch (2008)

2009-10-17T11:28:00.000-07:00

NOTE: SOME MILD SPOILERS AHEAD

I love all types of horror movies. Monster movies (anything from Tremors to In the Mouth of Madness to Night of the Living Dead), ghost movies, alien movies (The Thing, They Live), evil-kid movies (Joshua), demonic possession movies, freaky drugged-out mind-fuck movies (Jacob's Ladder), plus all combinations thereof (Event Horizon). I can even appreciate a good slasher film, if done right (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is still the gold standard, as far as I am concerned).

What unites all these films -- indeed, what unites almost the entire genre -- is the basic activity of watching a person or a group of people being forced to confront some seemingly unstoppable and inexplicable outside force. It's all about the fear of "the other," whatever that other may be. H.P. Lovecraft took this notion to its furthest extreme with his tales or cosmic horror, where the human characters find themselves so completely overwhelmed by their encounters with impossibly powerful and completely unfathomable Godlike entities like Cthulhu, Dagon, The Goat With The Thousand Young, etc., that they are rendered completely useless and are -- almost to the man (Lovecraft didn't write a lot about women) -- driven to madness.

Literary and film critics have tried time and time again to quantify this "other" in psychological terms, to make the monsters, ghosts, demons and serial killers stand for something recognizably human and -- too often -- mundane. Sometimes the conclusions are obvious. Frankenstein's monster represents our fear of scientific progress. The slasher killers of the 80s are stand-ins for AIDS. Sometimes the connotations are ugly and uncomfortable. Vampires become our rape fantasies. King Kong is about the White Europeans fear of the Black African (and, after seeing Peter Jackson's portrayal of the ochre-painted natives in his massive-budget remake, I have to say I can see the point). Sometimes they seem more than a little ludicrous. I remember reading an article that drew a line from old tentacle-faced Cthulhu Him(?)self to Lovecraft's supposed pathological terror of his mother's vagina.

There may be something to all this, even if the arguments can become a bit reductive. What ultimately matters -- I think -- is that there is some part of our unevolved, reptilian brains that is still afraid of the dark...and whatever might be lurking within it. This "whatever" can take on any form it likes. It can be Hannibal Lecter, the creepy-voiced Pazuzu from The Exorcist, fire-breathing Godzilla, the weird ghost hand pressing against the door in The Haunting. All we know for sure is that IT IS NOT US.

There's a reason why Stephen King named his novel about the shape-shifting clown It.

This kind of horror -- which I'd ballpark guess makes up 90 percent or more of the genre -- is ultimately comforting. By making the evil something that exists completely separate from ourselves, these stories reaffirm our humanity. And by turning our rape fantasies into Dracula or our Freudian vaginal disgust into Cthulhu, we're given enough distance to tell ourselves that it's only a story, and we don't have to take it seriously if we don't want to.

This is not an original observation, by any means. But I think it's basically a true one.

There is another kind of horror story, however, one that is at once simpler, bleaker, more nihilistic, and -- I believe -- much scarier. These are stories that take us into those weird little places that lurk just a hair's breadth beyond the reach of civilization, where the comforting veneer of modernity that we depend on to get us through our day is suddenly torn away and we're confronted with the fact that -- at the end of it all -- we're basically still animals. In these stories, our own capacity for violence is limited only by our imagination.

Call it the Lord of the Flies school of horror. The movies don't seem to take us there too often, or at least not directly. If a film treads into those waters, it's more likely to be couched within some sort of crime-based revenge fantasy (like Deathwish or its Kevin-Bacon-starring offspring Death Sentence), an Apocalyptic future (A Boy and His Dog), or a distant war scenario (Apocalypse Now). Occasionally someone will take a crack at a really serious drama (Straw Dogs) or even a black, black comedy (Very Bad Things, or just about anything by the Coen Brothers).

Horror movies themselves don't seem go there too often (although you do see much more of it in horror fiction...anyone who's ever read a Jack Ketchum novel knows what I'm talking about). There are a few exceptions, like some of Wes Craven's early work (Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes), but those tend to be pretty few and far between. I think this is probably because -- at least in our country -- studios are simply afraid to go there. It's much easier to sell an unapologetically scary movie if you at least provide the dubious comfort of some external source of all the carnage. Even most of the newish wave of "torture porn" films tend to give us a clear and distinctly separate antagonist (I don't know about you guys, but I've never met anyone who resembles Jigsaw from the Saw films). It's simply harder to get a studio to sign onto something that just goes ahead and rips the scab off the wound and says, in effect, that we're the problem.

I'm guessing most of you know what a "donkey punch" is, but I'm gonna go ahead and describe it anyway so that there's no confusion. If you're squeamish about such things, skip the rest of this paragraph (and for God's sake, don't see this movie). A donkey punch is a gross, irredeemably misogynistic, mostly apocryphal don't-try-this-at-home sex act wherein a man, whilst performing anal sex on a (likely female) partner, delivers a vicious punch to the back of the head right at the point of orgasm, thereby causing an involuntary contraction of the partner's sphincter muscles and, in theory, increasing exponentially the level of pleasure during climax (for the puncher, of course, not for the punchee).

Donkey Punch -- the movie, not the sex act -- is the first film from English music-video director Oliver Blackburn (who co-wrote the script with David Bloom). Set in coastal Spain, it opens with three vacationing lasses from Leeds (Sian Breckin, Jaime Winstone, and Nichola Burley), who encounter four caddish but charming enough Londoners (Tom Burke, Julian Morris, Robert Boulter, and Jay Taylor). The boys crew a luxury yacht, and they invite the girls onto the boat to party. The girls go (of course), and before long are all stripping down to their bikinis. The alcohol and ecstasy are supplemented by crack, and the conversation turns -- as it so often does in these situations -- to sex. There are brief discussions of the "dirty sanchez," the "rusty trombone," and -- of course -- the donkey punch.

Finally (and inevitably) two of the girls go down below with two of the boys. A third boy accompanies them, video camera in tow. The two "nice" kids stay up top and talk about, you know, feelings and relationships and stuff, while the others rip off each others' clothes and engage in the type of spontaneous on-camera orgy that you see popping up in online porn every so often (and, no, don't ask me how I know that). The boys egg each other on. Finally, one of them tries a donkey punch. And a girl ends up dead.

So there's your setup. The best one-sentence description I've read so far comes from Scott Tobias of the Onion A.V. Club, who wrote: "...the film is what Dead Calm or Knife In The Water would look like if they featured late-period cast members from The Real World." If you think it all sounds tawdry, you're right. I'm generally a pretty unflappable movie-goer, but I'm not ashamed to admit that I watched the orgy scene in particular with my mouth agape and consumed by the itchy feeling that I needed a shower.

What sets Donkey Punch apart from its hardcore horror contemporaries and elevates it somewhat beyond the limits of the Howard-Stern worthy premise is Blackburn and Bloom's eye for moral ambiguity. The characters are fairly generic on the page. The girls fall into two types: Tammi (Burley) is the shy and reluctant one, while the other two are apparently up for just about anything. The boys are equally archetypal. You have Sean (Boulter), who -- on the surface, at least -- comes off as responsible and sensitive. On the other end of the spectrum is the thuggish and amoral Bluey (Burke), who provides the drugs, steers the conversation to rough sex, and eventually engineers the on-camera orgy. In between the two extremes are Marcus (Taylor), the ship's arrogant skipper; and Josh (Morris), Sean's boyish and unfortunately suggestible younger brother.

These are not complicated characters, but Blackburn is a smart director and he and his actors have an impressively clear eye for nuance. They avoid packing in a lot of backstory and instead look for the little moments -- a lilt in one's voice, a twitch in the eye, a particularly revealing turn of phrase -- to establish the characters. They infuse the performances with an easy naturalism that makes these kids relateable, if not entirely likeable.

This is key, because when the shit goes down and eveyone inevitably turns on everyone else, the situation remains horrifyingly plausible.

The film could have very easily been another us vs. them horror movie, with the boys being the obvious villains. But Blackburn's not interested in that. No one in this film is a monster...or, at least, no one is any more monstrous than anyone else. At first the boys -- fearing for their jobs and their freedom -- make the executive decision to dump the body and concoct a believable cover story. They repeatedly try to convince, cajole, and eventually bully the surviving girls into going along. The girls resist. And I think you can guess where that's going to lead.

Most of the characters (except for the dead girl) commit at least one truly nasty act of violence, and they are each given a plausible motivation for his or her behavior. The violence -- when it comes -- is more the result of fear, frustration, and a few remarkably bad choices than any inherent psychopathy on anyone's part. Bluey would seem to be the obvious choice to fill the villain role, but Blackburn and Bloom sidestep this pitfall nicely by never making him directly responsible for any of the violence. He's a thug, sure, but he's mostly shit-talk and bluster.

Blackburn and Bloom craft a superbly realized thriller by relying on this crazy-kilter seesawing of the audience's sympathies. As soon as you think you've pinned down the villain, someone else does something worse.

There are some serious missteps, however. Blackburn and Bloom stage a conversation over a loaf of bread just after the body has been dumped that is filled with tension and a nauseating sense of dread, but they end up pushing it way too far in a desperate attempt to bridge a narrative gap and nearly blow all the credibility they had earned over the previous hour or so.

In retrospect, that beat was portentious because the movie -- so carefully constructed in its first two acts -- descends into familiar stalker/slasher territory during the last twenty minutes. Blackburn and Bloom toss aside the meticulous interior logic they had spent so much time lovingly creating for the sake of simple narrative expediency. Characters start behaving in ways that people only do in movies...which would be sort of forgivable if the filmmakers hadn't done such a solid job of defying the genre conventions in the movie's early stages.

But in a world overstuffed with crap like the upcoming Saw VI and the unforgivable remake of The Stepfather, I'll take a hard-hitting and thematically ambitious movie like Donkey Punch any day. It manages to be a pretty taut, engaging, and genuinely thought-provoking psychological thriller, and even if it ultimately falls short of the high bar it sets for itself I have to give everyone involved credit for going for it.

Apologies

2009-10-16T19:39:00.001-07:00

So I started this blog with the best intentions of, you know, actually writing it. But then I moved, and didn't really have ready Internet access, and, well...

So the entire summer went by, and I managed to NOT review almost anything, including "Inglourious Basterds" (although I assume no one was waiting with baited breath for my thoughts on "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen").

Anyway, now I've got Internet again, so hopefully this will be a bit more regular than it has been for the past few months. No promises.

Later tonight or tomorrow I'll be posting my review of Donkey Punch. Hope you enjoy!

Orphan and A Perfect Getaway (2009) SPOILERS

2009-08-14T17:31:00.000-07:00

I decided to wait a couple of weeks before talking about Orphan (directed by Jaume Collet-Serra) and A Perfect Getaway (written and directed by David Twohy). Reviews about movies like this are no fun unless you can get into the spoilers, so I figured I'd give people some time to see the films first.

If you haven't seen one or both of them yet and still might have some interest in doing so, I'd suggest coming back later or just waiting until I get a chance to write about District 9 and Inglorious Basterds. Because I'm gonna be spoiling like crazy here. Consider yourselves notified.

Before I get into what I thought of these movies, I wanted to post this quote from the Washington Post's review of Orphan.

"...the only people who should escape unscathed from 'Orphan' are the three young actors who play [Vera] Farmiga and [Peter] Sarsgaard's children, adopted and biological. The sadistic violence, symbolic incest and flirtation with pedophilia in the film -- not to mention its shameless perpetuation of toxic stereotypes surrounding the adoption of older children -- leads one to think their work on this film wasn't employment so much as child abuse. Finally, let's hear it for those fearless executives at Warner Bros., currently bloated like engorged ticks with billions made from Batman and Harry Potter, for using all the time, talent and treasure at their disposal to put out bilge like this. Their lust for money, apparently, is exceeded only by their contempt for the suckers who keep on forking it over. Shame on them all, every single one." -- Ann Hornaday

Wow. I'm sorry, but any movie that gets a review like that is a must-see for someone like me. What on earth could have raised the bile so viciously into Ms. Hornaday's throat? I have to know.

Orphan and A Perfect Getaway are both "twist" thrillers, which seems to be the only type of thriller Hollywood knows how to make in this post-Shyamalan world. I'm not complaining, exactly, because I dig twist thrillers. They get knocked all the time for being gimmicky and artificial. I totally agree. That's part of what I love about them. To my mind, dismissing a twist movie as cheesy and artificial completely misses the point of what a twist thriller is. It's like telling Motley Crue they should try to sound a little more like Beethoven. To mix metaphors here, not everything can be filet mignon. Sometimes you just want candy. It may rot your teeth and make you want to puke later, but when you're eating it it tastes so good.

With that out of the way, I have to say that I liked both but didn't love either of these movies. They're both fun and pretty well executed for what they are, which are B movies. Orphan is The Bad Seed all dolled up to resemble a taut, arthouse thriller. It seems to want to be more than it is, and for that I found it kind of adorable. Getaway, for its part, is much more aware of its limitations.

Each film has a genre setup that can, if you're inclined to be forgiving, be described as "conventional." Orphan gives us John and Kate (Peter Sarsgaard and Vera Farmiga), two loving parents who -- after a tragic miscarriage -- decide to adopt a precocious (and weird) little Russian girl named Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman) from one of those antiquated, down-country Catholic orphanages that I'm inclined to believe exist only in movies. Apparently it doesn't occur to either of them that it might be a good idea to introduce Esther to their two biological children, Danny and Max (Jimmy Bennett and Aryana Engineer), before tossing her headfirst into the family. But if they had there wouldn't be a movie, so whatever.

Esther at first seems to be a model child. She's hyper-articulate, preturnaturally talented, obnoxiously devoted to John and endlessly respectful towards Kate. So far so good. But she's also a weirdo. She refuses to wear anything but little baby-doll dresses that seem to have floated right up out of a Tim Burton daydream, and she freaks out if anyone tries to remove the cloth ribbons she uses to cover her wrists and neck...

Hmmm...

I think we all sort of know where this is going (twist notwithstanding). What makes Orphan work moderately better than it should have is a flawed but basically well-constructed script by Alex Mace and David Johnson, assured (if uninventive) direction by Collet-Serra, and strong acting almost across the board.

Collet-Serra directed Paris Hilton in House of Wax. I recently happened to catch that one on FX while laid up with a bad back a few weeks ago, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was only bad, not awful. In Orphan -- with somewhat better material and actual actors to work with -- Collet-Serra settles into a style that remains (until the end) refreshingly understated without ever quite being turgid. He clearly understands the value of taking his time, and he knows when to get out of the way of the actors. There's nothing he does here that will blow anyone away (he does resort to a couple unfortunate cat-in-the-closet scares early on) but he surpasses "competent" (which is the best you can say for his work in House of Wax) and progresses all the way to "okay."

It's the performances that really make the movie hum. Farmiga is impressive if only for managing to play essentially the same role she did in Joshua (2007) without completely feeling like she's repeating herself. Farmiga is one of those instantly believable actresses who has found a niche turning rote characters into something memorable. She stood out in Joshua, and owned her few scenes as a Russian hooker in Anthony Minghella's Breaking and Entering (2006). She even managed to take one of the most extraneous characters ever conceived -- the pyschiatrist/girlfriend in The Departed -- and nearly steal the show from Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, and Leonardo DiCaprio.

In Orphan, she has the thankless task of portraying a grieving mom with a drinking problem who slowly starts to realize that her adopted replacement child is a psychopathic killer. In a lesser actress's hands, this would have tipped over into melodrama right quick. Farmiga manages to keep Kate grounded, and lets the back story seep through the performance in an organic way rather than force it through histrionics. She never plays either the grief or the addiction; they're just there, infused in every glance, gesture, and movement.

Sarsgaard is okay, but he never manages to bring his equally thankless character to life. Roger Ebert had the best line, so I'm going to go ahead and steal it: "John is the kind of understanding husband who doesn’t understand a damned thing except that he is understanding." The script does a nice job of motivating his relentless obtuseness (he's understandably dubious about Kate's suspicions because of her history with the booze). But Sarsgaard never manages to get the audience on his side. By the end of the movie, I found myself hoping that Kate would just give up on trying to convince him and just crack his skull open with a bottle or something.

The real revelations here are the kids (Bennett, Engineer, and Fuhrman). All three are very, very good. Danny is another stock character -- the spoiled brat who is immediately jealous his new sister -- but Bennett manages to hit all the right notes. In his hands, Danny comes off like a real kid with understandible (if primitive) motivations.

Little Max is more interesting. She's hearing-impaired, cute as a button, and takes an immediate shine to her new big sister. But as Esther starts to show her true nature -- first smashing a pigeon with a brick, then pushing another girl off a jungle gym, and finally inviting Max to play Russian roullette with a loaded pistol before enlisting her help in disposing of the body of a nun she just murdered -- Engineer has to strike a very delicate balance. Her feelings towards Esther move from adoration to concern to outright terror, and she must portray Max's childish moral quandary -- to tattle or not to tattle -- without the crutch of dialogue to guide her. That's a feat that would be difficult for an actress twenty years her senior. Engineer nails it.

It's Fuhrman, however, who really steals the show. Her Esther is genuinely chilling. When she puts a pistol to little Max's head and asks "want to play?" or sneaks into Danny's room and threatens to cut his balls off with a box cutter, she does so with all the cold malice and devillish poise that De Niro brought to Jimmy Conway in Goodfellas and Alan Arkin brought to Harry Roat in Wait Until Dark. It's a remarkably disciplined and self-assure performance. Forget Dakota Fanning or whoever else is being groomed to take her place. This evil little girl is the real deal.

Perhaps my favorite thing about the movie -- and what seems to have made Ms. Hornaday so livid -- is the kid's-eye-view perspective. Esther remains perfectly behaved around the parents but shows her true face to Danny and Max early on. Their growing terror and eventual resolve to stop her rests at the heart of the film. It's a heavy burden for any child actor to carry, and here we have three who handle it beautifully.

A Perfect Getaway is, in many ways, the weaker of the two movies. It's goofier, and the plot contrivances are eye-rolling from the start. Yet, in a strange way, I found that awkwardness somehow endearing. The movie reminded me of a big German Shepherd puppy not quite used to its gangly big-dog legs. The way it slides and stumbles all over the screen in its panting, eager-to-please way only adds to the charm.

Steve Zahn and Mila Jovovich play Cliff and Cydney, a newlywed couple honeymooning in Hawaii. They are city-folk all the way: a budding screenwriter and a rich girl who wants nothing more than to be a stay-at-home mom. On their way to a renowned but hard-to-get-to beach they stop and pick up a couple creepy hitchhikers named Cleo and Kale (Marley Shelton and Chris Hemsworth). They quickly make their escape, and just as they start their hike they overhear some vacationing girls (so outlandishly caricatured as to engender a number of surprised laughs from the audience) talking about another honeymooning couple who were recently butchered in Honolulu. Now the police think the killers -- a couple -- have jumped to another island.

Trying to stay ahead of the obvious Kale and Cleo, Cliff and Cydney encounter Nick (Timothy Olyphant), a friendly but slightly peculiar Army vet with a love of knives and a plate in his skull. Nick leads them to a waterfall, where his naked Southern girlfriend Gina (Kiele Sanchez) suns herself on a raft.

Cliff's fevered, screenwriter's imagination starts to churn away. Could Nick and Gina be the killers? Or is it Cleo and Kale? Meanwhile, the Honolulu newspaper has posted a grainy photo of the suspected murderers online, conveniently captured by a well-placed surveillance camera. Now if only Cliff's cell phone would get better service...

Hmmmm.....

Writer/director David Twohy is best known for his Vin Diesel sci-fi/horror twofer Pitch Black (2000) and The Chronicles of Riddick (2004). Genre fans will also know him from the low-budget submarine horror film Below (2002) and as a writer on such films as Critters 2 and Warlock. He's no auteur, but he's got a solid enough grasp of genre storytelling, he's pretty good with character, and he adds a refreshingly off-kilter tone that keeps A Perfect Getaway from ever feeling entirely like a retread. There's not a whole lot more to say about him, other than that he knows what he's doing, within a limited scope.

The performances are decent, if not exceptional. I've always liked Zahn, almost in spite of myself. He does a solid job here giving us the many faces of Steve Zahn, and I enjoyed him. Sanchez is alternately sultry and sweetly likeable, punctuated with little stabs of menace here and there. Jovovich (not one of my favorite actresses) manages not to be too irritating, even if the demands of the role are clearly way outside her pay grade. Only Olyphant really delivers. He brings a goofball sense of humor and almost lovable agreeableness to his ostensibly villainous Nick.

And now, on to the twists.

Last chance to turn back...

Okay, you've been warned.

Both twists are unexpected and jaw dropping ... not because they are so cleverly set up (a la The Sixth Sense or The Usual Suspects) but rather because they are so brazenly outlandish that I couldn't help but respect the balls it took to throw them out there.

In Orphan, we learn that Esther is not a nine-year-old girl at all. She's actually a 32-year-old Russian woman with a rare genetic form of "primordial dwarfism" (whatever that is) and a really massive daddy complex. She has spent her life in and out of Russian mental institutions between bouts of posing as a little girl so that she can be adopted by unsuspecting families, where she tries to seduce the father and -- after being predictably rebuffed -- murders the entire family. She's sort of the reverse of Terry O'Quinn in The Stepfather (1987).

We learn all this via one of those frantic "get your family out of the house" phone conversations that takes place near the end of the movie. Kate, after some too-easy sleuthing, manages to track down the administrator (Karel Roden) of the last institution where Esther was committed. Roden delivers an ungainly but mercifully brief chunk of exposition, and then it's off to the races as Kate -- at the hospital with an injured Danny -- rushes home to get John and Max away from Esther.

In A Perfect Getaway, we discover that Cliff and Cydney are the killers, not Nick and Gina or Kale and Cleo. It's a red herring on top of red herring (awkwardly telegraphed in an early conversation about movies between Cliff and Nick that should have been left on the cutting-room floor). Cliff's nervousness throughout the hike was not about being in danger, we learn, but about being discovered. Nick and Gina figure out -- too late, of course -- that they are his next targets.

Trust me, this makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Not only is it not set up earlier in the film, it flagrantly contradicts everything we've seen. Twohy tries to stitch a pig's ear onto a cow by reaching to the very bottom of the desperate filmmaker's tool box and resorting to the time-honored tradition of stopping the story altogether and giving us a really long black-and-white flashback, where we're supposed to reevaluate all the previous scenes, dialogue, etc. It doesn't help.

At least in Orphan, the twist is within earshot of believability. Luckily, Collet-Serra and screenwriters Mace and Johnson have a couple tricks up their sleeve. Rather than do the hard work necessary to patch the logic holes, they try to distract us with an eye-poppingly tasteless scene where Esther puts on makeup and a slinky black dress, then goes to a drunk and weepy John and tries to give him a handie.

Yeah, you read that right. Esther, played by 10-year-old Fuhrman, tries to give John, played by 38-year-old Peter Sarsgaard, a hand job.

And no, this movie isn't French.

It's no wonder that critics like Hornaday are up in arms. I, for one, kind of loved it. It's so wantonly over-the-top, so wickedly debauched, as to be truly awe-inspiring. (For the record, I don't think anything about this was likely to have traumatized Fuhrman. The action itself is merely suggested, and if you blink you'll miss it.)

The rest of the movie is pretty by-the-numbers, and Collet-Serra wisely gives us almost no time to think about what we just witnessed and gets us out of there as quickly as he can. John rejects Esther, Esther kills John, Esther chases Max around the house with a gun, Kate shows up, Kate kills Esther. I was still reeling as the end credits started to roll, and Fuhrman is the reason why. She sold it. As stupid as it is, narratively, I never doubted Esther's transformation into an adult. She moves like an adult, talks like an adult, even seduces like an adult. When the shit hits the fan and she starts shooting at Max and Kate, it's an adult firing the gun.

It's a little hard to defend this, both on moral and analytical grounds. So I won't even try. If you think it's wrong to have a 10-year-old actress act out a seduction scene, I'm not going to be able to say anything to convince you otherwise. In the end, what I dug about it is that the filmmakers were shooting for something. They didn't come anywhere the bullseye, but at least they stayed on the dartboard. That's something, at least.

What Twohy does in A Perfect Getaway is not nearly as debauched, but what it lacks in teeth it more than makes up for in pure idiot shamelessness. To employ a perfectly gross metaphor, I'd say that Getaway is like a guy/girl trying to convince a prospective suitor that he/she is still a virgin immediately after showing said prospective suitor a sex-tape of him/her on the receiving end of a high-school gangbang.

From what I was able to gather, Cliff (whose actual name is Rocky) is supposed to be some sort of pathological liar and psychopath who likes to kill people and then live out their lives for as long as he can before moving on to his next victim. Cydney is his somewhat reluctant girlfriend. The last twenty minutes or so turn into an extended three-way chase scene, and the narrative violation is so deep and so complete that I was happy enough to just shut my brain off and watch all the pretty Hawaiin scenery drift across the screen.

That said, however, I kind of liked it. Like Orphan, the twist is so brazen, artless, and unapologetic that I just couldn't help but enjoy it for what was.

For some reason, I always find it really cute when little kids try to lie. They're just so bad at it. They understand the concept of deceit in a blunt way, but they don't understand how to perpetrate it. But they don't give up. I remember once watching my nephew -- maybe six or seven at the time -- throw a ball in the house and break something. When I asked him why he did it, he just looked at me right in the eye and denied throwing the ball at all. The lie was so blatant that I just couldn't be angry at him. In fact, some dark part of me kind of wanted to encourage him to keep it up (this is why I should probably not have kids, by the way).

That's what Twoy and -- to a slightly lesser degree -- Collet-Serra do here. Neither of them come anywhere near pulling off the lie, but I have to give them credit for even going for it in the first place.

Thirst (2009)

2009-08-01T16:05:00.000-07:00

I'm not going to spend a lot of time here talking about the return of the vampire to the international zeitgeist, or whatever. Critics have been going on and on about that for months. Suffice it to say, from True Blood to Twilight to Let The Right One In, vampires are kind of "the thing" again.

Thirst, from Korean director Park Chan-wook (Old Boy), is the latest vampire movie to hit the screens. Twilight it's not. The movie is gory, violent, and has two or three really graphic sex scenes that kind of made me blush.

The story follows Sang-hyun (Song Kang-ho), a Catholic priest who somewhat inexplicably volunteers to participate in an African study to find a cure for the Emmanuel Virus, an ebola-like malady that causes painful blisters and ends with those afflicted vomiting up very cinematic quantities of blood. Predictably, Sang-hyun is infected and, at deaths door, undergoes a blood transfusion. He survives (the only one in the study to do so) and goes back to Korea, where he suddenly finds himself craving blood, as well as yearning for "sins of the flesh." He's hailed by the faithful as a miracle worker. A desperate mother begs for him to pray at the bedside of her loutish son, Kang-woo (Shin Ha-kyun), who is stricken with cancer. Sang-hyun drifts into the bizarre family's orbit and soon falls for Kang-woo's beautiful but disturbed wife, Tae-Ju (Kim Ok-bin). Eventually Sang-hyun defies his priestly vows and has a lot of noisy, acrobatic sex with Tae-Ju, and -- as his vampire nature begins to assert itself -- falls under her manipulative, femme fatale spell.

Park Chan-wook is one of those culty genre directors (like Guy Ritchie and Takashi Miike before him) that critics like to frame as an heir to Quentin Tarantino. And, to be honest, Park's films do seem to owe a lot to Tarantino. He likes to take pretty straight-forward genre concepts and throw them into a blender with a lot of other stuff. Thirst is no different. It's a violent, occasionally scary, often funny vampire movie with allusions to classic noir and family melodrama, along with a couple fart jokes for good measure. There's more than a little Double Indemnity at work here, side-by-side with some Three Stooges slapstick and a pinch of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The effect of all this is sporadically interesting, sometimes effective, very often frustrating.

The problem -- and it's not a new problem for Park -- is that, once you get past all the razzle-dazzle, it quickly becomes clear that the dude can't tell a story to save his fucking life. Park knows what to do with the camera, and he crafts more than a few dazzling scenes (nothing quite as cool as the infamous fight sequence in Old Boy, but dazzling nonetheless). These scenes, in isolation, feel lifted from a much better movie. There are some really bravura moments, such as the scene where Sang-hyun shows off his new vampire skills to Tae-ju by taking her into his arms and leaping from rooftop to rooftop. And the conclusion by the ocean is spectacular. But, once it's all strung together, the movie itself becomes an incomprehensible mess. It's not that it's confusing as much as, after awhile, really boring. After about an hour I had no idea where the story was going, and not in a good way. There's no emotional logic connecting one sequence to another, and the characters are pretty much insipid and unlikable across-the-board. Half-a-dozen visually breathtaking scenes don't mean anything if, in the end, you don't give a shit.

That's not to say there's not a lot to like here. The cumulative effect of all these cool sequences is deceptive; if you're not paying attention, you may mistake this for a good movie. I just wish Park had put more of his efforts into joining it all together with more than the movie equivalent of cheap twine and old duct tape.

Public Enemies (2009)

2009-07-05T18:47:00.000-07:00

I've been stewing for the last 24 hours trying to decide why I didn't like Public Enemies more than I did.

To be honest, I think part of the problem is that I read the book that the film is based on, Bryan Burrough's Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933–34. It's always problematic trying to evaluate a movie based on source material that is as detailed, gripping, and exhaustive as that.

The book was both epic and dizzyingly specific. Burrough's goal, it seemed, was largely to demythologize the "public enemy" era and its many colorful participants as much as possible. Potentially larger-than-life figures like bank robbers John Dillinger, Lester Gillis (aka "Babyface Nelson"), George "Machine Gun" Kelly, Charles "Pretty Boy" Floyd, Bonnie Parker, Clyde Barrow, and FBI agent Melvin Purvis are depicted as the flawed human beings they were. Most of them did not come across as particularly intelligent. Perhaps the most fascinating part of the story was how the FBI in general -- and Purvis in particular -- was clearly not up to the job.

I know, I know...the book is not the movie...blah blah blah. I get it. I get that director Michael Mann needed to boil Burrough's massive tome down to a single straight-forward narrative. Unless we're talking about a 10-hour HBO miniseries (which, apparently, was the original plan), it would have been completely impossible to tell the entire story in one movie. So Mann made the simple and understandible choice to focus on Dillinger -- easily the most colorful of the era's outlaws -- and Purvis's attempts to catch him. It should be noted that John Milius already made that movie in 1973. It was called Dillinger, and starred Warren Oates, Ben Johnson, Richard Dreyfuss, and Harry Dean Stanton. Check it out if you haven't seen it. It's awesome.

If I had to pick, I would have probably preferred a movie about a somewhat lesser known gangster like Pretty Boy Floyd or Babyface Nelson. But whatever. Mann picked Dillinger. That's fine. Unfortunately, however, he managed to miss almost everything that was so great about the book (and Milius's film, for that matter) and adds very little new that's interesting.

Note to filmmakers: If you're going to make a two-and-a-half hour movie about the epic battle between a notorious outlaw and a celebrated lawman and you have Johnny Depp and Christian Bale as your leads, you really have no excuse if your actors are boring. That's the biggest problem with Public Enemies. For all the visual razzle dazzle on display here (I actually liked the HD cinematography that a lot of people are bitching about), there's really not one performance that stood out. With the exception of Stephen Graham (brilliant, by the way, as the conflicted neo-Nazi in Shane Meadows' This Is England) as Babyface Nelson and French actress Marion Cotillard (Ma Vie En Rose) as Dillinger's girlfriend Billie Frechette, the supporting characters all completely run together. We get a bunch of glowering bad guys in suits and fedoras, and a bunch of glowering FBI agents in suits and fedoras. Billy Crudup is almost memorable as J. Edgar Hoover, but not for the right reasons. His performance was clichéd, one-note, and caricatured, and the obviously latex double chin was distracting.

This all leaves a void, but you would have thought that Bale and Depp would be more than up to the job of filling it. Not so much. Bale gives the pretty much the same humorlessly intense performance that he's been giving since Batman Begins, adding only a mild Southern accent to the mix. Depp, for his part, leaves nearly all of his natural charisma at the door. His performance is minimalistic and almost completely internal. He mumbles. He stares at people. A lot. When he does smile, it's just a little half twitch to his lips. Normally I would say that it's nice to see Depp prove -- after so many flamboyant turns in so many other movies -- that he can do the quiet slow-burn like the best of them...except, he's playing John Fucking Dillinger here. John Dillinger shouldn't slow burn. John Dillinger should crackle and dance like a downed power line.

Really. How do you cast Johnny Depp as John Dillinger and have it land with a complete thud? How exactly does that happen, Mr. Mann?

Without that famed charm, Dillinger's relationship with Frechette makes no sense whatsoever. Cotillard gives probably the best performance in the movie, but never once do we understand what she sees in this guy who comes off more like a mopey, potentially psychotic stalker than the famed ladies' man Dillinger apparently was. After one aborted date he shows up at her job, beats up a customer, and demands that she go with him because "you're my girl now." When she does, I have to admit I kind of hated her a little.

To be fair to Depp, the script really doesn't give him much to work with. He's either moping silently, shooting at people, or trying to deliver awful, faux-Bogartesque lines like: "Were having too much fun today to think about tomorrow." Yuck. When, after some sex, Billie asks him what he wants in life, he responds with: "Everything. (important movie pause). Right now." I mean, seriously, who farted?

Setting the performances aside, Mann and his screenplay give almost no context for what's going on, who these people are, or why any of this is interesting or important. He's more focused on capturing a series of moments than in giving any sort of big picture. I almost want to praise him for this. It's pretty ballsy to eschew exposition and character backstory altogether. But, when you have ten actors sitting up there on screen with their thumbs pretty much up their asses, it really doesn't work. After an hour, I was checking my watch. After two I was actively counting down the minutes until the lights came up and I could go get a sandwich.

I know this all sounds like I really hated this movie. I didn't, actually. I've seen worse. It's no Batman and Robin or...from what I've heard...Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen. It's got some cool stuff. Some of the robberies are pretty sweet (particularly the one toward the end with Babyface Nelson). The famous wooden-gun jailbreak is neat. The final showdown at the Biograph Theater is nice and tense. But, overall, Public Enemies is pretty mediocre, and to be Michael Mann and have subject matter like this and actors like these at your disposal and then to turn around and make a mediocre movie is just outright unforgivable.

At worst, this movie should have been pulpy, ridiculous, and exciting (I don't want to talk it up too much, but you really should check out Dillinger if you haven't seen it). I would have even taken dark, pretentious, and exciting. "Exciting," of course, being the operative word here. But to just have it be kind of cold and blah is a crime. Maybe not like murder, exactly, but at least on the level of armed robbery or vehicular manslaughter.

I don't know if I've ever really loved a Michael Mann movie, but I've at least solidly liked almost all of them. The Insider and Collateral are pretty great. Heat and Manhunter are definite classics. Hell, I even liked Ali.

So I had high hopes for this one. This was going to by my movie of the summer. Oh well. Maybe G.I. Joe will kick ass.

The Girlfriend Experience (2009)

2009-05-27T23:57:00.000-07:00

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)

2009-05-26T18:28:00.000-07:00

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.

Eden Lake (2008)

2009-05-20T14:59:00.000-07:00

I recently watched Eden Lake, a pretty hardcore and well executed, if not exactly revolutionary, British horror movie, and it has made me rethink what I said in my Behind the Mask review about slasher films being a dead genre.

On second thought, it occurs to me that, sort of like with the Harry Potter books, slasher films haven't really died; they've just aged along with their audiences. The genre's heydey was in the 80s and 90s, and those of us who grew up with those movies (from their birth with Halloween in 1978 to their sort-of death with Scream in 1996) are now mostly in our 30s and 40s. Stories about frisky teenagers in peril don't really have the same resonance now that many of us have mortgages to pay, parent-teacher conferences to attend, powerpoint presentations to organize before Monday's board meeting, etc.

Similarly, the protagonists of those 80s and 90s slasher films would also be adults now (if, of course, they survived) with similar adult concerns. So, while the teen slasher film is in creative decline, now we're seeing a spate of more adult-focused stalk-and-slash movies.

The most interesting trend in these movies is the curious role reversal that's happened between the traditional victims and killers. It used to be that the stalkees were a fairly large group of nubile teens, many of whom end up naked or mostly so at some point before getting stabbed, and the stalkers were lone and psychotic adults who were meting out punishment either for past crimes committed against them (Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th), for transgressive teenage behavior (Halloween), or both. More than one academic essay has been written about the primal teenage anxieties being tapped in these films: sex, AIDS, powerlessness against seemingly arbitrary adult authority, etc.

The focus in this new wave of slasher films is usually one or two adults being attacked by multiple killers, and the killers are usually either teens or even children. And where we knew that Freddy was killing the Elm Street kids because of what their parents did to him, and Michael Meyers was going after the kids in Haddonfield because his sister liked to fuck around, the killers' motives in these new films are usually entirely opaque. These films seem to be saying that there's just something fundamentally wrong with kids today. This can be seen in everything from Michael Hanake's artier-than-thou Funny Games to last year's The Strangers to the 2006 French film Ils (Them).

Right or wrong, it's a sentiment I can relate to. I know that, even as a 31-year-old horror fan and ex headbanger who used to consider myself a "Satanist" in that boneheaded way most 19-year-old metal guys do, I often look at teens today -- whether at the mall, or in line at the convenience store, or in the movie theater -- and wonder what the fuck is wrong with them. While at the same time, of course, wondering what the fuck happened to me and how I got so old and square.

Where many teen-oriented slasher films -- even pre-Scream -- were campy and had their tongue firmly planted in cheek, these new films come off deadly (you might even say tediously) self-serious. These movies are not being played for laughs.

Eden Lake falls right in line with the others, and while it isn't particularly original, it is definitely effective. The story follows an English schoolteacher named Jenny (Kelly Reilly) and her yuppy boyfriend Stephen (Michael Fassbender) as they escape London for a romantic weekend camping by the titular lake. Stephen is clearly planning to propose, and he has picked this spot because he remembers its natural beauty from a previous camping trip a few years before. He doesn't realize, however, that developers are moving in and are planning to put up a gated community by the lake, which has left the locals none-too-pleased (this is made clear with a bit of grafitti we see early in the film that will be familiar to any New Mexican who has ever driven through Truchas).

Stephen and Jenny set up their campsite on the beach, but are immediately annoyed by a group of teenagers -- lead by a little thug named Brett (Jack O'Connell) -- who bully a shy East Indian boy, insist on playing loud music, and refuse to leash their Rottweiller. Stephen asks the kids, nicely as he can, to turn their music down, and is not very gently rebuffed. One of the kids exposes himself to Jenny, and that night they stick beer bottles under the tires of Stephen's Jeep.

Things, of course, escalate between the two camps, and before long Stephen is tied to a post with barbed wire and Jenny is running for her life.

What sets Eden Lake apart from a movie like The Strangers or even Funny Games is the killers. They aren't faceless or motiveless sociopaths. They have names and unique personalities, as well as a very defined reason for the carnage they inflict upon Stephen and Jenny. It's just that their reason is stupid and petty, the ways kids' reasons for doing anything mean usually are. Director James Watkins has a clear understanding of the suspicion those of us who are well past our teen years tend to hold towards the younger generation, and he taps into this fear in a visceral way, expertly turning the screws until the tension explodes into a crescendo of brutal and all-too-realistic violence in the second half. Nothing seems gratuitous, and (unlike The Strangers) he doesn't get bogged down in atmosphere. The writing is taut, and the characters are -- while not complex -- realistic and well drawn. Stephen and Jenny are fairly generic, but Fassbender and Reilly at least make them relatable. It's the teenage actors -- including O'Connell and Thomas Turgoose from This Is England -- who are the real showstoppers. If you've ever seen a movie of this type before, you'll probably be able to see most of the beats coming before they arrive. But, regardless of its predictably, Watkins and the cast kept me engaged throughout.

I did have a problem, however, with the movie's fairly classist depiction of the rural working class. Stephen and Jenny are youngish, attractive, liberal, and upwardly mobile. The Eden Lake locals, by contrast, are without exception backwards, abusive, usually fat, always trashy. From the mom at the hotel near the beginning who smacks her crying kid across the face to the parents of the thugs at the lake, there is not one redeemable character to be found amongst them. Watkins may be trying to tap into the visceral suspicion city folk have of country folk (a tried-and-true trope of horror movies since at least the 70s), but there is something distasteful with the simple binary he presents. If you're from the country, he seems to be saying, you're probably some sort of pig-fucking, wife swapping, child-abusing psycho killer. I'm not sure I can really get behind that.

JCVD (2008)

2009-05-16T15:40:00.000-07:00

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)

2009-05-15T20:04:00.000-07:00

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)

2009-05-14T11:10:00.000-07:00

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)

2009-05-12T15:46:00.000-07:00

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)

2009-05-12T12:35:00.000-07:00

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)

2009-05-12T11:29:00.001-07:00

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.